Trumbull County beekeeper upgrades self-serve cabinet, reflects on 15 years
A Trumbull County beekeeper and business owner has grown from keeping two bee hives to now looking after 25 hives all while sticking to their values for pure, chemical-free honey.
Kimmer Wolfinger started keeping bees in 2009 and owns FarmGirl’s Honey, which is in North Bloomfield.
“Our beekeeping started with a conversation in the garden one morning,” Wolfinger said. “My husband and I were gardening and noticed we’re not getting the vegetables that we used to get here. He said, ‘Well, do you want to get bees?’ I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’”
Before getting their first colony, Wolfinger said she did research into managing hives and met with other working apiarists for their insight.
“We started with two hives, and now we’ve gone to 25,” she said. “We thought initially we would run about 50, but it hasn’t grown that big. We got to a point where we thought, ‘Are we going to go big or are we going to stay true to who we are?’ And we decided to stay true to who we are.”
One thing that makes FarmGirl’s Honey unique is their chemical-free method of dealing with unwanted pests getting into the hives.
“We manipulate the hives with something called integrated pest management,” Wolfinger said. “Pest management is just the whole process on how to run your highest chemical free. We decided to not use pesticides to treat the hives for different diseases. The whole thought process is, ‘How do you kill a bug that’s on a bug?’”
Wolfinger said essentially FarmGirl’s Honey does this by sprinkling the bees with powdered sugar.
“The bees have hair on them, so they don’t like the sugar,” she said. “They’ll groom off the mites in that process, too. We love nature and taking care of the bees, which then grew into more gardening.”
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While gardening, Wolfinger became interested in creating junque, the art of salvaging and repurposing treasures to add a unique touch to one’s space.
“There are more bicycles in my flower [gardens] than anything else,” she said. “I have bottle trees, bicycles, old lamps all incorporated in there. People come to our garden walks to just get ideas. We’re in the middle of the woods, so a lot of people can’t see it. You can have gardens in the middle of woods and put junque in it, it still looks nice and whimsical.”
This love for repurposing items into garden decor inspired Wolfinger to expand the farm in North Bloomfield into a vintage shop.
“I’d collected a lot of that stuff in my home, and then it was just growing too large in the house, so I started to do the vintage and primitives, then repurposing items and selling those that people can put into the garden,” Wolfinger said.
In addition to honey, Wolfinger sells lip balms and lotion bars, which is a solid, heat-activated lotion designed to help rough, elbows, hands and heels.
“We grow habanero peppers, enough to infuse them and we created a hot honey,” she said. “It’s become quite popular, we can’t seem to keep it on our shelves, so it’s a limited product.”
Wolfinger said many people find FarmGirl’s Honey while traveling from out of town along Route 11 and come back for the self-serve honey cabinet.
“When they Google us, they find out that we’re real close to a major highway, so we get a lot of people traveling to Erie or customers that drive from Erie, Pennsylvania once a year and buy in bulk,” she said.
The self-serve cabinet is located on the porch with a cash box, and also accepts Venmo and PayPal; when customers place pre-order, they can pay and pick up from that cabinet too.
“We’re natural and simple and down-to-earth people and we love to have our community support us like they have,” Wolfinger said. “Our customers have really become our friends, no matter where they come from.”
