May I have your attention, please? The following
is not the real Jeff Fox review. If you have
ever considered sewing little tiny uniforms for
your scout bees, you might be a beekeeper. that
a bee vacuum is really too big for bees to use
to clean the floors in their hive. You might
be a beekeeper. If you have ever said, it'll
feel good to get stung for the first time this
spring, and you weren't being sarcastic, you
might be a beekeeper. You might also be nuts.
Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented
by Man Lake. Our question of the day is this,
have you ever created something for your own
beekeeping or maybe modified equipment to better
fit your needs? Lots of beekeepers do. Today
our guest is Dan Long and we'll find out how
his creativity and his 3D printer created something
better and more useful for his queen rearing
operation. But first, While scientists are still
working hard to figure out the cause of the great
bee die -off here in the states, another theory
comes in from some new studies about microplastics.
Recent studies have shown that tiny pieces of
plastic, which may originate from everyday products
such as food packaging, disposable cutlery, or
plastic toys, anything out there that's plastic
can make bees more susceptible to bacteria and
viruses. When, say, a plastic water bottle ends
up in a ditch or in a river, it disintegrates
with the help of the sun, water, and wind into
even smaller pieces which float into the air,
seep into soils, and settle on vegetation. Other
microplastics are made minuscule from the start,
such as glitter or microbeads and body scrubs.
They make it washed off from our skin into wastewater,
which is then used for irrigation of crops. Bees
can accumulate microplastics from many sources,
like air, water, soil, and also flowers, said
David Baracci, a behavioral ecologist at the
University of Florence in Italy. In 2021, a study
conducted in Denmark detected 13 types of microplastics
on honey bees' bodies. Since then, other studies
have confirmed that bees are often covered in
tiny plastics, which stick to their wings, their
heads, and their abdomens. Bees can swallow microplastics
with nectar, too, so that they accumulate in
their guts. The consequences may be serious.
A 2024 study by Baracci and his colleagues found
that certain microplastics mixed together may
kill bees. In other studies, honey bees fed microplastics
developed worse infections with a pathogen that's
been linked with colony collapse. Microplastics
can also reach honeybee brains and may affect
their thinking and memory. Microplastic -laden
bees can also mean microplastic -laden honey.
Oh man. When Turkish scientists tested samples
of honey, they discovered that a vast majority
contained microplastics, with single flower honeys
the most affected. In Germany, commercial honey
contained almost 300 pieces of microplastics
per pound, or about five pieces in each teaspoonful.
In short, research shows microplastics can enter
bees' guts and brains, damaging memory, weakening
immune responses, and increasing death rates.
Folks, let's get this thing figured out. Alright,
on a lighter note, let's have some fun. Let's
head to the southeastern United States for our
discussion today with beekeeper Dan Long. Hey,
Dan, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having
me on. Good. And we're going all the way out
to Athens, Georgia, home of the famous Georgia
Bulldogs. And you're their number one fan, aren't
you? I'm sorry. I set you in a trap for that
one. Well, I've been down here for 15 years now,
and I've learned that that is the equivalent
of sun. You just got here. So I'm a Northerner
in Georgia. Sounds like where I live I have people
down the street from me in their 90s that have
lived here their entire life and Their parents
were here their entire life and we've been here
10 or 12 years. We will always be the newbies
and Yep. Oh, well, that's life. Hey, we're gonna
be talking about all kinds of fun stuff today
Queen rearing we're gonna talk about your crazy
mad professor Isms that you have developed which
is awesome and a lot of beekeepers have a new
product that you've developed and how and why
and But first if you wouldn't mind, can you give
us a very brief? What got you started in beekeeping?
How many hives do you run? Give us an idea of
who Dan is. Sure. Well, I started beekeeping
officially in 1996, but I wasn't really serious
about it until I moved to Georgia again about
about 15 years ago. And it was essentially born
out of the idea of homesteading. You know, we
have a big vegetable garden. We have some fruit
trees that have chickens, that kind of thing.
And I thought, well, you know, I need a couple
of hives and. I found I absolutely loved it.
It is challenging, frustrating, hot, sweaty,
hard lifting, getting stung. But when you get
the hang of it, it's absolutely wonderful. You
have really hot summers out there, don't you?
We do. It gets pretty brutal here in the summertime.
So what's it like? quote overwintering, since
you don't have a real winter, but you certainly
have a downtime. Do you do your bees run through
a long dearth during the winter? Actually, we
get a pretty short nectar flow followed by a
long summer dearth, and then it stays warm enough
that the queens often don't shut down entirely.
But we hit brood minimum, you know, right around
the just before the winter solstice. which is
obviously a great time to treat with oxalic acid.
Yeah. We haven't talked much about queen rearing
on this show yet. That's something that you have
some experience with. If somebody has never done
it before, can you give us a little background?
And I know you're not like a professor, but from
your experience, what kind of method do you like
to use? How does it work? Give us a little tutorial.
Sure. Well, what's really cool about it is that
the beekeeper can work with the bees own instinctive
responses to being queenless in order to generate
new queens in various ways. Basically, when she's
gone, they know it right away and they can start
to raise their own replacement queens. And if
you do that under the right conditions, you can
use a colony or you can set up a particular box.
to create high quality queens at larger numbers
than they would normally do. It wouldn't be a
unreasonable thing for a backyard beekeeper to
produce 30 queens at a time. I guess I've tried
different techniques before. I tend to fall back
on the cloak board method. Harry Cloak, I believe
out of New Zealand, developed this. And it's
essentially an opening and closing double screen
board technique. where you create, the hive is
called a starter finisher at that point, and
you create a queen -less condition in the upper
box of a double deep. You can use an 8 frame
or a 10 frame. You create a queen -less condition
with a lot of young bees up top. You feed them
very well, and then you graft, and then sort
of graft frame into that top box. and they go
to town on it, and you leave it there for usually
24, sometimes 48 hours. Then you reintegrate
the lower box by opening up the door, in essence,
and it becomes just queen excluder there. So
it becomes queen right, which tends to finish
better. And then after a few days, they've capped
those off. You can pull them out to an incubator.
You can protect them with cages in the finisher
if you want. There are different techniques used
from there to finish. You use some terms that
some people haven't heard of yet. And by the
way, we have on this podcast, we have listeners
that are commercial beekeepers that know a hundred
times more than I ever will. We also have beginners.
So give us an idea what the heck is grafting
and a couple of the other terms you used. Sure,
right. Yeah, grafting. is basically transferring
larvae from a frame that you've chosen. And they
have to be very young larvae, just one day hatched,
basically. You want them, if you're looking visually,
you can see how larvae are. They're C -shaped
when they develop. You want to get them when
they are comma -shaped, not even a C -shape yet.
So very, very young, recently hatched larvae.
And you carefully scoop them out of the cell.
and you put them into a cell that you choose
that is on a bar that then faces vertically downward
like a queen cell, they will under those conditions
I mentioned before about good nutrition and being
queenless, they will create a queen cell from
that and you can put whole bars of 15, 30, 45
at a time depending on the strength of your starter.
the strength is determined by how many nurse
bees you can pack in. So that's grafting. Double
screen board, I mentioned that. It's important
in this starter -finisher box that if you're
going to have a queen in it, in the lower box,
they can't communicate pheromones to the upper
box. So in the case of the cloak board, there's
actually a slide that acts as a door that closes
the upper box from the lower box so that Pheromone
is no longer being transmitted back and forth.
They believe they're queenless upstairs and they
will then generate queen cells. You don't want
to provide them with any brood of their own to
do that. You want the larvae that you have chosen
only. Not only because you're looking for your
favorite queen, your favorite hive, the genetics
you're after, various other selected traits,
but you want them to focus only on the larvae
that you have put in there for that. If you leave
other open larvae in the upper box, they'll continue
to feed them. And you want those nurse bees,
those worker bees, to do nothing but focus on
your grafts. And how are they going to be doing
that? What exactly are they going to do to your
grafts? They are going to feed the heck out of
them with royal jelly. and they're going to pack
those cells full of royal jelly hopefully more
than the larvae will ever possibly consume and
they're going to make a big beefy happy virgin
queen for you all right any secrets after that
you've got these virgin queens what are you doing
next well if you once you open that slide door
back up again you want to finish off those cells
for a few days until they're capped now there's
some Conditions that can occur in there, cold
nights, sometimes workers will tear cells back
down again, sometimes you can get a rogue queen
flying into the upper box. There are any number
of things that can put those cells at risk. So
what I like to do after they're capped, all they
need is warmth and humidity. I like to pull them
out and put them into an incubator. I prefer
93 Fahrenheit. Some people go a little warmer,
some people go a little cooler. And the choice
of incubator is up to you. It depends on how
many you have, whether you need portability.
Some commercial guys have giant ones that look
like the size of a refrigerator. Some people
use chicken egg incubators, for example, or reptile
egg incubators. Anything will work as long as
it holds a steady temperature. And then these
queens hatch. And then what are you doing with
them so they go out and get mated? Right. So
once they emerge, Sorry, emerge, not hatch. Thank
you for correcting me on that one. I didn't mean
to use the wrong term there. Yeah. Yeah. Thank
you. Yeah. Yeah. Eggs hatch, virgins emerge.
Yeah. So the virgins will emerge. I like to emerge
them and look at them. Now you talk to the commercial
guys and they're like, no, that's a lot of extra
work. We don't have time for that. And they're
right. Time is money. In my case, what I really
like to do, I like to emerge those virgins. I
like to get a good look at them. make sure they've
got all six legs, all their wings are looking
good, they're big fat healthy girls, and cull
the ones that don't meet the standard. Let me
just take a minute here to thank our presenting
sponsor, Man Lake. One of the things I love about
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don't forget your discount code MLBlove10, it's
in the show notes, for $10 off your first $100
purchase. Now, back to the guest. So once I've
got those virgins, I can put them into mating
nukes. And a mating nuke is just a nucleus colony
that you've got set aside. that you rotate virgins
in and mated queens out. Mating nucs are on a
commercial scale or teeny tiny little styrofoam
things, but it can be a full -size colony if
you really want it to. What I prefer is a five
frame nuc box with a gallon and a half feeder
in place. So I've really got a three frame box,
but I can put some feed in there when needed.
I like working with the deep frames. I like a
bigger mating nuc than normal. It is a little
harder to find the queen, but you've got a little
buffer here and there on the timing on pulling
those queens back out again once they're mated.
I find it's a little more comfortable to use
three deep frames. How do you know when those
queens have successfully mated? Oh, well, you
definitely check back on them after a while.
It takes them a little time to mature. Then they
go on mating flights and then they come back.
What I like is to see a really good pattern of
brood. You need to make sure they're not drone
layers. You need to make sure they've come back
from their mating flight. Sometimes they don't
make it home. They get pecked off by a bird or
something. And I like to see a good pattern develop.
I believe the science has shown that the queen
will be healthier if she's got a three -week
cycle between installing and pulling or catching.
That there is some maturation. You can see that
she's a good queen after a couple of weeks, but
waiting a little bit longer. she'll mature a
little bit more. So it takes a little bit longer.
Again, time is money. And the commercial beekeepers
are like, no, we don't have time for that. We
see that she's a good queen. We can we can send
her on. I'm not on such a tight schedule. So
I like a three week schedule. All right. I like
it. I called you earlier mad scientist. That
was a loving term, not a discriminatory kind
of thing. OK, let's explain why now, because
like a lot of beekeepers, you found, oh, here's
something I like, but I can make it better. Go
for it. Tell us what you've created. Right, right.
Well, a lot of us, you know, beekeepers were
tinkerers in a lot of different ways. We were
either building boxes or making gizmos and gadgets.
And I'm a big fan of the JZBZ Queen Cell Cup.
That's for grafting. That's the larval transfer
we talked about. But JZBZ does not manufacture
a corresponding cage. So I had to rig up this
and that and use other manufacturers' components
to properly cage those cells to emerge the virgins
safely to protect them from each other. Because
as you know, but maybe some of the audience don't
know, when those virgins emerge, if they're out
there running around with each other, they're
going to fight each other to the death. So I
want to protect them from each other and from
being torn down in the finish or all that So
I fiddled with this and that and the other thing,
you know duct tape and wire mesh and what we
call roller cages and a few other ideas and then
I learned how to 3d print and Then I learned
how to design 3d models for 3d printing and Developed
over time and with help and input from other
beekeepers a cage that works very well for the
JZBZ Queen Cell Cup and goes on the bar and since
then I've developed an entire line of accessories
to help make your beekeeping, help make your
queen rearing easier. And I named it EZPZ. You
can keep going. Well, I think you can tell us
more about it. I'm looking at your website right
now, and that'll be in the show notes, by the
way, so everybody can look it up. I know these
aren't in mass production yet. In other words,
a lot of the suppliers are not going to have
these. They're going to have to go to your website
if they want to take a look at them because they're
individually 3D printed at this point. But yeah,
I'm scrolling through. This stuff looks pretty
cool. Tell us about some of the things you have.
Sure. Well, it all started with the cage and
the original idea of protecting the virgin when
she emerged. But then I realized, well, now that
same cage could be used for introduction. So
I developed a candy cap that you take the JZBZ
cell cup out and plug it with the candy cap so
that it can be used either for releasing the
virgin slowly, which isn't normally necessary,
or for releasing a mated queen slowly. can also
be used for transport. Then I got a different
kind of incubator and realized that a tray to
hold these cages would be really handy. And so
there's a tray that goes with it as well now.
And then I designed and built a bracket device
that holds the JZBZ cell bars and a little grafting
stand, you know, You can buy a really, really
fancy grafting stand or grafting station as they're
called, but all you really need is something
that'll hold your frame for grafting. You just
prop it up just nicely, and it doesn't have to
be all that fancy to work right. So those are
the main products, and more and more things have
kind of spawned from that. I don't know if you
know about the yellow -legged hornet down here.
We've talked about it on the show. Yeah, it's
pretty scary. It's coming over from Europe, originally
from Asia. Tell us how much of it's going on
there. Well, it's confined so far to the coastal
area of Georgia and South Carolina down near
Savannah. What I did was I developed an easy
little track device that works with mason jars
and donated a bunch of them to beekeepers down
in the Savannah area. In order to help them monitor
it was a it's a monitoring device. I suppose
that you could spin it out for a full effective
not eradication, but reduction of The population
of the actual insect I just wanted some kind
of a zapper right one of those yellow -legged
Hornets gets around one of my colonies. I just
want to zap it Can you develop that for me? If
only it could be that selective, that would be
pretty awesome. And that simple, nothing is.
A couple of the other things that I've developed
with the input from other beekeepers, oftentimes
existing customers will say, well, you know,
I'd really like to do this. Once those queens
are mated, a lot of folks like to bank them in
either a queenless upper or a queenless hive
entirely. And so I developed the banker that
goes on a frame, either a Langstroth deep or
a Langstroth medium that will hold a number of
the easy peasy cages. And then just recently,
this is a really fun thing, just recently I was
contacted by a guy in Florida who's really good
at cutting queen cells off of foundation. And
he said, I really want to try to figure out a
way to make your cage work so that I can... do
more, you know, when I've got five really nice
looking cells on a frame, in order to really
get the most out of that, instead of just putting
that whole frame into a queen -less nuke, I want
to be able to make five queen -less nukes out
of that instead. And so I developed a cage that
you put the, you harvest the queen cell off of
the foundation, and you put it in the cage and
it closes over clamshell fashion. and you can
emerge the virgin safely in that cage as well.
I call that one the cut cell cage. That's something
I haven't done yet. Once you cut those cells,
how difficult is that to successfully stick them
to another frame somewhere or foundation? That's
just it. It's depending on how it is hanging.
You can put it on another frame. You can kind
of mash it in there as long as you don't mash
the cell itself. But what he likes to do is he
also likes to emerge those virgins just as if
he wanted to use the easy peasy cage. But I developed
this entire cage that it closes over. Instead
of trying to stick it down the opening, it closes
over the entire cell and encases it and holds
it steady for that virgin to emerge in the cage.
It's been surprisingly popular. We're going to
have to start adding video to this podcast in
the future so that you can actually demonstrate
some of that stuff. It would be cool to see.
It would be. It would be. Tell us about Tallahassee
Highlands. Oh, sure. Well, that's the the name
of the official name of the area is Tallahassee
Highlands Apiary. The area right here is high
ground just outside of Athens, Georgia. We're
right at the edge of the county. The Talisie
King was a Native American chief who lived here
many, many years ago. And the area is, it's really
informally known as Talisie Highlands, but we
liked it a lot. So we chose that as the apiary
name. I like it. Do you mind telling us what
you know, you don't have to tell us any secrets
or anything, but I think it's good for beekeepers
to hear a little bit about the business model
of other beekeepers. Or is this your full time
gig? And if so, how do you make money? I like
to refer to it as my obsession. I actually I
own and operate a mail order plant nursery. So
I am. super busy in the springtime. I probably
shouldn't even be a beekeeper, but I can't help
myself. I just, I love it way too much. So I
manage about 50 colonies and I would say 25 of
them are what I would consider to be in actual
honey production. And our nectar flow is on right
now. It's on strong right now. It won't last
very long. And I am a small producer. I produce
in the hundreds of pounds, not the thousands
of pounds. The local wildflower honey is pretty
tasty here. And then I also will, after we pull
supers and bottle up the local wildflower honey,
I will take a number of hives up into the Blue
Ridge Mountains for the sourwood flow. and it's
a lot of work hauling bees. And to ask any migratory
beekeeper, it's a lot of work and I don't even
move that many, but I just, I love sourwood honey
and it commands a premium price. I'm a little
low for boutique. I'm at $12 a pound for the
wildflower and $18 a pound for the sourwood,
but it's profitable enough for me. I make a decent
amount of money on it. Most years I'll sell a
couple of dozen nukes as well. as a part of swarm
prevention, and it's profitable. I like selling
bees. And then hopefully I'm going to be ramping
up queen sales. I've had a bit of a rough time
getting started this spring for various reasons,
but hopefully we'll get going. This year, I hope
to produce 150 vaccinated queens. From Dalen?
Yes, the Dalen vaccine. Yeah, they've been on
this podcast too. So if anybody wants to hear
more about the vaccine, Go back to that episode.
I don't know the number off the top of my head,
but we had a couple of people from Dalen on and
they were excellent explaining how that works
and explaining how you don't have to catch each
queen and get a needle and vaccinator like that.
All right. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff they're
doing. It's time, Dan. Have you thought of a
wild and crazy story yet? Oh, no, no. You know,
again, migratory beekeepers would say, oh, that's
nothing. But I always think of how crazy it is
driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains with
a trailer load full of bees weaving and turning
in the mountain roads at night. And it's classed
as a temperate rainforest. So it's usually pretty
wet up there, too. And we haven't lost anything
yet, but it gets a little bit hairy sometimes.
I wish I had something better for you. I really
You keep thinking about it for a minute Anyway,
I need to try that sour wood honey. I'll have
to can I order some from your website? I'd be
happy to send you some it's it's delicious. I
can't wait to try it I love tasting honey from
all over Every place that I travel it is so fun
to try different honeys and I don't mean infused
honeys because you can do that anywhere, but
honey's from Different local pollination so and
in different nectar flows. So anyway back to
your wild and crazy beekeeping story Can you
tell me what is the most times you've been stung
in one day? Oh, well, there was the time my wife
had my veil and jacket in the back of the truck
and There was a swarm it had it had formed the
bivouac on a branch very high up I it was early
on in my beekeeping. I think I had probably had
you know, just a few years under my belt and
I needed that swarm. I needed it badly. You know
how it is. Got my Poland bucket and got it extended
up and it was right near a power line too. So
I was being a little bit careful how I was handling
things. I bopped that branch with the bucket
and I missed and the entire bivouac came down.
It seemed like about half of it came down on
me. You know a bivouac is pretty peaceful until
it drops 30 feet down hard. Yeah. I got stung
up, as they say here in Georgia, I got ed up.
Probably, I don't know, probably 25, 30 stings
before I got out of there. Yeah, that's a that's
a pretty crazy thing. When you're up there and
you're not suited up and all of a sudden you
realize that thousands of bees are falling on
you. You know, at least I didn't climb 30 feet
in the air. You know, I always I hear these people
that have fallen off of their ladder over. You
know, a swarm is a beautiful thing, but it's
not worth a trip to the hospital. Now, the long
poles make a lot more sense than 20 foot tall
ladders. Yeah. Yeah. Safety wise. Absolutely.
Hey, Dan, I appreciate your time today. Your
knowledge, your insights. Thank you so very much.
Keep in touch with the show. People can find
you in the show notes and we'll talk again soon.
All right. Thanks very much. Thanks again for
joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping, presented
by Man Lake. Remember right now to follow or
subscribe and share this podcast. Also a quick
shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support.
Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes
Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release
Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. Enjoy spring
everybody, enjoy your bees, and 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.