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Keeper's Keep
- Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa
- 079 688 0756
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Keepers’ Keep is a Port Elizabeth-based beekeeping supply shop founded by Sonja Miller of “The Bee Team” and her daughter Erin. We provide all things beekeeping-related, from equipment to mentoring, along with a variety of hive products including honey straight from the hive, beeswax-based balms and ointments, and many more.
Co-founder of Keepers’ Keep, Sonja Miller is qualified as a Journeyman Beekeeper through the University of Montana, and has had experience keeping bees on and off since the 90s; the art of which has developed into one of her primary passions over the past seven years. During her years of beekeeping, Sonja has had experience in many technical areas of the field, including grafting and rearing queens, splitting and combining colonies, and diagnosing a variety of common colony ailments such as tracheal mites, nosema, and verroa mites. She is also a highly competent beekeeping mentor, and currently fills the role of Head Teacher at the Garden Route Honey Producers Beekeepers School, as well as offering private, one-on-one mentoring opportunities. Through her studies with the University of Montana in the United States, Sonja has elevated her practical knowledge with scientific literature about the life and ecology of the honey bee, the honey bee’s interaction with native pollinators, the plants they work with, bee poisoning and pollinator protection. Sonja is the proud Keeper of 20 hives of her own, and is passionate about helping others get involved in beekeeping and sharing her knowledge.
Co-Founder and daughter to Sonja, Erin is behind the design, admin and sales side of the Keepers’ Keep. She began selling honey to her peers on Sonja’s behalf in 2018, at a very small scale – this venture then grew exponentially during the 2020 Covid-19 nationwide lockdown. Through the establishment of this budding family business, Erin has developed a passion for website design and entrepreneurship and has several side ventures in the works in addition to her part in Keepers’ Keep. Erin’s passions lie in art, environmental sustainability, and entrepreneurship; all of which come together with beautiful synergy in the work she does for the Keep. She is currently in her third year of study at Nelson Mandela University, where she is working towards a degree in Fine Art – after which she hopes to plunge all her available energy into building the family business alongside growing her artistic portfolio.
The concept of the Keep was born as a pipeline dream in the mind of Sonja Miller, who had longed to own “a little bee shop” for as long as she had been involved in beekeeping. While this seemed like a far-off possibility at best, it wasn’t until the 2020 Covid-19 nationwide lockdown that the Keep began to manifest itself as a reality. Prior to 2020, Erin had been selling the odd jar of honey to her peers on behalf of her mother for several years; during the lockdown however, these sales grew at an exponential rate as Sonja had more time to tend to the hives and Erin had more time to advertise, as well as offer free local delivery to all those confined to their homes in quarantine. For the first time, selling hive products began to look like a viable family income.
While the sales side of things was blooming, what Sonja truely envisioned for the future was a community space for budding beekeepers – a ‘home base’ of sorts where anyone new to beekeeping or interested in learning could come for guidance, support, and to buy equipment, and to provide experienced beekeepers with much-needed resources and services at a greater convenience than what was available at the time. Thus the collaboration between Erin and Sonja began – with Erin taking on the majority of the marketing side of things and the responsibilities for the shop, and Sonja building up what came to be known as the Bee Room and beginning to offer mentoring to local budding beekeepers.
At this time, Sonja also formed a partnership with Garden Route Honey Producers; together launching the Bee School, a series of workshops that cover a broad spectrum of in-depth, technical aspects of beekeeping. It was not long after this that Sonja began offering mentorship opportunities to the budding beekeepers that had been introduced into the world of beekeeping through the Bee School, but still lacked the confidence to work in their own hives alone. Under Sonja’s patient guidance, many a new keeper has blossomed into a confident and successful apiary manager.
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