Brothers Glenn and Wesley Card grew up with bees. Their grandfather started with a single hive bought from a Sears and Roebuck catalog in 1958. Today, Wes and Glenn run The B Farm, now a third-generation family beekeeping business with tens of thousands of colonies across the U.S.
They raise nucleus colonies, mated queens, and provide commercial pollination services. Crystal's Raw Honey is the family's retail honey brand, named after Wes and Glenn's mother, bringing that same operation's harvest directly to your table.
We asked Wes and his father Andy to walk us through some of the questions they get most, from how they grew the business, to how a queen is made and what keeps bees healthy.
How did you get started?
The Card family started keeping bees in Dunstable, Massachusetts in the 1950s. The farm grew first as a pollination business, renting hives to apple, blueberry, and cranberry farmers across New England.
The family sold the honey wholesale and then shifted into retail and direct sales after discovering something remarkable in New York: a wildflower honey made from knapweed that was almost white in color and unusually good-tasting.
With single-varietal honey like knapweed, the flavor comes from pollination by a single floral source. It is unlike the traditional honey most people know, which is mass-blended and heated to make it all taste the same, resulting in flavor loss.
"That's what led to the start of Crystal's," says Andy Card, Wes and Glenn's father, and a second generation beekeeper. "We recognized how amazing it was and wanted to bring it to the public."
The expansion south came out of necessity, too. The construction of I-95 created new competition from southern beekeepers trucking colonies north to pollinate New England crops. Those bees had a two to three-month head start because their spring begins in February.
The family followed the season south, consolidating their southern operation in Louisiana in the mid-1980s, where it remains today with locations in Jennings and Bunkie in addition to their northern farms in New England and New York.
Bees move with the seasons, and Wes and Glenn lead the movement of 35,000 hives for pollination, the production of around 14,000 nucleus colonies a year for regional beekeepers, and the shipping of queens across U.S. The byproduct is the regional raw honey that Crystal's is known for.
Honey Bee Facts Most People Don't Know
It takes 21 days to make a worker bee
From the moment the queen lays an egg to the moment a worker bee chews her way out of her cell, exactly 21 days pass. "You can see the bees right here just chewing their way through," Wes says during a hive inspection, pointing to cells where bees are about to emerge. "The other bees will help them sometimes, but once they make it all the way around, they'll crawl out of that cell on their own."
Workers are female bees and what you see covering every frame. They make up the vast majority of any hive's population. They collect pollen and do hive upkeep.
The other type of bee you'll find in a hive is the drone — the male bee, whose only role is to mate with a queen. What's interesting, Wes explains, is that drones carry only the queen's genetics, with no contribution from a father. Workers, by contrast, are fertilized eggs with genetics from both parents.
Smoke doesn't sedate bees — it tricks them
The beekeeper's smoker is one of the oldest tools in the trade, and it works because of a very specific instinct.
"It triggers a natural response to forest fire," Wes says. "The bees stop their defensive behavior, go into the hive, and it masks the alarm pheromone."
In other words, smoke makes bees think the woods are burning, which makes them focus on protecting their stores rather than defending the entrance. "It really just disarms them so they become more docile and easier to work with."
A queen is made, not born
This is the part most people find surprising. Any fertilized egg can theoretically become a queen. What determines her fate is what she's fed and how she's raised. At Crystal's, the process starts with hand-selecting larvae from their best genetic queens.
"We are physically removing three-day-old larvae from the cells that our selected genetic queens are laying their eggs in," Wes explains.
This is where the grafting tool comes in. A small, fine-tipped wand is used to gently slide underneath a larva barely visible to the naked eye and transfer it into an artificial queen cell cup without damaging it. It's precise, painstaking work. "We graft thousands of cells every day," Wes says
Those cups are then placed in starter colonies where nurse bees assess each one. The viable larvae are recognized by the bees as potential queens and fed royal jelly, the rich secretion that triggers queen development. The ones that don't pass muster are rejected and removed by the bees themselves.
From there, the accepted cells move to builder colonies. From graft to emergence of the virgin queen takes roughly 11 days. The cells are harvested just before hatching, cut carefully from the frame, and placed into individual mating boxes where the new queens take mating flights over the following week or two. The full cycle from graft to mated queen is about 16 to 20 days, and Wes's team runs new grafts continuously to keep up with demand.
"We ship queens twice a week...hundreds of queens to anywhere in the lower 48," Wes says.
What makes a good queen isn't color, it's behavior
You might have heard that beekeepers mark queens with colored dots. There's actually an internationally standardized system where the dot color corresponds to the year the queen was born, rotating through five colors on a set schedule. It's purely an age-tracking tool so beekeepers can spot immediately if the colony has replaced their queen with a new, unmarked one.
Separate from that system, some breeders have historically selected queens based on their natural body color, the queen's own physical pigmentation.
Wes says that's less important. "It's been established through research that color is not a strong indicator of behavior," he says. "We're not concerned about color, we're concerned about keeping high productivity, low mite reproduction through established low mite counts on colonies that have not been treated."
Their selection process starts with the highest honey producers. From those, they look for colonies showing less than 1% mite levels without treatment, colonies that overwintered successfully, and colonies that responded quickest to the spring pollen flows.
What is a nucleus colony (nuc)?
If you've ever ordered bees, you've probably heard the term nuc. It's short for nucleus colony. It's the starter kit of the beekeeping world: a small, established colony on five frames, with a laying queen, worker bees in all stages, and brood (developing offspring including eggs, larvae and pupa) already developing.
"You have full coverage of adhering bees on five frames," Wes explains. "You have brood on three frames in all stages. This queen was mated and has been with this colony; she was not introduced. She's been mated to this colony and then transferred to this box for the journey to wherever home she goes next."
That last part matters. A nuc from Crystal's isn't just frames of bees. The queen has already established herself in that colony, which makes the transition to a new hive much smoother and more successful for the beekeeper.
The B Farm raises their nucs in holding yards of under 100 colonies, mates them on-site, and checks each one before transferring to ventilated plastic boxes for shipping. "We like the wooden nucs to mate and raise our honeybees," Wes says, "but when it comes time to load them on the trucks, we like to transfer them to the Pro Nuc boxes for ventilation."
What does commercial pollination involve?
Most people know that bees pollinate crops, but the logistics of commercial pollination are something else entirely. Crystal's moves hives by the truckload to large farms across the country, and the operation runs on a very specific clock.
"We begin the process in the evening," Wes explains, "as the bees return to the colonies, they all come back. Once there, we can load them up to make sure no bees are left behind." The loaded trucks are then covered with large nets to keep the bees settled during the journey. For multi-day trips, the trucks drive during the day, which keeps bees quiet with the sound of the wind, and stop at night so the bees can rest and be given water. "Usually within two days we reach most of our destinations."
On arrival, a crew is already positioned to unload as quickly as possible, getting hives into the fields where they can start working. The stakes are high because a blueberry bloom or an almond orchard won't wait. Growers are counting on the bees to be there at exactly the right moment, in strong enough numbers to do the job.
"The number one challenge is weather," Wes says. "Bees need to meet the criteria to make sure the grower's crops develop."
It's demanding work with long hours during loading and transport. "When things need to get done, they have to happen...that's how we make sure our bees are the best they can be."
What is the most important factor when it comes to bee health?
Ask Wes what keeps bees healthy, and the answer comes back to two things: pollen diversity and genetics.
"Pollen diversity is a major reason why we are here in Louisiana," he says. "You have multiple different, very nutritious forms of pollen available to the bees for an extended period of time. That allows for quick, rapid buildup of the honeybees in a healthier environment, and they end up being better survivor stock and producers throughout the rest of the season."
On the genetics side, the farm's selection program is relentless. Low mite reproduction, high honey production, calm temperament, successful overwintering — these are the traits they've been selecting for across generations of bees. "What we are doing now is the fruits of our labor from last summer," Wes says. "This summer is going to set the stage for what we are going to be able to do next year. It's a year-long cycle."
And underneath all of it is a philosophy passed down from Andy's father, and now carried forward by his grandchildren:
"If you take care of your bees, your bees will take care of you," Andy said recalling the moment his father sat him down on the couch and told him that.
"The bees come first. Always," said Wes.
Queen bees are being grown in queen cell cups (above). Crystal's Raw Honey and The B Farm are sister third-generation family businesses focused on raising bees, commercial pollination, and single varietal honey, with farms across the U.S. Shop our regional raw honey and our bees (nucs and queens) online.