As it turned out, Grayson was equally impressed with Dennard’s honey-making skills. He was inspired as he watched his equally broke roommate, Jennifer Grayson, take a $5,000 loan to open her One Fish Two Fish boutique on Whitaker Street in 1998. I wanted to innovate, but I didn’t think there was any money in marketing unique flavors.” “I’d made some tonics with honey and herbs, but I didn’t want to adulterate my passion,” he said. Then came health and wellness, medicine, and massage therapy. What am I doing? Why did I study religion in college? I got past the self-pity by taking out a pad of paper and writing down all of my interests that I could see being a profession.”Īt the top of the list was his dream job, directing movies. “I just couldn’t believe I didn’t have my life figured out by then.
When he returned stateside and moved his handful of beehives to Savannah in 1997, a then 30-year-old Dennard struggled to pay rent, let alone find his life’s purpose, after a failed wildlife-focused business venture. “Teaching the Jamaican people to care for, protect, and rebuild the hives, that’s really where I first learned how much I was benefiting by giving.” Over 90 percent of the world’s feral hives were destroyed,” he said.
“These Varroa mites, they decimated beehives in the US and around the world.
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“I had great parents and an easy life growing up, so I knew I wanted to give back and create positive ripples like the bees, but it has been an incredible journey in finding how to achieve that mission.”Īfter he graduated from college in the late ’80s, Dennard joined the Peace Corps, using his tutelage from Hightower to teach beekeeping in Jamaica at a time when the world’s bee population was nearly eradicated by a mite pandemic. “I’m the first to admit that this path was far from intentional,” Dennard said. More than 40 years later, he’s become one of the country’s foremost bee preachers and has built an unlikely yet ever-growing business and education empire around a hobby that became a life’s passion. As much as he learned from Hightower, Dennard never imagined that he’d be able to build a career around spreading that gospel and extracting the fruits of the bees’ labor. His mentor, Roy Hightower, believed in beekeeping as a way of life. They are a vital resource, and I knew early on in life that it was just as vitally important to show others that bees are heroes to be celebrated.” The sheer volume of their positive ripples on the plant world is epic. “One beehive will visit more than 500 million flowers in a year.
Bees have a relentless work ethic they are so giving to the world around them,” said the founder of the Savannah Bee Company. Once the teenager was exposed to the heritage beyond the fear and stereotypes, he saw these marvels of nature in a completely different light. Simons Island, Dennard might feel the same way. If not for meeting an elderly beekeeper on his native St. They are the enemy of relaxation, a pest that must be expelled before it becomes a stinging assassin. Ted Dennard knows what most people see when a bee invades their personal space.
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