Show Me the Honey: Houston Beekeeper Buzzes to $4,000/Month

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Greetings and welcome back to Side Hustle School. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. Are you a multi-potentialite? Have you ever heard that word? A multi-potentialite is someone who likes to do more than one thing, which is kind of like a lot of us, if not all of us.

You can also think of it in contrast to being a specialist. So someone who's a specialist is really good at one thing. Someone who's a multi-potentialite is interested in several things, not just strong in one area. Now I've always identified with this concept. For better or worse, I've done a lot of different projects.

They all haven't had the same focus. There's actually a book about this concept coming out soon by Emily Wapnick. It's called "How to Be Everything," a guide for those who still don't know what they want to be when they grow up. Love that title. And today we're talking about a side hustle, of course, but today's featured story has done a lot of different things.

There have been multiple career moves, dozens of job titles, finally settling in as an entrepreneurial cheese monger and beekeeper. She also does search engine optimization and rents a spare bedroom on Airbnb. Probably a bunch of other stuff too, but we're gonna focus on the bees. What's all the buzz about? I'll tell you right after this.

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The city of Houston, Texas, America's fourth largest metropolitan area, is known as the birthplace of Beyonce, NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center, a lot of large trucks and automobiles. But until recently, it was not known as a thriving hub for bees. In fact, there was no beekeeping service anywhere in the city, and this was a crisis. A beekeeping service is where a beekeeper installs and maintains beehives on your property, whether residential or commercial, and similar to a landscaper or a swimming pool service, the beekeeper visits the hives regularly to look after the bees and collect the honey. And that's where Nicole Berger's, our queen bee for today, enters the story.

Nicole discovered beekeeping while working as an SEO specialist and a cheese monger. You heard that right. A cheese monger is someone who sells cheese, and a beekeeper is, well, someone who manages hives and collects honey. If you'd like to learn a new word for the day, this person is also called an apiarist. Anyway, through her job as a cheese monger, Nicole had seen customers turn up their nose at honey varietals that just weren't local enough.

She also knew local beekeepers that were giving their honey away because they didn't know how to market it. So she wanted to fix both these problems. She started an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign called Bee to Bee Honey Collective with the mission to provide a healthy, sustainable habitat for honey bees and promote urban beekeeping and education. Is this a hobby? Nope, it is an income-generating side hustle.

This project actually brings in a lot of sweet cash, especially during the high season. So I asked Nicole, tell me how it works, show me the honey. And she said, "Chris, mine your own beeswax." Well, not really. She was actually very helpful in forthright. Monthly revenue in the honey hustle varies depending on season and number of clients.

Nicole is currently managing 42 hives. When she was just getting started in the low season, she made $500 a month. She's now working toward $4,000 a month with a full client base. And this does not include sales of honey itself. That sweet component also averages $500 to $1,200 a month.

All of that income takes a bit of the sting out of the startup costs. To get going, Nicole withdrew $5,000 from her 501K, but she also had that Indiegogo campaign that raised more than $13,000 based on that promise of bringing the first commercial beekeeping service to Houston. Nicole is quick to point out that her job is not all about eating cheese and honey, though that would be awesome. She also has to do accounting, scheduling, legal and insurance work, not to mention the real risk of being stung by the very population she's trying to serve. Still, she loves being able to go outside each day to do something for the environment while creating opportunities for new beekeepers and raising interest in protecting the local honey bee population.

And because one side hustle is not enough for multi-potentialites like Nicole, she's also busy with several other projects, helping a professor launch a tabletop game on Kickstarter, renting out the master bedroom in her apartment on Airbnb, and producing events for the Houston Dairy Maid's cheese shop just to keep her cheese skills sharp. Did you know you can make up to $4,000 a month looking after bees in a big city? I certainly didn't, and I also didn't know what an apiarist is. But now I do, and you do too. And speaking of you, how are things going over there?

Are you just bumbling about searching for your side hustle hive? Listen, I don't wanna be a buzzkill. I don't wanna keep waxing on. You have work to do. Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to see the show notes for today, go to sidehustleschool.com/104. You can learn more about beekeeping. And if you live in Houston, you want to get some bees on your property, well, I know someone who can help. To leave a comment or question for the show, give me a call on the Hustle Hotline.

It's 844-9 Hustle. That's 844-948-7853. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau. I'll buzz back tomorrow with another exciting episode.

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