Renn Bee Farm
Local honey by the pound and quart. Creamed honey, sourwood honey, and honey sticks also available.
Vendor Story
Marcel Renn
By the time “hive mind” became dot.com shorthand for the idea of corporate “crowdsourcing,” Marcel Renn was already moving away from those corporate crowds—and toward the real hives of Renn Bee Farms.
Today, Marcel’s apiaries provide Davidson Farmers Market patrons with the sweet loca success of tulip poplar, wildflower, clover, persimmons and other fruit-tree honey. From mountain hives farther afield comes sourwood honey. He creams some stock, too, for a smoothly crystallized, spreadable treat. (His private-stock mead is not on offer at the market, more’s the pity.)
Marcel traded the worker-bee life of his corporate job for the real thing after taking a honeybee class in Forsyth County in 1996. He bought a farmhouse on Faith Road in Salisbury, land he had admired often in his incarnation as a Swiss textile engineer leading a manufacturing salesman’s life in North Carolina. Now instead of supervisors, he has goats, guarded by a Great Pyrenees names Suzanne.
But the bees are the focus.
“Bees don’t have friends,” Marcel says with his trademark stoic smile. “Somebody always is after their larvae or their honey.”
One way he shows them friendship in exchange for honey is buying sugar 1,000 pounds at a time at WalMart, a stock to help ensure food during lean seasons. He keeps his hives organized and safe according to best beekeeping practices. That real-life hive mind at work ranges from the workaday installation of a “queen excluder” that separates parts of the hive to sometimes urgent repair of hive structures after storms. He lost two Allegheny County hives to Hurricane Helene.
Honey production can vary widely season to season. Local honey runs April to May, harvested end of June. Sourwood runs in July and August, harvested in September. The Renn Bee market table reflects the apian schedule as well as human supply and demand. Get it while you can!
Meantime, the hive will keep you in mind, and Marcel will continue to deploy the peaceful smile of the beekeeper, quoting Peter Fonda’s beekeeper character in Ulee’s Gold along the way: “Don’t panic when they sting!”
