Francis Farms

The Greenville Newscame out for some video footage of our apiary. They published a story as Front Page news!See the article and video online here! The US Air Force's Combat Cameradivision out of Charleston, SC took interest in our bee farm and came out for some practice to film us out around the apiary tending to our hives. Watch the video here. Our beekeeping history began when we moved out of the city and into the country in Simpsonville, SC. Ever since then we've enjoyed living out on our dirt road and, as one neighbor puts, "Trying to act like country-folk even though they're really city-folk." It's true. We definitely are a lot more country now than when we moved out here. My wife Adrianneenjoys making homemade soap, laundry detergent, no-till gardening, permaculture, composting,and all things herbalism. I enjoy our beekeeping hobby, which is sort of an obsession at this point as well as our flock of chickens and ducks. Many things about our beekeeping method are counter-intuitive from the mainstream beekeeping perspective. We're doing almost everything from a different or opposite approach to what the beekeeper is told they need to do. We embraced a few things that make no sense from a commercial or mainstream perspective. Beekeepers have many decisions to make with regard to hive management and production harvesting. I decided that I want to be able to say with confidence, "It is impossible to make a more natural and pure product than our product." When we chose what containers to bottle and sell our honey in we picked glass over plastic. You can always set crystallized honey in a double boiler in Winter or just out on the back deck in Summer with no worries about plastic leaching. When deciding whether to use commercially manufactured foundation laced with a trace amount of treatment chemicals or take the cleanest but more management intensive approach of running an apiary foundationless letting the bees draw out the entire honeycomb, we went the chemical-free route and picked foundationless. When it comes to the decision to treat a weak hive by putting chemicals in the hive we chose to use zero chemicals whatsoever on our colonies. Even if that means a colony with weak genetics might not make it. When choosing what method we would use to get the honey out of the comb we chose the more labor intensive and smaller production volume crush and strain method that harvests from each honeycomb only once instead of using a high speed extractor and reusing honeycomb over and over. It is impossible to find honey in our area that is more pure, unaltered and as robust in flavor as our honey. Our honey is pure; sold to you in a glass jar with all nutrients perfectly retained and not altered in any way. Nothing added, nothing taken away. You see now that at every decision point we faced we always took the purist route. Even if that meant we'd have to work harder. Even if that meant we'd have smaller harvests. Even if that means we'd need more hives than other beekeepers. I didn't want to look back in 10 years and see some new beekeeper selling better tasting, healthier and more pure honey than we were. A lot of beekeepers would probably tell you what we are doing is overkill and it doesn't make much difference. But we've built up a fiercely loyal customer base who buy our honey because itisbetter. There's a reason we get the price we get for our honey and still sell out every season. Because of our no compromises approach we sell a rare product and its value is recognized by our knowledgeable discerning customers. We're growing the apiary and are looking for local like minded cottage industry families with land to promote our shared philosophy, network with and host some of our beehives. Guess what kind of property we want to put our bees on? A peach orchard? An apple orchard? A blueberry farm? No, no and no. Why? That's what all the other beekeepers would be jealous to have.  We don't want our bees foraging on that because most