CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. — A beloved bee farm is recovering after a fire damaged most of its property on Sunday.
Foti Bees says the fire burned its honey-processing facility and thousands of pounds of honey, too. The family is now picking up the pieces.
“Forty years of memories with our dad, everything that he built was in this building,” he said.
In a pile of ash, memories are now all that Sarah Foti and her sister Sandra have left of their family beekeeping business.
“You could see the smoke rolling out both ends, and the west wall had actually blown off of the building, and I could see all of the honey supers we had in there,” says Foti, who is the owner & operator of Foti Bees.
Foti says they were able to salvage some of its equipment. Including a few 84-frame extractors.
“Luckily, these are made out of stainless steel, so they withheld the temperatures pretty well,” said Foti, while examining the extractors. “Which is a blessing because these are about $9,000 to replace a piece and we can process up to 20 pallets of honey a day.”
Despite the smell of ash, that hasn’t stopped the bees from doing what they do best: sensing the honey amongst the rubble.
“The bees that are here now, they are forager bees from different bee yards that are in the area,” Foti said. “They just smell what honey’s left, and they come here and they pick at it and they’ll take it back to their hive, which, we had 82 pallets of honey in there that got burnt up. That was just under 2,000 supers of honey.”
Or roughly 80,000 pounds of honey, now burned. It’s a sharp blow to the family-owned business that began with Foti’s father.
“It’s not like it’s just a building, and it’s our livelihood, but just to add a little more to it, it’s like all these memories that he passed on from his childhood and his beekeeping years to this building and now everything is just a pile of ash,” Foti said. “That’s the hardest part.”
It’s also not stopping Foti. They are going to continue the legacy, she says, and pass it down to her sister’s children.
“The first step is to remove all the debris and get it back to a clean slate and then go from there,” Foti said. “There’s a lot in between that. But just to summarize it, that’s the goal right now and to keep taking care of the bees because those are our priority. They still need a lot of care and a lot of equipment and all the things. It’s kind of like you still have everything else going on and you’re still trying to handle this, you know?”
But there’s still some hope left. Foti says their old bee shop is still on Ozello Key. A potential starting point as they build back.
“Our friends have offered it back to us to start running out of,” she says. “So in the in-between, that’s where we’ll be back is down on the island building that shop back up so we can run out of it. And then, meanwhile, we’re going to get this one cleaned up and hopefully start setting some walls up and just getting it back going. There’s still hope. Even in the storm, there’s still hope.”
Still hope to carry on the family beekeeping legacy.
The family launched a fundraiser to help rebuild and has already raised more than $20,000.
Calvin Lewis
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