The Beekeeper Teaching a Town to Pay Attention

Lana Brooks keeps her bee suit hung on a nail by the back door, the way other people keep a raincoat. "I'm in the hives most days," she says. "You stop noticing the suit after a while. You start noticing the field."

From two hives to twenty

Honeycomb Hollow began in 2021 with two starter hives and a borrowed book. Today, Lana manages twenty colonies across three Sussex County properties and supplies raw varietal honey to nine local markets.

“A backyard isn't small if you treat it like it matters. Every yard in this county could be feeding pollinators by July.”

Teaching the neighbors

What sets Honeycomb Hollow apart isn't the honey — though the buckwheat varietal is genuinely remarkable. It's the free workshops Lana runs every spring at the Stillwater library, teaching neighbors which native plants to put in and which lawn habits to drop.

"You can't keep bees if there's nothing for them to eat," she says. "This is everyone's project, whether they know it or not."