Teen-driven Orlando honey brand still buzzing after nearly 7 years

When she was 15, Jamisha Woodson joined an Orlando-based honey brand and became one of the members of its founding class. She charted one future goal for herself: Be her own boss.

At 22, Woodson returned to honey after creating her own line of hair and skin products — a venture she said earns her a six-figure salary. Mission accomplished.

“I only worked one job my entire life and that’s Black Bee Honey,” she said.

The honey brand started in September 2017 through a city-funded Families, Parks and Recreation Department initiative to teach students in Parramore, a historically Black neighborhood, how to run their own business. The kids do exactly that — they harvest, bottle and sell the honey themselves while enrolling in business classes so they can apply lessons to their own endeavors.

Selling honey was a strategy move. Parramore is one of Orlando’s most-impoverished neighborhoods and home to a food desert.

“From the corner stores, you can’t really get fresh vegetables and fruits, so all you can really find is junk food,” said Francesca Amervil, a 14-year-old at Black Bee. “The purpose of Black Bee Honey is to try and get a healthier alternative for sweet sugar.”

The brand gathers its product from honey farms at two fire stations and bottles it at the Grand Avenue Neighborhood Center where the kids also learn business skills. Once the bottles are filled, cleaned and labeled they’re sold at farmers markets in the community.

Black Bee’s line of products includes four honey flavors — Palmetto, Orange Blossom, Wildflower and Gallberry — in a variety of sizes. Palmetto has with hints of smoky wood, Orange Blossom has a citrus fragrance, Wildflower has a dark amber flavor and Gallberry has hints of molasses.

Amervil, one of the most recent students to join the hive, said she likes bottling honey the most.

“Bottling is simple and it just feels calming at the same time,” said Amervil, who wants to start a nonprofit to help people experiencing homelessness when she grows up.

Alexis Hicks, Black Bee’s program manager, said one of the few changes she’s seen since the brand started is the number of applicants she’s received — partly because its scope had expanded.

About 25 students are part of Black Bee’s latest generation of kids ages 14 to 18. There were eight other generations before them.

Over time, Black Bee students have built a national audience.

In 2017, Steve Harvey praised the students on his talk show for dreaming big in a low-income area: “You’re laying the groundwork for something that’s really tremendous,” he said. This year, Philip Rosenthal, of Netflix’s “Somebody Feed Phil,” taste-tested the honey and the segment was featured on an Orlando episode of the show’s newest season.

“It was great being able to work with Phil,” Hicks said. “He’s very humble, very kind, very funny, so he had a lot of jokes to throw in there.”

Locally, Black Bee has also partnered with organizations and businesses around Orlando.

On Thursday, the brand capped five years of supplying honey for cheesecake sold from The Grand Bohemian Hotel Orlando’s restaurant, The Boheme. To honor the occasion, The Boheme expanded its menu with more Black Bee Honey-infused items.

Among them, servers at the event presented pork belly sliders, watermelon salad, goat cheese croquettes and The Boheme’s signature “Bees Knees” cocktail to about 40 attendees including prominent Orlando leaders like Commissioners Robert Stuart and Bakari Burns, interim Commissioner Shan Rose and Mayor Buddy Dyer.

“The honey experience itself taught the kids about entrepreneurship, but the other aspects of it … shows them how to collaborate and learn to partner,” Dyer said.

Ben McCarney, general manager of The Grand Bohemian, said $1 from each Black Bee Honey-infused menu item sold goes back to the brand and is used as scholarship money for the students.

“These kids don’t even understand really what they have,” McCarney said. “Rubbing shoulders with the mayor, the city commissioners, business leaders in the community, they’re going to look back and say, ‘Wow, I belong.’”

In attendance at Thursday’s event was Reginald Burroughs, a director with the Families, Parks and Recreation Department who supervised Black Bee when it first started. He said he always knew Black Bee would be big and reflected on when he and students developed the brand name.

“The Black Bee is symbolic in a sense,” Burroughs said. “One of the kids actually spoke a little bit about how people are sometimes afraid of bees and they’re perceived as a threat, but if you actually understand what a bee does for the environment and for the world then you’re not as afraid of them.”