Local ingredients often create buzz on restaurant menus – and that’s no different at Stubbees Beestro.
But what sets the St. Joseph Island restaurant apart is that the owners make one of those local ingredients themselves, with the help of a few eager bees.
Located just off Bridge Road, the bee-themed eatery offers a variety of fare, from burgers, sandwiches, wraps, pizza and more.
It also carries several desserts and takeaway food like pies, cakes, ready-made soups and pasta, and it even offers an ice cream stand that runs through the summer.
Of course, it also offers local, island-made honey from beekeeper Cody Stubbe, who runs Stubbees Beestro with his wife, Stephanie.
“I think it's a bit of a novelty, for sure,” he told SooToday.
“We try to do local as much as we can and support local, and we’ve had vendor events and everything like that here through the summer, just to try to bring people together.”
For Stubbe, beekeeping started as a hobby in 2018, when he harvested under 100 pounds of honey starting out, before exploding into a 3,000 pound operation this year as he learned the ropes and expanded.
“The honey is just an interesting thing to me. They're a mild obsession – honeybees – that some might not call mild,” he said.
“I've had pretty good over-winter success the last few years – breeding my own bees, grafting my own queens, and growing my operation. I started out with two hives, and now I'm sitting at about 65.”
Opening a honey bee-themed “beestro” was never necessarily in Stubbe’s plans, but it fell into place naturally.
When Stubbe’s parents bought the building – which also houses his mother’s own bee-themed business, Bee Joyful Sewing – they approached the couple about starting a business in the vacant restaurant space.
“I thought it'd be nice to have a place to have a little bit of local honey on every table, and a place to get local honey, and then the restaurant beside that with desserts and food and everything,” he said.
Opened in January 2024, the island bistro is now buzzing along toward its second year in business.
“We have a great team here, and everybody works really hard to make it as good of an experience as we can,” Stubbe said.
More can be found about Stubbees Beestro on the restaurant's Facebook page.
