‘I share all my secrets with my bees’. Nicola Arkell Reed on turning a hobby into a business.
Nicola is used to growing colonies. 1 x partner, 6 x children, 280,000 bees. And counting.
When her husband James Reed, CEO of Reed’s recruitment, was given a hive by a friend for his birthday, Nicola found herself on a beekeeping course as James wanted nothing to do with it.
‘I didn’t want to ruin our friendship by rejecting the present,’ she laughs, ‘and then I fell in love with bees and everything to do with them’.
Happenstance seems to be at the heart of Beeble, Nicola’s honey-infused alcohol brand. So far whisky, rum and vodka have been given the Beeble treatment, with tequila coming out in March. They’re hugely popular online and are stocked in around 300 farm shops. She initially started trying to sell the honey, but ‘at local farmers’ markets, people weren’t really that interested. I found this extraordinary - it takes a lifetime for a bee to make half a teaspoon’.
This passion for eliminating wastage, paired with her creative spirit – she trained as an artist at Central St Martin’s and worked as an art teacher prior to setting up the business – spurred her on: ‘I put my waste product from harvesting honey into a cauldron of whisky, infused it for a month and then filtered it and gave everybody honey whiskey for Christmas. It was a huge hit! So I bottled up more, took it to farmers’ markets and it sailed out’. And it’s still sailing now.
It seems the bee gods weren’t finished with her yet, however. Next, in walked her daughter’s friend Matthew Brauer, an accountant with an eye for an idea. He approached Nicola after trying her whisky: ‘After pestering me, I finally bought a shoebox of invoices out from under the bed and he said ‘oh I can really see this is more of a hobby’, so we kind of started from scratch together and turned Beeble into a business’.
It’s clear that at the heart of Beeble is an eco conscience, and Nicola gets excited telling me about the thousands of trees that Reed’s have planted around Wiltshire where she lives. ‘That’s been fantastic for our apiary growth and has enabled the bees to have a huge amount of forage available to them. That’s been a great advantage.’
Using as much honey from her seven hives as she can is part of the process, and along the way she’s worked hard to increase the bee to human ratio; in her unusually large family, it’s definitely working.
‘I want more bees, more beekeepers, more interest in bees. It’s really important for us and our ethos.’
In conjunction with The Idler – a magazine and now school for grown-ups devoted to ‘idling’ – Beeble even now runs beekeeping courses. By the sounds of things, they’re just getting busier.
‘We just want to grow. We’ve been growing consistently 50% every year and we’d like to continue with that; we’re bringing out tequila and more gift boxes. And we just want to grow our team, grow our apiary holding and bring out new products as and when. We’re looking into non-alcoholic whisky which we’ve been struggling with, but hopefully we’ll come to something next year.’
When we speak, she is on her way to Glasgow to visit her youngest daughter, Tabitha, 20, who has just started art school. I wonder if she can remember all her children’s names, and she dutifully lists them out, one by one: ‘Rosie, 31, sculptor, Margate. Tessa, 30, tech, Toronto. Harry, 28, graphic designer, Kilburn. Patrick, 27, AstraZeneca, Kilburn. Aidan, 23, training to be an accountant, Kilburn’. A mini hive in London, then.
And has she named her bees?
She smiles and says she’s named her hives after her children and their boyfriends and girlfriends; there’s a little plaque on each. And so the circle is complete, bringing the whole family together, just how she likes it.
October, 2023
