COVER STORY
Meet Elisha Bixler, tampa bay's bee queen IG @howsyourdayhoney | www.howsyourdayhoney.com by Brie Gorecki, photos provided by Elisha Bixler
St. Petersburg mom Elisha Bixler has a sweet job. Her company, How’s Your Day Honey, bloomed from her passion for bees, beekeeping and honey. Bixler is dedicated to educating people about the importance of bees and how they play a key role as pollinators in our food supply. Her goal is to help build a sustainable environment and teach others to protect our honeybees. How’s Your Day Honey produces and sells local honey and provides a bee removal service. Elisha began posting videos about her garden and bee removal on social media to inspire others and spread awareness about honeybees. In late 2020, she joined TikTok and has since gained over 800,000 followers. In addition to helping the bees, Elisha is also a busy mom to her three children – Gabriel, 12; Adelaide, 10; and Quinn, 8. She recently talked to us about what she does and why she does it, and how we can do our part to save the bees.
I’ve always had an interest in plants and growing a garden and tropical fruit trees. I also like to know where my food comes from; it’s just a concern of mine. Our family was going through a ton of honey at the time. And I thought ‘I am going to start with a couple of hives in my backyard.’ So, I found somebody selling nucleus colonies. Those are just smaller, starter hives. I bought those and took off from there starting with a couple, and now I have around 125! It was quite a journey, and a lot of mistakes were made. It was just such a learning curve. I really didn’t know how complicated the bee world was. You think, ‘oh, I just want to have this honey. Just like gardening we can just start with a tomato plant, and you learn from there.’ Well, with bees it’s really learning bee biology, entomology and insect behavior altogether. It was overwhelming at times, but I pushed through and here I am! I like a challenge.
What do your kids think of the bees? We’ve got our urban homestead here. We have a half-acre property and we’ve got chickens and ducks and lots of fruit trees. We pretty much have an edible yard and the kids just love it. My natured, barefooted children play outside and climb trees in our yard. My older two have had a hand in it. They’ll get a break from school and will help me. My middle child really has a passion for it.
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TampaBayParenting.com APRIL 2022
How can you pinpoint the queen bee so quickly and what makes her different from the other bees? If you were good at Where’s Waldo, then you can find it! It’s the same idea. It all kind of looks the same, but there’s just a slight difference in the way my eye just catches it. There are plenty of trained beekeepers who still cannot find a queen. Her abdomen is going to be twice the length from all the eggs and then her thorax on her back is going to be black and shiny. There’s no fur like her daughters. The only difference between the queen and a regular honeybee is that she’s fertile. She was fed royal jelly as a larva, and it just made her fertile and she grew ovaries. The rest of the bees, her daughters, do not get the royal jelly diet. They get a mixture with something called bee bread and that makes them infertile. She goes out after she hatches, and she mates. She has all the eggs she’ll ever need. She only mates one time and then she comes back to the hive. The queen can lay 2000 eggs in a day! My favorite fact is that the queen does nothing – she doesn’t even feed herself or groom herself. She just has to do whatever her daughters say her daughters are in charge.
Your most viral TikTok video, with over 30 million views, was about “queen balling." What exactly is that and why does it happen? A lot of different reasons—if there’s an impostor queen, if there’s a smaller swarm, or sometimes bees will try to move into an established hive. They will kill her, and that’s just how they do it. They put her in that tight ball and buzz to heat her up and then they’ll bite her. Sometimes they’ll kill her when she’s not laying eggs any longer and she becomes kind of useless, so they have to get rid of her.
istockphoto.com/ Anastasia Gapeeva
How did How’s Your Day Honey get started?
