Hawaiian Rainbow Bees Family Values

For Hawaiian Rainbow Bees, a local honey business out of the Island of Oahu, the emphasis has always been on hard honest work and family values. Malcolm Yorkston, the founder and owner of Hawaiian Rainbow Bees, has taught his children beekeeping, how to respect the bees, the plants they collect pollen from, and care for the islands themselves. Hawaiian Rainbow Bees LLC is family-run and operated, and the Yorkston family all pitch in to produce the uniquely tropical honeys that their local business is admired for.

Yorkston’s young daughters, for instance, understand how important bees are, especially as their numbers are declining at alarming rates. The girls aren’t afraid to don their beekeeping suits, hop in their father’s pickup, and head into the swarms to harvest honey or help maintain the hives.

Yorkston’s wife, Mitsuko, is a botanist who works for the University of Hawaii, and her knowledge of local plants and sense of ease around the bees also helps when it comes to the family business, and claimed in an interview to Honolulu Magazine last year that while she does get stung on occasion, she doesn’t harbor any nervousness around them. “It happens,” she claimed. “That’s beekeeping.”

In a world where big corporations swallow up mom-and-pop businesses and create market monopolies, it is important and relieving to know that local entrepreneurship is alive and well here in Hawaii. The Yorkstons are doing more than simply making honey with their Hawaiian Rainbow Bees business. They are passing on the priceless values of family, hard work and a love for local nature and local business to their children, and teaching them skills that simply can’t be taught in a classroom setting.

For Hawaiian Rainbow Bees, a local honey business out of the Island of Oahu, the emphasis has always been on hard honest work and family values. Malcolm Yorkston, the founder and owner of Hawaiian Rainbow Bees, has taught his children beekeeping, how to respect the bees, the plants they collect pollen from, and care for the islands themselves. Hawaiian Rainbow Bees LLC is family-run and operated, and the Yorkston family all pitch in to produce the uniquely tropical honeys that their local business is admired for.

Yorkston’s young daughters, for instance, understand how important bees are, especially as their numbers are declining at alarming rates. The girls aren’t afraid to don their beekeeping suits, hop in their father’s pickup, and head into the swarms to harvest honey or help maintain the hives.

Yorkston’s wife, Mitsuko, is a botanist who works for the University of Hawaii, and her knowledge of local plants and sense of ease around the bees also helps when it comes to the family business, and claimed in an interview to Honolulu Magazine last year that while she does get stung on occasion, she doesn’t harbor any nervousness around them. “It happens,” she claimed. “That’s beekeeping.”

In a world where big corporations swallow up mom-and-pop businesses and create market monopolies, it is important and relieving to know that local entrepreneurship is alive and well here in Hawaii. The Yorkstons are doing more than simply making honey with their Hawaiian Rainbow Bees business. They are passing on the priceless values of family, hard work and a love for local nature and local business to their children, and teaching them skills that simply can’t be taught in a classroom setting.