11 minute read
MOMentum Moms. Meet Briesa Ruby, who “beelieves” keeping harmony in the family hive makes life sweet
MOMentum Moms
When 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 By Anna Snyder
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
involved in business together. We don’t compete with each other; rather, we help each other out and support one another in Southwest Florida.
What do you enjoy about beekeeping? I love that we get to spend so much time outside together; we’re an outdoor family. We keep lots of animals, and we try to be a self-sufficient, homemade type of family. I love honey, and I love bees. Honey is so versatile and delicious, and I’m fascinated by the intricate science behind this part of creation.
I do miss nursing; nursing is my passion, and I still maintain my license. At this point in my life, though, I’d much rather be able to help my husband. And, I love the family business aspect – we are all together. Bee hives and bee keeping are never boring, and I appreciate being able to help the environment in this way.
What is challenging about beekeeping? There’s no exact method or science that will work 100% of the time. There is so much out of our control regarding the realities of agriculture. Various bug issues, hurricanes, weird sicknesses, and bears can destroy hives and kill bees, even if we’ve done everything perfectly.
Beekeeping involves so much more than selling honey. Yes, we do sell honey, but we also raise queen bees, sell bees in packages and boxes, and provide bee removal services. We partner with small businesses around town that use our honey, and we provide residential delivery service one day a week. Our ultimate allergy blend is most popular, and it is a mixture of honey harvested throughout the year from various pollinations, so a teaspoon a day can be really effective for mitigating seasonal allergy symptoms.
How do you envision the future for your business? We hope to be able to hire a part-time employee or two. God provides exactly how much we need when we need it, but we’d love to increase production such that things are a bit easier on a regular basis. Long-term, we hope to have a shop out of which we can work – a store where people can come, buy honey, and learn more about bees and beekeeping.
What environmental challenges are facing Collier County that impact the bee population? We need to stop cutting down wetlands that we can never get
Photos, facing page: MOMentum Mom Briesa Ruby with a few of the bees that fuel her family’s business, Rubee’s Raw Florida Honey.
Above, L-R: Rennisen, Josh, Briesa, and Jacob Ruby.
back to make room for new developments. Collier County is losing parcels of the environment we’ll never be able to reclaim. That kind of stress is dangerous for every facet of our local ecosystems, and the bee population is included in that. The deforestation depletes our pollinators of their natural resources, taking away food sources and potential homes. This is one of the reasons there are so many bee swarms in our town and its neighborhoods.
Though mosquito control chemicals supposedly don’t hurt bees, there is no one who can guarantee that over time. The chemicals are designed to kill bugs, and we need to think long-term about mosquito control’s effect on bee population as well. How do you decide where to place your hives? Hive placement depends on a lot of factors. My husband’s genius brain determines the strategy behind all of it. We work hard to place hives closest to the nectar blooms that open up, and we move them around to make different types and flavors of honey. For example, we take our hives up to the Lake Placid area for the orange blossom bloom, where the orange groves are very healthy and well taken-care of. We also place hives near black mangroves at specific times in the year; bees then will produce black mangrove honey, which has a unique, salty flavor.
When there’s an impending hurricane, we move them inland, and during winter months, we also move them inland. It’s better for bees not to have supplemental feed when there’s nothing to feed on. My husband has knocked on doors [to find properties where we can move the bees], and we barter with honey [to use the land]. We have friends with property all over Hendry and Collier County. Bigger commercial beekeepers have contracts with groves, but we try to keep our business more personal.
What makes the honey you produce the “highest quality honey available,” according to your website? Why should people buy it instead of other raw honey available at other stores? When you buy honey locally, you can guarantee the quality and the healing properties of the honey you purchase. Even if a jar of honey is labeled “raw,” honey packagers must pasteurize it to some extent for it to be on a store’s shelf. Additionally, if honey is labeled “Florida Honey,” it may still come from other countries and have been packaged or distributed from somewhere in Florida.
direction needs to be something that both people in the relationship love fully and completely. When the dark times come, both people in the marriage must commit to not letting it get best of them. They’re both going to have to push through and make it work. And you have to be okay not making any money from the business – just seeking to break even.
We’ve run into a lot of hard times. It is not easy building a business from the ground up. There have been quite a few occasions when I’ve almost looked at my
Above, L-R: Briesa and Josh Ruby in their beekeeping gear. Below: The Rubys’ bee yard at their home in Golden Gate Estates.
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Honey on the store shelf may have very little actual honey in it; honey labeling is very vague and can be misleading. To get the full health benefit, it is best to buy from a local beekeeper. When you do so, you’re helping an American farmer, and you’re helping the local environment. Beekeepers are really scientists. They work closely with farmers and engage in active research to promote growth and pollination, and to support yield. Beekeepers worked to eradicate a dangerous
genetic of Africanized bee that was appearing several years ago. And, 8-10 years ago, bees were vanishing in areas across the country. Local beekeepers worked to get a better understanding of the issue and helped to begin reversing that trend. Buying honey from a local beekeeper supports that important work.
What advice would you give to other parents who are interested in pursuing their passion by starting their own family business? The business’ focus and
husband and said: “I want out.” The business is so hard on him. We lost 80+ hives during and after Hurricane Irma, and it took us a long time to be able to build back from that loss. It was so painful to watch Josh pull 10-12 hour days five to six days a week to build our business, working his fingers to the bone, and then to have a destructive hurricane hit.
And yet, my husband has so much integrity, heart, passion, and grit – he is what keeps me going. Sometimes I collapse and think, ‘Can I just be done tonight? I’ll be strong tomorrow.’ This family business is unique in that we live and breathe beekeeping – it’s our lifestyle. We can’t escape. Our relationship with our business is so intimate. But, in the end, that’s what makes it so great and so rewarding on a daily basis; it’s integral to our family culture. It’s our passion, our livelihood, our way of life.
NEAPOLITANfamily • February 2020 Visit Rubee’s Raw Florida Honey at therubees.com or find Briesa on Instagram: @briesaruby_honeygirl.
where the finalists are recognized and presented with their awards. This year’s banquet will be held on Feb. 20. Following the banquet, the winning presentations in each division can be found at www. collierschools.com. “We were made to go out and get hurt, to know what heartbreak is, to know the sting of failure, but perseverance is a gentleman and will knock before entering. Sometimes the only option we have left is to fall, and that is okay because eventually we rise again with a new sense of strength and power. The thing that makes a person is to be able to feel the depths of our emotions and to know that everything is just temporary. If we were to live in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to persevere, but we don’t so we are called to rise to the challenge.” – Excerpt from a high school semifinalist in the Laws of Life essay competition. Laws of Life Essay Program Helps to Build Character I n my most trying times, my mother reminded me of a quote from Wayne Dyer, ‘Have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.’” Good advice, I would say. The above is an excerpt from one of our high school semifinalists in the annual Laws of Life essay competition. The Laws of Life program is a character-building activity that helps young people focus on and develop positive character traits that lead to responsible citizenship and a successful life.
It was initiated as a suggestion by members of the Naples Young President’s Organization (YPO 49ers) who brought it before the City of Naples and Collier County Public Schools (CCPS). Now sponsored by the City of Naples, Collier County Sheriff’s Office, the Southwest Florida 49ers organization, and CCPS, the program is open to all student residents of Collier County who are enrolled in grades 4-12. Annually, more than 3,000 students compete for a variety of honors and scholarships in four grade-level divisions.
Students initially write essays connected to a Laws of Life character theme. The themes include self-control, citizenship, patriotism, honesty, fairness, courage, respect, tolerance, responsibility, cooperation, kindness, and perseverance.
“Respect to me is important because it is so much more than just considering someone’s feelings,” shared one middle school semifinalist. “It is taking that consideration and putting it into action by accepting someone’s beliefs, ideas, and decisions even if they are different than you. This shows that you care about them and see them as an equal rather than someone less than you.”
The student essays submitted are scored by a committee of readers and the top 10 students in each division are invited to participate in the speech phase of the competition. Once again, a committee composed of community judges scores the oral presentations. The top four student finalists in each division are then invited, along with their parents and teacher, to attend the annual Laws of Life banquet, Last year’s Laws of Life winners, L-R: Arya Rajaram, Joanne Augustin, Isabella Stapp, and Faith Hundley. “
