We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tim & Beth Couchoud. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tim & Beth below.

Tim & Beth , appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

It never gets old, convincing someone who says they don’t like honey to try ours and watching their eyes widen in delight, or seeing the shocked expression on the faces of people who thought they knew what honey tasted like, til they tried ours. When we started keeping bees, we weren’t aware of just how nuanced and complex the flavor of each apiaries’ honey would be, but we fell in love with the wonder of the way honeybees capture the essence of time and place and preserves it long past a season’s end. A good portion of the honey packing our supermarket shelves isn’t really pure honey, but as for the honey produced in the US, most of it is the by-product of industrial pollination. Industrial honey is mass harvested and blended together, totally obliterating its identity, but our honey is small batch, hand harvested throughout the year and never blended. This allows for the intensity of each apiary’s unique blend of flora to shine. It tells a story about where it came from: the woes of draught and the bounty of rain, the sorrow and the joy. Every jar of our honey is a time capsule and a once in a lifetime experience.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I told Tim I wanted to have a hive of bees, he gave me a scrunched face and said “We are not buying bugs.” Now a few short years later, spring to fall, I can barely get his attention; He’s only got eyes for his “bee girls.”

It wasn’t just a fanciful dream for me. My father was a beekeeper and fresh, raw honey felt like the most normal and essential thing a person should have. Once you’ve gotten used to spoonfuls of golden indulgence, you can’t live without it for long.

As a child, my job during harvest was to work the extractor. I stood on a stool cranking a creaky old vat that splattered globules of honey all over my face and hair. Then I got to open and close the valve to release the honey through the sieve. Of course my hands were covered as I sampled the product for quality. By the end of harvest days, I was one tangled, sticky, happy child. And like the sweet syrup that clung to every inch of my little self, the sweet memory of these autumn days was equally stuck in my heart and mind.
As soon as we bought our first home, I announced my desire for bees, Tim was not on board at first, but thankfully, my dad wanted to get back into the hobby. Somehow, Tim agreed. Our first few years were rough as we adjusted to the challenges of modern apiary life. We lost several colonies and it wasn’t until Tim found a reliable mentor, now our good friend, that things started to improve. As Tim grew more savvy with the bees, I grew more and more things in our yard. First it was a mini meadow to feed the bees, then a few food beds, and before we knew it, almost every space around our small suburban house lot had something growing in it. Almost immediately, we began to see the impact our non-chemical gardens had on the bees and vice versa. It wasn’t just our yard that flourished; the birds and butterflies and other wildlife thronged to feast in the safety of our little space. Nature was thriving around us and our own health and internal well-beings were drastically altered for the better and that was it, we were hooked.
We out grew our little space and began looking out into our community to find land owners and farmers with the same passion for quality and good earth stewardship as us. It wasn’t long before we met some of the kindest people who opened their land to partner with use as pollinators.
What started as a desire to source quality honey, has turned into a pursuit to provide our community with access to high quality nucleus colonies, NJ bred queens, artisan honey, and natural skincare. Everything we sell, we use ourselves and it’s the same level of care and excellence we expect for our own use that we provide to those who patronize our stand at markets or our porch cabinet.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

It was my junior year of high school and two of my friends and I were hangin out in the parking lot of our school after a long play rehearsal when I noticed someone I’d never seen before working on the landscaping around our campus. Without thinking I blurted out, “who is that guy, he is so hott!” to which my friend replied, “that’s my brother, Tim.” I was immediately embarrassed and asked him not to mention it to his brother, but he did. I guess that moment stuck in Tim’s mind because six years later, he messaged me on facebook and we began writing novellas to each other almost every day. A little over a year later, we were married. At that point had no idea that a family business was in our future, and it would be another five years before we would start on our beekeeping journey. It took the pandemic lockdowns to push us to officially start our Apiary business and there have been a lot of ups and downs being married business partners, but I do believe it has made us stronger.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Our business is in many ways, tailored to our community and our state, so vending at local events and markets has been our most valuable resource for gaining clients, word of mouth endorsement, and repeat customers. We also realized there was a niche in the honey sales market that we could fill. Most of the honey that people sell at local markets is either from Pollinating large mono crops or from small apiaries, where one or two harvest are done and all the honey is blended together. We decided to go the artisan route where we do several small batch harvests throughout the year and keep these separate by season and apiary location, so the most complex and nuanced flavors can be experience. Honey has tasting notes and flavor complexity just like wine or coffee. By keeping our harvests small and focused on seasonal blooms, we’re able to capture the taste of time and place. Each batch of our hand harvested, unblended honey maintains the unique and complex essence of a season and its flora. Offering honey tasting flights at markets, has brought us a lot of interest and sales success, plus it gives us the opportunity to really get to know our customers and open their minds to not only caring about local food, but about our pollinators and the environment.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.honeysucklenectary.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/honeysucklenectary
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/honeysucklenectary
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@honeysucklenectary

Image Credits
Vanessa Maestri Wagner (Tintype Portrait) Elizabeth Couchoud (all others)