Avital’s Apiaries: Skincare Inspired by Honey Bees

By Kristie Snyder, GreenStar Staff

A beloved local skincare company, Avital’s Apiaries is the creation of Lesli Sagan, who produces sumptuous skincare – soaps, lotion, balms, and more – in her home workshop in Cayuga Heights, incorporating the honey, beeswax, and propolis that her backyard bees produce.

Lesli’s love affair with bees — and she does love them! — began when she started keeping them as an antidote to the stress of a demanding systems administrator job. After she married and had a child, she left the job, but when her daughter began school, it gave her the time to explore creating a bee-based business. The name was a natural – her daughter, Avital, now 9, has her own bee suit, and fearlessly helps out in the bee yard.

Everything bees make, it turns out, is great for human skin. Honey attracts moisture, while beeswax seals it into the skin. Propolis, an antimicrobial substance that bees make to protect their hives from pests and disease, kills bacteria. Lesli uses bee products wherever she can in her products – bar soaps, lotion, body and lip balms, body butters, bath fizzies, and body scrub bars.

Lesli’s creations delight the senses. They are vibrantly colored with spices and clays, feel nourishing on the skin, and are deliciously scented with pure essential oils. And she’s mindful of those for whom scents can be problematic – several products are available in unscented versions.

What’s Lesli’s favorite of her many offerings? It’s the Scrub Bee bar, a new lotion/body scrub bar that uses sugar and cranberry seeds to exfoliate, while coating the skin with oils and butters that emulsify into a moisturizing lotion layer. “It really helps make winter more comfortable,” she says, noting that her own dry skin is the impetus for many of her moisturizing products.

Avital’s Apiaries strives to keep not only the humans who use their products healthy, but the bees, too. “As a beekeeper, I want everything to be good for the bees, good for nature, and good for us,” Lesli says. With a consciousness that extends beyond ingredients, she chooses reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable packaging, and pays her single employee a living wage. “This is not just a business,” Lesli explains. “It’s an expression of who I am.”