Our Story
William Werning
Werning Apiaries came to be in April of 2015
However William has been keeping bees since age 14
I grew up on a dairy farm in southeastern Wisconsin. One of my favorite memories when I was a child were the times my Uncle Harold Werning would show up at the farm. He was a Beekeeper. He had a storage building on the farm that he would use to store honey supers "boxes filled with honey". It was a place he used to store the boxes until he was ready to extract the honey from the frames. He would pull in the yard with his stake bed truck filled with the boxes of frames filled with honey. He would get out of his truck and me and my brothers would run to see him he was always happy and talked with or played with us a bit and then he would go about unloading the truck.
So I can not tell a lie. As happy as I was when my uncle Harold came to the farm, I was pretty happy after he would leave also. After he was gone and off to collect more honey, where did I go? Well I would go to the storage building. Open the door walk in to what looked like endless rows of these white and silver boxes filled with honey. Oh yes it smelled so good in the building. The beeswax and honey smell. I couldn't help it I just always had to pull a frame out of a box and devour some of that delicious honey.
Fast forward to the age of 14 Uncle Harold is no longer beekeeping full time so when I get to see him he is no longer needing to store the honey here at the farm. I'm in 4-H now and began raising bees for one of my projects. I started out with two hives.
I continued keeping bees even after graduating high school. Always somewhere between 10-25 or so hives. Around 1997 or so I sold all of my bees thinking It was fun while it lasted.
In the year 2000 if memory serves me right my brother Adam and I had the opportunity to purchase about 160 colonies of bees. and we formed Werning Bros Honey Farm. We both worked full time jobs, and cared for our bees on the weekends. Along with the help of our father Allen and occasionally other friends would help out
In 2005 or 2006 we sold the bees and most of the equipment. We felt at that time it was the right decision at that point in our lives.
Fast forward to the summer of 2014. My niece Mya and stepdaughter Kat were roaming around the farm. They decided to investigate some old deserted beehives that were behind the dairy barn, they were excited to inform us that bees had swarmed and moved in to the old run down equipment. I took a walk out to see the newly discovered bees After a few minutes of watching them come and go from the hive I realized how much I missed them.
The honeybee is such an amazing insect.
In the winter of 2014-2015 I purchased some new equipment to prepare for the spring of 2015. Bees were purchased and installed in the new equipment that spring. And that is how Werning Apiaries came to BEE.
We have been selling Pure Raw Honey ever since. And began incorporating other products that include ingredients made by the bees as well.