Dave McComb: From One Hive to a Thriving Beekeeping Business (348)

348 - Dave McComb: From One Hive to a Thriving Beekeeping Business

Keith Michaels: Good morning. This is Keith Michaels. I'm from Wheeler, Illinois, came to the expo to have the experience of what's going on, and welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast.

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

Becky: 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. Thank you, Keith, for that wonderful opening there in Illinois.

Becky: Was that from the North American Honey Bee Expo, Jeff?

Jeff: That was definitely from way, way back, long ago in January in Louisville.

Becky: You don't have like 2,700 more recordings, do you?

Jeff: Actually, no. I'm glad you brought that up, Becky, because I'm down at the end of our knobby openers from 2025. You know what that means? That means we need new listener openers.

Becky: Like somebody from California or maybe North Dakota or South Dakota.

Jeff: Idaho.

Becky: Vermont.

Jeff: Vermont, even.

Becky: I think Delaware. Do we have any listeners in Delaware who'd be willing to record an opening?

Jeff: Missouri. Missouri would be a good place for an opener.

Becky: How about somebody from a different country?

Jeff: Ooh.

Becky: That'd be fun too.

Jeff: We have listeners from all over the world. It'd be great to have some more on our list.

Becky: We are a big hit in Singapore. I've seen that on some podcast data. I would love for a beekeeper in Singapore to send an opening. Is that too much to ask for?

Jeff: No. You just did. That's wonderful. In fact, we love our openers. If you want to send us an opener from any state, from any country, go to our website. You can find more information there, read our newsletter, or even a template of what you can enter.

Becky: Yes.

Jeff: Becky, it's the end of August. I've got my honey harvested, and I'm sitting pretty.

Becky: Are you Varroa-free? Certified?

Jeff: No, I don't know if I'm certified yet. They certify it in so many different ways. I'm now at the end of my 14-day window here for the formic, so I don't know for sure. Fingers crossed. Then, 30 days out or so, I'll check and make sure I have all my queens. I'm really positive about it. Last year's results were really positive. I had more bees through the winter last year because I treated properly at the end of summer and end of the fall, so I'm feeling positive for this coming fall and winter.

Becky: Excellent. That is great news.

Jeff: What about you?

Becky: I found a surprise in my colonies in one apiary. Was it yesterday? It was a fun surprise. I'm in an apiary at a garden center in a suburban wetland area, predominantly suburban developed wetlands and wetlands, buckwheat honey. I've got a nice little crop of buckwheat honey.

Jeff: Seriously?

Becky: Yes. I've tasted it before, but when I've tasted it before, I haven't seen it. Buckwheat can really influence honey because it's such a strong flavor. This time I'm seeing it and I actually can see the dark, dark honey in the comb. It's actually in one of the colonies where I've got the hogg half comb set up.

Jeff: Oh, wow.

Becky: I quickly peeked, and I do see some evidence of buckwheat in that hogg half comb but as well as in other places. I don't know. It's fun. It's like, thank you, girls. Because I've been pulling the honey regularly through the season, I've got not a single source. I'm sure it's not pure, but it's closer than I've ever made it before as far as buckwheat. I'm excited.

Jeff: Well, that'll be fun. I like the way that you're doing that with your extracting as the season progresses, so you can identify different honey flows as opposed to, I don't know, let's say, the other person in the room right now. Oh, that's me, who just extracts all at one time. It's mostly this, but it's mostly wildflower. I like to say it's more, around here it's the blackberry bloom, but we'll see.

Becky: Both ways work, Jeff. Both ways work.

[laughter]

Jeff: That's true. I'm looking for today's guest, Dave McComb, who you know.

Becky: Yes. Yes, I met Dave when I was giving a talk at an Indiana field day in May. I was able to learn a little bit about his operation, and he impressed the heck out of me. We had a lot of fun talking bees, and I just thought, "You know what, I bet our listeners would like to talk bees with Dave and you, of course, too."

Jeff: We're going to talk about how he runs his business there in Indiana, his operation, and what he's doing that is making him successful. It'll be a great discussion.

Becky: I agree.

Jeff: I see Dave out in the green room. Let's invite him in right after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting across this great big virtual Beekeeping Today podcast table in Yoder, Indiana, is Dave McComb. Becky's up in St. Paul, and I'm out in Olympia. Hey, everybody. Hey, Dave. Welcome to the show.

David McComb: Hello, thank you.

Becky: Dave, so happy you're joining us today. We can't wait to hear about what you're doing there in Indiana.

Jeff: Thank you for joining us. Becky heard you talk earlier this season and thought that you had a unique and strong business approach to beekeeping, and thought that you'd make a great guest for our listeners to learn from. Can you tell us a little bit about how did you get started in bees? How did you get interested in bees?

David: 2018, like a lot of people in the news, there was a lot of talk about how the bees were in decline. We live on five and a half acres, and I thought it would be nice to have bees, but for the previous five years, I didn't act on that. My wife had a coworker that was moving away and said, "Hey, if Dave wants the bees, he can have them. Meet me Sunday night with a trailer, we'll put it on there, come back the next day, we'll haul it to your house." That just started. He had probably, at one time, close to 15 hives. He gave me everything, all the supers, all the boxes, suits, everything. There I was with one colony on a trailer with all kinds of stuff. That just is what started it.

Jeff: What time of year was that?

David: Oh, gosh, it was probably the first week of June.

Jeff: So it was a growing colony at that time.

David: Well, I didn't know any better. The first thing I did is I called the bee club to join the bee club and said, "I need a mentor. I need somebody to come out and help me." They said, "Okay." My mentor finally contacted me, and he said, "Well, what do you want?"I said, "Well, I'd really like it if you could find the queen and mark her." He came out and we went through the colony. We took 20 frames out. She was crawling out of the entrance. He got her, marked her.

This colony was so hot. I would walk down my driveway a half a mile and walk back and stand in front of a big fan and rip all my clothes off so I wouldn't get stung. I just thought, "I am terrible at this," because I'm watching all these YouTube videos of guys with no gloves and veils, and I'm just thinking, "What am I doing wrong? They're just stuck to my mask. I can't see." I finally asked my mentor to help me with a split. We split them, and the split didn't work out. Then I split them again, and I put a new queen in each side and realized that it was a queen problem, and it wasn't a me problem. After that, things went a lot better.

Becky: I guess if you get through that, if you get through a defensive colony and a queen problem, and being able to navigate all of that and still want to keep bees, that really sets you up for a nice second year.

David: When I had that one colony, I would watch probably eight hours of videos a day. I was reading books. I was just trying to get as much information as I could to keep those bees alive, and so it was just everything I could do to learn about bees and try to figure out what to do. I was really influenced by a student of Paul Kelly that had a YouTube channel that talked a lot about raising bees in singles, single deeps. It just intuitively made so much sense to me to raise the bees in a single.

When I talked to other beekeepers, they would tell me, "Oh, you can't do that. You can't do singles in this area. That just won't work. They'll starve to death." They had all these reasons, and I just was convinced that I'm going to do this. That first winter, I went into winter with singles, and I don't regret it at all. It's been great.

Becky: That was just 2018. Give us a quick summary of where your operation is right now, and then we can go back to talk about how you grew that operation. How many colonies do you have right now, and what are you all doing with those colonies?

David: Right now I have about 100 colonies that are producing colonies, and then I have another 50 nucs that I'll use to raise queens, or sell as nucs, or use as resources. I have a cell builder that I run from the middle of May all the way. I just took cells out yesterday. That'll be the end of that. That's done. That's where I'm at now. I sell about 125 nucs a year, all my bees, 50 overwintered and another 50 that I start in the spring. Then I have a wait list, and then I'll go through the wait list and sell some off the wait list if people are willing to wait until July.

Becky: I remember at the meeting, I was told, because I think I mentioned in the talk that I really like single deeps, also single-deep colonies. A couple of people told me, "You got to meet Dave, and his bees live. You got to hear about his wintering success rate." Before we get into all those details, what's your wintering success look like, Dave?

David: For the first five years, I didn't have a single loss. It's only been the last three years that I've had a loss. This last winter, I lost three, and the previous winter I think I lost three, and maybe four the previous winter. It's like 3% loss.

Jeff: That's impressive. Not so many months ago, we were hearing of losses around the country up to 62%, if I remember right, or 60-something percent.

Becky: 62% and growing, so 62% was the last documented, I think.

Jeff: To hear you say you're managing not one or two hives in the backyard, you're managing 100 plus, and you had a 3% loss, that's impressive. I'll ask the immediate question that our listeners are asking, what do you attribute that to?

David: I don't know. I get asked that a lot, and I think we always want the silver bullet. I have a feeling that it's a lot of little things that I do together. I get the supers off early. I get feeding them early. I think that helps. Doing mite checks. So many people that I sell bees to or talk to, they just don't have any idea what their mite levels are and whether the product they're using for mite control works. I can't count the times that that has completely saved me, knowing that I still have to deal with mites.

Jeff: How do you count them? What's your preferred method?

David: Well, I started out with the alcohol, and then when Randy Oliver came up with the Dawn detergent, liquid detergent solution, I've switched to that. Now I do the, what, a tablespoon of Dawn Ultra to a gallon of water. That's how I do the washes now, which is great because you can just throw it out. You don't have to recover the alcohol. It's a lot faster when you're checking a lot of colonies.

Jeff: Are you checking all of your colonies, or you're checking multiples per yard?

David: I don't check like that anymore, but when I started, I would check all of them. I would check all of them prior to treatment, during treatment, and after treatment. I would do a lot of washes to see. Because when I first started with oxalic acid, it was two grams per box. When I was doing mite washes, it was not working, and so I just kept bumping the rate up, bumping the rate up. I think I got to probably six or eight grams per box of oxalic before I started seeing results. Those are the things that you don't learn if you don't do the washes. That was a key.

Jeff: That sounds like you're doing OAV, or are you doing Dribble?

David: I just do vapor. That's the only treatment I do now. I tried Apivar one year, and it did not work. I didn't have any change in my mite levels. I finished that year with oxalic acid, and then that's when I went to caging queens.

Jeff: Caging, and not isolating. You're forcing a brood break at that point.

David: Correct.

Becky: When do you start that?

David: The key is you want to do it about three weeks before the end of your honey flow, because any bees born prior to that really aren't going to contribute to bringing in more nectar. Then, without brood in the colony, they'll bring in more honey because they don't have the brood to feed. In my area, it's the first week of July, I try to cage the queen, and I cage her for 18 days. That gives me a five-day window to go in with oxalic acid vapor.

Becky: How many colonies do you find the queen and cage her a day when you're doing this management step?

David: I'll try to do 2 bee yards a day, and I have 9 total. I'll do two a day because I know I can come back. The singles, it's really easy to do. You got 10 frames. I mark everything, so it makes it a lot easier to do that. About two-thirds of my colonies are side-by-side Michael Palmer, whatever they're called, two-queen colonies, four frames over four. Those can be harder to do, but it's worth it.

Becky: You showed me the queen cage. You actually gave me one that you use. You ordered them, was it from France?

David: From Italy.

Becky: From Italy. Okay. I knew it was over there someplace. What's it called again, Dave?

David: I don't know. It's Mapamundi. It's something in Italian. I saw all this. I was watching videos on the National Honey Show. They show the previous year's conferences online. They're always amazing. There was a guy on there talking about all these different ways you can create brood breaks. The experiments they did, they used this cage, and so I found it and went directly through Italy to get it. You just cut a little square out and hang it in there.

This year was something I did different. I used to, when I'd build frames in the winter, I would pre-cut the square, and I just cut it on every frame. That way, if I ever wanted to put it in a frame, it was just a matter of cutting the wax out, because I use plastic foundation. Then this year, I have a little Milwaukee tool, an orbital cutter. If I see a frame that I want to put the cage in, I just cut it out in the field and put the cage in. That's worked out really well, so now I don't have to worry about cutting all the squares out in the winter.

Jeff: I'm not familiar with what you're doing. I've seen where you cage the entire frame, or you might cage the queen and press it into the wax, into the comb. This is something different than that?

David: Yes. It's about the size of a cigarette pack. It's a queen excluder, basically. It's got a little door on it to put the queen in, or you can open the whole thing up to let the queen out. You put the queen in there, and then the workers can come in and out, but the queen can't get out. It's the width of a drawn frame, so it perfectly fits in without any disturbance.

Jeff: You take out one frame or you take out-- oh, that's where you're talking about cutting in- [cr0sstalk]

David: Yes.

Becky: It gives her a little bit of room so she's not in a little, tiny queen cage and really confined.

Jeff: We'll see if we can find a link for that and put it in our show notes.

Becky: Yes, because it's also giving more workers access to her, because usually when you put just a caged queen in a smaller queen cage into a colony, the bees are just right on it. Here, it's just bigger geographic area.

David: Yes. It allows the workers to come in and feed her and groom her and pass her pheromone. This year, I think I probably caged over 50 queens and I didn't have a single dead queen, and not a single queen cell was built outside of that. Now that's not typical. I've caged queens for 21 days before and I opened the cage and there's a virgin in there with a dead queen. They've actually built a queen cell in the cage, she's laid in it, the version's hatched, killed the queen, and I let her out and go get made it and then you have a new queen. That happens too. You get the whole gamut.

Becky: That's got to be a little bit more rare than just a successful brood break, though.

David: I would think so. Sometimes they get their heads stuck in the excluder and they die because they can't get out. That's happened before, too.

Jeff: Hey, let's take this opportunity for a quick break and we'll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

[music]

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Dave, you have an operation where you're selling nucs, you're selling queens. Can you tell us a little bit about your selection process for queens and how you're raising them?

David: It's easy to select when they all survive the winner. That makes it-- typically, out of my single deeps, I'll try to keep those queens as long as I can. After three years, I will select one of those to use for grafting, but then I'm also active in the Indiana Queen Breeders Association, which is really key to getting good Indiana stock because our state beekeepers work together really, really well. The commercial guys share with the sideliner guys. We work close with Purdue. We have a field day where, in just one weekend, we'll instrumentally inseminate up to 40 queens, and then the members of the queen breeders get those. This year I got a Purdue virgin queen that was inseminated with Dave Shenefield Clover Blossom honey drones. That's primarily the queen that I've been grafting and trying to get daughters and get into my operation as many as I can.

Becky: Do you have any more problems with defensive colonies, or after that first year is it really rare that that happens?

David: No, I get two or three a year. I got three right now that are hotter than I want to be. For that process, I've learned that I'll just direct swap queens. I'll just take the mean queen out, put a different queen in directly, and that usually works pretty good. I can do that.

Becky: When you say direct swap, you mean you're not putting her in a cage and giving her three days, you're just throwing her right in there?

David: Brother Adam, I read this, where he would do this. He would take new queens and swap them with old queens going into winter because he always thought that second-year colonies produced more honey. I've found that to be true too. I think that they produce more honey. I just direct swap queens. In fact, I'll do that, probably in the next couple weeks I'll go out and start-- I've got like 50 nucs and I'll just start swapping queens out to get the stock I want to go through winter.

Becky: Are you taking really good notes and then going back and checking queen acceptance?

David: No, I take no notes. I saw this thing where Steve Jobs, people like him, their closet is all the same clothes because they don't want to dedicate any brain power to thinking about anything outside of what they're doing. I am like that. Everything is about these bees, and so in my mind I'm constantly juggling what is where, what is happening. If I go on vacation for three days, I feel like I've lost everything. No, other than writing on the boxes, I really just, in my mind, keep track of everything.

Becky: Basically, your approach when you get into an apiary is that you do your inspections and you fix what you have to.

David: Yes. I think that's what makes beekeepers have more success than others when you're going into the colonies and you're putting out those fires. The sooner, I think, you can discover those fires, the easier it is to fix them. I like to go through colonies a lot and figure out what's going on.

Becky: When you go to do an inspection at a couple of yards for the day, do you pull out queens from the queen bank so that you have some to fix the problem if you need to?

David: I will write down when I go through a yard. I'll say, "Okay. I need to bring a cell back to this colony or a virgin or a mated queen or install a nuc." I'll take notes. Because with my process, we start extracting honey about the first week of June. So every day I'm going out to multiple bee yards and putting in bee escapes, and then I have to come back the next day and pull that honey. The next day when I come back I can fix problems that I saw the previous day, putting on the bee escapes or going through the colonies. Then I have about four of the yards where I raise the nucs. Then I will also go through the nucs that day. If I have issues with I don't see a virgin or they need a cell, I'll follow up the next day, bringing those things to that yard.

Becky: Is there an Excel spreadsheet someplace, though?

David: No.

Becky: No? It's just in your head. Okay.

David: Yes. I think the thing with the honeybees is because of the way they mate and because of how many generations you can create, it just seems like it would take so much time to actually try to follow all that. I'll leave that to Purdue and other people to figure out. I can't manage that all and write it all down.

Becky: You're selling virgin cells and mated queens, correct?

David: Yes. I start my cell builder about the middle of May. I am on a five-day grafting schedule, and I'm pretty much on that until I stop. What really works well for me now is I run two cell builders at the same time. I basically take one of those two queen colonies and run two, eight-frame cell builders. Only brood goes in the bottom, then cells go in the top. It's easy to cycle brood in the bottom and check for queen cells. If I do get a virgin in one side, it doesn't knock out all the cells for the week. I'm going to get at least 24 cells or 32 or whatever I'm doing.

Yes, I always have tons of cells, lots of virgins. I have lots of resources to just keep fixing stuff. Because early in the spring, it's really hard to get nucs mated sometimes. Sometimes I'll only have 30% success on the first round, and I'll have to just keep sticking cells in them and sticking brood in them. It takes a while until I get to the middle of May where then all of a sudden everything's working. I can really start cranking through.

Becky: Are you selling cells and virgins to people who just drive up to your house and buy them? Then are you mailing any queens out?

David: I do not mail anything. You have to come get it. That's always tricky with the cells because I'm trying to sell the cells like day 14, 15 so they're safe for somebody to pick up and they're pretty much going to hatch and be ready for them. Through the website, people will find that I have that stuff. Now I've done it long enough that club members, people around me know. James Wheeler, where the field day was at, he's been buying cells this fall. I don't sell a lot of cells, but I have them. It just depends. Sometimes I'll get people coming from Ohio, they'll want 50 or something.

Jeff: Besides the queens, which sounds like it takes a lot of your time and a good portion of your business, I see that you also produce a lot of honey. Can you talk a little bit about your honey production?

David: Yes. The honey production, I think in our state, our average is 43 pounds per colony or something.

Becky: I think that's right.

David: I usually average over 150 per colony for honey production. That's running the singles, constantly cycling through the supers and having strong colonies. Then we produce anywhere from 10 to 20 boxes of comb honey.

Becky: When you say you're cycling through the supers, it means, I think you're doing what I do, but you're doing it on a bigger scale. You're pulling, extracting, putting wet supers back on colonies?

David: Yes.

Becky: That's really helpful because the bees really like those wet supers.

David: It's helpful for a lot of things. It's helpful from a business standpoint because I can then hire people to extract and they know that they can come in twice a week and extract. I pull the supers every week. It doesn't matter if they're 30% full or if they're 80% full, they get pulled, they get brought back to the honey house. It doesn't matter what the moisture content is because we have enough dehumidifiers and fans. We can almost drop 2% a day. If I get enough stuff pulled on a Friday, they come in on a Monday, they've got more than enough work to do, and then I put back out what they're done with and we just do that. Starting in June, we just go all the way into August with that.

Becky: How many supers at a time are on your singles?

David: I try not to go over three. I think that works pretty well. Sometimes I may be pulling one, and sometimes I may be pulling all three. It just depends on how full they are. With the two queen colonies, you've got two queens with roughly eight frames of brood on each side. There's a tremendous population. When the honey flow is strong, I can pull three boxes of honey a week off of those. I'll pull three and put three empties on, and they'll fill those three.

Jeff: What's your primary honey crop? What's your primary floral source?

David: Prior to the last two years, I felt like the honey flow, once it started in May, it was pretty consistent all the way to August. The last couple years, it seems like we've had these dips. It's usually, I think, because of lack of rain, but basswood is a big one, especially when it's dry. We get a lot of clover also. One that a lot of people don't realize is soybean. Soybean's a pretty big crop at the end. I don't leave the supers out after the first or second week of August. The bees get the goldenrod. I don't collect goldenrod. I'm kind of in 'get ready for winter' mode.

Jeff: I've not seen any other beekeepers produce this as a two-ounce pack of honey that you have for athletes, endurance-minded folks who want that for a quick hit of energy. What inspired you to do that?

David: Up until COVID, I had spent 20 years bicycle racing. I was into, at the end there, cyclocross. I raced cyclocross at a pretty high level for seven or eight years, mountain biking, and I would always use those goo packets. When I became a beekeeper, I thought, "Wow, why don't I just use honey? Those goop packets are just a modified corn syrup. Why not just use honey?" It took me a long time to find a source to buy those packets. They're not easy to fill.

Jeff: Oh, they look horrible.

David: People love the packets. I thought that that would be the audience, would be athletes and people would appreciate, but it's just everything. People want them in their purse in case they have some tea. I sell those at the farmer's market, tons of them.

Jeff: Did you ever buy a special machine for filling those packets?

David: No. I use a 16-ounce honey bear to fill those.

Jeff: Oh my gosh. We won't bore the listeners, but we'll have to talk about cycling here after we've done recording.

Becky: Don't you remember? You were going to start a cross-country bee cycle thing, so I found you somebody cross country to connect with.

Jeff: There you go.

[laughter]

David: Yes, we're actually a host for warm showers. We get people that stay at our house that are riding across the United States frequently.

Jeff: That's great. Warm showers, for the folks that may not know it, you host cyclists who are doing cross-country trips or regional trips, you might have a warm bed and warm shower for them as well. That's really neat. What are you doing that people come to you and ask for your advice that you want to just offer to our listeners at this point that would really make beekeepers more successful in their season, if they're planning for next season or even through the fall. What would be your advice?

David: I think for new beekeepers, I try to encourage them to learn to do the mite washes. They really need to know what their mite load is, do whatever the treatment they're going to do, and then see if it worked. I think fall feeding is important, too. Then I just encourage them to get in the colonies at least once a week and just look for eggs because once you realize that you don't have eggs, it's so easy to fix that. You have all options available. You can do queen cells, a virgin, a mated queen, you can make your own. You just have all these options.

Oftentimes, people want to buy a queen, and I'll say, "Well, when is the last time you saw a brood?" "Oh, it's been about three weeks." "Well, you probably don't want to stick a mated queen in there; they're probably going to kill her." I just encourage people to get in and see what they've got and make sure they've got eggs. In my area, people get really caught up about moisture and insulation. Those two things I don't think really matter a whole lot. I'm doing singles with screen bottom boards. Clearly, it's not about the bottom board. It's not about your hive-configure as much. Controlling the mites and having some insulation on top of the colony is really all that matters, at least where I'm at.

Jeff: A healthy colony is going to be more successful than any condition than one that's stressed with furrow-associated diseases and other stressors.

Becky: Talking about the healthy colony in the winter, are you combining any colonies going into winter?

David: Yes, I used to expand that way. I would always have nucs leftover at the end of the year. Then in September, at some point, mid-September, I would just start combining them and create a new bee yard. Sometimes I would combine three, sometimes I would combine four, but whatever I needed to get enough brood and bees into eight frames that I thought could get through the winter. Sometimes I would pick the queen, and sometimes I would just let them pick the queen. I'd just stick all four queens in there and see what would happen, and let them figure out which one is the best queen.

Jeff: Do you have a preference approach? You took my question right out of my mouth. Do you just let them duke it out, or do you choose the queen?

David: I just let them duke it out now. Sometimes you have to be careful because one can still live and be damaged, and then they don't like that queen because she's damaged. Now what I do is I'm bringing those nucs inside because I bring a live bee display to the farmer's market 52 weeks a year. So I've got to get a colony through winter that I can pull a frame out of every Saturday. I keep that in my garage at 50 degrees in the extraction room. I think last year I brought in eight nucs just to see what I needed to get them through winter. We'll try again this year. I learned some things last year to see if I can be a little more successful. I did get half of them through and was able to take these to the farmer's market all winter.

Becky: That's actually my next question is that for experienced beekeepers who are developing their honey product and offering and websites and farmer's market, if you look at your website, you are so far along in the process. How long did it take you to get to that point, and do you have any recommendations for beekeepers who are building their businesses as far as how quickly to grow to, for example, where you're at?

David: When I started, I thought, "Oh, I'm just going to do word of mouth and I'm not going to have a website and all that stuff." At the time, I didn't even have a cell phone. I was anti-cell phone. I was a stay-at-home dad, and I just thought it was terrible because parents were talking on their phone in the car and ignoring their kids. I just thought it was antisocial. It was just terrible. But then I couldn't even get my immediate family to remember to buy honey from me, and I thought, "This is not going to work. I've got to get online. Word of mouth just isn't going to do it."

After the denial of knowing I had to do that, I decided that I got to figure out how to do this. I started after the season, it was probably December, and I just got online and just kept Googling and figuring out, and I decided to go with Wix. At that time, they had a-- I don't know if it was AI, but you could tell them you were a beekeeper and they would come up with a pre-made site. Then once you did that, as you learn how to change things, you could go in and make it your own. That's what I did.

I bet I made 4,000 versions of my website over a two-year-period because the first winter, I got the website going and then the second winter, it was just refining and refining and refining and just getting it the way I wanted it to look and what I wanted to be on it and how I wanted it to work. Those sites like Wix are really nice because when you do your site, you're also doing the phone app part of it, too. You're not making a separate thing for your phone and a separate thing for the laptop.

Now they've just naturally rolled it over into now your phone is the priority, not the website. I thought, "Oh, well now I got this website, everyone's going to come find it," and then you realize, no, that's just like you've put a store on an island. Now you have to go out and do social media. You have to do TikTok and you have to do Instagram and you got to get backlinks and you got to get-- and there's a whole language with all that. I don't know how people do that without figuring it out because there's no way I could have paid somebody to do that. I don't know how you would do that, but it's really paid for itself 100 times over.

Becky: You have a dedicated farmer's market presence? Is that once a week?

David: Yes, that's once a week. Then in the fall here, in a couple of weeks, I'll go to West Lafayette, Purdue. On campus they have a market, and that's a really good market too. That'll be Thursdays and I'll do that all fall.

Becky: What do you use for your point of sale transactions?

David: I use PayPal. A lot of people do Square. PayPal, when I first started, they had their credit card reader and it was terrible. The batteries would die. It didn't work very well. They bought, I think it was a European company called Zettle, Z-E-T-T-L-E. They have a nice, really robust platform now. I can take everything. I can take PayPal. Whatever you've got, I can take it, and it's worked really well. It tracks all my sales, all my stuff. It's really nice.

Becky: You have national award-winning honey also. On top of everything else, you have actually entered your honey into honey shows. Could you just tell us a little bit about that?

David: Yes. I entered our fall beekeeping conference contest one year and the creamed honey won and they said, “Wow, Dave, you should enter this at the ABF, at the American Honey Show.” So I did, and that was a COVID year. At the time I was a swim coach and I was worried if I went to the conference, I wouldn't get back in time. They let you ship it out there, so I shipped it out there and it got second place and I was really excited about that.

I've always entered the state fair, I've always entered the beekeeping conference and now the ABF. Then last year I won with the creamed honey and placed second with my other two entries at the time. That was in Reno, Nevada. I like the contest. I think it teaches you how to bottle your product more accurately. It just fits my personality. I'm just that way about being very particular about things, and so the contest suits me well, I think. I use it to my advantage at the farmer's markets. I have my ribbons and my plaques and I want people to know that I win awards with this honey. This year, the mead that won at the state fair this year was my honey. That was really exciting because they did an amazing job with the mead.

Jeff: Do you get any of the recognition supplying the honey or is that just your own personal gratification?

David: Well, it's both. They were very prominent about featuring me and who it was on their menu when they sell it because they were all about being local and he found me through the website. There's another one where without that website, he wouldn't have bought product from me. That's been a good relationship working with the meadery.

Jeff: Well, Dave, it's been a pleasure talking with you this afternoon and learning about your business and how you've grown from a few hives or no, just one hive.

Becky: One hive, one mean hive.

Jeff: One particularly strong hive, mean hive, and have grown into a very viable business and with all the recognition that you've received. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us and we look forward to hearing more down the road.

Becky: Thanks so much for joining us, Dave.

David: Thank you.

Jeff: Talking to a beekeeper like Dave makes me feel lazy.

Becky: It's pretty intense because when you look at just how long he hasn't been keeping bees and just how successful he is managing a larger operation, it's very impressive, very, very impressive.

Jeff: I like that also he's doing most, if not all, of it in a single deep setup, which is not conventional for the Midwest. That's fun to see him make that successful.

Becky: I really have found that, and I don't winter all single deeps, but it's intriguing as a system because when you put them into winter and you look at them, you just know they're going to do well because you are looking at one colony, so you're looking at all of the resources and all of the bees and it's a little less mysterious sometimes, I think, than a two deep system because you just have one box to look at, but his success is so impressive, so impressive.

Jeff: I'm going to consider that for 2026 as converting, or at least do half my colonies in single deeps just to get used to it, because it would be nice to have fewer boxes to have-- I'll be honest, that top deep of all honey is difficult when you want to look for the queen or look for eggs in the lower box, just from a pure standpoint. That was fun to hear. It gives me a goal for 2026. Thanks for inviting him onto the show, Becky.

Becky: That was fun.

Jeff: Well, 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 Podcasts 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 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.

[00:46:42] [END OF AUDIO]