In February 2012, Tom Wilk, head beekeeper at Wilk Apiary, took The New York City Beekeepers Association Beekeeping Course with Andrew and Norm Cote. From that tentative beginning we have grown to having 15 apiaries with 82 hives in Queens, Manhattan, Nassau County, Ulster County, Orange County, and Sullivan County – all in New York State.
Our main focus is to raise colonies of honey bees in New York City. We usually have just a hive or two per location. These locations are hosted by environmentally aware people who want to help the honey bees by having us put hives on their property. If a site is large enough and there seems to be enough forage space to accommodate more honey bees, we will consider placing more hives.
While it sometimes gets crazy going to multiple sites inspecting and servicing the honeybees, we like the idea of bringing honey bees to as many areas as we can.
We sell honey from our hives as well as other places to help pay for the costs involved with keeping honey bees in New York.
In July 2019, Tom Wilk became a Certified Master Beekeeper at Cornell University's Dyce Labs for Honey Bee Studies. Tom also became the Long Island/New York City region director for the Empire State Honey Producers Association. A position he held until 2024.
Our History
In 2020, we expanded our apiary at the Magnanini Winery to over 20 hives along with some breeding hives. This apiary is using only NY state bred honey bees from Shultz Apiaries in Allegany County, NY as part of our commitment to use and raise honey bees that are conditioned for our weather. Please follow along as we enter into our 10th season of beekeeping in 2021.
In December 2020 we official became the first New York City beekeepers to be part of the New York State Grown & Certified program. All honey from our New York State hives falls under this category and can contain the official logo.
Our big changes in 2024 is the building of our own dedicated honey processing center. It is in Bethel, New York on our own land. We expect to have it in operation for our first 2025 harvests.
As we have time over the winter months, Tom's hope is to show some before and during construction stories for Wilk Apiary North.
Wilk Apiary North will be a place to get all of our production work done as well as a place we can let local beekeepers come to use our large accumulation of honey extraction equipment saving them money and giving them a pristine work place which also will save them time.
Tom is very proud to have not used any crowd funding sources for this large endeavor and just use money from his hard work and the honey sales we get throughout the year.
