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Author: Marie Hathaway
San Sankofa is a farmer outreach specialist with Pasa, working to build relationships with marginalized farmers—including farmers of color, urban farmers, and military veterans—to learn about their successes and challenges and to connect them with relevant federal, state, and private resources.
As part of this work, San recently spoke with Mark Fujita, a military veteran and beekeeper at Funny Farm Apiaries in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
They talked about how the season went and what sustainability means in the context of beekeeping. Mark explained how warmer winters and drier summers are affecting bees and suggested what USDA could be doing to better support beekeepers.
For Mark, beekeeping is about nurturing resilience—in both hives and people.
He shared the unique way the farm is giving back to the veteran community through the Hives for Heroes program, which pairs veterans with beekeeping mentors to receive introductory training, along with the therapeutic benefits of tending to a humming hive.
San is also a veteran and operates his own farm business, Herbal Affirmations, in Lehigh County, growing herbs and making teas, tinctures, and herbal smoke blends with the mission to support fellow soldiers working through struggles with stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. He’s been studying beekeeping through the Hives for Heroes program at Funny Farm Apiaries under the mentorship of Mark’s, wife Wendy Fujita.
Mark and San’s work demonstrates how sustainable farming can play a vital role in supporting veteran communities and protecting our ecosystems for the future.
Watch or listen to their conversation above, or read a transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
San Sankofa: Hello, everyone. This is San from Pasa Sustainable Agriculture. Thanks for tuning in to our conversation series where farmers share their successes and challenges. We also talk about resources that are helping them farm in a way that is meaningful, manageable, and sustainable.
Today I’m talking with Mark Fujita from Funny Farm Apiaries. They have over, or maybe close to 100 hives now. And yeah, Mark, thanks for checking in.
Mark Fujita: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
San: So we can start with, like. What got you into beekeeping?
Mark: So my grandfather and my father were both beekeepers. My dad had an orchard of about 500, 600 trees, and he needed bees for pollination. I was probably 10 when I worked with him and the bees. So I didn’t learn a lot. I just learned about bees and was involved in the bees.
And then when I bought our farm, or when my wife and I bought our farm 20 some years ago, I wanted bees as a hobby. So I got one hive and one became two, then four, then eight, then 12. And that’s just how they progress.
San: So can you share with us… so you have a background in the military. Has any of your military experience kind of helped you out with beekeeping?
Mark: I wouldn’t swear to that because when I was in the military. So I enlisted in the military right after high school because I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I, I really wanted to fly, but I got out, out of high school, and you need to have four years of college to be able to fly.
So I just, I joined the Air Force. I did four years in the Air Force as a vehicle operator dispatch. And then when I, I wanted to re-enlist in as far as in computers, something to do with computers, but they said, “No, you’re going to have to re-enlist first and then we’ll cross-train you.”
And I said, “Oh no, been here, done that. I understand how this works. If I don’t get it in paper before I sign up, you guys own me for another four years, and I didn’t want to do vehicle operator dispatch for another four years.” So I got out of the military and just kind of banged around different jobs till I finally found something that worked for me.
But yeah, I don’t know that the military gave me any kind of, maybe some discipline to make sure I was on time for my jobs and things like that. But as far as helping with the farm, I had grew up on all kinds of farms. When I was a kid, my dad had the orchard. I worked for dairy farmers around me. I worked for vegetable farmers.
The good thing about going into the military and being the vehicle operator dispatch, I knew how to pretty much drive almost any kind of vehicle before I even got there. From the farm.
San: Okay. So like, so far, how’s your season been going?
Mark: We had a good year. It was, we began the season with about 50 or so hives and pretty quickly ramped up to almost double that. And a lot of splits and a lot of swarms. And it was a weird year based on the weather. We, we had that really, really dry June, which I thought was going to be indicative of the whole summer.
And I thought, we are going to be in what they call the “summer dearth,” where there’s nothing really blooming because everything is so dry. But that never really happened. It seemed like we got just enough rain. Even though it was hot, we had just enough rain to allow everything to bloom pretty periodically, and we did really, really well on a lot of our hives.
They, they produced… Some hives produced well over 200 pounds of honey extra, and some of the hives produced 60 pounds for themselves. And that’s about it. Just depended on the area. So yeah, the season went really, really well. Almost 100 hives this summer. Now we’re down. We had to combine a few, so we’re probably back down to around 80, 85 hives.
San: Okay so, are you getting towards, like, the end of the season… or you’re almost done extracting?
Mark: Yeah. We’re.. we’re just about done. We’re probably going to go around one more time to all the yards. What we do is we try to balance honey across all the hives in each yard, so that everybody has the same amount of honey. At least, we want to try and leave at least 60 pounds on everybody, on every hive, so that they can use that throughout winter.
If the winter is anything like last year, 60 pounds will not be enough at all because last winter, October, November, and December were all really, really warm months, and they were flying every day and there was nothing available for them to bring back. So when they get back to the hive, they were just eating honey like crazy.
And a lot of my hives were out of that 60 pounds by the beginning of December. So starting in December, we were feeding sugar, sugar blocks, winter patties, and fondant. From December on, we went through December, January, and February feeding them. We were checking hives every two to three weeks just to make sure they had enough resources so they wouldn’t starve.
San: Okay. Can you share like one beekeeping story?
Mark: Let me think for a minute. We had. So lately we’ve been going around checking, making sure all of our hives are queen right. And everybody says, “Oh, is there always one queen per hive?”. And yes, that’s the norm. But it’s not unheard of to have a mother-daughter. One queen above the queen excluder and one queen below the queen excluder.
And we found that multiple times this year. So. To say that there’s only one queen per hive isn’t always a given. And then with beekeeping, nothing is ever a given. Everything can change or be different from year to year. But like I said, we found many queens, many hives that had multiple queens this year. Sometimes we’ve seen queens, multiple queens, hatch all at the same time.
And we might have three, four, five virgin queens running around a hive, and we’re scrambling to get queen catchers and catch them all and put them in separate new hives so that we can take all five of those queens and have them become actual functioning units. So it’s been a weird year for queens. We’ve had quite a few.
I won’t say quite a few, but we’ve had more than usual of multiple queens or two queens in a hive. And when I say a queen excluder, it’s a screen that goes above the, the two three bottom boxes, and it keeps the queen down there so she doesn’t go up through and lay in the top boxes, which is our honey boxes.
You don’t want the queens to lay eggs in your honey boxes because then you can’t extract any of that. So we put a queen excluder on. It’s a metal screen that the bees can go through, but the queen cannot fit through. And more times this year than we would like, we’ve gotten to a hive, and there’s a queen in the top part of the boxes, and there’s a queen in the bottom part, and they’re coexisting and they’re happy as clams.
And it’s, it’s a bizarre situation where you have to then figure out you have to split that hive into two and move each queen. So that’s a… uncommon occurrence, but it’s been more common this year than in the past. And I don’t know if that was us or it was just the way the queens decided to do it this year.
San: So, you sell your honey at farmers markets and online. Do you carry or sell any, like, unique, niche, products?
Mark: Probably for us, our most unique niche is the flavor infused honeys, where my wife takes natural flavorings and infuses the honey with that flavoring. So case in point is vanilla bean. She’ll take vanilla beans, scrape the insides out, put that in the honey, and let it sit for a while, and it picks up the flavor of the vanilla beans.
My wife started that when she first started beekeeping because she didn’t really like honey, but she wanted the benefits of it. So to get over the taste, she used cinnamon in the honey to make it more palatable to her. And from there, she’s branched out to almost 30 or so flavors, which is another way that we try to help people get used to.
I have a lot of people say, “Oh, I don’t like honey,” but then they try one of the flavor honeys and they’re like, “Oh, I can do that. That’s good.” So it gets them used to, honey, and then they come back later and say, “Oh, I’m going to try something different.” And then eventually a year later, I see them and they’re buying regular honey because now they’re like, “I like it all now,” and, which is good.
San: So within beekeeping, what does sustainable agriculture mean to you, or how would it look, how does it look like to you?
Mark: “Sustainable” means I’m trying to get all my hives through winter. I would like to have a 100% survival rate every year. When I first started, some years I’d have 100%. Some, some years I’d have 100% loss. I don’t, I don’t know that I ever had 100. Yeah, I did. I had a year where I had two hives and I lost both of them, so that was a 100% loss.
Most of the years were 50% loss. I’d lose half of everything, be it not maintaining of them right. Or not understanding how much honey they needed, or things like that, or the mite problems that we have. We have rural mites, which are a very big problem. Treating for mites is the, I believe, the number one reason beekeepers are losing bees.
I watch a lot of forums. I’m in a lot of groups, and I see a lot of people asking that question of “Why did my bees die every year?”. And a lot of it’s due to the mites. Even though they think they’re treating right, they’re, they’re not treating as aggressively as I think they should be. And then there’s a whole ton of people out there that want to do non, or treatment-free,and it can work but I’m not sold on that working 100%.
So…So that’s the sustainability part of it is just trying to make sure that I get through winter with almost as many hives as I went into winter with, whether it’s feeding, or treating, or doing things like that. And learning more and more about managing the hives over the winter because beekeeping is like you talk to 10 different beekeepers, you get 12 different answers, and you know, it’s just hit or miss what works for everybody.
I, I say this every year. You could do everything right and still lose bees. You can do everything wrong and still have your bees survive. It’s agriculture. There’s no set fast rule that, there’s no playbook that says “This is guaranteed to make it work.” So that’s my, that’s the toughest part of sustainability of bees.
San: What is your experience with, like, participating with like U-USDA programs? If you don’t have any experience, like, can you share like, what is your ideal situation or program you would want to, want to be implemented?
Mark: So we don’t deal with USDA ag very much. I’m registered with the state as far as the beekeepers because we have to be registered. You’re supposed to have all your hives registered or every beekeeper’s supposed to be registered. So that they know what area you’re in, if they’re going to spray in the state for mosquitoes. Which I just saw, Texas is having a big problem where one of the counties went around and sprayed, and then everybody in that area is losing bees, like mass quantities.
So you should be registered with either the state or USDA ag as far as you having bees. The other thing is, we don’t, there’s not a lot of programs to help beekeepers from USDA ag, per se. What was the other organization? FSA?
San: Yeah, the FSA is one of them.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, we don’t deal with them either. I don’t think. And as far as programs that would help us, I, I’m not sure. I’d like to see USDA ag help out with losses every year if, if they could. Like, you know, some kind of, I don’t want to say insurance, but we had a really bad year. We lost 50% of our bees.
Could they help us replace those bees? Possibly. That’s, you know. As a commercial guy, I don’t, I don’t. Well, I’m not really a commercial guy, but we’re what they call sideliners. We have a business that, but we’re not thousands of hives. So we’re called sideliners. But even as a business, I’d like to see some kind of, I know, crop loss.
Like if farmers lose crops, they get reimbursed for things. I don’t know. You know, I, I wonder if there would be a program like that. I mean, to replace the hive every year is probably $130, $140 a piece. We replace them by splitting them, one of our other hives or bigger hives in half. So we don’t have a cost.
But, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a program for that. I’d like to see that. But you know, that would help some of the other smaller beekeepers too, because I’ve talked to some people and they’ve lost every hive for the past three years. And, you know, that’s a pretty good shot. If they were running five or four or five hives and you have to replace them every year, USDA, I could step in with some of that. I would think, I would like to hope it could.
San: Okay, so I know you guys have like a, a mentorship program, Hives for Heroes. Can you speak on that?
Mark: A veteran will contact Hives for Heroes, and they pair them up with a local mentor. They work with us for about a year.
So being a veteran and seeing how poorly our veterans sometimes are treated, we are trying to give back to the veteran community, especially because beekeeping is very therapeutic, not just for veterans’ PSTD, PTSD, but for anybody. It’s so therapeutic.
So the Hives for Heroes, we try to give back to veterans and help then, a) get through the trauma that they’ve had by letting them beekeep. And that calming effect of the bees really does. I, I don’t know how much it’s helped you, but my veteran that I’m mentoring right now is, he’s been working with me all summer and opened up a whole lot more, and he seems a lot more comfortable and generally better, in a better place. And I’m glad that that’s happening.
Because, you’ve probably been here at least every month for the beginning, from the beginning of the season. How is the program working for you? Do you feel any kind of benefit from it?
San: So, I would say, yes, a lot of benefit. Just to get the experience, hands-on experience, and be able to get a one-on-one, like, feedback on things, like how I’m doing.
It also benefits me in a way where I feel calmer when I’m beekeeping. It’s kind of like, it forces you to be calm, because if you’re like, a little agitated or, or a little anxious, they can, seem like they can sense it and they’ll definitely get angry if you’re not on the same page as them.
Mark: There’s something else that they say, that the frequency of the hum of the bees. I think I’ve read that it’s the key of C, which is a, like, a therapeutic calming frequency. And it’s supposed to help with people with anxiety because it’s supposed to calm you also, not just because you have to be calm, but the hum of the bees calms you down. So you’re like more relaxed and able to focus on the actual task at hand of beekeeping.
San: Alright. Well, Mark, thank you so much for taking the time and talking with us in this interview. And yeah. Appreciate it.
Mark: Sure. And like I said, I mean, if anybody has any questions about the Hives for Heroes program, they can always look up our website or our Facebook page, Funny Farm Apiaries. We come up pretty readily in the search engines. Give us a call. We, right now, we have… we do have three mentors, and there’s only three of us. So for mentees, we’re… we’re maxed out right now. But I’m hoping in the spring, you guys will all graduate because we have three that are going through the summer.
We get you through till spring, and we’re going to be handing off hives to you and getting three more mentors. So we’ll see how that works in spring.
San: Alright. I’m looking forward to it.
This conversation was supported by a grant from the USDA Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement,
