Mission Beekeeping

Genuine Sheds is founded on the principles of creating spaces for individuals and families to expand and grow. We are committed to crafting quality studios and sheds, and this has led us to meeting extraordinary people! We work with people who are utilizing the space as a music or art studio, writing corner, launching their business etc, we are always amazed at all that then gets done in the cozy spaces we build together. We are pleased to bring some of these small businesses and creators to light! 

We got to watch a honey pour with the amazing Mission Beekeeping and get to know a little about the roots of their local business!

Who is Mission Beekeeping?

Steve Nimmer, owner and operator of Mission Beekeeping, grew up in Carpinteria with an innate love of plants and animals. As an adult, this love manifested itself as a desire to homestead, garden and fish.  Steve’s first two hives didn’t survive more than a few months but his third hive produced a bumper crop of honey and he was able to split that hive into two other hives.  Although Steve didn’t realize it at the time, this was the beginning of a growing beekeeping business.  Today, Mission Beekeeping keeps roughly between 500-600 hives in Ventura County and Carpinteria. These hives provide pollination to local growers and produce local, raw and unfiltered honey.

What part of your story, what moment in time, led you to where you are today? Is there a particular part of your unique story you want to share?

How Steve discovered beekeeping was when his neighbor showed him his hive and Steve was able to spot the queen right away. He had been pursuing a different career path at that time, but this experience showed him another path starting with one hive.

What does a day in the honey shed look like? Can you paint a picture with words that lets us into this process?

Steve uses a forklift to load 650 pound drums of honey into the workshop. Once we are ready to jar, we turn on the bottling tank, a drum warming jacket and turn on a pump to fill the bottling tank. Once it's warmed up, we turn the gate on and fill the jars. The next step is applying the labels, loading the jars back in the box and putting it in the correct warming box for storage.

Where were you working out of before? What made you want to expand your space?

Steve was jarring honey in another workshop that is for storing equipment for pollination at another location.  There was never enough space and his wife, Kelly, was getting more involved in the honey side of the business. It made more sense to keep it near home and have a dedicated space for jarring and storing honey. 

What is special about the honey process?

We like to say our honey is hive to jar because we do not change it. The first step is that Steve pulls out the frames from the hives once they're full of honey in the late spring and early summer. Then he gives the frames to another beekeeper that has a large honey processing facility. The honey is put into large 650 pound drums and returned to us. Steve built his own "warming tank". We heat the honey to 115 degrees so it is technically still raw and unpasturized.  The heat turns the honey into a more liquid consistency, allowing us to pump easier and the bottleling tank to fill up faster.

As you grow and continue as a business what are things you want to do more of, and what are things you would like to transition away from? 

This is always a question we ask ourselves. Steve is most passionate about pollination which requires him to be in tune with his bees and take care of them year-round. Every year their needs are different depending on the weather, the seasons, the pests, etc. He is constantly learning how they adapt to their environments and about their colony behavior. However, we also love honey! That will always be secondary to pollination though, because keeping healthy bees means we can't pull all the honey from their hives. The reason bees make honey in the first place is to have food to help them get through the winter when there's limited nectar to collect. Steve always leaves honey in their hives for them so we will never be large producers of honey. For now, we supply honey to a few small grocery stores in Ojai Valley, a weekly Farmers Market and for a few other families that buy 5 gallon buckets of honey at a time. 

How has your studio/shed helped in the expansion of your business?

For the first time, we actually have our honey organized by size and variety and have a sense of our inventory. This allows us to be more efficient in fulfilling orders for grocery stores. The honey also can't get too cold or it'll crystallize so Steve made warm boxes out of old commercial size refrigerators to keep the honey at the appropriate temperature. These, of course, take up space so we're grateful to have a dedicated shed for honey jarring and honey storage. This allows us to be able to fulfill larger orders and maybe even expand to other stores and farmers markets. 

What are you learning to love that you didn’t know you could love as you move into the next phases of business and discovery? 

We are learning all the ways to provide honey and all the different products that use honey. For example, an ice cream store and a skin care business buy our honey in bulk to use in their products. We had no idea we'd have such a variety of customers! Even families will link up together to buy a bucket of our honey and share with one another. We love how our product reveals the supportive and intimate community we live in. So many local businesses want to support us as another local business. Who knows where the honey will take us and we're looking forward to it!