Nevra Ledwon made her bees angry. She'd just pulled 12 honeycomb frames from the two hives in her McLean backyard, shaking the bees off before carrying the box inside to her kitchen floor. Now it was her neighbors' turn to get their hands sticky.

Ledwon, a McLean resident who started keeping bees after spotting hives in a neighbor's yard during the pandemic, invites friends and neighbors each summer to help extract honey. At her first harvest of the season in the first week of July, neighbors Kathleen and Denis showed up ready to work alongside Ledwon's son Hendrix.

"I was driving down the street one day, and I saw bee hives in a neighbor's yard," Ledwon told the McLean Connection. "I stopped and asked a lot of questions, and now here I am."

The process is hands-on. Volunteers use yellow scrapers to peel wax caps off the honeycomb frames, with the wax falling into a large bowl. Ledwon tells participants they can chew the wax to enjoy residual honey. The uncapped frames go three at a time into a large extractor that spins them for several minutes, flinging honey into a vat. Ledwon then opens a spigot at the bottom, and the honey oozes through a filter into a bucket.

Each batch tastes different depending on which flowers are blooming. Ledwon said the late spring honey, made largely from neighboring Black Locust trees, produces a lighter taste that many neighbors prefer.

Ledwon extracts two batches per year from her two hives but stops harvesting sometime in July. After that, she treats the hives with FormicPro, a product used against an endemic mite. She also leaves enough honey in the hives to feed the colonies through winter.

Ledwon has hired a hive manager named Armando to help keep the colonies healthy, and she sells jars of honey to friends and neighbors to offset costs. She described beekeeping as "really expensive but so gratifying."

Upcoming: Honey Harvest Festival in Great Falls

Residents who want more local honey can visit the 4th Annual Honey Harvest Festival on Sunday, August 30, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Christ the King Lutheran Church, 10550 Georgetown Pike, Great Falls. The free event features a petting zoo, craft vendors, a Rocklands Barbeque food truck, baked goods, local honey for sale, and outdoor live music. At 5 p.m., the Great Falls Philharmonic performs "Peter and the Wolf" inside the sanctuary; concert tickets cost $10. More information is available at ctkbees.org.