Bee Yard
A Bee Yard View…
When people think of beekeeping, they often imagine a single, picturesque apiary buzzing with bees. But here’s the thing—our honey operation stretches far beyond this farm. While this is home to some of our hives, we manage around 800 colonies in 25+ bee yards across surrounding counties, each carefully placed in locations with the best nectar sources for our bees.
Everyday is different in the life of a beekeeper.
Some of our best days are spent together in these bee yards—checking hives, watching the bees work, and sometimes just enjoying a quiet picnic among the buzzing (because what’s better than fresh air, a honey-drizzled snack, and thousands of tiny workers politely minding their own business?).
Why So Many Bee Yards?
Bees are opportunistic foragers, meaning they’ll go wherever the best nectar is—and not all locations offer the same floral buffet. To keep our bees thriving and producing top-quality honey, we place our hives in strategic locations with:
Diverse nectar sources – Different plants bloom at different times, ensuring a longer honey flow and a rich variety of flavors in our honey.
Strong native forage – Wildflowers, clover, prairie blooms, and tree blossoms make for excellent honey-producing plants.
Low-spray environments – We carefully avoid high-spray zones like large-scale row crops and orchards, choosing instead to place our hives in areas with cleaner, more natural forage sources.
This approach means our bees aren’t just working around the farm—they’re busy collecting nectar from wild meadows, pastures, native grasslands, and pollinator-friendly landscapes throughout the region.
“Getting to work side by side with my husband, doing what we love, is the sweetest blessing. Bees, honey, and shared passion-it doesn’t get much better than that.”
A Day in the Life of a Bee Yard
Every bee yard is its own mini-city, with thousands of workers moving in perfect sync. Inside the hive:
The queen lays eggs, building up the colony for peak foraging season.
The worker bees collect nectar, build comb, store honey, and guard the hive.
The drones (the males) have one purpose—mating. By fall, their time is up, and they get the boot.
Meanwhile, the foragers are out in the fields, traveling up to 3-10 miles to find the best nectar sources. These little workers visit millions of flowers to make just a single jar of honey. Wild, huh?
How Bee Yards Shape Our Honey
Because our hives are spread out across multiple counties, every honey harvest is unique. The nectar sources at each location create distinct flavors and characteristics, meaning the honey we collect from a wildflower-dense area will taste different from the honey near a clover-rich pasture.
This is why you might notice subtle seasonal variations in our honey—because nature is never the same two years in a row.
So while you’re here at the farm, just remember—the honey in your jar comes from thousands of tiny navigators, spreading out across miles of native grasslands and wildflower fields, bringing the best of Nebraska’s landscape straight to the hive. And if you ever catch Brian and me sitting by a bee yard with a picnic and a jar of honey, just know—we’re exactly where we’re meant to be.
“A hive can easily weigh in at over 100 pounds at peak honey flow-so yeah, beekeeping is basically a farm to table weight lifting program.”