Bee Great with David Mullins (349)

349 - Bee Great with David Mullins

Joy: Hi. This is Joy from North Central Massachusetts. You're listening to the Beekeeping Today podcast. Have a good day.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website.

There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Hey, thank you, Joy, in Massachusetts for that wonderful opening. That sounded perfect.

Becky: It was. "Have a nice day." It was just like she's doing openings all the time. Good for her and lucky us.

Jeff: I liked it. Thanks so much. Folks, Joy just used the website and clicked on the microphone and recorded the opening. It just came out so wonderful. You too can do that. Thank you, Joy, for thinking of us. Becky, end of August, are you done harvesting your honey?

Becky: No. No, but I really hope to be in the next, let's say, give me seven days. Seven days.

Jeff: By the time this comes out, you will have harvested all your honey.

Becky: I really hope so. There's a slight chance I'd have a little bit extra that I throw a super on for space. I've got some heavy hives. Sometimes you just need to make sure they have room for their brood nest. If anything comes in, you want it to go someplace else. I'm almost done harvesting.

I've got some singles that I'm going to be putting into winter. They always take a lot of planning. I need to make sure that they're very, very strong and well-fed and they don't have a slowdown of anything coming in, so I start feeding them very early.

Jeff: We'll come back to that topic next season because I plan on working on singles next year just to give it a try. I've never worked with singles, so it sounds like a challenge. Why not try?

Becky: It's really fun. I think I've said that already. Hey, I saw you did some bottling.

Jeff: I posted a picture there on, what is that called? Oh, Facebook.

Becky: On the Facebook.

Jeff: Yes, I did. It's been a disruptive year, as I've mentioned. We're in the middle of moving and hopefully we'll be moved into our new place by the end of September. Because of the move, my honey houses no longer exist. Most of the equipment went to Paul's. I just didn't know what I was going to do. I ended up having it extracted by another local beekeeper who does it as a side business for other beekeepers. They did a wonderful job and I got my honey back and now I'm in the middle of bottling it. I always enjoy that.

Becky: It's really relaxing as long as the spill or the drip doesn't happen, which I now call the strip, I guess. As long as nothing bad happens. I use five-gallon buckets, so I just have multiple five-gallon buckets. Have you ever poured it in and not had that gate totally closed and as you pour, it comes out? Or has that never happened to you?

Jeff: I won't say it's never happened, but if it happened, it was long enough ago that I don't remember. Honey can be a big mess if you're not careful. I both applaud and am horrified by the fact you do your honey extraction and bottling in your kitchen. That terrifies me because I would spill it and it would just be a mess and I'd be sticking to that kitchen floor for months.

Becky: It works out very well. I've never had a dedicated space just for that. The kitchen's always been-- It always works, kitchen/dining room for my whole honey operation. We're living in a little bit of chaos because we're redoing our house. It's not like I'm dismantling something that's perfectly run anyway. We're good. Maybe if-- No, my husband's pretty flexible. It's all good.

Jeff: Today's guest is another beekeeper you met there in the Indiana area at a meeting?

Becky: Yes. I had so much fun at this field day. I met some great beekeepers. I went to dinner with our next guest. More importantly, before dinner, I met him and his family at their store. I can't wait for our listeners to hear about this store.

Jeff: We've had a couple of guests on the show who have taken their hobby and made it a business. I think that's a really interesting area to explore. I'm really happy that you found David Mullins here to be a guest. We'll invite Dave in right after these words from our sponsors, including Return of HiveAlive.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today podcast table is Dave Mullins sitting in Churubusco, Indiana, just outside of Fort Wayne. Becky's up in St. Paul. I'm out in Olympia. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. David, welcome to the show.

David Mullins: Thank you for having me today.

Becky: David, it's so nice to see you again. Last time I saw you, I was actually right there with you outside of Fort Wayne in your great store, your Bee Great store. I mentioned earlier, I think that our listeners are going to really enjoy hearing about everything that you've done, all the different beekeeping services you offer, and you're going to be an inspiration. No pressure.

David: Thank you for the kind words. I'm not sure what I can offer, but I'll try.

Jeff: Dave, we've invited you to the show to talk about how you've taken your business from a hobby. Now it is a good sideline business of beekeeping, and then you might consider a commercial beekeeper. I'm not sure your numbers or anything.

We'll explore that, but we want to see how you did that because that's a process that many beekeepers consider, and especially as we're going into the fall, and people are thinking about the coming season and they're thinking, "What would it take to get to the next level? Or, "What do I need to do next?" We're trying to provide some pathways that folks are considered to do that. Before we get going much further, can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in bees and your bee operation?

David: When I was a kid, we'd go down to southeastern Kentucky, down to Pike County, where my dad was from, and we'd visit my grandparents down there. My papa down there, we called him, had some hives. Mostly he said, "You kids stay away from there." When he was younger, so a long time ago, he said, I found out later, that they would go look for gum trees.

The gum trees would be hollowed out, there'd be bees' nests, they'd see the bees flying. They'd cut the trees down. They'd actually smoke sulfur at the end, and that'd kill the bees, and they'd harvest out the honey that they wanted out of it, but it killed the bees. Then they learned that they could cut the trunks.

They would put the bees inside of the trunk and make a piece that was big enough that they could just throw something on top of it, that underneath then was wobbly, so there wasn't a firm base on the bottom, so they had holes. They could come and go out of the bottom of it. Then they got some protective gear and that kind of thing and started to actually manage some of the bees and just go anywhere, cut out honeycomb when they wanted to. He'd always have a piece on the table. I just thought that was the coolest thing that there was honeycomb there.

Fast forward a long time after that, and my mom was allergic to bee stings, go to the hospital, anaphylactic reaction, so we could never have bees. Then she died about 20-some years ago. I wanted to do something with my dad we could do without politics or religion discussion. Bees seemed like a good thing to talk about a lot. I said, "You know what, I'm going to get a beekeeping class for him for Christmas through our local beekeeping club."

He said, "I don't want this if you don't do it too." We did together. That would have been in 2014, I think it was. We were 11, 12 years ago, whatever that works out to be. We started off with one box each, put them both at his place. His brother down in Kentucky, still keeps bees down there, and his other brother up here keeps bees. I have two uncles that are beekeepers or that play with it.

The one in Kentucky does a lot more. He's got about 20 hives, but straight up side of a hill. They're right up on the top of a mountain there. They're serious about working. Mine's easy, he always tells me, because everything's flat here. The few times I've been to help him, I realized what real work was and what the heat was. Anyway, that's how we got started.

Then from there, it was just a hobby, and we said, "Oh, let's go get a couple more hives from my uncle there in Kentucky." He wanted to cut back some, so he gave me a couple. We probably illegally transported them into Indiana. I'm not sure what the rules are on that. Anyway, we brought a couple. They all died. Didn't know that they had to be ventilated the whole time. We let them overheat, and I got them here, and nothing but dead bees when we opened it. I felt horrible.

I do know a lot about killing bees, unfortunately. It's not intentional ever, but it sure happens. I was a professor for 30-some years, roughly. The program at the university I was at, I was a professor of sociology, and the program got cut. That would have been right during COVID in 2020. My wife and I had been talking about doing some planning for retirement. I said I should work full-time, and we'll open this little side business of bees. I'll sell a little honey at fairs and things like that, and we'll pay for trips. It'll be fun. That's all we'll do. I think I had 15 hives then I built up to--

That's when I lost my position. I said we could go whole hog with this and do the teaching part-time online at different universities and things. I did that for a couple years. Then by 2023, when we had the building in 2022, was open. By then, I didn't have any time to teach anymore. It was full-time. We had two locations with 11 staff or 12, and decided to close one of the retail locations.

Our lease was going to be up right during harvest. By then, we had about 75 or 80 hives. Now we have 150 hives. We're down to two other people plus me. I have a lot of health issues. This year, I had heart problems and all those kinds of things. I've learned a lot more about managing hives with disabilities. Even though I'm not technically disabled, it's close enough.

Getting older, harder to pick things up. Our staff does some of the work with me. We have two people who help keep bees. We're not a big commercial operation. In a typical year, we produce maybe two months worth of the honey that we sell. Then the rest of it, we buy and resell from local beekeepers. We know where all the hives are that we buy our honey from.

We can speak exactly to where those locations are because it's really important to our customer base for most of our honeys that they want the local raw honey just like most people do. We always buy the 4H Blue Ribbon Honey from all the counties around in our area that we can. Then we've got some local folks from the bee club who sell to us who might do six or seven buckets full of honey a year.

I buy from them and buy from a larger beekeeper. It's the biggest one here in the state of Indiana. We buy from them. It's an interesting connection between beekeepers we found out is that the bigger ones all help each other out. One sells cut comb honey and the other one sells liquid and somebody needs to buy the packages. We work together to do that.

This year, though, with the 150, this is the first year we've had that. We had, I think 80. Last year, we've got 150 now and we've had a bumper crop so far this year. This is the only week in the last six weeks I haven't harvested, haven't been actually extracting. The reason is that we bring customers in that we keep bees for. For a monthly fee, we keep bees on their property.

They can help, not help. We bring all the supplies and everything. Some want to be beekeepers. Others don't want anything to do with it. They just want to have the pollinators and help the bees, but they come in to help extract the honey from their hive.

Although I've got the equipment to pretty quickly process and extract 150 hives for our operation, we still use buckets and strainers because everybody's hive, their honey super gets labeled when it comes in the building. We know whose frames are whose. We run it through the extractor and it comes out in a bucket that has their name on it again and then it gets bottled up however they want it. That's how we got to where we are.

Jeff: That's a lot of business in a short period of time, I think.

David: I think one of the things that really has helped us is that we put our finger into everything. My wife was, at that time, principal of a school and they had a fish tank. The guy was out there cleaning tanks and I said, "How's this work?" He said, "For a monthly fee, we come out and clean the fish tank. We go around, surrounding eight or 10 counties." I said, "I could do that with bees. Why not?" Then I looked online. Sure enough, there's people who do that.

I didn't realize anybody had done it. I thought I was the first, like you always do. Then I went, "Oh, I don't particularly like the way they do certain things. It wouldn't work for us." I didn't mean that. They're fine doing how they do it. That's not what we want. One does some corporate work where they do corporate training and things like that. I don't want to do that.

It's not team building based on how honey bees interact with each other. That's not my forte. I don't want to do that. I just want to teach people how to be beekeepers and be more involved with the beekeeping club. That's what we did. Then we started teaching classes and we said, "We've got to sell some soap," because somebody came in and said, "Do you have any goat milk honey soap?" I went, "I can, sure," so we did.

Somebody else came in and said, "Hey, I'd like an all-natural chest rub. I don't like that thick stuff. That's all synthetic or whatever." I said, "We can make that. Why not?" We just started making products that people asked for. People came in, "Do you have hot honey?" "No, buy Mike's." They sell everybody else. Why should I make hot honey?

Then I thought, "That'd be fun if we did something that was different." We do a Cajun hot honey, a wasabi hot honey, and a hot curry hot honey. Packed with flavor, not with heat. We're actually now looking at expanding into international markets. I was just, an hour before this, on a call with a logistics expert who was very kind enough to help me with some of the logistics of how you pack containers to ship overseas.

We don't have a contract yet, but I don't know what to charge them until I figure out how to pack it. I know what it's going to cost me to get it on that container should they want to. We've expanded into doing some of that and the wasabi and the hot curry and the Cajun, especially the Cajun. An American product going to Taiwan or Singapore or Saudi Arabia.

We've got a big show in December that we'll be doing by sending the samples there and a USDA representative will be showing them at the show for us. We're excited about that. People are looking for American products overseas and we'll see what happens. We may never sell anything anywhere but right here. We may end up shipping it all around the world. Who knows? We always think big. Hence the name, Bee Great. Bee Great with whatever it is, we're going to be great about it.

Jeff: I'm still trying to figure out how you make goat butter honey rub. What was that?

Becky: Wait, no, those are two different things.

David: Goat milk soap.

Jeff: Goat milk soap.

David: Goat milk and honey soap, we actually get a goat milk base. It's a melt and pour, super simple. Elementary school kids do it all the time. You can buy it on Amazon. It's a little two-pound pack. Cut it up, melt in the microwave, add your honey into it, add your fragrance and your coloring, and you mix it up and you pour it into molds.

All available online or at your local craft store. We do it on a larger scale. I was shocked, we probably-- Oh, a couple thousand bars of that soap every year now. We did that just because it was something someone asked us to do and we did six or eight of them and said, "Let's sell that to Farmers Market and try it out."

Jeff: That's the fun thing about talking with beekeepers or doing things as a business. I would have never thought of anything like that.

David: I never thought of selling soap, but we sell enough of it through the year at $6 or $7 a bar, whatever we charge for it. We actually sell it wholesale by the case to some stores and they resell at boutiques, places like that. It's just part of the list of items that we have. If anything, we probably have way too many items available for people to purchase. We make too many things that are small scale where we only make 50 at a time or whatever it is. As long as they keep buying it, we've got time to make it, we'll do that. Small batch seems to sell really well.

Becky: You were so generous when I was visiting as a speaker. I got a lovely gift bag from Be Great Local. Honestly, your products are pretty darn amazing. I have used that goat milk honey soap and I love it.

David: Oh, good. I'm glad you like it.

Becky: No, I love it and I will be ordering more. I'm not a huge honey fan and you gave me a lot of the flavored honeys. That ginger lemon or lemon ginger, I don't think I've ever loved any honey so much as I love that.

David: Thank you for saying that. One of the things, we call it ginger lemon for a reason. We're into all of the search engine optimization and all that kind of thing. If you look up lemon ginger, there's a million of them. If you look up ginger lemon, we're one of the few. It shows up pretty quick.

Becky: I think I said it right the first time then. Ginger lemon, okay.

David: Ginger lemon is the way we did. We just set it backwards, even though the ginger is the smallest part of the flavor and the lemon's really, hopefully, is the forefront with it. We're very in tune, or try to be, with how search engines work and naming products, and product pages and getting them higher ranked because we can never compete with the big companies that have so much money behind.

We don't pay for any advertising like that. None online. It's never been successful. I paid a tiny little bit a couple times for ads. I thought, "Why am I wasting my time with this? I need to get out there." If I can sell honey door to door and make more money than that ad, that's what I would do. I've thought many times about a little red wagon and just pulling it down the street and see what happens.

A lot of our products and things, we do put a lot of time and effort into the planning part. We don't just launch products. When we do, we make sure that the titles, especially all of our skincare products, you notice I don't use the word cosmetics. Cosmetics have a whole line of legalities that go along with it, where all natural skincare doesn't. We're very careful about it.

One of our staff is big into all natural bug repellents. She said, "I want to make a bug repellent soap." I said, "You just can't call it that. That sounds great, but no bug repellent." She said, "How about Bug Off?" I said, "I could." I said, "That wasn't personal? Wasn't directed at me." She says, "No." I said, "That would be a great name." We've got Bug Off soap. We're very careful about how we approach the naming of things. I think that's been to our advantage.

Becky: Is that from experience, from maybe being called on something, or is that the research that you do ahead of time?

David: No, I do the research ahead of time for anything we want to sell. People have asked for, "I would like a shampoo." Shampoo's highly regulated. I'm a stickler for rules. I don't want to get caught later on. What if it did go big? What if I make a deodorant that's fantastic and someone wants to buy a containerful and I ship a truckload of it and then suddenly I'm caught because I don't have the right license or whatever?

We're very careful about our products to make sure that we have the right things upfront because if you're going to be great, you don't want to start with a copyrighted image or a recipe that someone else owns the copyright to, and it's on my website. We're very careful about how we do that, probably more so than what I need to spend my time doing.

There's tons of free advice about that. We work a lot, did initially, with SCORE through the Small Business Administration. They provided, I think I got two or three hours of legal time for free the first year. Just the call I was on earlier is through Food Export Midwest that we talked with. For 50 bucks, I got to talk to a logistics expert that there is no way I could afford to talk to otherwise if we were paying her for her time as a consultant. Then follow-up questions and things like that you have the opportunity to do.

It cost me a little bit to get involved with that, but it was minor. We're talking hundreds, not tens of thousands. We try to tap into expertise ahead of time before we start to develop anything, especially since people consume our products. We are insured to the hilt. I probably pay more for insurance than I should, but all it takes is one person to say, "Hey, that made me sick. You didn't say that there was ginger inside your ginger lemon honey." We looked carefully into the laws about what we had to--

Just because it's in the title doesn't mean that that's in the ingredients, which I didn't know when I started. We want to be transparent. I don't want anybody eating anything or buying anything that they don't want. We offer a 100% guaranteed money-back guarantee. We actually have taken in a bottle of honey from someone that we did not sell that product. I said, "I will give you store credit. Sure. Yes, you're right. Swap it for that one over there." I said, "I've never had that jar."

Fortunately, I was there and it didn't happen to one of our staff. I said, "No, we never had that jar, but that's a customer for life." We want to make sure that people are happy with the products they get. I'll gladly refund their money to them and give them a store credit for something else. We've always done that. If something didn't go right, you get a little gift card that says, "Hey, on your next purchase, you're going to get 20% off of whatever it is that we offer for free as a little token inside."

Maybe a bar of soap that goes out with it and a little handful of candy. We're so sorry that happened. You don't get that from Walmart. We're more than honey. We've really, really drilled that into our staff and we train our staff extensively. They get tired of hearing about everything to do with beekeeping and honeys and what's in our products. We want everyone to know exactly what they're consuming.

Jeff: Do you keep an observation hive in your store?

David: We do not. We have one out back you can see through the window. No, we intentionally did not do that. My wife wants me very much to take out the back window and put an observation hive in it. The problem is I don't get any light in the back of the store then. Through the day, there's a lot of sunlight that comes through there. I don't know that the observation hive's good for the bees.

No offense to anyone who has one. I want the bees to do what the bees do in as much of a natural environment as possible. Having people peek in at them, tap the glass constantly, doesn't seem like something I want to support. I know that's upsetting some people, sorry.

Becky: It's daycare season. It's happening all across the country right now, David.

David: I know it. It's just like a fish tank. "Look with your eyes, not your hands." That's what my wife told all the little kids walking by. Look with your eyes, not your hands. It's one thing to take it to the Farmers Market or something like that just to show it. If it were permanent there, it's a lot of effort to take care of it. I want to make sure our bees do well. I don't want to put any bees in a hive there.

They can look through the window, completely protected then, and see the bees. If they want to walk around the back and get closer, they're welcome to go out back and walk around and look at the hive back there. Right now, like I said, we've been extracting. We take the empty supers and anything sticky and put it outside. Buckets, we pick them dry before we wash it out. Might as well feed the bees out there.

The neighbor has about 20 hives. He's about a half a mile back behind us, behind the houses there because we're right in town. His bees come over and feast on everything that's left. It's pretty cool for customers to get to look at thousands of honey bees right out the back sliding window. The sliding door has a window and they can look through that glass and watch them just feasting back there. That's pretty cool.

We don't have an observation hive, but they get to see bees when they come. It also will take a lot of time. Here's my other opinion on that because you can do lots of things in your store. We've tried some agritourism things, and bringing groups in and talking to kids and doing that for free, and then maybe they purchase or not. We found that it occupies someone's time to do that. That means we're not doing something else.

I figure every hour I spend talking to a group of children is an hour I didn't go contact grocery stores and set up a new account, which generates more money for us in the long run. We're in this to make money. We want to help the bees and all, but we're a family business and we want to make money off of this and pay our staff. That means we have to sell.

What we do instead is now-- I started charging to speak. I figured I can't get a plumber to come to my house for free, why should a beekeeper come to your group and speak for free? Some things like kids groups and things, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, we do all that at no charge. When a nursing home calls or a private group-- Nursing homes we typically don't charge, but we invite them to come to our store, and they always buy while they're there.

They'll bring 10 or 15 people. We've got a very small space for that. They all buy a hand lotion, and we give them honey sticks and things like that, something small. They almost always spend a few $100 while they're there. In comparison, certain groups come in and they don't want to spend anything, but they want all your time. We just decided that if we were going to do that, we needed to charge for things.

That was a little difficult for me to do at first. Beekeepers give away their skills for free all the time. "Will you come get this swarm of bees?" "Yes, for a charge. I'll be happy to come get that because I have to pay my staff." If they don't want to volunteer their time, if we're going to start doing that, then somehow we have to recoup that cost."

It doesn't do me any good to go get the bees. There's nothing in that for me. I don't want to make it sound like everything's in it for me, but it's a business. I started off in mortuary science. I was a funeral director and embalmer. I can't tell you how many times I heard the discussion of, is this a business or a service to serve the community? The answer was always, if you don't run it like a business, you can't serve the community because you'll be closed.

I think of that most every day when I walk in and I see payroll and I see electricity and I see the gas bill and I go, "I've got to sell honey and I have to be able to pay for things. Every free service we provide costs us in the long run. I want to be able to do things for people." We haven't had anyone who's ever said, "No, it's not worth it. We wish we'd never given you $100 to come and speak for an hour and a half and bring us free honey sticks," and whatever little skincare products or whatever.

I would say to anyone who's starting a business with it, you can't do things for free. The free things have to be targeted very specifically, I think. We give away, for example, any kind of silent auction items, things like that. At least once a week somebody's getting a free product. Cash, no. The cash we hold back because the product is cheaper for me than the cash is. You're always looking at the bottom line.

Now the question is, with 150 hives, someone who's much larger, they've probably got about 10,000 hives, a guy that I know. He said, "When do you get to 300?" I said, "Oh, man, don't do that." I said I don't know. He said, "When do you want 10,000 then? You want to buy my stuff?" I said, "No, I don't want to have 10,000. That's not our plan."

He said, "You need a plan for what your growth is. Are you going to be the farmer who always wants another tractor, or are you going to get by with the one you've got?" I said, "I'm pretty impressed that we've got what we have at this point starting off with two not that long ago, I think." It's always a question of what can you afford to do and what's the trade-off for what you're doing.

If you're starting a business in beekeeping, we dabble in everything that we can get our hands in. We've, honestly, looked into honey dipped cigars. We've looked into mead tastings and mead events. We've looked into actually getting a little moonshine still deal, one of those stills, and distilling some of our own, honey moonshine is what we've called it. I don't know what to call it.

We've looked at all that stuff and said, "Here's the trade-off. It would cost this much. What is our clientele then? Who's coming in the door? What facility do we have to support that? Should we sell honey ice cream? Should we do honey lemonade?" We did baklava for a little bit. There was a guy from Persia. He's Persian. I thought, "Okay." Anyway, he was from Persia according to him. He had his grandma's baklava recipe.

I said, "Do you have a commercial kitchen?" "Yes, I do it at the commissary," and he sells it on a food truck. I said, "Get us some. Use our rum-flavored honey and make a honey-rum baklava for us." He did, and it sold like crazy. Then it just stopped selling. It was a unique product that people loved for a while, and then he moved. That was the end of that.

We dabble in just about anything that'll sell. That got us into beekeeping supplies and more teaching, which is my forte because that's my background. We started doing beekeeping classes. Now we've got at least 100 people every year who take the class. We offer free mentoring along with that. I say two years, but anyone who texts me, I'll answer your question as best as I can.

That's not an open invitation, but hopefully lots of people are listening. Now my phone is constantly going off. We've worked with, because of all the messages of people, "This is what's happening with my bees, I don't know what to do. I found you online, I took one of your classes three years ago, I bought equipment from you."

Our staff is great about letting me farm that out to them. I forward those messages to them. They field some of those messages sometimes. I think we've built a tremendous customer base because of that. Again, it's the service that goes with the honey because you can buy honey anywhere.

Jeff: Your discussion a moment ago about taking care of business made me remember, we need to take care of ours. Let's hear from a couple of our sponsors. We'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. David, I have to ask you, you have all of these products, honey, skincare, everything that I can just see in a stand at a Farmers Market. Are you doing Farmers Markets?

David: Occasionally, we drop in on a Farmers Market by invitation because we have some history with Farmers Markets. When we first started, we get asked to do it, but it's rare. For example, there's a hospital near us that's doing a small Farmers Market of their own, and they'd like for us to come.

They were one of the first places that allowed us to set up one of our displays selling our honeys, which we don't do with them anymore, under some new leadership. I said I'd come to their market. Typically, no, but we started certainly with Farmers Markets, and we had a strategy with that. I called the local television station and I said, "How much is an ad?" I went, "No."

However much that is, that's too much. We went to a Farmers Market, I think I paid $2 a week to attend. He came around and collected the cash. Then there was a 50-cent tip. I don't know what that was. I had to give him $2.50, and you had to have exact change. It was an interesting one. There were probably 15 or 20 vendors. Everyone backed up next to each other.

There were two lines, and the space was in between. The cars, you could just open the doors on the sides so no one could get between the cars. You could not leave early, and you had to get in line with everyone else because you were right in the center. You were a foot from the car in front of you or behind you. Everyone had their tent, and it had to be secured to your car with bungee cords.

I remember complaining about the price of bungee cords because we just didn't have any money at all. My dad said, "I got some bungee cords here. Take these bungee cords." I said, "Oh, great," because I don't want to have to go buy them. Everything to me was, how many bottles of honey does it cost to buy that bungee cord? Your tent had to be secured with the bungee cord.

I borrowed a tent from someone who said it was okay if I cut the side out of it because I didn't have a canopy tent. I cut the two sides out, and I actually had a big pup tent that I raised up on five-gallon buckets that had concrete on the bottom that we used for anchors at the lake. We were super cheap. Anyway, that was the first one, and the product sold.

"Oh, I'm out of honey. This was a good event." Then I said, the next year, what I need to do is I need to move into other areas because I knew my goal was going to be to get into stores, and I wanted to advertise our product. I figured for $2.50, I'm going to make that money back, and I'll never make the money back on an ad on TV the same way.

We've always had that approach, is that advertising should sell itself. Can't make the money back out of the advertising, then we need to consider why we're advertising that way. We then went to the surrounding Farmers Markets and found all of them we could possibly find, and talked to each one of the people who organized those and said, "I won't do the full season, but I'll do a rotating schedule."

The biggest one, I said I can do one a month, and the other three days I'm going to skip between-- Because they're all Saturdays. Of course, everybody wants to be out Saturday morning. We said we were going to do alternating ones. I did them twice a month, and then the others I did once a month, and I would alternate months.

What it did though, was get us out in front of lots of people. They were all nice enough to let me be. It cost me a little more per visit as opposed to signing a contract for the whole season. We were very fortunate that we had an indoor market in the winter as well here. Then I found one on a Wednesday night, but it was only in July, and only for three Wednesdays.

We went there, and we set it up initially. We did our online store and used Shopify. I still use Shopify. I promote them heavily because I love them in comparison to everybody else we've worked with. They have their downsides, but we've had very few products on there, five or six to begin with, and now I think we've got almost 600-and-some SKUs on there. Then I learned the word SKU.

We have lots of products on there, and they had tons of educational material for here's how you build a successful e-commerce store. We did. I've actually been invited to speak at a couple of Shopify events online like this where they say, "Can you just give us a couple of your stories of how you got your store to grow and be successful?"

Then we knew that we needed a facility to sell the grocery stores because that was the next step. We did Farmers Markets, and I delivered anywhere within 30-mile radius. That's a big circle. To anyone, for one bottle of honey, I would drive 30 miles and drop that honey off. I told my wife, "We'll just go to dinner that way. Wherever we get an order. Why don't we just run out there--" Our daughter was small and I said, "We'll go to a playground near there. We'll go to dinner. We'll swing by McDonald's or whatever, a fast food joint, and we'll come home and we'll sell a bottle of honey." We have a loyal customer base because they come to us because I delivered to them initially .

Then COVID hit. When it did, no one was on the street except for me, because we were an essential food service according to the health department, and they didn't have any problem with me delivering. They had some regulations on how I had to deliver to the door. Then we had to start putting on a restriction. It's 15 miles now and we had to put on a minimum order of $35. I think we're up to a minimum order of $50 now, because now I have to pay staff to go do it.

None of my staff wants to work for $5 an hour. By the time they make a 20-minute run in one direction and come back, they've wasted an hour of their time in the day, and we just can't afford to do that. Now there's a minimum. We still offer the home delivery, though, people love that. The online business really took off during COVID. That was amazing.

I get choked up, I'm going to cry now if I don't keep myself from crying. I can't tell you the number of people who messaged me on Facebook and said, "We want your product because we don't want you to fold." I'm going to cry. That was 2020, people were so generous. I would get people who would call and say, "Are you paying your bills?

How much do we need to order? We want to order for our company and we want you to deliver to all their houses."

We had a nursing home that called and said, "We want to buy for all of our staff, and we have about 40 people who work here between all of the locations, and we want to buy them all a gift. Can you bring it to it and leave it outside? You can't come in the nursing home." I was just floored. I always said, "Yes, we can do that. Thank you so much."

We've got some really loyal people. I know there are tons of other stories. It's not just us of people who did that during that time. Online sales went through the route. People would order and we would send out one email and I would listen to-- I've got the phone set so that it makes an old timey cash register sound when we get an order, because I didn't know when I had to go deliver it.

We turned that off because we sell all day, fortunately now. All of a sudden there'd be 15, bing, bing, bing. Right after the email went out, within minutes, I'd say, "I've got a sale on this. We're going to pay for--" I'd pick something-- We did tons of support things for other people. We wanted to do something for veterans who were at home, home-bound veterans, and there's an organization who did that.

$2 off of every sale of honey is going to go to that organization. Can you buy for them? This is going to go to Riley's Children Hospital. We'll give them a buck for every bottle that you buy. That's what we did during COVID to help all the people out as much as we could. We would promote, here's another store in the area that will bring their things with us.

When we come, if you'll place an order from us, we'll call them and get the your order from them and bring it at the same time, and it won't cost you anything because the big delivery services were charging just like they always did, because they were a business as well. I said, "I'm coming anyway. I can bring you that." I can't tell you the number of people that we delivered to that would call and say, "I just can't afford this now, and we would deliver."

We told people, "Hey, if you need something to eat, let us know." We'll bring some food out from the food pantry, because they weren't open and so they couldn't go get the stuff from the food pantries, but the food pantries had food on the shelves. We said, "Hey, we'll deliver that, tell us where your delivery base is. While we're out, I'll run that out with us."

I filled the truck up and we'd go deliver and sell some honey along the way. I hate to say it was a good time, but it was, that was some of the best times because you got to help so many people. Then you'd see the reward from customers who'd say, "I can't believe you're doing that. That's fantastic," and they placed an order. By the time they found out what I was doing, someone in their family had placed an order on the way home.

Jeff: That's the most meaningful work is when you're able to help other people.

David: There are two things that are great. Our daughter is 12 now. She's going to be 13 in December. I get to take her to school every morning and I get to bring her home every day after school. She doesn't always want me to, but I still go over on the golf cart. We're about five blocks away and she walks with her friends and I hang out behind some.

I took the puppy over we've got today and her friends got to play with the puppy a little bit on the way home. The benefit of that alone, because my wife's schedule doesn't allow that, she works 11 or 12 hour days most days. I get to spend a ton of time with my daughter and she now keeps bees with us.

She cut grass at the shop this summer, and she labels and she bottles and anything that we've got going on, she's right there. She's in cheerleading five days a week now that school started too. It's not like she's deprived of other activities, but we get to spend time doing things together, making deliveries together. I can't tell you what that time was like.

Anytime we make deliveries, I pick her up after school and we go deliver for two hours. We still do that. That's great stuff. The other thing is when gifts end up under the tree when people say, "Hey, we're having a wedding and we want you to do the wedding favors for us." We do tons of gift giving things. We work with other local businesses.

We work with Bloomington Chocolate Company in Bloomington, Indiana, a couple hours south of us here. She puts our creamed honeys in the center of the chocolates. Then I buy the chocolates back from her. She sells them in her shop in other places. We sell them here. There are honey in her chocolates. We met her through an artisan group that we're members of.

Awards and recognition in those things get you hooked up with other people who have those same kinds of awards and recognitions. We try to work with other businesses that do those same kind of things. That's really cool because you know that your honey is being given on Valentine's Day, even though you don't make chocolates.

Or people just come in and they say, "Hey, we want to do a gift for someone who's retiring, and we want something really nice," or, "We're doing a baby shower and we want you to be part of that. We love your products." Then Christmas, it's just crazy. We do 60% of our business, dollar wise in November and December, and people really start earlier now.

We're getting ready to start putting up some of that stuff. We're ordering all of our holiday stuff, the candles and all those things that people come and buy. It's just amazing to say on Christmas Day is our busiest day online with no sales.

We get almost no sales on Christmas Day, but the amount of traffic, because people are looking up the products, which tells me that they were in their stocking and under their tree and at their Christmas parties and things like that. It's fantastic to see that. I peek in a couple times through the day and say, "Look at that."

Jeff: David, you're definitely doing great things there with Bee Great. I can't believe that we've come nearly a full hour. We still have so much to cover. I'm going to have to ask if we can invite you back at a later date to talk more about your business and the things that you're doing to be so successful there, just outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana with the be great business that you have.

David: Maybe we could get a couple of other people so I don't talk the whole time. They might have some ideas to bounce around. We'll do a round table discussion.

Jeff: There you go. We're totally grateful for your time this afternoon. We know our listeners out there have also enjoyed listening to you and gotten some great ideas from what you're achieving there. Thank you so much for sharing.

David: In all honesty, before we end, please be sure that you go to our website. My contact information is on there, my email's on there, my cell phone's on there. Anyone who wants any suggestions about how we did what we did right, wrong or indifferent, we're happy to answer those. Shoot me an email or something if anybody wants to.

We'd be happy to talk more about specific areas or whatever and point you towards the direction of how we went through it. I'm not saying we're doing everything right, we're certainly not. If other people hadn't helped me to overcome some of the obstacles along the way of growth, I wouldn't have known where to look for things. We're always happy to answer questions and no judgment that goes along with it sometimes when you're on Facebook to beat you up good when you ask questions.

Jeff: I never noticed that. Never noticed that. David, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to having you back.

Becky: You've been so generous with information. Thank you, David.

David: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Jeff: Becky, that's probably one of the first episodes of Beekeeping Today podcast, and we almost had no discussion about managing bees. This is totally about the business of beekeeping from a retail standpoint. This is a landmark episode.

Becky: I have to agree with you. I kept listening going, "I wouldn't have even thought to ask that. I'm glad he's telling us." It was a lot of retail information like you said. I know some of our beekeepers are aware of some of this, but I think that if you are building your bee business, this was great information from somebody who's done his homework for us.

Jeff: Absolutely. We're talking offline right after we finished recording and he talked about how he's really leaning into the use of the ChatGPT or AI and building his web presence and his price list and everything. That's great. That's what is needed to be competitive in today's market. Kudos to David.

Becky: I think I've said it a couple times. It's very generous that he was willing to give us his time and then share all of his secrets. We have a lot of great guests who are willing to share secrets. I don't know, I think that that's going to really help beekeepers out there.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd like.

You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage. We want to thank Betterbee, and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot everybody.

[00:50:53] [END OF AUDIO]