How Texas Beeworks’s Erika Thompson Became the Queen Bee of Pastoral TikTok By Lauren Larson
Photos by Jasmine Archie
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few years ago, when Erika Thompson was living in Austin, she came across a dove languishing on the sidewalk. She scooped the dove up, took him home, and nursed him back to health. Thompson hoped to release him into the wild when he was ready, but he refused to fly. The dove, Lime, now perches on the back of one of Thompson’s dogs, a wiry mutt named Shelby. “We think Lime likes the fur,” Thompson says, watching the pair serenely for a few seconds. The cross-species harmony is broken when Thompson’s husband, Andrew Hollister, 44 Volume
Texas Farm&Ranch
suddenly opens their house’s back door. Shelby hurls herself towards Hollister and Lime does a ruffled loop before perching on a nearby table. Thompson sighs. “That’s about as much as he flies,” she says, coaxing Lime onto an outstretched finger. Lime has settled into the Thompson menagerie, along with her three dogs, five chickens, and millions of bees. Thompson, 34, is a beekeeper, a TikTok star, and a woodland Disney princess. Her life is a pastoral idyll. Every day she has a slice of pumpkin pie for breakfast; sometimes she takes her coffee riverside, surrounded by her three dogs. She suspects her H-E-B keeps one pumpkin pie per week in stock year-round, just for her. On one of the first tolerably warm days in September, she walks me around her place near Elgin, which she and Hollister bought last year.
“When we first saw this property, we’d been looking for a while. I just wanted to get out of town,” Thompson says. As a beekeeper with her own company, Texas Beeworks, she needed more space for her beekeeping equipment, and she wanted to be able to keep hives closer to home. A significant part of her business is removing unwanted colonies from people’s properties, a process which can take anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours, depending on the size of the hive. When she lived in Austin, after each removal she had to drive the bees to one of her apiaries across Central Texas. (In Texas, homeowners who host colonies on their properties can qualify for agricultural tax exemptions.) Now she just takes the bees home to her apiary, two long rows of stacked white wooden boxes a short walk from her house. “I just drive
