There was a buzz going on early this month at the 2026 North American Honey Bee Expo. The mood was festive and friendly especially considering the extraordinary beehive collapse in 2025. Honey was plentiful in Louisville. An estimated 3600 bee lovers showed up to listen to lectures, walk the trade show, and make a beeline for the Honey Bar.
I arrived at the Expo in time for a last row seat in a cavernous room packed with nearly 1300 honey enthusiasts for a Beekeeping Roundtable and Q&A with industry experts about beekeeping. Expo founder Kamon Reynolds emceed. I sat next to veteran beekeeper Robert Lewis of Irwin, Tennessee. I confessed I knew little about bees or honey. Lewis, a truck driver for a living, helped interpret a lot of what was being shared on stage. He has been beekeeping for seventeen years and keeps seventeen hives at home.
Oddly, during this hour nothing was mentioned about the 2025 catastrophic honeybee colony collapse, when an estimated 60% of honeybees were lost. No one needed to be reminded.
Probably not a cure-all, but “Researchers may have discovered a rich new source of ecofriendly treatments for bee diseases hiding in plain sight.”
The panelists stressed to aspiring commercial beekeepers that they “not bite off more than they could chew and then be stuck figuring out how to chew.”
Quality of over quantity starts with quality Queen Bees—“the cornerstone of successful beekeeping.”
Lessons learned were:
There is no good substitute for good pollen.
Don’t forsake good hive hygiene.
And don’t be surprised by the sweat equity investment of an 80-hour work week if you want to get into the business.
Buzzing the Trade Show
One hundred and forty-five vendors were pushing beehives, bee suits, miticides, digital operating systems, honey flavored sodas, and good will. I have a sharp eye for the best booths at trade shows and always ask others what not to miss. (I spent years standing on concrete floors at trade shows for Jelitto Perennial Seeds.)
Jessica Dodds-Davis and Jesse Davis of Honeybee Tennessee
I spotted Jesse Davis as soon as I walked through the door. It was hard to miss the bright honey-colored Save The Honey Bee backdrop. Jesse deferred to his wife Jessica who was finishing up leading the Expo’s Honey Swap in another room nearby.
Jessica Dodds-Davis at the Honey Swap
Beekeepers had just completed swapping 5,573 jars of honey with one another. What a marvelous idea. (Note to Allen: Suggest to the Perennial Plant Association that they should have a member’s perennial plant swap at their symposium this summer in East Lansing, Michigan.)
Jessica Dodds-Davis started the non-profit Honeybee Tennessee, in 2017 with a broad mission of educating the public, but especially the next generation. “We go into schools from kindergarten to high school and get them excited about honey bees. If there’s an FFA group interested in beekeeping we can help with everything they need and provide a mentor to help the next generation to get started.”
North American Honey Bar
I’ve bellied up to a lot of bars, but none this long. The horseshoe-shaped Honey Bar stretched nearly two-thirds the length of a football field. Hundreds of honey nuts lined up to dip one wooden popsicle stick after another into 160 honey samples from across the forty-eight state and six Canadian provinces. There were no abstainers.
Beekeepers are not shy about telling you their own honey is the best. Lavern Hostetler from Owenton, Kentucky, lobbied for the nectar provided by the white blooms of his native black locusts. Robert Lewis, my acquaintance at the panel discussion, was partial to his East Tennessee wildflower honey but told me to not to miss the Manoa honey from Hawaii. Tastes differed. Irwin found the darker sourwood honey too sweet for him. “Tastes like sugar to me,” he said. I have a sweet tooth and a fondness for sourwood honey, but North Carolina’s entry tasted a little different from Georgia’s. That’s not unusual I learned.
No abstainers at the Honey Bar
For years, before craft beer, I drank a cheap Louisville beer, ridiculed as having the “taste of a fried catfish sandwich in every bottle.” I wasn’t picky. Before my visit to this year’s Honey Bee Expo, my tastes in honey were limited.
Schooled at the Honey Bar
The brownish Hawaiian Manoa honey had a nice bouquet, rich, not too sweet. Tupelo Honey (Van Morrison didn’t make this up!) was smooth and not cloying.
A young beekeeper pointed to the green swamp honey. “It’s different and earthy,” he said, though acknowledging it was not everyone’s bread and honey. The color was explained as a “natural phenomenon” occurring when bees gathered flower pollen from plants in wetland habitats.
(L-R): Honey from the beehive— Green Swamp, Orange Blossom and Saw Palmetto
How could you be sure where the pollen came from?
Accurate honey identification is possible with mellisopalynolgy, a word with a syllable stew of Latin and Greek that means: “microscopic pollen analysis of honey.”
This wasn’t a concern at the Honey Bar.
Bar bees made their own analysis: Buzzed over flavor.
Green honey! Who knew?
Joe, how about that!
Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I was a hobbyist beekeeper here in Henderson Co. NC for about 14 years, until covid and life changes affected my free time. I really miss it but don’t think I can take on the heavy lifting (literally) any longer at my age. Interestingly, while I have harvested summertime pale colored sourwood honey some years, I actually prefer the darker, more complex flavors of spring honey. It usually includes primarily tulip poplar nectar but other floral sources also. Some folks don’t realize sourwood honey is only found in the southern Appalachians and is sometimes called the champagne of honeys. I do miss beekeeping, but thankfully I continue to have many feral honeybees in my gardens that have thrived after swarming from my hives over the years. Before I started keeping bees, they had largely disappeared here. I love seeing them on my blooms and hope to start seeing them visit my hellebores as early as next month.
Thank you, Barbara. And also for filling us in on your Henderson County beekeeping experience. Interesting, you have some feral honeybees that took a liking to your garden.
One of my favorite online discoveries was a passionate debate between an animal-rights/welfare vegan and a natural-foods advocate. The vegan didn’t eat honey because of concern for exploitation of the bees. The natural-foods guy pointed out that (aside from the agave that many vegans use being over-harvested and thus endangering the bats/insects that depend on it) bees consent. Bees are Unionized – if they don’t like the working conditions they absolutely will just buzz off and find better. It ended with somebody else quipping that bees pay “protection honey” to the beekeeper.
Sandy, thanks for “Protection honey!”
Who knew a tradeshow post could be so interesting! I learned a bunch. Thanks.
Thanks, Susan. BTW…I envied you, Scott and Marianne at MANTS. Always one of my favorites.
The county bee inspector (a very very low paying position, done out of love) would stop in my office and talk about bees. If you showed an interest he was right there encouraging you. Miss those visits now that I’m retired. Wonder if he attended the bee tradeshow?
Tibs, I enjoyed the Bee Expo a lot. I’m sure your county bee inspector would enjoy it, too. It’s been held in Louisville for a couple of years. I heard, though not sure, it’s coming back again next year.
Honey bees are livestock imported from Europe, and not a natural part of our ecosystem. Unfortunately, the proliferation of backyard bee keeping negatively impacts our native bees, and is just another blow to the ecosystem..