(upbeat music)
- Honey as a food source is absolutely universal.
One of the things we love about honey
is that regardless of your race, your culture,
your background, everyone has this affinity to honey,
so it's absolutely a universal food.
It's impossible to make honey without bees.
You can make sugar substances, sugar, corn syrup sweeteners,
but you can't make natural honey without bees.
Bees are one of the few animals,
I think the only animal that produce their own food.
They collect nectar from the flower, ingest the nectar,
regurgitate it, and it becomes honey.
We're gonna go back and see the bees right now,
so we've got three hives in this yard.
We've got roughly 5 1/2 acres on this property.
Roughly around probably two million bees just here,
but that's actually not, it sounds like a lot
but it's, that's not, that's not a lot.
Our bee season starts typically around late March.
This is a smoker, right?
So essentially this is what all beekeepers use,
and then the wood chips, this hardwood pellets,
and this really gives a nice clean burning smoke.
You might have 200,000 bees in here alone
and so what you're doin' is you're blocking the pheromones
so they can't signal that there's an intruder,
and also it distracts them, right?
All right.
So this is all full of honey.
You probably have 50 pounds of honey
right in this one alone.
Here we go, you crack it.
And we'll just see what's goin' on in here.
Just scrape it off, woop.
I, they didn't like that.
So I just got stung. Can you see it moving in there?
So I just got stung.
That's essentially the stinger and the venom sac,
and it's moving.
The venom sac is designed to pulse
and pump venom into your body, right?
So if you don't find the stinger, not a big deal,
right, the stinger will naturally sort of pop out.
See, now the pain is going away, I don't even feel it.
But if I didn't find the stinger, I'd be a little grumpy.
All the comments on YouTube'll be like, "That dude's hand!"
People are most afraid of getting stung.
It happens, hand here, right, so you'll see,
clearly this one is the stung.
(funky music)
Hey, my name is Kam.
I'm with Zach & Zoe Honey.
I do a little bit of everything,
keep the bees, sell the honey.
Each deep box will have 10 frames in it, right?
Let's pop it open here,
they're in a pretty good mood.
And what you'll see is, so this right here is not done yet.
This is nectar.
That's being prepared for honey.
What happens is the bees, they flap their wings,
and they lower the moisture contents.
Water evaporates, which is why honey
is able to be preserved so long.
And then they cap it.
They use the wax to cap it right here.
And this, we'll see, I'll pop it open, but you'll see,
that's all honey that you can just eat.
Over time, they're basically laying a foundation of wax
and that foundation of wax is where they store their honey,
it's where they store pollen.
It starts as this, a new hive starts as this,
and then ends up, this is honey.
That's honey, you can eat that.
It's just raw honey.
I'm gonna pig out a little bit, haven't had breakfast.
So forgive me.
Mm.
You see that?
That is not a honeybee.
These are hornets that are robbing,
these hornets were trying to infiltrate the colony,
and what you see is they were killed here by the bees.
So they did their job,
but look how much larger that hornet is compared
to a honeybee.
The colony is very simple, right?
Females run the show.
The queen governs the nature of the bees.
The queen determines the health of the beehive.
It's clearly a matriarchal system.
Y'know, the males are there to work.
Male bees or drone bees, they have one purpose
and that's to mate with the queen.
The ladies will kick out the men as they go into the winter,
right, so they're no longer needed.
Right, the majority of the bees in here are females.
So once we're ready for extraction, that's the fun process.
And then first thing, again,
we'll make sure the hive has enough honey
to sustain itself for X number of months.
You see that one?
This is all honey right there, right?
So we can extract, take this one out for extraction.
There's still a lot of honey in here.
We'll do one frame.
But when we're doin' our big honey harvest it's,
again, it's a multi-day affair.
- So this is our wax cutter.
And we just basically just cut straight down here.
So I try to get it nice and shallow
so you don't cause too much damage
to the rest of the cell inside.
- Y'know, extraction essentially
is we're using an extractor,
we're putting the frames vertical-wise in the extractor,
using cylindrical force.
When we knew we wanted to get into beekeeping,
you have to find a guy,
right, you have to find somebody,
an old timer who's into bees,
and often they don't wanna be bothered.
They're older,
they've been there, done that,
they've seen a lot of people come in
and never hear from them again.
I met Larry roughly five years ago.
I bought my first bees from Larry
and I've been in love with the guy as an uncle,
Uncle Larry, ever since.
We just hit it off.
- Yeah, I mean, people think they want bees, right?
It's like a trendy thing right now,
but it's not for everybody.
- I've been with you for five years,
Larry. - No, it's not for everybody,
really. - Be quiet, let him talk.
- And I basically told him, I says, (laughs)
"Nah, you don't want bees."
Just stay out of it, you know?
Frankly, he persisted and persisted,
and now he's a bee guy, you know?
- [Kam] Our operation differs from Larry,
in just terms of size.
We're much, much smaller, right, we're younger.
I mean, Larry's been beekeeping for close to 35 years.
- I started beekeeping in 1972.
I was probably about 20 years old.
Been in it ever since.
For liquid honey, what we do, we take the caps off
and put it in these spinning machines
and just literally centrifugal force forces it out.
And we strain it and put in a bottle.
This, we're cutting the comb out,
and that's one reason it's kind of an expensive product
'cause bees have to make the comb every year.
I gotta tell you,
this is probably some of the best comb honey
in the world, really.
Believe it or not.
- So I'm learning from him,
hey, how do you think about wholesale accounts?
And also as he thinks about going direct-to-consumer
which is something he's interested in,
we're, I'm helping him with that, right, so it's really cool
that there's mutual value in a sense that, you know,
we're both learning things from each other.
So I buy my, bees, you know, every year, every spring
from Larry and Pam.
These are nukes that are being prepared for next spring.
- It's a short term for nucleus hive.
So these are nucleus hives that were started this summer.
They're, winter in these small boxes
'cause they'll winter better and build up faster
in the spring, and we take increase bees out of these.
We'll pull like two or three new hives out next spring.
And they make up, they're for sale for people like him
and make up for dead hives and stuff like that.
(upbeat rock music) No. - I see you've got,
they're like this,
and not getting touched. - Did you smoke the bees
that stung you, or?
- Did I smoke the bees?
Of course, Unc.
- Well, why'd they sting you?
- The biggest thing I learned from Larry
is you can't rush it.
I mean, my advice to any new beekeeper,
anybody interested in it is, find an experienced beekeeper
and just spend time with them.
And that's the only way.
Beekeepers are a really cool community.
It's very trust-based, very honor-based,
it's very much a handshake and you're good.
They'll lend bees to each other.
They will borrow bees.
They'll borrow equipment.
So it's very common in the community,
it's very much your word is your bond,
and so it's cool, it's very old school.
(groans)
(laughs)
(upbeat pop music)
A lot of commercial honey is just, it's corn syrup,
so it doesn't have a lot of the natural vitamins
and minerals that that natural raw honey has,
and so we try not to be honey snobs,
right, we try to be gracious,
but we do want people to understand there's a difference,
right, and what we consume and what we eat does matter.
Our honey, we can have the same hive
with the same bees produce very different tasting honey,
even in the same year.
Some of it could be more buttery.
Some of it could be a lot more floral.
You know, some of it's a lot more acidic.
So once the honey is filtered, jarred, and package,
then for customers that we have a relationship with,
we'll hand-deliver it, and that's always fun,
catching up, seeing how their business is doing,
getting feedback on the honey from their customers
is always really rewarding.
What's cool about Chelsea Market
is it's such a universal destination
in a sense that there's so many people,
so many tourists who come to New York,
they come by Chelsea Market,
and one of the things I know Summer and I love
is just meeting people from all over the world.
- So we sell our honey wholesale
to a couple of the restaurants around the city.
So we're gonna take our honey up and head over
to Gabriel's over at Fairfax.
Do some, I know you needed certain flavors.
- [Kam] We have a lot of restaurants who purchase our honey,
a lot of chefs, home chefs who purchase our honey.
- Local raw honey is usually gonna pick up flavors
that are relevant to other produce that you're utilizing
in your area because the bees are pollinating both things.
So generally, it's gonna have like flavors
in those sorts of things, unless you have a specified honey,
like a clover honey or orange blossom honey or eucalyptus,
that sort of thing.
- We just fulfilled an order
for a synagogue in Upper West Side.
With the Jewish holidays,
they wanted to support a Black-owned business
and it was really cool
to see the two cultures comin' together.
We got started because Zachary,
our middle child, really struggled with allergies.
And so Summer, you know, God bless her,
read and learned about the benefits of raw honey
and exposing your body to natural allergens,
and so we were giving him a lot of raw honey.
And then we're like, hey, you know, let's,
we got some land, let's get a couple hives.
And one of the cool things about naming it Zach & Zoe
is that we knew he couldn't give up.
Right, we knew that, and this is gettin' emotional,
we knew that if it had their names on it,
we'd be forced to go that extra mile starting up,
and so it's been a hard road, but it is so rewarding.
- Being a family business definitely has its ups and downs,
because you have to cooperate,
'cause you have to live with the people that you work with.
That's one of the biggest challenges I think.
Other than that it's really rewarding
because you get a chance to work
with the people that you love.
(inspirational electronic music)