3 Bee Farms

Our take

What the record actually confirms

3 Bee Farms sits at 14922 535th Street outside Griswold in Cass County, and the record describes it as family-run since 1993, combining an apple orchard with active beehives and an on-site cider mill. That combination — apples, honey, and pressed cider all from the same small operation — is a distinctive angle among the orchards researched in this batch, most of which handle only one or two of those three at once.

The confirmed schedule is specific: open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with Wednesday as the one closed day. Hours run 10am-6pm on the open weekdays and Saturday, narrowing to 1pm-5pm on Sunday. Phone is 712-778-4256. Beyond apples, the farm offers a pumpkin patch, a corn maze, farm animals, a picnic area, school tours, and birthday parties — a fuller slate of family-day activities than a bare picking stop.

Where this record comes from matters

Unlike several other orchards in this research pass, the details here come entirely from third-party sources — Iowa State University Extension’s Visit Iowa Farms directory and pickyourown.org’s regional page — rather than the farm’s own website, which didn’t return usable text during this research pass. That’s worth being upfront about: extension listings and grower directories are generally reliable for basic facts like hours and amenities, but they’re not the same as a farm confirming its own 2026 season dates. No apple varieties are named anywhere in the sources checked, and no u-pick pricing was found.

The honey-and-cider angle

The cider mill detail is confirmed and worth calling out specifically, since pressing juice on-site is a smaller-scale operation than what some larger festival-style orchards offer. Paired with the honeybee hives, it suggests a farm built around several small agricultural products rather than one big apple-only draw. If the goal of a visit is coming home with fresh-pressed cider and local honey alongside apples, that combination is a genuine differentiator here — but the record doesn’t say whether cider is pressed daily, seasonally, or only at certain times, so that’s worth a phone call before assuming it’ll be available on any given visit.

What’s still missing

The biggest gaps are apple variety names and u-pick pricing — neither is confirmed anywhere in the record. Season timing is also unconfirmed: there’s no season-start or season-end date, which means a visitor can’t tell from this record alone whether early September or mid-October is the better window. Given that the farm’s own site didn’t return content on this pass, calling 712-778-4256 directly is the most reliable way to confirm apple availability, pricing, and whether the cider mill is actively pressing before making the drive to Griswold.

Bottom line

3 Bee Farms offers a genuinely distinctive combination — orchard, honey, and cider mill together — with a confirmed, specific weekly schedule (closed Wednesdays) that’s easy to plan around. What it lacks from this record is anything about apple varieties, pricing, or exact season dates, and the fact that these details came from third-party listings rather than the farm’s own current site means a call ahead is the more reliable next step than treating this as a locked-in schedule.