A photo tour around Bastin Honey Bee Farm in Knightstown, Indiana.

"We have 800 hives," Joe Bastin, beekeeper at Bastin Honey Bee Farm, said Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. "And there are 40,000 bees per hive."

Bees swarm a bucket of pollen substitute Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, on Bastin Honey Bee Farm's property in Knightstown, Indiana. "Right now there is no forage sources out there," beekeeper Joe Bastin said. "We've had our freeze, everything is dead. There's nothing out there for them. If you stand outside, they're going to come to you and they're going to check you out because you're warm and they just want to see what's there."

Joe Bastin poses Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, in a beekeeper suit on his way out to the 800 hives his family keeps at a farm in an open field in Knightstown, Indiana. Bastin and his family have been in the beekeeping business for about 20 years. "This is actually my parents farm," Bastin said. "We were at the time raising blackberries and trying to make wine. And so a friend said, 'Hey, if you're going to blackberries, you're going to bees.' So we got some bees and we got some more bees. Then we got rid of the blackberries and we got more bees."

Nearly 50,000 pounds of honey sits Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, inside a storage area at Bastin Honey Bee Farm in Knightstown, Indiana. The farm produced 3,500 gallons of honey in 2023, all of which they'll sell within the year at various stores, farmers markets and wholesale to other beekeepers. "We can bottle a 55 gallon drum of honey in one day," beekeeper Joe Bastin said.

"We hand label everything," Joe Bastin, beekeeper at Bastin Honey Bee Farm, said Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. "So those are some of our labels for the different things that we produce."

Until shelved in their store, honeycombs sit frozen Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, inside a storage area at Bastin Honey Bee Farm in Knightstown, Indiana."A lot of people chew on it until the honey is all squished out of it and then they spit the wax out," beekeeper Joe Bastin said. "You remember the little soda bottle candy things? It's a lot like that."

Bees fly around Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, near some of the 800 hives located at Bastin Honey Bee Farm in Knightstown, Indiana. "We treat bees and we teach people to treat bees like livestock," Joe Bastin, a Knightstown, Indiana, beekeeper, said. "You got to feed them. You've got to take care of them. Bees get medicines because there's 70,000 mouths living in that hive and they'll get viruses and they'll share those viruses. So it takes it takes some work to to actually make a hive do well." Bastin says he's helped people start hives in places from cul-de-sacs to hospital rooftops. "An average hive should produce, not a first year high but an average hive, somewhere around 100 pounds of honey. So that's a little over a five gallon bucket and a half we'll say."

Bastin Honey Bee Farm beekeeping woodenware sits on display Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, inside their shop at located on their farm in Knightstown, Indiana. Aside from honey, inside their store the company offers beekeeping suits, woodenware, bottling supplies, extraction and processing equipment, hand tools, personal protective gear, books, pollinator friendly seeds, and more.