Whendi Grad and her husband, fourth-generation beekeeper Garnett Puett, have built their lives and careers around bees and honey, and that passion has been catching.

Puett’s award-winning organic, varietal, single-floral raw honeys, sold via Grad’s Big Island Bees brand, have generated requests for tours of bee yards and more information about bees and honey.

"I realized that lots of people have no idea about honey. They don’t even know it comes from flowers," Grad said.

But without bee yards on their Keala­ke­kua property — the hives are moved seasonally to take advantage of blooming ohia lehua, maca­da­mia nut and wile­laiki trees, often on private property — they cannot hold tours.

So in July, Grad opened the Big Island Bees Honey and Beekeeping Museum, a quaint one-room structure that looks to be an old-style garage, which takes visitors "from bee to honey jar," she said.

The museum features displays of old beekeeping equipment and archival family photographs, books and artwork on the subject of bees and hives, and even writings in verse that wax poetic (pun intended) about bees.

"It’s a place to educate people, and it’s partly to have fun," Grad said. "People have got so many questions, it’s a great way of presenting answers in an interesting way."

The museum also carries products made from honey and wax such as soaps, candles, salves and balms. There’s a variety of Big Island Bees honey and other edible products.

Grad says the museum is still a work in progress, so it opens just on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. She has more prints to mount — not an easy task since it’s tricky to incorporate more information without altering the aesthetic of the place.

The importance Grad puts on aesthetics reflects the couple’s unlikely back story: They are fine artists who met at art school at the University of Washington. In fact, Grad became exposed to beekeeping when Puett worked with bees during summers.

During graduate school at the Pratt Institute in New York, Puett figured out how to collaborate with bees on his artistic work. The former metal sculptor began using beeswax in his sculptures, which led him to create skeletons around which the bees would build hives into specific shapes. Some of his work is included in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Puett has beekeeping in his family tree. His father was a queen breeder in Georgia; his stepfather was a honey producer in Idaho. In the 1960s his step-grandfather and stepfather turned their thoughts to producing honey from Hawaii, where there’s year-round honey flow.

"They bought Miller bees on a Big Island ranch in 1971, roughly about 100 colonies, and built it to almost 4,000 colonies," Grad said.

When his stepfather decided to sell the honey business in 1988, Puett and partner Ben Cari­aga bought the operation. At the time, Puett and Grad were living in New York and traveling back and forth from the big city to the Big Island.

Finally, in 1992, Puett decided enough was enough and moved back permanently to go full time with the venture.

The men’s Captain Cook Honey Co. became the state’s largest honey producer, and they sold their product in large quantities to distributors and packers who blended their honey with other honeys, sometimes cooking the product.

Puett felt the purity and quality of his honey was being compromised, so in 2004, Grad put her art skills to work, designing labels for Big Island Bees honeys and becoming its packer, distributor and marketer.

Their honeys are minimally processed and never heated, preserving their pollen, enzymes, antioxidants and nutritional value, which preserves the unique flavors. The company’s ohia lehua and wile­laiki blossom honeys are completely organic.

All this integrity speaks to not just Puett’s love of bees and honey, but Grad’s as well.

"The more I study bees, the more interesting they become," she said. "On the subject of honey, there is folklore, recipes, mystical qualities and health benefits — warriors would pack wounds with it during battle. I just love it. Because of my husband, I’m fascinated with the world of beekeeping."