Meet Our Bees: Inside Life on an Ohio Honey Farm

Every jar of Nate's Nectar honey starts the same way: with a hive, a beekeeper, and a whole lot of patience and manual labor.

Our story is a family story — and like most family stories, it did not happen all at once. It started small, grew steadily, and turned into something none of us completely planned for.

How It Started

Nathan (Nate) Davis got his start in beekeeping through a club in college. What began as a hobby and a curiosity became, over time, a genuine passion. He started with four hives. He paid attention, learned from mistakes, and kept going. Those four hives became a few dozen. A few dozen became several hundred.

Today, Davis Apiaries operates a few hundred hives across west central Ohio. What started as a college hobby is now a full-scale operation that provides the honey and beeswax behind every product we sell.

Nate's Nectar — the brand — grew out of that operation as a way to bring our products directly to the people who wanted them. What started as honey expanded into creamed honey, hot honey, beeswax candles, skin care, and hair care, all made from raw honey and beeswax.

A Family Operation

This is not a one-person business, and it never has been. Nate manages the bees and the broader production operation. Erika handles the marketing, the brand, and the day-to-day business side of things. Lauryn is behind the candle line, the skin care products are managed by Jessica and Marissa created the hair care lineup. Every item that leaves our facility has a person attached to it — someone who made it, packed it, or had a direct hand in bringing it to life. Each product line was built by someone who wanted to use those products in their own life.

That matters to us, and we think it shows in the products.

Life on the Apiary

People often picture beekeeping as a warm-weather activity, but the work is year-round. Spring and summer are the active seasons — the bees are foraging, producing honey, and building up their colonies. Those are the months of inspections, honey harvest, and long days out in the bee yard.

Fall is about preparing the hives for winter. Making sure colonies are strong, have enough food stored, and are well-protected before temperatures drop.

Winter is quieter on the surface, but it is not idle. We actively have to check the bees and add food as needed so that they will not starve.

Through all of it, there is planning. Ordering equipment, managing health records, thinking ahead to the next season. Beekeeping at scale is as much logistics as it is agriculture.

From Hive to Jar

Once honey is harvested, it comes to our FDA-certified production kitchen in DeGraff, Ohio. There it is lightly filtered, processed, and prepared — whether that means bottling it as raw liquid honey, mixing it at room temperature for creamed honey, or infusing it with real peppers for our hot honey line.

Everything is made in small batches. That is not a marketing phrase for us — it is how we manage quality. When you are working with multiple product lines, smaller batches give you more control over the finished product and make it much easier to catch anything that does not meet the standard before it goes out the door.

The Products

Raw honey is where everything starts. Our wildflower/clover/soybean honey comes from local apiaries and is lightly filtered, minimally processed, and packed with the natural complexity that comes from bees foraging across a varied local landscape.

Creamed honey is our most popular product — raw honey mixed at room temperature to create a smooth, spreadable texture that our customers reach for every morning. We currently make it in ten flavors, from Original to Cinnamon to Caramel.

Hot honey brings real heat to the table. Three varieties — Smoked, Buzzin', and Stingin' — each with its own pepper profile and heat level, all starting from the same raw honey base.

Beeswax skin care, hair care, and candles round out the line. The beeswax  goes into body butters, healing salves, lip balms, beeswax hair sticks, and candles. All made with the same attention to clean, simple ingredients that guides everything we do.

Why We Do It

The honest answer is that we love it. Beekeeping is not an easy business. The work is physical, the variables are unpredictable, and agriculture rarely offers comfortable margins. But there is something about working with bees and nature — about being part of a food system that starts with a flower and ends with something as extraordinary as honey — that keeps pulling us forward.

We are grateful for every customer who chooses to support what we do in DeGraff. Your order is not just a transaction to us. It is what makes it possible to keep doing what we love.

Come Find Us

We are based in DeGraff, Ohio, and we ship directly to customers across the country through our online store. If you have ever wondered about our products, our process, or what life with bees actually looks like day to day, we are happy to talk. Reach out through the contact page on our site — we read every message.

Explore our full product line at natesnectarandmore.com, or visit our Meet the Family page to learn more about the people behind the honey.

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