Famille Mary

Jean Mary, born in 1894 into an Anjou farming family, discovered beekeeping almost by accident: wounded in 1916 during the First World War, he convalesced at a Swiss hospital located near a beekeeping school, where he first learned the craft. In 1921 he moved his family to the Moulin de Beaurivage, a 17th-century water mill on the Moine river in the Loire valley that remains the company's home today. That same year he built his first wooden hives with movable frames and, during a historically dry, hot July, brought in his first honey harvests.

For over a decade Jean balanced beekeeping with farming, but in 1936 he gave up agriculture entirely to focus solely on bees, expanding with new hives along the Atlantic coast. After his death in 1967, his sons Jean and Pierre took over management and grew the operation further; within three years the domain held around 1,500 hives, making Beaurivage the largest apiary estate in France at the time.

The company has stayed headquartered at Beaurivage for over a century, selling honey alongside other hive products — royal jelly, propolis, and pollen — built on the founding generation's original methods.