{"id":35017,"date":"2018-09-18T10:07:18","date_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/?p=35017"},"modified":"2021-04-23T17:03:57","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T21:03:57","slug":"minneapolis-beekeeper-kristy-allen-building-thriving-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/minneapolis-beekeeper-kristy-allen-building-thriving-business\/","title":{"rendered":"This Minneapolis Beekeeper Is Building a Thriving Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Editor\u2019s Note: This is part of our <a href=\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/good-on-the-ground\/\">Good on the Ground<\/a> series, profiling entrepreneurial women who are addressing social issues in innovative and inspiring ways.\u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Video by <a href=\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/author\/sue-williams-and-victoria-wang\/\">Sue Williams<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most people associate the phrase &#8220;lean in&#8221; with Sheryl Sandberg&#8217;s manifesto on women in the corporate workplace. For beekeeper Kristy Allen of Minneapolis, the term means something quite different. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;When I was being educated about bees, someone once said, &#8216;You know a real beekeeper because they lean in instead of cower back,'&#8221; she says. &#8220;I immediately leaned in.&#8221; She recalls being hooked by both the smell and taste of real honey. &#8220;You\u2019re outside, flowers are blooming, and \u2026 they\u2019re buzzing all the time. It\u2019s very meditative.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That was 10 years ago. Today, Allen is the founder of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thebeezkneezdelivery.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Beez Kneez<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a unique business that maintains hives, sells honey, teaches intensive beekeeping classes and, generally speaking, manages to thrive &#8212; current annual revenue: $200,000 &#8212; while maintaining environmentally sustainable practices.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"tse-player\"><div class><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/plugins\/tse-shortcodes\/lib\/images\/headphones.png\"><\/div><div><h2>Let&#039;s Hear it for Honeybees<\/h2><h3>Listen to our podcast episode for more of our interview with Kristy Allen.<\/h3><audio controls class=\"podcast-player\" preload=\"metadata\"><source src=\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/app\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Kristy-Allen-Podcast_Final.mp3\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/div><\/div>\n<p><b>The Plight of the Bee<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is not your typical &#8220;sell honey at the farmers market&#8221; type of business. Many beekeepers are hobbyists, tending to bees on nights or weekends while holding a job in another field. Not Allen. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A 2008 graduate of the University of Minnesota, Allen decided early on she wanted to make a living in agriculture. &#8220;I&#8217;m a hard worker &#8230; and I\u2019ve always wanted to spend my profession outside,&#8221; she says. But more than that, as a global studies major, she was drawn to social issues and &#8212; perhaps idealistically &#8212; fixing large-scale problems like lack of access to affordable food. The plight of the bee, she realized, is intrinsically linked to public health, especially for people of lower income. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Environmentalists have been concerned for decades about the drastic drop in the number of \u00a0pollinators: bees, butterflies, bats and other animal species who pollinate food crops. In recent years, bees&#8217; health has been severely compromised by mites, the overuse of pesticides and other factors, such as the mysterious malady called Colony Collapse Disorder. Their downturn, in turn, impacts global food security. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bees &#8220;pollinate a third of everything that we eat,&#8221; Allen says. &#8220;Without bees, who\u2019s gonna do that very important pollination work of making those plants reproduce?&#8221; It&#8217;s not a stretch to imagine a world where &#8220;only the very rich would probably get to eat things like strawberries,&#8221; she says. &#8220;These things we kind of take for granted &#8212; apples, watermelons, any fruit &#8212; would be gone.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Taking a Gamble<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Allen first learned to work with bees on post-graduate stints with the AmeriCorps program in Arkansas and then Ecuador. Then in 2009, she came back to the U.S. to work for her aunt, who had married a commercial beekeeper in northern Minnesota. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While Allen initially wanted to go into farming, &#8220;I was really inspired by the way that bees work,&#8221; she says. &#8220;It\u2019s an all-female run organization. They dance to communicate.&#8221; She read a book called &#8220;Honeybee Democracy&#8221; by Thomas D. Seeley, a leading researcher, on how bees make decisions collectively. &#8220;It blew my mind,&#8221; she says. While working as a bartender to make ends meet, Allen decided: &#8220;I&#8217;m gonna be a beekeeper.&#8221; \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Figuring out her business model would be the next challenge. When your livelihood is &#8220;dependent upon something that is dying or struggling to survive, it\u2019s a pretty big gamble you\u2019re taking,&#8221; she says. She knew she&#8217;d need several different streams of revenue to make it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She began that fall by selling her aunt and uncle&#8217;s honey via bicycle throughout Minneapolis. Because it was close to Halloween, she decided as a marketing gimmick to wear a bee costume. &#8220;I put on some striped socks, I got some pipe cleaners and some foam balls, and at 30 years old,&#8221; she pauses to laugh, &#8220;I dressed up like a bee and handed out business cards with honey samples.&#8221; It worked. Customers to this day include local restaurants, coffee shops and food co-ops who saw her cycle by in that getup. She dubbed her pedal-powered business The Beez Kneez.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Next, Allen decided she needed a &#8220;honey house,&#8221; a term that describes a structure where honey is extracted and processed for sale. After taking a business course via Women Venture, a women&#8217;s business center run by the Small Business Administration, Allen launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2013. The goal? Turn an old carpet factory &#8212; &#8220;a big concrete box,&#8221; she says &#8212; in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, smack in the middle of the Twin Cities, into her honey house. The campaign successfully raised close to $40,000. The property now serves as The Beez Kneez headquarters and a place hobby beekeepers can come process their honey. &#8220;We charge by the hour and do the clean-up afterward,&#8221; she says. &#8220;It&#8217;s very sticky.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Pedal Power <\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">These days, Allen tends to 130 hives in and around Minneapolis. Some hives are owned by local universities, who pay an annual maintenance fee to The Beez Kneez. Each spring, she and another beekeeper teach a 14-week course on beekeeping called <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thebeezkneezdelivery.com\/campbeezkneez2018\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Camp Beez Kneez<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Tuition is close to $600. Last year, about 40 students signed up, and this past season, &#8220;we [had] a waitlist,&#8221; she says. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And Allen is most proud of a device she invented called the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebeezkneezdelivery.com\/honeycycle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Beez Kneez Honey Cycle<\/a>, which she more recently put on the market. Many beekeepers use a hand-crank, something like a butter churner, to extract honey, which is &#8220;really awkward to use,&#8221; she says. Allen worked with a mechanical friend to design a pedal-powered version, which looks something like a stationary bike with a giant tank on it, for extracting and filtering honey. She has sold a few extractors (retail price: $2,000) and hopes to raise funds to properly advertise the product.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t know any other bee operation running like this,&#8221; she says. &#8220;I hope it grows to a point where it can sustain itself, and continue to do really good work with community.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>(This story has been updated.)<\/p>\n<div class=\"transcript-box\" style=\"float:none !important;\">\r\n<div class=\"accordion-container\">\r\n\t\t<a href=\"#\" class=\"accordion-toggle\">Read Full Transcript<span class=\"toggle-icon\"><i class=\"fa fa-angle-double-down\"><\/i><\/span><\/a>\r\n\t\t<div class=\"accordion-accordion_content\">\r\n\t\t\t<p><p>Kristy Lynn Allen \u2013 Founder + CEO \u2013 The Beez Kneez<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tI can\u2019t remember how much of our prairie has disappeared since monocultures and, and pesticides started to be used on a much larger scale. Bees are insects. So if you spray a crop and a bee gets exposed to it or if it gets in the water or onto other plants you have a big problem.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tThe Beez Kneez is a local beekeeping organization that is pedal-powered both in honey delivery and honey extraction. We teach intensive beekeeping classes. We rent out our honey house to beekeepers. We sell beekeeping equipment and we do advocacy and education around bees.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tKristy grew up on the outskirts of Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tGrowing up I really enjoyed swimming, and camping, and, and being outside, and then I saw the town change dramatically from, you know, a lot of that open prairie or, or traditional farms to big box stores or strip malls.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tAfter high school, Kristy was eager to see the world.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tShe grabbed an opportunity to teach English in China.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tI took out a loan and went to China for three weeks and it changed my life. It just opened my eyes to how big the world was.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tWhen Kristy returned home she began a degree in global studies at the University of Minnesota.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tI started working in restaurants and then gradually finished my degree but it took a while because I, I was sort of addicted to traveling and I kept taking trips. I felt like I was learning a lot more that way about myself and the world than I was in school.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tKristy finally graduated in 2008. She worked on a farm and began to learn about beekeeping.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tWhen I was being educated about bees someone once said, \u201cYou know a real beekeeper because they lean in instead of cower back,\u201d right. And I immediately leaned in. I was just, the smell, the taste of real honey and the sound, you know, they\u2019re buzzing all the time and it\u2019s, it\u2019s very meditative and you have to be present with bees.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tIn 2009 Kristy\u2019s aunt and uncle, who run a commercial beekeeping operation, asked her to sell their honey in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tI was like, \u201cIt\u2019s close to Halloween. I should paint my bike like a bee and dress up like one and hand out honey samples.\u201d So on Halloween I, I did that. I actually started by delivering to people\u2019s doors. And in an age of technology where there\u2019s always a screen in front of who we\u2019re interacting with I was really thirsty for, \u201cWho\u2019s my community? Who are these people? Let\u2019s talk about bees,\u201d and it worked.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tKristy started Beez Knees in 2010.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tI think the, the hardest challenge for me was figuring out the model and the financial model. And, and I mean as any business owner, it\u2019s a perpetual challenge. But your livelihood being dependent upon something that is dying or struggling to survive, it\u2019s a pretty big gamble you\u2019re taking.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tBees pollinate one-third of the world\u2019s crops and most wild plants.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tBut bee populations everywhere are collapsing.<\/p>\n<p>SOT\tLet\u2019s see if we can find the queen. She\u2019s right there. And you\u2019ll see bees following her around. She\u2019s got her own little contingent.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tBees used to make 100 to 300 pounds of honey per hive and now they make 40 to 60. One of the things really impacting bee health is the overuse and misuse of pesticides. They impact the bees\u2019 ability to forage. They forget what they\u2019re doing, they forget to feed their young and then the entire colony is in trouble.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tKristy has taken business courses, consulted with advisors and used a Kickstarter campaign to build Beez Kneez.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tShe has developed pedal-powered honey extractors that local beekeepers rent or buy.<\/p>\n<p>SOT\tIt\u2019s like a washing machine. The centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the cone. There\u2019s a filter built inside the machine so the really, like, huge benefit of this machine is that it filters while you\u2019re extracting honey.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tKristy and her staff run classes throughout the year.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tMy role in the company is, is changing. As I get older I can\u2019t be hauling as much honey around on my bicycle. I hope it grows to a point where it can sustain itself and, and continue to do really good work with community.<\/p>\n<p>TEXT\tBeez Kneez earns about $200,00 a year, enough to support herself and her small staff.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tWe have a political environment that is not friendly to the environment. But we as consumers have a ton of power and it\u2019s the only power that we seem to have right now and, and so using it wisely, supporting small businesses, small beekeepers, farmers that are growing food in, in a sustainable manner, that\u2019s number one.<\/p>\n<p>SOT\tSo this is this year\u2019s harvest. So it\u2019s going to be a little bit different than what he was getting, but it\u2019s super delicious and drizzles real nice.<\/p>\n<p>Kristy\tNumber two is we\u2019re not involved in our political system nearly enough. Pick something that really matters to you, planting flowers is a very simple thing that lots of people can do. Remember, \u201cIf you\u2019re not at the table you\u2019re on the menu.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<!--\/.accordion-accordion_content-->\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kristy Allen is no hobbyist beekeeper. Her Beez Kneez has multiple sources of revenue, and a pedal-powered invention is up next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":35021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"autoblue_enabled":false,"autoblue_custom_message":"","autoblue_shares":[],"autoblue_post_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[187,218,3],"tags":[19442,19446,19452,19444,19839,20404,19731],"class_list":["post-35017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-good-on-the-ground","category-entrepreneur-videos","tag-agriculture","tag-food","tag-social-entrepreneurs","tag-animal-business","tag-social-enterprise","tag-sustainable-agriculture","tag-women-entrepreneurs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.3 (Yoast SEO v27.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>This Minneapolis Beekeeper Is Building a Thriving Business<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Kristy Allen is no hobbyist beekeeper. 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