Honey Hobby Becomes Buzzing Biz

Fortune Small Business:

When Tony and Terri Schwager learned that their first child, Anthony, was developmentally delayed and had epilepsy, they worried themselves sick.

“We couldn’t help but think, ‘What is going to happen to Anthony when we move on?’ ” says Terri. “He is very sweet, gentle, and quiet. We were afraid that someone might take advantage of him.”

“A kid with a disability … when it happens, you realize it is not the end of the world,” says Tony. Still, they worried about the future. How would they take care of Anthony after they retired?

But then, to their surprise, Anthony himself found the answer.

Excited by a video he saw in third grade, Anthony begged his parents to add bees to the small farm they kept on the side for fun. After a year they relented and eventually set up clear plastic tubes to house the hives in his bedroom. He was obsessed, not only with bees but with the honey. He harvested so much of the stuff that three years later he and his parents decided to try selling it at the farmers’ market downtown.

They started small, displaying seven plastic squeeze bottles on a foot-square table. “Everything fit into my two-door Honda Civic,” says Aaron KimLuellen, a caretaker. Nine years later they’re still in business, and transporting their inventory - which includes beeswax lip balm, lotion, candles, and other honey products - now requires Tony’s pickup truck and a tow trailer.

A big reason for their success is Anthony, now 21. He does math like a fourth-grader and reads at a high school level, but when he’s manning the stall, marked with a cheerful ANTHONY’S BEEHIVE sign, customers respond. With a laid-back demeanor, he approaches passersby as if he were sharing news with friends.

“This honey is local, and there’s no preservatives,” he’ll explain in his soft-spoken way, letting them sample all the merchandise.

He also offers free candlemaking lessons for children, who watch enthralled, eager to wrap their fingers around the warm beeswax and roll it into a cylinder, just as Anthony, squatting down to their height, is showing them. With Anthony, there’s no hard sell; once drawn in, his customers become fans.

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Photo by Colby Lysne.

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