Local jewelry maker’s designs help honeybees

Press release from Ilana Fiorenza:

Artist and jewelry designer Ilana Fiorenza is a metalsmith, a freeform beadweaver and makes wearable and often symbolic jewelry. Recently she was inspired by the beauty and industriousness of the honeybee when her parents began to keep bees at their West Asheville home, fascinated that the life’s work of a honeybee amounts to a 12th of a teaspoon of honey, and was inspired to create her line of “honeypot” jewelry. “I think it is poignant that the honeybee works so hard to create such a small amount of honey, and that they are now facing decline, so I think the honeypots help us to appreciate the beauty and sweetness in the smallest of things,” said Ilana. “I want my work to have social meaning and importance.”

Each unique locally-hand blown glass vessel holds approximately the amount of honey from Ilana’s family’s hives that a single honeybee can make in her lifetime. The vessel is sealed, so it will not go bad. “Honey lasts forever,” Ilana likes to say. Ilana also donates a portion of proceeds from the sale of the honeypots to a nonprofit called Bee City USA, which works to raise awareness about the plight of the honeybees and helps to create pollinator gardens and other bee-friendly infrastructure.

Ilana sells her honeypots online on Etsy and on her website ilanadesigns.com. Downtown shops Desirant and Kress Emporium carry Ilana’s honeypots as well, and you can find her selling those and other designs at the Portico Artists’ Market at the Grove Arcade on most weekends.