HOGEYE, Ark. — It's the time of year when most people are getting ready to go on vacation, but at Hogeye Honey, the busy bees are hard at work.
Andrew Long is the owner of the honeybee farm just south of Fayetteville. Long works full-time as a nurse practitioner, but he’s no stranger to farming.
“I grew up farming, and we wanted to do some, but the capital investment is quite a bit for regular farming like cows and stuff like that,” Long said. “So we started out with bees.”
The Long family started their farm in 2018 with four hives.
By the end of this week, Long says they’ll have close to 400 hives, with millions of honeybees.
Long says it’s a business that the whole family helps take care of, including his wife and kids.
“We wake up early, we check the hives and we'll do whatever needs to be done that day,” Long said.
Not only does Hogeye sell honey, but they also help others get started producing their own.
“We sell everything you would need to start beekeeping: suits, boxes, hive equipment, and even the bees themselves,” Long said.
Long says while the bees produce honey in the spring, peak harvest time runs through June and July.
Making honey isn’t the only job of these worker bees, they also play an important role in other foods we eat.
“Bees pollinate most of the fruits and vegetables we eat, they pollinate blueberries, they pollinate almonds … if we didn't have bees out there to pollinate them, likely our yields would decrease greatly and we wouldn't have as much food available and prices would go up,” Long said.
According to Long, after this summer's harvest, things will start to wind down as they leave the honey produced for the bees to get through the winter.
When the weather warms up next spring, the whole process will start again.
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