The Story of Sleeping Bear Farms Tupelo Honey
Sleeping Bear Farms · www.sleepingbearfarms.com
Some dreams take a lifetime to ripen. Ours took 45 years, two states, a river, and a dedication to keeping honeybees as a calling.
Sharon and I fell in love with beekeeping when we bought our first two hives and got a crop of honey the first year. Over the years we began following the seasons the way the bees do, loading hives onto flatbed trailers each autumn and heading south to winter in Florida. We were migratory beekeepers, chasing the bloom, always moving. It was a good life. But somewhere on those long drives south, a bigger dream took root.
Tupelo honey.
If you know honey — really know it — you know that Tupelo is something apart. It comes from a single tree: Nyssa ogeche, the White Ogeechee Tupelo, which grows with its feet in the water along the river bottoms and creek edges of the Florida Panhandle. It blooms for roughly two weeks each spring. In that brief window, if your hives are in the right place at the right moment, the bees fill the combs with something extraordinary — light amber, almost luminous, with a delicate floral sweetness that lingers. Because of its unusual sugar chemistry, true Tupelo resists crystallization. A jar stays soft and clear for years.
We had tasted it. We had talked about it on those long drives south. One day, we told each other. One day we will have hives on a Florida river bottom.
Twenty-five years ago, that day arrived.
We found our farm in the Florida Panhandle near Chipley, close to the Apalachicola River — one of the last great Tupelo rivers in the world. We built a new honeyhouse on the 40 acre farm we purchased, the kind you build when you intend to stay, and began the patient work of finding the trees.
Tupelo doesn't grow just anywhere. It grows where the water is — in flooded bottoms and shadowed creek edges where most people never go. You find it by boat, by wading, by asking the right questions of the right people. The local beekeeping community in the Panhandle consists of tight-knit, multi generational families, who are generous with knowledge once you've earned a measure of trust. Slowly, season by season, we learned where the Tupelo grew along the Apalachicola's river bottoms and the quiet creeks that fed it. Each new spot felt like a discovery — trees overhanging dark water, blossoms so small and pale you'd miss them if you weren't looking, and the unmistakable sound of thousands of bees working a bloom at full tilt.
Meanwhile, back at the Florida bee farm, Sharon was doing something that would quietly change everything.
Large scale Beekeeping requires hive replacement— hives perish, and you either buy replacements or grow your own. We chose to split our hives for increase and we needed queen bees to head the new hives. Out of necessity, Sharon developed the skill and art of raising queen bees and became something genuinely rare: a skilled queen rearer. She learned to read a colony, identify the qualities worth propagating, and coax queen cells from the best hives. It is painstaking, intimate work — more art than science — and she mastered it.
Her queens kept our hives strong, word traveled fast through out the southern beekeeping community, and neighboring beekeepers began asking if Sharon had cells to spare. She did. And with those surplus queen cells went something harder to quantify — trust, and friendship. The beekeepers who had once been strangers became colleagues, then friends. The network that helped us find our Tupelo locations grew deeper. We were no longer outsiders learning the river, we were part of the local beekeeping community.
We set our hives in those river bottoms each spring and waited. We pulled the supers when the bloom ended, brought them back to the honeyhouse, and extracted what the bees had made. The first jar we held up to the light told us everything we needed to know.
It was exactly what we had dreamed.
More than two decades have passed since we built that honeyhouse. We are in our seventies now, and we still make the drive to Florida every season — because some things you do not hand off easily. We work alongside a remarkable crew of beekeepers and multi generational family who live on our farm year-round, tending hives through the quiet months, building new colonies, getting ready for the spring flow. Together we make new hives in the flatwoods, harvest the lowbush Gallberry that blooms across the Florida landscape, and every spring we work the Tupelo bottoms on the Apalachicola.
Forty-five + years of beekeeping shared between us. Forty-five years of learning what the bees need, what the land offers, and what it means to do this work with patience and respect. The crew in Florida carries that knowledge forward, and just like a bee hive, each person contributes one of the quiet joys of a life spent with honeybees.
Every jar of our Tupelo honey comes from those river bottoms.
Some honey is simply made. This honey is earned.
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Sleeping Bear Farms · Beulah, Michigan & Chipley, Florida · Est. 1980
www.sleepingbearfarms.com · "the honey people"