The Sun is Shining!

Oh Spring--you are so welcome! And sitting in Annapolis Royal's Bistro East yesterday, in front of a plate-glass window, wearing the layers of clothes we'd donned to weather the melting snows of Keji National Park, I felt the blaze of sun on my face and neck and suddenly recalled that we closed the autumn with only two tins of Sunny Bee sunscreen.

It's time to make some more!

Like all our products, Sunny Bee is all natural; made with the classic skin-protector zinc oxide, blended into beeswax and vegetable oils. The research on the new chemical sunscreens is all bad--they contain ingredients toxic to humans and the environment, they wash off--and the ones that resist water often create allergic reactions in wearers. When I couldn't wear sunscreens (they gave me a rash), I started using diaper creams, which contain zinc oxide in sufficient quantities to act as very good sunscreens. But nearly all of them are also based in petroleum products--mineral oil, petroleum jelly--or contain lanolin, which, of course, I'm also allergic to. They were also heavy and greasy--not ideal skin coatings for a sun-deprived, pale-skinned northern dweller.     

So Sunny Bee was born! All -natural, vegetarian (not vegan, as we do use beeswax), simple and good. SPF 30. We made it affordable, too. We'll be selling it at local farmers' markets and very soon, online. If you want some before we make the transition to Internet Sales, drop us a line through this blog and we'll mail you a tin.

Mike Bienstock & Lori Covington
Medway Candle

Medway Candle Crosses the Pond--for Research Purposes

We're putting on our travellin' shoes and taking to the road. England--the home of traditional, hand-made bee skeps, fields of lavender and centuries of herbal and gardening lore, calls out to us. Ok, it's calling in a sort of funny accent, but we're used to that, having spent a lot of time watching BBC.

We're going to do a couple of things on this autumnal venture down the lanes and hedgerows of the Old Country. We're going to check out the landscapes and botany of the place (much of which is similar to our own) and see if we find any eye-opening medicinal herbs that may also be growing under our noses right here at home. We're going to meet some beekeepers (we hope) and learn from them. We may even eat a scone or two, and sample some farm-made cider.

It's an exciting time here at Medway Candle--and for those of you who buy Mike's candles and Lori's creams at the local farmers' markets, don't you worry. After a short hiatus, Mike will be returning to at least one winter market and sometime this winter, you'll even be able to buy candles and essentials from us online. But don't worry: if you run out of beeswax candles or Bee Balm, Bee Serious or Bee Cool before our website's up and running, you can call or email us and we'll make sure to get you the products you need.

Medway Candle Welcomes Pete's Frootique

Medway Candle is so pleased to announce that the fine people at Pete's Frootique have added our beeswax candles to their line-up of natural products. Fact is, we've had a little piece of wedding cake under our pillows for a year, waiting and hoping that the best grocery and gourmet store in the province would take a gander at our candles, lip balm and creams: with Pete's stellar natural products section and their focus on providing the best to the folks of Halifax (and all of us who travel to the city to buy from their fantastic cheese counter, outrageous dessert shop and endless arrays of fresh veg) , it seemed like a match made in Heaven! Knowing that our beeswax candles are keeping company with the fine soaps, SLS-free shampoos and lovely essential oils crowding the shelves at Pete's on Spring Garden Road gives us a warm Medway Candle glow...

Stinky Bee Becomes Buzz Off--and Bites are Down 80%!

Our new venture into mosquito repellent has been big fun and our test groups are telling us they like Buzz Off (nee, Stinky Bee) for all the bites they aren't getting. Tested on Long Cove Road, the buggiest place in Port Medway, with occasional forays into Keji adjunct and up the Mersey River with some naturalists, Buzz Off seems to be repelling the little devils at least as well as scary DEET-based bug juice, and without the toxicity. Made with smelly essential oils researched  in tropical climes like India and Thailand, our Buzz Off is composed of affordable and safe oils each shown to prevent bites. Personally, we hate the smell (having spilled a batch on the kitchen table), but our testers like it fine! Some are even using it as a perfume!

Made with four top-secret essential oils in a carrier base of grapeseed or olive oil, Buzz Off works for a solid hour before you need to reapply. One ingredient was chosen for its reputation as a tick repellent, the others, all repellents in their own right, work synergistically to offend mosquitoes and send them off looking for something else to eat. They'll still buzz you, but you'll find you get significantly fewer bites.

Now, if someone would only come up with a way to get us to put the stuff on BEFORE we go outside and get the first ten bites! (Why do we always hope there won't be any bugs?) One thing for sure, for Buzz Off to work, you have to put it on!

Our new, 25ml bottles are thick green glass--gorgeous--and sell for only $10.

Why Glass?

Our signature cobalt glass jars are the result of weeks of searching not just this continent but the whole world for just the right containers. It's not easy to find good containers in eastern Canada; most people give up and use clear plastic. But when you're using essential oils and vegetable carrier oils, you want to keep them as strong as possible for as long as possible. Essential oils keep their useful qualities when you keep them from the light, and we already knew that glass isn't going to leach chemicals into products the way plastics do. So we went out of our way to find lovely, thick, dark glass jars for our water-free Bee Serious and Bee Balm and our Bee Cool lip balm too. They cost a little more, but they're worth it. Recyclable, beautiful and safe, our cobalt jars are one example of how when compromising would have been easier, we stuck to our plan. If you're gonna do it, do it right.

Welcome to The Studios at Key West!

Photos from our candle shop and herb garden. Photos by Mike Bienstock...

 Black currant in bloom...

Melting beeswax for candlemaking

Lady's mantle, muscari and dandelion...

Tapers...

Spearmint, wild fruit mint and creeping Charlie

Purple and white violets and essential oils.

Votive candles

Bee Serious is for Seriously Sensitive Skin

Most people don't realize that hand creams are waaay over-engineered. Who knows why companies put so much junk in their products? A tiny pot of hand cream can have 25 or 30 ingredients!

The problems with having a lot of ingredients are several: for one thing, the more ingredients, the more likely there will be interactions between the various components, which may be irritating to delicate skin.

Another problem with lots of ingredients is that the useful or "active" ingredients can be present in teeny amounts and the manufacturer can list them on the packaging, even though their effects are nonexistent. So you'll see lotions or creams advertised "with aloe" or "with Vitamin E", but there's not enough to do you any good. Such products are "filled" with chemicals, additives, preservatives and usually the main ingredient, water.

A third problem is that the more ingredients, the more likely people with sensitivities will be sensitive to one or more ingredients. Some of us can't use "ordinary" ingredients like lanolin, alcohol or aromatics like camphor, which is cooling and smells nice, but can be irritating.

So we've created Bee Serious salve. Partly out of selfishness--the creator struggled with sensitive, cracked and painful hands for 30 years. Bee Serious cured her. Her hands are smooth and soft and healed. Bee Serious has an oil, a wax and essential oils. That's it. It works. If your hands overreact to soaps, dust, housework or gardening, if your skin cracks and hurts, try Bee Serious. Seriously.