Written by Palmetto Bluff
Jun 16, 2021
Ted Dennard knows what most people see when a bee invades their personal space. They are the enemy of relaxation, a pest that must be expelled before it becomes a stinging assassin.
If not for meeting an elderly beekeeper on his native St. Simons Island, Dennard might feel the same way. Once the teenager was exposed to the heritage beyond the fear and stereotypes, he saw these marvels of nature in a completely different light.
“They are amazing role models. Bees have a relentless work ethic; they are so giving to the world around them,” said the founder of the Savannah Bee Company. “One beehive will visit more than 500 million flowers in a year. The sheer volume of their positive ripples on the plant world is epic. 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.”
His mentor, Roy Hightower, believed in beekeeping as a way of life. 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.
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.
