Black Hills Business: Dakota Honey & Bee Supplies

"You get a queen for about 3 pound package of bees and you dump them in the hive, they start making the comb, and putting the honey away..." Bill and Joan Clements are talking about bee keeping, and you can actually buy a package and start doing that, just like them.

"Jerry Owens from the fair here in Rapid City, offered a hive, a package of bees, one year of mentor ship, so we bought that just out of fun and curiosity, and then that looks fun, yeah, we did it, but we didn't realize, one bee hive can make up to 200 pounds of honey, so you can be overrun pretty quick, you're giving honey away to friends and family

and neighbors, still have lots of honey."

This "Sweet" deal motivated them from doing it as a hobby, to start selling honey, and making it a profession to provide tools... for people to start learning about the buzz... "There has never been a store like this in this area or in South Dakota.... We offer so many things here and people are excited about it, it's fun to see them getting into bee keeping," the Clements say. Bees may look like they are all the same,

but each buzz comes from very different beeswax of their own. "You can have two bee hives sitting right next to each other, and one of them, you take the top off, they're like engineers, everything is smooth,

straight and clean, and you take the other one off, it's just a mess. And they always know which hive to go back to, because of the pheromone of the queen, so you can have several hives sitting next to each other, and the bees will not get confused and go to the other hives."

The Clements will be based in D& M Ag Supply store, spreading the local goodness.