From Intensive Mentorships to Full Service Hive Maintenance
Our family is honored to share the art of beekeeping with your family. We trust you will find it as endlessly fascinating and rewarding as we do. Grateful Trees and Bees will install a hive and tend it for you — from purchasing equipment, to hiving the queen, to keeping the hive healthy, to extracting and bottling honey. Or we’ll help you don a beekeeper’s suit of your own and offer mentoring and support as you work your own hive.
Our goal is to empower you to become a beekeeper. We offer beekeeping service plans that include intensive one-on-one mentoring sessions to help you grow your confidence in caring for your own hive. We strongly encourage each of our beekeeping clients to join their local Beekeeper’s Association. The North Carolina Beekeeper’s Association maintains a list of County Chapters. The Bull City has a wonderfully active Chapter, the Durham Beekeeper’s Association.
We are also more than ready to serve as your beekeeper! GTB offers beekeeping service plans for clients who wish to host a honeybee hive on their property, but not actively work it. GTB’s beekeepers monitors the health of the hive throughout the year. They check for brood, assess when to harvest honey, harvest honey, and secure the hive for over wintering. Honey is bottled and returned to you, or you can give us the honey to help defray the cost of maintaining your hive.
Bee Packages
In North Carolina, honeybee packages are typically available from late March through early May, making the early spring the best time to establish a honey bee hive. This window may vary given the actual weather conditions we have in any given spring. We source our bees primarily from Lee’s Bees in Mebane, North Carolina.
Each package, also called a “nuc,” weighs three pounds and will contain 10,000 – 12,000 bees and a queen bee. We expect that the available species of honeybee will be apis mellifera ligustica, often called Italians. Italian honeybees are gentle, non-aggressive, and slightly smaller than other honeybees.