BeeGeorge Honey: 'Every day keeping bees is a great day'
According to his mother, when George Meyer was a baby, a swarm of bees flew in an open window and landed on his cradle.
“I was ordained since then,” Meyer, now the owner of BeeGeorge Honey, said as four hives of bees buzzed a few feet away.
About 12 years ago, Meyer made a career change. He left his job as a program manager at a computer company to spend his time caring for 150 hives and bringing joy to people throughout Maryland with his locally sourced honey.
Though it was a big decision at the time, it was not a surprising one. Meyer said he had been preparing his whole life to make this popular hobby a full time job.
As a child he would find creative ways to obtain and care for hives, and as a young adult he spent a year and a half keeping Africanized bees and doing pollination work in Nicaragua.
Over the years, Meyer has taught classes on beekeeping, given small tours of the hives and provided mentorship to bee enthusiasts of all ages.
During a tour of his Oxford site, Meyer sought through the hives with his bare hands, thousands of bees swarming around him. In swift and quick motions he used a beekeeping smoker, a device designed to emit cool smoke when working with honeybee colonies, to help inspect the hive. Meyer said the device calms bees as the smoke interferes with the bees’ primary form of communication, which is smell.
Throughout the tour, Meyer made sure to explain the high functioning environment of a hive from the worker bees, brood (baby bees) in the pupa (cocoon) stage and closely pointing out the queen bee herself, who only mates once in her lifetime.
At some point, Meyer looked through the hive and excitedly pointed out glossy combs in the hive which he explained was honey. According to Meyer, nectar, honey, comes from flowers and nectar can be a high percentage of water but honey is 16% to 18% water, so the bees evaporate off the extra water by fanning away moisture with their wings before it is officially honey.
“Fortunately for us, honeybees aren’t very good at figuring out how much nectar they need, and they way over produce,” Meyer said. “As a beekeeper, I’ve got enough experience to know how much they’re going to need in the wintertime, and so I just take the rest.”
And that is where his profits come in. Meyer bottles up the extra honey and sells it to local businesses throughout the Eastern Shore.
Ricky Travers, owner of Simmons Center Market, said he has been selling BeeGeorge Honey for about five years now and says he is happy to work with local businesses.
“It’s great having a local supplier, and just being able to pick up the phone and give him a call and the next day he drops him in here to us, takes good care of us, and his products are just really, really good,” Travers said.
Keith MacPherson, owner of Captain’s Ketch Seafood, said BeeGeorge’s local honey is not only popular along the Eastern Shore but provides many people with health benefits.
“It (BeeGeorge Honey) is very popular,” MacPherson said. “It has a very good following in the area with customers and very good customer service … A lot of our customers say they like it because it’s local honey and it’s good for their allergies.”
Meyer said he is proud with the work he does throughout the Eastern Shore and hopes to maintain a functioning small business so he can continue to have hands-on time with his hives. When asked about his future aspirations he told a story about a museum in Key West.
“There’s a museum down there about a guy who spent his whole life trying to find the wreck from a Spanish galleon that was loaded with gold,” Meyer said. “And so every day he said, ‘This is going to be the day,’ And okay, that’s cool I appreciate that. (But) this is the day for me. Every day is a great day. Every day keeping bees is a great day.”
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