The Duchess of Sussex is so immersed in her swarms of bees that she has bought special masked bee-keeping suits for five-year-old Prince Archie and three-year-old Princess Lilibet, her master beekeeper has revealed.
Branden Aroyan, who set up Meghan’s hives and works with her monthly to maintain the colony and gather honey, reports that she becomes like a ‘giddy teenager’ when surrounded by the 100,000 bees she keeps in her Montecito garden.
Her passion for beekeeping is on display in her new Netflix series ‘With Love, Meghan,’ which debuts on Tuesday (March 4).
‘Meghan has a couple of hives and she loves them,’ Aroyan, 50, tells MailOnline.
‘She’s giggling. She’s just like, “Wow, that’s so amazing! Look at them! Oh my gosh, look at all those bees walking around, crawling around! This one has orange pollen in its pocket! Oh that one has yellow!
‘Look how big this one is! What are these guys doing?” Just asking questions, and continuous “Wow!” The entire time she’s like a giddy teenager.’
‘Harry loves it, and Archie and Lilibet are into it too. It’s a whole family affair. They all have their own beekeeper suits. They’re just all super-fascinated by it.’
Meghan follows in a long line of Royal beekeepers. The late Queen Elizabeth had hives at Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, Windsor Castle and Sandringham. King Charles maintains those hives, and also has several at his Highgrove country estate in Gloucestershire.
Beekeeping is understood to have been a long-time hobby of the Princess of Wales, who tends hives at her Norfolk country home Anmer Hall on the Sandringham Estate. Queen Camilla has also kept bees on her Ray Mill estate in Wiltshire since 2015.
Meghan and the whole family have their own beekeeper suits and are all fascinated by the bees
Meghan Markle filming for the Netflix show, With Love, Meghan which airs March 4
Aroyan set up Meghan’s hives in 2023, and says Meghan has no fear of being stung.
‘She’s not at all nervous,’ he says. ‘In all our time together she’s never been stung. We take our time. She’s whispering. We’re not making loud noises, just moving slowly and surely. Just being kind to the bees, and they respond accordingly.
‘She’s fascinated by the bees, loves it and really cares for them. She is intrigued by the interconnectedness of the whole colony and how they take care of each other. There’s no ego and it’s all for the greater good and the health of the hive.
‘She loves to plant flowers for them: perennials that bloom throughout the year, and a variety of salvias that the bees just love, and so do the butterflies and the hummingbirds. It’s a great way to fill the garden with wildlife and gives the bees what they need to prosper and pollinate.
‘Listening to the buzz and hearing their hum is so calming, like yoga or deep meditation.
‘After you hang out with them you walk away and all’s right with the world. She says that all the time. You show up, “Oooh! Ooh! Ooh!” And after it’s like, “Ahhh, thanks bees.”
Meghan plans to sell honey along with jams and preserves when she launches her new lifestyle brand, As Ever – until recently named American Riviera Orchard – as well as honey butter, honey sticks, honey pots, honey dippers and honey stirrers, according to her US trademark application.
She relishes the honey gathered from her homegrown apiary, but it won’t produce enough of the sweet stuff to sell commercially. Meghan’s two hives might produce enough honey to fill only 64 8-oz jars each season.
‘We harvest the honey and I put it in jars for them,’ says Aroyan. ‘Each hive can produce a couple of gallons of honey. That’s why in the Netflix trailer, she says: “My golly, it’s so much honey.”
Branden Aroyan, Beekeeper from Pacific Coast Pollinators who helped set up Meghan’s hives in 2023
Buckingham Palace is home to four Italian honey bee (Apis mellifera ligustica) hives. The bees live on an island in the Palace gardens and forage on a wealth of nectar plants, both native and exotic
Five hives are in the gardens of the palace and are run by Bee Keeper John Chapple
‘Meghan will keep jars from previous seasons, and label them so she can compare the different flavours as the flowers really alter the taste. It’s wildflower honey, but some seasons it’s a little more citrusy. We do it together, but I’m basically helping her do it.
‘She wants to save as many bees as possible. She wanted to know: “How many bees can we put on this property? Can we put more than one hive?” So she has two hives, with about 50,000 bees per hive in the garden.
‘She loves letting them have their space and sunshine and some shade. That philosophy really starts expanding the rest of your life and your relationships, and that’s what’s so great about the bees: they remind you of that, and you feel better and get to carry that on. It gives them so much joy, excitement and involvement.’
The eight-part series ‘With Love, Meghan’ may be Prince Harry and Meghan’s last-ditch effort to save their beleaguered $100 million Netflix deal, which expires later this year.
After their sporting reality series ‘Polo’ landed with a thud in December, the renegade royals will be hoping the new lifestyle and cookery show is a smash.
But even before airing, the show has come in for criticism for – it has been claimed – being a cooking show without providing recipes, as Meghan apparently potters around her kitchen and garden, aiming to find things that ‘spark joy.’
Meghan’s new Netflix show ‘With Love Meghan’ airs next week
Kate Middleton, like her brother James, has been an avid bee keeper for a while
Kate’s hives are at Anmer Hall and Queen Camilla has also kept bees on her Ray Mill estate in Wiltshire since 2015
Meghan’s passion for fine cuisine is such that she recently offered to work in a top restaurant’s kitchen, reveals famed American chef Alice Waters, who appears as a guest star in ‘With Love,’ Meghan.’
‘She said she would love to come and be in our kitchen,’ discloses Waters, aged 80, godmother of California cuisine, who pioneered the farm-to-table culinary movement at her famed restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Northern California.
‘I told her: “We take interns, and if you have time, please come, you could be an intern.” I think it would interest her.
‘I hope she was serious about coming. I don’t know what she’s allowed to do. It’s very strict, her security.’
‘Her garden is beautiful,’ says Waters. ‘It’s substantial in terms of biodiversity. She has a whole herb garden, corn, every colour of tomato, cherry tomatoes and larger ones, beautiful purple radicchio, and all kind of fruit trees, orange and citrus. It was very impressive. She grows potatoes and carrots – we ate some of her carrots right there in the garden.
‘She has chickens in the garden, and on the table were all different colours of eggs that she had collected with her kids. Meghan also composts, with discarded food scraps, the whole thing.
‘I always learn something from people’s gardens. Meghan’s had winding paths where you could play hide and seek. I loved that you could hide behind the raspberry bush. It seemed so charming.’
