Ray Bee an ice-cream institution at Boone Hall Farms snack bar

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Ray Bee, snack bar manager at Boone Hall Farms, demonstrates how he prepares ice cream from scratch each week. Watch »

Jessica Johnson
The Post and Courier

A smiling Ray Bee has become a fixture at the Boone Hall Farms snack bar, where he makes ice cream and fudge, and serves sandwiches and hot dogs.

Anyone spending more than a few minutes at Boone Hall Farms snack bar and especially children learn quickly how Ray Bee makes ice cream from scratch, and that key lime is the only flavor with an unnatural ingredient: food coloring.

"Can I help you? Want to try some ice cream?" a smiling Bee asks people standing at the counter.

When customers don't like the ice cream, they will tell you, he says.

Laura Lewis of Mount Pleasant takes a bite of blueberry and shakes her head no.

She and her daughter sample one flavor after the other, strawberry, peach, key lime, then pick chocolate.

"Just plain chocolate?" Bee says.

Bee spent the last few hours churning milk to make several gallons of ice cream all fruit-flavored. Two he set up to churn on a 1928 John Deere engine, called the hit-and-miss, because every so often the engine misfires, belching smoke into the air.

He stops the churn and opens a metal drum checking the process.

"See how pretty that is?" He says of the cream.

Once a churn is finished, 2 1/2 hours if everything goes right, Bee adds the ingredients and freezes them for the following day.

All it takes is a churn, rock salt and milk with at least 14 percent butterfat, he says while making a customer a sandwich.

She nods.

"Oh, you know about making ice cream?" Bee says with his signature smile. Bee has made ice cream at the snack bar for the last two years, taking advice from a man who has made it for 20. He came to Charleston after retiring from firefighting and cooking in Columbia. An infectious smile and an easy temper have made Bee a fixture of the Boone Hall snack bar among high school and college students who work part time.

Cole Sellazzo, a Wando High School graduate attending Clemson University, said on the rare occasion Bee takes the day off, inevitably someone, usually a child, will come in asking for Bee.

"People come, people go, but Ray is still here making ice cream, fudge and chicken salad." Sellazzo said.

Reach Jessica Johnson at 937-5921 or jjohnson@postandcourier.com.