Bees
Here at BOTL Farm, we are beekeepers. Years before we started farming, we already had a few backyard hives of honeybees and we’ve been known to transport them state-to-state when we moved after college. We are not particularly talented or careful beekeepers, but we maintain a few hives every year because the world can’t survive without bees. Honeybee populations are declining worldwide and bees are wonderful. Having honeybees on our farm provides our own (and surrounding!) farms with pollination services.
Beekeeping is hard. Bees have numerous natural predators plus they are often killed by humans, when homeowners use pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides on their lawns, gardens, and landscaping or farmers spray crops nearby. Then there is Colony Collapse Disorder, neonicotinoids, mites, and a host of other things that kill bees. It’s hard out there.
Apiary management: a losing venture
We don’t keep enough hives to recover from overwinter die-off, so we don’t sustain our bee populations on our own. We generally need to replace at least a few hives every year so we buy in packages of bees to replace lost hives.
Did we mention that the world would end without bees? We feel strongly enough about continuing to raise bees that we do it despite heavy colony losses and the reality that bees have never been financially profitable for us [okay, as of 2025 we sold aaalmost enough lip balm to cover the cost of bees. Winning!] If you’d like to support a hive or hives, feel free to donate to our losing cause (thanks, Mom!)!
Things we make
Lip Balm
We've been making lip balm for ourselves for years and finally made it for sale in 2024. We challenged ourselves to make lip balm that doesn’t use plastic packaging and only uses ingredients that grow on our farm. Plastic-free containers were pretty easy to source, we found super-cute metal tins that are just slightly bigger than the volume of a regular ‘stick’ chapstick. Farm-grown ingredients were going to require some thinking.
The main lip balm ingredients, lard and beeswax, are pretty standard for us but we were a little stumped on what scents we could make, extract, or distill from our farm. After a few bad ideas like spring onion or bacon (bacon+onion sandwich?), we decided on some (slightly) more traditional options: lilac, mint, and rose. For lilac, we picked fresh spring blossoms from the lilac bush that the previous owners of our house planted and we haven’t managed to kill. Mint comes from our herb/cocktail garden (honestly the garden just has one herb [mint] that we use for cocktails. Whatever). The rose scent comes from an invasive briar bush, multiflora rose, that used to overrun our farm but now has been largely tamed by our ruminous herbivores to the edges of fields and hedges. Although not a fancy cultivated rose, it is in the rose family and the blossoms carry the same scent.
Our fourth version of lip balm is unscented for the more adventurous and mostly smells like beeswax, with a tiny little hint of lard. Yum!
Honey
Since we keep bees, you would expect us to write here about all the ways you can buy honey from us. Turns out, we're relatively bad beekeepers and beekeeping is hard anyways. As of 2026, we haven't sold honey in many years. Head over to the things we used to make page to read about honey!
Honey extractor rental
Since we don’t make much honey, our honey extractor sits idle most of the time. If you can use it for your operation or your hives, reach out to inquire about renting or buying ours!
Page Last Updated on 2026-01-09