Robert Weeks was eleven years old when his grandfather handed him a veil, a smoker, and a job. You're going to learn how to do this, the old man said, and that was the whole of the explanation. Three generations later, Robert runs two hundred hives across four properties in Shelby County, and he still doesn't fully understand why bees do half the things they do.
That honest puzzlement is, he says, the only correct posture for a beekeeper. The moment you think you have it figured out is the moment you lose a hive to something you should have seen coming.
My grandfather always said bees will humble you. He was right every single time.
— Robert Weeks, Weeks Family Apiary
The land and the river
The Weeks family has farmed the same stretch of Shelby County since Robert's grandfather bought forty acres on a handshake after World War II. The bottom land along the Cahaba River is fertile and old, the kind of soil that rewards patience. It also floods. The Cahaba has overrun Robert's lower hive yards three times in the past four years, and each time he's lost equipment, production, and about three weeks of sleep.
The flooding hasn't pushed him to higher ground permanently. The bottom land grows the best tulip poplar, white clover, and gallberry in the county, and those three plants produce the bulk of what Weeks Family Apiary sells as their signature spring blend. Moving the hives would mean moving the honey, and the honey is the point.
What they make
The apiary produces four distinct honeys: a spring wildflower pulled in May and June, a summer blend heavy with tulip poplar and gallberry, a late-season goldenrod with a deeper, almost malty edge, and — in good years — a small run of Cahaba lily honey harvested from hives Robert places near the river's protected lily colonies each April. The lily honey is never listed for sale. It goes to family and to the handful of restaurants in Birmingham that have been buying from him long enough to be on the list.
He sells at the Alabaster Farmers Market on Saturday mornings and through a short list of specialty grocers in Hoover and Vestavia Hills. He does not sell online. This is a deliberate decision and also, he admits, a stubbornness. He wants to meet the people who eat his honey. He wants to answer their questions. He wants them to know that the man who pulled the frames is the same man handing it across the table.
You lose something when you ship it. Not the honey. Something else.
— Robert Weeks
Three generations in
Robert's son Marcus helps on weekends and during the spring rush. His daughter Camille has shown no interest in bees, which Robert says is completely fine and also a little disappointing. His wife Deb runs the accounts, manages the market schedule, and is the one who actually answers messages from customers. Robert acknowledges that the operation would not function without her. He says this without being asked.
When asked what he'd tell someone thinking about starting a hive, Robert pauses for a longer moment than expected. Start with one, he says finally. Not two. One. Learn that one colony as well as you can. Lose it. Start again. That's how you actually learn.
He's standing in the yard when he says this, veil pushed back on his head, smoker still in hand. A few bees drift past him without landing. He watches them the way you watch something you know extremely well and still find surprising.