Sweet Bee Honey

Stacey Lieuallen and her husband run The Sweet Bee Honey Company, a commercial operation that produces natural, individually flavored honeys. My husband, in addition to being beekeeper, you become kind of a master of the floral sources too. When certain floral sources are blooming example like blackberry bushes or star thistle. Then you place your bees there in time so they can collect the nectar from that predominant plant. And that honey then is representative of the nectar that was provided from that plant. We literally are bloom chasers. We chase the floral sources and a lot of that, just like wine, depends on the weather and everything else, too. So the terroir affects the flavor of the honey and they are there different flavors, but we're not adding anything to make them that. That's purely what that flower produced and then what the bees did to make that nectar into honey. How many hives do you have at your disposal? On a commercial operation? We have what we consider about and it varies by season, much like the type of operation. You've always got replacements coming up. But we have on average, about 6000 working hives and a hive consists of a base box, plus any supers on top of it. Wow. How many bees in a hive? Oh, my gosh. Really varies based on the time of year. If you have a really big hive, you're going to have bees in the millions. If it's in the winter and it's a very small cluster, it may just be several hundred thousand. Sweetbeehoneyco.COM. The co's short for company.