Stephanie Spear TT’s Bees is a Centreville-based apiary and bee-removal service. It’s also a family business run by a father-daughter duo who started out as hobbyists and are now award-winning beekeepers. The duo harvests honey and beeswax from the hives throughout Northern Virginia. Read on for more about this buzzing business and where to find this special honey.
About TT
Tagg Timm is a retired Air Force Major and the namesake for the apiary. But he credits his daughter, Maia, for getting him into bees in the first place. “She’s always been into bugs, and during COVID, she proposed that we try out getting a beehive,” he said. Tagg and Maia started with a couple of hives and learned all they could about beekeeping, earning certificates from Michigan State University’s Heroes to Hives program.
What started as a backyard hobby has turned into a family business, with Tagg managing the 20+ hives he has now, and Maia running the sales side of things. There are 20 hives at the Timm home in Centreville, and a handful more in Purcellville, VA. Tagg and Maia sell raw beeswax, beeswax candles, and honeycomb in addition to the honey.
Tagg got involved with the Fairfax Beekeepers, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating aspiring and seasoned beekeepers through mentorship, education, and equipment sharing. He started attending virtual meetings, then hosting group events for honey extraction, and eventually became president for two years.
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Members across Fairfax County share the bulky and costly equipment, and making sure everyone had access to it was important to Tagg. “My main goal was to get more equipment and have it spread out throughout the county to make it easier for members to use,” he said. For example, one of the pieces of equipment in high demand is an extractor, which uses centrifugal force to extract the honey. And since most beekeepers are on the same springtime production schedule, having more equipment makes it easier for everyone to complete their harvests.
Tagg continues his mentorship of aspiring beekeepers informally now that his presidency is complete. “I sell queen bees to people who want to start a hive,” he said, “and I built small starter bee boxes for people who want to get started.”
About the Honey
Tasting the honey is akin to wine tasting: each blend has a distinctive taste. The color of the honey varies based on the kind of flower it visited to gather nectar. During our visit, we tasted about a dozen different honeys, each of which would have been delicious on its own, but taken all together, made for a truly decadent experience.
One of TT’s honeys won 1st Place in the 2023 Virginia State Fair, in the category for dark extracted honey. “We plan to win again this year,” Tagg said. Approximately 400 honeys were entered into the honey category, with winners broken down into 14 honey and honey-adjacent categories (such as candles and beeswax). The honey is made from a copse of Tree of Life trees near the hives in Centreville.
Tagg shows a queen bee in a protective case
Tagg and Maia sell almost exclusively through word of mouth. “We don’t go to farmers markets, we don’t advertise, and we always sell out,” he said. The harvest season runs from approximately April to June, and Tagg said that he sold the last of the 2023 harvest in December 2023. The total harvest amount is dependent on the weather. “A poor year might be 45 pounds of honey per hive, while a good year would be 125 pounds of honey per hive,” Tagg said.
In addition to the blue-ribbon winning Tree of Life honey, Tagg said that another big seller is the early season honey, which many people use to treat springtime seasonal allergies. “I started this year with five, 25-gallon tubs of it, and I’m down to three jars,” Tagg said of this type of honey during an early-July visit.
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Tagg has spent a great deal of time learning about the mechanics of honey bees and their behavior. He talks about the bees and their talents with reverence, describing them as some of the smartest animals on the planet. “A honeycomb is an architectural and structural accomplishment,” he said. “These little bees are making one of the most structurally sound things in the world.”
Tagg’s knowledge of bees and comfort handling them means he is frequently called to help remove a hive that has formed in the wrong spot, such as a tree branch or under someone’s deck.
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