Meet Our Team- Hannah

Hey, Hannah here! I wanted to share my story and how my side of Honeybee came to be.

The site of my future garden

After buying our first house in 2022, my husband Johnathon and I got right to work with clearing the overgrown shrubs and planning on our 5-year home. We had talked about the end goal being a barn dominium with some land and a few chickens, but we found a great starter home on about 1/3 of an acre in Lake County, IL. I went to culinary school and really loved the idea of "farm to table" style of cooking and I had a small interest in plants and gardening- Every apartment we lived in had herbs in pots and tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets. My favorite past time was reading on the patio and listening to the hum of the bees around my container plants, and it created a level of peace that I strive for.

Finnigan loves picking carrots

In January of 2023, we welcomed our first son, Finnigan and started to really look at what was in our food. A family friend had recommended this app "Yuka" that looks at the item and rated it out of 100 based on the ingredients and nutritional information. We would spend hours in grocery stores scanning everything from fruit snacks and bottles of juice to sunscreen and ChapStick. It started getting us on the path of choosing better options of our usual grocery items and learning that just because it's easy to grab or marketed as "healthy" doesn't mean that its true! Now I will be the first one to admit that I don't know everything, but I am really interested in learning and with wanting to feed my family healthy and natural food, I started designing my garden and researching homesteading.

In 2024 we welcomed our second son, Emmett and our dream of living off the

Emmett and I in front of the garden

land turned into full blown plans. We started plotting our land for more flower beds, a chicken coup and a duck run; I started a sourdough starter named "Edgar Allen Dough" and received my first electric canner. I made a list of the skills I wanted to learn, and it is still growing to this day. My first goal is to create my own pasta sauce with all tomatoes, onions, garlic, and basil grown on our property. My list also contains maintaining bee hives, baking with sourdough, preserving food, raising farm animals for meat, eggs, and fresh milk, and so much more.

In one of my daily talks with my sister Emma, she had also started making some similar lifestyle changes to her home and we came to realize that in our research we really backed the herbalist and homeopathic way of living. And political views aside, we believed that we are being poisoned as a society- if we stay sick and uninformed than we will be reliant on our government. While we understand we need to evolve, we believe that the idea of convenience comes at the cost of our health in everything to the food we eat to the shows we watch and the beauty products we use every day. That is where our mission to become self-reliant stems from. In the last couple years, we watched many natural disasters and COVID clear our grocery store shelves in days, and I never want my family to be in that situation. And we can't be the only ones.

The idea for Honeybee Homestead is to create a community of likeminded people to share information, tips and tricks, and support. We are taking this lifestyle change as a gradual transformation with understanding that you can't just take a left turn into a different way of life. The Lord has blessed us with everything humanity needs to thrive, and we want to use it to do good in our households and communities. We plan on sharing everything from gardening and growing your own food to preserving it on your shelf for the future. From ditching that chemical-based body wash and endocrine disrupting candle for simple and natural homemade one. We hope you join us, gain some inspiration, and start living with the land.

The Michael Family