Context 

Honey Bees Unlimited (HBU) is a growing pollination outfit in Texas run by Gary Barber and his brother Michael with five full time employees. With a background working for the Dallas Morning News, Gary brings a positive, future looking attitude to beekeeping that’s on full display in his Youtube channel, where he documents the daily challenges and big wins of his work in the field.

While HBU previously focused mainly on almond pollination and honey bee sales, Barber and his team changed directions in 2012 after the State of Texas changed its agriculture code to allow honey bees to qualify as livestock. This allowed homeowners with properties between five and twenty acres to take advantage of state-wide tax breaks that incentivize agricultural production. Participants can significantly reduce their property taxes by placing honeybees on their property, a far simpler solution than using cows or goats. Barber and HBU now make the majority of their revenue renting honey bee hives to individual homeowners, each with six to twelve hives that remain on the property for at least seven months of the year. That means Barber and his team have to manage 1600 hives spread across hundreds of different yards around the state, each with their own individual needs and specifications. In February 2024, Barber signed up for Nectar to help—to simplify the process of managing a complex, multi-faceted operation with a small team.

Better team management 

Because of HBU’s unique business model, Nectar was helpful as a way to ensure that his team diligently monitors each individual hive. With Nectar, “we can see all those 200 yards and see when it's been three weeks and we need to check on these.” To do so, he uses Nectar’s “Last Visit” offering, a custom map and list that helps beekeepers visualize when they last visited each individual yard. In previous years, employees have claimed to have visited a specific yard but then two weeks later realized that they’d missed half the neighborhood, Barber says. This year, that’s not happening anymore. “They're not forgetting.”

A clear picture of what’s been done is also helping his team act more efficiently. “I don't know how many times we forgot two yards but they may be 60 miles in the other direction so now we’ve got another 120 mile round trip,” Barber says. With Nectar, “now they can look at the map and say, ‘Oh gosh, we got another red dot over here. Might as well tend to it while we’re in the area.’”

Such situations can mean “three hours of someone's day because they forgot a yard,” Barber says. “We don't want that anymore.” This is becoming increasingly important as HBU scales up its operation. “We spent $20,000 on diesel last year and those things add up—running around or just wasting the crew's time because they're on the road too much.” As HBU grows, Barber says, “we have to be more efficient.”

Client management

With hundreds of small contracts, each with their own gate codes, contact information, emails and notes, managing HBU’s client list takes up a lot of Barbers time. In the past, he used an excel sheet paired with other tools like Google Maps to manage this information. “Now I don't have to,” he says, because the client’s “contact info, emails, notes, and gate codes are already with the crew. There's a lot of them. But it also tracks when they’ve been there and when the hives have been pulled out.”

Some of HBU’s pricing is also different by region, so, with Nectar, Barber can have a better picture of his revenue splits. “All our contracts are seven months,” he says, “so whenever we make the drop date, we just go out seven months and kick it into the Nectar system.” “I really look forward to seeing how the renewal process works next year,” he said, because, in his current system, “there’s a lot of data entry.” With Nectar’s pollination tool, Barber can easily ‘renew’ contracts in the system year after year, reducing the amount of administrative work.

Hive grading 

Even though homeowner hive rentals have become Barber’s primary revenue source, he still sends some of his hives for pollination in California. In the past, he would have his team collect all of their hives and bring them to a single facility for hive grading. But with Nectar, he doesn’t have to. The approach has changed how he plans his annual operation. “The guys are constantly grading the hives so we cherry pick the strong ones,” Barber says. This year, “we'll just leave the weak ones in the field and then send the strong ones out there to California.”

With Nectar, Barber says, “I can pull up and see where our strength is; I can see where we need to focus.” “If we get a dead out,” he says, “and we drop below our contracted number of hives, I get a highlighted little box that says, ‘hey, you know you're below the threshold and then I know we need to go and look out there.” That way, he can keep the contract fulfilled. 

Insurance Reports 

Come filing season, all of this information comes together in a single automated report with everything Barber needs to file insurance claims, with hive count and mortality data broken down by region, yard, and even hive. Barber says that he currently uses his insurance report for two separate filings: ELAP and rainfall insurance. ““I didn't realize when I signed up that I would get all of that GPS data for my hives and everything. Now I can kick that report over to my insurance agent and I'm not going to be missing anything. I'm going to get the full benefit and be able to insure so much more.”

Growing with Nectar

In the future, Barber is hoping that Nectar will help him offer route optimization for his team. “I would love to be able to add a group of yards and then kick it to their phones and give them a route.” “I think the future is going to be a lot more smaller yards spread out and it's going to be just more of a management headache. I really think Nectar is going to help us with that. Better data keeps us better informed, and more efficient.”

Big picture, he’s also hoping that Nectar will integrate with more of his operation, from procurement to billing. “I would equate it to a content management system,” Barber says, drawing on his background at the Dallas Morning News. “It’s like in a newspaper, where everything is looped in. We would store all our photos or articles, kick out assignments through there, you know, it was one management system.” That’s what he wants Nectar to be for beekeeping.

 I see [Nectar] paying for itself by just tracking our dead outs. It's a pretty huge thing. Before, we we're just mainly entering that on a spreadsheet, but everything's automatic now. If you catch one deadout a month that you would have missed, it pays for Nectar.

Gary Barber, Owner at Bees Unlimited & VP of the Texas Beekeepers Association