SAVE THE BEES: HELP Honey Flow at Sunswick Farm

Together we have reached our goal! We have raised $50,000 to match the Empire State Development Grant of $50,000 and the Sunswick Farm Honey House Construction is almost complete. See our recent update!  
Thank you to all who have supported our efforts!


The Honey House

A ‘honey house’ is the cornerstone of the honey operation, housing and facilitating our work and the flow of product from bee yards into honey jars. It will cost $100,000 to build this planned insulated, heated and plumbed 28’ x 60’ honey house at Sunswick Farm with a loading dock. It will house our new honey extractor equipment and serve as a stable onsite base of operations for bottling and storing our annual production of honey. Contributions large or small are most welcome. Feel free to contact us with questions. Thank you in advance for your contribution to our efforts and sharing this with your friends and family.

The Team (Our Hive)
My name is Brooks Mullahy and I am a small scale commercial beekeeper. I have an undergraduate degree in Horticulture and a graduate degree in Organizational Development. That is to say, I have a passion for organizing wildlife as a precursor to organizing community around sustainable agriculture and healthy food. I earned a master beekeeper certificate through Cornell’s University’s Dyce Laboratory and apprenticed with a master beekeeper for 5 years before starting Sunswick Farm Honey.

My husband Peter manages the repair and maintenance of machines and equipment and all the trips to pick up bottles for our honey.  I manage honey production and sales with the help of a seasonal apprentice. We  have family and friends pitching in to help label bottles, paint new or restored bee boxes and so much more. There’s always work to be done and we are grateful for all the support from our hive.

Most importantly, there are the Bees, an incalculable amount of local honey bees, encompassing 35 square miles in a radial geographic area that includes 3 New York counties: Cayuga, Onondaga, and Cortland. Our bees pollinate an extraordinary number of family farms, gardens, public parks, and natural habitats in the Finger Lakes, and produce the honey that our customers love!

The Story
I moved to the Finger Lakes Region of New York State in 2012 and bought a large farm with diverse habitat to be a steward of the land and honey bees. Thus, Sunswick Farm was born, and Phase 1 of our bee venture began. Now booming, we harvest approximately 18,000 lbs of raw honey made by our bees each year and sell it to beloved customers year-round at the Syracuse Regional Farmers Market. We also distribute to restaurants, kombucha producers, mead makers, bakers and retail shops.

Sunswick Farm Honey started in the Spring of 2016 with an initial purchase of 21 bee yards which included 121 live hives. We opened last season with 26 yards, each with 4 to 24 hives. Our largest yard at Sunswick Farm has 24 hives. At the height of a good season, we will manage close to 300 live hives.

To manage this number of live hives there is a lot of equipment needed, so we built an 800 sq. ft. barn at Sunswick Farm where we store honey boxes and over 400 honey supers. The honey super is what we put on top of a live beehive to collect the honey we extract, bottle and sell. The barn is also used for the repair and maintenance of our equipment and storage of bottles waiting to be labeled and filled with honey for sale. 

At the currently leased honey house we extract and bottle our honey in the summer and fall. We then bring the honey back to Sunswick Farm and store it in the heated basement of our house. From there we pull inventory for the regional market and other sales.

The Future
With the future loss of our honey house lease, the opportunity arises to streamline operations and enter Phase 2 of our business development, cementing Sunswick Farm as the hub of Sunswick Farm Honey. Working with the Cowan Manufacturing Company in Utah we have secured a 28 frame extracting machine. Cowan only makes a few of these each year and the Sunswick Farm name is on one of them. This system upgrade is perfect for us because it will refine our extracting process, improving our ability to separate our seasonal honey varieties. Now we need to build a home for it. We are asking for your encouragement and financial support, please make a gift, and share this request with all your friends and family.