Our Story
Benjamin Pixie made his first mead before he was old enough to purchase it. He shared it with friends in the mountains, near the fireweed bloom from which that honey had been gathered. Benjamin found himself running through the dark forest offering sacred libations to his friends to sweeten, buzz, and bewilder their senses. He found his calling in life as the bearer of this golden elixir of delight and soon dove deep into mead making.
Benjamin caught his first swarm of bees in 2006, and that was the beginning of a lifelong marriage to those ladies who do the love work of the plants. In 2007, he began the Pixie Honey Company, the same year Colony Collapse Disorder was first recognized in the United States. Since then, he has developed beyond organic, treatment free, bee centered methods of tending bees that have enriched the health of the hives, and the medicines harvested from them. Benjamin has taken his background in botanical medicine and years of experience in potion crafting to offer truly unique and potent botanical meads that celebrate the plants and the bees, while returning reverence, magic, and medicine to the imbibing of alcohol.
Benjamin first crossed paths with Maeyoka Brightheart in a luscious meadow on a golden June afternoon in 2013. Over the years a love and eventually a partnership grew, fed by their mutual reverence for the honeybees and passion for the wild. Maeyoka brings to the table a decade of experience tending bees, working with herbal medicine, and deepening her embodiment of the lessons of reciprocity and interconnectedness imparted by the bees and plants. The Brightheart-Pixie family now calls that meadow where they first met home. Benjamin, Maeyoka, their four children, and a growing community are the stewards of a 160 acre honeybee sanctuary and retreat center, called Skalitude, a name that means "to live in harmony with nature".
The Pixie Honey team has grown to become a buzzing hive of inspired and industrious friends and family, all working and loving in service to the honeyed beauties that enrich our lives. Many hands contribute to the tending of hives, harvesting of plants, making of the the magic that fills the bottles, and bringing the medicine of the bees to the people.
We look to the bees as great teachers of how to live in service to that which feeds you. Honeybees have been practicing civilization for over 50 million years. Living in cities with populations so dense that they need to gather their sustenance from the areas around to feed their people. In that time they have inspired all that they harvest from to grow more colorful, more fragrant, more abundant, and to offer sweeter rewards all in collaboration with the honeybees.
Everything we consume takes life to create. Mead is the only alcohol on the planet that the production of actually benefits the ecosystem it was harvested from- through the honeybees pollination and fertilization of the flowers the land grows more diverse, more fecund, and more abundant for her presence. We at Pixie Mead are so inspired by her work that we are proponents of sanctuary beekeeping.
We are dedicated to using this avenue of honey wine to transform the Earth and channel energy into ecological restoration by planting year round, diverse forage to see the bees and our world abundant and thriving. 5% of profits of Pixie Mead sales will go towards habitat growth for honey bees and other pollinators.
We need the lessons of the bees now more than ever! Honeybees have been working to make the world into a flowering garden of abundance for millions of years. The Earth needs us humans to apply all of our ingenuity and reverence into joining them in stewarding green, living, blooming diversity in the land that we tend and that feeds us.
