May I have your attention, please?
The following is not the real Jeff Vox really.
If you have ever put on a B suit
with nothing but underwear underneath,
you might be a beekeeper in Texas.
If you've ever noticed that KFC's honey sauce
contains only a 7% real honey,
and wondered what the other 93% was,
you might be a beekeeper.
If your beehives have a fresh coat of paint,
but your house doesn't,
you might be a beekeeper.
At Bee Love, we're all about the honeybees
and of course the beekeepers.
Before we jump into our interview today
with Jerry Hayes from Bee Culture Magazine,
we have a bit of good news ripped from the headlines.
The world's largest hornet, an invasive breed
dubbed Murder Hornet, for its dangerous sting
and ability to slaughter a honeybee hive
in a matter of hours, has been declared eradicated in the U.S.
Five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington,
state near the Canadian border.
Now, I'm sure we all heard about this back then.
Murder Hornet is another name for the Asian giant hornet.
And this was a little spooky when these things arrived,
and they were up in the British Columbia area
of the state of Washington.
And officials there have done just a great job
of getting rid of these things.
We hope they don't come back someday.
It's almost inevitable, but for now,
hey, really good news, they are gone.
Here's a little bit more detail about this.
The entomologist from Washington state
that was working on this project,
he said, I've been doing this type of work
for over 25 years now, and it's a rare day
when the humans actually get to win one against the insects.
The hornets, which can be five centimeters long
or around two inches, were formerly called Asian giant hornets.
So these hornets, which come from Eastern Asia,
China specifically, they are known to kill
about 42 people in China each year.
And as far as honeybees, they can just wipe out a colony
in no time flat.
They were first detected in North America,
in British Columbia, in August of 2019,
and confirmed in Washington state
in December of the same year.
These hornets have been known to sting
through most beekeeper suits,
and they delivered nearly seven times
the amount of venom as a honeybee,
and they can sting multiple times.
So I know I don't want to get close to one,
you don't want to either.
Anyway, the good news is for now, they are gone.
So people down in the south now,
just look out for those yellow-legged hornets,
and let's, oh man, let's just keep working on this stuff.
Let's go.
While I'm at it, one more thing in the headline
that grabbed my attention this week,
and this is something that just happened over in the UK.
They have now outlawed a neonicotinoids
in a quote bid to protect honeybees.
Now, if you've been following this topic,
and I know it's controversial,
and by the way, I welcome your feedback,
go ahead, email me whether you're for or against all of this.
I've been outlawed in the EU for a few years now,
but the UK has finally jumped on board.
US is, who knows how far behind?
Here's a quote from that article.
The move comes ahead of the publication
of a new UK National Action Plan, NAP,
which will set how pesticides can be used sustainably.
DEFRA said bees and other pollinators
are crucial to the agricultural economy
and the economic benefits of pollination to crop production
in the UK estimated at 500 million pounds annually.
Anyway, like I said, it's controversial.
I know the sugar beet growers over in the UK
are really worried about this ban.
They're going to be filing for some emergency authorizations.
I don't know if they're going to start turning more of those
down than in the past.
The article goes on to state,
proposals been welcomed by several wildlife charities.
The government has signed an international pledge
to have the risk from pesticides
and highly hazardous chemicals.
So this positive step should be followed in short order
with stronger regulation,
alignment with the EU on chemicals, restrictions,
and generous incentives for farming systems
that do not rely on chemicals.
In the US, we're a long ways behind,
but I think at least from everything I can see,
again, I welcome your opinion on this topic.
I would love to welcome our special guest today,
Jerry Hayes, who happens to be the big wig, the big cheese,
the editor of Bee Culture Magazine.
Did I catch off guard there, Jerry?
Well, you did.
And you know, and when you said cheese,
the first thing came to mind when I was cut the cheese
and the smell that comes along with that.
Just let me know, okay?
Now, this is a classy show.
Come on.
It is a classy show, but yes,
I've been in the industry a long time
and I've learned a lot of things
and I've done a lot of wrong things
and have been able to integrate with wonderful beekeepers.
But anybody who says there's a...
that they're an expert is a liar.
Well, I know a lot of beekeepers that think they're experts.
All of them.
Yes.
And most of them are third-year beekeepers.
They're now the global expert.
I have a podcast and a website and TikTok
and are telling their listeners to use green jello
to control rural lights.
I have to admit, that's what I haven't heard yet,
but it would probably work as good
as some of the other stuff out there.
As long as you brought that up, I got a...
I've really... I've asked other guests this too.
And I really think it's a topic that we need to mention now then.
And that is, there is so much information out there,
especially YouTube, TikTok,
on how you should do beekeeping, how you shouldn't,
and people wearing no protective clothing at all,
doing swarm removals,
and things that I hate to encourage beginners to do,
because it could actually be very dangerous.
Could you give us a little bit of insight,
right off the bat, here on, how do you know who you can trust?
And, no, that's a great question, Eric.
And so I have been asked that question before,
and it's been in my writings and what had you.
And I think you have to default to those vetted researchers
at USDA, or AAPA Inspectors of America,
or Pridar Dapis Malefra,
or Honey Bee Health Coalition,
what have you, that they again have membership
that are in the industry and can review and help them
with their information that they're spreading around.
I would be really, as a new beekeeper,
you're gonna want information
and you're gonna go to a podcast, what have you.
But I would suggest you don't do that.
It would be kind of like me.
I want to learn about physics,
and I don't know anything about physics,
so I'm gonna go on a physics podcast.
But how do I know if that podcast and that information
is right or wrong?
I don't.
So you have to dive a little bit deeper in this,
because beekeeping is, managed honey beekeeping is,
it takes a lot.
This is not like having a dog or a cat in the kitchen.
This is a lot more difficult of a hobby
than people realize before they get into it.
And we're just talking hobbyists now.
If you're gonna do it right, yeah.
If we're talking commercial beekeepers,
and that's amplified by a thousand.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
This is, you know, back in the day,
when I was young and good-looking and started beekeeping,
we didn't have the pest predators and diseases
and other races of honey bees here.
And you could go fishing for the rest of the year.
But now you have to be a beekeeper manager
in order to keep your honey bees alive and successful,
not only for you, but for the environment as well.
Okay, but back to my question.
The fact is, a lot of beekeepers,
especially new ones, are gonna go to YouTube.
So is there any guidance you can give them as to how,
and we're not naming any names,
but how do they determine, gee,
I think I can believe this person.
I don't think I can believe that person.
Yeah, I'm gonna give you a generality
and all generalities are false.
But if that person would go to their state
beekeeping association, which all states have one,
and simply ask them that question,
and then participate in their meetings
and local and regional meetings,
because the best way to learn about beekeeping
is to actually do it, and you're going to make mistakes,
and you're going to fail and everything else,
but you're going to learn differently.
Just because somebody gives you an answer
doesn't mean that that's the right answer.
And so getting involved with the industry
and with the sociality and culture of it,
I think helps people progress more quickly.
And get a mentor.
And get a mentor, you know,
and I didn't have a mentor when I started.
I remember buying some packaged bees.
And in the packaged bees, there's always a queen
in her own little cage, and I had read
that there's candy at the end of this box
that is there to help feed the queen.
And you take a nail and press it through that candy
in order to open it up so help the bees on the outside
and the bees on the inside kind of eat through it
and let them release the queen.
So I thought, okay, great.
So I took a nail and for some reason,
I thought that candy was going to be like hard crunchy candy.
And it wasn't really soft.
So I pushed it all the way through
and stabbed the queen and the other end and killed her.
So anyway, you can get answers.
But as you just said, a mentor is going to help you a lot more.
We are talking to a queen bee murderer right here.
Okay, let's move out, talk about some other topics.
And there are a hundred different things
that you could talk about.
And I wish I had a bunch of listeners right next to me
saying, here's what we're most interested in.
But since we don't, I want to bring up some things
that we haven't talked about much on this show yet.
One would be pesticides.
And you have some history with Monsanto and USDA.
Give us a little background on where you come from,
what your thoughts are.
Let me start off by saying that there was some research
done a few years ago that looked at pesticides and beehives.
And at the time, I was the chief of the apiary section
for the Florida Department of Agriculture.
And we had a research apiary that I had set up
and it had all new equipment, new wax, new frames,
new bees, new everything.
So I was pretty confident that when I was asked
to give samples of bees and wax and larvae and kupa,
what have you, that, you know, I was feeling a little feisty
here that I was going to be pretty clean
and a lot better than everybody else.
When I set those in, and these bees had been there
for a few months and bees, you know, foraging that two,
two and a half mile radius, they found over 140
different pesticides in those colony samples,
three of which weren't even registered in the United States.
So yes, there are a lot of things out there.
As honey bees, as environmental samplers can get into.
But beta from that also showed that about 40, 42%
of all chemicals they found in a beehive
were the ones that we beekeepers put in there.
But to, you know, control veromites or control other diseases
or small high beetles or what have you.
So there's this discrepancy here.
I've, you know, beekeepers are always pointing their fingers
at farmers and others.
But, you know, when you, what's that whole thing,
you point a finger and the other fingers pointing back at you.
So you have to be careful.
So Monsanto, yes, I work for Monsanto.
They had purchased a company that had a new biological method
that they thought could be used to control veromites,
which is great because then we wouldn't have to use
as many chemicals that have collateral damage
to the colony or what have you.
So I took the job.
Everybody hated Monsanto, but I figured that,
Gully, you got this huge corporation that has lots of money
and on the lab and they have invited me to come
to see if we could do this.
They weren't going to make any money on this product,
but it was going to hopefully give them some positive PR
if they could show the industry that they were helping.
So I was there and over years we did our best,
but we couldn't make it work consistently in a beehive.
So I moved on to this role actually right now.
Are there a lot of pesticides out there?
Yes.
Farmers generally read the label directions,
which would not impact honey bees,
because you don't want to spray when something is blooming.
A big problem is suburban homeowners.
So we have approximately 50 million acres of suburban lawns
in the United States taking 18,000 pounds,
18 million pounds of chemicals and 10,000 gallons of water
each above rainfall to keep them like the 18th holodigusta.
And so in my mind, grass lawns look beautiful,
but they're worthless.
And then they have flowers around the side of the house
that they find a bug on them.
And so they go from Hub Depot and buy some chemical
and it says to put a tablespoon and a gallon of water
and they say, well, that bug is kind of big.
Let's put two tablespoons in there.
And so we have this disconnect with people
because these things are tested well and labeled
and show you how to use them and not have batting act
on not only honey bees, but other native bees
and butterflies and everything else.
So we generally do a pretty poor job here.
Well, how are we supposed to protect our bees?
They're going to go where they're going to go.
What do we do to help them out?
There's nothing much you can do if you figure out
the acreage of that 2.5 miles of where they're going
and bringing back all sorts of stuff.
You know, there are beekeepers who sometimes put their
the bees if they're lucky enough in Arizona and New
Mexico and the desert or up on a mountain
or something like that.
Other than that, you can't do anything.
One of the one of the suggestions has been the last
few years is to rotate frames of call every three years
or so out of a colony.
Bees wax is a fatty acid.
It's a lipid and fat loves to absorb chemicals.
And if you took a fast sample of me and looked at it,
you probably find all sorts of scary stuff in there.
But we want to single out and move out these combs
that may have accumulated some pesticides that the bees
would be exposed to 24-7, 365.
We place it with new frames and with a new call and cut down
on that exposure to pest predator pests and pesticides.
Makes sense.
What do you see as some of the biggest?
Well, it's kind of obvious what the biggest diseases
out there are and the biggest pests, Varroa, obviously.
But as far as diseases, are there some things that we really,
really should be looking for regularly?
I mean, if we've got American fowl brood,
we probably know it.
It's not that hard to figure out.
I don't know.
Give me your take on some of the diseases and how much we
should be concerned and how much we should really dig in
and know our stuff.
Yeah, but let me back up a little bit.
Because you mentioned Varroa mite.
And if everybody out there would make a fist and put it
someplace on you, proportionally, this is how large
a Varroa mite is, or honeybee's body.
And they can have several on them.
And they're in between the abdominal segments because this
here is where it's easier to chew through.
They can chew through this cuticle, but they can chew
through here and eat the fat bodies of the teleogenin,
which creates hormones to help their very shallow immune
system and vector viruses, vector diseases, lower immunity.
So controlling Varroa many times has a strong link to
these other diseases.
And American fowl brood and European fowl brood,
those kind of things.
Yes, if a beekeeper is looking in his or her colonies,
for those, they will be able to identify them.
But we also have new beekeepers who are concerned about
looking in a colony, or they want to be natural beekeepers
and let that bees try to figure it out for themselves.
And that never works in the dynamics that we have now,
because beekeeping is a visual sport.
You have to open up that colony, take it apart, look at it.
It's not like a cow in the field, we can walk up to that
cow and it's got a big runny, juicy nose.
You say, well, that cow's got something.
Or your dog in the house is scratching all the time,
and you're looking, is that a flea or what?
I mean, so we have to be more engaged in management
of our colonies.
You're in touch with the whole industry in the United States,
probably outside the United States too, I would guess.
Do you see anything new, promising, coming down the
pike for Varroa?
No, not really.
We have a group with the Honey Bee Health Coalition now
that's actually working with some large corporations.
There are a lot of chemical pesticides that are off patent
that have been put on the shelf.
And so there's a review going on about can some of these be
used, adapted for the use in a beekeeping colony,
and control Varroa in various ways.
And one of the issues is we talked about collateral damage
to bees by putting chemicals in or out of the control Varroa.
We have to, or the Varroa is going to kill that colony anyway.
But what begets hit every time we put a chemical in there,
it's the queen.
Those other bees will maybe in the summer rotate ever six,
eight weeks, morning, winter time, you know, every few months.
But that queen gets whacked every time.
And if that's to your fertile female, who is the mother of
everybody in that colony, we have to figure out a way to keep
her more safe and more viable.
And I think that goes to maybe looking at
bioreational, biological controls more fully.
But there again, we have a small industry that is incredibly
vital, not only to production agriculture, but to the environment
and to the environment and how they can produce it and what
had you.
But to look at something like this, you know, that might cost
a couple of million dollars, you know, there's no big companies
out there that want to do it.
And because beekeepers and honeybees are so good, you know,
we're losing, I think numbers, oh, numbers are coming out no,
tomorrow, Thursday, from Auburn University about the loss of
because this is going to be on before Thursday, right?
It's probably not going to be for a week or two.
So go right ahead.
They've documented a 55% loss of Honey Bee colonies in 2023.
And that's incredible.
If it wasn't for Honey Bee colonies,
that you can take one colony artificially split it and make
two, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Beekeeper has 1,000 colonies and loses 500 of them,
let's say, can take those 500 and make up the loss.
But then you have 1,000 week colonies
and do they meet pollination contracts standards?
And so this is crazy.
And we need more support to do a better job in all of this.
How different is that from, say, 2022 or 2021?
That was in that 30% to 40% range.
This is the second highest, if I'm not mistaken,
loss numbers that have been collected.
So it's way up.
Do we have any explanation as to why yet?
No, not really.
Those are just losses.
We probably know about these things.
And it's multifactorial.
You've heard that before.
Varroa, virus legacy, weather changes, food management.
Where else can you load an insect's nest
with 800 of them on a semi and grab it
across the United States to pollinate almonds, let's say?
And you lose 10% of your queens every time you do that.
And then you may have taken care of Varroa and it's there.
But when there's 2 million colonies going to California,
it's like the elementary school.
All the bees are sharing everything
because they're all kind of wadded up together.
This is a tough industry, tough industry.
I don't know how commercial beekeepers actually do it.
These numbers, this 55% colony loss,
is that specifically among commercial beekeepers
or do they factor in any hobbyists or sidelineers?
Yeah, it's those who have actually filled out the form
to participate in the survey.
So it's a whole variety.
Let me just take a minute here to thank our presenting
sponsor, Man Lake.
I've been asked, does Man Lake provide equipment
for commercial beekeepers?
Yes.
Do they provide equipment for sidelineers?
Yes.
How about beginners?
Of course.
Protective gear, yes.
Queens, nukes, and packages, yes.
Processing equipment, yes, yes, and yes.
There is a reason that Man Lake is the number one supplier
for thousands and thousands of beekeepers.
In fact, I could give you 100 reasons to try them,
but let's start with just 10.
As in $10 off your first $100 purchase
with the discount code MLBLOV10.
Don't worry, it's all in the show notes.
Seriously, you'll be happy you gave Man Lake a try.
And now back to the guest.
You mentioned Honey Bee Health Coalition a couple of minutes
ago.
For those that aren't familiar with it,
tell us about their role.
Honey Bee Health Coalition is unique.
And I was involved in starting that back in the day.
Put together this coalition of Big Ag and universities,
and USDA, and beekeepers, and what
can add you into this big group that we could sit around
and figure out, talk to each other,
and figure out how we can bring some more consistency
or viability to our industry.
And so they've been in going here for nine or 10 years.
I've done a super job.
They came up with the Tools for Rural Management Guide,
which you probably, whoever reads it,
you don't need to read anything else.
It's all there.
They have videos.
And we have all sorts of stuff there in the Honey Bee
Health Coalition that is a go-to place for information
like we were talking about earlier, Eric.
Well, and I can say that Vural Management Guide is a very
simple, easy tool to use.
It's not like you're reading 10 pages of six-point text.
If I remember, I've spent a little while since I've used it.
Where are you in the country?
How hot is it?
Some of those kinds of factors.
Where's your brood cycle right now?
Those kinds of things.
And you put a little info in, and it gives you options
on Vural Management, correct?
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And it doesn't tell you what to do.
It gives you choices.
It's not the dictating to you.
So if you have choices based on all that information
that you just talked about, and it's a terrific product.
So that's one of the reasons I immediately trusted it,
is because it didn't say, here's your one and only answer.
It's this product from this manufacturer.
It was, here's a few options.
If you want to be more organic, go this way.
If you need to really hit it hard, kind of,
you can go this way.
Watch your temperatures, because as we know,
some of these chemicals, if it's above 85 degrees,
different things happen, and it can be more poisonous.
What did you call it, collateral damage?
There can be a whole lot more of that,
if we're not careful with those things.
It's not like we just buy one treatment,
and buy a Costco box of them,
and then use them forever and at all times of years.
We need to put our own little research into that.
Yeah, no, and then we have to rotate products
because raw mites are like all mites.
The best thing to do is develop resistance to things,
and we've seen that over the years in our products.
And so there's a lot of things going on there,
but it is simple to use and it works.
Now, you personally have done beekeeping.
You've mentioned Florida.
I know you're in Ohio now.
Any other states or areas that you have been a beekeeper?
Yeah, and this might sound like I can't keep a job.
Yeah, no, I started out as a high school teacher,
and then like, and so went into another business
and had a guy working with me who was a beekeeper,
and this was a long time ago,
and I thought, well, this is pretty cool,
and nobody actually knows a beekeeper.
And so I picked this person's brain and asked questions
and marked questions, and then started reading things
and marked questions, and then I've turned into
the Consummit Backyard Beekeeper.
I did all the goofy things that big backyard beekeepers do,
including killing queens in a cage.
And then I thought that passion grew,
and some psychologists ought to do a profile
of a beekeeper's because we're different.
That'd be scary.
I know, I know, it would,
but it would make a great Ken Burns documentary.
And so I thought, well, could I go back to school
and learn some more and take care of a family?
So I did went back to Agricultural Technical Institute
of Iowa State University, and then from there,
I went to the USDA bee breeding and stock lab
and back rooms where Africanized bees are just coming in.
And so my job as a rookie lab technician,
where we were pulling wings and legs off bees
to see if we could see any morphological differences
in these that we could use to identify bee samples
that came in before.
Then I was offered a job by Datant and Sons
as a branch manager up in Michigan.
And I did that for a year,
and then I was offered another job by somebody else.
And the people at Datant said, no,
we're gonna move you down to Hamilton, Illinois,
the home office at Datant.
So I was there for a long time.
It was great because I learned so much.
It was a great experience learning about the business,
about beekeeping.
And I wrote the classroom question and answer section
in the American Bee Journal for 40 years, I think,
or so I think I have the world's record.
And then from there to Monsanto in Missouri,
and then I was gonna retire and Kim Flodham,
the editor of Bee Culture Magazine,
always got a retired and they asked me if I wanted to do it.
And I'd never been an editor before,
written papers and outright books and that kind of stuff.
But I said, well, shoot,
who gets to be offered this job?
So I took it and this has been marvelous as well,
to be engaged with the industry
and a fun educational outreach, if you will.
Has it been difficult to adjust your beekeeping technique,
style, whatever it is,
between the various different climates you've been
from Michigan to Florida
and nearly every place in between?
Give me a little feel for that
and where you enjoyed it the most, maybe.
No, you're right, but it's all seasonal.
It's all based on temperature.
And so regardless of where you're at,
you're looking at daylight length and temperatures
and when spring officially may be coming,
when the dandelions pop out of the ground and do that.
So it's been, it hasn't been difficult
in the different places.
You just have to be paying attention
and be on your game a little bit.
No, you make that sound pretty easy.
I got that from a podcast.
Well, then it must be true.
That's right.
This podcast is really meant to be
for people that love honeybees
and that can be beekeepers
or people that have no desire to be a beekeeper,
but realize what an important resource honeybees are.
Do you have any recommendations
that you would give to people in all walks of life,
no matter where they are on that spectrum?
What can we all do to help honeybees?
I know one of the things that we've tried to do
in our family is different things that we've planted
around our yard and garden.
Give us some wisdom.
I don't know if this is gonna be wisdom or not,
but there are approximately 125,000 beekeepers
in the United States according to the National Honey Board.
Not all states register beekeepers
and so those numbers are up and down and back and forth.
Out of 330 million people in the United States,
there's more people who do yoga or stamp collecting
than beekeeping.
And so I don't want us to focus so much on ourselves,
but on ourselves as educational outreach teachers
to our family, our friends, our community, our churches,
what have you.
Because we are aware of how valuable honeybees are
for pollinating fruits, nuts and vegetables,
how valuable they are as they forge in the environment
to, you know, pollinate trees that produce seeds and nuts
that they can reproduce on or squirrels or turkeys
or deer, each and what have you.
I want those people who walk into the grocery store.
And when you walk into the grocery store,
most of the time you walk into the produce section
because that is where value is.
And most of that value comes from honeybees going
from one flower to another flower with this collaboration
that these two different species have come up with
over the millennia and be aware that that's there
because of honeybees or agriculture and what have you.
And then you go down all the other aisles
and see the canned beans and the frozen fruit
and everything else because of honeybees
and growers who do this.
And this is amazing.
I think we're getting 30 to 40% of our fruit, nuts
and vegetables from other countries, but nobody cares.
Why would you care if you walk into the produce section
and it's full of stuff that you can still box?
I disagree with that 100% because what happens
if those countries decide, well, you know,
you're, you know, this has been great,
but we're not doing this anymore, have a nice day.
And we don't have food to eat.
We're not as self-sufficient as we could be to eat.
And if you're watching the six o'clock news now
and seeing those struggles that others are having
because their food supply change has been disrupted,
I don't want hours to and have that negative influence.
One of the things that we've done at our house
is to plant a pussy willow tree.
And the reason for that is because it seems
to be the very first thing, at least where I am,
even before the dandelions that the bees absolutely love
and can feed off of.
You have any other recommendations?
No, but you're to go back once you said,
pussy willows of course, but I always wait for
the dandelions, that's my, that's one,
that's when I really get excited about a spray time.
Because dandelions, the neat thing about dandelions
is not only they produce pollen, which bees can use,
you know, as their protein bottom on mineral source,
but the sugar in their nectar is very high.
It can be a high as 30%.
And so bees, when they're trying to build up,
raise new bees in their colony and get ready,
you know, bees are always preparing for winter.
They want a big colony that they can prepare
for the next winter.
So that resource is tremendous.
And we beekeepers, you know, one of the things we do
is feed honeybees with sugar share.
This is one of those things where this is a natural product
that the bees like and that really helps them.
So what if your neighbors give you a hard time
for not killing all the dandelions in your yard?
Yeah, when I moved here, bought a house
in kind of the semi-country, we have eight acres.
And the person who owned the home before us,
talking to the people who live on either side of us,
said that he would mow three to four times a week.
And I said, I'm not doing that
because grass is a waste of time and money.
And they just kind of looked at me.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Right, and so now we have,
we experiment in growing things
and we have some fruit trees
and we have like 30 apple trees, actually,
fruit trees and what have you.
And it's different than it was before,
but I always take our neighbors jars of honey over the year
just so that they don't get too bulky with me.
Well, I know we're replacing a lot of our grass,
our turf with clover.
Ooh, nice.
And I let it grow, I let it bloom, I mow it every once in a while
when I absolutely have to,
but actually the deer do most of the mowing for me.
So I don't have to mow it very much.
But yeah, I'm like you, I'm semi-country,
I'm on five acres and we can do that.
My neighbors don't complain too terribly much
about dandelions.
Yeah, and clover is amazing.
You know, it's a legume and put some roots, you know,
10 to 12 feet, breaks up the soil, adds nitrogen.
It's just a great plant.
And you can, you know, as you said,
you don't have to mow it that often
because generally it doesn't grow more than three
to six inches high and it looks okay.
And it uses less water,
which here in the desert is a big deal.
Oh, growling, yeah.
Well, when you're putting down roots 10 to 12 feet,
generally, but you guys have certainly had a lot of issues
with less rainfall, it generally can survive pretty well.
Okay, last thing, this is the fun part.
I wanna hear some kind of wild and crazy
beekeeping story from you.
Something that stands out,
it might have been fun, embarrassing, painful.
Well, it's all been painful sometimes.
Valley, no, I really, I mean, it's all been fun
and in a learning situation for me,
I guess the worst thing that's happened to me
is we had a few years ago,
a guy with, I think he had a couple acres of pumpkins
around us and he wanted some bee hives.
So I loaded bee hives on this little trailer.
I had used only a couple of miles away.
And using my exquisite expert brain,
I did not tie them down because I thought two miles,
I can go slow and it'll be okay, I won't have you.
And yes, I did slow and went around a curve
into his drive and they both turned over
and I had bees everywhere
and he was really unimpressed with me.
That's a good one.
How about something in beekeeping that just brings you joy?
I like it when beekeepers get together and don't argue.
They share, they socialize, share information.
I have a few weeks ago,
I was up in Saskatchewan, Canada, Saskatoon,
where they were having a meeting
and they had asked me to come and speak.
And this was mostly a commercial group
and they were wonderful in talking
and you could challenge them with some ideas or things
or what they needed to do
or what you needed them to do for you.
And it was a family event.
And I really loved that feeling
that everybody was on the same page.
Maybe they didn't agree
or maybe they had different opinions,
but they would listen
and you can all of a sudden see some of them
had that aha moment
and the light bulb went over their head
and I just love that.
Last thing, I'm gonna let you give a little pitch
for your magazine.
So I'm holding up Bee Culture Magazine.
We're coming up on our 152nd year of this magazine
that was started by AI Root, who was an amazing guy.
There should be a whole podcast on AI Root
about honey bees and beekeeping
and how we can be better
and how we can join together,
how you can see new information, research.
The last couple of years,
I've had series in there
by a well-known beekeeping research agents, universities.
I had the University of Florida and Dr. Jamie Ellis.
And then last year we had the University of California,
Davis and this year we're having Auburn University.
And so it's not about telling you what to do,
it's sharing many things about researchers, universities,
beekeepers, what they do, how they do it,
how they nest up and organizations and meetings
and all these things which I think need to be brought together
so that we can be better beekeepers
because bee culture is,
it's the best beekeeping magazine around.
And when Eugene hears me from ABJ say that,
probably his eyes will roll back in his head.
But, and I worked for ABJ for years, great magazine,
but I have to be selfish now and say bee culture is amazing.
All right, Jerry, thanks so much for being with me today.
Thank you, this has been fun, I sure appreciate it.
Thank you so much for joining us here on Bee Love Beekeeping
presented by Man Lake.
Please, right now before you forget, hit that follower,
subscribe button and be sure to share this podcast
with a friend.
Remember, if you're not just in it for the honey
or the money, you're in it for the love.
See you next week.
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