Long before there was an Edisto Gold Honey, there were four beehives, a family kitchen, and a teenage boy learning to pay attention to bees.
Mark Connelly was about sixteen when his mother was given four hives by a retiring beekeeper. She began reading, asking questions, and learning how to care for them. Mark and his younger brother were sent to local beekeeping classes, where they learned from experienced beekeepers who had spent years working with hives.
When it was time to harvest, the family carried boxes of honey from the bee yard to the kitchen, spun the honey from the comb, and filled jars together. By seventeen, Mark had his own pickup truck and was hauling hives to nearby apple orchards for pollination, selling the extra honey through a local general store.
Beekeeping stayed with him.
Mark eventually came to Charleston to attend The Citadel, earning a degree in civil engineering. Life took him through different careers, but he continued keeping bees. After settling in South Carolina, that lifelong practice eventually brought him to the banks of the Edisto River—and to David Anderson of Black Pearl Organic Blueberry Farm.
The two recognized something important in the relationship between the farm and the hive. Blueberry plants needed pollinators. Bees needed healthy places to forage. And the honey coming from those hives carried the character of the land around them.
In 2019, Edisto Gold Honey was born.
Today, Edisto Gold manages hundreds of hives across the region, including around St. George, Bowman, Ravenel, and Johns Island. Some are placed on farms specifically to help pollinate crops. The hives move as seasons change—where the bees can stay healthy, where farmers need them, and where something is coming into bloom.
That makes their honey a little different.
Bees don't follow a recipe. They follow flowers.
As blueberries, wildflowers, berries, and other plants bloom across South Carolina, the nectar available to the bees changes with them. The color and flavor of the honey can change, too. It is one of the quiet signatures of real local honey: the landscape leaves something behind in the jar.
Edisto Gold keeps that connection close. Their honey is raw and unfiltered, and the company is a Certified South Carolina producer.
And Mark is still doing the work himself.
Alongside tending bees, working with farmers, and building Edisto Gold, he has spent much of his adult life as a firefighter—two kinds of work that, in different ways, require showing up, paying attention, and taking care of what depends on you.
What began with four hives has become something much larger. But the heart of it hasn't changed.
Healthy bees. Good land. Farmers helping farmers. And South Carolina honey that still carries a sense of where it came from.
