Our Story
How we began our mission to help the bees and share the joy…
We’re Roger Gomes and Clara Benn, a couple living in Ham - a little known corner of Richmond upon Thames in S.W. London.
Having discovered our love of beekeeping, we have a dream of keeping bees in a way that genuinely supports the natural bee population, shares our love of bees and native wildlife, and educates others on how to support it - all whilst living in a semi-detached house with a small garden and no disposable income to speak of. We call it:
Roger & Clara’s Grand Bee Adventure
...The main problem with beekeeping on a decent scale, when you live in a very ordinary house, with a small garden, two largish dogs and two extraordinary teenagers, is where to put all the bees?
We quickly realised that our own garden wasn't really an option. There’s a limit to how many bee-hives you can keep in a small suburban garden. On top of which, it’s really very useful to have an area that isn’t full of bees to do the kind of work that quickly attracts the intense interest of very many bees - such as cleaning and refurbishing old hives and equipment, not to mention processing wax and honey. We were going to have to find a better solution.
We didn’t think it would be easy to find a suitable plot of land to rent in an area as built-up and pricy as Richmond upon Thames and surrounds. And even if we could find one, we had no way of paying for it.
The answer we came up with was this:
There must be lots of people who would like to have a beehive in their garden, but who do not want to dedicate the considerable amount of time and money it takes to learn beekeeping and maintain happy, healthy hives.
We just needed to find these people and offer to do all the work, in return for a small corner of their garden and the immense pleasure of hosting a beehive. We’d throw in a share of the honey to sweeten the deal, of course!
And so, the premise for Roger & Clara’s Bee Company was forged.