From Hospitality to Homestead….the beginning of us!

It all began with an idea, the idea of owning pigs.

“PIGS!”, you say, I thought this page sold honey and honeybee products…did I get lost on a click somewhere? No, you are in the correct place, in fact I need to pull back slightly and give you some background on my husband and myself.

My husband ‘Heath’ was born and raised in Minden, Louisiana. His father was in the U.S. Army, his mother was a wonderful home health, physical therapist until her retirement. My husbands father was a country boy at heart and always wanted a small plot of land to call his own where he could raise his family, hunt and fish. His father passed away when my husband was nine years old, leaving behind him my wonderful Mother in law, my husbands sweet older sister, and of course my husband Heath. My angel of a Mother in Law “Jan” split the land in two for each of the children and there my husband sat waiting on me to find him…..at least that’s what I keep telling him!! In 2008 my husband started working for DiamondJacks Casino in Bossier City, in the warehouse; now I know you are wondering why I’m adding such a random bit of information at the end of info about a Casino…we will get there.

I was raised a military brat, no permanent home location, but New Orleans Louisiana was the place I hold near and dear in my heart. It’s also where my father was born and raised, and where most of our relatives on his side live close to. Both of my wonderful parents, Lee & Leslie, were in the Airforce and had outstanding life long careers. My father was a Command Chief Master Sargent in the security police and my mother was a Tech Sargent in the weather squadron. We traveled around the states and the world my entire life, it had it’s ups and downs but I am extremely grateful for the opportunities and cultures I got to experience as well as being so very proud of both of my parents for their service to our country and its people. They retired in Bossier City from Barksdale AF Base and this is where we all decided to stay. I’m going to skip ahead a little here…I started working for Isle of Capri Casino in 1997, it was later purchased and rebranded DiamondJacks Casino…..Now you’re getting it!!

My husband and I met at the Casino, he worked in the Warehouse and I worked in the Food & Beverage department. Now I’m going to cut this short because I could go on and on with stories from both of us about our years in customer service at a casino….I’ll save some of those for the Blog! Years later I moved over to the hotel side of the casino business, working my way up to Director of Hotel Operations while my husband moved up into the purchasing area of the warehouse to become a Purchasing agent for the casino. My husband had 12 years invested and I had 24 years in when Covid-19 hit us all in 2020 and shut our casino down permanently…leaving us and about 400 other people suddenly very unemployed.

But that’s another jump in our timeline….let me back up to 2015.

In 2015 my Mother and Father in Law, Jan and Glen bought CHICKENS. Now I know what you’re saying “Chickens? Pigs? What about the Bees?” They’re coming, I promise. So Jan and Glen live out on some acreage on the other side of ours, she had long dreamed of a little homestead with a big garden filled with chickens, goats and cows. At some point in 2015 Glen builds a chicken coop… “A BIG ONE!” and Jan orders about 20 chicks (also a possible story from my husband for the Blog). Now keep in mind that at this point in our lives my husband and I live and work in the city. (Shreveport to be exact, in fact as I sit here writing this we are still living there, trying to decide what our next move should be with our home… Farming doesn’t earn as much as a Corporate job and the Covid shut down hit us both hard with the double loss of our careers.) So we are working and living in the city but I decide I want to help with the homestead. Birds kind of freak me out though and it’s going to be some years before we are even thinking about leaving the city. I figured at this point some research for a future endeavor wouldn’t hurt!

I LOVE pigs. As pets or food, I think they are wonderful creatures and ever since our time living in the Azores as a girl I have wanted to own some. So like any good book nerd I start to do my research about all things piggy . Where to buy them, what to feed them, what not to feed them, how to build a pen, what to look for in a good breeder…the list goes on and on. I start to look on the internet for information and I decide to invest and buy some reading material from Amazon. Now Amazon knowing me like it does, helpfully recommended to me some other options for a homestead, with many many pop up hints on what other people bought and looked at. Lots of books about goats, ducks, cows, cheese making and all the way down at the bottom of the recommendations was a lonely little Bee keeping book. It called to me for some reason that I can not explain. I don’t care for bugs much, especially ones that sting, but I clicked on the book and read a few of the sample pages. It sounded interesting and was only around 10 bucks so I thought “why not?” I added it and one other beekeeping book by a different author to my cart. THANK YOU AMAZON!

My books come, I devour the piggy books and I am so excited about them, I must have talked my husbands ear off for days about pigs. A few weeks in I finally get around to reading my bee books. I’d purchased two books, one from an Englishman and the other from an American, they were like night and day. I start with the book from the English author, the first paragraph of his book says “you’re going to get stung, it’s going to hurt”…..and his book goes on like this. He goes into the dirty hotness of wearing a full bee suit in the summer time (which by the way I’ve lived in England and that 70 degree summer ain’t got nothing on our 90 plus!), getting stung in the face, accidentally dropping a hive, even possible death…I LOVED IT!!! Every word of it, I couldn’t get enough; the way he described their social behaviors, their team work, the production of honey and wax it was so fascinating. I couldn’t get enough of it. As soon as I finished the first book I started the second from the American author. Now she was from California and it was what I would describe as “Love and Honeybees”. Do not get me wrong, I LOVED IT TOO, her optimism about bees and flowers offset his more practical, gritty descriptions of being a beekeeper. When I got done I made my husband read the books, he too thought they seemed like fascinating creatures and at this point we both seemed to be interested. It was something we could do and still live in the city, as a lot of beekeeping can be hands off depending on the size of your yards and the season that you’re in. We decided to take the next step of what we call Hobbyist beekeeping.

All the books say you should first Join A Club…

In early 2016 I start to google around and to my excitement I find that Shreveport has a Beekeepers club. The Arklatex Beekeepers Club. I find out where they meet and talk my husband and my mother into going to a meeting with me. It was a pretty large group of about 20-30 people, they had a presenter from the local college there to speak about pollinators and what we could do to help them out. The club president spoke for a little while and they took questions afterwards. The people there seemed warm and approachable so we decided to come back next month. On our second visit we joined the club and began to really enjoy getting to know all the wonderful members. So for most of the year we watched and listened quietly at the meetings, trying to absorb as much bee information that we could; we still weren’t very active members but wanted to be. In November I decided to donate some of my art work to the at that time President of the State beekeepers association for their annual charity fund raiser and this got me some unintentional attention from our clubs board members. We missed February’s meeting because it fell on the 14th and being in the hospitality industry I had to work the high volume day. We came back for the March meeting without realizing that our full involvement and a whirlwind into beekeeping had begun….

Never Miss A Meeting!

Never miss a Club meeting, you get volunteered (volun-told) for jobs that you didn’t know were available. As we walked into March’s meeting one of the Board members, Stan (a wonderful man that I just adore), came over to me and told me “Thank you so much for taking over the Newsletter, you’ll do a good job.” I was taken aback, this was the first I had ever heard of it, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just said you’re welcome and looked at my husband with a quizzical glance. He shrugged. After the meeting was over with our club president came over to speak with me and asked if I could help out with the newsletter for the club as the current editor had his hands full with other commitments and needed some breathing space. So I said okay! He introduced me to the current editor and we exchanged information. I HAD NO CLUE WHAT I WAS DOING! Jaydee emailed me the publisher he used, some past newsletters, and let me go. In April of 2016 I became the Editor to the Club, a position I still hold. I was so nervous, what in the world was I going to write and compile for a group of 200 seasoned beekeepers?! I made it through the first one and the second and then the third….no one complained, no one said a word! I was so excited, I was involved in the club!

We still don’t own any bees…

In 2017 I got placed on the clubs board as it’s secretary and got to be even more involved with the clubs members and inner workings. That’s where I got to know Jeremy, our current Club President and mine and my husbands Honeybee Mentor, Grand Pooba and friend. I mentioned in a passing conversation with Jeremy that I still didn’t have any bees and that was all it took….a few days later he called me and he had three hives for us! NOT ONE BUT THREE! And so let it Bee, we got our first honeybees. We got a crash course on night moving hives from one yard to another (Scarier than you’d think according to my husband. Lots of angry vibrating noise all around you with low visibility.). Let me tell you there is nothing like them, it’s almost Zen like working with the girls, checking their hive boxes and frames, making sure everything is going okay…Yes, you get stung and sometimes in places that really hurt. The husband always seems to get hit in the head somewhere and the girls love to tag me in the gut. But the stings and swells are all worth it. So we managed to maintain 2-3 hives for the first year or so, we lost some hives and got some back. Our girls are small (nucs) to start so no honey for us, they have to build up their numbers and make food for themselves before we can start to put supers on top of the hives. Lord and if I heard one more time “When you going to have honey?” I was going to scream…it’s a process, it takes time.

Lets jump forward, 2020…the beginning of the end and the start of the beginning.

In March of 2020 the world shuts down, no news to you all, you were also there! Our casino closed down just like every other business in America for the Covid-19 crisis. It was supposed to be temporary, a few weeks; you all know the drill…weeks turned in months and our owners finally made the difficult choice to close us down for good. My husband and around 400 other team members were laid off. They kept me on for a few extra months to help with the close down and the liquidation process. SO MUCH FUN….Not! While we had a little time because I was still employed we decided to make some big life changing decisions. I’ve always wanted to do something more with my art and to expand our apiary. So that’s what we did and here we are at the start of a new adventure in our lives. From Hospitality to Homestead, it’s going to be a hell of a ride!!

Oh! I almost forgot…I still don’t own any pigs but I guarantee that is going to be our next big adventure!