May I have your attention please? The following is not the real Jeff Vox really. If you are all abuzz about your YouTube channel, you might be a beekeeper. If you know what SHB is, you might be a beekeeper. If you didn't know that fondant was for wedding cake decorating, you might be a beekeeper. Welcome welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping podcast presented by our friends at Man Lake. Special thanks goes out to the not real Jeff Vox worthy for that fun intro.
And by the way, Jeff is getting a little thin on ideas for upcoming episodes. So if you can think of fun things that make you a beekeeper, please send them our way. Send to Eric at beelovebeekeeping.com. At Bee Love we're all about the honeybees and of course the beekeepers. And while I realize you may be listening to this episode during other times of the year, we are recording today's show during the Christmas holiday season.
And it is such a good time of year to think about ways we can give back and help others. As an example, today we're going to learn all about hives for heroes. That may be a good fit for you, or you may have something else in mind. Bottom line, giving to others is even more rewarding when it includes some of our favorite things. As a beekeeper, I think you've got some great ideas.
Now before we go all the way to Houston, Texas for our interview today, here are a couple of unusual beekeeping stories sent in from our listeners. First up is Rosie, who says beekeeping while pregnant was really tough, mainly because of lifting the deeps to do mite checks and treatments. I had a defensive hive and had to wear my suit, but my belly stuck out far, and I got stung through the suit on my belly like 10 times.
I was kind of hoping the adrenaline would make me go into labor, but it didn't. It just hurt a lot. And then this from Alicia, she says, my first year of beekeeping, I tried the method of wearing nitro gloves that everyone was raving about on Facebook. My mistake was that we only had black nitro gloves. After smashing a bee, her friends attacked to exact vengeance, and I was stung three times on the hand.
Now this normally wouldn't be a problem for a beekeeper who expects some stings, but in my reflex to get away from the perceived danger, I backpedaled away from the hive. Well, I had forgotten about the 10 fruit trees that I had recently planted, for the bees of course, and I fell over one of them. I reached my elbow out to catch my fall and ended up with a broken arm, one fully torn tendon, and another partly torn tendon, as well as ligament damage.
Needless to say, my husband decided that I had taken up a rather expensive hobby since it included so many doctor visits, medical tests, therapy sessions, and time off. Eight weeks in a sling followed by eight weeks in a movable brace. And she says that I came up with a catchy phrase when people asked me what happened. I said, I got stung by the bees, I tripped over a tree, and now my elbow is painting me.
I would love to welcome to the show today Steve Jimenez from Houston, Texas, and he is founder and CEO of Hives for Heroes. Good morning, Steve. Good morning, Eric. Thank you for having us on this Be Love podcast. Congratulations on all of the things that you are doing. Very excited to be here. Thank you. Well, thank you, but you're the one that deserves a congratulations because you and everybody on your team, you're doing so much good out there in the world.
And I heard about Hives for Heroes quite a few years ago, so I have a little bit of background, but I'm guessing a lot of people still haven't. And for those that haven't, can you give us just the basics? What the heck is it? Absolutely. Hives for Heroes is a community of heroes beekeeping, unique people, unique stories, experiences from all over the country with similar backgrounds in service, whether that's serving your country overseas, serving your communities here in local areas.
We come together as a community and support each other, support our communities through beekeeping, but that also brings a ton of unique abilities and talents and personalities, so it makes it rather fun. We have incredible leaders all over the United States that have taken that banner and said, hey, you know what, I want to support One Hero 2, and that has turned into a very large organization now expanding into the third country and just continuing to serve, a heart of service.
Give me an idea of just how big this is, why I didn't even know you were in other countries. Where are you? Yeah, so we expanded into Australia, I think 2022 early, with a great group of people out there, and the expansion here currently will be through Canada with another great group of people. And we operate as a network, right? There's a difference between a network and a program, and a network is very malleable, it can grow at an excessive rate based on our core values,
and those core values are, first of all, connection. How can we connect back to each other, back to our communities with the healing and therapeutic aspects of nature, which is our bees getting out into the yard, breathing fresh air, being physically active, having a purpose, and then leading into our other core values of purpose, finding purpose bigger than yourself. Oftentimes, leaving the military or services, we find our identity there, and we are more than just, you know, Steve the Marine.
It's Steve that happened to be in the Marines, and although I'm proud of my service, I'm also proud to be a dad, a friend, a son. There's a lot of titles that I am proud to carry. And then building healthy, accountable relationships with people that I would have never met before. We have people all over the country that have become best friends that would have never met without beekeeping, would have never met without a community like I've Spireros, and other communities around there.
There's tons of great organizations throughout the United States. Beekeepers are incredible people. And then our last one of serving others well. And so our core values really stick us together, and this is opportunity to be extremely creative, to have a ton of fun, and really act like a hive. You know, many hands make light work with everybody in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, serving our heroes.
That is a great 30,000 foot view. Let's bring it down to the ground now. What happens on a day-to-day basis? On a day-to-day basis, we're structured in different levels. So we have a headquarters unit, just as you would anticipate from a military or emergency response type services. So we have a headquarters unit that works, you know, day-to-day tirelessly, our fearless national connections director, retired colonel.
Charles McMaster is our connections person. So he's diligently trying to match a newbie to a mentor. So quick definitions. A newbie would be somebody with little to no beekeeping experience that is interested in beekeeping, and then a mentor, which we always need more mentors, the shameless plug for more mentors in the organization to serve our newbies.
And that includes somebody that has three or more years of beekeeping experience and is willing to serve. That's it. There are no other qualifications. You don't have to have a master beekeeping certificate. You don't have to be the best in the world, because this is really a people organization utilizing bees as a conduit to healing. And so on a daily basis, Charlie is matching. We have our state leaders that do unbelievable, incredible jobs.
I'll take one step back and go back to headquarters. We have Nila that does all our communications, collaborations and development. So if you're interested in working with Hives for Heroes in any capacity, that would be who you'd be contacting. Kevin, retired Marine, EOD, for those of you that you don't know that, Explosive Ordnance, which is a pretty dangerous job. He's also an incredible human being with a wonderful Marine family. His wife's also a Marine, and he's a Purple Heart recipient.
So he is an incredible hero. He does all our products and our shipping and our engraving and things of that nature. So he brings his gifts to the organization as well. And then our state leaders. We can't say enough about our state leaders and coordinators. They're all boots on the ground out there working with the state beekeeping associations, national beekeeping associations, master beekeeping programs and veteran service organizations that are out there that we would just love to support.
And again, as we act like a network, it's very easy to work with Hives for Heroes. And then of course, the most important people that are out there, which is what we call that one to one to one, one newbie, around one newbie and one mentor centered around a hive. And that's where the healing happens. That's where the fun and the joy is. And we'd like to take all that administrative burden off of anybody that, you know,
is starting organizations or things of that nature, because it's a lot of work. And most of us just want to be keep. We just want to have fun. And so those ladies and gentlemen that are out there, boots on the ground every day, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, doing the work, doing the incredible work of transitioning. Let's talk about the boots on the ground. I want to get even closer to the ground. All right.
For example, tell me about a mentor. Tell me about a newbie. How do they work together? What do they do? Just kind of go right to the basics. Give me, you know, sort of an example of one person. Roger that. So we have we have tons of tremendous stories that are out there. A lot of them are either on our website with in our story section, I believe.
Grateful for the opportunity beyond, you know, ABC, CBS, NBC, Texas country reporter, a lot of publications that are out there that people might have seen on your on your show. A typical mentor is going to be three years more of the keeping experience that open up their heart and their apiary to sometimes a stranger. Oftentimes they become friends. And this is centered around that hive to where the newbie doesn't have to be, you know, sharing traumatic experiences or doing things of that nature.
They just have a willingness to learn. And so some of our newbies are able to go into the mentors, apiaries and have practical hands on experience, you know, pretty much day one after our welcome email and I can go through that here shortly as well. But this is really about relationships, building friends and family in communities, you know, all across the country.
And so we have a lot of people that are out there, you know, who are in the middle of our incredible mentors. Of course, a lot of them are state leaders as well. But you asked for a specific story and this one's always fun and it comes out of Indiana with, you know, people we hadn't met before. So again, these these guidelines that we have in these core values that we have are so important and then the freedom to be able to do as you wish.
And so, you know, we have a lot of experience, he does a lot of rescues and removals. Let's let's call him a little bit of a straightforward individual, if you will. And then Ron Ray Army got out of the Army and had some some troubles, right, as a lot of us have had troubles with myself included alcoholism, drugs, depression, PTSD, TBI. There's a lot of things out there that returning heroes, you know, again, defined by us for service members, veterans and first responders have.
And the first time that Ron went and met with Bill, it was literally the first time and Bill said, do you really want to do this? Now, I want to caveat that every relationship is different because we're humans and every human is different. So every relationship is different. And he's like, you do you really want to do this. And Ron's like, I mean, I think I do. So Bill takes him out to do a removal. And boom, Ron is hooked. And from struggling a little bit, that was his first hive.
This is year one, day one. He gets his first hive. Now, typically we don't we don't want that to happen. We ask the newbies not to get bees in their first year and get proper education previously. But this was their experience. And within the first year, Ron and Bill did a tremendous amount of rescues and removals and then Ron started doing them on his own as well. And before you know it, year one, Ron has 64 hives.
He starts out year two and creates their own business in Indiana called Archive's Apiary. So now from, you know what some would consider struggling to thriving successful marriage, sober, moving forward with a business. He's now our state leader in Indiana. He's built a wonderful community out there that he mentors dozens of people out there.
And he just has a wonderful time doing it all from a little bit of a challenge from his mentor and the backing that side by side working together in what we would call the military like shared hardships. Right. Removals and rescues aren't easy. We all know that some people choose not to do them anymore because of the difficulty level. And he's continued to thrive in those areas. So this newbie mentor relationship, there is no standard.
There isn't a program that you go through to say, hey, you need to do ABCD and then you're, you got a big check mark. This is about relationships and understanding each other, challenging each other in a healthy way, building those relationships and building purpose back into your life. So that's an example that went really big. I'm sure there's probably a lot of others that are just one on one, one beehive, couple beehives, that kind of thing. And I want to talk about that in a second.
But the thing that's on my mind first is how does this experience actually help somebody? You mentioned PTSD and some other issues that a lot of vets have and a lot of first responders and other people. Why does this help and how does it help? Yeah, this is a very under talked about. I would call it the actual epidemic. I know a lot of people would and would agree with that piece is the standing numbers are 22 veterans take their lives on a daily basis. That's unacceptable.
These are heroes that are coming back from, you know, sign a blank check for their life and service to this country. And we're not doing the necessary things to transition back. So instead of calling ourselves a suicide prevention organization, we lean towards a healthy transition organization.
And these things are, they're things that have have happened this and trauma affects the brain the same way in any circumstance, whether it's a bad vehicle accident, whether it's combat, whether it's sexual trauma or whether it's childhood trauma. All these things affect the brain the same way in the physiology the same way as well. And so what we've learned is there's a lot of methodologies out there.
You have counseling, you have therapy, you have EMDR, you have all sorts of different things that are out there. And from my personal experience, which then I found out I was not unique. I have a unique story, but my experience isn't unique. The first time I went into a hive, I had anxiety, you know, a pts as well. And I had a high amount of anxiety, hypervigilance. I was kind of a mess. I hadn't felt what it looked like or felt what it felt like to almost breathe.
And I went in with, of course, trained beekeeper, which I'm grateful for from a introduction by a friend. And this friend invited me and I didn't want to go play with bees who wants to go play with, you know, thousands of ladies that want to kill you. And this experience transitioned from that relationship and she was like, hey, I want to go do this. Will you spend time with me? So it didn't have anything to do about bees.
And as soon as, you know, you're getting suited up, you're working, you start working the hives and you open these hives and these ladies start coming out and pouring out all over. It was a unique experience that I've never had before. And with that came this overwhelming sense of calmness, which I hadn't felt in 10 years. It was very different for me, but it was noticeable. I couldn't tell you why I don't know the science behind it. I'm not a scientist. But I knew that it worked.
And over the years of sharing that story, many people have had the same experience of this overwhelming sense of calmness and chaos. How is that possible? So we just started making some analogies, putting metaphors to this. So one of the things that we talk about in the organization is trusting yourself, your gear and your buddies, following a process, finding success and building confidence. Well, wow, that sounds very familiar.
Any veteran first responder, heavy training, combat firefighter, things of that nature, trust themselves, their gear and their buddies, follow a known process, find success and build confidence. But here you're not getting shot at. So it's a different experience as a step down level. It feels as a step down from trauma, but a portion of healing.
As we continue to learn these things and more and more, you know, research and things of that come out, you understand that it actually does change your physiology and also starts creating new neural pathways for your decision making and your emotions. So bees are quite healing for everybody. We just focus on veterans and first responders because we know there's a need.
We know that we need to advocate for our heroes, both those that have been overseas, those that have been here serving our communities every day. So that is the cool thing that and I don't know if you can explain it any deeper. I don't know your scientific background, but the fact that this can be healing is what just comes out to me in big broad colors and just goes, wait a minute.
You know, how is it healing? If somebody has PTSD, for example, you'd think, oh, there's stress in 40,000 bees all of a sudden looking at you going, I would love to sting you. But I am right on board with what you said. There can be calm in that and there should be calm in that and there often is calm in that. Does everybody feel that calm? Or is it just people like you and me?
You know, it's hard to speak for other people. I love talking about personal experiences and sharing stories that others have allowed to share out of respect. There's this component that you can overcome trauma and there's this idea of PTSD. So typically people call it PTSD, which is post traumatic stress disorder.
And some know I chose to drop the D off and just call it post traumatic stress as I did not know it was going on. It took probably eight years for me to actually go to the VA and be communicated the diagnosis. And in those times, there were a lot of struggles and and I can take it a step back. You know, I graduated from Texas A&M.
I went to the Marine Corps, had wonderful experiences, clearly not always wonderful experiences. But then I came out and I put my efforts into work. And I know a lot of us can relate with that. I put it into my profession, which was lean and six sigma. We did a lot of manufacturing with large companies, building business process improvement for companies, Fortune 500 companies, and had a high level of success.
And I was always pushing that away, pushing that down, compartmentalizing again, something that a lot of us can can relate to. And when that those success levels continue to increase, and I, you know, exited the private sector, I found myself not having goals anymore. So again, going back to that purpose, I transitioned my purpose in the military to my purpose in professional life.
My purpose from professional life stopped when I stopped the professional life. And all those like we call demons started coming back, right, all those things. And I didn't know how to handle them because I didn't know what I was going through. And there could be people on this call, or on this podcast that that could feel the same way today. And I would encourage them to join a supportive community and seek also professional help because we are not professionals in the mental health facilities.
And so this beekeeping experience, you know, the VA typical stuff is medication, right, and then we self medicate alcohol, bad choices, etc. You know, I had a service dog as well. So here I am with a service dog not traveling almost isolating myself from the entire world, and then bees. And he literally me personally I literally say bees saved my life. And I didn't find bees bees found me through a friend.
So now we just keep putting all these pieces together of experiences that now have been communicated over and over with people in the organization and people around the organization. And I go, Wow, there's something there. It's not about the necessarily individual but it's a collective lessons learned that we continue to make each other better on whatever level that is.
It could be mental health, it could be just you being a better beekeeper, maybe a better dad or son or wife, mother, you know, all these things are really about becoming a better version of yourself and creating your own identity of beekeeping.
And this is like, for example, if I were to be a mentor, which I think I want to sign up and try this right. If I were to be a mentor, there isn't a specific protocol that I need to learn there isn't a, you know, I'm not I don't need to go through some kind of therapeutic training or anything like that. It's just, I want to be a friend. I want to introduce you to my bees. And if you're interested in it. I can get you more involved in it is that am I thinking right on that.
We're thinking spot on it's like, will you be my neighbor. Yeah, you know, we've grew up with that type of stuff. There's there's not. And by the way, we encourage education we encourage being knowledgeable in your profession. Those are all good things. You don't need to be a mental health professional or anything like that because those those heroes that are, you know, getting off the couch and going and finding something that's purposeful.
They want and desire something to do and learn. Those are really good things. So yeah, to your point, we're all special in our own capacity by just being human and being able to care about another person. Your skill sets of beekeeping allow the the the hero to come into your yard and experience something that you might not even have to talk about.
Right. This this getting into a suit and experiencing this through your with yourself. One of my buddies Brett who has significant childhood trauma and as a leader in the community he's a massive leader in the bio biohacking space. And he does a lot of traumatic healing work through again biohacking. But he came into the yard. He's like, tell me what this is about like show them. And I was like, I can't really tell you but get into a suit and let's let's go into a hive.
Let me just take a minute here to thank our presenting sponsor Man Lake. I've been asked, does Man Lake provide equipment for commercial beekeepers? Yes. Do they provide equipment for side liners? Yes. How about beginners? Yeah, of course. Protective gear. Yes. Queens, nukes and packages. Yes. Processing equipment. Yes. Yes. And yes. There is a reason that Man Lake is the number one supplier for thousands and thousands of beekeepers. In fact, I could give you 100 reasons to try them.
But let's start with just 10. As in $10 off your first $100 purchase with the discount code MLBLOV10. Don't worry. It's all in the show notes. Seriously, you'll be happy you gave Man Lake a try. And now back to the guest.
First time into a hive. And you know, at first he's talking, he's a little bit nervous and things like that. Before you know it, there's complete silence. And he's just staring at a frame. And I mean, I swear it was five minutes, it really wasn't. It was just that time stopped. And, you know, maybe 30 seconds to a minute of just staring at this frame.
And he goes, I can feel their life. I can hear their life like this is why doesn't everybody do this? Right. And this is a non beekeeper that just had a singular experience. He goes, this is life changing stuff. And it is. And I imagine it's different for everybody. I remember one of the first times that I took a friend into one of my hives, I had done beekeeping sort of by myself for a few years first. And this friend who is interested in getting started.
I cracked open the lid. She looked inside and she took this breath, this kind of beautiful inhalation sort of breath and she said, it smells so wonderful. And I guess I was used to it. I hadn't really thought of that. And for someone else, it may be something different. Right. But I get the whole healing thing. I don't know the science behind it, like you were saying. And I can't wait to see it in action.
It's beautiful. And I encourage anybody to be a mentor. We try to match people within 30 miles of each other so that you can have an actual relationship. And a lot of times families get together and eat dinner. It has nothing to do with bees. And that's a beautiful component. It's just building a community. Yeah. And so our newbies might not have any experience.
Some of them might. You know, there's tons of great organizations out there that do education and things of that nature. I can tell you now that in our initial email, you get instant access to self paced education through the University of Arkansas. They do incredible work. We work with University of Florida, Dr Ellis and everybody that's out there. Dr Broman shank from University of Montana.
And that leads into this this free level of education, which is wonderful. Again, self paced. There's other organizations that do education as well, which is highly encouraged. On our website, you can see our resources and we put anything out there that is going to be a benefit to a hero. Right. Our mission is as bold as it sounds is to keep guns out of mouths.
That's our mission to keep our heroes alive, but more importantly thriving in something that they really love. And that could be one experience or it could be a lifetime of beekeeping. It doesn't matter to us because the journey is the goal. Right. That's the components. But as a mentor, I mean, as a mentor or newbie, it's extremely easy. You go to hypesforheroes.org, you fill out your application, you're going to get a welcome email and it will give you tons of resources.
We have weekly meetings. We have monthly YouTube's with amazing people that have been on there. Dr Tarpe from North Carolina State was just on there. Frederick Dunn, Navy veteran, who's absolutely incredible. Dr for hot from UTSA, who's a leading expert in honey. Dirt rooster, you know, Randy dirt rooster is incredible. Yeah, be man. I mean, the list goes on of people that support our nation's heroes, and they're willing to give their time, talent, knowledge with honestly minimal effort.
It's just sharing stories and hanging out. And those things are priceless. You can't you can't buy that. Right. That's another piece of that. You can't buy what bees do. You can buy bees, but you can't buy what bees do. That's a good way to put it. Now, I know this is probably impossible to measure, but do you have any kind of a success rate? How do you quantify what you're doing?
That's a good question. It's very difficult in a personal type relationship. So as we were, we were calculating our success based on the number of connections that we made. And what we found was there's a huge flaw in that. And of course, leaders continue to iterate, learn, develop, grow. And geographically, it's impossible.
So we took these massively impossible ideas and said, Hey, wait a minute, this organization or this person doesn't like this person because they use a of our strips, or this one uses mediums and I use, you know, 10 frame deeps and I just don't like them. You know, and we go, Hey, that doesn't that doesn't make sense. So we just created like that higher purpose of serving our nation's heroes. And because of that, we eliminate all the all the stuff in between.
If you're a natural speedkeeper, great. If you like 10 frames, great. If you like a PMA, great. If you like top bar hives, awesome. That's not the component that matters. We want to build, you know, bridges, not walls, right. So as we continue to grow, really, it was a geography. It's, you know, an all volunteer organization that doesn't have any marketing, completely word of mouth that are connecting nodes all across the United States in a beautiful fashion.
But what we saw was there is a larger need for education for connection. Then we had mentors. So now we're letting down our heroes. And we thought that's not that's not the right thing to do. So we front loaded it. We said, Here's the education up front. Here's the community up front.
Because our, our communication was, we're going to 100% match you to a mentor. Well, geographically, it's impossible. So then we just, we just continue to shift and always make that our goal to build that community. But we have the need for more mentors. We're either three to three to one or four to one newbies to mentors. And what I always encourage anybody with years of experience, or that that want to join the organization as a mentor.
The, the time is small. This is going to be you doing what you do anyway, and inviting somebody to do it with you. This isn't group sessions. This isn't, you know, starting an AP area for somebody, there's nothing like that. It's just inviting somebody into your space.
Hopefully becoming a friend. Oftentimes I say we can become from friends to family. I mean, there's people I go all over the country and I'm able to, you know, stay at their house or others meet our Georgia State leader all that he's incredible. He travels a lot and he just saw some DC the other week because he just happened to be there. So again, it's more of a family feel. And then we're here to support you. We cannot do it for you though.
We're here to support you in your journey and beekeeping, but we cannot hold your hand every step of the way, but we'll give you all the resources available for your opportunity at your own life. Now, are we trying to encourage these newbies to become beekeepers or just come spend time with us doing beekeeping? You had mentioned earlier, you recommend that they don't get a beehive until their second year. So put all that together for me.
Yeah, so our first year kind of our rules. I would call them guidelines, not really rules, but we'd encourage the newbies to get on board, you know, getting on an application at hivesforheroes.org. You'll receive an email, start going through the education immediately, connect with our Facebook group page immediately, you're going to see people that you might even know from the service. It's quite cool.
And then we're going to try to attach you to a mentor in your area. And the reason for that is there is responsibility that must be had, right? You can hurt yourself, the bees or others without proper education and practical application. So we encourage them not to get their first year, but their mentors gift them either a swarm, a split, a hive or things of that nature in their second year.
And that encourages the reward system. So now you're building things on effort and reward instead of things being given to you. As most people know, things that are given to you, you don't value things that you earn, you sure value. And then in their third year, we asked them to come back, continue and become a mentor in the organization.
As well, and pay that forward. So that's been, it's been a solid amount of growth, you know, publications with through the, the VA through all the other national publications and things of that nature have been a good success. But again, we don't have, you know, marketing thing, it's just literally word of mouth and people caring about each other. So how many mentors and newbies are there in the system right now? Do you know?
Currently, we serve over 7500 throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. There's about 400 out in Australia and continue. We're just starting off the Canadian one. Give me an idea of your background in beekeeping. Not that you have to be a pro to do what you're doing. Oh, no, no, but I'm kind of curious. You're in Houston. Yeah, definitely not a pro. What's it like keeping bees in that hot climate? Definitely not a pro. I've hit a lot of areas out of shared curiosity and stubbornness.
The, my first experience is what I shared previously, which was an incredible experience. And then we quickly got into, you know, three, three gentlemen that would go out and do rescues and removals. Why we started that way. I will never know. But it did share a lot of experiences. And really, for us, it was about serving others. And we would go out and serve the community when you saw like, you know, rescues and removals cutouts and things of that nature.
A lot of us have had hands on experience, you know, some of my background in real estate and and renovations and things of that nature. And we went out and we served and that was the underlying component, but we served together. Right. So I remember one of my buddies Bob, we did, we did a removal from three different houses and it was Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
And I'll never forget this, but he just looks at me on the Saturday one. It was kind of a sad story. It was a widow and her, her husband was a beekeeper and he had recently passed. And the bees were in the wall. So we did a cutout and we gave her, you know, some of the honey that was there that she wanted. And we're just sitting there on the front after we've done the removal. And he just looks at me, he goes, man, you know what I've been doing right now.
So what's up. And he's like, I'd have been drunk. He said, you know what, come to think of it. I would have been drunk yesterday and I'd have been drunk the day before too. This is awesome. He was doing service instead. Service instead serving together. And that, that is another just layer of what it looks like. And they were completely inexperienced. By the way, I do not recommend this. We should not have been doing it.
We didn't understand all the complexities and the liabilities and things of that nature. Hives for Heroes does not do rescues and removals anymore. But it was a way for us to fund our, you know, five, six person little group here in Houston to start our little apiary. And when we realized what we had on the human level, it really stopped going all towards beekeeping and more towards people.
But in those experiences, we had to learn. And that was rescues and removals. We did that for a tremendous amount of time. And that's how we were funding the org through our own, we wanted to create value and then fund it and then give it back. Right. So now we're buying equipment for other people. We're buying suits for other people or trying to get them into beekeeping. And that was phenomenal because it provides a foundation of giving and service.
And as we continued moving forward, we had people that started asking us, could we keep hives? Right. So could we do agricultural exemptions? Could we do larger things? So the largest one that we did on a single property was 100 hives. Well, from people that don't really know what they're doing, that's a lot of work. And we didn't realize what we were getting into.
But we did it anyway. And we learned a lot. You know, how the cycles of bees go. So you don't have many opportunities for failure in beekeeping. So when you go and say you're going to do something, you got to, you got to get it done. So we started reaching out to other mentors and experiences. And I'm grateful to Blake Schuch. He allowed us to come out to the, to the commercial yard up in Blue Ridge.
And that was the first time that we learned how to do splits. You can always, you can see it on the internet. You can watch it. You can do one or two in your backyard. There is nothing like doing 600 splits in a morning. And you learn what to look for very quickly. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that would have taken me years. I mean, maybe never would I have been able to do 600 splits in a day. Right. It was incredible.
But we learned so much from that experience. So we just kept saying yes to things. And that was one of those things. So we're grateful for that. We had probably three or four members at the time that went out there. And it was kind of life changing, if you will, because you see this rescues and removals, you see backyard beekeeping, you see commercial stuff. That's also the day that we figured out we didn't want to be commercial beekeepers.
It's a lot of work. It's a lot. Yeah, I totally get that. Respect those ladies and gentlemen so much. They deserve a ton of respect. They worked very hard. Okay. Just a couple of last things. One is how else can people get involved? And I assume you need financial donations as well. Yes, that's an excellent component now as we've continued to grow. We have three major components that we do. Access, which is what we were talking about.
Access to the National Beekeeping Network. Access to the Facebook group page. Access to education. All these things are access based. These are going to be our baseline stuff. Of course, everything's free to the veteran and first responder that go through that access piece. And then we have resources. So collaborating organizations or affiliate organizations that are out there. We work with the state beekeeping associations. We work with the master beekeeping programs.
We work with public companies, private companies, etc. So if you're interested in that, we'd be happy to work with you. And then we have our funding and the funding piece is a great component that you bring up. We decided that the dollar should be going to future, right? So we have two major scholarships that we do. One is called the Bee More Scholarship. And those have gone. We've done $50,000 worth of those scholarships in the last three years.
And we're going to continue to grow that. That is to promote small business and startups. As people are continuing to grow after their second year, they're able to apply to the application for the Bee More. And so again, we've had 50 people that have received those throughout the past years, which is incredible. This is kind of a holistic approach to funding. We do get dollars and donations. We are a 501C3.
And the dollars after the applications, we have a process. So our headquarters staff goes through and vets it. Then our board of advisors does a review and recommends to our board of directors the approval process. And then those are presented in the form of $1,000 checks. Now those $1,000 checks don't go to that veteran or first responder. They go to their local Bee Store so that they are forced to have another level of connection.
And we promote small business. So now they have relationships in their community again. And we've had tremendous amount of success with that and a lot of happy beekeepers and a lot of happy store owners, which is great. The other one is the BU scholarship. In an effort to continue the education, we reimburse any of the Master Bee Keeping programs. So you can go into our website. You can see it from that level of perspective of there's a lot of Master Bee Keeping programs out there.
They all have their benefits, right? They all have the best things that they do. And so we want you to choose where you go. And this is for all veterans and first responders and probably the largest funders of scholarships ever at this point. So if you go to the Master Bee Keeping program, you put your money up front. When you pass, you submit a form to us and we send you a check. No questions asked. So that's our commitment to our veterans and first responders for education.
And then we have a new fellowship that we've been doing for about a year. And that's with our corporate sponsors and things of that nature. If we have bees on their campuses or they do work with us, then we are able to pay them in that capacity as well. So we have a fellowship program. Things continue to grow, which is wonderful. We're always accepting donations at hivesforheroes.org. Our 990s are public so you can see where the dollars are going.
We also have a tremendous amount of visibility with the board of directors, board of advisors and a ton of state leaders that are guarantee you hold us accountable, which is incredible. And then also Honey as well. So Heroes Honey is now open and live. We've done a tremendous amount of sales on that as well and all the proceeds go back to hivesforheroes to include those scholarships and fellowships.
That's fantastic. All right, before we wrap up my favorite part of every interview, you personally are a beekeeper. We're going to set hives for heroes aside for just a second. Steve, I want a wild and crazy beekeeping story from your experience. I was going to share that TBS story, but I will say that my wildest one that I actually thought that would never end was a removal that I tried to do by myself.
And this removal ended up being in a two-story building home that was in between the rafters. And as y'all know, bees don't have any barriers. So when people started coming out to see what was going on, I felt that people would get hurt. This lasted incredibly too long because I could not reach far enough into the building in order to get all the comb out of the building. And so this was a component. This is why I tell people that, you know, don't do this to start for sure.
Always go with a buddy like we did in the military as well. But know your limitations. Know your capabilities and limitations because I was not prepared for that. My ego was large. My skill set was not. And that could have turned out worse than it was. So my craziest story is literally not feeling that this removal would ever end. And the anxiety and all the stuff that was going on was actually a place of fear for me.
And that stopped, you know, really that level of, hey, you can do whatever you want to know. You need to be calculated and plan and have the right tools and have the right resources for the success of not only that job, but also for the health of the bees. And the health of the community because, you know, man, if they're kids around or things of that nature, you always got to be thinking about these things.
Beekeepers are awesome thinkers. And so that was probably my craziest, worst, but most valuable lesson as well. Plan first, have the right resources. Have your buddy pairs with you at a minimum. But plan for success. Don't just walk into somewhere thinking you're going to be successful. Steve Jimenez, Hives for Heroes. Thank you so much for being with me today. Oh, thank you, Eric. Good luck on the show. Thank you for doing so much for our community.
Thank you so much for joining us here on Bee Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Please, right now, before you forget, hit that follow or subscribe button and be sure to share this podcast with a friend. 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.