Chris Bush and Mindy Brasdovich don’t just sell honey at their Hive Works Honey Co. They help kids with learning disabilities acquire socialization and work skills, while at the same time helping businesses take on corporate social responsibility.

Companies get free honey and help young people with developmental disabilities, while the kids get invaluable work and life experience.

How did these North Olmstead natives get themselves into the apiary business? If necessity is the mother of invention, then the deprivation caused by the Covid pandemic proved to be the catalyst for Hive Works Honey Co.

For Bush, his necessity was not being able to find honey for the meads he makes. For his Brasdovich, an occupational therapist, it was a desire to help her learning-disabled students find meaningful work when they finished school.

Bush solved the first problem by purchasing a hive and teaching himself the ways of an amateur beekeeper. When Covid forced his 80-year-old neighbor to move to Florida, Bush opened his door one morning to find the man’s beehives on his front porch with a note saying, “Take Care of my Bees.”

Suddenly, bees and honey started taking priority over wine.

Shortly after inheriting the hives an afternoon trip to the grocery store made the mission clear to Bush and Brasdovich.

They saw a group of learning-disabled kids in job training, and all they were doing was pushing the grocery carts into the store. Bush and Brasdovich thought there had to be better job training than just simply pushing carts.

“Mindy had a kid that really needed help with social training,” Bush recalls. “We thought if we could take the bees and kind of mix them together [with occupational training], we’d have something special.”

Soon after, one of Brasdovich’s occupational therapy (OT) students came out to a beehive, learned how to bottle jars of honey and put labels on jars, and Hive Works was born.

Soon after, Brasdovich developed a targeted OT program that teaches students effective communication techniques with coworkers and customers, and targets executive function skills like following directions, initiating tasks, and solving problems.

Brasdovich says working with the beehives and selling honey proved to be a wonderful way for her students to get this kind of firsthand experience.

Hive Works Honey CompanyThe pair started hiring people and began to work with United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Cleveland and the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities to find kids who might benefit from the program.

Bush partners with the West Creek Conservancy, which hosts many of the beehive locations, which can be found all over the west side of Cleveland, from Riverside Cemetery in Brooklyn Centre, to as far west as Put-in-Bay and Middle Bass Island.

After they recruited more kids to their job training program, the next step was finding corporate sponsors.

“When a company sponsors a beehive, they get their name on the beehive and the honey from it,” explains Bush. “They all get to come for an event, take pictures of bees, and help spread the whole ‘save-the-bees message.’”

So far, Hive Works has signed a wide range of organizations, from Fit by Five: Preschool and Summer Camp in Westlake, to B Theory, an organic skincare company in California, to Cleveland Auto Wholesale.

As Hive Works Honey Co. looks towards its third year, Bush is launching a new website, which he says will make it easier to sponsor hives and get kids involved.

He says they have plans to get the honey in area retail stores soon. In the meantime, Hive Works honey can be purchased at the Tremont Farmer’s Market every Tuesday and Thursday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.