Photo by Cameo Wood

From an e-mail to customers from Cameo Wood, the owner of Her Majesty’s Secret Bee Keeper at 3520 20th St.:

I’m going to be closing the store and going back into tech within the next two months. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that my lease is up in two months and the rent would increase dramatically after that point. The second reason is that I’ve worked here by myself for over a year now, and I’m not entirely happy with working in retail. I miss working with other people on solving creative technical problems. I’ve thought about just hiring someone to work at the store while I work elsewhere, but it just doesn’t make sense with the rent increase and other fees associated with hiring a full-time employee.

I have been a proud member of the Mission District community for the past year and thank each and every customer for supporting my store and making me a part of your family. Please stop by in the next two months so we may say goodbye and so you can take advantage of our closing sale. There are lots of beautiful things for the holidays and of course we will still be selling local honey. We will be packing boxes on the 16th with the remaining merchandise to be donated to my non-profit, San Francisco Bee-Cause. I hope that I can continue to help introduce as many people as possible to beekeeping.

Since opening day the business has been wonderful fun and profitable. You have all been amazing customers, and I’ve enjoyed working with you. During the time the store has been open, we’ve taught over 300 students, and sold over 500 beehives. I’ve been to your homes and we’ve looked inside of each other’s beehives. It’s been awesome.

Thanks, San Francisco!

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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