MOMentum Moms
By Anna Snyder hen you examine your life – your work, your family, your home – does it look different than you imagined it would as a teen or young adult? For Briesa Ruby, a pediatric emergency nurse, life on a five-acre homestead in Golden Gate Estates is all about bees, bee hives, and honey (and her two young children, of course). She coordinates daily operations, sales, and
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marketing, and provides chaos control (i.e. corralling two toddlers) for Rubee’s Raw Florida Honey. The growing business’ brand is a word play on the family’s last name, dreamed up many years ago by her husband, Josh. I had a chance to sit down with Briesa to discuss the family’s business, their bees, and their vision for the future. Tell me about you and your family. My husband and I have two children.
Our daughter, Rennisen, is 2 years old, and our son, Jacob, is 20 months. We also have two dogs, a cat, several cows, and chickens. We do keep some bee hives at our house (we have 400 hives total) for making queen bees. I’m a Naples native, and my parents homeschooled my siblings and me. During our homeschool years, we connected with other families through various programs, including “the bee family” (my husband’s family) – my mother ordered honey from the Rubys on a regular basis. I always thought of my husband as that “weird bee kid,” and he remembers thinking of me as that “weird punk kid.” I studied to become a nurse, and I lived at home throughout my education. When I graduated from Florida Southwestern University in 2013, my parents gave me two pointer puppies. I came home one afternoon and discovered a bee hive on one of our fence posts – I was concerned for my puppies. My mom told me to call the Rubys, and they sent Josh. When I saw him after several years, I thought “wow.” Josh thought the same thing about me, too, and in 2016, we got married. I worked for four years at Golisano Children’s Hospital as a nurse in the pediatric emergency department before I resigned to raise our family and run the business. How did you get into beekeeping? From a young age, my husband dreamed of becoming a beekeeper. It’s how he grew up, and by the time we got married, he had a lot of experience running the family beekeeping business. The Ruby family gave us four hives as a wedding present, and we built our own business from there. We made the decision to branch out on our own and form Rubee’s Raw Florida Honey – we never wanted to hinder our family relationships in any way, which can happen when various generations get NEAPOLITANfamily • February 2020
