Posted in administrative, education, equipment, honey house, marketing, special events, store, tagged raffle, Smoker on November 30, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Howdy, friends. In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere – here is a listing of free workshops we are hosting at the Bee Ranch every Saturday morning through January 2016! We make a pot of hot coffee and I’ll put on hot cider for non-coffee drinkers and y’all just talk about things with Mark while I tend the shop. Pretty fun and Mark even gave away a free smoker, a $40 value, as part of a raffle for attendees. Nice and lots of fun. We hope to see you a a workshop in the near future.
Posted in administrative, animals, bee craft, bee yard, bees, Carolina, education, equipment, health, honey, honey house, marketing, Markets, packaging, photography, special events, tours, weather, tagged rain gauge, rattlesnakes on October 3, 2014| 3 Comments »
Well happy October, everyone! I can’t believe it’s here already but what a welcome change in terms of weather patterns. Mark caught this little guy in the rain gauge last week when he was checking on the rain we had gotten. Over the past several weeks, we have seen maybe 1 to 3 inches of rain each week and it’s made everything around here green again. The bees are flying heavily and bringing in tons of pollen. They’re also making some good honey for their winter stores and we are so excited about the potential for another great season next spring. Yes, we are already thinking ahead. This good soaking of the ground is what the wildflowers need NOW in order to bloom beautifully LATER.
In other news, we’ve been getting honey supers cleaned (with help from the bees as well as Stan and Mr. Savior), getting the home better organized (finally unpacking books and such now that we found some shelves), and preparing for upcoming holiday events! It’s about that time, right? We are busily getting wording and pictures updated so we can get the website caught up – we are so behind in terms of all the new products we haven’t had time to get listed. Well, we are now working on it and hope to have information to our friend Troy soon. He’s our awesome web designer who also happens to now have his own hives (yay Troy and family!)!
Last Sunday we hosted our first vendor/member for our Pearl FM family! It was a great turnout and we look forward to having more of these so that we can all get to know each other better, away from the hustle and bustle of market. We are all so busy there that it’s hard to have time to visit with each other. This event was so much fun and we appreciated folks making time to drive to the Bee Ranch to see the operation. Can’t wait to see where we go next time!
One more thing before I go…this is Mark’s third rattler killed. Thankfully only one has been at the house and now that we have spotted the family of gray foxes, we haven’t noticed snakes. Anyway, this one was at the Carolina bee yard which is located at the Moo Jesus Dairy Farm. Mark said it was headed into the garden the family keeps and he sure did not want it surprising them so he grabbed his handing garden hoe and took care of it. Thank goodness he had his snake boots on this time! Yay, honeybee! Good job, love. People have been telling us that they notice more rattlers this year so be careful out there, friends!
Posted in administrative, education, magazines, marketing, publications, tagged bees, class, classes on August 24, 2014| 2 Comments »
Here it is – our second published article in August! Wow, it’s as exciting as the fact that the bees are still making honey into August. We still have bees in Comanche making some honey. Crazy but good year! Back to the article. We met these two wonderful gentlemen at the Pearl Farmers Market back in June I believe and we really enjoyed learning about their plans for a new publication with a focus on the true producers of Texas, whether farming or ranching. Even on a Bee Ranch. We are so happy to be in the first issue of TXfarm2market and we hope you will make some time to read it in support of the publication as well as our fellow Pearl Farmers Market vendor, the Palmers of Palmer Farms. Thank you, Ernie, for taking the time to visit with us at market as well as driving out to Seguin to see the Bee Ranch – it was fun! Click here to see the first issue. Below is a shot of Ernie interviewing Mark at the Bee Ranch.
As we wrap up the last of honey being produced, there’s a lot of work to clean and then treat the hives for mites and fumigating with moth crystals to make sure we kill any wax moth larvae that might be on the frames. With three-digit heat indices, the men are usually pretty exhausted by the time they call it a day. Actually some days, lunch time brings me two very pooped men and I feel for them when they often head back out after lunch. Sometimes they can catch a break with work in the Candle Shop and when they do, I come home to beautiful candles. I love seeing what they do at the end of the day and hearing about it over dinner. Here’s a shot I took one afternoon when they starting hand-dipping sweet little tapers. I shot this one holding my camera under the rack and just above the hot beeswax. A little bit nervous but glad I got the shot.
Before I close, I want to mention that our bee classes are kicking back up next month! Nice to think that some slightly less sweltering heat is right around the corner (really it is!). If you are interested or know anyone who would like to come visit us for a class, then please check out our website for more information. Who’s ready to look at some bees with my beekeeper?
Posted in administrative, beeswax, education, honey house, marketing, special events, tagged Open House on March 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Guess what? It’s on! Spring is coming – can’t you see it in the wildflowers that are popping up more and more around us? How about these great little rain storms we’ve been getting? It’s great for the flowers, trees, fields and bees. We are excited about the outlook for the honey season. We’re also very excited about sharing our new Honey House with you all so we decided we didn’t want to wait until the Christmas holidays rolled around again. That is waaaaaaay too far away. So please swing by for our Spring Open House and we’ll be happy to show you around the new building and property. While we won’t every single thing in place, we have it functioning and looking and feeling really awesome. We just want to share some of that goodness. As always, honey tastings are going to be available as well as whatever wonderful beeswax products we’ve poured…including the exquisite Bunny ornament that Mark started pouring recently. I love it! Perfect for an Easter basket or a sweet little hostess gift. We hope to see you soon!
Posted in administrative, bee craft, beeswax, honey house, marketing, packaging, store, travel, tagged Christmas tree on October 28, 2013| 2 Comments »
We are so thrilled to finally have all the components ready for the rollout of our first-ever holiday ornaments! We had been working on the packaging as I have mentioned in previous posts and now we’re ready. We did a soft launch this past weekend at market and class but now these lovelies are up for grabs anywhere and anytime. I still have to do an official photo shoot in order to prep them each for the website but here’s the basic information you’ll need to know to decide if you want to buy them for yourself or as a gift for others:
Here’s the front of the booklet:
The inside and back are filled with beeswax ornament history and care information:
Also, just so you know, I can’t wait to do a beeswax ornament themed tree this year – our first. 🙂 Excited! We’ve been testing the impact of small lights on the ornaments and are happy to report there is no significant impact whatsoever and I’ve had the bulb touching the ornaments for weeks. There’s barely any warmth where it touches the wax so it appears to withstand the lights quite well.
PS – You can click on each picture to view them at a larger size. Just a reminder.
Subscript to the PS – I did some Christmas shopping already and I’m putting a gift under the tree tonight! HEHE
Posted in administrative, bee craft, beeswax, equipment, honey house, marketing, queen, sale, special events, store, tagged ornaments, Pearl, queening on October 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
This is us testing the impact of Christmas light heat on the beeswax ornaments. So far, no impact. Good.
I never know where the days melt away to from Monday to Thursday night. Isn’t that interesting? Last thing I recalled, it was Sunday evening and I was relishing the relaxed hours after market and before the official work week kicked in the next morning. Anyway, here we are. Time to get tags together for Creamed Honey jars, prep supplies such as spoons and postcards, box up the bottled honey Stan got ready for us during the week…oh yea, and gear up to do a new DOUBLE TENT set up at Saturday’s Pearl Farmers Market. We are thrilled to give it a try and now we’ll have Sunday to rest a bit. We are on Quarry Market sabbatical until further notice. We have got to have a little rest now that the harvest is over and we just really want to be back with our church family for a while. We really miss them. So while we will enjoy sleeping until at least 7am one day out of the week, maybe even 7:30am (!!) and seeing our church family, we will surely miss our Quarry market family for a while. We’ve met some wonderful, wonderful people and feel so blessed.
On the beekeeping front, Mark is doing really well with his requeening project. Down to one yard left to be completely done. Yay! He’s been pushing it and is pretty much tired out by evening time each day but I’m so proud of him. Besides the bee work and candle work and beeswax testing, Honey House construction and some administrative work, Mark found a little time to check out some merchandise at our favorite home goods and gift shop here in town – Gift & Gourmet. They had a big warehouse sale today and boy did we strike it rich! Mark actually was taking some stuff to store there at the warehouse Mary graciously is letting us use and he couldn’t get in. Tough luck. lol BUT in the process, we scored a couple of awesome display shelves – one with lights even! That will show off the products very nicely we think. We also purchased several very lovely display racks and ornament trees. What a gift – we didn’t like what we’d seen last night during our research of ornament display trees and this serendipitous shopping excursion pretty much has us set for a while in terms of product display furniture. Nice. Oh yes, in the picture below, I did a collage of the three cabinets Mark sent pictures of for my input. We didn’t buy all of these but I still couldn’t get over the fact that they were so affordable and better yet, that we’d have many pieces of our favorite shop in our own shop. That’s so special to us. We love Mary and her staff and all the wonderful things they do for us as well as for the community. They are just awesome folks. The bottom left picture is the ONE shot I thought to snap of a display rack and the mini-crockpot is actually for wax melting. Smells lovely and will be going with us to market since our double tent will now have electricity! woohoo – we are moving on up, eh? I was so excited about personal shopping that I totally forgot to shoot anything of all the other super cool pieces we bought for the bee biz. haha, I am bad! By the time I got there and saw the outrageously low prices, I went into Christmas gift shopping mode for family and girlfriends. It was awesome. And fun. Things and people were everywhere. To get out from “behind the scenes” where Mary treated us to some special treasures, we actually climbed through the bottom shelf of a display cabinet. Talk about fun. And even Mark did it. He said it is a good thing he’s dropped 40 pounds recently. hehe Wish you could have seen us.
Late afternoon brought a few customers to the Bee Ranch. This is a fairly new beekeeper who’s enjoyed his two hives so much, he is on the list for several more nucs come next spring. Love to hear that. Today he was picking up two queens so he and Mark discussed the direct introduction method for his new queen installation. Hopefully he will have as much success as we have had with that way of doing the queen intros.
Later I will share with your our other visitor – a florist from north of Austin. We have partnered with them and are honored and thrilled they want to share our honey and beeswax products with their customers. Can’t wait to post about that when the time is right. 🙂 For now, I bid you a goodnight. Sleep well.
Posted in administrative, bee craft, bees, beeswax, brood, dividing, health, marketing, Marriott, packaging, queen, tagged Queens in the mail on September 27, 2013| 2 Comments »
These are ready for markets this weekend although the ornaments are wrapped and stored for our big holiday rollout after we finalize packaging and labeling. Yay!
Besides hand-pouring all these lovely beeswax candles, bars, blocks and ornaments, Mark’s been on a tight schedule to clean up from harvest season, treat and requeen all hives and make progress on the Honey House project. Finally got some engineers who speak the same language so we are super please about that. Thanks to our good friend Thomas for his help in reviewing all the plans and proposals and catching some things that helped us out a lot!
Check it out – more queens! Mark is really trucking along on Project Requeen Every Hive before mid-October. Good job, love. Unlike the last back of Olivarez queens (they came around 7:00pm), this box was waiting for me when I got home for lunch, which is really nice to be able to do almost every day. My day job is about 7 minutes from home. Pretty awesome. Anyway, so far so good on the requeening. Things are going very smoothly this year and the direct introduction method is working very well with our hives. So glad Mark read about it on our friend Emily’s bee blog and then followed up with the researchers. It has saved Mark a lot of time and energy.
The box under the queens contains more samples of containers we are considering for packaging the new holiday ornaments we have developed and plan to roll out in time for holiday shoppers! So excited. We are making progress with Maeve as well and hopefully we’ll have our new tags and labels soon for the creamed honey as well as the beeswax products. Did I mention we are excited? 🙂
Speaking of excited – the report for the JW Marriott bee yard is fantastic. Mark went there this morning and was thrilled to see all the hives were doing very well. That’s a frame full of beautiful brood from one of the hives. You may recall that we lost four out of five hives out there at the Marriott last year so we are really happy they are thriving this year. You never know from year to year which yards will do well. Historical performances don’t always act as the best indications of how well a bee yard will do the current year. It all has to rain and what’s been blooming for the bees. No rain, no blooms, no protein = two bee yards moved out to new locations this year. You have to watch the hives and if they are not doing well, you have to help them and in our case, Mark moved them to areas that seem to be getting more rain this year. In both instances, the colonies made progress within a week or two of being in their new yards. That’s always a good feeling to know that you’ve helped them in some way. They do so much for us.
One last thing, I miss seeing all our new divides out behind the house. We still kept a few teaching hives as well as the queen bank out back but this week, Mark and Stan completed their move of the new divides to their permanent home. They have been developing quite well and we hope they will make it through winter just fine. You don’t really know what 2014 will be like for them until spring, when we can see how they managed. But these bees have been building up their honey stores and carrying pollen like crazy so those are great signs. It’s raining on and off here this afternoon and that’s also a great sign. A wet fall and winter would do wonders for next season’s crop. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, shall we?
Here’s how it looked when we had a full house not too long ago.
Posted in administrative, bees, education, marketing, packaging, tagged consultants, Pinterest, postcards on August 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Howdy and happy Friday! We are happy these got done in time for our weekend markets – since I can’t really help with the bees, I can do things like keep up with the social media, some emails, phone inquiries, and create and edit print materials such as our postcards. Those things fly off the table and they also get used a lot in our packaged and shipped merchandise. Nice to have them in and reflecting our new social media logos. I have been meaning to do a post on all our social media but haven’t had a chance to but for now, definitely check us out on Pinterest – just search for Gretchen Bee Ranch and there we are. I am somewhat in extreme love with Pinterest. I’d use some exclamation points there but I’d probably get carried away and scare you. That’s how much I love it. I describe Pinterest as a visual bookmarking site and I fell in love with it the first time I tried it last year since I’m very visual, as you likely guessed from all my pictures. I do best when I can see things or can at least visualize things. (If you tell me about someone, I usually ask their name at least so I can create an image in my mind.) I resisted getting GBR on Pinterest for the longest time simply because I wasn’t sure I could handle adding yet another social media “thing” to keep up with but finally realized I needed to do it. Plus the app for the phone is a huge help and it’s yet another way to connect with others and share ideas, which I do enjoy a lot. So, go check GBR out on Pinterest – it’s pretty cool. And don’t worry, the initial obsession phase eases after the first week and then you either find value in it and start your own boards (think clipboards), or you realize you will lose too many hours just looking at all the prettiness and shut down your account. That’s okay. Just come back to us on the blog or one of the other accounts! lol Have fun! And I DO try the many of the things I pin, just in case people tell you Pinterest lovers simply pin things they’ll never own, do, or try to cook. I try.
[Side note: I really wish someone would pay me to just find and teach people about social media. :)]
Yesterday we had a lovely visit and consultation with Maeve of Design Maeven out of Austin. Totally great times! We had a wonderful discussion about where we want to see our product lines and image evolve towards and how she might help us get there. Exciting!! We found Maeve online after we looked at the Sweet Cream Suds Company, which is own by a customer who bought a variety of our products. We loved the look of her shop and products and when we Googled more about things, we eventually found Maeve’s name and a few emails later, here she is.
Of course we took her to see the bees and she did great with them and vice versa. They were calm and Maeve handled them calmly and no one got stung. Good all around. We like it when the people we work with want to really know what we are about so one great way for us to see what they are like and about is to invite them to the Bee Ranch. Here they get to see us in our element and we have a chance to see how they feel about what we do. We are thrilled to have found Maeve – not sure our paths would ever have crossed with Maeve’s had it not been for all this social media connectivity. 🙂 See? I brought it all around from beginning to end. lol
Personal note: I love crafting and paper arts and paper in general. I appreciate quality craftsmanship and attention to detail. We are so glad to have a chance to meet someone who recognizes that presentation of yourself, your product and your image is all tied together and is very important. It’s important to us. So here’s to a partnership that will hopefully help us move our company on to the next level. We want to show people our uniqueness and we look forward to Maeve helping us do that. Stay tuned!
Check it out – books with samples of some lovely, lovely papers, packaging and design ideas. I really enjoyed thumbing through them. Nothing like great stock to make you want to create something beautiful and fun.
Now…off to wrap up candles for market and fold table covers. See y’all tomorrow at the Pearl and Sunday at the Quarry!
Posted in administrative, honey, marketing, Markets, sale, store, technology, tagged new store, shopping cart, website on July 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »
It’s back and better! When the shopping cart went down on us a couple of weeks ago, the company that ran the back end didn’t even notify clients. Really! That is crazy business. Thanks to Troy and Mark working away since that time, we now have a brand new shopping cart with lots more for you.
Here are a couple of things I wanted to point out real quick since I need to go to bed for an early drive to SA markets.
You like the honey? You want to tell us how you cooked with it in a wonderful recipe? We now have a review feature – tell us what you liked and didn’t like (hopefully you’ll call us on this one so we can work it out together)!
Need to do a quick search since you don’t have time to browse? Check out the new search capability as well as the featured products for that time period.
Take a look around and tell us what you think. We’ve been working and testing but nothing beats real user testing. We also added several free pickup locations in the “shipping” section. Thanks for your patience and support as we worked through another little hurdle in running a business and having an online store. When a server crashes, sometimes you just have to sit and eat honey until the next solution is ready. 🙂 We’re ready now.
Posted in honey, marketing, Markets, plants, pollen on May 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »
First off, let me just say that although it turned out to be the hottest days yet this spring (upper 90s and we felt it on the asphalt at markets), we really had a great time being back at both the Pearl and the Quarry markets. We sure miss our friends – both vendors and customers – when we are not at market! And how nice to know they missed us as well. 🙂 Thanks for the love, everyone. I am also thrilled to once again restock our produce, meats and eggs and I even grabbed several beautiful sunflowers from our next door neighbor vendor, Naegelin Farms, for my mom’s prayer table. They are at the Quarry Farmers & Ranchers Market. These things make me so happy!
You should see all the wonderful things you can buy at market – check out my Flickr set for examples. I told Mark starting in June, I will keep track of how much we spend each weekend at the markets. I want to see some numbers since I have been feeling as if my initial assessment may be inaccurate – that you spend more eating better when you buy at farmers market than if you buy at the usual grocery stores. I really think we’ve been spending less because what we do buy last a LOT longer than what we used to buy at stores. But I want collect real data on that. We both LOVE buying our vegetables, meats, eggs, plants/flowers and eats at market. It’s better quality products; it’s made by people we’ve met and have gotten to know; it’s not been “chemicalized” and is as fresh and real as you can get…it’s an amazingly reassuring feeling to know where things come from and to know the hands that brought it all to market. Anyway, I’ll let you know what I discover. All that to say this, if you haven’t tried the farmers markets yet, you should. Even if you aren’t there for us, you should check out the other products. I think you’ll like it. Here are just some of the wonderful things I look forward to preparing this week. Not included here are: fresh bread, tilapia, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, chicken, and eggs.
And these beauties from Oak Hills Farm out of Poteet and at the Pearl Farmers Market:
AND…we introduced our newest honey at the Quarry market today to a very, very warm reception! I don’t have the numbers in front of me but informally, we both felt the Cenizo out-sold the Wildflower AND the Huajilla today. It’s really delightful – a blend of both flavors in my opinion. Not as flowery as the Wildflower Honey but more body than the Huajilla Honey. You’re going to have to taste it yourself soon and let us know what you think. 🙂
Gretchen Bee Ranch 