‘I had to learn how to make my own’
Bee’n a Blossom offers natural health, beauty, cleaning products in Amherst
Pamela Ibbitson has always sought alternatives.
As an allergy sufferer and diagnosed celiac, with rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, Ibbitson has always looked for natural health and cleansing products that won’t cause a bad reaction.
For years, she had a supplier. But when COVID-19 struck, it changed everything. The local small business where she acquired her products was forced to shut down. And in lieu of it closing, she says she couldn’t even order anything online. The situation eventually forced Ibbitson to take things into her own hands: literally.
“I had to learn how to make my own or I wasn’t going to have soap,” she tells Cumberland Wire.
She sat down at her computer and started research, before setting to work on her first batch. Ibbitson and her partner had their own beehives, so she used their own wax and honey, as well as various flowers, herbs and oils to make the soap. The first batch didn’t turn out perfectly, but it was a start, and it was soap.
“It’s not a soap I would have sold, and it did work, but it was just this misshapen block of glycerin,” she recalls with a laugh.
She was persistent, however, in applying the knowledge she inherited from her grandmother, continuing research, soliciting feedback and using her intuition to press forward to perfect her new craft.
She quickly expanded beyond soap, making her first salve for her skin soon thereafter.
Today, she makes more than 250 natural products, from deodorants and creams to cleaning products to laundry detergents to the salves and soaps with which she started.
In a very short time, her work has enabled Ibbitson to run her own natural health and beauty products store, made entirely by her own hand: the Bee’n a Blossom in Amherst.
RUNNING THE BEE’N A BLOSSOM
Ibbitson was still living in Miramichi, N.B. when she started making soap and other products.
It wasn’t long before other people took notice.
A lady was helping Ibbitson and her partner plant raspberry canes when she asked Ibbitson for some of the icy
joint balm for sore hands, joints and muscles. Ibbitson shared a jar with her. Soon thereafter, this lady shared it with somebody, and then that person asked Ibbitson if they could buy some. Ibbitson decided to just give away another jar.
After continuing to give products away, she realized there were a lot of people who needed these items.
“In our small community, people weren’t able to access the same things that I had,” she says. “And they also needed a good, clean cream or they couldn’t get the soap they wanted.”
When she started selling her products, people were more than happy to buy it.
She soon derived the name, Bee’n a Blossom, out of the key role the bees play in the process of making her products.
Ibbitson told her partner, Diane Doiron, she wanted to plant herbs and flowers serving as a long-term food source for the bees. In the fields and raised boxes near the beehives, she planted the herbs and flowers that would nourish the bees through the fall.
“I used to love - it brings me such comfort – to sit in the herb beds and watch the bees inside of the blossoms of the herbs and the flowers and they’re just all covered in pollen,” she explains. “I would sit there and watch them until they were finished doing what they were meant to do to the blossom. And once the petals were not able to give them the food source anymore, I would harvest that for the soaps, the oils and the salves.”
In this way, waiting for the bees to get what they wanted first and then harvesting what she wanted, the bees weren’t working for Ibbitson, but she was working with the bees.
And the name was derived simply from her watching the bees in the blossoms.
Since Ibbitson and Doiron moved to Amherst from Miramichi in 2021, they have had to sell off their beehive. They currently get their honey and wax from another local supplier.
However, they are in the process of acquiring new hives in Amherst.
Ibbitson loves her new life’s work.
“I don’t want to be a millionaire. I want to be able to do what I love to do and help other people and this is a way to do it,” she says.
She feels her example illustrates how some good can come out of a bad situation.
“When life gives you something right out of the blue and you hit a brick wall, what are you going to do with it? You can’t sit there, we have to evolve with it,” she says. “COVID hasn’t left. It’s still around. But we’ve evolved into this other stage of our being that you know, we’re going to do the best with what we have in the moment and I think that’s what everybody around me has done.”
Ibbitson, who still makes everything herself, continues to run Bee’n a Blossom out of her Amherst home. The business is located at 224 Highway 366, Amherst. Hours may vary.
To learn more, follow Bee’n a Blossom on Facebook or check out the website beenablossom.ca