The Story

Back about 30 years ago......Kirk Jones bought 2 hives of bees from a local beekeeper with the idea of making some honey for his family. He was inspired by a childhood memory of finding a log full of honeybees in the wilds of Louisiana and facinated with the pleasant hum of busy bees gathering nectar with no apparent regard for the onlookers.

Well, those first two hives were so much fun, that the beekeeping turned into a full time endeavor within a few years. The garage became the first honeyhouse, and we pulled the back seat out of the car and Sharon Jones delivered the honey to Traverse City, Michigan. Oryana food co-op became our first customer and we had to expand the beehives just to meet the demand. We named the business Jones Bee Yards.

By 1990, we were humming along pretty good, but started to have more problems with the bee mites that got imported from Asia. As it turned out, we decided to take the bees to Florida for the winter. The warmer weather encouraged the queen bees to lay lots of eggs and the hives became so full of bees, we could take some bees out of the hives and put them into new boxes and put in a new queen bee, and voila! ....a new hive of bees. That really helped us to keep up our hive numbers up and to increase our hive count if needed.

At about the same time, another beekeeper, Dave Nesky from Bingham, Michigan teamed up with us and we renamed the business, Sleeping Bear Farms/ Sleeping Bear Apiaires. We found young local guys to help with the operation and really expanded our pollination services to the local cherry and apple farmers.

In 2002, we found a nice 40 acre farm in the panhandle of Florida. Times were good with honey prices and we moved our Florida operation from the central part of Florida by Orlando to the "sticks" of Florida. The first few years were tough as we learned how to manage bees in a different climate with different floral sources that was a radical change from central Florida. By 2006 we had found" GOLD"......liquid gold that is. It's called Tupelo honey, and we were sitting in the heart of the best Tupelo area in the world. We had lots of help from the local beekeepers who took us under their wings.

In 2004 we started shipping our bees to California as the demand for honeybees grew to pollinate almond trees. We never dreamed that we would be sending out almost all of our bees for the winter. Traditionally, we would feed the bees in the fall and "cross our fingers" that they would be alive in the spring after a long cold winter. Now the bees could take a short rest after making star thistle honey in Michigan and then depart to California in January for a nice break in the winter and provide us beekeepers with additional income. Now any bees that did not go to Florida for the winter would go to California. Life is good!

Raising Queen Bees

We started to raise queen bees in Florida in 2004 at our new farm in the panhandle area. Sharon and JJ raise thousands of queen bee cells for our new hives every spring. Many beekeepers in the area purchase queen cells from us to put into their new beehives. The whole process begins with finding queen stock, meaning finding beehives that exhibit excellent traits, headed by queens that exemplify qualities desired by beekeepers. We take those hives to our queen raising yard and select her freshly hatched larvae to place in special cells for other hives to raise into queen bees. It is a highly specialized process that allows a beekeeper to keep hives headed by the best queens that raise lots of young bees that have disease resistance, gentleness, ability to gather vast amounts of nectar, mite resistance, etc.

We pick the best queens from our own stock that exhibit good qualities and order breeder queens from Glenn Apiaries from California. We generally prefer Italian stock and Carniolan stock.

The Queen Raising yard

The beekeepers select about 60 hives and pick the strongest of these to use for raising the queen cells. The hives are prepared by splitting the top and bottom boxes with a "cloake board" which is a special screen or filter that allows to workers to pass through but keeps the queen in one box. About 24 hours before we put in special bars of baby larvae hand picked from the breeder queen mothers, we push in a solid sheet of metal to trap the queen in the bottom box and we put the grafted larvae into the top box. The top box is chuck full of young bees and are tricked into a queenless state. When we place the freshly grafted larvae into the top box, the bees immediately feed them vast quantities of royal jelly and begin the mysterious process of turning the young lavae into queens. The only distinctive factor between incomplete female workers and the complete female queen is the early process of an abundance of royal jelly to feed upon in the first few days of life.

Star Thistle Honey from Michigan

Star Thistle (or Knapweed) blooms from the middle of July through the middle of August in Michigan and provides the nectar for our signature honey. This honey is very mild and light coloured. Many people who visit Northern Michigan write to us every year and comment on the delicious mild flavor. We package star thistle honey as a varietal honey.

Florida Tupelo Honey

Tupelo honey blooms in the Panhandle of Florida about the 20th of April and is a rare honey. It only grows in abundance in the river and creek swamps and blooms for only a short period of time. We go to great lengths to keep this rare honey separate from other honeys. The bloom are very delicate. The honey is very buttery with and light colored. We package Tupelo honey have it available only on our website.

Bee Beard

Sweet honey kisses...with the queen bee. That is what this bee keeper is smiling about. His bee beard is made with about 10,000 honeybees!... Sharon was hosting a St. Ambrose festival at BeeDazzled and wanted to entertain the crowd with a bee beard demonstration. So Kirk went out to the hives and shook out a mess of bees. Then he found the queen bee and put her in little cage under his chin to attract the worker bees. After a while the cloud of bees settled down on his face. Sure he got stung a bit...what's new there? Some people say he got stung once too many times. But that's another story for Sharon to tell.