American Bee Journal • October 2016 Vol. 156 No. 10 • Minnesota’s Homestead Apiaries Bottle And Sell Half Of Their Own Honey Crop

Corey Behlke, co-owner of Homestead Apiaries in Dennison, MN, is unusual among commercial beekeepers (he has 3500 hives) in selling much of his honey crop bottled each year. “Most years, we sell almost half of our crop bottled.” An employee, Jenny Jurek, who does not migrate to Texas with the rest of the crew, makes deliveries, usually 3 days a week, to individual stores of several large grocery chains in the Minneapolis area as stores place orders. Jenny drops off boxes of bottled honey at the stores, and store employees put the honey on the shelf and rotate it. Not many commercial beekeepers manage to juggle both beekeeping and a large bottling operation.

What this means is that Corey and his crew work a little extra harder to bottle a lot of their honey, instead of simply loading that honey on semi-trailers in totes. His bottling operation is unique in another way. He bottles all the honey he anticipates he will need for the next year, with some to spare, immediately after the honey is extracted, using a German-made Nassenhieder automatic bottler, into glass pint and quart jars. However Behlke tries not to sell any of it until it has crystallized. “My customers think if it’s not crystallized, honey might not be raw,” he explained. “I only sell uncrystallized honey in pints and quarts if sales have been so good that I’ve run out of crystallized honey bottled the previous year before the new crop has crystallized.

“This year we ran out on August 14, and had only begun bottling new crop the week before, forcing us to sell liquid raw honey in our normally crystallized packs. But that honey will eventually crystallize, (it is unheated), and then we’ll be back on track.” Normally, the only liquid honey Homestead Honey sell is in 1- pound plastic squeeze bottles, bottled as needed through the year by Jenny using a small Dadant bottler, and in 60-pound jugs that go into the bulk dispensers in grocery stores. “Our crystallized raw honey is by far our best-selling product.”

Bottling liquid honey and selling if after it has crystallized can be an ‘iffy’ proposition! Some nectar sources will crystallize with large, grainy crystals that feel unpleasantly rough when tasted. Behlke’s honey, in contrast, crystallizes into a fine, smooth consistency that is delightful to eat. Is the consistency the result of the particular combination of nectar sources—mostly clover and basswood—gathered by his bees? It may be. Some nectar sources are known for characteristically smooth or grainy crystallization, and combinations of nectars could modify that. Or is it the way he handles the bottled honey until it has set up naturally in the jar? “I try to keep it warm, at indoor room temperature, but cooler than the outside air in August.” “I don’t let it freeze.” “I try to keep it out of direct sunlight,” are some possible hints he gives that may play a role. He also cautioned, “If it sits for the summer and gets real hot, I can get some real strange consistencies!”

However Behlke accomplishes producing his silky-smooth crystallized honey, he has a fantastic raw, naturally crystallized product. When we tasted it, we would have guessed it had been whipped, rather than crystallized naturally. All his honey is labeled as a mixture of clover and basswood, and it sells extremely well.

“I’d like to keep my local honey affordable so that many customers can enjoy it,” he commented. “Customers shouldn’t have to pay $7+ per pound for good domestic honey. Families will buy imported honey to save a buck.

“It’s awesome to be able to offer good local, raw honey, produced by our own hives, to grocery stores at an affordable wholesale price. It’s frustrating sometimes, though, to see the quarts marked with a $15 to $18 shelf price, depending on the store,” a far cry from Behlke’s modest wholesale price of $3.50 a pound. But there’s nothing he can do about store markups, and his honey seems to ‘run off the shelf’ anyway.

“It’s still more affordable than most of my competitors on the grocery shelves. Most of my competitors buy local honey from a beekeeper by the barrel, bottle it, and sell it. My honey is 100% produced by my bees and handled by my operation from day one, so I can afford to wholesale it more cheaply than my competitors, and I do. Also, I have total control over what goes in my bottles. I choose carefully what will be bottled for my grocery stores.” The rest of Behlke’s honey is mostly sold to small packers.

“I think it’s funny,” he commented, “that in some grocery stores, my bottled honey is on the shelf next to my own honey in someone else’s bottles that costs more.” Behlke has at times thought about paring back his operation, which he owns together with his now-retired-beekeeper parents who started the operation in 1972, if he chose to do so. “I only need to produce enough to bottle for our retail accounts.” But he is driven by the challenge of the commercial beekeeping industry.

Behlke has had some good honey production years and some not-so-good years, like all beekeepers, but “we’ve never had a crop failure. I’ve learned by now not to think of it as one crop, one year. I figure that in a poor year, the next year will probably be better.”

The income Behlke makes from the extra honey he produces is being invested in infrastructure for his business, which has two locations, Carthage, Texas and Dennison, MN. Each location has its own forklifts and other equipment, work buildings, acreage, and home. “I have all the equipment I need in Texas. When we leave for Texas, we just need to remember to bring along the tags for the license plates, and we’re good to go!

“We actually fly back and forth to Texas every month all winter long, but from the end of February to early May, we all stay there.“

Behlke has excelled in finding conscientious, hard-working help. His key team today consists of his friends from high school and college, who love beekeeping and the life of a commercial beekeeper almost as much as he does. “Any of them can do what I can do when it comes to running bees,” he commented.

Behlke has two right hand men, Jared Crislip and Ben Closser. Closser is a friend from high school who lives locally. “He has been with our business for over 10 years. He worked for my Dad before I came back and joined the business.”

Jared is a friend Behlke met at Duluth, MN while Corey was earning an associate’s degree, preparing to become an electrician. They met through their mutual love of snowboarding, especially in the mountains of Wyoming. (Behlke never did much work as an electrician. He started with the family beekeeping operation while still in college about ten years ago.”)

Jared lives in an exceptionally attractive new home that Corey and the beekeeping crew worked together to construct at the edge of 60 acres of mature forest, mostly maple and basswood trees. It is the kind of perk many employees would envy. “Jared has earned that place,” stated Behlke. “He’s an unbelievable worker.” Another of Jared’s perks is running his own side business collecting and selling propolis the bees collect. “He has a freezer full of it right now. He makes a good price per pound.”

“I try to treat my employees well and not push them too hard,” Behlke continued. “On our 12- acre compound in Texas, which I share with two other beekeeping operations, each employee has his own bedroom, and we have a pool for relaxing after work. Jared does the cooking, and he is an excellent cook.”

In addition to Jared and Ben, Behlke employs another 4 to 5 workers for beekeeping- related work. “I like to ask for input from my employees when there are decisions to be made,” he continued. “They are a very important part of this operation. I couldn’t do what I do without them.

“I also couldn’t be where I am today without Mike Feist, a former employee. He worked with my Dad while I was going to college. Although I’d lived bees my whole life, and I understood the ‘how’ of beekeeping, I didn’t understand the ‘why’ and ‘when’ – when certain things had to be done, in MN and in TX and in CA, to keep everything on schedule and running smoothly.

“Mike understood all of this, and we worked incredibly hard together to build this operation the first couple years after my Dad and Mom suddenly retired. Basically, my Dad was driven out of business by the inability to find dependable help, even though my Mom had always been as hard a worker as any man could be. They always worked as a team, but they just couldn’t keep it up anymore.

“I guess Mike and I worked so hard because we were both too young to know any better. Between us, we knew how and when and why of keeping bees, but not how to run a beekeeping business. We learned that together too. I’m so grateful it worked out for Mike and me the way it did.”

They had their disagreements, particularly at 5 AM in Texas after a night of no sleep. “The one thing I don’t like about beekeeping is unloading bees at night.” Today Mike has his own 800-hive operation and his own extracting system- a ‘one man band.’ “When we’re all in Texas, he works from my land. Sometimes he uses some of my 100+ bee yards in MN that I don’t happen to be using in a given year.

Behlke has been investing heavily in his honey business. He recently built a large storage building for beekeeping equipment at his MN home on the adjacent property to his honey farm. Also, when we visited in July, construction was just about complete on a spanking new 48’X36’ extracting building, which is referred to as “the blue shed”, with considerable understatement. The ‘blue shed’ is not far from the older honey house, still referred to as ‘the honey house,’ which the operation had been using since 1983. The old honey house will now be used exclusively for honey bottling and storage. “It was time for a change and more space. Homestead Honey had been extracting honey in the same place for 33 years! We will finally have a separate space for bottling only.”

The ‘blue shed’ is super-insulated with 4 inches of sprayed-on foam, and is air-tight to cut down on robbing. It also has air conditioning with a heat pump, and was carefully designed for maximum ease of use. “The hot room is constructed so we can pull the truck full or supers into it if we don’t feel like unloading. We use 4-way pallets, and the new hot room will hold 100 pallets, although we don’t ever let it get that full. We could never keep up. The honey is already warm from the hives, and we don’t want to warm it again. We extract honey within 2-3 days, if not sooner, after harvesting. This hot room is held at 88 degrees, using forced air heat to keep the honey dry. We use a Gunness uncapper.

In addition to the two large Dadant extractors and one Hubbard Extractor, all 90-framers, that have been used in the old honey house for many years, a brand new Dadant extractor with the capacity for 120 frames, still in its sturdy wood shipping crate, awaited installation in the new ‘Blue Shed’ when we visited.

“After extraction, the honey passes through our Cook and Beals separator and is lightly strained before being piped directly into 3,000 lb. Totes, if it is to be used for bottling. Those totes are settled in the Hot Room of the old honey house, which has heating in the floor. Then that honey is piped to a tank that holds 25 drums behind a wall for a second settling. “We tap this tank off the bottom. It’s hooked up to the German- made Nassenhieder automatic bottler. We’ve been using Nassenhieder for 6 years. (Before that, everything was always bottled by hand.) It helps with the process by bottling accurately, but it’s still very much a hands-on operation. The glass jars come in boxes with lids on. We remove lids by hand, slide jars under the bottler by hand, and replace and tighten the lids by hand. We then wrap the boxes of bottled honey in black shrink wrap so sunlight can’t reach them.”

A year’s worth of bottled honey takes a lot of storage space! “We’ve been bottling 2,000 cases of quarts and 2,000 cases of pints per year, and can only stack 50 cases of quarts or 84 cases of pints per pallet.”

Extracted honey to be sold by the tote “is pretty clean after it comes through the Cook and Beals, but settles in our 7,000 lb. Settling tank in the ‘blue shed’ before being piped into the 3,000 pound totes and moved to other buildings for storage, then loaded on semi-trailers and trucked to customers.

In a characteristic understatement, Behlke noted, “It gets very busy trying to pull honey, treat bees, extract and bottle. [I believe many beekeepers would use a stronger word than ‘very busy’ in this context with 3500 hives!] It’s helpful to be able to bottle as we extract, now that we have two separate buildings.”

“We render our wax ourselves, and sell it to a buyer as a block—5500 pounds of beeswax last year.”

Corey’s parents designed a neck tag for their honey jars, attached with an elastic band [the operation has never used stick-on labels), using a large picture that “Dad’s cousin, David Behlke, had painted of our original honey farm, about four miles from here. The painting is bright and colorful, and it still hangs in my parents’ living room.”

Over the years, the brightly colored neck tag designed from that painting has become a sort of trademark for Behlke honey, and Corey has kept that same design. His bottling business keeps growing by itself! “We’re in 6 different chains in the Twin Cities area. I don’t have to go out and find new customers. Every time one of those chains opens a new store, as they have been doing with regularity, they call us, and we have more shelf space to fill and keep stocked.”

The popularity of his honey ensures the continued success of Behlke’s bottled honey business, (unless he decides he’s sick of all the work involved, which is sometimes the case!) “We get 50+ notes and emails a year from customers saying how much they like our raw honey,” continued Behlke. “Some are from customers from out of the area who hope that we will ship honey to them, but that’s not something we’ve gotten into.”

Behlke is concerned enough about possible slips-ups in the bottled honey business that he takes every possible precaution. For example, he never, ever uses deeps as supers, even though doing so would cut extracting time. “I can’t take the risk of possibly mixing up my brood combs with my honey super combs. Any chemical residues from the brood combs which could get into the honey would have disastrous consequences for my bottled honey business.” So Behlke continues to use only mediums and shallows for supers, even though it means more boxes to handle and more total extracting time with the smaller frames. (He does not ‘double up’ the smaller frames in his extractors, as some beekeepers do.)

“We all spend February through mid- May in TX.” A few years ago, Corey tried keeping some hives in TX year-round. Now the operation keeps a full semi-load of 400 there to draw out new comb. We spread them out in May and super them in June, and often we don’t see them again until October. We can fly down and take off honey or unload trucks with only a veil and a smoker.” This year, Corey thought about harvesting some of the TX honey, but decided to leave it for the bees. “Usually, I just harvest enough in October to give landowners their yard rent. There can be a tremendous goldenrod flow in September and October in east Texas. I never have to feed those bees.”

Donald Timmer, a former employee of Corey’s parents back in the 80’s, checks on the Texas bees and reports if there are problems. “He also unloads bees for us. The bees down there don’t need a lot of care like they do up north. It’s a non-agricultural area with no crops to spray. Home owners use much fewer pesticides than in MN. They don’t seem as concerned with manicured yards. The area is very rural and backwoods. Although we only treat those hives once a year in spring, they stay alive and thrive.” The 400 hives that stay in Texas year-round thrive because of the abundance of clean pollen.

In the past, “I did a little grafting, and I just didn’t have enough time to keep on top of everything. I got cells from, and shared with, many different beekeepers over the years. We’re getting much closer now to raising all our own queens, since I was able to hire an experienced grafting employee, Steve Aust from Arkansas. He only works for us for a few months in spring. The rest of the time, he’s in real estate. But he has made a difference! Last year we raised all our own queens and had some to sell. I had known Steve a little before I heard from industry friends that he might be available. When I asked him if he could work for us, he said he’d be happy to.” Corey is much happier spending his time in the beeyards making splits.

“I enjoy commercial beekeeping. I enjoy the camaraderie. There are dozens of beekeepers in our small town of Carthage, and we like to be part of the community there.” With the two other operations that work out of Corey’s land, “We all get along, and we all help each other.”

”Dad had hauled packages from CA for years. He had a custom hauling rig, and I remember growing up, that in the spring it was my job to pull the slats and unload the packages, which were distributed to several nearby beekeepers.

Corey’s Father split bees in CA for a few years in the early 90’s. “Now we do all our splitting and wintering in Texas. I’ve always made a point of not taking all my hives to almonds. I usually take 1200 to 1800.”

About 3 years ago, however, a dream house came up for sale on the neighboring property to Behlke’s honey farm in MN. “When my Dad originally bought land here, he bought more than he could afford at the time, so he sold 20 acres to the neighbors,” who later built a beautiful, well-kept house with a big stone fireplace and windows looking out on the woods. For unknown reasons, the neighbors suddenly put the house up for sale. “One day I was driving past and saw a FOR SALE sign at the end of the driveway. The price was more than my wife, an elementary teacher, and I could manage, but by sending an extra semi of hives to almonds, we were able to earn the extra money we needed to purchase it.” The house with its extra acreage, located on his farm’s neighboring property, was truly a dream come true.

Keeping bees alive in MN with its huge acreages of corn and soybeans sprayed with neonics, is much more difficult than in the unsprayed, rural country in east Texas near the LA border.

“If I rotate treatments enough, they will work. I can control the mites. I can’t control what the bees forage on, and pesticides plus malnutrition from fence-row to fencerow farming are hurting our industry. If it isn’t being killed, it’s being mowed down by the state or the county. Minnesota mows too much and mows the ditches way too often. In contrast, Iowa now plants flowering plants along the roadsides.

“To control mites, I treat the bees that will be coming north twice in Texas and twice in spring after we get home, each 10 days apart, using oxalic acid and mixing my own thymol patties. I will treat 3 more times this fall using oxalic acid vapor.” Even with a lot of mite control, Behlke still loses hives to mites and viruses every year.

“If it weren’t for the bees’ weakened immune systems from agricultural chemicals, they could handle a small mite load much better.”

Keeping bees in MN involves putting lots of miles on bee trucks—and paying employees for a lot of time spent driving between the far-flung yards. “Most of my yards are within about a 50-mile radius of my home base, but some are 60 miles away, and my farthest yards in MN, in Lake City and Shakopee, are even farther—which makes keeping 3500 hives in 100 or so yards a more daunting proposition than in some states where yards can be closer together.

Corey puts a lot of effort each year into finding new bee yards and getting rid of older ones that are not productive—depending, for example on how that year’s basswood flow appears to be shaping up. “There was not a great basswood flow this year, compared to what we were used to in the past. There are only so many good areas for locating bee yards to gather a honey crop in a given year in our part of MN.”

Homestead Apiaries used to pollinate cherries, along with apples and cranberries. “It’s amazing how many different aspects of beekeeping my Dad was involved in. He hauled packages and experienced beekeeping in many different states: Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California. My older sister Miel (which is Spanish for honey) and I used to go to elementary school in Texas.” For the Behlke’s at Homestead Apiaries, beekeeping was never a hobby. “From day one, beekeeping was thought of in our family as an agricultural business.”

Today, Corey still moves 400 hives to pollinate apples every spring. “I come home from Texas a couple weeks early to spread the hives out in the orchards, then go back to TX again.”

Corey has cut out the time-consuming job of selling nucs to a lot of small beekeepers by turning that job over to Chris Schad, a Rochester, MN beekeeper, and the business he shares with retiree Dr. John Shonyo [both of Mayo Clinic], called ‘The Bee Shed.’ “I used to sell 1 or 2 nucs at a time to hundreds of hobbyists. I remember having nucs lining our driveway on both sides, waiting for small beekeepers to come and pick them up. Now I don’t take small orders. I deliver a couple hundred nucs to Chris Schad at ‘The Bee Shed,’ and he takes care of the smaller individual sales.

“We still take orders for nucs and queens, with a minimum order of 50 for each. We raise and sell our own mated queens, running 600 baby nucs in TX, with a potential of 600 queens per round.

“We’ve had many opportunities to expand our bottling operation. But I want to make sure that every drop in every jar that we sell comes from my own bees, and expanding too much could risk that in a poor year for honey production.”

Another major change will be occurring this coming December: Corey and his wife Crystal are expecting their first child (they already know it is a boy), and his wife will become a full-time stay-at- home Mom. Corey is hoping for the possibility of a 3rd generation of the Behlke beekeeping operation. Crystal enjoys being a beekeeper’s wife.