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Bees flitter in and out of one of their boxes at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Chris Moore checks out the bees, eggs and honey being produced in one of the hives on site at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Chris Moore stirs warming honey at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Bees walk atop one of their hive panels at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Natural honey and bee pollen are available at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Inside nearly each tiny comb base, thin slivers of silver looking eggs lie at the bottom of a panel inside a hive at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

A store display filled with product sits inside a warehouse at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Jars sit beneath a bottling machine at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

A smoker calms the bees within a hive being checked at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Honey naturally crystallizes and must be warmed to return to a syrup state before bottling at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

A trucked filled with product awaits being transported to area stores at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Chris Moore looks on as son Jake examines a panel filled with eggs and the first honey at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Bees with legs full of pollen return to an on site hive at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Bees make their way in and out of an on site hive at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Chris Moore lifts a hive box at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Crystallized honey is warmed back to a syrupy liquid state before bottling at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Chris Moore looks on as son Jake examines a panel filled with eggs and the first honey at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Jake Moore smokes hives before opening them to heck on the bees at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Barrels filled with what remains of last season's honey harvest sit inside a warehouse at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Jake Moore holds a panel where bees have laid eggs and are building honey combs at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

A bee whose legs are filled with pollen arrives at an on site hive at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise

Click here to see more photos of Moore's operation.

Hive boxes that eventually will make their way to area fields sit inside a warehouse at Moore's Honey Farm in Kountze. Photo made Wednesday April 27, 2022. Kim Brent/The Enterprise 

For 23 years, Chris Moore has been in the business of making authentic, local honey. He stumbled into the industry sort-of by accident and decided to stay.

He works with fellow beekeepers across North America and even hires workers from Nicaragua.

Now, the Moore family lives on a large tract of land deep in the woods of Kountze and sends their honey to stores all over the coastal counties. We sat down with Moore to ask him seven questions about bees and his life as a beekeeper:

A: It depends on the time of year. That's one reason I like this job. We're never doing the same thing. We have seasons. We just finished what we refer to as “splitting” or starting new colonies for the year. So, that goes on for three or four weeks.

And now we're kind of preparing the bees for the spring flowers we have right now. We are treating bees for varroa mites this week. I'll be mowing locations where we're going to put bees.

We're getting boxes ready. When we start a new colony, it's in one box. And then we'll add a second box. So, we've already added a second box for probably 80% of our colonies, but there's 20% that are a little behind. We've got to get those boxes ready.

Every year’s different. You got the weather, Mother Nature's always throwing your curveball, and then you've got the health of your bees. I mean, there's so many different factors that go into our schedule. Sometimes what we do this year is not what we do next year, and it's different the following year.

I tell people, it’s like, if you play cards, you never know what card you're gonna get. 

A: Bees have two stomachs. They have their stomach like you and I have, but they also have a storage tank where when they go collect nectar from flowers, they're not ingesting that in their stomach, they are putting it in their transport stomach. They're just taking that back to the colony.

They gather nectar from the different flowers, and they bring it back to the colony. They actually pass it off to another bee, which then will put it in the cell and in the meantime they're adding enzymes when they do that.

Their tongues look like little straws and they stick their tongue out and the second bee sticks its tongue out. That nectar might be 30% or 40% moisture. So, the bees also dry the nectar down to about 18% moisture.

Bees only produce honey in spring, late spring, and then once we pull honey in June, that's it for the year. We have fall flowers. They make a little bit of fall honey, but we leave all that honey for the bees to consume. 

A: I did corporate sales (for an) industrial supply company. I did that for 10 years. I just got tired of the corporate rat race. It’s like, the better job you do, the more work they give you. And they promise you more income, but they don't give it to you.

And so I met a guy at church – we were doing some work. First, we had a single mom at church – she needed a roof. So we redid a roof on her house. And then there's a widow lady that ran the choir and we rebuilt her garage for her.

Anyway, I got to meet Glenn. We had a group of guys that did this once a month. And he would always show up with trucks and forklifts and different equipment – I'm  like, “What in the world do you do?” And he said, “I keep bees,” and I thought, “That's kind of fascinating.”

So, I started helping him a little bit on the weekends and then he offered me a job. And it's probably the dumbest thing I could have ever done because my son was a year old at the time – leaving a job that's got benefits and reliable income to go work for this guy.

And, and then sure enough, the first year I went to work for him, he had to file bankruptcy because there's a verroa mite that gets on honeybees, and it will decimate the colony. So, the mites tore up his colonies. That was the first year the mites were in Texas.

So, I put my sales hat back on and I went and got a beginning farm loan and I bought him out and I’d only been doing it for six months. But he stuck around and technically on paper, he worked for me, even though I was still learning from him.

Then after a few years, he retired. That's how I got in. Most people grow up in it, just like farming, most people grow up in it. Me, I'm a first-generation beekeeper.

A: It’s me and my son. And my wife helps with the bookkeeping part. I've got a delivery driver that just runs to grocery stores every day. And then I've got two girls that fill honey, just part time. Right now I've got four seasonal workers here. They’re out here six months and then go home. 

A: There's so much fraud. I got involved in the Texas Beekeepers Association probably 12 years ago. Being on the board there, you find out how much fraud there is.

If you’re at a store and there's six different brands that say they're local honey, none of them are local. So, we'd always tell people don't buy honey in a grocery store. It’s not what it says it is.

A: Bees need a good, clean source of water. Unfortunately, when farmers grow a crop, they've got to protect that crop. That's how they're making their money.

So, if they're growing corn, if it's a sod farm, they've got to keep the grubs and the ants and stuff out of there, because that's where they're making a living. I get that, but the problem is they're treating hundreds of acres with some type of chemical to control whatever bug they're trying to control – well, then you get run off from that. And the bees are nearby. Or even if the bees are within two miles of that, they're potentially getting run off from that. And they're potentially getting some of that chemical.

I can't say I'm opposed to farmers using chemicals. I know they’ve got to make a living. But it's like, everybody's trying to kill bugs. And we're trying to raise bugs. And they're beneficial because what's the most important thing we get from bees? They're going from one flower to the next flower, where they're cross pollinating.

So, they're producing food – watermelon, apples, oranges, lemons, strawberries. Almonds is a big one. When you go grocery store, and you see that big produce section with all the fruits and vegetables, bees pollinate like two-thirds of them. 

A: I would love to just – I just want to produce local honey and provide people with that honest, local honey. Beekeepers have to make multiple incomes off our bees because we can't produce honey with all the imported honey in the U.S., which is 75% of U.S. honey.

So, we can't just produce honey here and make that sustain our business. You've got fewer family farms. And the farms that are still farming have more acreage. Farming is a business. It's an agricultural business. So, you've got to be cost efficient, and the more volume you run on anything, usually, the cheaper you can produce it.

What’s happened is, it's gone to the extreme where there's no more, there's no more family farms. And beekeepers are the same deal. We have to take the same bees we have to send them to California to produce almonds, in the summertime we send (them) to the Lubbock area, we pollinate seedless watermelons. So we're making various incomes. We have to.

A: It's hard to find good places to place our bees. We do need locations to put bees on. It needs to be at a productive area. And we need to have access – in the wintertime, we have to feed the bees several times.

We need to pull up our big truck right next to the bees, even if we get 12 inches of rain. We need a decent road. We need access to get to him so we can take care of them.

The other issue is, people can get help with property taxes. If you've got five and 20 acres of property, you can put that AG valuation for honeybees. So, people want bees, but they only want like six, or eight hives so they can claim ag exemption on their property taxes, which is not cost effective for me to go (out) for six or eight.

If I go put some amount, 50 or 100 – that's what we can do efficiently and cost effective for us. You want them to have a good source of water. If I'm offered a location, if I go look at it, and there's a house close by, and they've got kids toys outside, I might say, “Thank you, but no, thank you. I don't want to be a hindrance to those people, those kids.”

Rachel Kersey is the local government reporter for The Beaumont Enterprise.