Ruben on the Road: Creek House Honey Farm thriving in the Texas Panhandle

CANYON, Texas (KFDA) - Ruben makes a stop in Canyon to visit a local honey farm and learns what makes them thrive in the Texas Panhandle.

George Nester, co-owner of Honey Buzz Winery, says about five years ago they opened up Creek House Honey Farm.

George says they wanted to utilize a lot of that honey not just for selling or in skin care, but to also make mead, a fermented honey wine.

“And so about five years ago I started experimenting with making mead and now we do that. We probably use about 100 gallons a month of that,” said George.

George says with the expansion they’re going to do, they’ll increase that several times fold.

Paige Nester, co-owner of Creek House Honey Farm, says people can expect to come to the restaurant and eat food that’s honey based.

“For example, we have a honey melt. We make all of our dressings, we make our honey mustard, we make our poppy seed. We just, we like to be fresh and we like to be unique and we like to stick with the theme,” said Paige.

Paige says their skin care started out with her making a lip balm and lotion. They started to realize quickly that the propolis they were using and the beeswax were healing.

“So people that have dermatitis issues like eczema or psoriasis, it was actually healing their skin,” said Paige. “And so that’s where the skin care kind of blew up because just word of mouth spread quickly on how effective it was for people.”

Paige says the sell it at the farm and about 100 different retail stores. They go to market in January and they’re building a production facility to help with that growth.

“I grew up in Canyon. We sit on some land that my grandparents owned that was passed down to my parents and then to Paige and me,” said George.

They have the land and opportunity, and George says the Texas Panhandle is unique.

“We are sort of up in the desert, so we’re lucky we’re the biggest apiary in the Panhandle or the biggest meadery in the Panhandle,” said George.

The environment has helped them with that uniqueness. George says what they’re doing is different, have honey to have skin care from the beehives.

“So it’s unique, it’s different, and yeah, the city of Canyon and Amarillo and really the whole Panhandle, has really been behind us,” said George.

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