Why I created the Florabella Hive Circle
This summer I am opening the first edition of the Florabella Hive Circle: 25 people, two real hives, one season to follow. This is the story of how I got here — and of the ideas I discarded along the way.
The idea I discarded
When I started thinking about how to let other people into the Florabella project, the obvious road was already paved: adopt a hive, receive your honey, check on your bees from an app. There are platforms that do this well, with sensors, dashboards and impact reports. I studied them at length. And the more I studied them, the more I understood it was not what I wanted to build.
Not because the technology is wrong — I have worked with tech brands for more than twenty years, and I even built my own tool for apiary inspections. But a sensor measures the weight of a hive; it does not tell you why the linden bloomed a week early this year. And a dashboard full of live numbers creates a very specific expectation: that nature is a service — always available, always measurable, always on time. It is not.
What an apiary teaches you about limits
Our apiary in Koziegłowy is small: two hives, not an industrial operation. They are called Maria and Maja. Maria is a name from home; Maja recalls the cartoon bee of my childhood — that small, curious bee many still remember fondly. Two simple names for two real colonies, working every day among blooms, weather and unpredictable seasons. Around them, a meadow and the Warta river five hundred metres away. In two seasons it has taught me more about waiting than twenty years of deadlines and product launches ever did.
The harvest depends on the weather, the blooms, the health of the colonies. A season can be generous, difficult, surprising or unpredictable — and no app changes that. You can measure everything and guarantee nothing. It is the part that often stays in the background when beekeeping is told only through dashboards, numbers and promises of control — and it is exactly the part I wanted to put at the centre.
So the Circle was born
I decided to do the opposite of a platform. Small instead of scalable: 25 places for the first edition. Not because I want to seem exclusive, but because I want to follow every member with the same care I give the hives. Personal instead of automatic: every access request is read by me, one by one. Told instead of monitored: written updates from the apiary, with real photos, real blooms and — when it goes that way — real problems.
The whole idea fits in the three lines at the top of the project page: less automation, more relationship; fewer live numbers, more real season; less industrial promise, more artisanal transparency.
What being in it means
Members receive a personal certificate with their own name and member code — format FB-HC-2026-001, the same system we use to number our batches — the updates of the season, and priority access to the first numbered jars, if the harvest allows. The members’ register is public, with consent only: as I write, there are already five of us, from three countries. Code 001 is mine and stays at the apiary.
The honey is not guaranteed, and we say so clearly. If the harvest falls short, members get priority on the following batch, Florabella credit or a partial refund. I prefer a small promise kept to a big one that breaks.
Why now
As I write, the linden is in bloom in Wielkopolska and the hives grow heavier by the day. The harvest of the first batch is a matter of days: whoever joins now follows it from the very beginning — extraction, filtering, jarring, numbering by hand. There will not be a second first batch.
Requests for the first edition are open. It is not an automatic purchase: I will personally read every request. Discover the Florabella Hive Circle →
