No, not that Mr. Collins.

It started with the spotting of an unfamiliar truck making its way through the cow pasture.

Someone’s here to collect honey.

Wait.

We have bees on the farm?

Twenty-two days, and the farm is still full of surprises.

A few hours later, the truck pulls up to the front of the house.

An older-looking gentleman appears. He’s looking for the farmer, who has gone into town.

So, being a poor stand in for a farmer but a endlessly curious person, we strike up a conversation.

Mr. Collins (notably not in a bee suit) has a friendly demeanor, an easy smile, and a head (mostly full) of white hair adorned with a black baseball cap.

He tells me about how wax moths have entered one of the hives. Wax moths have the distasteful manners of invading a hive and bringing their larvae with them. This is very destructive and can quickly destroy stored beeswax combs. Today, he replaced a few of the wax trays and added an escape tray, so that bees could leave but can’t come back into the hive. This is regulated by the size of the holes in the try, incredible engineering!

He’ll return in two days to pick up the newly bee emptied hive and then harvest the honey.

He says I can go with him to see the process.

I’m buzzed.

Turns out he got into beekeeping as an early retirement. Previously, he was doing home construction, but after having one too many customers default on their payments, not to mention negligent employees who still wanted to be paid for the hard work of not showing up to work, he decided to focus his efforts on bee keeping.

He’s expanded from 50 to 200 hives, working with local farmers to host hives on their farms and help distribute the honey.

Making 170k a year, 20k on gas, and 5k on maintaining his equipment (energy is free thanks to the solar panels he installed two years ago), he keeps a clean 145k of profit for his labors.

With a seamless transition that can only be achieved by someone in their 70s, he voices his appreciation for the young advocates who have joined their voices to the call to protect the bees.

Now he’s looking to see if any of them want to do the work.

The number of beekeepers continues to drop year over year, who can be convinced to join their ranks?

Being a bit of a bee enthusiast myself, I encouraged him to post an apprenticeship position and get some young person trained. He said he’d love that. Maybe I can help him with the listing.