Oak Cliff Bee Company provides hive management services, including at The Crescent

Winnetka Heights neighbor Chris Chance says he started working with bees at exactly the wrong time.

“Didn’t go so great right out of the gate,” he says. “But you know, learned from my mistakes, and kind of got pretty good at it. Well, I say I got good at it. I didn’t get good at it. Even today, they still humble me in terms of reminding me that they’re going to do whatever they want to do.”

Although he says otherwise, Chance has grown his beekeeping success into the Oak Cliff Bee Company. The organization’s mission is to champion sustainable beekeeping practices through raising public awareness on the valuable role of bees, working with communities to safeguard the essential pollinators.

Chance got his start with bees after some time spent at Mount St. Michael Catholic School’s farm program, which he and his wife participated in while their children attended the school.

Around 2018 or 2019, the Chances started bringing in chickens to sell eggs and adding to the urban farm experience that included sheep and geese, turkeys around Thanksgiving, and a big Pyrenees dog. There’s also a cat on the property named Midnight Chicken.

“Every year, it’s somewhat of a struggle in terms of balancing the budget and everything. And so that didn’t leave a ton of resources available from the school to fund the farm,” Chance says. “And so I kind of had a really expensive month with electric fences and stuff that related to the chickens. And it’s like, ‘I got to figure out a way to make some revenue on this related to the farm, to help finance it, and I’ll pay for it.’”

He first introduced three or four hives to the farm in 2020, growing to six or seven before starting a bee club at the school. By November 2023, he launched the Oak Cliff Bee Company.

With his background in Fortune 500 businesses and running an IT company, Chance says he felt he had a pretty good handle on how to join the corporate side of hive management. There are few hive management companies in Dallas and after learning what a competitor offered, he says he felt he could do even better.

Oak Cliff Bee Company currently has about 50 installs that they manage, including hives at The Crescent, the North Texas Food Bank Community Garden and the Hilton Anatole. 

A typical day starts out in Oak Cliff, running a route across North Texas, checking in on whether or not to provide the bees with supplemental food and evaluating their resources. The dedicated beekeepers will either bring in additional boxes for expansion or implement splits, where colonies will be divided in a way that mimics natural swarm behavior.

Most recently, Chance says some of the queens that went through a split haven’t taken well. Another factor that affects hive management is the weather, with seasons coming a little bit earlier than normal this year.

“It’s one of these bridges that we can’t do anything about, just have to figure it out,” he says.

That troubleshooting aspect is part of why Chance continues to work with bees.

“I love the problem-solving piece of it. I love the fact that when everything clicks and again, they control it, right?” he says. “I act like I have something to do with it. I don’t. The whole hive is an organism, and (when) it works well, it’s just amazing to see it all come together.”

Another key component that Chance enjoys with beekeeping is sustainability.

“We’re very intentional with what we do, and it’s really driven from a Texas agriculture perspective,” he says.

By connecting with the community through education, Chance says it’s been a positive experience to see how bees bring people together.

“I really enjoy, personally, just educating people around that. And that’s part of the reason that I’m so passionate about our bee club that we have (at Mount St. Michael), and why I put so much energy into it,” he says. “Truly, that’s how, in my mind, we define sustainability is educating people around bees.”