“[Beekeeping] is like a craft, right? You fall in love with it. You do it like an art.” —Khaled Almaghafi

The first thing you notice when you walk into Oakland’s Bee Healthy Honey Shop is a photo of its owner, Khaled Almaghafi, looking nonchalant while the lower half of his face is covered with thousands of swarming bees. It makes sense, then, that Almaghafi comes from a long line of beekeepers in Yemen, where raising bees is a popular hobby. Before he moved to the Bay Area in 1986, Almaghafi learned the trade from his dad, who was an amateur beekeeper. So was his grandfather. In his native country, Almaghafi explains, “if there is a swarm [of bees] in the street, people will go chase it” to try to claim the bees as their property. “Here, they will be running away.”

In the United States, Almaghafi started a bee-removal business, fielding calls from panicked homeowners desperate to get rid of an unwanted hive. He’d hoover up the bees with a special vacuum and transfer them to hives he had set up around the Bay Area. Before long, he’d established a thriving honey business, selling several varieties under his own Queen of Sheeba brand name at local farmers markets and his Telegraph Avenue shop. Today, Almaghafi maintains more than 100 hives at sites in Oakland, Pleasanton, El Sobrante, La Honda, and Santa Clara. Many individual hives are populated by 50,000 to 60,000 bees, which seems inconceivable—but it’s not all that many compared to commercial honey manufacturers who work on a scale of tens of thousands of hives. Where Almaghafi has the edge is in the quality of his honey, which is sweet without being cloying and comes in varieties that taste wildly distinct from one another: light star-thistle honey from his hives in Pleasanton and Vallejo; delicate, citrusy orange-blossom honey from Fresno; and, most memorably, a chestnut honey from La Honda with a tangy, rich fullness of flavor that’s a shock to the senses.

Like other local small-scale honey producers, Almaghafi sells his honey raw and unfiltered to maximize its taste and nutritional qualities. There’s an art to getting the honey to taste its best, from hive placement and knowing when the honeycombs are ready to be harvested to just keeping the bees alive. Fortunately, Almaghafi—like his father and grandfather before him—has been doing this a long time. beehealthyhoneyshop.com.

From left: Bees taking care of larva eggs; the bees making the honeycomb; Almaghafi’s shop offers pure, raw local honey and royal Hawaiian organic honey.