in a world brimming with complexity few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless precision she dances from bloom to bloom each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct each act in service to the whole and then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to the bees' needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends and partners in
beekeeping, Man Lake. Today's guest recently spoke to almost 2 ,000 beekeepers at the North American Honey Bee Expo giving dozens and dozens, maybe even a hundred of useful tips for both new beekeepers as well as seasoned professionals. Her presentation was so useful and so popular that I just had to get her on the show. We're going to discuss tips for everything from melting wax, creaming honey, and catching swarms, to mite check, small hive beetle vacuums, and how
many times you should get stung every year. We have so much to cover that I'm going to shut up now and just get right to it. I'm so happy to welcome Deb Klugers to the show today, or
do we say Deborah? I'll answer to almost anything Hey beekeeper Anyway, hey, thank you We met at at the expo and it's great to see you again I hope I'm not dragging you away from anything But I figure you're in the state of New York on Long Island and with this huge cold snap You probably can't do much outside anyway, can you? Not much. Right after the snow I went outside and made sure the entrances were clear and that's about that. Take a few pictures and that's our
beekeeping for the week. We're under about a foot of snow and more to come this weekend. I promised our listeners all kinds of tips from you. So why don't we start with one that you just accidentally dropped which is clearing the snow out from the front of hives. Tell me why
and when. Let's just say that the way that I manage my bees which is in condensing condensing hives You often don't have to clear the snow from the front of the hive because the heat generated within is Actually going to take care of it The bees are warm and the only vent that the bees have on the way that I manage them is out the front door So typically there's gonna be they're
gonna take care of it themselves. So I just went around and made sure You know, um, that's what I do make sure they have food make sure their engines are cleared You know, I like to uh, leave the problems before they happen. So i'm um Hey before we jump into too many more tips give everybody an idea of who's deb What kind of beekeeping
do you do? How long have you been doing it? Well, i've been a beekeeper I think for about 15 or 16 years and when I first got started it was just to uh see what this be thing was all about i always grew food and i never knew the connection i have a degree in environmental studies and my master's in marine conservation policy and united degree did we ever discuss food systems
pollination. You know anything of that nature so i was i was clueless and once i learned about the bees and i started keeping them people started asking me for help. And I created a business which quickly grew, but I realized I really knew nothing. There's so much to know even to this
day. know that I need to know a lot more as we all do with bees, they're just magical and we just don't, you know, the biggest experts in the world besides the bees themselves don't really know as much about the bees as we would like. So I learned about the Eastern Apicultural Society Master Beekeeping Program, which is a program where they test you, they don't train you. So you have to come fully prepared to sit for four rigorous examinations, a field, an oral, a written
and a verse. When you have five years to pass, I passed them all in three. Still learning, going to these conferences, sitting in on demonstrations, lectures, reading, everything that I can. It's just so fascinating. The more that I learn, the better beekeeper I'm becoming. And I like to share that knowledge with other people as well. So I created this business where I basically place hives on residential and organic farms, residential estate out here in the Hamptons and
organic farms. The bees belong to the clients, the hives belong to the clients, the honey all belongs to the clients, and I'm their beekeeper. And that's how it grew from one to, I think I have about 40 clients today. And I also have a beautiful oceanfront farmland in Sagoponic, where I keep my own bees. About 30 colonies, 30, 50, something like that, for my own hive product. We need some pictures. It's glorious.
I mean, it's a 25 acres with me bees and trees and a gorgeous I think about a 40 foot flagpole flying that American flag. I just love it there Sounds fantastic Let's jump into winter just a bit Most of what needed to happen for winter needed to happen a few months ago in the fall Right now and and people listen to these podcasts when they're brand new like this week and in the summer and all you know and down the road. So just to let people know this is the end of
January 2026. Great big storm just hit New York and a bunch of the East Coast. What is there that you can do? You mentioned clearing snow from the front of hives. You also mentioned pictures. Is that just for fun or is there something you're checking with those? Well, the thermal imaging camera I basically use for doing cutouts. So I use it to find the bees, to locate the bees and structures, and I never cut until I find
the bees and I always find the bees. If I don't use my thermal imaging camera, I'll use an endoscopic camera, depending on the needs of each job. But thermal imaging is just for fun. It's cute. It takes all different colors, you know, whether it's rainbow or black and white or red and grayscale. And so it's just nice to get an eye on the colony inside the hive so that you know that it's alive from the heat that it's generating. Getting the bees ready for winter actually starts. probably
right about now for next winter. You know, everything we do is getting them ready to be able to overwinter on the common season. Keeping bees is kind of easy when there's a good nectar flow and there's not much going on besides the bees gathering and you're staying ahead of the swarming and making sure that they're good. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting them through winter.
And what's the number one key to that? I think having healthy, well -fed, mite -free colonies, pretty simple, in addition to the hive in which they're kept. So I mentioned earlier the condensing hive system that I use, and that's basically, you could say, the opposite of the ventilated hive, which is really the common way to keep bees and screen bottoms and upper entrances and screen dinner covers and all this stuff. And it actually goes against how bees would live
in nature. These are cavity dwellers, and they live in an airtight, light -tight cavity. I've never found a bee colony in a tree with a bunch of screens and openings on top. They typically look for a dark, dry cavity with one entrance, and if there's too much of an entrance, they'll propolize it to seal it up. Keeping the bees in the condensing hive gives them higher humidity, higher CO2, both of which are detrimental to
mites. So if there's anything I can do to undermine the Varroa mite, and hopefully not the soon -to -be Triple Aleph mite, but anything that I can do to keep those species at bay, including multiple treatments. different treatments multiple times a year. All these things that I'm doing is of course to keep them healthy for the day, but to get them through the winter. With a heavy mite load or even a heavy viral load going into the winter, you're not going to have as robust
a colony coming out in the spring. As long as we're on the mite subject, what's your favorite treatment? What's your philosophy? Well, my least favorite treatment is oxalate acid vaporization because it's dangerous to the beekeeper I think it's one of the best treatments When the bees are broodless because that treatment does not penetrate the brood capping. So it basically gets rid of the mites that are on the bees themselves.
But I guess maybe I guess I would say my favorite treatment could be the formic acid because it actually penetrates the brood cappings in times when the bees are brooding and kills where most of the mites are is underneath the brood cappings when they have brood. So I'd say formic pro. I like Apigard. It's good for warmer temperatures in the summertime. I use the Apigard on smaller colonies, nukes. I've been doing the impregnated
strips with the oxalic acid vaporization. But it's just, I think the trick is multiple treatments, the right treatments at the right time. Timing is everything. Beekeeping, if you don't get that right, you could mess things up. All right. You gave it your presentation about 100 tips in an hour or so. I don't know where else we want to jump in. Do you have some favorites you want to lead off with? Well, I love catching swarms. I manage my bees against swarming, so they're
not my bees that I'm catching. But I use this device. It's a basically a water jug or a five gallon pail or some kind of a vessel at the end of a pool telescoping pool pole. And I can get 30, 40 feet up. you know, without getting on a ladder to catch a swarm out of a tree. The people watching are pretty interested in watching how it goes, because I typically catch swarms dressed like this. I mean, I'm not suited up,
and that's another thing. You know, I do wear... protective gear when needed, but most of the times it's not needed. We're in New York. We don't have very much, if any, Africanized genetics here. Our bees are calm. They're gentle. I even do cutouts like that. No gloves. Usually no gear. I guess the tip there is to know the beast, you know, know what's going on in the environment and how their temperament could be. I like that.
The other tip that stands out to me with the thing with the pole, which a lot of us have done, I've used one of those painter poles that telescopes out and had not thought of a pool one, which would be longer and much, much stronger. Absolutely. Go to your pole supply store, right? Yep. You know, I put a lot of things on Facebook market or Facebook different sites, you know local free
cycles or local By us. It's called bonnock yard sale and I just put in anyone have a telescoping pool pole or does anyone have a a dorm refrigerator which I Did in order to get the little dorm refrigerator for that other device that I talked about Let's jump to that one. The tip about the dorm refrigerator. Yeah, so I was at EAS at a talk given by, oh, oh geez, I'm going to forget his name. He had shown a device that he made with an old dorm refrigerator and a lizard warming. pad, you know,
that you would put in a lizard tank. And however he built it, I went home and I said, huh, I think I'm going to try that. But instead of the lizard warming pad, I used a 100 watt light bulb and a little, I guess a light bulb holder, like a little tiny little lamp that would hold the light bulb and a non -working dorm refrigerator. But you can use a working one as well for other purposes. And I'll try to get to that. But basically it was Mark Friedel. That's who it was at EAS. he
showed it to render beeswax. And so I was like, huh, this is great. So I set up my device with the dorm refrigerator, 100 watt light bulb, and a thermostat, like a $30 thermostat that I purchased on Amazon. And I set the thermostat at 150 degrees, and within a day, you can literally render beeswax. I love rendering the beeswax outside in the summertime. with my solar wax melter, but that only works
from about maybe June through August. So in the wintertime when we have more time or if it's raining or what have you, the device that I made is a really good way to render your beeswax, but it can also be used as a honey decrystallizing cabinet. Just set it at 100. It takes a couple of days, and you have to turn the jars a little bit. I do that because I have a few clients, these bodybuilder guys, that they like to drizzle
the honey on their yogurt and such. But for the most part, I sell my honey as natural sed or crystallized honey. But some people really want the liquid, and it's easier for me to decrystallize it than them. And the other thing that I can use it for, if it was a working refrigerator, is to make creamed honey, set it at 53 degrees.
And the last thing is when I make candles, in order to not have that severe tunneling or cracking that sometimes happens in candle making, by slowly cooling the candles down, you can avoid that cracking and things of that nature. And basically I'll set it to about 80, maybe 85. Then I put it down to 80. And then eventually, you know, I just leave it shut. You can do that same technique with your candles just by putting them in an
oven and just the warmth. of the candles in the sealed oven, or a cooler, or a paper box with some styrofoam around it, something like that. But just cooling the candle slowly stops that cracking and tunneling. And a lot of ovens, if you just turn the light on in the oven, it'll get that thing at 80 degrees or whatever. Let's get back to the creamed honey. You mentioned 53 degrees. What is your particular method for creaming honey? Do you do stirring? What do you
do? I just basically will use a mixture, about 10 % of a already creamed honey that I find to be superior. Something that's got very little grit in the mouth and just a smooth texture. And those crystals will be the blueprint, so to speak, for the honey that you're attempting to cream. They'll kind of replicate those same size crystals. So if you have larger crystals, you're going to get a larger crystal sized creamed
honey. And all of the creamed honey is great, but when you're entering these shows, They want that really smooth smooth feel with no no grid or texture so when you if you have a Creamed honey that you found that you like save it and use that and you mix about 90 % put it in a 53 is the Optimal temperature 50 to 53. It's time and temperature really that gets your honey to become natural set or if you're making the creamed honey All right with the creamed honey. How often
are you stirring it? And how many days are you leaving it at that temperature? I don't really have all that written down, but I just kind of mix it up and put it in the jars and I'm done. Put it in that 53 and I'm not really stirring it any more than that. I don't know if that's the proper way to make it. Well, everybody does it different and that's why I love to ask. When I make like chocolate honey or cinnamon honey or something like that. It's really once and
done. I, I try to optimize my time. Yeah. Some people believe that during that 28 days at X temperature, they need to stir it twice a day or something like that. And you're saying stir it once and forget it. And it'll be great. I've taken a few ribbons. We can overcomplicate things a lot more than we need to. Okay. You also devised your very clever person. You devised something that I saw a picture of that was like a fan on top of a hive. Would you tell me what in the
world was going on with that? So I have always tapped and brush up to four or five thousand pounds of honey one frame at a time. Tap and brush, tap and brush. And it was quite the. assemblage of bees by the end of each each harvest you know and and i have i have connie's on about. I'd say forty some odd forty somewhat site so it's not like i've got a hundred colonies on one property
cuz that would be crazy. But yeah, so that's the way I did it and it just took a lot of time and a lot of disruption to the bees, honestly, you know, of course you smoke them down a little bit. I don't like to use a lot of smoke when I'm harvesting my honey because that soot can coat the wax. I manage my honey and stuff like that as if I'm entering honey shows. And so, you know, it's a high quality product that I try to achieve. So I'm still not going to, I'm
not going to. put a lot of smoke into a colony I'm trying to drag the bees down that I could put in some soot and things of that nature into the into the honey. So I had In the past tried, I don't know if you've ever seen it, it's like an elbow, a white PVC pipe that's an elbow and the idea behind that is you face that opening into the wind and the wind would come in and
gently drive the bees down. I tried that. Again, it's okay if you have a few colonies or something like that, but when you've got a hundred colonies to go through during the harvest, time is of the essence. So the other thing that I never used in the past was a fume board and you know, you spray it with a Bee Gone or Bee Quick or whatever. That Bee Gone and Bee Quick stuff, I use that in my cutouts if I'm at the point where I've got some bees hiding down in the rafters
or something like that. I'm gonna spray a very, very little bit to dry them out. You know, that's the only way to get them. You can't get 12 feet in, but you can spray a little Bee Quick. It may seem early, but right now is a great time to order your live bees for 2026 because they do sell out and because Man Lake is offering a discount for Be Love podcast listeners. Wait, what? I know you're saying live bees, they never go on sale. Well, they are now. Click on over
to Man Lake. Order your bees any variety nukes or packages and anything in the beginner essentials category and when you check out use the code get started in bees it's down in the show notes so you don't have to remember for a discount on everything so get your orders in early and save But what I made was what I would call a power fume board and I had a Commercial beekeeper friend just say mentioned that the big guys I call them the big guys the big boys They they
use some of them might use like some sort of a fan and he kind of explained it But I went huh, you know, let me again, you know You hear things and all of us beekeepers do it and then we kind of make it our own with what we have around the house So what I had around the house with these two pieces of plywood with the holes in it that I had already used for those PVC elbow type devices. So I already had those cut and then I had shims and I decided let me get this
fan. I got two $10 fans on Amazon because I made
two of these devices. In between the shim and I used a a comb honey super so it was a little bit shorter and then a shim and in between that I put some burlap and on that burlap I sprayed the be gone or be quick or whatever and then on top of that is the fan battery operated little small 3c batteries not a big deal, and I would put that Device on top of the hive and just two or three minutes that smell drove the bees down and out and the reason why I didn't use the customary
fume board is because a you need heat and sunlight and time and again time is is a The essence when you've got all these colonies to harvest from but also sometimes there is no Sun It's not that hot out or some of my my hives could be in shade so that the customary fume board wasn't gonna work So using this fan on top, it gently just blew this Be Gone or Be Quick down, and the bees would just come out the bottom, a lot of them,
and all be right there. And any stragglers left up in the honey supers, I used a blower that was battery operated that used the same batteries that my Instavep, my oxalic acid vaporizer blower. So like a leaf blower? Exactly and it cut my
harvest time down. I'd say 75 to 80 percent the time I was usually what took me a two full two weeks because again I'm going from site to site it's not all on one property is a lot of driving a lot of traffic out here in the Hamptons and It was literally we were done in like five days So it was tremendous amount of time saving and it would be great if you have one hive or if you've got 100 easy to make and expensive make it your own with what you've got around the house,
and these items are all on my Instagram and stuff like that. And all inexpensive, especially when you're getting them off Marketplace or something. I like the leaf blower thing. You mentioned the tap and brush, and I like to do the tap and blow. So I can take a frame out. I don't use queen excluders, so I'm quickly looking, make sure there's no queen. and shake the bees off, hand it to somebody else who's got the electric leaf blower done, stick it in something to take to
the honey house. So I felt it was so much less disruptive to the bees because again, with the tap and brush, there are bees everywhere. I mean, it just is what it was. And now they're they're all down at the bottom. Sometimes they're they're coming at the front and it looks kind of cool It kind of looks like a swarm when they're all funneling out But it's not it's just that they're just trying to get away from the smell which doesn't harm them and it doesn't impact the honey
So cool. Okay. Next thing I had in my notes was feeders My favorite feeder would have to be the baggie feeder. It's got so much merit to it. The first is that there's no drowning. So I'll just explain what it is. You take a shim, maybe a one inch shim or so or two inch shim or whatever you've got really, and a baggie. I buy baggies that are, I think they're about 18 by 15 inches. It holds a bit over a gallon. You could use regular baggies that you have in your house, but here's
a tip. Don't overfill it because what happens is you're going to put holes or slits on the top of the baggie and if it's over full that syrup can leak out so you know just make it so it's not over full and then I usually put a hundred holes on top some people and I count I'm like with my two little nails and some people do a slit whatever I find the slits the bees could get into it more than just a bunch of holes so you have no drowning the syrup stays warm it's
right on top of the hive. So the heat from the colony is warming the syrup. And that's especially important in the springtime, early spring, or even the fall, that the bees are not going to take cold syrup. So if you put a syrup, my second favorite syrup besides the division board feeders, which are inside the hive, which could also help the syrups to stay warm, but the top feeder with the wood with the floats, I just love that feeder
too. But that Syrup is going to get cold and the bees aren't going to go up and take cold syrup down So with the baggie feeder, yes, we have baggie waste But what I do is in the fall when I'm using my baggie feeders and I'm done with the baggie feeding I leave that baggie on
top and on top of that. I'll put my sugar slurry my Have a life fondant my fondant my sugar cakes whatever goes right on top of that and I'll do a slit right in the middle the bees could get up from the edges because I only made it like 18 by 15 and the baggy and the bees absolutely love it. Again, it lands to this condensing hive system where all the warm moist air stays right inside the hive and they can come up and get
their feed from on top. Brilliant. So when you say baggy, are you talking about just a regular Ziploc bag that's a gallon size or a two gallon size? Yeah, well for nukes, I'll use a gallon size, something like that. For my full size colonies, I buy baggies on, you can go search by the size and mine are 18 by 15 inches. And so they come almost all the way to the edges and you can get about a gallon and a quarter in each one. For you new beekeepers, exactly 100 little holes
is the way to do it. One more or one less, kill the bees. Yeah. Somebody had written Do you have a device for that? And I went, huh, well, no, but I'm going to make one. So I took a piece of my, um, my styrofoam, but I use it on the tops and I cut it and I shove the two nails through it and taped it up. Now I could do it with one hand and I could film it with the other one so I can do it instead of two hands. I love that. I just would never count. I would just go, okay,
done. We were kidding. Newbie keepers out there. Okay. No, it's actually two, a hundred. And you have to do exactly what I say. And I'm just kidding, because if we have five beekeepers telling us 10 different things, it doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means that that's how they do it at that time for their bees in that environment. So, you know, that's why we like to take a lot of information from lots of beekeepers and kind of make it your own what works for you. All right.
Any great tips or ideas for hive stands? Or was this your wild and crazy story? You can do both. I don't know about a wild and crazy story. It is kind of wild and crazy. It's kind of sad actually I was short on a couple of hive stands and I was like, oh, let me go get a few cinder blocks. So I went to my local lumber, it's not a lumber yard, whoever sells sand and stone, that kind of place. And I bought four cinder blocks and I kind of thought they smelled funky, but whatever.
I put them in my car, brought them out to Montauk, New York and put them down, put the bottom board on. Still got this weird feeling. Oh, these things kind of smell weird, but whatever. And I put the... Packages in the hives and I felt weird so I go back the next day and they were all dead and it was like there was something emanating from these cinder blocks cinder blocks are made from coal ash and and basically toxins and whatever I think that Older cinder box would be okay because
they have time over the years for that. Whatever is in them to Seep out the off -gassing Yeah, off -gassing exactly. So I would say also not to use them in your home gardens. People are building raised garden beds and things like that. Do not go get brand new cinder blocks. You just don't know what's in them. And the other toxic thing is pallets. Some pallets are heat treated and others are chemically treated and they're treated against insects and things of that nature.
So if you're putting your bees on a pesticide impregnated wooden platform, that might not be the best for the bees. So just check the pallets to make sure that they're heat treated. What did you do with those bad cinder blocks? I actually brought them back and They were only like four or five dollars, first of all, you know, so I was like, oh, this is great and affordable, whatever, which killed two colonies. But they were like, no refunds. I said, I understand. I don't want
a refund. I just don't want them. So I just brought them back to the store. Yeah, just take them. I don't care what you do with them. I had down that you had an interesting story about starting a smoker. Oh, the one that fell over. Have you had problems with smokers in the past? No, I
don't anymore. I was in a on a property and it was all pine needles and I didn't Need the smoker, but it was already lit, so I put it down on top of something I forget what it was but in my mind I was like oh boy that would stink if it fell over wouldn't it when I came back it had fallen over and it was a small little fire going which I stomped out But I guess the tip here is to always place your smoker on a solid non flammable surface it seems pretty simple I've melted a
few because I use the insulation on top of my hives underneath the inner cover underneath the outer cover. In between the inner and outer cover, I put insulation, but also on top. I'll put it. And occasionally I've placed my smoker on top of that and it makes a nice round melted spot. Well, they're hot. Yeah, very hot. You know, and I do place my smokers because I'm going from site to site. So traveling in my car, I put them in an ammunition metal ammo box and it air tight,
heat tight. I also put my oxalate acid vaporizers in there to keep them warm between sites because if you're using the battery operated one, it says that the battery will give about I think 30 treatments, 20 to 34, something like that, treatments per battery, the certain size. I was getting eight or nine. I was like, what's going on here? Well, I was going from site to site and it takes a lot of energy for the battery
to reheat the equipment back up to the. Proper temperature, so I put it in a hot box so to speak in between It extended the battery life greatly by doing that brilliant tips. Okay ammunition boxes yeah, or a kitty litter thing, but it's plastic but Some of us may have them lying around the house and they work pretty good as well.
How many cats do you have? I only have two And they love the bees they absolutely love the bees they'll sit and just watch them and you know when I do some open feeding they just sit there and they love the bees it's really interesting. The majority of people have one way of doing a mite check. Okay, we've got an alcohol wash, we've got a sugar shake, which is a similar kind of thing. But of course Deb does something different. Okay, here's tip number 190. How do you check
for mites? Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, when the bees are brooding, I'd say 50 to 90 percent of the mites are underneath the brood cappings. And let's just say that colony has 50 ,000 bees in it. and you're taking a sample of 300 bees from a colony of 50 ,000 and you're hoping that that sample that you're going to later do an alcohol wash on, you're hoping that that sample is a proper representation of the mite load within
the hive. And I kind of disagree because if most of the mites are underneath the brood cappings and you're taking a sample of 300 bees from a frame, first of all, how do you know that that sample that you've gathered. is a proper representation of the hive in general. There's a lot of room for user error, especially newbie keepers, if they don't know where to take the sample from or what have you. So what I do whenever I see drone brood within my hives, I'm opening that
up and looking for mites. Now we've learned that the mites seem to gravitate toward the drone brood more so than worker brood because they just have a few extra days to reproduce. So they're going to reproduce. a mite or two more so I just you can either just break it open And observe, you can uncap. I like to uncap 100 drone brood. Exactly a hundred. It's because it's easy to do the math, but if I see one mite, I'm done. I'm treating and I treat all my colonies. I don't
treat that one on that property. Everyone is getting treated. Everyone, every colony in North America has or will have mites. It's just how it is. I don't believe that there is a treatment free. ability. That's just my belief. Maybe there's some people that are successful at it, but where I live, there's a lot of beekeepers and a lot of new beekeepers that don't want to treat. And I was one of them. I was like, Oh, I'm going to do this natural. I don't need to do that.
My bees are good. They all died. They all died. And I literally saw mites running around. I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, and if you see mites, the colonies are already dead there. There's probably, if you see like mites everywhere, you just go order yourself some more bees or just learn learn how to better treat them. But by doing the drone brood inspection, you are looking right where the mites where you would expect them to be. And then I treat and also I'll remove
that drone brood. I do a drone brood culling as well as a part of an integrated pest management because if the mites are under in those drone brood under the cappings, just remove them and you're you're being able to get a bunch of mites out of the hive. The other problem also with doing the alcohol wash method by taking 300 bees, if your bees had swarmed, you're losing a good portion of those mites as well. So you might
have a false negative. You also might get a false positive in the fall when there's not a lot of... not a false positive, but a higher than normal number because in the fold, there's not a lot of brood going on. So the mites are more phoretic, more on the bees. You might get a much larger number than really what's your proper representation within the hive. I need to throw out a quick public service announcement. And that is that
we do need drones. So I don't advise taking out all of the drone brood in all of your hives. No, I don't take it all out. I'll just I actually make the bees make more so that I can take it out. So I could put an empty wooden frame with no foundation in it, say in spot three. So three in from the edges. and the bees will draw that
out typically with drone. brood size comb and then the queen will lay and so i'm actually manipulating them to make more drone brood so i can take that out i think the colonies know exactly what they're doing and when you start seeing drone brood it's a good sign that everything is good in that in that colony that they're actually making drones that they think things are good so of course we need them i overdo it i make them make more And another tip that you could do if you had
deep sized boxes, you could put in that medium frame. It could also have foundation in it. It could have worker foundation in it, but the bees will typically draw it down. If you put that medium in a deep box, they'll draw it down underneath that medium frame and it's typically going to be drawn, brewed, and once they cap it, you can cut that right off, feed it to your chickens. I'm just going to throw out there because we're going to be running out of time here real quick.
Deb has so many more tips on her social media and website, and I'll put a link to that down in the show notes so that people can find you, Deb. Thank you. And I want to shift gears for just a minute and talk a little bit about BeeVenom because you mentioned something to me the other day. About the fact that you think beekeepers need to get X amount of stings every year. Would you please explain that and the whys behind it?
One of the talks that I gave is called get your sting on and The it's not really my thought it's just from doing research that I came across some research that showed that the average person their incidence of having an anaphylactic allergic reaction to bee venom is about 1 to 3 percent in the general population. But the study claimed that I think it was between 35 and 48 percent.
of beekeepers and their families and pets actually can develop allergies to be venom whereas they weren't born with it but it develops over time and the reason why is because they're being all they're all suited up and gloves and duct tape and everything is they don't want to get stung. but they're getting low dose venom by squishing bees or breathing it in. And your body is reacting to that exposure to a toxin in a small amount.
But over time, when your body finally gets that one full dose of venom, and your body has already signaled that as being a very dangerous thing,
you go into an anaphylactic reaction. That also can happen to your pets, your kids, your wife, husband, because if you come in and you've got all this venom, and maybe you're getting stung all the time and it's fine, and you have no issues, but if you're giving your family and pets this constant low dose, their body is also signaling as this is danger, danger, and it's taking care of these low doses, but once it gets the full
dose, it goes into overdrive. So this study claimed that under 25 stings a year is you're asking for trouble as a beekeeper and then over 200 and over is a prophylactic dose to perhaps not develop an allergy. I've got three or four clients that started out as beekeepers but were tied up, duct taped and you know they did not ever want to get stung and they ended up when they did get stung going into an anaphylaxis emergency room type of issue and seeing allergists now
to try to reverse the damage. So, I mean, it's part of the job. B -venom is medicine. It cures all kinds of different diseases and disorders, anything from cosmetic to arthritis to MS, Lyme disease, different types of cancers. I mean, so it's medicine. We did a whole series on Apitherapy and all of the useful products from The Hive, in addition to Bee Venom, back at the end of Season 2. And it's a three -part series. It's
well worth listening to. Wonderful. One of the, if not the leading authority on Apitherapy in the world, Dr. Ilver in Romania was the guest for that three -part series. So I would recommend that. 200 stings just sounds like really a lot. It's not. I get that in a day. When you said 25, I was like, oh, that's a pretty good number. One thing that has concerned me in the past on this topic is I get stings in the spring, summer and fall. And in the winter, I'm not around the
bees at all. I don't have any that I use for any kind of apotherapy or anything in the winter. Am I a little bit more vulnerable or susceptible in the spring when I get stung again? Because I haven't for a while. I worry about that. Yeah, absolutely. And that that was talked about in these these studies as well. So I do order bees in the wintertime or on a warm day. I can go out there and take a willing or a non willing
participant to my therapy pursuits. But there's Ferris and Allen's Ferris is in, I think, South Carolina. Allen's bees, I think, is in California. So there are places that you can purchase a little box of bees. It could be 30, 40 dollars. You get 50, 60 bees and you could use it for all kinds of purposes or even inviting your friends and family over and get a little sting fest going. Most people don't think that sounds fun. It's
a lot of fun. All right. Last thing. When I've stung people, like, that they complain, I had a client, Boxer, one of my bee clients. Every time I'm there, this was one guy that did want to come out occasionally and check out the bees. Always complaining about his shoulder, his shoulder. And I kept telling him, you gotta sting it, you gotta sting it. He did not want to get stung. I'm tired of hearing this complaint every time
I see this guy. It's the same thing. So I just kind of lifted up a shirt, took a bee, stung him. And I was like... hoping we were still friends i did tell him take off his wedding ring and he was like why and i said well in case your arm swells it might be a good idea take it off he called me that night he said i have to thank you. I'm like, all right, so we're still friends. That's good. And he said, first of all, thank you for telling me to take my wedding ring off
because my whole arm swelled. I was like, OK. And he said, and the pain is like 85 % gone. And he was just amazed. I've heard this multiple times, one sting. People can sleep through the night after not having slept for a very long time. So it's alleged to be 100 times more potent as a bee venom is about 100 times more potent as an anti -inflammatory than a shot of cortisone. Cortisone is poison. You can only get it three times in a specific joint. Whereas bee venom,
it doesn't harm much. It heals, so there's so much to it. I'm a big believer. I've used it for all kinds of things myself. It's funny. My brain has a hard time going, it's a super strong anti -inflammatory if it makes me swell. It just seems counterintuitive, but there's a lot of science behind that. Yeah. It's amazing. It's been years since, since, since, since history has been written. The ancient Greek texts, the ancient Romans, Egyptians, you name it, China,
they've all done it. The other countries have been happily pursuing AP therapy. There's whole institutes devoted to it. It's just here. It's the big farm doesn't want, you know, they cannot recreate it in a lab. They can't hire us with our expertise. So they make it illegal and it cures people. So. All right, I'm going to give you the last word. If there's any favorite tip or advice out there that you have that we haven't covered yet, hit us with it now. I would say
to listen to the bees. And it seems it's a silly, simple thing to say. But here's a good example. If you've got this upper entrance that you've put on the bees and event and whatever it is,
and the bees propolize it shut. Then you go and you open it up and then the bees propel eyes it shut you should listen to the bees They know they are the foremost experts in the world on beekeeping and AP culture and even AP therapy if we just listen to them, you know and observe them and what are they what are they trying to tell us and Another thing, you know, sometimes people like all my bees are so hot I'm gonna
I'm gonna kill his colony. It's hot hive and my first questions are Are they well fed and are they sick? and then they have no mites and they've got plenty of food, I would then ask, you know, is there something disrupting them? Is there something coming at night? Are their boys throwing rocks? You know, what is it? Let's not go blame the bees immediately for their demeanor. Let's first check it out and see what's going on with them. And sometimes even the weather
can change their demeanor. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, one day nice, the next day not so nice. Yeah. All right. Deb, thank you so very much. I appreciate you coming back on with me and we're gonna have to do it again down the road because there's so much more that we could talk about. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks again for joining us on Bee Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends over at Man Lake. Hey and don't forget to order your bees. And a shout
out to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thank you so much guys. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion or topic that you'd like discussed on the show, shoot me an email, eric
at Be Love Beekeeping dot com. 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.