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This page is a presentation of current ideas and or articles,
topics listed may not reflect Draper's opinions.
This page is meant for educational and informational purposes only.
If you have a topic that you would like to see posted here let me know.
Updated on: 08/12/10
I am working on transcribing my grandfather's book word for
word and will be posting portions of it as I get it done.
Eventually I will post
the entire thing to be read online or downloaded.
I added the second part Dare to
Jump today - 05/26/10.
I added the third part Dare to Give Your Best today - 06/23/10.
I added the fourth part Dare to Stick With It today - 08/12/10.
YOU CAN GROSS A MILLION DOLLARS
By Bernard Draper
Introduction
Success?
Who doesn’t want a big slice of it? What beekeeper doesn’t want to harvest profitable crops even in bad-weather years? Even beekeepers who say their bees are just a hobby desire the extra psychological and financial benefits of maximum production.
At a New Jersey bee meeting I heard one man comment: “I’ve been a beekeeper for forty years and never made a dime.” Unfortunately he’s not alone in his testimonial. Many small-time beekeepers struggle on for years and years, never recovering their investments.
Even larger bee businesses sometimes “give in” to despair and want to throw in the towel. One Ohio man called us wanting to sell his seven hundred hives. The weather had been bad for three years, he said, and he couldn’t go on with such small crops. But I notice that no matter what the weather, some beekeepers seem always to have better crops than their neighbors. Some seem to be able to withstand the setbacks and continue to take off as much honey as conditions would possibly allow.
In Genesis 8:22 God promises that “while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest…shall not cease.” God does his part, bringing season after season to us. We must, in turn, do our part; having bees in the spring does not necessarily mean having honey in the fall. An abundance of planting, working, and implementing methods and procedures lies between seedtime and a tangible harvest.
What makes the difference between survivors and those who don’t make a go of it?
That question is answered in this small book. The principles I describe are not secret formulas; many of them are age-old common sense maxims, but they have never been learned or have been quickly forgotten by most people.
If you want to learn the fundamentals of beekeeping (and how important it is to know them), you should attend classes, read beekeeping books, read bee magazines, and/or attend bee meetings and conventions. Better yet, get acquainted with a successful beekeeper and make arrangements to work with him in the field. There you’ll be confronted with real problems, such as a queenless hive, a drone layer, too many drone cells in a brood chamber, congestion of a brood chamber, and swarming. First-hand experience and “apprenticeship” will teach you how a successful beekeeper does and should correct the problem.
More beekeepers than you would think do not know the basics of bee life. The fundamentals are very important, but they are not outlined in this book that details the business aspect of beekeeping.
After a recent lecture in which I covered the contents of this book, one beekeeper, who was also a furniture dealer, commented, “The principles and procedures you have given here will help me do a better job selling furniture.” And he was right. These principles are principles for living. They can influence you every hour of the day, no matter what your task.
In some ways, success is a relative term. If you see your beekeeping as a hobby, an enjoyable recreation that happens to bring a little extra income, and if you have reached that goal, then you have successes. One aspect of success involves achieving goals and knowing you have completed a job to your own satisfaction.
But on another level, success involves generating income and producing to your maximum potential. Beekeeping can be a lucrative business if properly managed. Last year we bought only part of one man’s thousand-hive crop, and, when we added up his invoices, we were (and he was!) surprised to see that we had paid him over $ 23,000. Now he was a successful beekeeper!
Do not think that such production is out of your reach. Starting today, you can begin your climb to heights you never dreamed possible.
Reach
for the Sky
Dare to Dream
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
So you remember being asked the question? Do you remember dreaming up the answer, thinking about the days when you’d be big enough and strong enough and smart enough to ____...To what? You fill in the blank with the dream that enchanted your playing hours.
No doubt your imagination ran wild—saving children from burning homes, leading a posse, healing sick people, parenting a baby, or mixing up new potions.
But then you grew up. And what happened? Did the childhood dreams mature into adult dreams or did the dreaming die as soon as you saw that you were able to pay you basic monthly bills—whether or not you were happy in what you were doing? A SUCCESSFUL PERSON NEVER STOPS DREAMING.
For years I’ve been watching people as they work and as they play. I see a difference between those who dream and those who have given it up forever. Many shop workers are content to work a seven-to-four shift year in and out. It seems they almost become a piece of the machinery, automatically and without thought using their muscles, but never their imaginations. Many homemakers tend to the bare necessities of keeping a house, and spend most of their hours watching daytime television or idly chatting with friends on the phone.
These dreamless people hardly seem aware of the fact that they live in a country where the sky is the limit, a country where dreamers can, and do, break out of their status quo molds. They don’t see that they can use the free enterprise system to its fullest potential. They are not under socialism that suppresses and forbids fulfillment of dreams that stifles a person’s productivity. We live in a land built for dreamers.
The dreamers (who might be running a machine identical to that of the non-dreamer or caring for a similar house) are always thinking up new challenges for themselves, improved methods, or a better life for their families.
Every success begins as a dream in someone’s mind. The colonialists dreamed of freedom before they declared themselves independent of England and before they won the war. The Wright brothers dreamed of flying before they rose off the ground. No one becomes president of the United States who doesn’t first dream about politics and about winning elections.
Dreamers always think in terms of potential. When driving past a swamp, they see a mine of loam. When watching fishermen bring in oysters, they think of pearls. When they see an empty canvas, they envision it covers with an oil landscape. When touching a bolt of cloth, they see a finished garment. When they see a field filled with flowering weeds, they dream of a honey crop.
Two growing companies, Mary Kay Cosmetics and Amway, have dangled dreams and potential in front of prospective distributors. They talk of financial independence and pumping the best from the American free enterprise system.
Although I see that their focus on status symbols such as pink Cadillacs and Winnebagos can easily be mis-used, I, nevertheless, applaud their founders and leaders who dared to dream what seemed to be an impossible dream. Because they first dreamed, they allow others to follow in their train.
But Amway and Mary Kay distributors have no corner on dreams. Someone before me has said it much better that I could: “It’s not the earning power one has but the yearning power” that motivates daring dreams.
Think about it. Did your hopes for the future end when you settled into your first job or your present job? Do you ever let yourself feel that you have “arrived” or that things will “always be this way”? If so, dare to shake off the cobwebs and think of how things could be. Dare to take on the attitude of one of my friends who is a pastor. Repeatedly he set a challenge before his congregation: “When this church no longer dreams dreams, I will know that my ministry here is over. I will move on to a new community.” He saw dreaming as one of the vital signs of the church’s life.
Some people think that dreaming hours are wasted hours. For me just the opposite is true. I look forward to the evening hours I spend lying in the cool grass of my backyard, looking up toward the cloud and star formations - and dreaming. The vastness of the heavens, stretching from horizon to horizon and in all directions, feeds my idea-bank until it is stuffed full. These are never wasted hours, for, although some creative ideas pop, in an instant, out of the sky, some have to build up for what seems like endless hours before they are whole and finished and full of sense. Sometimes a flash of inspiration will hit like lightning, but thinking through the exact working of the ides may, then, take hours, even weeks of star-gazing or lawn-mowing or dish-washing - whatever activity makes you most able to let your creative imagination run wild. Go ahead - Dare to Dream.
Have you ever quickly dismissed someone’s tales of future escapades by thinking, “Oh, he’s just a dreamer.” When the word “just” precedes the word I love so much, it loses all its power and “magic.”
We can dream all day and night and never change our prone position, say nothing of the whole world. DREAMS MUST BE ROLLED INTO ACTION.
Since no one cares as much about your dreams as you, it is only logical that you should be the one who makes them come true. If you don’t, no other person is going to. Your dreams will die.
One Midwestern farmer owned a field that was useless. A huge, deeply embedded rock sat in the middle of it. He saw no hope for moving it and so he sold the field. The buyer saw a great potential in the rock; he saw that it could be sculptured into a masterpiece.
If the new owner’s dream had stayed locked up in his mind for year, he would have been no better off than the farmer who had seen the land as good for nothing. Only when dreams jump into positive action do they do anyone any good. This man’s story ends profitably – the sculpture carved from that rock brought the new owner a fortune.
I, too, had a dream I wanted fulfilled, and I, too, have worked to make it come true. In November 1972 I backed into an angle bar and seriously injured my spinal cord. Doctors declared me totally and permanently disabled. They said I would eventually be paralyzed from the waist down, and they gave me no hope for any easing of the excruciating pain.
I will admit that at first I didn’t see any challenge in my condition. How could this have happened to me and WHY? I was angry at God, at the world, and at myself. But quickly I saw the devastating results of angry, negative thinking. I could not allow myself to think that I was an invalid. I would reach out and accomplish whatever I was physically able.
I would, at least, produce food for my own family – on that count I was determined. A few chickens, cows, and an adequate garden allowed us to eat well. But the price of sugar was high and I dreamed about a solution to the problem of sweetening that would lead us closer to our goal: being self-sufficient in the production of our food.
About that time a swarm set down in my oldest son’s nearby yard. A starter ser of bees was ours for the hiving. He and I grabbed at the opportunity of learning the basics of beekeeping.
From there our dream exploded into bigger dreams and we backed each step with positive action.
Have you ever watched someone who was blind to the obvious? Someone who struggled with and worried over problems for which the answer was right in plain sight? It sounds absurd to me now, but we could have called the local beekeeper and asked him to come take those menacing vermin off our land. But, instead, we saw them as just the food source we’d been looking for, and those bees surprised us by becoming so much more. Or was it a surprise? Did one small dream lead to another and another until we decided to gamble our savings on the beekeeping business?
How grateful I am that I did not despise “the little things,” the one swarm. I think of the biblical example of the mustard seed, the “least of all seeds” that brings forth the “greatest among herbs,” and I realize the great potential of something that looks so small. How many large corporations have started as cottage industries or in someone’s back lot and with only a few dollars cash, limited equipment and buildings? A small start – using what is available to us – can grow into endless bounty.
At first, and while we were still learning the basics of good beekeeping practices, we bought sixteen hives. Like many part-time beekeepers, we experimented in the kitchen with various bottling techniques. We nearly drove my patient wife to distraction.
At the end of the first year, we were thoroughly infected with the “bee bug.” We owned enough land to envision great possibilities, but would it work?
We had to try. The time was right for putting action behind our late-night talks.
My son left his job to give fulltime to the business we decided to call Draper’s Super Bee Apiaries. I continued to learn everything I could about the right and wrong way of encouraging prime production. We invested all our capital, and then borrowed $ 150,000 more.
Did people think we were foolish?
Most of our relatives and at least one acquaintance expressed great misgivings about our judgment. We were crazy to lay down that much money on our far-fetched dream – producing and selling honey and bee supplies on a mass scale. We knew that United States was consuming more honey that it was producing. Large amounts were being imported from South America and China. We knew the market existed. If we would be able to find our link in the chain, if we could get our product from off our hill and into the marketplace, we knew we could make a go of it.
We knew the saying was right, “If you have tried to do something and failed, you are vastly better off than if you had tried nothing and succeeded.”
One of my favorite Scripture verses says that if a farmer waits for just the right weather and soil conditions, he will never plant. If he never plants, he will never harvest a bumper crop. Regardless of the weather, a farmer, to receive a yield from his fields, must hide those kernels in the ground. Some years the perfect planting day never comes, but a good farmer jumps in. If he doesn’t gamble, he won’t harvest.
One New Testament story gives the best illustration of a man daring to “jump” when he had no proof of what the consequences would be. To walk on the water, Peter had to dare to step out of the boat. Surely most people would have thought him crazy for even thinking such a feat possible. But he did it. He put one foot, then both feet, on the water. Because of Jesus’s power, both feet stayed right there – on top of, rather than in, the lake.
How can you or I know what is possible, if we don’t take the plunge? As Norman Vincent Peale has said, anyone who “thinks he cannot do it will not do it.”
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Better than a fairy’s magic wand, one familiar four-letter word will transform dreams into realities. That word is work – work that involves commitment to a plan that leads toward a goal.
I’ve met people, who think of work as a “bad” four - letter word, and they avoid saying it and practicing it at all cost. They have no idea what they are missing – the joy of a job well done, the pride that comes with showing off the fruits of their work.
Someone has said that we are all manufacturers. Some of us make good, other make trouble, and still others make excuses. What makes the difference? What makes the difference between those who row the boat and those who rock it? (Have you ever noticed that rowers usually don’t have time to be rockers?)
Could the difference be found in a person’s attitude toward work?
We all set priorities for our lives. We choose how to spend our time and our money. If we want to succeed in business, WE MUST BE WILLING TO PAY THE PRICE OF HOURS OF HARD WORK. The prize is worth every moment of labor and every drop of sweat, yet we must not discount the fact that the price must be paid.
Who has ever heard of a prize-winning athlete who hasn’t practiced long hours for years on end? Hacksaw Reynolds, a member of the championship Los Angeles Rams inspired the whole team by his painstaking work. Long after the other players had gone home, he could be found in the back room watching filmed games, looking out for game plans and ideas on how to insure victory over their next opposing team.
He and other winners like him aren’t afraid to lay their energy in front of their fellow competitors. They aren’t afraid to win.
Anyone, young or old, who sets his or her eyes on earning a college degree, must start the process by ordering catalogues of courses, mailing the application, paying the tuition, and attending the scheduled classes. But anyone who has been through that process will tell you that there’s more to the story. No honest person receives a diploma that doesn’t spend countless hours reading, studying, and paper-writing. Any serious student occasionally or frequently has to say “no” to partying friends and “no” to droopy eyelids. He or she has goals and deadlines to meet that take precedence over other activities that may be worthy of attention – but later, not right now.
And so it is in business. Work makes dreams come true. There is nothing new about the importance of work. We often overlook all but the primary, first line of each of the Ten Commandments, but buried behind the commandment “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” is a command about work: Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work.”
If you were to inquire about the founding of most successful business, you would find some dreamer who was willing to work ten, twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen hours a day, six days a week to get and keep things going.
Jokes are sometimes made of Jewish businessmen, who are known for their frequent successes. But I have watched carefully, and noted that often the Jewish shopkeepers are out sweeping the sidewalk in the front of their stores hours before opening – and while their competitors are still lying in bed, asleep. Their relentless work makes them successful.
Dr. B.R. Lakin, a man now in his eighties, tells of his childhood and the successful fight against poverty that his father then waged. The whole family worked from “can to can’t” he says. He goes on to explain that they worked from “can see” in the morning to “can’t see” at night, from sun up to sun down. It worked for their family and I can vouch that it still works in the 1980s.
To be beneficial, work must accomplish a task that leads to another task that leads to another, with each completed project taking you one step closer to where you hope eventually to be. I have read accounts of guards in work camps who have emotionally worn down the prisoners by forcing them, day after day, to work on projects that have no purpose and that are destroyed as soon as they are completed. Men have had to dig holes and then, as soon as they were deep enough, fill them in, over and over again.
The thought of such senseless work sickens me, as does the thoughts of having a job where I would have to “look busy.” This kind of work smashes rather than accomplishes dreams. It is busyness and it is a waste of precious time. Work accomplishes when it heads toward a set, definable goal.
I recently heard the story of John Staggers, the director of an urban ministry in Washington, D.C. The most important part of his ministry is his dream: to transform that city into the country’s model city. But his dreams without any action would have prompted nothing except gales of laughter. To work toward the fulfillment of his dreams, he set forth a plan: He would work to transform one block. Then he would convince other people to commit themselves to adopting another block, then others to befriend the residents of a third block. Slowly but surely he is plugging away at changing the hearts and homes of his city.
Without a manageable plan, his dream was foolishness. Washington hosts some of the worst poverty and despair in the United States. It is a problem too big for answers. But John lives by a catchy slogan: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So how do you transform a city? One block at a time.”
When divided into bite-sized pieces no obstacle is too big to devour.
When my son decided to quit his job and we decided to jump head-first into the bee business, we established a three-fold plan. We thought it foolish to “put all our eggs in one basket.” We foresaw a company dependent on three different sources of income as less vulnerable to loss than a company dependent on only one source. We would not only be “insuring” our dollar investment, we would be insuring our work investment as well. We would not be wasting our energies in nonproductive busy-work.
Our plans included: 1) producing our own honey, 2) buying honey wholesale and marketing it, and 3) selling bee supplies and equipment.
We got busy and put our plan into action – the hard way: by working.
Only 3 percent of our population succeeds in achieving their goals or securing their dreams. The other 97 percent get “hung up” in one of two places. They never reach for their dreams or they give up too quickly.
Many people run away from small or even large failures, like a whipped dog runs, tail between his legs, toward some secret hiding place. BUT A SUCCESSFUL PERSON SHAKES HIS OR HER FIST AT FAILURE AND PERSEVERES.
A friend recently told me of a writer who sold an article to a magazine – after having that article rejected by over ninety other periodicals. He never gave a rejection slip the power to destroy one of his dreams. He never put an article in the back of a desk drawer and forgot about it. He kept writing “Dear Editor” letters until he received a “yes” reply.
An old television commercial illustrates the importance of stick-to-itiveness. It told the story of a real estate agent who showed one property thirty-one times before making the sale. With great pride she exclaimed, “I did it. I sold it!” Now that is the kind of company I would like to deal with – one that is full of people who keep pushing open new doors of possibility.
Statistics show that 90 percent of all sales in America are made by 10 percent of the salesmen. If you reverse that statistic, the facts seem even more astounding: 10 percent of all sales are made by 90 percent of all salesmen.
Doesn’t something seem amiss? Some analysts might say that the 10 percent who are truly successful are those who have a natural, charismatic, “sales” personality. But I see things differently. I agree with Dr. Robert Schuller who says, “Great people are ordinary people who have extraordinary determination.”
In his wonderful book (a book I’ve heard doctors claim add ten years to a heart patient’s life) The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale words it another way: “People are defeated in life not because of lack of ability, but for lack of wholeheartedness. They do not wholeheartedly expect to succeed. Results do not yield themselves to the person who refuses to give himself to the desired results.”
The success story of Draper’s Super Bee Apiaries would not be complete unless I told you that there were difficult setbacks and what seemed to be doors closed in our faces, in the early day of our venture. During the first two winters of our intensified operations, we suffered heavy losses, with over half of our bees dying before spring. Did we “throw in the towel”?
No. We studied and experimented. What had we done wrong and how could we change our procedures to minimize future losses? We learned from our mistakes and, in the years since then, have reaped the benefits of those mistakes. After the first four years, our field operation became profitable.
If we had not been undaunted in our plans, we also might have given up in the area of our bee supply sales. Our dream included owning and managing a warehouse, but obstacles kept coming between us and the fulfillment of that dream.
At first, we were dealers for the Dadant Company, but soon became aware of the limitations on our outreach and expansion. We called Dadant headquarters in Hamilton, Illinois and explained our desire to warehouse their supplies. Their answer was less than encouraging, so we inquired the same of the A.I. Root and Walter T. Kelly companies. Again we received negative responses. We kept knocking on doors! We contacted Strauser Bee Supply, who was willing to give us a franchise for distributing on the East Coast.
The Bible explains a truth that works time and time again: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7).
Does a hockey player give up trying to score because he keeps being pushed back by the goalie? Of course not, if that were the case the game would become senseless, even a laughing matter.
Jim Bakker, a host of the PTL Club, a TV talk show, compares life to a hockey game. In our efforts to succeed, we will often be confronted by goalies, who see their purpose as keeping us from scoring, keeping us from succeeding.
Anyone can fail or fall, but only the person with stick-to-itiveness will get up and try again – and again. Someone has well said, “The difference between success and failure is so very small, like 49 percent as opposed to 51 percent.” Trying one more time to fulfill our dreams may just bring the sought-after victory.
Think about it. Wouldn’t life be boring if there were no challenges in life, no hurdles to jump over, and no puzzles to put together? And who receives the most satisfying reward – the person who gives up when things get hard? The person who reaps the emotional and material benefits of finishing or winning is always the enviable party.
It is a story that seems as old as time, but the tale of the tortoise and the hare will always be one of my favorites. The rabbit, who would have been favored in all the averages, forgot one big principle. He didn’t run long enough and far enough to finish, adequately, the race he set out to win. It’s a story so familiar that we forget the great meaning in its message: We can’t give up until we’ve run, and won, the whole race.
Colony Collapse Disorder
A Complex
Buzz
from the USDA
