Atlanta Magazine
For Armond Wilbourn, beekeeping is about more than just the honey
“I want to change the image of farming and beekeeping within the African American community.”
Photograph by Growl
Armond Wilbourn was growing watermelon in Palmetto, Georgia, when he fell in love with honeybees. As pollinators, the insects are essential to farming melon and many other crops, so he purchased two colonies. “And from there, my love for bees just exploded,” he says. He found himself captivated by the bustling creatures’ social behaviors: “The drones, they’re the male bees. They do nothing. They just walk around the hive all day, and every now and then, they’ll mate with the queen.” Last fall, six years after buying his first hives, Wilbourn began bottling his bees’ output and selling it across Atlanta under the label Noble Honey Co.