The beekeeper behind the honey
A lifelong love of bees
From a Bavarian village in the 1960s to the high desert foothills of the Eastern Sierras — this is the story of Tola Ranch Honey.
Peter Cornelius — beekeeper, homesteader, lifelong bee enthusiast
Thank you for your interest in local honey and thanks for stopping by here!
My name is Peter Cornelius and I have been keeping bees since 2008. I got first introduced to beekeeping at a very early age in the 1960s. I vaguely remember the old beekeeper in Bavaria who showed me his hive and extraction setup when we lived in a village named Halfing. What I do remember are the 5 lb tins he sold his Forest Honey (“Waldhonig”) in and the distinctive smell and taste of his pure honeydew honey. My mom tells me it was hard to get me away from the magical bees.
Much, much later — and now living on a homestead in the Santa Cruz mountains in California — I started keeping bees with a few hives and joined the Santa Cruz Bee Guild. The year was 2007 or 2008. We lived on Tola Ranch Road in Soquel, and this is where the label name originates from. My son David created the label from a sketch of the courtyard of our house.
In 2020, I retired from my day job in Silicon Valley and moved to Washoe County near Reno, Nevada. Keeping bees in the high desert on the eastern slopes of the Sierras compared to coastal California presented its own challenges. I have since learned to seriously tie down the hives due to 75 mph gusts coming down the mountains. A hungry bear destroyed the harvest and equipment in spectacular fashion in the fall of 2022 — the hives up on Callahan Road are now secured by a solar-powered 10,000V electric bear fence. I am thankful for all the tips and help from the local Reno bee club, the Northern Nevada Beekeepers Association, in making that transition.
The last few years we have had strong harvests and good tasting honey. In 2024 we actually secured the #1 slot in a honey tasting contest at the Nevada State Beekeeping Conference in Yerington. Hope you can enjoy our local honey as much as my wife and I do. In gratitude, Peter
Our honey philosophy
Raw and unfiltered
Our honey is never heated and never filtered. It goes from the hive to the jar with nothing in between — preserving every enzyme, pollen grain, and natural flavor exactly as the bees made it.
Small-batch, single-origin
Each batch comes from a single location and a single harvest. Small batches mean we can pay close attention to quality and let the unique character of each season shine through.
Eastern Sierras wildflowers
Our bees forage on the wildflowers of the Eastern Sierras — a landscape of high-altitude meadows, sagebrush, and native blooms that gives Tola Ranch honey its distinctive depth and complexity.