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There is a short version of this story and a long version. For the sake of your time, I’ll give you the short version. The long version belongs in a book — and yes, I’m writing it.
Let me dispel something upfront: I don’t fit the image most people carry of a beekeeper. I wasn’t born in rural America. I’m not Amish. I am not elderly. I’m a second-generation African American beekeeper from New Jersey, raised in Linden — a city kid who found his temple in a beehive.
“The decision to become a beekeeper was easy. The path that led me there was the hardest thing I’ve ever walked.”
In 2013, I lost my mother, Linda Steward, to congestive heart failure. She was a woman of remarkable grace — compassionate, charitable, and wholly devoted to everyone she encountered. Her death left a void I didn’t know how to fill.
Grief has a way of redirecting a person. Mine redirected me to the hive.
I had been studying apiculture for years — attending conferences in Wooster and Plain City, absorbing both the science and the art of it. After losing her, something shifted from intellectual curiosity to urgent purpose. In 2014, I began raising honeybees. Four years later, in 2018, Linda’s Bee Farm LLC was formally established — named after my mother. Everything we build here is a tribute to her.
By profession, I am a Lean Six Sigma Logistics Specialist with the U.S. Postal Service — 35+ years of diagnosing operational waste, eliminating variance, and building systems that sustain themselves. I see the world through a process lens. What I discovered inside the hive was the most elegant process system I had ever encountered.
The colony has no supervisor. It has no policy manual. It has design — millions of years of evolutionary engineering producing zero waste, precise temperature regulation, and outputs that outlast anything we manufacture. I walked into beekeeping looking for healing. I found a graduate course in systems thinking.
“I concluded that if I could observe the bees and develop a relationship with them, perhaps I could obtain a more insightful understanding of Mother Nature herself — and through her, of myself.”
Apiculture is not a hobby for me. It is a convergence. It connects my study of biology, ecology, history, mythology, sacred geometry, and the ancient traditions that long recognized the bee as a symbol of divine order. The hexagonal comb — that six-sided perfection — appears in nature, in architecture, in the esoteric traditions from Egypt to the Kabbalah. The bee has always been a messenger between worlds.
That is not metaphor for the sake of marketing. It is my lived experience, confirmed every time I lift a frame and watch 60,000 individuals function as a single, purposeful mind.
Today, Linda’s Bee Farm operates 80+ active colonies across Trumbull, Coshocton, and Cuyahoga Counties, with a retail presence at Crocker Park in Westlake and a growing wholesale footprint across Northeast Ohio. We produce raw wildflower honey, botanical skincare, infused honey fusions, beeswax candles, and artisan gift collections. We host educational workshops, remove swarms, and provide Ohio-acclimated livestock to new beekeepers.
Every product carries my mother’s name. Every hive is managed with the same continuous improvement discipline I apply to postal operations. The farm is not a side project. It is a second career — built on grief, sustained by purpose, and guided by the most sophisticated organisms on the planet.
“Everything I have experienced — every loss, every win, every discipline I have mastered — has been preparation for this.”
The bees didn’t choose me. But I chose them. And that choice changed everything.
Shop raw Ohio honey, botanical skincare, and artisan gift collections — crafted with the precision of a systems specialist and the soul of a beekeeper.
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