Texas Beekeeping Classes
Learn how to manage your honeybee colony throughout its yearly cycle. Classes and ongoing support for beginning beekeepers.
Beekeeping Equipment
Beehives and beehive kits, hive components, protective gear & tools, feeders & feeding supplements, pest management supplies.
Russian Honey Bees
Russian Bees offer several significant advantages to Texas beekeepers. One of their main advantages is that they are more resistant toward Varroa mites.
Buy Honey
We have several varieties of honey, including wildflower honey, clover honey and creamed honey.
Shipping is available within the U.S.
Texas Beekeeping Classes
Learn how to manage your honeybee colony throughout its yearly cycle. Classes and ongoing support for beginning beekeepers.
Beekeeping Equipment
Beehives and beehive kits, hive components, protective gear & tools, feeders & feeding supplements, pest management supplies.
Buy Bees
Russian Bees offer several significant advantages to Texas beekeepers. One of their main advantages is that they are more resistant toward Varroa mites.
Buy Honey
We have several varieties of honey, including wildflower honey, clover honey and creamed honey.
Shipping is available within the U.S.
Learn to Keep Bees in a Year
Our step-by-step process, which will help you become a successful, sustainable Texas Beekeeper.
Learn to Raise Bees Successfully
Are you interested in starting to raise bees?
Small-scale beekeeping is a fascinating adventure and can be rewarding as well. Yet beekeeping in Texas today is also challenging, particularly since the introduction of the parasitic Varroa mite and Africanized bees into the U.S. in recent decades.
Did you know that most beginning beekeepers stop keeping bees within only 2-3 years? Without adequate training and a proven plan, few beginning beekeepers make the transition from "bee haver" to successful "bee keeper".
Our desire is to help beginning beekeepers learn to raise bees successfully.
We provide training and ongoing support to beekeepers for our beehive management plan. And we provide the bees, equipment and accessories needed to implement this plan.
Comments from Our Students and Customers
Susan Humiston
Oakley Family Apiaries stepped in to help us in early 2017 when our beekeeping adventure got a little out of hand. Randy Oakley feeds and treats our bees, especially the testing for and treatment of Varroa mites, and he helps us harvest the honey in the summer. Oakley Family Apiaries is a professional operation with caring and knowledgeable folks at the heart of the business. Randy helped us turn our hobby into a business, and I highly recommend Oakley Family Apiaries for purchasing honey, getting advice on your own beekeeping pursuits, or contracting with Randy for a larger venture.
Robin Key
We like Oakley Family Apiaries because they developed a bee management System that works for Texas. Randy Oakley and his family have a wealth of knowledge about bees and maintaining a sustainable hive. They helped us set up our hive and mentored us for a year making themselves available to answer questions and guide us step-by-step along the way. I wholeheartedly recommend them for help in getting started with beekeeping. The daylong introductory workshop and monthly half-day workshops gave us everything we needed to succeed.
Pure-Bred Russian Bees
We have been working with Russian Bees, and they have proven to have several superior qualities in comparison to the more commonly available Italian Honeybee.
There are certain differences in their grooming and brooding behavior that make Russian Bee colonies considerably more resistant to Varroa mites. Like the Italian Honeybee, they are excellent honey producers.
To work with them requires some differences in management approach. Please call us for more details.
Oakley Family Apiaries
Our family first became involved with beekeeping in 1975, when my Dad became a migratory beekeeper, wintering in Texas and traveling to North Dakota for the honey flow.
Having raised and worked with bees for many years, I have increasingly become focused on building a model for resilient, small-scale apiaries that are suitable for a family homestead or small farm.
Honey Bee Removal and Relocation
Serving Waco, Temple and Belton
Honey bees may take up residence in house walls, eaves, attics, trees or other structures around your home or yard.
If you need bees removed from your home, we can help.
We will locate the hive, carefully and safely remove the bees alive, remove any comb that they've built, and seal the wall or other entrance to prevent bees from re-infesting the enclosure. After that, we will relocate them and get them established at one of our apiaries. This will allow them to safely continue their important work. Please call for a phone estimate for our bee removal and relocation service.
Please call for a free phone estimate.
For Live Bee Removal
Call (254) 340-4415
Free Phone Estimate
Beekeeping Articles
The spring honeyflow in Central Texas has wrapped up for another year and our bees are headed into the dog days of summer. As the queen slows down her egg-laying rate, the brood area in the colony will begin to shrink because there is no need for additional foragers during…
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Introduction Honey bees have kept themselves for eons. Within their beehives they have labored tirelessly to produce honey, beeswax & propolis. Man has harvested these products from the beehive for thousands of years. In former, less industrial times, honey was man’s most valued sweetener. Beeswax and propolis had many household…
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Did you know that keeping just 6 colonies of bees on your 5+ acre plot may qualify your property for an “Ag Exemption,” thus lowering your property taxes?
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For many years I have been thinking of and developing an approach based on a self-contained bee colony that is sustainable and requires few inputs …
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We are continuing to develop and test our mentoring program, which we make available to students who have completed our initial one-day beekeeper training workshop. Our mentoring program is a month-by-month followup to that course. It consists of a series of monthly half-day training sessions. In these sessions, we share…
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