in a world brimming with complexity few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless precision she dances from bloom to bloom each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct each act in service to the whole and then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to the bees' needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. One of the best things about beekeeping is the community. Beekeepers are always willing to help each other, share information, and even
to step up when needed. And today I'll be having a conversation with a beekeeper in Utah that's learning that lesson in a big way. First just one brief new amazing thing about honeybees. Research published in the journal Biology Letters shows that bees possess a sophisticated sense of time, yes time, and it makes perfect sense as bees must carefully manage their time while foraging to maximize rewards and minimize the costs of energy and time in returning to the
nest. The results of the research help us better appreciate that bees are quote Not simple machines essentially driven by instinct, but rather complex animals with inner lives that have unique experiences. In fact, according to the research, they have complex cognition with flexibility in learning, memory, and behavior. Honey bees never cease
to amaze. Hey, I'd like to welcome to the show today Really special guest someone that I've been wanting to talk to here for a couple days and that is Trenton Frazier And he's coming to us. He's beekeeper in Utah Trenton. How are you today? I've been better doing okay. That's probably the worst question I've ever asked somebody in your shoes Because this has not been a fun week for you. And you know what? I want to just jump right into it Would you give us one minute just
one minute of? what kind of a beekeeping operation that you have, and then tell us about the phone call you got Sunday morning and let's go from there. Okay. All right. Well, the operation that we had is of course commercial. It's large scale, but I feel like we do it a little differently. I focus really on honey and I'm going to find a way to talk about honey even with this topic. You watch. And it's been about the quality of
honey. We used to keep bees in our backyard and then we kept them in our shed and then it moved to the shop and the shop and the driveway and then the whole street. We were just getting big and had to move out. So we moved into this, our warehouse facility about 15 years ago. It's a multi -generational operation. My father, he kept bees with his grandfather and that went
back five generations. It's been a hobby thing, but we really turned it back into a commercial business about 15 years ago under the name Beehive State Honey. But we didn't want to just move into the typical commercial space where we are processing the honey, selling it off to pay for operating expenses and things like that. My father got to the age of retirement and wanted to continue
to do something of value. And since beekeeping was a hobby, word my father obviously does not know the meaning, the definition of 60 hour a week hobby. Well, it's a good way to keep busy. And it really feels good when you are doing something of a farming type of type of nature. And so we really hit that pretty hard at first. realizing that there's a lot about beekeeping that we did not know and grew the business to the point it is today. But then again, did not want to change
the nature of honey. I noticed early on that there was a difference between our backyard honey and commercial honey, historic honey, and wanted to preserve that natural, organic, whatever it was that didn't fully understand, but came to quickly realize had to do with heating, filtration, and things like that. So we yanked all of the heating elements, put away all of the filters and the strainers. We don't even strain our honey.
And started to change. And it took about 10 to 15 years to develop something that is actually quite the antithesis of what honey product is. Most beekeepers would like a translucent, clear, liquid, nice amber honey. I want an opaque, creamed, not amber and doesn't matter the color. I think honey varies just like people do in personality and color and flavor. That's natural. And you have to embrace those things. And that's what we did. That's what we found to be is really
kind of a unique thing. And so we coined the phrase cold extracted honey, because raw wasn't really covering all the bases. Yes, raw means that it's not cooked, but raw can be everything from 115 degrees to cold. And I just didn't think that that was a fair comparison. even if you're warming it, you're still adding some heat and I finally worked it down to the definition that
was human integrity or human interaction. So I figured if we just cut that out, there is no heating element involved, plus we were to store it in some sort of an acid proof container, then we could preserve that beautiful flavor and that texture that I was familiar with all growing up. So for me, raw backyard honey was just natural.
That was part of my life and I just didn't want to compromise that but Fortunately in the process we were able to learn and define a lot more science and chemistry behind honey and how it crystallizes get down into the the molecules and how how the chemicals work out and separate and how they can actually cream and And so we develop we just keep developing that until we get a nice good opaque creamed kind of like peanut butter Honey that is a wide variety of multi floral textures
and just give it more of a sophisticated flavor and every little trick that we learn we implement it and Really had something that the community and our customers are really starting to just appreciate and love so I could you could say that developed something that really was meaningful and Every day I'd get up and find that I had purpose. I was starting to do some more value -added products like honey fizz soda, naturally carbonated, not mead, but more like kombucha
or honeycomb. Kombucha is actually the label we gave that. And things like that, just a lot of meaning, a lot of value. One morning, rudely get woken up, 4 a .m. Looks like a sales call or something. I don't even know why I answered it, but something told me to answer it. 4 .30 in the morning. I just want to give people perspective. This is just three days ago, right? Yeah, Sunday morning. I never answer my phone call in the
morning. Ever. I put it on silent or whatever, but it was just brrrr -rung and, uh, wife's tapping me. Turn your phone off. and I answered it and it looked like a weird, it was a restricted number. So again, another reason why not to answer it. But I just felt like what's going on here, answered it. And then I hear this bleep. I'm like, oh brother, this is just a marketing call. And by now it was dispatch and they said, hey, is this the owners of Beehive State? What's going on?
Oh, we're reporting a fire. And what, what do you mean? Oh shoot. Someone called in a fire and now I'm awake and I'm asking what's going on. There's a fire Do we know how big it is? Where is it? Is it is it in the building and? says yes, there's a there's been a fire reported and I said where and she's What side of the building is it on and she just said the whole thing? so that is pretty much where My final blanked out
like Couldn't wrap my mind around that. It's really hard to comprehend that everything you have worked for and put together for the last decade plus is just up in smoke, gone. You live, what, 10, 15 minutes from there? It's about, well, it used to be a 15 minute commute. Now it's 20, 25. There's been a lot of development around us. Well, without traffic at 430 in the morning, hopefully you got there quick. What did you see when you arrived? Couldn't even get
there. Policemen were not letting cars down the road, but you could see the flames from our driveway. There were videos coming in on social media showing this humongous flame at night all the way across the valley. It was going way up into the sky. So that right there gave something for us to just sob over the entire way down. Arriving, we had to get past the security. They let us
through once they knew I was the owner. I get right up to the gate and just start talking with the fire marshals, just seeing all of the flames and the smoke and the smell. I can hardly even recall everything. It was just so So overwhelming that I guess a lot of details have kind of left me now I realize I'm having a hard time even remembering those first hours but I do know that there was a lot of talking with police and the fire chief and We were beginning to bring in
hives Beehives from our yards. We have more than 50 locations run over a thousand between thousand to fifteen hundred colonies Among those, we have our yard stretched to 100 miles from Bountiful down to North Juab County out to Price, mostly throughout Utah County. And we have these yards every mile, two miles separated so that we can have the bees foraging without being oversaturated. But here in the fall, we're starting to bring them back. And so we had more than 100 colonies
lined up right down one of the buildings. that were separated by a distance. They were saved by the fire department because when the firefighters first got there, they had to park their trucks and their ladders in between these rows of beehives. And they're stretching their hoses all through the property and try not to knock over any beehives. And the chief firefighter is actually a beekeeper. He knew my father. He had spoken with us before. He's like, yeah, your father's a great guy. And
we showed up and I saw those bees. It was because of that that he zeroed in and he focused on those bees. They got a ladder up over one of the adjacent buildings on a neighboring property and they just started spraying the walls. And because of that, there were maybe two or three hives that got toasted. But they were going along and opening lids and checking and spraying down the building, which was just boiling over. I mean, the flames were about They were 50, 60 feet in
the air by the melting ingots of copper. It appears that the flame got well over 2 ,000 degrees, 2 ,200 degrees. And all of our wax, all of our honey, all of, I mean, the whole building plus was up in flames. And they're these firefighters, these brave, brave firefighters are saving the bees. I didn't hear about any of them getting stung. But some of the news articles reported that the firefighters were severely stung and
fighting the flames. I'll tell you what, these guys were so proud of those stings if that was the case. I didn't hear it from them. They're just like, yep, we saved your bees. And so I was really grateful, really grateful for that and for those heroes that stepped in and took care of that. But really, there wasn't a lot they could do about the flames. Everything has
just been reduced to rubble. Tell me print and what all was inside that building why a rough estimate that the building was about 37 ,000 37 ,000 square feet we had three parts of the building and We didn't we didn't need all of it We repurposed the building when we first purchased a prop property and it came with these buildings But we had a few very key portions. One was the
middle section. That was our wood shop where we built and fixed B frames the portion that was north where we had our wax rendering and our extraction center as well as our bottling
room. We had all of our palletized wax or wax renderings or wax blocks and then our prefab which is to be melted down all there including our entire harvest which is in drums so that's about 20 drums of honey this year which is Kind of a low yield, but we lost so many bees last year that we weren't able to get as much of a honey yield this year. It's a great year this year was, but we just didn't have the bees to
accomplish more. It may seem early, but right now is a great time to order your live bees for 2026 because they do sell out and because Man Lake is offering a discount for Be Love podcast listeners. Wait, what? I know, you're saying live bees, they never go on sale. Well, they are now. Click on over to Man Lake, order your bees any variety, nukes or packages, and anything
in the beginner essentials category. And when you check out, use the code GETSTARTEDINBEEZ, it's down in the show notes so you don't have to remember, for a discount on everything. So get your orders in early and save. And then we had our stockroom. And the stockroom had a collection of residuals of honey harvests over the years. There were more than 40 or 45 pallets of honey, including some barrels right there that we would sell throughout the year and then restock and
sell. So it was always kind of growing. I mean, for the first 10 years we were there, we weren't really selling a lot of honey. We weren't well known. So we had some honey in there that was several years old, but all bottled in glass in boxes on pallets. And honey has no shelf life and it never even degraded in color. Over 10 years, there was no change in hue or color. You can't tell the difference between those jars
and the jars that we just harvested. And then there were the shop section where we repaired boxes and And then there were other places where we just stored. Everything else was for storage areas, just for whatever purposes we needed. But it was everything, our whole operation. I just realized today that we lost our bee nets. Every step I take through the rubble, I remember something else that we no longer have. And that's bad because we no longer have our ability to
migrate. I could get into some of the really neat things that people have done to step in to make that short, just needed to get some bee nets for the next stage, which is migrating the bees that we have, because all our bees have survived, so we've got to keep them going, but we just don't have the resources and the materials to do so. It's all gone. We have our truck and forklift. So we can palletize our bees and bring them in, but we need to start bringing them in
from all of our locations. And once they're in, now what do we do with them? We don't have our hanger where we actually will keep the bees inside a climatized environment so that they can survive cold winters. Here in Utah, it can get down below freezing, and that's harsh on the bees, especially in the bee boxes. It's a typical Langstroth setup.
So unless we're migrating the bees to California we could lose a lot of bees to cold and So now we have to start investing into getting some insulation blankets and things to wrap the hives Well, that's a good concept but try wrapping a thousand hives Yeah, and you can still lose them. Hey on a personal note print into you and your family. Let me just say I'm I'm so sorry that this horrible thing happened to you. I can't imagine how devastating that must be. These sorts
of things are very emotional. It's not just the business and the money lost, right? There's such an emotional connection when that's your family and your family business and it's what you do all day every day. And so from an emotional standpoint, how are you and your family getting along now?
Mostly worried about my father. He's 81 now we began the business at his retirement of 65 And we got to a place to where he was just really comfortable and in routine He had a little corner that he loved to go and repair frames at that's that's gone And so the last few days he has been taking the role of just driving and doing errands we need Anything he's going to the store. He's going to the shop to get tires fixed and or buying materials and we really haven't gotten into a
lot of needs of materials. We're trying to gather things. People have been donating things. I've been overwhelmed with the amazing generosity and outreach of people all around that didn't even know existed before. So making friends, but it's been hard on him for us, the rest of
our family. We're doing Fairly well, I mean better now than I thought I would be here it was really emotionally devastating and it was a wreck and I've gone through a lot of those things, but it's it's very very interesting when you are forced to begin from the ashes how resilient the the mind and the heart is you have no choice so You start to quickly look forward to the future
and to try to put together some plans. And as much as you have lost an identity or a lifestyle or a routine, you quickly pick up on what is to come. And that's started, I mean, I'm really mostly spending my days on the phone and doing emails, dealing with contractors, electricians, and excavators. trying to work out insurances and figure out if there's anything that we can, you know, just trying to get the whole thing
picked up and rolling. So I almost feel like I haven't really had time to sit and grieve much. But I would say that I've had those moments where I just had no choice when it gets quiet and there's nothing to do. There's no one to talk to. And
suddenly it's now time to sleep. That's where you really know where you're at I'm glad you mentioned the generosity of people Because one of your friends set up a GoFundMe page And that's one of the reasons I wanted you on here was to let people out there know about the GoFundMe that there is so that anybody whether you're in Utah or Montana or New York or New Zealand or whatever else if you want to help out a fellow beekeeper I'll put a link to that GoFundMe down
in the show notes. This isn't something that Printen posted or did. It's the community wanting to step up and do it for them and we can all step up and help. Do you have any idea is the insurance company going to be able to cover much of this for you? Well probably to make it short and for lack of better explained words we're under insured. A quick explanation would be beekeeping is not a very lucrative business model as it
is. You can ask any commercial beekeeper. In fact, one of the ingeniouses of beekeeping is that we can figure out how to make raw materials work out of nothing and get the operation to float and make it pay. And so when it comes to insurance, you're trying to cover your basic needs. Now we inherited a property or rather when we first purchased the property and inherited the buildings that are part of it, it was a lot
larger than what we really needed. So I would say that we really operated our basic operations out of maybe 60%, which if we were strategic, we could reduce down to maybe 45 or 50%. of the actual place. And to go over the insurance and cover all of the building loss, and the only reason I say this is because I've worked this out a lot with the insurance, but it's not gonna cover. In fact, it doesn't even cover close to even half. And so we were insured and most of
that was liability. So that was really important for us to get Make sure you have general liability that if there's any other damages or injuries to somebody else or anything that we're covered, of course. But then when it comes to beekeepers, we kind of have a tendency to, and not just beekeepers, but everyone has a tendency to undervalue themselves and to say, look, what is the worst case scenario
and how could we survive through it? Let's set the bar there because we really don't have the money to pay for this level of insurance for potential damages. And so that's really the reality of what I'm sitting at now. I'm looking in saying, okay, we're now reduced to get whatever money the insurance can give us and go from there. And that is the very basics. That's the baseline. And it neglected a lot of things. For one, disaster cleanup could just swallow that all completely.
And we had about 37 ,000 square feet, as I mentioned, of building space. So all that roofline and all that debris and all that trash, I can't get in there with a backhoe and a trailer and take care of that and be done anytime soon. In order for us to get back up on our feet, we need to have that cleared out in within a couple of months, a month or two, that's got to be cleaned up. starting to look at contractors and excavators
and things that can do that. And that quickly just, I mean, those prices, no one considers that as part of the, well, you should. And I think I'm being pretty open and transparent here.
I don't think most people would want to divulge, but I really feel like if there are other beekeeping operations out there, that what I have learned over the last few days, they really would want to listen to and take in some advice because if anything were to happen, you know, I mean, you are dealing with wax, you are dealing with smokers. That's what I hear a lot of the time people are asking or speculating, did you forget to put out your smoker or were you melting wax?
And actually, no. Investigation is inconclusive as to what caused the fire. However, the Area of origin that they found the fire in there were there was not an area where we use any kind of flame There's no wax stored there. There's no
honey stored there. We don't even have any power tools in that area that would cause That kind of friction that was actually a corner of the room where we stapled together frames with a pneumatic stapler So it's just an air hose What caused the fire right there in that corner is just a mystery to me according to surveillance and everyone's alibi, I guess if you say their story, there wasn't anyone in that shop for three
days. The last anyone had been in there, I had been in there Friday, no one came in Saturday. And the last that anyone had worked in that corner
doing stapling or framing was Wednesday. So you would have had to either have something that was smoldering for three four days to finally go up Sunday morning or you have someone who sneaks in and they didn't rule out Larson but someone really would have had to you know come in through the back gate jump the fence crawl in there and do something and either way it's very unexplained. The need to clean up a mess
is included in what you get from insurance. So if you're going to use part of that money to pay for cleanup, you have that much less money to pay for like rebuild. So there really is no money for rebuild. Along with that was something, and I'm not an insurance expert, and maybe some people are better informed by their agent, but there's something called loss potential. which is the income or income loss potential that you had for the following year or up to a year after
the disaster. So how are you going to pay for employees? How do you usually make your money and are you going to now be able to do that? Beekeeping is half pollinating and fulfilling contracts. The other half is honey sales. So all of the other associates and colleagues that I have know of in the beekeeping field are producing honey and selling that all off at bulk to packers so that they can pay for the other half of their operational expenses. And both of these together
don't amount to much of a living. It mainly pays up the operation expenses. And if you're really good at cutting corners and you're doing everything yourself, then you're gonna be taking that money for yourself. So that's one of the reasons I think why beekeepers all have to be really hard workers is because we have to make things work ourselves in order to keep the business model
going. By all intents and purposes, having something like this happen, there's really no reason for me not to close up shop and say, look, I'm gonna go do something else besides beekeeping. This is not something that we can recover from. I mean, if I'm sane, that's what I would be saying, but I can't imagine doing anything else. I have employees, I have foremen and others who rely on this as their full -time living and their
income. I have too much of a community and too many customers who have grown to love our product and our business. Even if I didn't want to do it anymore, we have too much of intellectual asset properties and customers and value there, our business name and our logo and just being known in the community to just let it go. I would sell it to somebody else who wants to try. But beekeeping has been in our family for five generations and I can't be the one to just let that end.
It's not the only thing, but it's one thing that keeps reminding me that hey there's purpose in this. I appreciate you sharing all of that so much. I know it's hard and hopefully it's a little bit therapeutic talking about it just a little bit and I know there's people out there that are going to want to step up and help. If there's any other thing else that you can think of that people can do to help you know get with me on that we'll post it on social media or wherever.
But let's end up the interview today with just, I can tell how much you love beekeeping. This isn't just a responsibility that you have to keep doing it. This is something that you must really love and it's genetic for you now. This has been passed down all these generations. Give me an idea on a perfect beekeeping day. Maybe it was last summer sometime. What's your day like? What do you love about it? That is a very
good question. I have grown to love the whole, when you get to pick up a subject and learn about it, you find out that there's far more to it than you ever thought possible. Take the simplest concept, in this case bees, and bees are the producers of more than six products. No other insect on the planet produces more than one for human consumption. Bees produce six, including wax and honey and propolis, which are the main big three. Each one of those is a very deep topic.
You could get into the nutritional benefits and all the practical uses for these products and how they are good for health or good for value barter trade to prepare against disaster. And they're just, they're topics that lead to so many other things. And then learning about bees and getting to know bees, we're actually beginning to do a lot more with bee therapy, where the environment around bees is healing and cleansing.
And the last year of my life has actually been developing a program around that, including making a honey fizz soda, like honey kombucha. It just doesn't end. So for me, the warehouse was more than just a turnkey operation. It was a playground. It was a sandbox. It was the opportunity to explore
and build. The last thing that I built in that shop before it closed down was a little contraption that you could put against the entrance and the bees would come and fly up into a jar so that you could unscrew that and put it into a little container. that people could take away because I would sell bees to people who wanted to buy bees, just a few bees. I sell it to them as pets, but what they use them for is bee venom therapy. They have Lyme's disease, which bee sting therapy
has proven to relieve. By proven I mean there is a chemical in honey in the bee apatocin called
melaton Which is the primary? compound for dealing with the bacteria infection that is in the Lyme's disease and just kills and breaks down that shell on that bacteria and it just relieves the symptoms these customers are either taking a Beasting every other day for only three seconds up to 30 bee stings a day and leaving those stingers in there for up to 30 minutes and finding incredible relief to the point to where the bee sting isn't
anything compared to the symptoms. I mean, they're going to those extents to relieve those symptoms. So now I'm feeling like this is even more than just what bees are supposed to be. And for me, it is a journey of life. I could begin on a study of just water alone. and learning about distilled water and end up learning about space in the
universe. Any topic that you get started on, no matter how small it is, it's so complex that it leaves me from beekeeping into gardening, regenerative gardening, and creating nutrient dense foods to therapy and medicine. It does
not end. On the one end where we are working with private landowners who want to host our bees and love the barter trade that we have going with them and the connections that we have with so many friends and colleagues to just our personal exploration with our interests in life, there is just an endless topic. And so for me, it's my day -to -day life is about exploration, about
learning and about personal development. And I wish that everybody could have that freedom to do what they want, the kind of work that they want to do, to get up every day and say, this is the career that I have chosen. I'm not going to a job that pays, but I hate, and I can't wait until Friday. My least favorite day of the week is Saturday. And my favorite day of the week is Monday. And I'm saying that with absolute
sincerity and truth. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I'm like, ah, Saturday night and the week is over. I'm just, you know, because we close up our shop on Sunday and we don't go in. We don't allow anyone to open the gate. We take that day to rest. And then come Monday morning, it's like, yeah, I got to get back on that project because I'm focused. I was focused on something I did want to mention. And I'd be remiss not to mention a couple of things that came out of
this. There have been an incredible outpouring of generosity. But I did want to mention a couple of scenarios, a couple of examples, if that was OK. The first one was us not being able to winter, overwinter, and house our bees the way we typically do. There was an outreach of some beekeeper in California. who has yards where they've invited us to be able to send our bees so that they can
be down there for the winter. This is a huge blessing and a big potential help for us because not only are the bees kind of in our hair now where we're trying to clean up, we've got thousands of bees all over the place. In fact, You know, on a warm day, we get tens of thousands of bees all over the ash and rubble sitting there licking up the honey. And I'm thinking, well, great, that's one way to reclaim all the honey. But what kind of toxins are they bringing back to
the hive? And it's going to snow. We have somebody who has just said, hey, we want to help. We'll let you we'll open up a yard and have you bring your bees down here and you can feed them down here and and they'll be they'll be able to you'll be protected there and that is just one miracle. The other one was I got a call from a gentleman who saw the news report and immediately called
us and said that he was a beekeeper. He had been a beekeeper with his father and he had recently retired and he wanted to just help us out and donate his equipment and that was just me just almost just got overwhelmed with the emotion there just because thinking about it he and I went and I met him one of the most sincere generous people who I've ever talked to and so on the one hand this tragedy has left us devastated but on the other hand it has opened up a pathway
to meeting people and creating connections that are incredible. and wildly supportive and comforting. So I just wanted to mention a couple of things. Those are only two. We've had dozens of incredible things that I could go over. Whenever you have to rise from the ashes, there are always new windows and opportunities that open to make that happen. And you can't work it out in your mind, but it always comes. And I would encourage people to really honestly, let's make it real. Look
at your insurance. Make sure you not only have the coverage that you're going to need for equipment and for buildings, but make sure your agent is explaining to you other options. For example, income loss potential and Especially on your large pieces of equipment because there's there's a material loss and then there's building coverage and then there's general liability and Things like that. Yeah, it's a good lesson, you know really check and make sure everything's being
done, right? Well print and I appreciate your fantastic attitude so much It's a great example for all of us and from the beekeeping community and from my family our love and support to you and your family I know you're gonna bounce back right on your feet and be going going forward fantastic so keep it up my friend. Thanks again we'll talk soon. Okay. Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake.
If you like this content I hope you'll share it with a friend, follow and subscribe to this podcast and even sign up for our newsletter at BeLoveBeekeeping .com Also, just a shout out to Vita B Health for their support, we appreciate them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Veroxen, Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.