The company was started basically out of Warren’s home in Hayward in 1972. At the time, he had just retired as Hayward’s postmaster at the age of 55. Warren had an active mind and always thought of ways to improve things. Before joining the Army, he had a mechanical background and had taken some courses at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. During his service, he was part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the original CIA and taught the Chinese how to make radios.

In 1972 he started beekeeping as a hobby and as was usual with Warren, he needed to know all there was about it. While reading one of the bee journals, he came across an ad in the classified section “Wanted: Bee Propolis”. Every beekeeper knew what propolis was–a sticky, glue-like substance the bees collected from the leaf buds and cracks in the bark of trees — but Warren had no idea at the time why anyone would want to buy the stuff.

At the time, it was scraped out of the hive and rendered down with the wax; the wax was only worth about $.50 /lb. Warren was curious, so he wrote to the address in the classified ad and found that the man was serious and was willing to pay $90.00 a pound for the propolis in a very crude form. The company was from Denmark. There was just one problem … they wanted 100 lbs. to come in each shipment.

A Worldwide Venture in Bee Products

Warren knew each hive only produces about 1/2 lb. of propolis a year, so that meant gathering the bees’ by-products from many beekeepers. Warren formed a company and named it Propolis USA. He then put his own classified ads in bee journals to buy hivescrapping, which, after cleaning, would glean around one pound of propolis for every five pounds of waxy hivescrappings. This work began out of his garage, with his wife and brother working as helpers.

Thus began a business that would take Warren and his wife, Vivian, all over the world, searching for information regarding uses for propolis in human health and other valuable products from honeybees and beehives.

Every other year, they attended a conference called Apimondia. A place where beekeepers and other interested parties presented research on the honeybee and the many by-products of the beehive, including honey, pollen, royal jelly and propolis. These conferences brought them to Japan, China, Budapest, and many other major cities in Europe.

After a few years of selling propolis to his one customer in Denmark, Warren looked at the US market for propolis-based products and found very few. So, like the mad scientist he was, he started work on his own formulas that eventually included products that used all of the beehive products, including honey, royal jelly, and propolis. Some of these products came under the trademark label “Honey Silk”. During this time, he decided to change the corporate name to Beehive Botanicals to indicate that we no longer were dealing in just bee propolis. Soon after, Warren transferred management to his family and was off inventing and discovering other wonderful things, but Beehive Botanicals continued on.

Yes, We Can Do This For You

More and more people were contacting us asking if we could create products for them. We had recently started encapsulating our own propolis, pollen, and royal jelly products and said, “Yes”, we can do this for you too.” Today we work with hundreds of herbs and botanicals that we either source ourselves or our customers supply to us. We provide our customers with capsules, bottled or bulk, liquid and powder fill.