The lonely Indiana back roads leading to Hunter's Honey Farm give no sign of the buzz of activity that awaits visitors.
For over 100 years, Hunter's Honey Farm has been raising bees, harvesting their honey and serving it up to customers. Now owned by third generation beekeepers, Tracy Hunter and his wife Christina, Hunter's Honey Farm is dedicated to keeping the people of Indiana well stocked in sticky, golden goodness.
According to Kara Miner, office manager for Hunter's Honey Farm, keeping the bees healthy and productive isn't an easy feat.
"We are a working farm, so we're here all the time," Miner said.
For Miner, this means five days a week, but for the Hunters it can include weekends, late nights and some very early mornings.
With all the work there is to do, it's easy to see why keeping a bee farm is a full-time job. One of Hunter's Honey Farm's six full-time employees, Lanny Dameron, has been a beekeeper at the farm for almost 16 years. Dameron says his job never lets up.
"It involves a little bit of everything," Dameron said. "We try to keep them alive, we make sure they're pollinating, we've got to get honey crops. There's more than I could tell you in just a couple of minutes."
Dameron stressed that before farm employees can begin to think about harvesting honey, they've got to focus on the bees themselves. To get a hive started, the farm will order a three-pound package containing around 20,000 bees. Most bees on the farm have been shipped from California.
"We've got to order bees, you can whistle at them, but they're not going to pay any attention to you," Dameron said.
Since a good-sized hive contains around 40,000 to 80,000 bees, the queen has a lot of work to do to get her starter hive up to regulation.
Gary Bramer has been a beekeeper at Hunter's Honey Farm for five years now, and in that time has learned plenty about how a new hive of 20,000 can balloon up to 50,000 or 60,000 bees in just a few years.
"[The queen's] only job is to lay eggs," Bramer said.
According to Dameron, a healthy queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs in the summer months, the peak time for bees.
However, the queen is far from being the only bee in the hive with an important job to do. Each female bee is given an occupation: there are nurse bees, house cleaning bees, bees who care for the queen and the bees who take care of the drones.
"Then, of course, there's the collectors," Miner said.
Miner added that pollen collection is the prime occupation for any worker bee.
While the female bees, or workers, have their work cut out for them, the male bees, or drones, take life easy.
"The girls do all the work, the guys just loaf," Dameron said.
And there can be no doubt that the girls aren't just working-they're working hard. One hive can contain anywhere from 40 to 200 pounds of honey, depending on a number of factors.
The beehives themselves are man made, and the particular men who create the hives for Hunter's Honey Farm are none other than Dameron and Bramer. There are two parts to these beehives: the frame and the super. The frame is just that, a frame for holding the honeycomb. The super is basically a large drawer that holds multiple frames. The frames containing the honeycombs slide into a super, and the supers are then stacked on top of one another to form a hive.
For the most part, the beekeepers leave the bees to do their work. Once a super has filled up, however, the honey harvesting begins.
"We run all the bees out, and then we hurry up and get [the super] on the truck and get a lid on it," Dameron said.
This process has got to be done quickly, since once the bees that made this particular honey have been run off, the other bees begin to consider the honey in the open supers free food.
"Once its off the hives its fair game. The other bees will come to it and start robbing all the honey," he said.
Back at the barn, the honey has a long road to travel before it is ready to be bottled and sold. Firstly, the honey must be removed from the honeycombs. To do this, the frames are first put into a machine called an "uncapper," which cuts off the excess honeycomb and then into the "extractor."
"[The extractor] basically slings the honey off against the walls," Dameron said.
The honey then travels to a settling tank, where it sits for about 24-48 hours.
According to Miner, the honey is more than ready for human consumption at this point in the process. This "raw" honey is full of extra nutrition and parts of the honeycomb. However, it also contains gnats, dirt and even dead bees.
Still though, Miner stressed that even raw honey is "cleaner than most restaurant kitchens."
However, she does admit that some might find honey in its raw form unappealing, so most honey at the Hunter's farm undergoes a final step before bottling: straining.
"We just take this bucketful of honey and we strain it right into this cheese cloth," Miner said.
In keeping with the farm's tradition of natural honey production, no chemicals are used in this entire process, and everything that can be reused, is.
"Even if there's a spill we don't waste the honey, we feed it back to the bees," Miner said.
In order to ensure that absolutely nothing is wasted, the farm uses their excess beeswax for candles making. The candles burn cleanly, and beeswax actually gets so hot that they end up consuming themselves. Even the two pillowcases used to strain the wax are recycled.
"We don't even waste the pillow cases," said Miner, "we cut them up and use it as a fire starter."
On the surface, it seems that the mission of Hunter's Honey Farm is simply to make honey. However, to the employees of the farm, the job is much more.
"We have to take care of nature: we've only got one earth," Miner said.
She added that in the six years since she began working for the Hunter's, she has been given even greater cause to believe in something bigger than herself.
"It's the little things that really make you wonder," Miner said.
On the other hand, Dameron's sixteen years on the farm have left him with something a little more down to earth: numerous bee stings. When asked exactly how many that might be, he laughed.
"More than I can count."