Andrew Fisher is a fourth-generation Florida beekeeper. Two of those generations kept bees commercially, full time — and decades after they passed, people in the industry still remember his great-grandfather and grandfather.
As a kid around the family operation, one thing was always true: there was never enough good queens. The demand outran the supply every single year. He filed that away.
After years in professional sales with John Deere, the itch won. He missed the field. He missed being sweaty and sticky because of the bees. So he packed the pickup, drove south, and went to work learning commercial queen rearing — the last piece he needed to run a large beekeeping operation the way his family had.
Eight years later: a queen operation raising stock that customers reorder from Maine to California, run alongside thousands of production colonies. Somewhere in there, while selling queens in Alabama, he met Celena — and started sending her the customers he couldn't supply. She came for a look at the commercial beekeeping life in Florida and stayed for the queens.
Queen rearing started as the enjoyment of breeding his own stock. It still is.
