Our Story
The honeybee serves the wild divinity of the Earth in every moment of her life. Building flourishing matriarchal civilizations, singing life force into form. Golden winged priestesses, making love to the plants and bringing vitality to all that she touches. Ensuring the fruition of the harvest she won’t live to see, transforming the sweet seduction of flowers to create temple cities of ambrosia that last forever.
Since the dawning of humanity, our relationship with the bee has been a vital element of what makes us human. Like the bee, we also have the capacity for devotion to the thriving of all life. The bees hold a key to flowering remembrance, calling us to come home to ourselves.
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 unique and potent botanical meads that celebrate the plants and the bees, while returning reverence, magic, and medicine to the imbibing of alcohol.
The first time Maeyoka Brightheart opened a beehive in 2009, her life was changed forever. She was claimed by the nectar spell of the hive the moment their scent and hum enveloped her. When she saw the bees chained together, holding hands to direct wax comb building, her heart cracked open in wonder and filled with honey.
She has cultivated an intimate embodied relationship with the magic of the bees ever since, through apprenticeship, study and lived experience. Maeyoka is a medicinal beekeeper, herbalist and apitherapist, working with the life-giving medicines of honey, pollen, wax, propolis, royal jelly, hive air, hive song, and venom- and the healing force of the whole hive.
Benjamin and Maeyoka first crossed paths in a luscious meadow on a golden June afternoon in 2013, and it was love at first sight. Over the years a partnership grew, fed by their mutual reverence for the honeybees and passion for the wild. The Brightheart-Pixie family now calls that meadow where they first met home. Benjamin, Maeyoka, their five children, and a growing community are the stewards of a 160 acre pollinator sanctuary in the Methow Valley of Washington state.
The Pixie Honey team has grown to become a buzzing hive of inspired and industrious family and friends, devoted to collaboration with the honeyed beauties that enrich our lives. Many hands contribute to the tending of land and hives, harvesting of plants, crafting the magic that fills the bottles, and bringing the medicine of the bees to the people through Pixie Mead, Spirit of the Hive- our honey based distillery, The Pixie Traveling Medicine Show- our pop-up apothecary, and the Temple of Nectars Flowing- our mythopoetic educational devotional offering of bee magic and goddess worship.
Everything we consume takes life to create. Mead is the only alcohol that the production of actually benefits the ecosystem it was harvested from- through the honeybee’s pollination of the flowers, the land grows more diverse, more fecund, and more abundant. We at Pixie Mead are so inspired by her work that we devote our lives to sanctuary beekeeping.
We are dedicated to using this avenue of honey wine to transform the Earth and channel energy into ecological restoration by planting diverse forage to feed a world where all life can thrive. 5% of profits of Pixie Mead sales will go towards habitat growth for honey bees and other pollinators.
We look to the honeybees as great teachers of how to live in service to that which feeds you. Her civilizations have been sustained through devotion and reciprocity for over 50 million years, benefiting all life by the way she lives. Her nectar-dripping, ecstatic, relational feminine consciousness is vital medicine that this world is hungry for.
We are nothing without this force, and everything because of it.
