AUGUST 2019 I BOROMAG.COM 25
beekeeper began to sell some honey as a
way to break even.
“The business just started out as a way
to see if I could pay for the hobby,” he
said. “We didn’t start it as a business we
could live on.”
“The first year we did it was a lot of fun,”
he added.
During the first year, Ashley just kind of
let her husband do his thing with the little
creatures. She was dealing with a little
creature of her own.
“I didn’t have a big interest in the bees
when Nick started keeping them in the beginning,”
she said. “I was also pregnant with
our first child, so I was a little preoccupied.”
But both started to realize that a potential
business was on the horizon.
Whenever he would talk to people about
his hobby – Hoefly is a motion graphics
animator by trade and still freelances now
and then – people always seemed to react
in the same, encouraging ways.
“For most people, when you tell them
you have bees or that you’re a beekeeper,
there’s a little bit of astonishment,” Hoefly
said. “People are very interested. They
have questions. They like to tell me any
little factoid they know about bees.”
But more than anything else, they want
to know about his honey.
“We realized that people were very excited
about the bees and they wanted to know
more about the honey and what they could
do to save the bees,” Hoefly said.
After the first year, the couple essentially
doubled the amount of hives they had on
their Astoria roof.
/BOROMAG.COM
