A strong summer hive holds somewhere around fifty thousand bees, and on any warm day a third of them are foragers. Each forager makes ten or more trips, and each trip touches somewhere between fifty and a hundred flowers. Multiply it out and a single hive can visit 225,000 flowers before the sun goes down.
That number is where the counter on our homepage comes from. It is our best honest estimate, four hives' worth of days since April 2, 2025, six hives' worth since Earth Day 2026, ticking up while you read this.
Here is the part we love: the bees are not doing it for us. They are doing it for the hive. The pollination is a side effect, and it lands on every garden, crabapple, clover patch, and roadside wildflower within about two miles of our lot. That circle covers most of Libertyville and a good stretch of the Des Plaines River corridor.
While your oil gets changed, the bees put in about four thousand flower visits.
So if your tomatoes came in strong this year and you live anywhere near Milwaukee Avenue, one of our girls may have stopped by. She did not leave a card. She never does.
An oil change takes about forty minutes. In that time, our six hives will make roughly four thousand flower visits. We find it steadies the mind to wait alongside coworkers like that.
