As Art Holbrook walked across ten pastoral acres in Argyle, thirty miles northwest of Dallas, he knew he’d found his dream home. The rolling countryside was shaded by enormous post oak trees, some of them as old as three hundred years, and aside from some light cattle grazing, the property had been virtually untouched by humans for at least sixty years. Holbrook, 71, was enamored with a GMC flatbed truck that had broken down under a tree in 1953, one year after he was born, and never moved again. “That’s some of the most pristine property on the face of the earth,” he says. The chairman and CEO of a Dallas-based fabrication company had been looking for a peaceful place to live out his golden years with his wife, Jill. On that afternoon in January 2022, Holbrook’s search was over. He bought the land for $1.5 million and began planning for the future. 

He’d need to clear the masses of savage brambles and green briars to make the place walkable, along with figuring out the best spot to build a new, 3,500-square foot home. But before anything else, the money stuff: an outlay of $1.5 million was significant, even for Holbrook—a Harvard Business School graduate who, in addition to his CEO role, had also been a savvy real estate developer and investor. Property taxes were a big consideration. Holbrook calculated that they’d come out to $24,000 annually, an additional cost he found untenable. The self-professed “numbers guy” had a plan, of course. He’d simply put bees on his land. That way, his property tax bill would plummet—all the way down to $8. “That’s a pretty good investment,” Holbrook says. Who knew beekeeping could be so sweet?    

This may sound like a cheat code, but it’s all perfectly legal. In 1978, voters passed a state constitutional amendment to help farmers with large acreages but thin profits stay afloat in a tide of rising taxes. “Farmers were land rich and cash poor,” says David Anderson, a professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University. “We didn’t want to push farmers off their land as cities grew.” So the Legislature directed county appraisal districts to value farm and ranch properties at lower rates compared to other properties in the state. Since taxes are generally based on a property’s value, the law has resulted in massive tax relief for farmers and ranchers over the last forty years. These “special valuations” have been widely used by traditional agricultural producers—those who run cattle or grow hay, for instance—but in 2012, the Legislature afforded them to landowners involved in beekeeping too. 

Texas has been undergoing a massive bee boom ever since. In 2012, our state was home to just 1,900 or so beekeeping operations; after a decade of steady growth, that number has ballooned to 9,000, far more than any other U.S. state. The Washington Post reported in March that Texas is “so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined.” As word has gotten out about the tax benefits of beekeeping, a niche industry has sprung up to help landowners take advantage.

The growing demand for beekeeping services is being met by businesses such as Honey Bees Unlimited, which operates in eight North Texas counties, including Denton, where Argyle is located. Holbrook contacted the company and inked what’s known as a “pollinator agreement,” whereby he agreed to pay the company $2,400 annually to bring bees onto his property and manage them. It’s the same type of contract beekeepers and farmers use to pollinate plantings of almonds or apples or cucumbers. Except Holbrook wasn’t planning on doing any farming; he merely sought to reap the dividends of property tax savings, Texas’s most reliable cash crop.

Holbrook isn’t the only Texan who’s gotten wise to the value of the honey bee, a nonnative insect that was ferried over to the Americas by English colonists in 1622. Over centuries we’ve learned to house the insects and harness their capacity for producing honey and wax. But the idea that bees can also generate property tax savings is just starting to make a buzz in Texas. Brothers Gary and Michael Barber founded Honey Bees Unlimited in 2019 and now count roughly 175 clients. Many of them are in Holbrook’s position: city folks who want to move to the country but don’t want to get shellacked by taxes when they do.  

In early April, when I visited their 117-acre headquarters near Gainesville, the Barbers were hard at work. Both swaddled in soot-stained beekeeping suits, the brothers trudged through an idyllic forest meadow dotted with cube-shaped bee boxes painted bright shades of pink, yellow, and cyan. The day’s task was “splitting hives,” or moving a portion of bees from one colony to another, which encourages consistent growth in their population. Gary lifted the top of one box and bees swarmed out, clinging to his suit in rolling waves. “We’re a little spicy today!” he said as a few bees got under his left glove and stung his exposed wrist. One snuck inside his veil and hovered in the space between his eyes and his sunglasses. 

But like the honey badger, Gary don’t care. He removed trays until he found the colony’s queen, who had a long, narrow abdomen with a pointed end, and trapped her with a small silver instrument that looks like a spoon. The next day some of these bees will be taken elsewhere to create new colonies, and the Barbers need this queen to stay put. New colonies are made all the time here at Honey Bees Unlimited, where the name of the game is to make as many bees as quickly as possible. “We throw brute force at it. We throw numbers at it,” Michael says. The Barbers have been stung thousands of times, they say, but it’s well worth it.

The work is hard and hazardous, but the Barbers’ yellow-and-black empire has seen nearly unlimited expansion in five short years. In addition to serving clients like Holbrook (who make up about 80 percent of their revenue, Gary said), the Barbers produce honey and lease their bees to farmers as far away as California who need help pollinating almond trees and a forage crop called hairy vetch. They’re on track to have more than 2,000 boxes by December—each containing one queen, a few hundred drones, and up to 40,000 worker bees. Anderson, the economics professor, says there could be a healthy market for this type of business model. “If I had a lot of beehives and I had a bunch of landowners who would pay me to keep the bees on their property, then that starts to work,” he says. “Because I am going to have some honey sales, but I might be getting the bulk of my revenue from landowners.” Survey data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that beekeepers across the U.S. reeled in $255 million in “pollination income” (a category that includes both kinds of clients that Honey Bees Unlimited serves) in 2023, a 6 percent increase from the year before.

At 2 p.m. the Barbers disrobe to street clothes and leave for lunch in nearby Valley View. They sit around a table at a burger joint, York ’N Ale, with two of their three employees and discuss a swarm of a different sort: the steady stream of clients who are clamoring for their bees. “They bought property under [a special agriculture valuation] and they want to keep it. I’d say that’s most of our clients,” Gary says. Under Texas law, bees can only be used for property tax breaks if the land has been used for agriculture during five of the last seven years; that’s why newly sold and subdivided farmland has become a hot spot for new hives. And it makes April a particularly hectic month for Honey Bees Unlimited, since it coincides with the deadline for landowners to file documentation with local appraisal districts to retain their valuations. “About this time of year you get people calling you all at once” to place hives on their property, Gary says. “You’re saying, ‘I’m only one guy. I can’t save you all from your taxes in the next two weeks.’ ”     

Gary admits that not everyone is on the bee bandwagon—including some local tax officials in the areas where the company operates. A few seem to be rankled over the practice of awarding agricultural tax breaks to people who aren’t farmers. Some simply don’t see beekeeping as a legitimate agricultural use. For Kyle Wilhite, the agricultural manager for Hunt County Appraisal District, the bees are sometimes the symptom of a larger problem: what he sees as a twisting of the Texas tax code to benefit regular landowners looking to save a buck. Over the last two decades Wilhite has seen his county’s property rolls swell with Dallasites fleeing the big city to build homes on what used to be large, contiguous tracts of farmland. Many of these new landowners have bees on the brain. “This is turning into more of an urban place . . . More and more bee people,” Wilhite says. 

It’s his job to travel through the county and accurately assess the value of farm properties. To do this, he uses a state-mandated formula to determine the land’s productive capacity—put simply, how much income could be derived from farming it, after expenses. Farming is not particularly profitable ($50 to $200 per acre is the usual return), which is why assessed values on rural land have stayed so low for so long. But the pollinator agreements struck between beekeepers and landowners flout the formula for assessing land values, Wilhite says. These landowners frequently have no farm income—only expenses, from paying the beekeeper to bring the hives. Some properties report a negative farm income. If they were real farms, they’d be insolvent. Wilhite and other appraisal officials are sometimes faced with the conundrum of appraising a property that would be worth millions on the open market but, according to the formula, should also have a negative assessed value. “How am I going to use that?” Wilhite says. “The whole concept is way out of whack.”   

Overall, special agricultural valuations in Texas have grown increasingly lucrative with each passing year, data obtained from the state comptroller’s office shows. From 2014 to 2021, the market value of single family homes in Texas surged by 76 percent; accordingly, taxpayers have faced increasingly high property taxes. By contrast, assessed values for farm properties rose by only 12.5 percent over the same seven-year span. The upshot is that landowners with special valuations are enjoying a low—and increasingly lower—tax burden compared to the rest of Texans. The total tax benefit of bees in Texas is less clear, though it probably represents a tiny portion of savings for farmers overall, says Deborah Cartwright, the former chief of the comptroller’s property tax assistance program. She points out a specific restriction that limits beekeeping tax breaks to those who own between 5 and 20 acres. “I know some people get real twisted about beekeeping, but the fact is that it can never be more than twenty acres. And they still have to deal with bees,” Cartwright says.

Taxes aside, some conservationists say that large densities of nonnative honeybees can place undue stress on the four thousand species of bees that are native to North America. Texas counts eight hundred of those species, including bumblebees, mason bees, and sweat bees. These native critters are rarely seen because they nest in strange places—in the ground and in the stalks of felled sunflowers, for example—and forage at night. Their population numbers are usually low, says Rich Hatfield, an entomologist at the Xerces Society who studies native pollinators. “The vast majority of them are essentially just single moms living in a hole in the ground by themselves, trying to feed their kids. They don’t have a colony to help them. They’re just out there flying around to find food,” Hatfield says. 

The influx of large honeybee colonies can strain limited nectar and pollen resources in a given area, making foraging more challenging for native bees. “That causes them to fly a little bit farther and makes it harder for them to feed their kids. It’s no different than the increasing costs of groceries in our grocery stores,” Hatfield says. For his part, Gary says that his bees are frequently placed on retired farmland that has been allowed to go back to pasture for the honeybees’ sake. When native flowering plants retake land that has been used to grow monocultures of Bermuda hay, all pollinators win. In Argyle, Holbrook is trying to do right by the honeybees. He has joined the local beekeeper’s association and has tried to keep the insects fed by planting crimson clover and various flowering shrubs on the property. But first, the money stuff: “I don’t want to mislead you; I’m not one of those tree-hugging environmentalists,” he says. “I’m practical.”