Welcome to Apis Hive Co.

Now Taking Orders for Package Honey Bees, Top Bar Hives Nucs, and 5 Frame Nucs

Be sure to see our Bare Bones Kit, and the Whole Enchilada kit 

Which Queen Is Right for You?

The timeless practice of keeping honey bees becoming the common place?

The art of Urban beekeeping is quickly becoming a desired hobby for families.  Space is not typically  an issue– a bee hive occupies is less than 2 ½ Sq Feet! Afraid of getting stung? The Italian Honey Bee is NOT an aggressive bee, it is bred for gentleness for a backyard beehive.  If you suffer from allergies then experts suggest ingesting raw honey. Honey and pollen is actually good for us, it has immune stimulating properties. This can help us build a tolerance to the stuff that makes your nose run and eyes itch.  A healthy mature hive can produce 40-60 pounds of raw green pure honey per year. This is yet another way to become self sufficient.

WHO

The Italian Honey Bee

At Apis Hive Co. we seem to be making real progress in over coming the problems by using natural methods of beekeeping. We’re called a sideline Commercial Beekeeper.  We’re based in the hart of the Rocky Mountains. In Grand Junction Colorado.

WHY

Walk down your street, to the woods, or a nearby park or meadow.  The spring air is like perfume with the scent of all kinds of flowers.  Notice the birds singing, squirrels doing squirrel things.  It’s a beautiful spring day, but one thing was missing – honey bees.  You might not see a single one.  Not long ago honeybees were everywhere – They were an integral part of being outdoors.  Not so anymore.  Honeybees are having a hard time, and even the experts don’t

know exactly what the problem is. You might have noticed in your garden things like cucumbers that only develop on one end, or healthy squash vines that don’t seem to produce like they should.  These are symptoms of inadequate pollination.

WHEN

That’s all about to change.  You can now order bees right now.  When you order a package this winter when spring arrives so will your package of about 5,000 girls with a marked queen bee. With a little reading, videos, and dreaming, this winter you can understand how “sweet the anticipation” it must be getting ready for your honeybees to arrive.  Delivery date is Mid to Late April to Salt Lake City, Denver Colorado, and Grand Junction Colorado.

WHAT

Backyard beekeepers can be part of the solution and help save the honeybee by acting as a kind reservoir for domestic bees.  Also your bees will undertake garden pollination for you and your neighbors’.  Honeybees don’t make noise, don’t have to be tended while you take week long summer vacations.

WHERE

Backyard Beekeepers are everywhere.  We have friends’ beekeeping on top of downtown apartment buildings to suburban neighborhoods and gentleman farmers’.  If you have 2.5 square feet you have room for hive and are likely to produce sustainable clean honey and other hive products within sight.

National Honey Board Profile
Apis Hive and Honey Profile

Heidi & Chad Ragland owners of Apis Hive and Honey Co.

Our mission is to help all beekeepers new and old alike to learn, grow and share only the most important lessons’ we’ve learned.  What we’ve written here on the site will introduce you to our valuable resources and education.  We hope the progressive media style makes it much easier for you learn.  We also hope you can benefit from what is compiled and become a better beekeeper.  What you will learn with Apis Hive Co., is we never stop learning.  We hope you can continue to learn along because we just don’t know everything yet!  However were getting there and getting there fast.  Our significant research and school of hard knocks we can and will share with you so you don’t have to learn what we have.  This in turn will save you time and money.

Why the site?

On the Phone: Hello Hello… Yes this is Chad.  I frequently get calls about honey bees and I love it.  What if… How do you… Can you… Do you… Where do I find… Can I come… Please help me!

However long the day is, I knew I couldn’t spend my whole day being the 1-800 hot line for answering everyone’s questions, however I do love talking to dozens of keepers, but I just flat ran out of time.  We currently are connected with 1000’s of keepers across the intermountain West and beyond.  With the help of modern applications on the internet like Twitter, YOUTUBE, Facebook, and our BLOG.  Now you can follow with the many who have called our phones or would of called but now just get good information and education here at the site.  Were all about making it easy and fun.

What’s Lacking in Beekeeping?

If you’re a real visual learner you and Apishive.com are a perfect match for each other.  We know our content will provide what’s lacking in the industry.  Example:  Say you just lost your hives to a bear. (we know how you feel)   We have a great section on How to build a bear fence. Now it may not eliminate the chance of another attack but we’ve taken time to video ourselves following plans of really stout bear fence.  Not a 100% of keeping bears out but really good odds of keeping them out.  We hope you find it helpful yet educational because no one has truly ever posted a legitimate bear fence on YOUTUBE but now we have, and hope you can benefit from it.  Maybe it’s your first year planning to have bees but you’re not so sure how to build and paint your equipment to last.  Over the years we’ve built it wrong and right and were happy to link our videos to show you how to do it right.  We hope this site can be a quality site to help keepers manage the hive so your honey bees will be healthy and strong.  We want success for you and the bees!  Keeping healthy bees makes a difference, we know you can follow or tips and videos on this site to help you do that.

Blogging and Feedback

Most folks who are keeping bees already learned lessons.  We’ve started a Blog on this site that will carry on the ideas, and lessons learned threw out the tests we have going or have completed.  If we don’t try new things then were losing bees we don’t want to lose.  We hope to write a few times a week to keep you up to date with some of the bees studies were currently carrying on in the Western United States.  You can select the topics were dealing with and read results there.  It’s at the top of this page at any time.  Furthermore many of our commercial beekeeping friends who are unable to blog or report there findings we’ve agreed to carry additional keepers projects under the blog section as well, so you will see others success and failures recorded.

What does it take to be beekeeper?

We use Colorado River Flood Plains to Make Wonderful Full Body Honey

Anyone can. That’s our point: you can do it your way with your bees and use your methods.  Here at Apishive Co. we just hope to share with you our successes and pass them along to you.  We know everyone who wants bees or has bees is learning along side us, and we celebrate that.  However, we have ideas that don’t work for this area and ideas that do work.  We’ve formatted them for easy absorption and application.  We teach those who want to listen or read ideals that give you sustainable beekeeping practices.

Our passion is teaching people to be aware of bees, growing more keepers, keeping bees alive, researching bee behavior, harvesting honey, pollinating crops, selling honey bees, and living our Colorado dream.  That is what Apishive.com is all about.