Eleven Yards and What They Taught Me

Sourwood grows on disturbed ridges and old logging cuts, and in this county it stops mattering below about 2,000 feet. My three lower yards near the river make good tulip poplar in May and then very little through the summer dearth, so they are nucs and queen mating yards now rather than production sites. The two ridge yards above Sandy Mush are the ones that pay for the year. In a good season each one makes 400 to 500 pounds of sourwood in a two week window. In 2022, when it rained for nine straight days across the flow, both made almost nothing and I had 260 pounds total across the whole operation. That is the business. Two weeks in July decides the year, the weather decides the two weeks, and everything else I do is making sure the colonies are at full strength on the right date so that when the window opens I am not the reason I missed it.

The Barnardsville yard was eight hives on the edge of a hayfield, agreed over a coffee with a man in his eighties who liked having the bees there and took four gallons a year. When he died the family sold the property to somebody in Charlotte and I got a text in February telling me to have the boxes off by the end of the month. I had no agreement in writing. I had no claim and I was not owed one, and it was still eight colonies I had to squeeze into two other yards in the worst month of the year. Now I put every site agreement on one page: what I bring, what they get, thirty days notice either way, and a line saying the agreement passes to a new owner unless they cancel it. Not everybody signs and I place the hives anyway when I like the person. But I ask, every time, and about half say yes without blinking.

2017: 34 colonies, 610 pounds of honey, 9,200 dollars in sales and about 14,000 dollars in equipment. Boxes, frames, foundation, an extractor, a truck bed cover, a used bottling tank. I lost roughly 5,000 dollars and I had planned to. 2018: 61 colonies, 1,340 pounds, 21,000 in sales, still 11,000 in equipment because I was building yard by yard. Roughly break even, which felt like a triumph. 2019 was the first year the operation paid me anything and it paid me 19,000 dollars, which was less than half of what the hospital had paid. The line that hurt most was not equipment, it was the 640 dollars a month for health insurance that used to come out of a paycheque I never had to think about. I am fine now. But I had eleven years of savings behind me and if I had not, this would not have worked.

Rough split of a normal year now, on gross: Honey, about 46 percent. Two tailgate markets, four shops, and mail order that has grown every year since I started naming the yards on the labels. Nucs and queens, about 33 percent. Ninety nucs and around 200 mated queens. This is the most reliable line I have because it sells in April, before the season can go wrong, and people book it in December. Removals and cutouts, about 14 percent. Thirty calls a season, most of them in May and June, and it is the only part of the job where I regularly work inside somebody's house. Pollination, about 7 percent. Four to eight hives on blueberries. It does not pay much but it puts my strongest colonies on good early forage right when they need it. The lesson is that the crop that made my name is barely half of what keeps the lights on.