As a child, Scott Holifield remembers listening to his father’s stories about retrieving honey from wild honeybees. He also recalls visits to the Missouri Botanical Garden with him to watch bees at work.
But it wasn’t until years later, in 2013, that Holifield rekindled his interest in the buzzy pollinators. He moved to a house in the city with a yard large enough to host beehives and, calling on his pharmaceutical background, began experimenting. A neighbor’s homecoming gift—a bottle of Compton Heights honey—felt like a sign that he was on the right track.
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“It tasted completely different from store-bought honey or anything that I’d ever tasted,” says Holifield, recalling the herbal and floral notes derived from the historic neighborhood’s mature linden and poplar trees.
When he started taking samples of his own honey into the office, to his delight his co-workers requested more.
With the help of the Eastern Missouri Beekeeping Association, Holifield has steeped himself into the art of beekeeping and today runs Hawthorne Honey. His hives in Tower Grove Park and the Saint Louis University Orchard house enough honeybees for him to make and sell lip balms, of compounded beeswax and essential oils, at Kitchen House Coffee. He also makes hot honey (infused with spicy peppers) for Melo’s Pizzeria in Benton Park, where it’s served on pizza specials. A fortuitous meeting in December 2019 with John Pitman and Tom Niemeier of SPACE Architecture inspired his next big beekeeping project: the forthcoming apiary atop the firm’s design studio in The Grove.
“As a firm that tries to make the most basic ecological moves, knowing that somebody who’s working with nature has asked us to work with him, is a real compliment,” says Pitman. “Sustainability doesn’t have to be something you overstate; it can be understated by making basic changes.”
Details for the beehive installation are still being finalized, but the idea is to host two of them among SPACE’s rooftop solar and geothermal heating and cooling systems. Installing them on a rooftop provides plenty of benefits: Curious onlookers can’t get too close to the hives and because the plan doesn’t call for soil, there is little chance of pests disrupting them. Holifield hopes to have the bees delivered to the roof by late April, with keepers extracting honey by next summer.
“There’s a real opportunity to do this throughout central county, even out into suburban areas,” says Pitman. “There could be a great chance to put this atop a local grocery store.”
“I want to have hives scattered around as the flavor of the honey is so different from neighborhood to neighborhood,” adds Holifield.
So what does honey from The Grove taste like? Holifield isn’t sure. Beekeeping, he says, brings many surprises. “It would be a fun project to see what different neighborhoods taste like—sort of like a wine tasting! ‘Here we have 63108 honey, and it tastes like this. What do you think it tastes like?’”
