The Creatresses
This is Emily Forrest
Emily’s life’s is interwoven with the bee on a deep and cellular level. She is passionate about bee guardianship, natural bee tending and bringing the ancient methods of the medicines of the hive back to the people.
Nearly eight years ago Emily fell in love with bees, and it became her life’s purpose to work intimately with them; firstly exploring mythology and a spiritual connection to the bees.
Emily then had the amazing opportunity to live and work with Save the Bees Australia for five years. This was filled with hands-on bee work - with every one of Simon’s hives a rescue (they would re-home bees from many different structures to save them from being exterminated). Over the time that Emily volunteered, she helped to campaign against chemical use and honey laundering, as Simon was taken to the Supreme Court by the largest honey corporation in the world. The result of this influenced people to distrust supermarket honey and instead buy from local and small-scale beekeepers.
Experimenting with making products out of beeswax, Emily processed what was left over from the rescues
and it organically became the beginning of Embodybee.
She moved away and worked with many different styles of natural hive designs and researched Apitherapy (an alternative modality of healing using not just all the products, but the elements of the bee hive to benefit human health and healing).
After living very isolated during the pandemic Emily was craving community and moved to the Bellingen Valley where she began living on an actual Community. Emily met Ayla there and together they renovated a neglected community building, which is now the ‘Co Creatress’ - their production space.
Ayla is weaving in the folkloric herb alchemy with Emily’s ancient hive alchemy knowledge to bring to you high vibrational hand-made products.
This is Ayla Resha
Ayla is blessed to live a life close to the land. Growing up on community, submersed in her families food forest. Ayla is a lover of food as medicine and from a young age has incorporated the knowledge and wisdom of plant medicines into her daily life.
Ayla’s father had a medicinal herb nursery while she was growing up, Ayla was an enthusiastic helper - with her hands in the earth from a very young age, living and breathing the authentic experience.
Ayla wishes to offer to the world what she has been blessed to have at her doorstep her entire life. She is inspired to help humanity re-discover preventive medicines. Health and well-being is her top priority, she finds joy in helping others develop a deep intimate relationship with the natural world, by creating and providing delicious and health bearing products everyone can now have a taste of land.
In her early twenties Ayla lived, studied, and worked on an herb farm in Northern California. She lived with a horticulturist woman on top of Bear Mountain in a pristine place brimming with nature’s abundance, wild herbs growing everywhere. During that time she infused her life with all sorts of plant preparations, making tinctures, balms, sun teas & medicinal oils - a truly immersive experience and real-life exploration of herbal medicine.
On her return to Australia, Ayla bought a house on the community she grew up on. Her first priority was to plant as many food and medicine plants as possible. Ayla took over her father's organic farming business, expanding into larger food production. While working the land, Ayla was granted a scholarship to study with Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine, sharing in this study journey with her close friend Nirmala.
While developing her home, farming business and community, Ayla came to realise that being a primary producer was a lot of physical labour. She was looking to transition into growing smaller areas of food and medicine to create high quality products from the land. It was at this point she met Emily.
Emily, Ayla, and Nirmala quickly realised their collaborative potential and set up a production space on the community.
The rest will bee the sweet unfolding of the blossoming flowers.