It all started when our son asked a man at our church if he could go see his bee hives with him. After a couple trips, he offered to sell us all his bees and equipment because he was moving. We bought 12 hives, plenty (we thought!) of extra wood ware, two extractors, and a lot of other equipment we didn’t know how to use or even pronounce!
On a camping trip during the winter, we visited a large bee company in the north Georgia mountains and decided to try grafting to increase our hives numbers. Although we lost a couple of hives our first winter, we jumped right into making queens in late winter with a plastic box, some little cups, and a good “how to” book we found in all the stuff we bought. Our first attempt went exceptionally well, and we were off to the races.
Through hours of videos, countless bee keeping articles, several trips to the Fat Bee Man, lots of trial-and-error, a couple clipboards full of notes, making wax queen cells two at a time, multiple queens “raiding” our cell builders, a couple of dead queens, and more hours of thinking and discussing, we went from 9 hives in early spring to about 50 hives and nucs by mid-summer. We bought some additional queens to increase our numbers going into our second winter to be able to shake packages at the start of the following season.
We’ve learned A LOT since those first queens – a lot to do and a lot not to do. It all counts, and, we pray, adds up to a wonderful business in which our family can work together and help meet your bee needs from queens and bees to classes and bee-keeper-for-a-day opportunities as well as educational and relaxing opportunities for our local veterans, foster families, and others through a ministry we are starting to share Christ through everyday life-on-the-farm experiences (including training wild horses!).
We look forward to serving you and appreciate your business, support and prayers as we seek to bring glory to the Lord through the opportunities and resources with which He has blessed us.