New Hope Honey Makers was founded with a mission to help formerly incarcerated men of faith re-enter their community and workforce through saving and shepherding the honeybee, one of God’s most amazing creatures. We currently have three bee-passionate positions and will be hopefully adding a fourth in the near future. Every team member is encouraged to share the individual message of hope that they bring from their incarcerated experience back into their community. We work in a variety of community settings, including work with at-risk young people and within our larger communities of faith throughout California.

They produce honey! Everyone likes honey. Moreover, honeybees are special for a number of other reasons too. First, one of every three bites of food you eat today requires pollination and the honeybee is our top pollinating insect. We would not have the variety of foods we do without their tireless work. Two, there are nearly 4,000 bee species in North America; 75% of these live in the West and most of those live solitary lives. The honeybee is different because they live in community. A honeybee colony is a wonderful example to us of what it means to be in community and actively contribute to our community and with one another. Three, the honeybee is one of God’s most fascinating creatures as it and honey are mentioned over 60 times in the Bible. The honeybee and what they produce have been part of our lives for thousands of years.

We currently keep and shepherd more than 50 hives, or colonies, throughout six apiaries spread out in the tri-county areas of Monetary, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties of California’s beautiful Central Coast. Depending on the time of year, the number of hives we actively manage does vary on a variety of issues large and small affecting the bee. In each apiary, our bees forage on the delightful nectars of flowers growing in the fields, orchards, and home gardens around these areas close to the Pacific Ocean.

Every team member at New Hope Honey Makers was originally sentenced to life in prison. We might never go home! We intimately know what it means to not have hope and to feel that powerful emotion of hopelessness in our lives. We learned too about the greatest hope of all that is found in our faith, the Hope we have in Jesus. We also learned that people in prison and jail have the best stories! If the incarceration experience doesn’t break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambitions and that it can end any day, at any time. So why worry? We learned that just like with life on the outside, you can have a life in prison. Another vital benefit of our prison experiences is that we learned to appreciate very simple pleasures in life, such as the morning sunlight or a cool evening breeze. Our collective incarcerated experiences taught us the following: 1. Be calm. 2. We need a regimen or structure in our days, like getting up early, praying, or exercising. 3. Don’t eat too much. 4. Try not to sleep during the day because it is a form of escape. 5. Don’t live in the dark; natural light is always the best! 6. Keep your mind active, and as best you can, be positive. For example, reading only good books or making your brain work hard because these things would always leave you feeling better afterward. 7. Don’t seek power, instead give it to others if necessary; be humble. 8. Try to accomplish something EVERY DAY, for example, read part of a book, learn new words or a foreign language, do more push-ups, or maybe write a letter. 9. To help one another, and this is a source of quiet strength. 10. Keep a journal and how this is a form of therapy.

We remind ourselves daily that freedom is a wonderful gift. When our days sometimes don’t go the way we expect or want them to, we stop and ponder that we could still be incarcerated. That thought always seems to place life’s challenges in their proper perspective.

We like every opportunity we have to answer questions about raising and living among the bees. We love opportunities to share our strengths and hope that we carry forward from our former lives and into our lives today with others.

Our days are filled with a passion for the honeybee. We'll continue producing local kinds of honey and other products from the hive, like pollen, beeswax, and propolis and we are experimenting with making candles and skin care products. We keep on spreading the Good News message of Hope to this stressed-out world in which we live!