All the Buzz About Grandmas Alaskan Honey

Despite the name of her business, Grandmas Alaskan Honey, Renea McAllister doesn’t have a “Grandma” vibe. She’s a bootstrapping farmer and innovative businesswoman who uses honeybees as a tool to help people recover from trauma and injury. But a grandma she is. At 52 years old, she has school-aged grandchildren, and because of the pandemic, she spends some days each week helping them with online school.

When we connected, she was on her farm in the Mat-Su Valley, apologizing for the poor cell phone connection. Her business is high-touch and low-tech—even though her delicious products are available on Etsy and Facebook.

Throughout her adult life, McAllister has suffered from traumatic brain injuries and related symptoms. Some years ago, she decided to get herself off pharmaceutical treatments and discovered that working with honeybees brought her moments of peace and helped ease her anxiety. She also found that the honey itself had properties that made her feel better. She said “The bees require you to be in the here and now.”

“My dad says I was always the happiest when I was digging in the dirt,” McAllister recalled when she was searching for a new vocation. She felt she wasn’t a good candidate to be an employee, and was thrilled to find that the Alaska Division of Vocational Rehabilitation—a state agency that helps residents with physical, mental, and intellectual challenges find work—would train her to run a small business. She connected with UAF Distance Learning along with Stephen Brown, the local Cooperative Extension Agent, and learned about Alaska berries and rhodiola among other agricultural opportunities. She found herself attracted to bees and beekeeping and got her first honeybees on her birthday in 2017. “The fire was lit, and I haven’t looked back.”

“Everyone has honey,” McAllister says, “but I wanted to do something else, something unique, something that nobody else has.” She landed on a honey that’s flavored with the addition of freeze-dried Alaska wild blueberries. Her sweet and aromatic raw honey is also naturally flavored by the plants the honeybees pollinate. “We’re up against a game reserve, so our honeybees are foraging on fireweed and wild berry flowers; we have Labrador tea...as well.”

McAllister has big plans. She garnered approval to participate in the Alaska Grown program and says her application to the Made in Alaska program is next. Grandmas is installing a commercial kitchen at the farm with some help from the Alaska Mental Health Land Trust, and they are bringing in a new style of hive that is accessible for people of all kinds of varying physical abilities. McAllister is eager to give back and share what she’s learned. “I have permission to put a learning apiary at the [Matanuska Experiment Farm & Extension Center] with a handicap accessible Slovenia-style bee house along with traditional style hives so people can come and say ‘what kind of beekeeping can I do?’” She says connecting with her community and reaching out was a challenge for her, because she’s used to giving help, not taking it, but she couldn’t have created her successful business without the connections she made. She also credits the Alaska SBDC and Julie Nolan with helping her apply for the micro-enterprise grant that helped her replace equipment destroyed by bears. The Alaska Farmland Trust, which oversees the local Farmlink project, has made it possible for her to secure the farmland she now leases for her apiary.

What else is next for Grandma? She’s developing new products and new outlets for her wild honey and infused flavored honeys. She’s been fermenting garlic and fruit in honey too. “In all this craziness, something else that I took on in 2019...I bought a beard product company, so now I make small batched beard balm, beard lotion, and oil.” The new brand, 907 Beards, features products made with McAllister’s honey and beeswax. Obviously, the buzz around Grandmas Alaskan Honey is only going to get louder.

Find Grandmas Alaskan Honey at NuLyfe Labs in Wasilla, online via Etsy, or contact them via Facebook for more information.

This profile is part of our web series sponsored by the Alaska Small Business Development Center. Read the rest of the series.