Beekeeping – Working your hives. Watching the worker bees bring in nectar and pollen on a warm sunny day. Extracting honey in the fall. The excitement of finding the queen. The buzzing of bees in a flower patch. All of these and more may come to mind when you think about beekeeping.
As our business grows we are realizing the not-so-glamorous part of beekeeping is taking more and more time to address–the part that we never had to do or worry about when we only had a few hives. For example, early on we had enough friends and neighbors to sell or give away our honey to. Now we must give needed attention to marketing to expand our customer base.
Please don’t get me wrong. It’s a blessing and a top-of-the-world feeling to see our bee business reach this point in just five short years. I’m just saying there is more to beekeeping than spending time with bees – the nuts and bolts of a successful bee business.
There are off-season things like building pallets, building more bee equipment, and maintenance on the bee truck and trailer used to haul bees to Texas (tires, lights, change oil, etc). The decision to overwinter our bees in Texas this year added a whole new chapter to the nuts and bolts part. The logistics of transporting bees legally and safely in large scale takes much planning.
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