I suffer from an auto immune disorder called Rheumatoid Arthritis otherwise known as RA. This disorder causes warm, painful and swollen joints. After learning that bee venom therapy has helped those who have MS, I wanted to test it on myself to see if it would help my RA.
I eventually went to a friend who was a beekeeper. After discussing my RA with him, he agreed to do the stings for me. I started with as many as 42 stings done in one sitting, but later learned more isn't necessarily better. Bee stings can be quite painful so they took some getting used to, but I was thrilled to discover the bee stings were helping my RA pain.
The more I thought about it, I decided I wanted my own bees so I could do the stings myself, at home. I discussed it with my husband who said "Are you insane"! After more discussion, he said "Well, if you're going to have one, you might as well have a couple.”
In 2001, we started off with three colonies and joined a local county Bee Association. We learned everything we could on beekeeping by attending meetings, reading, networking, etc. Once people found out we had honey, they requested to buy some. We then began selling honey out of our home.
I learned how to make several other items by attending the meetings. With my excitement from everything I was learning, and the substantial health benefits of honeybee products, our inventory grew fast. We had a few stands set up in our dining room with honey, one flavor of creamed honey and one flavor of lip balm and a hand cream. Again, I increased our inventory making even more items, where it ultimately took over our dining room. We realized we needed more space once the demand for honey and our other products increased so we eventually built a barn to house our shop.