PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — A Pinellas County woman has created two successful businesses focused on honey bees.

Elisha Bixler, the owner of How’s Your Day Honey, originally started making honey for her family but has since grown that hobby into products found in more than a dozen stores around the Bay Area.

Bixler says she is enjoying sweet success thanks in part to the thousands of bees she encounters daily.

“Sometimes some are a little more feisty, but usually I can just wear a veil,” she said as she was preparing for a day of work.

Bixler said it all started with an apiary at her house, a location where beehives of honey bees are kept, and the love she has for fresh honey.

“I started with a couple hives in the backyard,” she said.

Since then, she says her passion has grown so much that she’s started a business where she's able to utilize her love of honey while also making sure bees stay alive and thriving away from people’s homes.

“I get such a thrill of opening walls and seeing the treasure behind,” she said.

She started How’s Your Day Honey, which not only produces honey, but also relocates problem beehives found in people’s homes or trees.

Bixler moves the hives  to her apiaries or farms so the bees can produce honey, which she can turn around and sell.

Right now, Bixler said her days are rarely slow.

“Calls are coming in,” she said.

On the day she spoke with Spectrum News, Bixler spent most of the day at a Pinellas County home where the homeowner found a large number of bees coming out of her wall.

When she gets a call, Bixler travels to the site and works to remove the hive.

“Smoker,” she said of one step in the process to calm the bees before removal. “That’s how we’re going to do this.”

She moves the bees into containers with replicated hives inside before removing them.

“Oh, look at that,” Bixler said after locating bees in a couple different spots at the house. “They’re coming out, they are in here.”

Once she gets these bees to come out of their hiding places and moved to her property, the honey they produce gets bottled and sold to stores in the Bay Area.

“I’m really lucky that I get to save bees and raise them,” Bixler said.

She says the job does come with some occupational hazards.

“I got stung five times in the face when I first got my hives,” she said.

She says getting stung happens almost daily but she doesn’t mind.

“This is where I get excited,” Bixler said.

Because getting the chance to save these honey makers is why she says she could spend the rest of her life surrounded by them.

Bixler says following the pandemic, she had to deal with supply chain issues getting jars and lids for her honey but says that has drastically improved this year.

On each jar of honey that she sells she prints the location of the hives where the honey is produced.