FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

George Watkins’s family has been in the Apalachicola area since the late nineteenth century. They’ve witnessed the sponge trade, the loading of cotton boats, and a booming seafood industry. When George was a kid, his grandfather took him fishing every weekend. He put George in a boat when he was eight years old. Right then, George knew he wanted to be a fisherman. Over the years he has harvested just about everything the bay has to offer. But one day George decided to take up beekeeping. He says it was because he just liked honey. Like everything else George does, he threw himself into beekeeping with a passion. He started small, but soon he was the top tupelo honey producer in the area. For George, it’s not just about the tupelo. It’s about the river that nourishes the trees that make the blossoms that make the bees make such wonderful honey.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of George Watkins talking about the architecture of a bee box.
[Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: George Watkins, beekeeper
Date: December 5, 2005
Location: ANERR Education Room – Apalachicola, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans on Monday, December 5th 2005 in Apalachicola, Florida, and I'm at the Apalachicola National Estuarine Reserve—Research Reserve, better known as ANERR, and I'm with George Watkins. And George, would you mind saying your name and your birth date for the record, please?

George Watkins: I'm George Watkins—two, two, fifty-eight [February 2nd, 1958] is my birthday.

And your family goes back some generations here in Apalach, is that right?

Yeah, back to about the early nineteen—well, late 1800s, I'd say…[T]hey were actually running sponge boats, I think, is what they said. Running [natural] sponges to Tarpon Springs and then from Tarpon Springs back and forth to here.

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What did [your parents] do for a living here?

Well my mother was kind of like a teacher. She taught a little bit and she was interested in kids, like you know, at school and she did the recreational program down here and was a housewife. And then my dad, he worked at the bank. After he ran seafood houses and all he got an offer to work at the bank and he started at the Apalachicola State Bank and worked twenty-five years probably there and then retired.

What were your parents' names?

Joyce and Richard Watkins—Joyce Marshall and Richard Watkins.

So what [areas of the seafood industry] had [your father] worked before he went into banking?

Well he worked in the mullet—sometimes in the mullet, you know, unloading. He—he never was much of a boat fisherman…He worked in the seafood house and he worked in an oyster house once, and he went away to the Coast Guard for a term.

So when he went into the banking business, was he looking to make a better living, or was he tired of working off the bay or what?

No, he was just looking to make a better living. He got an offer—something he hadn't tried yet, you know, and he took it.

So how did you get to working on the bay?

When I was a kid, every weekend [my grandfather] took me fishing with nets and all…And it was like commercial fishing but it was—they didn't have to do it. You know, they went when the wanted to and they raised me up and then they, you know, put me in a boat when I was about eight years old. Got my own boat—a little boat and all—and then they wondered why I wanted to be a fisherman. You know, and I just never had interest in any kind of office job or anything. I liked to produce and I was just born with food producing. It's messed me up, really, all my life. It took my college degree away; it took my career—anything that I've had has been messed up by the—mainly being we live on the water and not, you know, up north where there's farms, you know. [The] food that we produce is on the water, and that's all I really am satisfied doing.

So when you say it messed up college for you and all that, how do you mean?

Well I had a choice when I got out of high school. My dad said, “Do you want to go to college? Are you ready?” And he wanted me to go for it and be like an architect or something because I had it in my family blood to be a builder…And a few years went by and I got into the shrimping business and started going out on some of these boats in the summertime and got my own little boat and made good money in high school. And I just told him, I said “I just don't believe I want to go to college, you know. I just don't believe I'm—I want to go.” And when it came down to it, I said “I believe I want to get me a boat you know and go shrimping and be a shrimper.” I said. “Plenty of money is being made up here and it will last forever.” So he helped me—put his house on the line to get a loan to get a big boat, and I took it and ran with it and did good, you know. And I stayed in it for a while—about ten years—and then as I got married and started having kids I decided I'd, you know, get off the water for a while.
A friend wanted to buy my boat, so I sold out to a friend but then I never could get away from it, I've always gone back and scalloped and shrimped. And then I got into—after I got off out of the big shrimping boat industry I got into the—into the crabs. That's the first thing I went into—flounders and crabs—spearing flounders at night and crabs. And then after I got out of that I got into soft shell crabs, which was a little bit of the same thing as crabbing. It was kind of a hard thing to do but you know it was—it was good money in that—hard work though. And then I got into the gill net business and stayed in that for about ten years until they banned the nets. They banned our gill nets…And then after that I got into what I'm doing now. I'm trying to get back into shrimp because the shrimp is about the best thing going right now, you know—something able to do and work at the same time, you know have a boat that's—you have to—the way it is now, you have to have a boat that is paid for. I don't see anybody getting out of school and getting a boat and being able to pay for it like we once did. But if you could get a boat and worked on it and paid for the loan and by the time you get it ready to go and not owe a lot of money on it—of course we used to have to carry insurance on the boats, but now there's no way you could afford insurance on a boat, you know, the way the shrimp prices is kind of down because of the imports. But you'd have to have a boat kind of ready to go and paid for and be able to tie it up and do something else like have a job or do something else and—and then go when the shrimp is good.

That's pretty much why you're doing what you're doing now here, working at the Research Reserve and making honey?

I've worked here for about ten years—going on ten years and it's not a career service job. I could probably get a career service job but it wouldn't be here; it would be with the forestry, or it would be with the shellfish over here. It would be something that—that would be more restrictive you know. We're—we're fire burners or firefighters now but only on our land. We own maybe 3,000 acres in one tract and hundreds of acres in another tract, and then we've got Little St. George 3,000 or 2,800 acres as all part of the research reserve lands—DEP Lands—CAMA Lands they call it, Coastal Aquatic Managed Areas. And we're headquartered out of Tallahassee and we're only firefighters and burn our own property.

So what's your title here, if you have one?

My title is a Park Service Specialist.

When you started here was there an opening that you applied for, or were you just kind of pulled into it because you were interested?

Well actually, when I first got hired here I got hired to—as like two days a month to take care of the beehive and the greenhouse. And that's how I got started. And I got paid just a minimum hourly rate for however many hours I put in. It wasn't like a nine to five job or an eight to five job; it was just when I wanted to come in and take care or do anything it took to keep an observation hive going in the greenhouse. And there was a guy that worked down here that I helped get it started. They've bought more and more property and they keep saying they want to hire us full-time but they can't get the positions you know; so I don't really care. At my age, I don't care about getting a new—starting a new career anyway. I'm about ready to go off on my own and build things and build boats and—and shrimp before it's over, you know, while we can still do it legally and all. And the bees, too. And I got into the bee business fifteen years ago. That takes a lot of time and it's pretty good money in it. There's not real good money in the red honey, but there's good money in tupelo [honey]. So I kind of am interested in that, you know, and I think I can survive as long as I stay healthy. And if I go down, I'm going to have to hire somebody to take care of everything.

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So tell me how you got into that and what interested you in keeping bees.

I liked honey. My grandmother, when I was a kid, got honey from the local beekeeper out here, and he did tupelo honey. And that's where I first tasted tupelo honey. [There were] several old-timers around here. One guy was named Joe Zingarelli [brother to Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli] and he was an older beekeeper that had always done the honey. I mean he, was the honey man. Him and his two sons. And you know, he had a fairly good operation. Not huge, but I mean one hundred-something hives and colonies, and he worked pretty hard….I'd always liked tupelo honey, so I knew I'd like to produce it. So I just started studying on it like everything else. [I] went to a guest lecture right here [in the ANERR education room] in 1992. Jack Polk, I think his name is, a bee keeper from Havana, Florida, over by Tallahassee came—him and his wife. They were experienced beekeepers. They did a guest lecture right here, and in 1998, I think it was, I was doing a guest lecture right here in the same place.
But I got into it small and then bought into it a little more. I bought three hives from some guys in Panama City and then I got—bought—went back in February; that was like in October and then I went back in February and bought twenty more and then worked up to around two hundred hives by just building them and splitting them and building more and splitting and doubling and splitting and doubling. And we just got into it and got—ended up getting a tractor and ended up getting a barge—a small barge and two trailers and a truck and just paid for a lot of stuff. I mean, one of my fellow beekeepers told me, he said, “Well I'll tell you—.” We would always talk about whether we were going to make it or not. He said, “If you take care of your bees they'll take care of you.” And he was right…If it wasn't for the tupelo, though, I don't think we could make it as a beekeeper around here because of the imports. I hate to keep dwelling on it but they bring in this cheap Chinese honey and Mexican honey, Vietnam honey. We know that's where it's coming from because they give us the old barrels to put our honey in. Most of our honey goes to Dutch Gold in Pennsylvania. [That’s a] big company, Dutch Gold, and they ship barrels down here to a dealer and all the empty barrels—they give us the barrels and we put the honey in and give them back to them, and then they got their old barrels with our honey, and they pay us for the honey and—but the barrels are all from China, Mexico, Vietnam, and—and South America—Argentina…So anyway, if we didn't have tupelo, I don't know that we could make it with, you know, the low price of the import honey business. We can't compete with them.

Can you explain what's special about tupelo honey?

Well it's just specialty honey. Every area has their specialty honey, and the tupelo honey is just a tree that grows in our river that nobody probably ever in the years and years ago before—you know bees haven't been in the United States that long. Since the late 1800s, early 1900s is the beginning of the—the European honey bee. It was introduced to the United States; before then it most of our bees was just the bumblebees and the sting-less bees and the ones that didn't carry surplus honey…So anyway, they brought the bees over here and somebody discovered that the bees were working the [Apalachicola] river. Now I don't know the exact story. I'd like to learn about it, but they discovered that the bees would make honey off of these trees up the river, and the trees were really powerful trees. I mean, big trees that put out a good blossom, but the only bad thing is they don't last but three weeks during the bloom. If you don't make that three weeks of the—I mean, and every day counts. If you don't make the honey within three weeks or have a spell of one week of bad weather, I mean, it messes you up big time in production. Every day—every minute of every day counts because them bees have to get out and bring the nectar in. That's the only way to make tupelo honey. If you can have a machine and go up there and harvest the blossoms or something and manufacture honey—squeeze it out—it would be wonderful, but you can't. The only way to make it is bees collecting the nectar off of the male blossom and a little bit off the female.     There's two trees—a male and female tree but they—it's just a—a real different taste in honey, and we don't have very much of it either. And there's not a lot of the honey because there's not very many beekeepers left. And I don't know what the average of the barrel is, but I mean I'm sure they don't make it—we probably—everybody in this don't make 500 barrels of tupelo honey produced in the world. Five hundred fifty-five-gallon drums would be my estimate of what is produced in the southeastern United States between the Ochlockonee River, the Apalachicola River and the Choctawhatchee River, which is about the extent of it.
     A little bit of it may grow up the river some but it’s not really good enough to really produce certified tupelo honey which, has to be enough of the tupelo pollen in the honey to actually get certified as to call it you know tupelo honey—good tupelo honey. But it’s got a distinct flavor. It’s got minerals, vitamins…Over around Tallahassee, there were some big bee keepers over there back in the days and around Havana, but most of them came down our river and had leases on our river. And now I’ve got about the only bee leases on our river that’s existing, but we don’t run enough bees up there to really—I mean, we could run a lot more bees and produce more honey, and that’s what I’d kind of like to do because there’s been an explosion in the market of tupelo honey. People are discovering it and it’s, you know, like everything else it’s more and more people, you know, on the earth right now than there’s ever been and traveling down here and tourism, you know, still going pretty good and pretty strong. And they come and buy few little jars, and they’ll go back and then they’ll call me and want me to ship them a lot of it. Which I do a lot—as much as I can. Sometimes I just can't do it and then, usually, we’ll sell out.
     But I have kept it all year and made enough for the last two years, and it was a good thing because some of the time—like we might go a year and not make hardly anything—be bad weather, a norther come out or something. I’ve had—out of my fifteen or fourteen years of doing it, I think I’ve had two seasons where we didn’t hardly make anything. And, you know, you don’t make any honey, you don’t do any work. You do something else—go after more flounders or mullet or crabs or whatever.

And working off the river was that something that was important to you to do because not anybody is doing it anymore?

Well if I didn't do it, nobody around here would get any good honey that I know of. I mean there's Lanier over in—in Wewahitchka and he's—he makes good honey, but it isn't from our river. He's over in a branch off the Chipola River and the Dead Lakes, and he's over in Gulf County, you know, and I don't bother him and he don't usually bother me…Our lease is on the river and the bees—we travel two miles. They can't get to the mainland hardwood forest to get gallberries, so all they can get is tupelo, and we put them up on them remote docks that's only accessible by boat which is, you know, that's pretty hard in itself to have to haul a bunch of bees on a boat, you know. But our old-timers has been doing it for years. I hauled them on a lot of different kind of boats—mullet boats, crab boats, flounder boats, skiffs, duck boats [Laughs]—we've done it all kind of ways, but the flat deck pontoon barge is the way to go that we pull out on a trailer.
But the bees have to go—I mean they go two miles, so if you set out like they do over in Gulf County and on the mainland and let them go, sure they'll go to the tupelo [trees], but they're getting a percentage of gallberry, and once you get gallberry mixed with the tupelo it don't taste right, and it also goes to sugar. They would call it “sugar in a battle” where tupelo—good pure tupelo—won't granulate. But if it's got gallberry in it, it will settle in the bottom, and it will be about a half-inch thick, especially after cold weather. If it's cold it causes honey to, you know, thicken up and it will cause it to granulate if it's got the capability. I love, personally, orange blossom honey, but it granulates bad. And it just ruins the taste to me.

Does the tupelo gum tree specifically like being along the river right there? Is that a habitat?

Oh, yeah. They're water trees. They grow right out of the water. They will grow on land. Like I've got them in my yard [at home], but I have to water them a lot, and they don't never grow as good as they do in the water. I've seen some huge trees—I mean this big around—three-foot big around or bigger and sixty-foot tall or more. Just huge trees, growing back in some of the swamps and cypress swamps is where they like to grow in the water and they get reproduced by the seeds. The seeds will float around, and when the conditions are right it will take off, you know. That's how I planted mine—the seeds.

Are there any youngsters who are interesting in apprenticing with you about bee keeping?

There's a few every now and then. Most of them end up going to college and moving off, though. I don't know that there's going to be too many that really—it don't seem to be as many—now days as many born food producers as it used to be. Because they don't have to. Back in my day, a lot of people were food producers…But there's not near as many food producers as it used to be. I mean, I've produced thousands and thousands of pounds of food for people to eat myself, you know, by [getting] shrimp, fish, crabs, honey. But there's—I mean, you'll have some—some people that never touch anything like that and never have to produce the first, you know, pound of anything. And that's good, you know. I wish that's the way I was. I wish I could surf all my life, which I like to do. But I can't get the food producing out of me, and I just don't think that the youngsters have got it in them.
But on the bees, I don't know. It takes somebody that really wants to work hard to be in the bee business because it's the hottest work you'll ever do. It's so hot, you can't hardly do it. Every year I say I'm never going to do this again. That's one of them things—never again. After this, this does it for me. It's just too hot. But I end up keep doing it, you know. spring will get here and the spring is nice. If it stayed like spring every year, I mean all—the whole year it would be fine. Spring is wonderful. I make plenty of honey and everything but then when it starts getting June and July heat and you've got thunderstorms and muggy weather and storms and just that heat—intense heat in August, you just about can't work. And after the summer, you go back in the fall and you just have to take the dead [bees] out, you know. It's just part of it. You lose some by not working. You'll lose them. The Queens will die. The moths eat all the combs up, you know, and basically just throw them away and build new frames and foundations and then take them away from your powerful hives in the spring to rebuild. You have to keep—they take care of their selves but not by their selves. You have to manually go in and rebuild.

Where is your honey house?

It's at my house up here about—not far from the Piggly-Wiggly. It's not big though; it's just like a shed that I closed in and it's got a concrete floor. And it's too small; I've outgrown it a long time ago and I've got a—but then I said well I'm going to build me a big honey nest but I just hadn't got around to it. I've got another house that I've inherited from my grandmother and it's got an old shed that I can—that I'm thinking about redoing it you know and making—because I'm eventually going to move down there. It's a bigger piece of property and I've got more room for all of my boats; I've got about five boats and I've got them at different locations you know—got a few at my house, few at my dad's house, couple here and a couple there; got one up at the Bee Yard. The boat stays up at what we call the Bee Yard Headquarters up on Highway 65, but I eventually am going to build a new honey house.

The bees are at different places and there are different seasonal things that they're getting pollen from. Are you bottling that honey too, or is that just—they're sustaining themselves?

No, they're sustaining themselves. That honey, we take that—the honey that we take in the spring like that they make in January and February and March and—and the first part of April, all that goes as baker grade honey. It all mixes together. A lot of them call it red honey, a lot of beekeepers do, baker grade. Light amber is what it's called on the market, and it goes anywhere from—I've seen the price start at thirty-eight-cents a pound and be as high as a dollar thirty a pound. Unfortunately, I've never sold any for that kind of price. I think the most I've ever got was like maybe ninety [cents].
But anyway, we usually leave all the honey from about the end of the summer and let them sustain itself with that honey, but we take the baker grade and barrel it up. And sometimes we might keep it for several years—keep it in a shed in the barrels—tight drum, you know—and all, and you can keep it for years because it goes to sugar, and it's just in a sugary form—not crystal sugar. It's kind of like a paste. It's kind of like cake icing, thick cake icing, and it'll be good until whoever gets it will heat it up and then liquefy, and then they'll filter it and most of it goes to the—to the baking industry. Like I say baker grade. In fact, a few—about four years ago we sold to Dutch Gold, and they took it up to Pennsylvania. I don't know what—where they go; they're all over with their honey. But the last time we sold, the year before last in the summer about a year and a half ago it went to Sara Lee Bakeries because they didn't want any imported honey because they heard it had chemicals in it and our whole truckload of honey like 68 barrels went to—to make honey wheat bread or honey bread that they came out with…That's where it went. And we sold—we made it here and it stayed here, you know, in the Southeast.

I want to ask you about the bee boxes themselves. And I have one question that I've always been curious about, and it's probably a silly question, but the bee boxes are always all different colors. And I wonder if that at one time like one producer had one color, and they just got mixed up over the years or if that means something.

Kind of a combination. That, and sometimes they'll just go—it's just a preference. Like I've had friends that wouldn't paint theirs nothing but white. Myself, I like the silver color because I think it reflects the sun better, and it don't show the stains as bad. I've [seen] people that painted them light green. I've had one guy say he just buys the paint that's on sale and paints his houses all different colors…And they get all mixed up when you sell boxes to one another. And I'll buy somebody else out or they might buy somebody out, they just get all mixed up. But it's mainly like somebody painted 100 of them here and 100 there but just a certain color that they decided they liked or something. People get into the business and get out of it all the time. I mean there's a lot of people that get in and out of it. I've seen five or six people get in it and back out, since I've been in it.

Can you talk about the architecture of a box and the boards that go in it and the spaces between and the—?

Well the normal box is like a deep—when I say deep, it's a nine and five-eighths depth box, and they're about sixteen inches wide and twenty inches long. That's the standard high-body box. And they hold nine frames all the way across. We call them frames, and they're wooden little slats that go in and they have a plastic or a bee wax foundation, and once you set them on a hive they'll actually draw out and make combs out of it. So you've got nine combs in a normal box, and that comb can just be used over and over and over. And after they put honey in it, they'll seal it off, and you have to uncap it and use all the cappings after they—the caps that come off of it—there's a machine called an uncapper—uncapping machine or a hot knife. The old-timers used old hot knives. You melt that down and that's what makes candles and, you know—we have about several hundred pounds of surplus wax every year just from—from old cappings and combs and stuff that might have been broke up or something. But anyway, they're all the standard width and length, but you have different depths. Some of the bee keepers like the shallower boxes, and they're easier to handle, especially when they're full of honey. So I have seen honey boxes weigh eighty pounds before or more. I don't know how much they weigh. I just can't hardly pick them up. So over the years they've developed a medium-sized box and a shallow box. The shallow boxes are really too shallow. The deep boxes are too deep and the medium boxes are really the best depth as far as, you know, the honey boxes. But a lot of people won't use a medium box because when you extract them and you take out the load and extractor—there are these deep combs. I mean, you really put out a lot of honey. So if you're going to go through the trouble of loading thirty-five frames into an extractor, it might as well be the big ones because when you put out—when they unload and spin—the honey spins out of those combs, you're going to have a lot of honey compared to just a little bit. You've done—all the time is loading and unloading and extracting machine—the centrifuge is what they are—a spindle. That's where the work is. But I mean, that's the basic principle of a box.

Do you know much or anything about the folks who use bee stings to help arthritis and things like that?

Yeah, I've had some people. They use it for Muscular Dystrophy and arthritis. But I've had people come and get bees from me before that was traveling. They use it, and they say it works good. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to move sometimes. It's kind of like it's got cortisone in it—in the bee sting. It's protein is all it is—it's protein—protein but they say it's got cortisone, and it will go into you and—and, you know, support the muscle or refurbish the muscle somehow. And I know it goes into your muscle because it swells up big time, especially if you're not used to it.

So people just call you up because they know you have bees, and they'll ask to buy a few?

They have before, uh-hmm. I just give them to them.

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What name do you call your honey that you sell?

My honey that I sell, well, I call it Apalachicola River Tupelo Honey. And I've got my company, Watkins Honey Incorporated. I had to incorporate for liability purposes and just to keep all the books straight and all. It's more aggravation. You would not believe the trouble it is just to be a beekeeper. When you say, well he's a bee keeper; he's got some bees in his yard and he sells honey and that's that. [Laughs] But it's just like when you get into the corporations and the food inspector and the—all the inspections and you have to go to the license and insurance and leases—licenses and the leases and the—just permits and the—just everything, the income tax and the liability insurance, products liability. And just the labels you have to get, the containers, and the wood ware and the feed and the chemicals [Laughs]—not chemicals but the antibiotics, you know. Medications I'd say. I mean it's just about an overwhelming business. And I know some big beekeepers that's got out of it here recently, but I never really wanted to get into big enough that I couldn't just get out of it pretty quick. You know, I don't want to be into it with 1,000 beehives where I'd be locked into it for life and, you know, lose a lot of money if it didn't pan out. Or something came in and killed the bees or something, you know. I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, you know, with the bees. But it's been fun.

Would you say you're unique in having these three hats you wear—or probably twenty hats you wear—but with the work you're in?

I'm saying there ain't very many—probably nobody that I know of around here that does as much as I've ever done. And, you know, I do four things at one time. I mean, it's a job but it's just—it takes planning and it takes pre-planning because what you do today is going to affect what's going to happen this time next year. That's the biggest thing; you've got to be able to plan ahead. If you don't plan ahead and know what's going to happen—and that takes years to you know learn and you know what's going to happen. Where am I going to be this time next year if I do this for this and that with this over here, you know? What's going to happen, you know. And that's—it's just like when you're planting, see. Well, I'm going to plan seed in September, and in November I'm going to be eating mustard greens, you know? You've got to say, “Well, what's going to be going on in November? Am I going to be able to take care of them or do I want them then?” And then another thing, like planting the seed, you've got to take care of it. For two weeks I'd say I—I water all my seeds every day because once they start germinating if you—you know let them go dry then they can't make it, but once they develop roots, of course, they can take care of their self. But that's the type of thing I do to make sure—kind of repeated every day thing, but being a diabetic I've learned to live with a schedule. And that's probably one of the biggest things in life that anybody can be that I've seen that can really be important production-wise or anything is to be on a normal schedule and not be sporadic, you know, and do things all you know mixed up—different times.

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Do you think there's something else out there that you're going to pick up and know how to do?

Hmm, I don't know. I don't really want to do anything else. I mean I've got enough to do. [Laughs] I'd like to get in on a little more of this money that the tourists are bringing in because that's where the big money is.

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Well how do you see a possibility of you getting into the tourist trade that's growing here?

The way I was thinking would be a restaurant like I was telling you. The restaurant business is really—somebody that would manage it their self. The worst part of a restaurant—I've seen this happen a lot of times—is they'll get a good restaurant operation going and let somebody else run it, somebody that was a good foundation, a good person that could work with people and know—and know how to cook and know how to run the operation and get it set up and all and then move and not have a good manager. That's the death of a good restaurant. I've seen that happen a lot of times But if they stay there—I've seen mom and pop operations with little restaurants raise families forever and retire on a little restaurant, but they never left. The mom and pop never left and just a little operation and make a good—make a good living but they opened a lot and they had a good—they had the same product. They never really got—went off the wall, you know, and had—they had the best hamburger in town, the best fried chicken, you know, and they sold a little beer and whatnot. But they never turned it over to somebody and went off and did something else…But I'd like to get into it. I just got so much going.
But since I've been in the honey business, I've started making honey mead which is like honey wine. And I'd like to make that and sell it on the commercial operation but you can't—I can't sell it to you and you sell it to the public. You have to sell it to another dealer, and then they'd have to sell it—the way Florida law is. Or, either I'd have to have like a pub or a bar and brew it right there and sell it in the glass but not sell it in the bottle. But everybody wants to get bottles and sell it to their friends—or give it to their friends you know and—and they want it. Everybody I've made it and gave it to, they want to buy it, you know. That's the first thing they say, “When are you going to sell me some,” you know. But you can't make but so many gallons a year as a recreational operation. But I learned it from a guy—a friend in New Orleans. He taught me how to do it and he said use any kind of honey. It don't have to be table-grade honey but I tried that and it made a real strong—the sugary honey like gallberry goes to sugar fast, it made a real powerful alcohol that I didn't like too good but the tupelo made a more table honey. The table honey tupelo made a better—a better tasting wine.

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