Our “One Day” Honey Stand…So Why Keep Bees?
This is our third year of setting up our honey stand and selling our fresh, local honey from our bees. This year we sold 100 bottles of honey in 4 hours. Jax and Harper always look forward to this day and wish we were open more days, but thanks to support of so many friends and family…we cannot make it past one day. Of course the other reason is because we have such a limited supply of honey. We only had two hives make it through the winter this year, but we have 12 strong hives right now…so the work begins now on getting our bees ready for the winter.
We were able to pull five frames of honey this year and gathered about 16 gallons of honey from these 5 frames. We bottle our honey in one pound containers os that we have more to go around.
Our customers seem to like this dripless squeeze bottle which allows them to capture even the last drop of honey. This year I had about 200 bees in the honey house join me as I spun out the honey. It appears my front doors will need to be replaced as they have rotted out and the bees can get in. The good news is they pretty much left me alone and focused on enjoying exposed honey. I knew I had to continue and decided to leave them alone and hoped they would provide me the same courtesy…and they did.
Let me just say that there is a great deal of manuel labor, care, and expense that goes into keeping bees. While I did recover some of my expenses this year, I am a long way from being called a profitable business. I remind myself that my main reason for getting into bee keeping was to teach my grandkids a skill and provide them with a hobby which would be beneficial to our good earth. From this prospective my beekeeping continues to be a grand success. They love the bees, love taking care of them, love eating their honey, and of course love marketing and selling their honey. These lessons are priceless and inspire me to forge ahead as a beekeeper and a teacher of beekeeping as well. There are other reasons I keep bees too and why we need more beekeepers. I found this article below from a website I often visit called Bee Built. For those interested you can set up a hive at our bee Apiary and learn the art of beekeeping “hands on” with me. The price is right…all lessons are free…you just have to invest in your equipment and book.