Sweet Endeavors, LLC

06/02/2025

Do you have honey to glaze those grilled meats and sweeten you drinks this summer?

Sweet Endeavors Honey has your dinners and be erages covered with our tasty 100% pure, raw, local honey.

Please visit www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to place an order.

Our bees produce the best local honey and beeswax around! Sweet Endeavors Honey, LLC only provides 100% pure raw honey, we never add anothing to the honey. Why would we, the bees make it perfect every time. We also never pasteurize the honey, this makes sure it maintains all of the flavors and nutri...

03/21/2025

You need honey and we have honey.

Please visit us either in person or online at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to get your next jar of honey.

Our bees produce the best local honey and beeswax around! Sweet Endeavors Honey, LLC only provides 100% pure raw honey, we never add anothing to the honey. Why would we, the bees make it perfect every time. We also never pasteurize the honey, this makes sure it maintains all of the flavors and nutri...

03/20/2025

Nuclear Level Bee Death and we’re all going to starve!!!

Sorry for the propganda; we are not interested in hyping up bee keeping or anything else.

However, hype and B.S seem to bee the way most businesses try to sell things these days.

Not here! Ever….

We sell 100% pure, raw, local honey. No hype, no B.S., just a high quality honey for your family.

We will stand by our products and services everyday.

Please stop by to pick up your honey and meet the bees, or you can place an order on the website at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com.

Just let us know what we can do to help you out🐝🐝🐝

Our bees produce the best local honey and beeswax around! Sweet Endeavors Honey, LLC only provides 100% pure raw honey, we never add anothing to the honey. Why would we, the bees make it perfect every time. We also never pasteurize the honey, this makes sure it maintains all of the flavors and nutri...

03/11/2025

The bees were brining in some pollen yesterday. Come on spring!

Please visit us a www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to place your honey order and help support the bees and our business.

02/25/2025

Spring is the most heart breaking time of the year for me and our bees.

No matter what we do, we always seem to lose far too many colonies, and I love our bees like they are my kids.

This is a picture of dead bees after cleaning out just a few hives.

These bees represent just a fraction of our total losses this winter.

Bee keeping is expensive, hard work, and heartbreaking.

Please visit www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to purchase your honey or help support our bees today.

02/24/2025

The bees were out and active this afternoon with the warm weather. Praise the Lord we haven’t lost all of them, at least so far…

It was also cleansing flight day. Since bees don’t go to the bathroom in the hive, they wait until a nice warm, “spring day”. Well, today was it.

This is bee p**p that was deposited all over the snow this afternoon.

Please visit www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to place your honey order today.

02/15/2025

Welcome back to another episode of, “As The Bees Buzz”!

Going into the winter of 2018/2019 our hives were already struggling, and consequently we lost all of them that winter.

So in the spring of 2019, we purchased brand new packages of bees and started over. We also expanded the operation and added 6 hive. The whole process is expensive and lanor intensive…🐝

Fortunately during the summer of 2019, Queen loses were no where near as bad as in 2018.

Overall the hives did ok, but then here come the Varroa Mites in droves…. A proverbial, “Mite Bomb”.

I recognized the symptoms of the problem; unfortunately, I was new enough to bee keeping I didn’t recognize the severity of the problem.

The new-bees in the spring had been treated for mites, but late June I started noticing symptoms of mites in the hive:

These symptoms included Deformed Wing Syndrome and K-Wing Symdrome in the bees.

By not realizing how severe the problem was and I need to respond immediately, I waited until late summer to treat.

By then the damage was done.

The colonies were already showing signs of distress and some were already absconding the hives due to the stress of the mites.

Eggs that are laid by the Queen in late early fall are the bees that over winter. The mites must bee well controlled by mid to late August so the colony is not overwhelmed by mites moving into fall and winter. I failed providing that medication and support.

Consequently, we lost a large number of colonies in the Winter of 2019/2020.

Please visit the website at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to place an order or to reach out and touch base.

Our bees produce the best local honey and beeswax around! Sweet Endeavors Honey, LLC only provides 100% pure raw honey, we never add anothing to the honey. Why would we, the bees make it perfect every time. We also never pasteurize the honey, this makes sure it maintains all of the flavors and nutri...

02/14/2025

Welcome back to the third day of, “As The Bees Buzz”.

After the summer of 2018 of the great Queen Bee failures, we were not in a good place going into fall and winter that year.

Bee colonies do really well with winter as long as the colony is strong enough to keep the warmth and they have enough honey stored up for food. With the consistent Queen Bee loses we had that year, the colonies were weak going into winter.

During winter a typical colony of bees will consume 1 lb of honey a day. Consequently, we let them store at least 120 lbs of honey to get the through the winter.

With the weak colonies they didn’t store enough honey and their population was too small to keep the temperature up in the hive.

A healty colony of bees will keep the temperature of the colony somewhere between the upper 80 degrees Fahrenheit and lower 90 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the time of year. Even if the temperature is below zero.

A weak colony cannot maintain that temperature so either the colony will freeze or not bee able to, “break cluster” and move around to get the honey to eat.

It is heart breaking to see.

I love my bees like my kids and I hate to lose a hive.

Winter of 2018/2019 saw a 100% loss of our colonies of bees, which is heart breaking to a beekeeper and expensive to recover from those types of losses.

A package of bees in the spring at the time was anout $150.00 each, plus the colony had to start building up both the number of bees, honey stores, clean out the dead bees, etc. It’s a whole process and a lot of work for the new-bees…

I dont like to share these pictures, but thesevare dead bees in the hives in the spring.

Just being honest and real in this story.

I’ll share more tomorrow….

If you would like to help support our business and our bees, please visit us at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to place an order for your honey or to just touch base.

02/13/2025

Welcome back to todays episode of, “As the Bees Buzz”

As summer turned into fall and winter our first year, the hives were really strong, they had plenty of honey for the colonies to feed on during the winter, and our mite levels were low, no small hive beetles we seen, and wax moths had been kept of the hives by the strong colonies.

As winter progressed I checked the hives as the weather permitted and we made it through winter with the loss of only (1) small colony.

I thought I had beekeeping all figured out. What a, “New-bee” mistake…

Going into our second year I was really confident. We were able to make some early season splits and had (12) hives…

…and then reality set in.

The Queen Bees kept dying, or beeing killed, or leaving the hives?

The colonies were strong, but the Queen Bees kept disappearing, and without a Queen to lay eggs, they had no way of raising a replacement Queen.

Out of (12) hives that year, I purchased (50) Queen Bees. Since each hive needs a Queen Bee, on average I tepla ed the Queen in each hive (4) times. Absolutely ridiculous. I spoke with several experienced Beekeepers, and they were experiencing similar issue, but couldn’t offer any readons why it was happening.

Consequently, the colonies weakened through the spring and summer of 2018 and set us up for a tough 2018/2019 winter, but more on that tomorrow.

Please check us out at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com

02/12/2025

I would like to tell you a story about Sweet Endeavors Honey, how we got started, the challenges we face, and maybe some other tidbits along the way.

Are you ok with that? 🐝

Story: “As The Bees Buzz”

A bitvanoit me to start with.

In general I have a lot of trouble relaxing and just sitting still. I always seem to have a drive to bee busy.

I love to work in our vegetable garden as well as our flower gardens. I also love to fish, clean the house, mow the lawn, etc.

During the fall of 2016 I was looking for my next adventure and decided that beekeeping was a good fit.

I then spent all winter reading about bees….

In May of 2017 we purchased our first (4) packages and hives. I loved them so much, a week later we purchased another (4) packages and hives.

The first year our goal was just to get the beehives established, and we were really successful.

Come back tomorrow for the continuing saga of “As The Bees Buzz”!

# sweet endeavors honey

02/11/2025

Lots of snow and cold weather coming in this week into central Iowa.

Please keep the bees in your thoughts and prayers.

Hives that are weaked from Varroa Mites or other parasites/diseases are really suseptable We have already list 61% of our colonies and don’t need to lose anymore.

If you need honey please visit our website at www.sweetendeavorshoney.com to order your next bottle of honey.

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