It Takes 72 Million Bees To Keep The Honey House In Dubois Stocked Up

DUBOIS — Chocolate-covered honeycombs. Honey cotton candy. Honey infused with flavors like raspberry and jalapeño. Cold-brewed honey coffee, honey soda, and even soap that’s made from — you guessed it — honey.

It doesn’t take long to conclude that someone who is just a little obsessed with honey might be connected with The Honey House in Dubois. There’s not a single item in the store that’s not in some way connected either to honey or the bees who make it.

That someone is actually a dynamic duo, Kyle Miller and his wife Nicole. They’re taking their Wyoming honey-making to the next level with just a little help — 72 million bees.

Kyle is a third-generation beekeeper from Crowheart, Wyoming, but he’s doing things just a little bit differently than either his father or his grandfather, Fremont Miller.

Where It Started

Fremont started the family obsession with bees and honey as a high school student just before World War II, Kyle told Cowboy State Daily.

“Grandad started with bees in high school, and he worked for a guy in Riverton,” he said. “He and his brothers bought some bees up here in the Crowheart Valley outside of Dubois right before World War II. And two of the brothers went to war, while the other stayed home to take care of the bees.”

In the 1980s, Kyle’s father, Milton, bought out Fremont Miller’s bees, taking over the operation, which for two generations has focused on traditional operations like selling wholesale honey and pollination.

These days, most beekeepers are more focused on pollination, which is a bigger paycheck, but some do focus mainly on honey production.

An Evolution

But Kyle is doing something completely different. He does have a pollination contract in California during the winter and a few wholesale honey contracts in Jackson and other places across Wyoming.

But the main focus for him is The Honey House in Dubois.

“Ninety percent of the products in the store are ours,” Kyle said. “We do have some vitamins, cotton candy and energy drinks that we wholesale, but all the honey and wax products are ours. We make them ourselves.”

That includes infused honey flavors like raspberry and jalapeno, soaps made from honey, candles made from beeswax, honey barbecue sauces, honey mustards and, of course, raw honey, all shipped under the Wonderful Wyoming Honey label.

One of the most popular of these is a raw product that looks and tastes a bit like whipped honey. But it’s not whipped at all. That’s just the way it comes from the hives.

That product is thanks to Wyoming having just the right moisture content to produce a natural, raw honey product that not only looks whipped, but tastes just as fluffy.

It’s heaven on a spoon. Just imagine it on a warm slice of sourdough bread.

New Zealand inspired

Kyle has hives set up from Kinnear to Jackson. But he didn’t set out to become the Don of honey in Dubois.

He started off exploring the world. He went to New Zealand with the idea of playing basketball there. But after six surgeries in his 20s, those dreams were dashed.

“But I got accepted to an outdoor education school for six months in New Zealand,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “The Sir Edmond Hillary Outdoor Pursuit Center.”

As part of that world-class experience, he was certified in a number of outdoor activities — climbing, caving, navigation, orienteering, and so on.

“We’d go explore on our weekends off, and I found a honey store one of those weekends,” he recalled. “They sold honey liquor, honey syrup — just all kinds of things — all made from honey.”

Given that his family was into honey in a big way, that experience really stuck with him, and he still feels it’s one of the neatest stores he’s ever seen.

Eventually, when Kyle was tired of exploring the world and decided to settle down, he returned home to Dubois to help his dad keep the honey farm going.

It didn’t take long for him to remember that fancy honey store in New Zealand.

“Bees are kind of in right now for tourism itself,” he said. “And people are realizing how important they are. So, I thought everyone who sees a bee store might just want to stop in.”

And his assumption was totally, 100% correct.

The House of Honey in Dubois is a favorite stop for many tourists, as well as town folk. At any given time, the store has lots of people buzzing around in it. Some even stop to take selfies in front under the big The Honey House sign.

“We started in 2021 right during the COVID, so we got kind of nervous because the whole world was shutting down,” Kyle said. “But it ended up everyone was hiding out in Dubois, so it’s worked out great.”

About Fremont Miller

Fremont, as some might recognize, is the subject of the book “Growing Up With Wyoming: The Life of Fremont Miller,” as told to Eugenia Christensen.

Fremont was a survivor, and the tale of how he survived three days in the North Sea during World War II is retold in the book.

“I think they were shooting up a train and it knocked his plane down,” Kyle said. “And the weather was so bad, they couldn’t find him for three days.”

Fremont almost lost his legs because of the incident.

“His friend made just one more pass and found him,” Kyle said.

Kyle remembers helping his grandfather as a young man to take care of bees on the ranch during the summer.

“That was the summer life,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “My grandmother would make like a Thanksgiving meal for all the workers in the summer when we worked for them. It was kind of like a big party.”

Kyle remembers stories about the pet elk his grandfather raised, as well as a pet bear.

“One of the uncles caught a baby bear,” Kyle said. “Its mom was dead.”

Fremont’s children would teeter-totter with the bear while they and it were growing up. Until one day, it got mad and took a swipe at one of the children on the teeter-totter. That was the end of that.

Kyle remembers his grandparents growing a lot of their own food, and their ranch dinners were legendary.

“We got sweaty and sticky every day, and we worked our butts off,” Kyle said. “But we ate like kings. And there was nothing better than a good spoonful of honey right out of the hive on a fresh, warm honeycomb.”

Busy As A Bee

Busy people are often compared to bees, but not many realize just how apt the cliche really is.

With 1,200 hives stretched from Kinnear to Jackson, Kyle has a truly gigantic army working in Wyoming.

“A full hive in the summer is 60,000 bees per hive,” Kyle said. “And during the honey flow, the queen is laying 2,000 eggs per day.”

That’s 72 million bees in all, working every summer in Wyoming.

It takes a lot of bees to make an appreciable amount of honey. Thirty-six worker bees will only make, on average, 1 tablespoon of honey in a six-week timeframe — the lifespan of a bee.

That means it takes about 9,216 bees on average to make a single gallon of honey.

One beehive will typically make between 60 to 100 pounds of honey in a single year.

Millions Of Flowers, Too

Kyle is located near a peony farm in Dubois, so it would be fair to think that gives him a unique advantage.

However, one peony farm isn’t nearly enough flowers to make even a pound of honey.

It takes a couple million flowers for that.

“The peony farm is really cool, though,” Kyle said. “I think they have about 15,000 blooms, and it makes you feel good to just look at them. I sit there in the morning and drink my coffee and watch all of the flowers, and some of the blooms are as big as a basketball. They are huge.”

The Miller family’s bees visit the peonies now and then, Kyle said, and bouquets of the totally cool peonies are for sale at The Honey House during season.

Kyle’s bees are pretty much working year-round, taking only a short break every fall. In November, they’ll head to California for a working vacation pollinating almonds. Then they come home to Wyoming for May flowers and summer blooms.

“We do get our honey tested to make sure it’s 100% honey,” Kyle added. “If you are buying honey, it’s important to know where you’re getting it from. Some producers have been adding corn syrup or rice sugars to their honey.”

Several China producers in particular were caught adding rice sugar to honey and weren’t allowed to sell honey in the United States for a time, he said.

“If you want to make sure you’re getting the real stuff, you have to buy from a beekeeper,” Kyle said.

Four Jobs In One

Hard work isn’t only for bees, though. It’s hard work to be a beekeeper, and it’s even harder work to be both beekeeper and shopkeeper.

He credits his wife with making the storefront dream possible.

“She has her summers off, so she can help manage the store to keep it open,” he said. “And she keeps our wholesale and our retail products stocked up.”

The store itself has been a fun experiment.

“But, after year four it’s not an experiment anymore,” Kyle added. “It’s like adding a fourth job. I mean, it’s all the same job, but when you add up all the jobs you have to do to keep the bees going, it’s like four jobs in one. And the store is the final product. But it’s the fun part.”

Part of that fun for Kyle is getting to teach people about bees.

Not too long ago, The Honey House hosted 50 second graders from Lander for bee education.

The kids tried on bee suits, tried a little honey and learned all about a day in the life of bees.

They also learn how bees have been troubled lately with colony collapse disorder.

“Ten years ago, colonies all over the world collapsed,” Kyle said. “More than half the hives in the world died. Beekeepers have had to put more time in to keep these little bee civilizations going.”

That’s made honey farms like Kyle’s a one year at a time proposition. But, he added, he’s not going anywhere. He just loves the bees.

“If my health stays good, I plan to do this as many years as I can,” he said. “And maybe in the future we’ll not have to go to California. But we’ll keep that pollination contract for now, because it helps pay for everything.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.