The bee yard, live from Winnsboro, Texas.

Nine hives on forty-nine acres of East Texas pasture and pine. The camera points at the front of the yard, so what you see is what the bees see: morning orientation flights, the afternoon rush, and the slow evenings when the guards take the porch.

The bee yard camera is coming online soon. Check back shortly.

Live Bee yard camera · Wood County, Texas · local time Watch 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 doing orientation flights: hovering in front of the entrance, facing the hive, memorising where home is.
Hot afternoons — bearding. A curtain of bees on the front of a box is cooling, 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, the last syrup went on in August, and we're deciding whether to top up stores before winter. Oxalic acid vapor goes in during the broodless window around New Year.

The bees

We started the yard this spring with nine first-year colonies in double-deep Langstroth boxes. East Texas gives them a long season: redbud and dewberry in March, tallow and privet in May, then a hard summer dearth that we feed through with 2:1 syrup from four-gallon top feeders.

Varroa mites are the thing that kills hives here, so the calendar is built around them. Oxalic acid strips go in early June, Apivar in mid-August, and a mite wash after every treatment tells us whether it worked. In the broodless window after Christmas we vaporize once more and then leave them alone until the redbuds bloom.

Small hive beetles get traps in every box, and the yard sits in full sun on a gravel pad to keep them from pupating in the soil.

Colonies: 9
Hive style: Double-deep Langstroth
First hives: Spring 2026
Winter feed: ~60 lb sugar per hive, as 2:1 syrup
Mite plan: Oxalic strips · Apivar · winter vapor

Forty-nine acres in Wood County

Bought in 2023 as rough pasture and pine with one good pond and a lot of feral hog damage. The work since has been slow and mostly unglamorous: water lines, fencing, hog trapping, and getting the bee yard set up where it catches the morning sun.

Water

A rural water main runs the length of the property now, with frost-proof hydrants at the yard, the barn pad, and the garden. Before that, everything came out of the pond in a tank on the truck.

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.

Forage

We're leaving the fence lines wild and seeding the open pasture with clover and vetch. The bees get spring forage, the soil gets nitrogen, and the hogs get less to dig for.

Camp

Weekends here mean a truck, a rooftop tent, and the sound of the yard at dusk. There's no house yet. That's on purpose for now.

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 from the farm and at local markets.

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

Visit

We're a working farm, not a public park, but we like visitors who like bees. If you keep bees in Wood, Franklin, or Hopkins County and want to compare notes, or you'd like to see the yard, write to us and we'll find a weekend.

Pachamama Valley Farms LLCWinnsboro, Texas 75494hello@pachamamavalleyfarms.com