Know Your Honey & Your Beekeepers
Dan’s Honey Company of rural Perham MN, thanks you for visiting our website, and wishes to thank you for your interest in purchasing a locally made product, produced by our bees up here in the lake country of Northwest Minnesota. Opening a honey store online, and at our farm north of Perham, in Corliss township, is a new venture for us. Again, I would like to thank you for looking at our locally made beehive products. We hope to sell more of our honey in bottles, directly to the consumer, instead of in 55 gal. drums to large packers, where we are forced to compete on a global scale with cheap, and sometimes adulterated foreign honey. The most immediate threat to U.S. beekeepers, is not viruses, parasites, or farm chemicals, it is the importation of foreign honey. 75% of the honey consumed in this country comes from foreign sources. Some of this foreign honey is blended with syrups, and all of it is produced with lower input costs than we can match here in the US. Foreign honey imports come into the US, one to two dollars per pound less than a beekeeper can produce here in the United States. We simply cannot compete on price. Keep in mind, that without bees and beekeepers, America’s crops will not get pollinated. 1/3 of every bite you take requires a flower to be pollinated. Please read the label and pay attention to the country of origin. If you can’t find local or regional honey, please buy USA honey only. Make a stink at your local grocery store and ask for USA only honey to be carried. Don’t buy honey based on the cheapest price. The lower the price, the higher the foreign % of honey in the blend, and the lower the quality. Dan’s Honey Company honey is produced from our 2,000 colonies placed in 90 apiaries located throughout Ottertail, Becker, Hubbard, Clay, and Wilkin counties. We place the bees in safe locations close to the targeted floral sources we are seeking. Almost all our bee yards are fenced to keep out bears. We produce over 300 drums of Basswood, Wildflower, Clover, Buckwheat, and Sunflower honey each year. We select 15% of the nicest types of honey each year to hold back to bottle for our customers. The rest gets sold to hobbyist beekeepers that have more honey sales than hives they can manage, and to large scale packers in the US. We ship out 3-4 semi loads of honey each year from our location north of Perham. There is a remarkably high probability, you have eaten our honey in the past and not even known it. Again, our honey is produced by our bees, in our apiaries across 5 counties in NW Minnesota. We place the hives on the land with permission from the landowner, in exchange for honey. We have 90 landowners in MN and 25 in Texas. We could not run our business without our landowners. I have known most of our landowners since I was a kid, or as a young 21-year-old man, when I started this business. In many cases, I am only the 3rd beekeeper to be on a family farm or property, dating back to World War 2. We consider it an honor and a privilege to be trusted and allowed to place our bees on someone’s land. Our small family farm/bee business started in 1994, and is run by myself (Dan), with the help of my wife Jen Whitney, and our 2 sons Lane (16 yrs. old), and Nick (13 yrs. old). We have 5 employees for 9-10 months out of the year, from the H2A program. Our 2 main workers, brothers Osmany and Gerson Almendarez have been with us since 2017. They have green card status and are considering applying for US citizenship in the future. Their cousin Daniel has been with us since 2020. The last 2 years their fiancées Leonella, and Seidy have come on board to help with the bees. Our bees are in Minnesota, from early May until November, for honey production. And then, the bees are loaded onto 2-3 semi-trucks and shipped to Newton, Texas in November. From, the months of February until the bees are shipped north on 3-4 semi-trucks in May, we graft 25,000 queen cells, produce 4,000 mated queens, and fill 1500 starter hives for other beekeepers. We select hives throughout the year, to use as potential breeder queens the following spring. We work with the University of Minnesota Bee Lab and Extension to help us with the queen selection process and disease and parasite testing. We are terribly busy from mid-January to mid-November, putting in 60-80 hours a week. Mother nature waits for no one! There is so much involved in keeping bees, that as this website evolves, I will break down the various aspects of our business into categories or pages. Such as honey production, disease monitoring, queen rearing etc. I have a lot of videos and photos from my cell phone I can share as well.
Sincerely, from my family to yours, thank you for selecting our honey to place on your table.Daniel C. Whitney
Why support your local Minnesota beekeeper?1. Support your local agricultural community.2. Keep your hard-earned money local.3. According to the USDA-ERS and USDA-AMS about 70% of honey sold in the US is imported.4. Be confident you are purchasing real Minnesota honey.5. The USDA and FDA do not define nor regulate terms to describe honey like raw, local, natural, or unfiltered.6. Real Local Raw honey contains local pollens.7. Help keep Minnesota honey bees alive by supporting your local beekeeper.
Why support your local Minnesota beekeeper?1. Support your local agricultural community.2. Keep your hard-earned money local.3. According to the USDA-ERS and USDA-AMS about 70% of honey sold in the US is imported.4. Be confident you are purchasing real Minnesota honey.5. The USDA and FDA do not define nor regulate terms to describe honey like raw, local, natural, or unfiltered.6. Real Local Raw honey contains local pollens.7. Help keep Minnesota honey bees alive by supporting your local beekeeper.