1st Annual Spring Open House

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!

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We’re Ready for Holiday Open House

Well, we are finally cleaned up and ready for bed. But not before I post a little on what we’ve been doing. I was wondering earlier about all the “famous and successful” businesses that started out in garages. You know, I’m too tired to go Google it and I have set a time limit on how late I can stay up to write this so I’ll keep moving. You know what I mean about the garage. We all have to start and sometimes restart somewhere and here’s where we’re at – our new Bee Ranch at 2745 W. Kingsbury. We’re now on the edge of town. Feels like the country sometimes since we are no longer about ten feet from our neighbors and we regularly have deer grazing on and running through the front to the back yard and then on to the eleven acres behind our property. 🙂 We will miss the good ole house on Krezdorn and people will have to adjust their coordinates for picking up our products, but we are really just ten minutes from where we used to be and right down the street from Interstate 10 AND Granzin’s Meat Market. What more could you ask for?

So, here’s your chance to see our restart. The Krezdorn house is under contract now, which means we seriously need to start emptying out the Honey House (not to mention our attic, still). When it came time to decide about events such as daily drop-bys from customers and the open house event, it seemed like the right time to go ahead and transition things over to the new Bee Ranch. We are happy to say we had our first shoppers stop by for BLACK FRIDAY shopping – we weren’t even having any specials but they sure didn’t mind. We appreciated their support as well as another big order I took over the phone. It’s that gift-giving time of year and we’re happy people are picking up our honey and wax products for family and friends. Tomorrow we’ll open our garage doors for any of you who’d like to do a little shopping, a little visiting and a little munching. We’ll have light snacks and some hot cider. Mark and I will be happy to show you our vision for the new Bee Ranch – Where will the honey house sit? Where might the retail shop be located? Where will Mark make his gorgeous candles? Where will Stan bottle honey? Which boots will I wear to tromp around the property in search of photo opportunities? If you swing by here tomorrow, we can show you where all this and more will happen. AND Smokey will be so happy to see you! He may run around the yard in a frenzy from the joy of having people visit us again. I think he’s really missed seeing people for classes and drop-by customers. Poor cat, like Lan and I don’t give him enough attention and snuggles.

Here’s a look at some of the handiwork from setup activities this evening. We just want to say a great big THANK YOU to my sis Lan. Boy, she is a worker bee to the max. Helped us out at the Pearl Farmers Market then came to Seguin in the evening to hang out and help us set up for tomorrow. We love working with family members and have enjoyed her feedback in addition to her hard work. We even had a video call with my other sis Thuy in NC to show her what we were doing – she loves our products and events as much as we do although today she told me that she thinks she gets more excited about our Pearl adventures than I do. How lovely that so many people, especially family members, care so much about what we do and how we do that they text and call afterwards to see how things went. It’s so awesome!

Okay, I’ve exceeded my time limit by three minutes. Oops. Gotta go to bed now so y’all sleep tight and come visit us!

Oh! The bees are here also! I know a lot of you love to see them. So there. Okay, this time I am really stopping. 🙂

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Market, Class, Chocolates, Holiday Open House – It’s All Here!

After another busy week and another two-event day, I am in my pajamas already and Smokey is crashed out on his current favorite spot while he is recovering from some injury he picked up while I was gone. Poor little guy. I bet if he was able to join bee class this morning, that would have cheered him up. Lan and I handled the Pearl market as Mark had seven students join him for class here in Seguin. Ah, I miss doing the classes with Mark. While we are blessed to be so busy and to have so many new opportunities, we always miss working events together. Sigh. The price of success I guess. 🙂 Here’s a shot from class today.

At least we have the evenings together. Tonight we were suppose to go to a Chucho Valdez concert and we were both so excited but unfortunately, I was really exhausted and an earlier migraine post-market really wiped me out (even after sleeping it off for three hours). Mark is pretty beat as well so we thought it’d be best to not push it by rushing to SA to catch Chucho. We’ll have to catch him again when we can. 😦 Instead, we had a nice, quiet dinner out and now we are both doing a bit of administrative work as we watch the Spurs beat up on the Denver Nuggets. AND we are sipping on some yummy hot chocolate topped with marshmallows and a touch of cinnamon AND we are nibbling on the delicious Texas Honey Caramel Truffles that Ms. Chocolatier dropped off at our booth today at market. They are a fellow vendor at the Pearl and they used some of our honey in this magnificent creation. Has a touch of sea salt on top – SCRUMPTIOUS. Is chocolate on chocolate too much? Impossible.

One ore thing…guess what time it is? Besides turkey time, it’s time for our annual Holiday Open House! I know, it feels like it was just yesterday that we were all trying to keep warm and dry in the tiny little Honey House on Krezdorn while it poured down cold rain on Seguin last year. Right? Well, here we are again. Gearing up for holiday shoppers who have already started placing their orders. We’d love to see you here at our new Bee Ranch on Kingsbury. We’ll have some yummy, light snacks and plenty of time to talk gift-giving ideas with you if you have time to shop local with us.

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Does Santa Deliver Bees?

We’re finding some good looking hives as we do our round of last-minute feeding. This hive is at the Deadman Creek yard and had some nice brood and a healthy amount of bees. Do you see the queen? We scrambled to feed the new hives at the Farm Yard, which were light when we bought them, and then decided to check on the rest of the hives as well. The bees need plenty of food for the winter because it provides the fuel that the bees need to vibrate their wings to keep the winter bee-cluster warm. The bees maintain a fairly constant 90 degrees in the hive even on those cold winter nights. We normally leave a super of honey on each hive for this purpose, but this year’s drought had other ideas.

We’re taking a break from our bee work tomorrow for our second annual Christmas Open House. We hope you can join us 2-6 tomorrow afternoon at our GBR Honey House here in Seguin (116 W. Krezdorn). We’ll have lots of refreshments, tours of the honey house, a candle making demonstration, free honey tastings, and of course a full array of beautiful bee-made goodies for that one-of-a-kind Christmas gift. So take a break from the crowded malls and stressful traffic and visit with us for awhile — we promise to put the sweetness back in your Christmas Spirit!

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