WHO WE ARE
The Garden Hive is made by Bill and Carol Rawleigh in beautiful Julian North Carolina. Bill has operated Rawleigh Woodworking since the late ’70’s doing custom architectural millwork, cabinets, and furniture for the design trades. Carol is a writer, editor, and lifelong gardener.
The idea for the Garden Hive came from a particularly bad year in the family vegetable garden. Our apple tree had very few apples, and many of our vegetables were small and badly formed. When we realized that we were seeing very few honeybees we figured we had a pollination problem and went to work researching honeybees and how to attract them to our garden. Once we saw a top bar hive and learned of its advantages we knew we had to have one. Bill, being a creative type and looking for work in a down economy, decided to build a prototype and, after a year of improvements, tweaks, and help from the local beekeeping community we offered our Garden Hive for sale.
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Each Garden Hive is built by hand in our shop in Julian and reflects Bill’s attention to detail in construction and design as well as Carol’s interest in sustainability. The result is a jewel box of a beehive, with solid brass hardware mounted on select cypress lumber enclosing a bee-friendly interior which is easy to manage and which produces loads of pure honey and beeswax from our flowering plants. Only one question remains – why didn’t we do this years ago?
