Local honey-maker Gees Bees is adding a new buzz to the ByWard Market with a retail location opening this week.
Marianne and Matt Gee, co-owners of Gees Bees Honey Company, told OBJ on Wednesday that they never intended to get into the “bees-ness.”
“We bought a house in Dunrobin in the winter of 2009 and we noticed that there were bees in the wall of the house,” Matt said.
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“We weren’t beekeepers at the time,” Marianne added. “I was an epidemiologist for the Public Health Agency of Canada and Matt was an estimator for a roofing and siding company … We didn’t want to exterminate the bees.”
Once they had moved the colony to their backyard, they started interacting with the bees as a hobby, she added. As the interest for bees grew into something more serious, Matt and Marianne quit their jobs to start their company in 2015.
“We didn’t even want to start a honey company,” Matt explained. “We just wanted to rent beehives to people so we could teach them about bees.”
Starting out with their “host-a-hive” business model, they supplied beehives to people’s backyards and businesses, with their first customer being Cliff Lyness, executive chef at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata.
Two years later, Marianne and Matt moved their business to a farm in the aptly-named Honey Gables neighbourhood in Riverside South, where it grew into an agritourism destination.
Now, 10 years after starting the business, the beekeeping couple is opening a new storefront at 531A Sussex Dr., where they will sell all the same products available for purchase at their farm, including honey, beeswax candles and honey mocktails. “It’s sort of an extension of the farm experience,” Marianne said.
With the agritourism season at their Honey Gables farm lasting from the end of May through to the middle of August, Marianne said she hopes the ByWard Market location will continue to put their farm on the map for tourists.
“By bridging into the ByWard Market, we’re hoping that tourists that are visiting Ottawa for the first time (will see) that Ottawa has this great agritourism scene – not just us, but there are a number of interesting farms,” Marianne said. “We want to bring some of what we do to the heart of the city, which has been the tradition of what the Market was supposed to be.”
Matt added that though they used to make many of the products themselves, “as you scale, you just can’t keep up.”
“We also own Ottawa Beekeeping Supply, which is a beekeeping store where everybody can buy their bee equipment. So through the years of doing that, we’ve just met so many beekeepers that, now, we’ve got a huge community of local beekeepers providing us with honey and other products,” he added.
The partnerships that Gees Bees has formed with other local beekeepers are a win-win for many, Marianne said, as “not everyone wants to be a retailer.”
In addition to selling honey products, visitors to the Sussex Drive store will be able to sample some of the stock at the honey-tasting station. Much like wine, Marianne said that honey has a versatility of flavour.
“Honey, like wine, has what’s called terroir, or taste of place. Honey from different flowers taste different. It has a different colour and flavour depending on the flowers that the bees visit to make it. It can even change across the seasons. Spring honey might be different from a fall honey,” she explained.
In searching for a retail location that was closer to the downtown, Marianne said the already-yellow storefront at 531A Sussex was exactly what they were looking for, not to mention it was “the perfect size for a honey store.”
Matt added that the location adds charm to in-person shopping and he’s confident tourists will come in to taste and buy Canadian honey. “It’s destination retail. There are certain things about brick-and-mortar (shopping) that you just can’t replace,” Marianne said.
Though the Market has faced some challenges recently, Marianne said it’s up to entrepreneurs to reinvigorate the area.
“If you want to have a revitalized (downtown) core, you have to have entrepreneurs coming in there to bring new, wonderful ideas to delight and inspire people. You can’t rejuvenate the Market without people taking a chance and coming down there and trying something different,” she said. “Policy-makers can do everything they want, but entrepreneurs (need to) come and build businesses there. Those two things need to go hand-in-hand.”
Marianne said neighbouring businesses and restaurants have already shown their support, including one familiar face.
“When we were setting up the store on Sussex, I saw a guy looking through the window and it was Clifford (Lyness),” Matt said. “He was our first customer when we hosted beehives and our first customer at the downtown store, which was just a coincidence.”
While Gees Bees is responsible for the beehives that sit atop the National Arts Centre and Rideau Hall among other downtown buildings, there are no plans just yet to host a beehive on the rooftop of 531A Sussex, Matt said.
One thing that is in the works is a much-anticipated hot honey, satisfying a growing demand for the spicy-sweet condiment. “The honey takes the ‘hot’ away. You get the hot burn, but then the honey somehow fixes the tongue so that it doesn’t continue the burn,” Matt said, adding that it is great on pizza.
As they look to the future, Matt said they are interested in making mead, or honey wine.
“We’re playing with the idea of making mead. There isn’t a mead-maker in Ottawa yet, so we’re pretty excited just trying to figure it out. When you say mead, people think it’s (the stuff) Vikings drink out of horns but it actually tastes like a beautiful white wine. That’s a longer-term project,” Matt said.
The couple told OBJ that they want to continue to build a honey dynasty for Gees Bees, saying the company has the potential to grow.
“I see Gees Bees being a big brand. If it can do well on the farm and if it does well on Sussex, why not have one in Orléans, Kanata, Montreal, Toronto, British Columbia and so on? Maybe it won’t just be honey from Canada. It’ll be honey from all over the world, like from Spain where maybe you get a beautiful limetree honey or lavender and rosemary honey,” Matt said.
Marianne added that the versatility of honey fills her with the hope that the brand can reach new heights.
“It’s a fabulous food that I think has been largely underappreciated. People think of honey as the squeeze bear (container) and you put it on toast and that it all tastes the same … Honey is way more nuanced than that,” she said.
