Charlie Bee Company

(upbeat country rock music) Bees, honey, mead. Today I'm working with the folks from BeeWeaver Honey Farm, the epicenter of Texas beekeeping. I'm heading to East Texas, where I'll be tackling a hive way up in a tree, or at least I'll try to. (lift beeping) Excuse me. Then I'm spending the day working a commercial bee operation. That's good, now put it back. It's gonna be busy, hot and just plain wild. My name is Charlie Agar and I'm a beekeeper in the Texas Hill Country. Look at me. I help people with nuisance bee problems and rescue bees from sticky situations. I think I got some bees on me. With bee populations in decline, it's more important now than ever to save these bees. Beekeeping has taken me all over the State of Texas and working with bees has given me the opportunity to meet some incredible people along the way. I'm always learning, experiencing new things and working hard. Things can get a little crazy. But I love it. (upbeat rock music) Yeah. Get back. It was wild, I love it, I love it. We're solving somebody's problem. We're putting these bees to work where they're meant to work, somewhere safe and away from people. This is what it's all about. Ta da. Woo. Big day in Houston, long drive. We've got this crazy huge hive up in a tree. I get to work with Dan Weaver, first family of beekeeping in Texas, BeeWeaver Apiaries and Honey Farm. They're incredible folks, one of the biggest operations in Texas. It's enormous and it's exposed on the outside of a tree trunk, which is rather unusual and it's very beautiful but it's gonna be very tricky to handle. It is Texas, it is summertime. Temperatures are in the 90s. That makes the wax very pliable. It's heavily laden with honey and brooding bees right now. We'll face some challenges because we're gonna be 30 feet in the air but nothing that we can't handle I think. Famous last words. You okay? I'm just old and fat (laughs). (upbeat rock music) (record screeches) What is this? That turns it this way. (lift beeps) Oh, does this thing start? So blue is up, right? I think you're right, yeah. Oh, wait a minute. (lift beeping) Woo hoo hoo. Is that normal? Man, that's gonna be irritating as hell. (lift rumbling) I don't like the way that sounded. Now then, you ready to go out? Yeah. How does that look? Maybe we don't go out. Yep. (tepid trumpet music) Okay whoa, that's as far as it can go. You know what? We got a problem. We can't get there. Whoa. It's tilting us back. Whoa. So we got the lift to work. Now we gotta move the lift closer to the hive. (lift beeping) Easy. Just like that when you did it before. Oh, it was. - Up or down. Both these gotta go natural. We're pushing every button we can find and nothing's happening. Do you think it'll make it to the trunk? Nope. Okay, it's gotta level out on its own. So it's trying to level out. We're beekeepers, not crane operators. Oh, and now we have an audience. There we go. - There we go. Camera. Bring it left. Straight back, straight back. There we go. (lift rumbling) It has to go all the way past this next tree. Whoa. - That's good. I feel like I'm working for the city. Excellent. (upbeat country rock music) Dan, I'm gonna be the cameraman today. Cool. Hook me up. Woo hoo. - Here we go. Bye bye. That is quite a swarm. What a gorgeous hive, it is massive. We're gonna need about 25 YETI coolers. How's the peanut gallery, did we scare you off yet? They're starting to wake up a little bit here. I'm gonna start trying to carve this up. Man, look at that. Oh, there we go. Oops, ow, ow, ow. Oh here, let's get this side. And here comes the honey, there we go. My footage is gonna be like a shaky drunken man here 'cause I'm like double duty-ing. I can't help but try and get my hands in the hive. No, there's no honey up here for anybody else, guys. There's nothing here for you. What do you think, go back down and get some more containers? Yeah, that'll work. This hive is loaded with honey and we're gonna have to take multiple trips up and down. (upbeat country rock music) Tastes like West Houston. A little diesel smoke. A little conservative ideology. As big as this hive is, these girls are surprisingly gentle. It's heavy. There's a lot of honey. Okay. Oh wow, I got a whiff of some different kind of honey all of a sudden. Oh, I smell that. - You smell that? I do. Isn't that almost like baked goods? Yeah (laughs), that is awesome. Who knows how but these bees must have robbed a Dunkin Donuts or something, it smells so good. I think we hit right on the lens. Right on the lens. Right on the lens, Ash. - Beautiful. Is that expensive? Because now it's covered in honey. Sorry about that. Nothing that a little warm water and a wet towel won't fix I bet. Good, Jackie. Round three. There's not much holding this limb on. There you go, start breaking 'em. Yeah, the hive might be holding this whole thing together. Really going out on a limb up here. We done? - I think we're done. You rock, man. Well, that was worth the price of admission I tell you. That was a great one. Now I'm just gonna have to hose myself down for the today. 10 pounds of bees. That was an absolute blessing that they were genial, friendly bees but not nasty, except for right there, except for right there. Adrian. I'm done with my bee removal, Adrian. Woo, what a day. Thank you, man, that was awesome. For sure. - That was awesome. I appreciate your help. - Oh, I'm happy to help. No, I learned so much. I love watching you work, man, that was great. I was hoping we'd find the queen. I think we've probably got her once we sort through what we captured but if not, she could have been lurking back there in the interstices of that tree. And the cool thing with y'all is you've got queens galore, so when you take this hive back, you just say "All right, queen 'em up and roll." That's great. - That's right. That's not an issue for us. - That's awesome. If I can ever help you in any way, sign me up. That was a great day. - You got it, man. We'll see you soon. - All right. Take care Dan, thanks. Adios. - Adios. Ask and you shall receive, my friends. I just heard from Dan, he's invited me out to BeeWeaver to spend the day with them. BeeWeaver is one of the oldest beekeeping operations in the State of Texas. I've been buying queens from them for years. They do it right and I'm gonna get a chance to get behind the scenes, really see how the sausage gets made, too cool. (relaxed country guitar music) I'm Laura Weaver and we're at BeeWeaver Honey Farm, located here since 1888. We operate in a five county radius and we have about 40 bee yards. We're one of the few folks in Texas who do bee breeding commercially, bees, honey and mead. Charlie, you made it. You're here. - I made it. In Navasota, this is the epicenter of Texas beekeeping. I'm excited. - Then welcome, welcome and we're ready to put you to work. We have a lot on your plate today. I'm ready. - Okay. Package bee shaking. - Got it. Queen rearing, we'll let you taste a little honey. We'll let you go taste a little mead. So you'll have some fun too. - Awesome. So Charlie's gonna get stung (laughs). And I'm gonna meet up with you at the end but I'm gonna hand you off to Dan and Roosevelt. So you're gonna have to put on a bee suit and get going, man. I'm ready. - You're ready to roll. I'll go follow 'em. Okay. - All right. My husband's great-grandmother Florence, her brothers were beekeepers and when Florence and her groom-to-be Zachariah got married in December of 1888, her brothers gifted them 10 hives of bees as a wedding present. So that was the birth of having bees right here in Lynn Grove. The Weaver family, they've been beekeepers for generations and so I get to learn from the pros. What BeeWeaver is best known for is our breed. So we would sell about 20,000 queens in a year. Lots of bees. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on queens. I have very little queen experience in like raising queens. I've fooled with it but this is all new to me and just learning from these folks, they know their stuff and so I'm really just gonna be picking their brains. I'm gonna be a sponge. You know, we're not gonna be taking it easy on Charlie. It's gonna be a busy day because it is Texas after all, right? So he's probably gonna get hot. He's probably gonna sweat a lot. But he's gonna learn a lot too. (upbeat country guitar music) Come on over, guys. Okay, so we're gonna go shake packages today and one of the things we're gonna need are queens to go in the packages. So we're gonna get some queens out of our queen storage hive. A package being like an artificial swarm that we produce and that other people can use to start hives with. These are all marked queens, Dan? Yeah, they're clipped and marked. Clipped and marked, okay. That's how we prefer to put 'em in packages because that'll reduce their chances of them swarming or absconding before the package is established. How many packages will we be making today? It's toward the end of the season and so our run today's not as big as it sometimes is but big enough, given that it's the end of May now. Okay. 75 or so is probably what we'll come up with. Wow, what's a top day for you on shaking packages in April? A couple hundred. - Couple hundred, wow. 3000 hives, is that right? Well, it varies a lot from time of year to time of year. This time of year, we're selling so many bees that our numbers are down a little bit and we'll build 'em back up over the course of the next month or so. Okay, beautiful queens. I've got a handful of your queens that do so well, just love 'em. That's good news, we always like hearing that. Yeah. Your queens are world famous. I was talking with Cedar who created the Flow Hive in Australia about our problem with Varroa mites and he said "Mate, you've gotta get yourself BeeWeaver queen." They know about you in Australia. Oh yeah. - That's great. If you wouldn't mind grabbing my smoker? Yep. This thing's got syrup in it, so it's- Oh, it's heavy. - A little bit, well, it's a little tricky to handle. Yeah. I don't want to get myself covered with syrup right off the bat. I didn't cover myself with bug spray today. I heard that's what you did when you started (laughs). How'd you knew that? - I heard that on your video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. BeeWeaver is known for three things, bees, honey and mead and the BeeWeaver brand is world famous. People come from all over to buy their bees and now I get to see how the magic happens. What we're doing is we're producing an artificial swarm really. So we're harvesting bees from our colonies, along with a queen and a can of syrup to provision 'em with feed while they're in transit. The hard part of that is harvesting those bees to begin with. So we have to go out and we have to physically remove those bees from a colony. The way we do it is with a shaker box. We physically tap the colony to shake the bees out and we run 'em through an excluder so that we can put the queen back and after we filtered the bees, we put the packages on a scale and we weigh three pounds of bees into the package and do that over and over again and we produce thousands of packages every Spring, somewhere between 75 and 200 to 300 packages a day. We are gonna produce some packages today. Okay. Which our customers are gonna come pick up tomorrow and Saturday. (mid tempo country rock music) Cool. How do we know we don't have the queen in there? Or she won't go in, huh? 'Cause there's a queen excluder. Yeah, that is a specially constructed basket that's made out of queen excluder material. Queens are bigger than worker bees and queen excluder is a barrier made of plastic or metal just big enough for the workers to get through but too small for the queen to get through. You see her? - There she is. All right, pretty good eye, I like that. Back in the hive. I'll let you do this on the next hive. So bang it down, spin it, down through the funnel into the bottom we go. You wanna come over here and crack this one apart? Sure, I'll be happy to. Sure, I'll give it a try. It's only 102 degrees out and I'm sweating buckets. When cracking a hive open, you just never know what you're gonna find. So here we go, we've got some grown larvae right there and you can see that there's Varroa mites in the drones. I can see that right there. So there are some parasites that take advantage of bees and those parasites carry diseases. The breed that Dan helped develop, our BeeWeaver breed doesn't die from the diseases those parasites carry, they're called Varroa mites. Varroa mites are the bane of existence to beekeepers. There's a lot of beekeepers who they put so many chemicals in their hives and thankfully, we don't have to do that. You see Varroa mites in our hive, for sure. That's an important point. Varroa mite tolerance doesn't mean that there are no mites in the hive. It just means that those mite populations never explode to the point that they cause colony mortality. Yeah, put that up on the smoker box. Now they're smoking down. - Yep. You lift it and bang, bang? Yeah, because they're on a nectar flow, you can shake too much nectar out. Okay. If you hit it too hard. - Okay. Unlike earlier in the year, it's a little trickier to do it. It has to be bang, bang and then pop, pop, pop, pop. Bang, bang (clacking). Good, now spin it around and put it back on. I didn't get a lot of bees (laughs). Good. There you go, bang, bang, bang. Good, now put it back. Good work. You better watch out, Charlie, I'm gonna make you part of my package. Say the word, man, I would do this all the long day. I love it, I could get an RV here real quick, Dan. That wouldn't be a problem. You see the queen in there yet? Did you see her? - Yep, I did. All right. I'm gonna let you find her. There she is right there. - That's right. And you just bare-hand her, huh? Oh yeah, well I mean that's the easy way to do it. That's the easiest way, right? Basically, Dan is a bad-ass. So when these arrive in the mail or I come here and pick it up, it looks like they sort of came that way. It's a lot of work to get 'em like this, this is amazing. Now that we've got the bees out of their hives, it's time to shake them into actual packages. I'm gonna pick it up and demonstrate. You gotta get the rope in this hand. Yep. - Lift it up. Okay. - Rest it on your hip. Okay. So the technique here is to roll it off so it's rocking. I see. Okay, so we have the crate of packages sitting on the scale and we're gonna pour into the package while we look at the scale. I just need a few more, I got two and 8/10ths. There we go. And the queens are hanging in there already. Yeah, I stabled them in there. Yeah. - That's what I was doing. Awesome. And now Chris Farley has a go at it. Let's hope I'm better at this than shaking boxes. (upbeat rock music) Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ready? - Yeah. 0.30. - Oh, oh, oh. Oh, sorry. Gotta watch your scale. - Yes sir. You almost got it, oh, oh. - There you go. You gotta take your left hand and grab your funnel. Oh, grab the funnel, okay, yes, sir. All right, now give a big dump right at the start. All right, now look at the scale. This feels like work, guys. This is hard work, man. Mac's grabbing me, this is great though, I love it. Ready? Oh man, this is crazy. I love it, I love it, I love it. I've always wanted to do this, be in a production yard like this. So these folks are making packages. I had a chance to shake bees out of strong hives and then we take 'em and make three pound packages that folks buy. I've only been on the receiving end of the beautiful little three pound package and the queen. Now I see what goes into it. It is a lot of work. Jackie, I'm tired, that was good. Thank you. - This ain't nothing. (laughs) Good job. - I could do it all day. Great job. - 10 years ago. Woo. It's so awesome to see how those packages are put together and Dan has put so much time and energy into creating the BeeWeaver bee. (relaxed country guitar music) When I rejoined the family business, I decided that I didn't want to live the rest of my life and keep bees the rest of my life putting poisons in my colony to control Varroa mites. I wanted to develop bees that could do it on their own. There were plenty of scientists who said, "Oh no, no, no, you can't do it. It's like trying to find sheep that are resistant to wolves." I started with about 1,000 colonies that I decided to leave untreated and select from the survivors that were not eliminated by Varroa mites and of those, fewer than 50 survived and in the beginning, we really did lose thousands of colonies and that's an expensive proposition and that's just one year, right? And it took a number of years to actually get traction in that breeding program. But it was an uphill battle but we got there and I'm grateful that we persisted and we've prevailed and now for more than 20 years, all our colonies have been left untreated. We don't worry about Varroa mites. We don't even monitor Varroa mite populations. Those are some wicked tough bees if you ask me. Aside from their packaged bees, BeeWeaver is even more famous for their queen rearing operation and Dan is about to put me right in the thick of it. We're gonna go through all the principle phases of queen rearing. We've got a special program for 'em if you will. Charlie's gonna go graft, he's gonna move cells, he's gonna take off and work up to finished cells. He's gonna take those finished cells to the queen yard, we're gonna catch queens and we're gonna put the cells back in the mating mix. (relaxed country guitar music) All right, what are we working on here, Dan? We're grafting. - Grafting. The first step in the queen rearing process. So we're pulling the first instar larva. The first stage of the larva, they're really teeny tiny. Right after the chorion of the egg dissolves, that's the stage we're looking for. Grafting is removing a very small larva from a cell and putting it into an artificial queen cup. It's hard to see the larva when they're at that stage 'cause they're so small. It's easier to see the pool of brood food that they're floating in. Right. And because these have to be a very special age, I'll tell you, we'll let this come, not just any old common brood will do. So if you look on that column, you'll see that there are some older larvae kind of in the middle. - Yep. And then as you circle out radially- It gets smaller. - They get smaller, right? You see that? It's like a little teeny shrimp down in there. I can't see anything, they're microscopic. All right, so we're gonna take that in for 'em and see how they're doing. I think the ladies will like this one. So when we're grafting, it's usually me and-or Roosevelt that are pulling the grafting larvae from the breeder queens and taking 'em inside the grafting hut So that Maribel and Amelia, who are really good at grafting, and that's another skill that requires tremendous manual dexterity and good eyesight, transfer the first instar larvae into the queen cell cups. How do you find? They're so small. It's like sushi, I want to eat it. (Charlie laughs) Larva. - Larva, uh-huh. In Espanol, larva. - Larva. The larva is so small, you have to look straight down in there and my eyes are not that great. (relaxed country ensemble music) Charlie Bee takes a shot at larva fishing. Right there? No. - Too big, too big. (speaking foreign language) I cut it, I cut it in half. So the larvae that you can see that looks almost like a worm, like a C-shape, too big. So the first instar larva is so small, it looks just almost like a pool of jelly. This one? (speaking foreign language) Did I mention I'm also horrible at Spanish? I cut it. We'll get one. I think they're punking me. There are no a larvae in here. Got it. Got it. - Okay. Again? Oh. I got it. - Now cut a piece off. Oh no, it's too much work. I don't think I can do it, thank you. Awesome. So I got two eggs and it wasn't beautiful and they're just so small and my ophthalmologist says I have old eyes and that kind of hurts my feelings. But the fact is it's just really hard to see. If you can see the larva, if you can see that C-shaped larva looks like a worm, too big. On to step two. Once these ladies with supernatural vision are finished grafting, the larvae are taken to queenless colonies called starters. So then we'll take the freshly grafted larvae and we'll put 'em in a starter colony for 24 hours and they'll get lots of royal jelly. So tomorrow morning, we're gonna start this process all over. These bees are gonna go out to the cell builder. That's right, to be finished. (liquid trickling) It's Roosevelt time, y'all. I get to work with the king of bees. All right Roosevelt, how are you, sir? I'm great. - I'd shake hands but we're not supposed to. - That's right. I understand that. Thank you so much for your help today. I'm excited to work with you. Roosevelt, how long have you been beekeeping? Well, I've been beekeeping since 1966. Wow. - When I started here, would you believe it, I was 21 years old? Oh my goodness. I came out of high school in 1964. I branched out and started looking for a job. I went to Navasota and got a newspaper, looked in the wanted ad and the wanted ad says, "We need a young man to start working honeybees to start working immediately." Then I got excited. I got in my vehicle and I headed on out this way and I saw some men walking around out here, you know, that worked here. I was looking at 'em, see that the bees have 'em all swollen up. I said well, I'm gonna get back in my vehicle and leave. Then after awhile, the old man came out the office. He said "Son, do you think you can put your hands into a hive of bees?" I said "Whoa." I said "You've got those men, don't they put their hands in there?" He said "Yes sir." I said "By golly, I can do it too" and I did it. They've been buzzing me and I've been buzzing them since 1966 right here and I love it. Tell me what we're gonna do today. So we grafted larvae yesterday and we moved the larvae into a queenless hive and we have to let 'em stay in there at least 24 hours. So we're gonna grab these one day old grafts, we're gonna move them to a cell builder, did you say? Yeah. - I'm excited. You want to get to it? - Yeah, let's get to it. Let's go ahead and start buzzing them. They gonna buzz us, we gonna buzz them, okay? I love it, I'll follow your lead. You know what to do. - Okay. How many times you been stung in your life, thousands? I can't never answer that question but you know what I tell 'em? I wish I had the dollars, I would be a rich man. Get into the beehive, this is the one we grafted yesterday. So let's start in this one right here. We'll smoke 'em before we go into their home. Ooh, busy. Yeah, everybody home today. They sure are. Wait, let me shake these up here and see how they look. Yeah. Yeah, now see, they started pretty good. See all these little wax tips on the end here? What's your percentage on grafts? If we got all new bees, our percentage gonna be 85 or 90%. Is that right? Sometime we have 95% or over-under. That's great, so they're not closed over yet though. No. - They're still open. They just started. - They just started. And we gonna move 'em to our finishing hive. Then they gonna- - Finish 'em off, okay. These girls don't have a queen. No, it'll have to be a queen- All the time. - You can see, that's right because what they doing, they know they supposed to have a queen. So that's what they doing, trying to raise themselves a queen. Okay, let's see what we got here. Oh wow. See all that with the wax on the tip end? That means they all started. Now when we put 'em in the finishing hive within about four or five days, they gonna be sealed off. And they'll be longer, right? Right. - Like peanut-shaped. There you go. These are all good nurse bees, right? Right, now let's get to the one over here. (upbeat guitar music) A starter hive is a queenless colony and when you introduce recently grafted young larva, these bees go to work making queens. They feed the larva royal jelly and they build up the cell walls and in 24 hours, you've got the beginning of a queen. It's incredible to see this process in action and it's even better working with someone who has such history and passion as Roosevelt. One thing about beekeeping, I've been doing it all these years, you can always learn something new everyday. Experience beats all. This is so cool. It's great. Okay, now we gonna load 'em up and we gonna carry 'em to our finishing hive. All right, can I take these for you? Yes, please. - Great. (upbeat rock music) We've got queen larvae from the starter hives and after chasing Dan 30 minutes across the countryside, we're going to the finishing yard. (liquid trickling) All right, so we're taking off some queen cells and we're gonna be working up fresh young brood in the top of these cell builders and then when we're done with that operation, we'll drop in the baby cells that you all just removed from the starter colonies at the grafting yard. Okay, so the operation here is to find a young brood to move up above the excluder because that's where we want the nurse bees. Okay. There we go. Are these bees queenless? - Nope. They have a queen? - Have a queen at the bottom. Okay. I'm just gonna make sure that the nurse bees are drawn upstairs. Okay. - Where the queen cells are. Okay. We're moving the sealed brood down. Okay. You see the little nectar shake out I got when I shook the bees off that comb? Yeah, getting a little flow now. The honey flow's finally started. Finally started, yeah. You've had a bad year here as well. This Spring has been one of the worst honey flows. It's been one of the poorest Springs in my life. Why was that, just the late cold and too much rain? It got warm early, the bees reared lots of brood and bees and they thought the honey flood was coming on just like we did and then we got cold wet weather for a long period of time. As my grandfather would say, "The good Lord willing and if the creek don't rise, we'll be all right." Awesome, so tell me again what you just did. These bees down here have a queen. There's a queen excluder in between here and then this is the cell builder on top. We think of the whole colony as being a cell builder. So this is a good strong colony, got a good start and because it takes lots of energy to produce all the royal jelly that they'll need to feed those queen cells, we're gonna give 'em some sugar syrup. Right. Even though they're finally on the honey flow, this will ensure that they can produce the copious amounts of royal jelly needed. Okay. All right, now we're done. (dramatic whooshing) The ladies of the forest, the majestic queen catchers. These ladies are tasked with the final stage of the queen rearing process which requires two things, skill and patience. And we're fortunate enough to have really high quality employees who are self-motivated, hardworking and have enormous manual dexterity so that they're able to capture the queen, clip her and mark her, put her in the cage, add attendant workers without getting stung. These ladies are the real deal. Okay, so Charlie, let me introduce you to the queen crew. The queen crew, how y'all doing? Good. - I'm Charlie. Starting on the left and working around, Amelia, Maribel, Elouisa and and Anna Rosa and they're gonna teach you about catching queens and after we catch queens out of these baby nucs, which are like little miniature hives, we're going to introduce one of the mature queen cells that we harvested earlier and so I leave you in capable hands here. Are you ready to teach me? Yes. (everyone laughs) Yes. She never speaks that nicely to me. Total enthusiasm, I love it, I love it. Okay, carry on. You're in charge. Show me what to do, I'll follow you. Oh yeah, I'm in trouble. Okay, so these cells are ready to go. These are finished cells. So a few more days in their mating nuc and then the queen will chew her way out, she'll emerge and then she'll go do her mating flight. So are you ready? - I'm ready. I'll follow you. - Okay. Let's go put some in their boxes. (relaxed guitar music) So you just set that right there? Mm hmm. - Do they need more food? Yes, we're gonna do it after we finish. Do the food, okay. So that's a virgin queen ready to emerge and she's gonna get put in her mating nuc right over here. After five or six days in the mating nuc, the queen emerges, she goes on her mating flight. She leaves the hive a virgin, she goes to a drone congregation area, a little bit like the mall like where the boys hang out. She mates with 15 to 20 males, she returns to the hive with enough sperm and egg to make millions of bees over up to five years. Happy mating, little queen. And that leads us to queen catching. Ooh, these are active. This is like just a teeny tiny, hi, this is two queens in here, right? Mm hmm, yes. (relaxed ensemble music) You see her? - There she is. Pretty queen. You catch them so carefully. For their wings, yeah. You just clip one wing or both? One, half of one. Half of one, okay. Marking her, now she's gonna put her in a cage. Wow, you're so gentle with the queen, wow. Then she's putting some attendant bees in there with the queen, so they'll take care of her while she waits for her new home. Maybe she'll go to a package, maybe they'll sell her just as a queen. Cuatro. (Anna laughs) Cinco. - Cinco (laughs). Seven? - Mm hmm. Seven bees, seven attendant bees. If I did this, it would be fumbling. You're so good, wow. You've done this a few times. Yeah. You're like a Zen Master. You really are. You move so carefully. I've been doing it for a long time. A long time. 20 years you said, didn't you? Like 40. - 40 years. I started at 21, I am 62. Wow, that is cool. Yeah. This is a bad year for honey? Uh-huh, yes. Worst ever? Mm hmm. - It is? Yeah. - About the worst ever? We used to make a lot of honey. You used to make a lot of honey. Why do you think, just weather? Yeah and like we don't have too many good locations to put bees on. - Okay. Because they're making a lot of house. I'm seeing that, we're driving around here, I see a lot of new developments of habitat. Without habitat, you can't support bees. I feel concerned about all pollinators. So I'm not just about honeybees and honeybees only. I feel like there's a big picture problem of us losing a lot of habitat. I don't like honey, I don't eat honey. You don't like honey, (laughs) you don't like honey? (speaking foreign language) Who doesn't like honey? Here she is right here. I'm scared to grab her though. Just do it slow. She's fast. Do you want to clip it? I'll try. Do I hold her legs? - Mm hmm. Part of her wing, just a little. Did I just clip her leg? - No (laughs). I hope not. Good. Is she okay? Did I kill her? Let me see. No, she's okay. She playing sick. She's playing sick. (Anna laughs) Well, I made that look difficult. You're gonna put the base in, just get her from the wings like this. Okay. Clinch. Ope, no. (relaxed country guitar music) How many you got there? Seven. Oh, I made my first queen cage. My goodness, I made that look really difficult. Okay, next one, let's have a look. Okay. This one? - Mm hmm. (relaxed guitar music) Oh dang. Got it, nope? - Nope. It's like fishing. Got it. Anna, you're a good teacher, you were very patient. Can I have your pen? - Yeah. Clipping the wing prevents the queen from absconding and taking the entire colony away with her. This is bad for bee keepers. (upbeat ensemble piano music) So you put bees in with the queen? I have. - Excellent. I've been making this look really hard. Anna Rosa is being- - Very generous. I'm nice. She's refraining from coaching but I don't know why. (laughs) How many you get in there already? Four. One, two, five. One less. - A little less. You have a cork? - Yeah. And you put it in sideways? - Uh-huh. Anna, that was very special. Thank you so much, that was very cool. I feel like a real beekeeper now. Maybe one day I'll be a true beekeeper. That's great. - You're still young. How old do you think I am? Cuanto anos? Trente cinco. (everyone laughs) No? Mas. Cuarenta cinco. - Cuarenta ocho. (everyone laughs) Okay, let me. I like that she says I'm 36, 31? 35. - 35. I remember when I was 35 when my memory comes back. (liquid trickling) (upbeat rock music) BeeWeaver is known for their packaged bee and queen rearing operations but people come from all over to visit their store in the woods. Their shop is full of apiary equipment and all the beekeeping knickknacks you could ask for but I'm here for their main attraction, honey tasting. We're bee breeders and honey production is big for us. We've got to have honey to sell in our store. We have so many people come in who want the local Texas honey. I am stoked and BeeWeaver's very own Mitzi is gonna be pouring shots of honey. Hey Charlie, well welcome in. I am about to give you an experience that you will never forget. Oh look out, I'm ready. We have about 25 different honeys. So let me just give you a couple of my favorites, how's that? Which ones, what's your top? My top is gonna be BeeWeaver. It's a really robust kind of honey. It's very dark. This is my kind of bar, I like it. Hey, people liken this to a wine tasting. Okay, so I just? Uh-huh, go ahead. - Just go for it, okay, cool. BeeWeaver honey. So this is about the five surrounding counties where we get our honey. Mm, tastes like the five surrounding counties. (Mitzi laughs) That's good stuff, mm. This is one from Hawaii. This is a set honey. Oh, set like creamed honey? Yes. - Aloha from Hawaii. That's right. Oh, Papa Oomaumau right there. It's good, isn't it? - That's pretty good. And then this one is a South Texas, it's a Mexican brush, it's a Huajillo. It's really one of the best honeys you can get out there. It really is unique and special. It's very light, very mild. You can use that on a lot of things. Toast, bagels. That's great. Now I'm gonna let you try a few that we infuse here. This is a Texas Pecan Coffee. Oh wow. It is starting to crystallize a little bit. Which is good and I could use a little coffee, that's perfect, all right. So you can eat this on ice cream. It's also good on pancakes. That is delicious. So how do I infuse my honeys? Are you involved with the production at all? Oh yeah, we infuse with Huajillo because Huajillo is so light and mild, it just absorbs all the flavors. Okay, what does infusing look like? Is it just stirring it? - No. It just depends on what you do. Like the Texas Pecan, we just put however many tablespoons of the coffee bean in the jar, fill it up with the Huajillo and let it sit for a couple of months. You infuse it in the jar? - Yes. Oh, interesting. - And that's the coffee beans. Okay, okay. I have one more that is a lime and sea salt. We call this our Margarita Honey. Going to Margaritaville. Oh, that's like a lollipop right there. So you can put that around the rim of your margarita glass and dip it in the salt. That's great. You can use it as your margarita simple syrup. That is delicious. - Yeah. That is great. How cool, thank you so much. You're so welcome. - I appreciate it. You're welcome. - Wonderful. Come back and see us. That was a treat, literally. But we have one more stop on our BeeWeaver adventure, their partners at WildFlyer Meadery. (upbeat rock music) Mead is the oldest drink ever. I think someone left an old mug of honey out and it rained in it and it fermented, they drank it and they had a great time and so then they started making it. Mead is coming along. It's the fastest growing adult beverage out there and people are doing some great things with fresh fruit, fresh spices and honey and water and yeast and making a great product. Whoa, check this out. This is awesome. How's a going, man? - Good. I'm Charlie. - Jeff. Jeff, good to meet you, brother. Yeah, you too. - What an operation. This is incredible. - Thanks, yeah. So exactly what is mead? So mead in its most basic sense is a honey wine. Legally we're a winery. So we can make any type of wine. We focus on honey-based wine because we're at the BeeWeaver Honey Farm, right? So over behind you is my mixing tank. So that's a big metal tank with a propeller inside to mix the honey and the water to the density, the specific gravity of the bricks and once it gets to that, that I'm comfortable with, I'll send it over into one of the fermentation tanks. Okay. - I'll add the yeast to it. I use a different yeast depending on what I'm making and then it'll ferment and so we will always leave some of the residual sugar in it because a dry mead is very dry. Is that right? - Yeah, and then I add the fruit. So this one specifically, it's got a lot going on. It's apple, orange, blackberry, hibiscus and cinnamon. So it's a sangria without any grapes in it. Wow, that's awesome. Mead's really great stuff if you've got somebody of the caliber of Jeff Murray making it for you. You gotta have a good mazer because not just any old mead will do. So where does this tradition come from? I mean I think of mead, I think of like medieval knights. Yeah, it's considered the oldest alcoholic beverage. If you think about it, people have been keeping bees or robbing honey from bees for millennia. So yeah, it'd be in the halls with Thor. Valhalla. - Yeah, exactly. Tell me, is mead kind of the redheaded stepchild of the alcohol world? Yeah, for sure. - How so? There's a couple reasons. One, people don't really know what it is. Two, based on Ren Fest, you think you gotta be wearing chain mail and horns and everything and that's not really the case. Three, it's very easy to make mead, it's very hard to make a good mead and so you'll have a lot of really bad mead that can be made commercially and a lot of times you find mead that's really big, boozy and sweet and that's about it. We do it a little bit different. We use all fresh fruit, we use all honey produced right here. What better place than with the BeeWeaver folks? Exactly. - This is like the mecca of beekeeping, right? - Yeah. Our first bees were BeeWeaver bees when we started. Are you still beekeeping? - Yeah, we do. So your honey I'm assuming comes from multiple sources? So everything we're using right now is BeeWeaver's Wildflower Honey that's produced right here. When we were trying to do this before we got with the Weavers, I was gonna have to be my own beekeeper entirely and that scared me to have to do everything and so it's really nice that I can be a beekeeper but I don't have to be the beekeeper. That's right, that's a big job. Oh wow, look at this place, so beautiful. How you doing, Laura? - Great, good to see you. Good to see you too. - Welcome back. Thank you. - How'd your day go? What a day, my goodness, that was actual work. Yes, there's no restaurant in between queen yard A and queen yard B, is there? Dan doesn't stop for a three martini lunch. No, that man works hard and the whole crew was just incredible. It's been great having you. Well thank you so much. This is the busiest time of year for y'all. So I really appreciate you accommodating us and I hope I helped a little bit maybe. Well, you helped, okay, I was gonna say, I'd have to find out. I do have to say you're a really quick study. How many queens did he find in the basket? A few. Not many early on but he got better. Yeah, I got better. So if you had a tip for queen finding, do you have one? You pray. (everyone laughs) But then you can't catch her. Please let me impress Dan. Just let me impress Dan, that was my goal today was to try to impress Dan and this is the epicenter of beekeeping to me. This is just so neat to see a large-scale operation and it's also, I can tell there's a family feel here. Oh, I love that you feel that. We're very lucky that we have so many employees who they have siblings or their parents worked or something like that and they want to continue on and still make it happen because without them, none of this could happen. And Roosevelt is an institution, he really is. Just the institutional knowledge and today was just like tuning in to what I love about bees and beekeeping and now we're like in the cool byproduct zone. Hey, it goes bees, honey, mead every time. Bees, honey, mead, I love it, I love it. Would you like a glass of mead? There's a lot of good mead. - Oh good, good. A lot of good mead. - Awesome. (relaxed guitar music) Wow, wow, wow. My time at BeeWeaver has been epic. I've learned and experienced so much about commercial beekeeping. I got to see how much work goes into making three pound packages of bees. I even witnessed the queen rearing process, from grafting larva to cell building and queen catching. The folks at BeeWeaver have given me a new appreciation for bees and beekeeping. Bees actually can potentially help us understand more about medicine and our bodies and biology and on top of that, bees are vital for us surviving. So understanding how the bee is made and what makes up the bee and what markers are on the bee can potentially help us help bees survive, which in turn increases our chances of making it as well. Charlie's a real fun guy. I love working with people like that who are real fun. And I always tell a person, if you got a job and you don't enjoy not being happy, you'd better get you another job. Charlie's a hoot, he's so much fun. Charlie held up really well. He's a trooper, right? We like to have fun as we work and he was of like mind. Thanks y'all, appreciate it. Bees, honey, mead. That's what BeeWeaver is all about. I tell you, today was awesome. This, this is my Graceland. Thank you all for tuning in to the first season of "Charlie Bee Company." Oh man, it has been a blast getting to share with you what I do, getting to learn so much myself and just being able to spread the word about bee conservation. I want to leave you with a little something special and with that, I'll catch you on the flip side. (upbeat rock music) Excuse me, can I get your attention My name is Charlie Bee and I'm sensing your tension About those flying stinging critters you find outdoors The fuzzy little bees making honey for storage Yeah, I'm the guy you call when they buzz I drive on by and pick them up And when they sting ya, we bring every solution Charlie Bee and the boys make the bee revolution Save these bees Charlie Bee and the boys comin' at ya Save these bees So what ya gonna do Pollinators, we need 'em the most If we don't save the bees, then we gonna be toast We don't want that, don't wanna be dead Gotta educate and get some facts in my head So I Googled all about the hives and bees About the stuff that made an apiary Got a swarm through my box, the bees need honey I bottled it up and made me some money Then one day while working out back Got a call from a lady about a bad bee attack She had bees in the wall and freaked right out Then it came to me, loud as a shout Save the bees, get bees then get some more And we'll make a TV show like the "Jersey Shore" Got my main man Al and my homie George too The phone keeps ringing but we know what to do We gonna save these bees You know we gonna hive them up Save these bees A little louder Light my smoker, get a hive pool Always get my suit on 'cause I'm no fool Get the bees, strap 'em up with a hula People all excited about our every maneuver But the clients, they love us the most Always liking my social media posts It's online and I send it back With Charlie Bee, it's just like that Now here's what to do if you find a swarm Don't spray, get away, the bees are no harm I'm Charlie Bee with the Bee Boys too Take away your fears 'cause that's what we do We gonna save these bees You call us and we'll do it for free Save these bees Save these bees I found a bee, bro Save these bees We're gonna go lay down I gotta call my wife Save these bees, y'all For more information about Charlie Bee Company, including new and exciting removals, visit us online at charliebee.com.