Business Spotlight: Beecharmer Farms

Most people say, "Don't mess with bees," but for honey farmer Valorie Nichols, there's no other place she'd rather be.

"I'm just a small hobbyist beekeeper with a hobby that got out of hand," says Nichols, a UPS driver by day who has built a profitable side business as an apiarist, or beekeeper, on her time off.

On autumn weekends, visitors will see her at Rutledge-Wilson Farm where she peddles pure Ozarks honey - harvested right in her backyard about 10 miles north of Springfield off Missouri Highway 13. Annually, her company, Beecharmer Farms, earns around $5,000 selling pints and quarts of the golden goodness.

Nichols' interest in apiaries began in childhood. "My great-grandparents had bees, and like the curious cat, I wanted to see what was going on," she explains. Nichols soon started taking beekeeping classes through the Ozarks Beekeepers Association (www.ozarksbeekeepers.org). "They had a dollar auction, and I won my first hive there," she says.

Years later, she began marketing honey to Springfield-area farms and specialty shops, where locals can't seem to get enough of the sweet stuff.

"People are hungry for any type of local food source," says Dan Bigbee, owner of Fassnight Creek Farm, 1366 S. Fort Ave., in Springfield. "Valorie keeps her hives here and we also sell her honey. Quarts, pints, 8-ounce honey bears - they all sell."

Nichols' honey is a seasonal item, so she can't meet the supply necessary for supermarkets. Instead, she sells pints and quarts through smaller venues such as Fassnight Creek Farm and the Farmer's Daughter restaurant in Rogersville, where people seek out locally grown products.

The bee charmer recently expanded her apiary to 45 hives from 20. "My long-term goal is to have 100 hives and keep my job at UPS," she says.

Nichols keeps the hives at local farms where her bees can help pollinate farmers' crops.

"These orchards need pollination badly because there is a shortage of bees," Nichols notes. "Farmers used to depend on bees living out in the wild for pollination, but since there aren't as many there, farmers are depending on beekeepers like myself to do temporary pollination."

Honeybees are critical for agricultural pollination, adding more than $15 billion in value to about 130 crops, especially fruits, berries, nuts and vegetables, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The season for harvesting honey in Missouri is generally short. Nichols begins her honey harvest in August by bringing in the hives for extraction.

"We're taking a lot of growing pains as any small business might," Nichols says. This year, her efforts were focused on building a certified honey house that meets state and local codes for production.

"Before, I was doing this out of my garage and I knew there had to be a better way," she says.

Her new 16x30-foot honey house has stainless steel equipment, washable walls and a drain in the floor. It can take several days to get the honey out of the hives and process it. Each frame of a honeycomb is capped over with wax by the bees once the honey is ripe. To extract the honey, a beekeeper needs to "uncap" the wax to expose the honey, usually by using a knife, fork or a hot air gun - all laborious processes. Nichols plans to speed up this process by investing in an uncapping machine.

Frames of honeycomb are valuable assets, and beekeepers work hard to keep them undamaged from season to season. Once the honey is extracted, the frames are put back on top of a hive where the bees will fill them again.

Pure Ozarks honey doesn't just taste good; there are many added benefits to eating it, Nichols says. Health-conscious people sometimes choose honey as a replacement for other processed sugars.

People also buy honey for its medicinal value. Honey has a natural peroxide base that is sometimes used as a topical ointment, and it's sometimes used to treat respiratory, gastric and intestinal disorders.

"There is endless amounts of literature on the way people take honey for everything," Nichols says. "It's sure better than taking cough syrup!"