Red Cloud’s Frey doubling as football star, beekeeper

RED CLOUD, Neb. (KSNB) - Caden Frey is passionate on the football field and has discovered a new passion off it.

“He always wanted to do bees, my dad did, and he thought it would be fun to try,” the Red Cloud incoming senior said. “We bought two of them and I went and helped him with it and I fell in love with it right there.”

Frey is a six-man football player with Division I scholarship offers.

“Football was never the thing that he really strived for,” said Andrea Frey, Caden’s mother. “He was always the kid crawling in dirt and picking the bugs and finding everything, so beekeeping was an easy transition for him.”

He’s also a beekeeper, known as the ‘Bee King’ of Red Cloud.

“Started as a hobby, just as a fun thing,” Caden Frey said. “Then it built up quite a bit now.”

Caden and his dad, Brad Frey, pursued their first couple of hives in November of 2017.

“It’s been a big, steep learning curve,” Brad Frey said. “We’ve had a lot of days where we questioned, ‘What exactly are we doing?’”

Now almost six years later, the Frey family has developed their company Abundant Life Honey. They’re up to 350 hives, with 50,000 bees to a colony. Do the math and it’s a fleet of roughly 17,500,000 bees.

“It’s grown exponentially, so it’s been fun to see,” Andrea Frey said. “I would have never guessed buying two hives for fun would have expanded into what we have today.”

“I’m always like it’s a lot of fun, but you can’t just get them and stick them out in the yard and be like, ‘OK, make me honey,’” Caden Frey said. “You’ve got to go work them yourself, you’ve got to take care of them, you’ve got to inspect them, you’ve got to treat them.”

It’s that labor that the Frey’s have fallen in love with. It’s the root of their labor of love.

“We love the bees,” Brad Frey said. “We love popping the lid and seeing the honey and the bees. It’s just fun.”

“That first few times I went and looked at them I thought it was just the coolest thing ever,” Caden Frey added.

And they’re enjoying the process of learning as a family.

“I’ve been working this as long as my dad has,” Caden Frey said. “We’ve taken a couple college credit classes together with each other about these things.”

“It’s a family event, so everybody helps,” Brad Frey added. “We get to spend a lot of time with our children and I’m very grateful for that.”

It’s almost high school football season in Nebraska and Caden is going into his senior year.

“It gets a little crazy around the start of the football season because we start harvesting honey around that same time, so it’s a lot of hours I end up putting in,” he said

But he wouldn’t have it any other way. And whatever his future pursuits, the path likely leads right back to Red Cloud.

“We do want to keep it within our family,” Brad Frey said. “We’re not looking to be giant.”

“I’m definitely going to come back and probably just pick up this, working with my dad and eventually take over the business,” Caden Frey added.