HIGHLAND -- A group of Highland neighbors has turned honey into a booming business. Their strategy is simple -- spread the honey around.

Two years ago, Grant Ellingson and his neighbors asked around to see if anyone might be interested in hosting a beehive on their property. Ellingson and his business partners would set up the hive and do all the work with the bees. Landowners would be given 10 percent of the honey collected.

It turns out there are a lot of people happy to have up to five hives on their land in exchange for free honey.

"We went to the Highland Fling [Highland's annual city celebration], and set up a booth and signed people up," Ellingson said. "We were really quite amazed at how many people were interested in having bees."

Over the past weekend, the group set up 225 hives, putting 10,000 bees into each hive. That is 75 more hives than last year.

The business is so popular that there is now a waiting list of families hoping to get bees from Neighborhood Bee Keeping, the business owned by the partners. Grant Ellingson and the others said they could have placed more hives this year, but have decided to slow expansion.

"The benefit to the homeowners and neighbors is that all their fruit trees and gardens get pollinated," Ellingson said.

Larry Jones, who is a partner in the business, said when his neighbors approached him to see if he was interested in joining their venture, "my wife said 'Yes, he is,'" Jones said with a laugh.

Despite handling hundreds of thousands of bees over the weekend, Jones had only been stung once by mid-afternoon. He said he rarely gets stung, but one time he was stung by eight angry bees at once.

In Orem on a recent afternoon, the men arrived with a truck humming because of the boxed bees stacked in back. Jones and Ellingson dumped a "packet" of 10,000 bees into each of five hives, and then fed the bees sugar syrup and a thick, waxy "pollen patty" to help them get established in their new hive.

A queen bee, contained in a tiny wire-and-wood cage the size of a finger, also went into each hive. Because it takes several days for a queen to use pheromones to take control of her worker bees, Jones and Ellingson removed a tiny wooden dowel blocking the queen's escape and replaced it with a miniature marshmallow. The worker bees would begin eating the marshmallow away, freeing the queen in two or three days. That would be all the time the queen needed to have imprinted her autocracy, using pheromones, over her new kingdom. Or queendom, as it were.

Ellingson said they can collect up to five gallons of honey from each hive in the fall. They sell the honey locally, and they also offer balms, salves and soap on their Web site.

For information on Neighborhood Bee Keeping, visit neighborhoodbeekeeping.com, or call Grant Ellingson at (801) 756-4574.