Bees have existed a lot longer than us humans.

They've been here for more than 100 million years.

[music] My father back in the 1970s, he started beekeeping.

He had a property on the countryside in Europe.

And growing up I was always around the bees because we always had hives in our backyard.

And my father would always go out and work on the bees.

Seeing him get stung a few times.

I was always afraid to get stung, so I always stayed pretty far away.

And it wasn't until I had my first interaction with the bees five years ago that I learned how amazing these creatures are.

I noticed a swarm of bees entered into our garage and I asked my dad, what do we do?

And he said, I have a beehive in the shed and we can try to capture them.

And maybe you like it and you start beekeeping.

That's a lot different from what I was doing previously.

I was doing electrical engineering for ten years.

We went and we got the smoker, and he told me just to drill a small hole in the concrete block.

And as soon as I started smoking, a lot of bees started exiting and they were flying in the air and they all landed right on the box.

In that moment, I was like, this is so cool.

This is completely different experience than I've ever had before.

In the end of 2022, my father passed away and that was a really difficult time for me.

I was really close to my father, and during the last few years of his life, we were sharing a lot of time together with the bees.

[laughter] It's important to teach people about beekeeping because we want to see a change, and the best way you can do that is by educating others on the importance of bees.

The queen is the bigger one here.

Okay.

In a bee colony, you have the queen, and she's responsible for laying eggs.

So a colony can only thrive if they have a queen.

And then you have the worker bees.

And the worker bees are all females.

And they start their life in working in the hive.

And later they'll become foragers, where they'll go out looking for nectar and pollen.

And then the drones are the male bees, and their only purpose is for mating.

[music] It's important to place the bees where they're going to have a good source of food.

We always are thinking about the seasons of when certain plants are blossoming, and we try to move the bees to those areas where they're going to be able to thrive.

This year we're putting our bees in the mangroves.

And this is because the hurricanes have caused a lot of damage to the mangroves.

And mangroves are decreasing every year because of development.

By placing the bees near the mangroves, we're going to help the mangroves be pollinated.

We're going to hopefully see results in the years to come.

If it wasn't for Alejandro, I would still be a backyard beekeeper.

She's the one that saw the potential in this.

She saw that it can be something a lot bigger, and she really wanted to get to the point where this could be something that we can do as our full time jobs.

[music] With Seminole Bee Farms, we offer bee education, beekeeping supplies, bee relocation services, and local honey.

Today we're going to be harvesting some honey, and we're going to demonstrate how that's done.

The bees, they store the honey in the supers.

And those are these boxes that are on top of the hive.

And we're going to be looking to see if the honey is capped off, because when the bees bring in the honey, it's nectar.

And then they have to dry the honey.

And when they dry the honey, they'll cap it off.

And that's when we know we can harvest it.

[music] We've got special bees.

They've done a really good job.

This all looks so tiny.

Some of them are so little.

My favorite part about doing beekeeping is that I get to be outdoors every day, and working with nature has really made me a lot happier as a person.

Beautiful, that's what we're looking for.