Natalie's Everyday Heroes: Beekeeper Chad Nelson

 

MILWAUKEE COUNTY, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Chad Nelson didn't set out to be an expert when it comes to bees, but over the last eight years, that's exactly what happened.

He started with one small hive, and now tends to bees all over Milwaukee County. The honey he creates is causing a buzz.

"I'm uncapping the capped honey or the capped nectar," Chad Nelson explained as he carefully scraped off the outer layer of beeswax.

Nelson is meticulous when it comes to his honey.

"Ideally, you just want to open the caps and do as little damage as you can," he continued.

With the beeswax removed, each frame is carefully loaded into his extractor, spinning until the honey pours out by the pound.

"I produce quite a bit of honey based on quite a bit of hives," he said of the output.

He's been doing this for about eight years now at his home in River Hills.

"I'm the chief bee wrangler at Fairy Garden Hives," he said with a laugh.

The honey is all locally sourced, like -- really local.

"It's created a buzz, if you will. Yeah," he said.

Nelson has his own large apiary, which is a fancy way of saying a collection of hives.

Each frame is home to 3,000 bees.

"I'm trying to find the queen," he said, carefully removing each frame, crawling with bees. 

But this hobby started small.

"A friend of mine who's a pathologist who retired had been a beekeeper. And he was getting a hip replacement. He couldn't do bees that year, so he gave me what's called a nucleus," Nelson explained of his start.

He describes it as the size of a small mailbox, but it got big results.

"So, at the end of the season, I ended up with something like seven hives that I made myself and several hundred pounds of honey," he recalled.

In addition to his own hives, he tends to colonies all over Milwaukee County.

"I was at 100 hives at one point, all over town, and that's about an hour a week per hive, so that's 100-hour weeks," he said.

That hard work allows Fairy Garden Hives to create some buzzworthy varieties, which he makes with his own honey, his wife Barbie Brennan Nelson, wearing a shirt proclaiming, "Queen Bee."

"Not all honey is created equal," she said. "And we do our honey very differently, where we do our honey by the month."

They bottle in May, June, July and August, giving each a specific flavor.

"So, when you start in May, you've got dandelions, you've got lilacs. You've got violets," she said of the flavors.

They even make honey from bees at Forest Home Cemetery.

"We went with Silent City Honey and then the monument that's on it is the Chapman Angel," she said of the design on the label.

The couple doesn't waste anything, creating a line of lotions and lip balms with beeswax.

"Honestly, I made them for myself to begin with because I get cracked hands in the winter," she said. 

The bees work together. Each creates just a 1/12 of a teaspoon in its lifetime.

Fairy Garden Hives takes a lot of teamwork, too, and it's created a community for the Nelsons. Or as Chad affectionately says, "I've met a lot of bee weirdos or 'beeks,' as we call them."

It's pretty unbelievable all of this started with just one hive.

For Nelson, the work is its own sweet reward.

"If it pays nothing, takes all your time and no one wants to do it, that's what I'm into. So, it's perfect for a beekeeper," he said.

To find out more about Fairy Garden Hives, just visit Official Fairy Garden Hives.

If you'd like to nominate an Everyday Hero, send Natalie a message at [email protected].