Our apiary is located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Right now we’re tending one thriving hive, though at our biggest we’ve kept as many as four buzzing away at once.
Meet the Hives
Every hive at Halo Honey gets a name, and it’s always somewhere special to Hal and Melissa. Over the years, our bees have called the following hives home:
– Greenville (SC, a favorite weekend vacation spot)
– Flagstaff (AZ, where the couple honeymooned)
– Wylie (an ode to Lake Wylie, where Hal lived when they met)
– Cashiers (Another special place in the mountains of NC)
A Peek Inside the Hive
A honeybee colony runs like a well-organized team. A single queen spends her days laying eggs, while thousands of worker bees — all female — forage for nectar and pollen, build wax comb, and care for the young. Male bees, called drones, have one job: mating with new queens from other colonies.
Worker bees turn the nectar they collect into honey by adding enzymes and fanning it with their wings to evaporate the extra moisture, then store it in hexagonal wax cells for later. Those hexagons aren’t just pretty — it’s the most efficient shape for packing in the most honey using the least wax.
Meet the Queen
Every hive has exactly one queen, and she’s the only bee who lays eggs — often more than 1,500 a day during her prime, keeping the colony’s numbers strong. Queens aren’t born special; any young female larva can become one if she’s fed royal jelly for her entire larval stage instead of just the first few days, and that richer diet is what lets her reproductive organs fully develop. Once she’s laying, the queen releases a pheromone that keeps her workers calm, cohesive, and focused on their jobs — beekeepers sometimes call it “queen substance.” A healthy queen can live two to three years, far longer than the workers she mothers, though beekeepers will occasionally requeen a hive (like Hal and Melissa are doing in the photo above) to keep a colony’s egg-laying strong as a queen ages.
Flowers Our Bees Love
Charlotte’s Piedmont region keeps our bees busy nearly year-round. Redbud, native azaleas, and spring wildflowers get the season started, and by summer our bees are working bee balm, mountain mint, and butterfly weed. Fall belongs to the aster family — purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed, and ironweed — which between them can keep something blooming from April clear through November. A steady run of blooms means a steady supply of nectar and pollen, which is exactly what keeps a colony fed and healthy through the seasons.
Right in our own yard, we’ve watched our bees work echinacea, marigolds, blue salvia, zinnias, irises, and day lilies all season long — a few of our favorite shots below.
Why Bees Need Our Help
Bees everywhere are under real pressure. Over the past year, U.S. beekeepers reported losing close to 40% of their managed colonies, with small-scale beekeepers like us hit even harder than commercial operations. Varroa mites are one of the biggest culprits — these tiny parasites weaken bees and spread viruses through a hive, and some mite populations are growing resistant to the treatments beekeepers rely on. Pesticide exposure adds to the strain, since even small doses can make it harder for a bee to forage, fight disease, or raise healthy brood. Climate change is raising the stakes further, bringing droughts, heat waves, and unpredictable weather that shorten blooming seasons and throw off the timing between flowers and the bees that need them.
Here in the Charlotte area, that pressure shows up closer to home, too: as more land gets developed, bees lose both nesting habitat and the variety of food they depend on. It’s a big part of why we try to keep our own yard full of the blooms above — every pollinator-friendly garden nearby gives local bees, ours and our wild neighbors alike, a better shot.
Halo Honey 