Robert Miller has been planting sunflowers for years around his Lee County home to help attract pollinators and feed birds, but it wasn’t until recently that he thought to capitalize on their beauty and invite photographers and onlookers out to his farm for the view.

“People kept stopping and asking if they could look and take pictures, so we just decided to try and bring the sunflowers out near the highway and commercialize them a little bit so everybody could get a chance to enjoy our sunflowers,” Miller said.

Miller dedicated about seven or eight acres of the farmland on Miller Farm, the 700-acre cotton and cattle farm founded by his grandfather, to the growth of sunflowers and planted them over the course of the spring so they’d last throughout the summer.
“I planted them in stages in eight different 1-acre patches over an eight week period,” Miller said. “If the weather is good, they should last until about the first week of September.”

Beehive Sunflowers, named after the road the field sits on, opened July 8 across the road from Loachapoka High School, and Miller said he’s had many visitors come to see the flowers in bloom since then.

“We opened last Thursday and we’ve had multiple visits, I can’t tell you how many,” Miller said. “We charge a little fee to come into the sunflower patch, and they can pick flowers if they want and take them home, and we charge a couple of bucks for a flower. A lot of families come out there to take photos, too.”

Access to the sunflower field costs $5 per person, while visitors will be able to pick their own sunflower and take it home for $2 per flower. Beehive Sunflowers is open to the public Thursday through Sunday from 2-8 p.m. until the flowers stop blooming, and photographers will be able to rent the field for golden hour sessions in the mornings and evenings.