Who We Are
The Garden Hive is made by Bill Rawleigh in beautiful Julian North Carolina. Bill has operated Rawleigh Woodworking since the late ’70′s in Greensboro N.C. doing custom architectural millwork, cabinets and furniture for the design trades. These days he’s semi retired, building beehives and whatever strikes his fancy in the shop he built at his home.
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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. We decided to build a prototype and, after a couple of years of improvements, tweaks, and help from the local beekeeping community we offered our first Garden Hive for sale. That was five years ago. Our latest design has been field tested and improved to become what we truly believe to be the best beehive on the market, the Garden Hive 2.0. Our bees seem to agree, we think you will too.
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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 his 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?
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