Ep. 96 Bee-yond the Balance Sheet: Diversifying with Honey Production

Main Topics Covered

1. Beekeeping Journey: Greg and Angela discuss how they started beekeeping, the initial setup, and the growth of their hives from two to nine, with hives located at their home and a local pumpkin patch.
2. Beekeeping Process: They explain the process of starting a hive, including purchasing bees and equipment, and the challenges of maintaining hives, such as dealing with swarms and hive losses.
3. Honey Production: The process of harvesting honey is detailed, including the use of supers and the importance of capped honey. They also discuss the limited use of beeswax and the challenges of marketing honey.

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Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:08):Welcome to AgCredit Said It, your go-to podcast for insights on farm finance and maximizing your return on investment. Join us as we talk to industry leaders, financial experts, and area farmers, bringing you skillful advice and strategies to grow your farm's financial future AgCredit Said It where farm finance goes beyond the balance sheet.

Kayla Laubacher (00:37):Welcome back to AgCredit Said It, where we take you beyond the balance sheet of Farm finance. I'm your guest host Kayla Laubacher, marketing specialist at AgCredit. And normally I am behind the scenes of the podcast handling the production of each episode, but today I'm going to take a stab at hosting and see how it goes. So this season we are focusing on ways you can diversify your operation. So today we are talking with Greg and Angela Laub of Laub Bee Honey, about raising honeybees in honey production. So welcome Greg and Angela. Thanks for having us, Kayla. So I'll let you guys start by introducing yourselves.

Angela Laub (01:08):I'm Angela and my husband Greg is joining us.

Greg Laub (01:12):I'm Greg.

Angela Laub (01:14):We do live right behind Kayla and her family and we were both born and raised in Oak Harbor. Haven't really ventured further than that and we have four children ranging in age of 27 to eight and every day is a new adventure in our house for sure.

Kayla Laubacher (01:34):It keeps you busy. Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, I know how that is. So we'll go ahead and just dive right in. How did you guys get started in beekeeping and how long have you been raising honeybees?

Angela Laub (01:45):This adventure started with Greg and his wanting to A Bee class. So we went over to Bellevue and took a class about, what was it, eight hours,

Greg Laub (02:01):Eight hour class. And that was approximately what, four years ago? Yes. I think we've been doing it for four years now.

Angela Laub (02:07):Yes, Greg does most of the beekeeping, the tending of the bees. He's our main beekeeper. I call myself the queen bee. I try to keep the marketing end of it open to whatever ideas somebody may have or suggestions.

Greg Laub (02:30):I just thought it would be neat to do something like that for pollinating our garden and honey was just a bonus if we got honey from doing that. So that's kind of how it started

Kayla Laubacher (02:44):And it's awesome for us how we, I guess that's how I initially met you guys. I think is through the beekeeping. So my family raises pumpkins and so Greg and Angela have a beehive at our pumpkin patch, which pollinates our pumpkins. Yeah, so we have 11 hives altogether.

Greg Laub (02:59):Oh, we have nine hives, six at our house and three over at the patch every year. You gain hives though.

Kayla Laubacher (03:08):I was going to say that's what my question's coming. We'll get right. Oh, that's the next question. How many hives do you maintain? So nine, and then you just have 'em to two locations, then your house and then at our pumpkin patch.

Greg Laub (03:16):Yes.

Kayla Laubacher (03:17):So how do you gain hives?

Greg Laub (03:19):So every spring if your hives are doing well enough, you should really split each hive, and if you do not do that, they're probably going to split themselves eventually by swarming. So yeah, we started off with two hives and that's originally all that I wanted and then we got into it and I found out no, you got to split 'em every year.

Kayla Laubacher (03:45):So they just naturally multiply for you

Greg Laub (03:47):Yes, yes.

Kayla Laubacher (03:49):So what's it like to get started in beekeeping then when you're starting your initial hive? How do you do that? Do you have to buy special equipment? Do you buy a queen bee? What do you have to get?

Angela Laub (04:01):We started by the first year we got into it, we actually ordered bees from Georgia and we went over and picked up a full set of beehive.

Greg Laub (04:16):It was a three pound pack is what it was, three pounds of bees with the queen and we installed those in a brand new hive setup is what we did. So that's kind of how we started. Then everybody said you should maybe get two hives so you can compare the two. We added another hive and I think we actually got another one after that. We ended up with three hives our first year to kind of compare and that way which ones are doing good and which ones are not doing good, I guess.

Kayla Laubacher (04:59):Nice. How many bees do you get to start a hive?

Greg Laub (05:05):So the Georgia hive was three pounds, but then you can buy nukes from people that sell them, which is like five frames with the queen with so many bees. I don't know number wise what that would be thousands, I guess. And then once the queen starts doing her thing, then she lays thousands of eggs per day. So it just goes from there.

Kayla Laubacher (05:36):Wow, that's crazy. Okay, this is not related, kind of related. How many times have you gotten stung in the past four years?

Greg Laub (05:44):Quite often.

Kayla Laubacher (05:46):Do you wear all the gear?

Greg Laub (05:47):Yeah, I wear the gear, but if you're in a hive for too long you could potentially get stung. But we have good gear now. My first year I had some cheaper gear and it was pretty easy for them for their stingers to make it through that suit. So I ended up upgrading the next year and going from there, because I was kind of tired of getting stung,

Kayla Laubacher (06:15):I got to do a video of a honeybee producer one time a couple years ago for work and I got to suit up and it was funny, they were so worried about us getting stung, so they duct taped every possible cuff and thing. So they were like, no, bees are getting to you. And it was nerve wracking. I mean I could see the guy getting stung as we were going through. He didn't wear anything and he, she's like, oh, it's just normal now. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine.

Angela Laub (06:37):And I'm actually semi allergic to bees. So I've only been Ewing a handful of times,

Greg Laub (06:45):Couple, two or three times

Angela Laub (06:46):I think. Yes. But we always keep EpiPens on hand and it's never been to the severity of going to the emergency room. But they're pretty particular about you being around their hives, so they're pretty protective.

Kayla Laubacher (07:06):Yeah, I can imagine. Okay, so this is random too. The bees were so bad this year around our pumpkin patch. Was it just the weather? It was so hot for so long. You think We had so many bees just up and around where we're working and stuff, which is far away from, I don't know if they were your bees specifically, but

Greg Laub (07:22):There

Kayla Laubacher (07:22):Was just so many bees around this year it seemed like, I don't know if you know, have any input on that.

Greg Laub (07:27):So it was pretty dry year. They might've been in a search for water. They will go up to approximately five miles to get water if they need to with the hives, you should try to keep water for them there so they don't have to travel as far. Obviously their lifespan is not very great as it is in the summertime. It's like four to six weeks is about roughly the longest they'll live. So anything to make it easier on them travel wise, you try to do that. So I'm guessing maybe the dry weather had something to do with that.

Kayla Laubacher (08:05):Gotcha. We had an event where we had a lot of sugary things like cotton candy, snow cones, and specifically after that they were really bad, but they seemed like they never went away. Our trash cans were out of control for the couple days after that, but we just noticed 'em,

Angela Laub (08:19):Once they find a food source or a water source, they will continue to use that until it is gone. Gotcha. That makes sense. And they go back and they tell their friends, Hey, I know where some water is, or I know where some food is, and that is probably why they hung around or it seemed like it was more than normal.

Kayla Laubacher (08:38):That makes sense. So let's switch gears a little and talk about the process of harvesting honey. What is that like or how do you do that? I've never seen that in action. I'll have to come watch sometimes.

Angela Laub (08:49):It's interesting and it's,

Greg Laub (08:53):So the honey that we're processing is in the upper boxes. The bottom boxes are called the brooded boxes. That is the honey for the bees for over the winter. The smaller boxes that are on top are called supers, and that's the honey that we process. So you kind of have to watch and every time you get in the hive and see how much honey is being capped, you don't want to process the honey until it is capped with wax. And the bees kind of know when to cap it. So they kind of can gauge in their mind what the moisture content is of that honey. And then they cap the honey. So once the honey is capped, then you remove the frames from the supers and then you can process it and go through all that bit. That's the messy part.

Kayla Laubacher (09:55):Do you take those home, take those frames home to get the honey off of it or do you do that at the hive?

Greg Laub (10:00):No, we will do it in the barn. We'll lay this clean down and because you're going to get messy and we have a regular electrical machine that will spin our honey out, then you do have to some either puncture the wax or people use knives to cut the wax off to expose the honey to be spun out then.

Kayla Laubacher (10:33):Gotcha. Interesting. Okay. So do you guys do anything with the wax, like the bees wax that you get? Do you market that or sell that or do anything?

Greg Laub (10:40):We do not really, per se. I've used it to wax frames, but we generally don't get enough wax to even really bother with it. We keep it, but we don't do a whole lot with it really.

Angela Laub (10:53):Yeah, gotcha.

(10:56):So typically we take the wax and what I do is I will put it in a pan and put it at a low temperature in my oven to separate the wax from the honey, let it melt down and the wax and the honey will separate from each other. And then I take the wax and strain it to get all the dirt debris out of it. And then like he said, he either uses it for the frames. I had a neighbor one time borrow or take some, she said they coated their cast iron pans with it. Gotcha. Yeah. So we find

Kayla Laubacher (11:37):Uses for it, but yeah, but like you said, you're not really gathering enough to do, I dunno. I think one place I went, they made candles or different things like

Greg Laub (11:46):Extra items, items we thought about maybe dabbling in that. But just like I said, we don't collect enough to bother with that.

Kayla Laubacher (11:56):So how long throughout the year are the bees producing honey? Is there certain months of the year or are they doing it year round?

Greg Laub (12:03):So they're doing it year round from spring all the way to winter time, right before winter. We actually are feeding them. It's a, what is the ratio? Two parts of sugar to one part,

Angela Laub (12:20):Water.

Greg Laub (12:20):Water, just so they can put that in their hive and over winter have enough. But yes, throughout the whole season they're constantly putting honey in their or honey in their brood boxes and in our supers for us then.

Kayla Laubacher (12:39):Gotcha.

Greg Laub (12:39):So yes, constant, it's just a constant thing for 'em.

Kayla Laubacher (12:42):Okay. Yeah, I guess I was thinking it was seasonal for some reason I didn't know. Do they, they hibernate in the winter a little bit? Is that

Greg Laub (12:47):Thing? No, so they don't hibernate at all. They just move around inside the hive and like I said, they have to have anywhere between what, 60 and a hundred pounds depending how big the hive is to survive the wintertime.

Kayla Laubacher (13:02):Gotcha.

Greg Laub (13:02):So yeah.

Kayla Laubacher (13:05):How much time would you say it takes to do all of the honey to beekeeping things? How much time do you have invested in maintaining your hives, harvesting honey, bottling processing?

Angela Laub (13:17):I will say if you average it out, it would be per day, I would say at least an hour to two hours every day by checking the hives or processing the honey, pulling the frames, keeping notes. Greg is very meticulous about keeping notes of when he was in the hive, what he did so that we can compare from hive to hive from year to year. And that doesn't mean we're in them or doing something with them every day, but if you were to average out the time that we are in them, I would say an hour and a half to two hours every day.

Kayla Laubacher (13:58):Okay. So it's kind of something you could definitely do. You mean you guys always do it not your full-time, but you could as kind of a hobby? You could.

Greg Laub (14:04):So usually roughly 10 to 12 days I'm in the hive and I try not to stay in a hive for no longer than 10 minutes. 10 minutes tops because by then they're pretty irritated. And if you can get in there and just pull a few frames and see what you want to see, then that's great. But definitely it's time consuming because the weather sometimes you obviously can't get in the highs when it's raining or when the weather's bad. Windy, I mean windy you can, but it irritates 'em. So you try to do it on the nice days, I guess.

Kayla Laubacher (14:47):Yeah. So that way they're not coming after when you get in there. So how do you market and sell your honey?

Angela Laub (14:56):Marketing is kind of my deal in the whole process. I do Facebook, I have attempted to do TikTok. I always have to bounce things off my kids or look at other people's stuff as to how they are advertising their stuff. We do sell at Jason's pumpkin patch in Oak Harbor, Ohio. That's obviously seasonal. We also sell at a boutique uptown in Oak Harbor, perfect imperfections in Oak Harbor. And then we have a seasonal Lily's veggie, veggie stand in the summertime. So we try to reach out to them and let them know, hey, we're going to post something about our honey. And

Greg Laub (15:53):People at work or friends or family also, they know we have it and they know it's good and it's healthy, have

Kayla Laubacher (16:01):Many bottles.

Greg Laub (16:03):So I mean it seems like it does. Okay. People know that good local honey is healthy for you.

Kayla Laubacher (16:13):I noticed this year at the pumpkin patch, I feel like we've sold the most. I haven't done the tallies yet, but mine, it seemed like we just went through it though more than ever. I thought, I don't know if you guys felt like you were refilling it more often, but I thought it seemed like it was going faster.

Angela Laub (16:26):I felt like we were always taking honey over, which is not a complaint at all.

Kayla Laubacher (16:30):Yeah, that's awesome. But I love that we sell at the patch because people always ask is this local honey? And just being able to tell 'em if they're ready, willing to listen to it. They love to hear the full story, full circle story of it. Yes. These hives are like in the pumpkin patch, they're ponding the pumpkins and making the honey. So this is the most local honey you can probably get over here. So I think that's kind of a selling point Absolutely. For people. So what are some challenges that you faced as a honeybee producer?

Angela Laub (16:56):I would say the swarms and the loss of hives.

Greg Laub (17:00):We have only lost one hive in our four years, which was the Georgia Hive. Genetics plays a big part of that. After I lost the Georgia hive, I had purchased nothing but Ohio bees after that. So that was obviously genetics plays a big part of it. Losing, I wouldn't say losing a hive, but having them swarm. You're losing two thirds of your bees plus the queen. But this past year we did, it seems like there was a lot of swarms, A lot of people I talked to caught swarms and we caught a lot of our swarms as well as other swarms. So that was pretty challenging in the smaller swarms that we ended up catching that I didn't think would make it over the winter I added or combined it to another hive, which that was new for me. So I guess there's a lot of challenges. I mean, if you lose a queen and you put a new one in there, are they going to accept her? Are they going to kill her? It's kind of one of them things. Are the kids going to like her?

Angela Laub (18:22):And typically if we buy a queen, you're always nervous, you are spending money and if they kill her or she flies off and she decides she doesn't want to come back, then there goes

Kayla Laubacher (18:36):Literally money flying away.

Angela Laub (18:37):Right, exactly. Yes. And I think that happens to any beekeeper.

Greg Laub (18:43):If you can make your own queen, it's definitely money in your pocket or money saved I guess, which we've done a lot of that too this year. It's just every year we learn more and more and everything is always a challenge. Every time you get in a hive, it seems like something has changed or you're dealing with something new. Definitely challenges are wax MAs. We did have a hive that had wax MAs. That was the first for us this year, but I resolved that pretty quickly. And there's hive beetles that you have to worry about. There's Vero mites, there's disease, there's just a lot of stuff that you have to worry about. But we try to stay on top of all that stuff too and treat for mites when they need it treated. So that's pretty good way of losing a hive if the mites take over, the beetles take over, the wax smalls take over. So them are some of the challenges, I guess.

Kayla Laubacher (19:54):Yeah, a lot of things I didn't even think about. I didn't even think of disease or things like that. Things like that. It's disease in anything.

Angela Laub (20:00):Right.

Kayla Laubacher (20:02):So what does the future look like for lobby honey? Do you guys have any plans to expand anymore? Do anything different or just kind of good with where you're at for right now, kind of maintaining?

Greg Laub (20:11):Well, the expansion is split in the hives every year, so

Kayla Laubacher (20:15):Naturally you're expanding.

Greg Laub (20:16):We really don't have that choice. I mean, you kind of do, but you don't. I mean you could split 'em and sell them. I have done that, but it's just about the time that you think that you're done expanding. Then you catch a swarm and then you start a new hive. And there was a lot of that this year. But I think we're pretty content. I don't believe that I want more than a dozen hives because it is so much work. Everything's work, especially in the hot weather. I'm not good with the hot weather anyways. And then you put the gear on and you're sweating. So yeah, I mean expansion wise, I don't know. We'd like to maybe get more honey and sell more, but the great thing about honey is it never goes bad either. So it's the only thing that never goes bad.

Angela Laub (21:12):That's so crazy. Yeah, selling it and expanding it would be great. It's the time. And right now with both of us working full time, it is not feasible. But I guess we have always talked about this being our retirement gig,

Kayla Laubacher (21:32):So expanding enough that you can just have something to do or you'll have more time to invest at that point, hopefully. Very cool. Well, do you have any advice for someone that maybe wants to get into beekeeping, take a class?

Greg Laub (21:46):Yeah, definitely. Definitely take a class. I thought I was going to get into this and just throw a couple hives out in the backyard and that was the wrong answer. I'm glad that somebody suggested that. I mean, it was a crash course class of eight hours, but that's probably the best thing that we did. A lot of information. But we have books that they handed to us and people to talk to. We're actually in a club that has monthly meetings and probably to start out, you might as well figure a couple thousand dollars on starting a couple hives before you even get one bottle of honey per se. So

Angela Laub (22:33):It's not a cheap hobby.

Greg Laub (22:34):No, I mean, yeah, it's definitely not because towards wintertime we're buying sugar now to help 'em throughout the wintertime. We put sugar boards on for the wintertime also. That's 10 pounds alone of sugar. So I mean everything, if you can save money, that's great. Doing things by yourself or for yourself or without having to buy things. But definitely, yeah, expect on a couple thousand dollars starting out, I would say.

Kayla Laubacher (23:08):Okay.

Greg Laub (23:08):So

Kayla Laubacher (23:09):Expect the input costs and take a class.

Greg Laub (23:12):Yes, for sure.

Kayla Laubacher (23:13):And now you mentioned your social media, so where can people find you on social media? I know you said Facebook. What is your page name?

Angela Laub (23:18):Lobby honey. And then our TikTok is, I think it's just Angela Lobb.

Kayla Laubacher (23:25):Okay. And I can tag, I'll make sure to tag your social medias in the show notes for this episode. Perfect. Awesome. Well thank you guys both for joining us today. I feel like I learned so much about beekeeping that I didn't know. I know we have your hives, but I'm going to have to come over and watch the honey

Greg Laub (23:37):Processing

Kayla Laubacher (23:38):Part because that sounds really interesting.

Angela Laub (23:40):It's an all day process for at least six hours, if not Oh

Kayla Laubacher (23:44):Really? Wow.

Angela Laub (23:45):Usually I'm in the barn spinning and he's bringing ins, frames, frames to me. I spin 'em, he takes 'em back out because whatever there is, sometimes some honey left. We give it back to the bees, let 'em retake it to the hive.

Greg Laub (24:02):They clean the frames all up, so they'll totally clean those frames to where there's not a speck of honey left on 'em. And they put it back in their hive, which is pretty neat. They're pretty clean insect, very meticulous on what they do also. But yeah, it's a pretty neat hobby. So we like it.

Kayla Laubacher (24:24):Awesome. Well I appreciate you guys coming and chatting with me today. It was so fun. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into another episode of Ag Credit Said It and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you.

Greg Laub (24:34):Thank you.

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