Drone view over the farm: an open pasture running down to the larger pond, ringed by East Texas oak and pine

Winnsboro, Wood County, Texas

Fifty acres, nine hives, and a live apiary cam.

Pachamama Valley Farm is a working farm in the pine and oak country of East Texas. Watch the colonies come and go in real time, then scroll down to see the land they forage.

Watch the bee yard

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Live Bee yard camera · local time Watch more on YouTube

What to look for

Mid-morning, warm days. Foragers leaving low and fast, loaded ones coming back heavy and dropping onto the landing board.
Early afternoon. Young bees on orientation flights, hovering in front of the entrance and facing the hive to memorize where home is.
Hot afternoons. Bearding. A curtain of bees on the front of a box is cooling the hive, not swarming.
Below about 50 °F. Nothing moves. The colony is clustered inside, shivering to keep the center near 95 °F.

Right now in the yard

Late October. Mite treatments are out and every hive is topped off with stores for winter. Oxalic acid vapor goes in during the broodless window around New Year.

The bees

We started the yard this spring with nine colonies in double-deep Langstroth boxes, set along the edges of the big oaks where they catch morning sun and get shade through the worst of the afternoon. If they keep doing well, we'll add around ten new hives a year for the next few years. East Texas gives them a long season and a hard summer dearth. New colonies get fed through it with 2:1 syrup from four-gallon top feeders. Established hives with honey of their own usually ride it out, and we only feed them if they come up light.

Varroa mites are what kill hives here, so the calendar is built around them: oxalic acid strips in early June, Apivar in mid-August, a mite wash after every treatment to see whether it worked, and one round of oxalic vapor in the broodless window after Christmas. Small hive beetles get traps in every box.

Colonies: 9
Hive style: Double-deep Langstroth
First hives: Spring 2026
Feed this season: About 60 lb of sugar per hive, as 2:1 syrup
Mite plan: Oxalic strips, Apivar, winter vapor

A single hive under the low branches of an oak, pasture and more oaks behind it — Under the oaks: morning sun, afternoon shade.

Two hives in tall summer grass at the edge of an open meadow — Two of the meadow hives in July.

A white hive and a cedar hive on wooden stands in front of the old corrugated grain bin, bees covering both fronts — Two hives against the old grain bin.

Fifty acres in Wood County

Bought in 2023 as rough pasture and woods with two ponds and a lot of feral hog damage. The work since has been slow and mostly unglamorous: hog trapping, water, fence lines, and getting the bee yard set up where the forage is.

Drone view of the larger pond, a long curve with mowed pasture on one bank and woods on the other — The larger pond, late afternoon in August.

Hogs

Feral hogs root up pasture faster than it grows back. We run corral traps watched by cellular cameras, so the gate drops when the whole sounder is inside and not before. The pasture is recovering.

Water

Two ponds hold water year-round and the bees use both. A rural water line to the yard and the cabin is the next big project, so the truck stops hauling tanks.

Forage

We leave the fence lines and pond banks wild. Brush, wildflowers and the big oaks feed the bees from early spring, and the less we mow, the more they have.

The cabin

A metal-roofed cabin with a deep front porch looks out over the pasture. Weekends here start with coffee on that porch and end with the yard going quiet at dusk.

From the farm

Phone pictures and drone frames from three seasons on the place. Tap any photo to see it larger.

The cabin, the big pasture and both ponds from the air

A hive in the shade of the oaks, foragers on the landing board

Bees bearding on the front of a double deep

Keeping an eye on the smaller pond from the fire pit

Barn swallows nesting under the porch roof

Honey

First-year colonies build comb; they don't make surplus honey. Our first real harvest comes off the spring flow, and when it does it will be raw, coarse-strained, and sold in small batches by the jar.

Leave an address if you want to hear when the first jars are ready. One email when it happens, nothing else.

Get in touch

Questions about the bees, the honey, or anything else on the farm? We'd love to hear from you. Here's how to reach us. The farm is private, so we don't take drop-in visits.

Pachamama Valley FarmWinnsboro, Texasinfo@pachamamavalleyfarm.comyoutube.com/@PachamamaValleyFarm

The larger pond seen from a wooded rise under a sky full of cumulus clouds — The larger pond on a summer afternoon.