The
Beez Kneez, which delivers local, raw honey by bicycle, has a $30,000
Kickstarter campaign going to fund a new local Honey House.
The company wants to develop a headquarters in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood, according to Beez Kneez founder Kristy Allen. The reason is, “Beez Kneez needs a space to harvest and extract honey and bottle it,” she says.
As it is now, the company has to go to other beekeepers’ places to do those things. This can get expensive and it’s time-consuming, she says. Also, the company needs “a place to store things and operate,” along with retail space. A regular office space can serve an educational purpose, as well. “It can be a place where we can meet with people and talk about bees,” she says.
The community-minded company plans to rent out space for people to use the facility for a small fee.
Longfellow is an ideal area because it’s an up-and-coming area of the city, she says, adding, “It’s focused on urban agriculture, too. A lot of people have gardens where they plant flowers or vegetables. We want to add to that.” The neighborhood even has a number of beekeepers, she says.
Beez Kneez are catering to people "who want to harvest honey, but who don’t want to do it in their kitchen or to buy the equipment,” she says.
The Honey House would also make creative use of the bicycle element--as an energy source. “We keep bees in hives with frames, and extracting is the process of taking honey from these frames--by spinning,” its Kickstarter page reads.
So far she’s found that “People are very positive and are very interested in having [this] resource.”
Source: Kristy Allen, Beez Kneez
Writer: Anna Pratt