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. Our guest today just helped save millions of honey bees after their truck jackknifed and dumped over 400 full hives down a steep ravine. How did she and her team do it? And what's it like to have so many homeless angry bees buzzing at the same time that you can't even hear the other beekeepers yelling to you? That's all coming up but first let's just take two minutes to go inside the hive. This feature presented by Primal Bee. We have talked about
the waggle dance before. How forager bees come back to the hive and tell everyone where the good flowers are by dancing on the comb. The angle of the dance points toward the food. The length tells you how far. Scientists just figured out something new. The quality of the dance depends on who's watching. Researchers at UC San Diego, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Queen Mary University of London ran experiments where they changed how many bees were paying attention to
the dancer. When a crowd gathered around the directions were precise, but when fewer bees showed up the dance got a little sloppy. One of the researchers compared it to a street performer. With a big crowd, you can focus on your act. When the audience thins out, you start scanning for attention, moving around, trying to draw people in. All that extra movement throws off your routine. Bees do the same thing. When followers are scarce, the forager wanders around the dance
floor looking for an audience. The directions get fuzzier because she's multitasking. The team also figured out how dancers know they're being watched. Audience members touch the performer with their antenna and bodies. That physical contact tells the dancer how many bees are following along. As one of the scientists put it, honey bees quite literally dance better when they know someone is watching. I'd like to welcome to the show today, Tristan Tartaglia. Hey, good morning,
Tristan. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm good. My tongue is running without my brain, as you can tell, but we'll try to get that going here as we wake up more this morning. It's early for you. No, the kids have already gone to school. We start early around here so that when midday rolls around, we can come inside and enjoy the air conditioning. Yeah, it's a
good time of day for us. got it well we're gonna have fun today oh this is gonna sound weird talking about a disaster But it is such an interesting story and I can't wait to hear all the details about this big bee truck rollover in Oregon that just happened a few days ago. We're recording at the end of March 2026 here and this is still very fresh from a week ago. You know what, before we jump into it Tristan, would you give us just a little bit of background about your beekeeping
journey? How long have you been doing it? I think I started in like 2020. You know, right at the end of COVID times we were all like... home and this and that and everybody needed something kind of extra to do or not necessarily extra, but maybe something that brought them back to gardening or kick -ins or something that brought them back. And so beekeeping was my thing. I have a story about that, but I'll tell you that at the end. We just, we got into beekeeping.
We ended up getting a mentor and joining our local club, Southern Oregon Beekeepers Association. And that year I won a ticket. Excuse me, I didn't win the ticket. My friend Jenny won the ticket and she took me because it happened to be on my birthday. So Jenny took me to the first ever Oregon State Beekeeping Conference. And I don't know if you've ever been to one of your state beekeeping conferences, but the vibe there is
so cool. I don't know if all of them are like that, but Oregon's is like, hey, hi, everybody is like. there for bees and it's really cool. So that was one of my first experiences and I was like this is where I want to be. These are the people I want to be around. I've been to a few of them. My state one, ABF, Honey Bee Expo, even Appamondia over in Copenhagen this last year. And I'll tell you one thing, beekeepers are some of the friendliest people anywhere.
Somebody told me recently it's because they're all nerds and so they all get along well. I don't know if that's the case. There's like half I think that are nerds and then there's this other half that are like just down to earth wanting to do that. You know like there's the educated and then there's the like we're just chilling here doing the thing with these guys. That's me. But I love that beekeepers are so happy to
share information with each other. It's not like I have the secret to taking care of a row, but I'm not going to tell anybody else. No, it's not that way. I worked at a pool hall for 10 years and everybody there was a hustler. You know, the old school hustlers, they come in and they only beat you by three points. And then the next time and you're better and they then only beat you by two points, but you still got a chance. Give me 10 bucks. You know, beekeeping
is not like that at all. So it's really a cool community. I agree. And I'll bet in Oregon, even more so. Yeah. As you said, there's a lot of hippie dippies around. There's a lot of hippie dippies here and that is not negative. It is really cool chill vibe. For those that weren't there before we were recording, we were talking about Ashland and what a beautiful place it is and what kind of community it is. You do a bunch of cutouts. How many do you do every year, would
you say? I do. I would say somewhere between 60 and 120, depending on the year. And my cutouts are not always honeybees. Ashland is one of those places that will actually hire me to come out and pull yellow jackets, bald -faced hornets out with no chemicals. That's my shtick is, hey, I'll come and I'll take them out with no chemicals. And they love it. that. So it is a bit of a drive from here, but they're willing to compensate that. So Ashland is a great spot for sure. Okay.
I'm going to get off topic for a second and say, how do you find the yellow jacket nests? Well, I don't know how you feel about cursing on your thing, but you follow the butt wads. You just follow them and you hope not to get stung while you're doing it. If there's a hole in the ground, you start digging. And you know that you've hit them when you get a second wave of them coming at you and you feel this feeling in the back of your skull that tells you you're going to
die. You found the nest. They're really violent. I admit, I'm someone that would get out some kind of poison at that point, but you're paid to remove them. So you just what? Dig the nest out, stick it in a box or something and. Yep. Take it to hell and drop it off where it belongs.
Yep I actually dig the nest up then I put it in a cooler and I leave the cooler open until nighttime and Then I put the lid on the cooler come back in the morning Vacuum up every one that I can and everybody needs to know like that's a hot zone for three days They are gonna be pissed. But yeah, we chemically free come and remove them We can't promise that we can get every bug, but you will not be having another brood cycle Where do you take them? I don't take them anywhere.
They stay in that cooler until the next time I need the cooler and the cooler gets very hot in the back of a car. And if anyone sees this, that can direct me how to use them better than that. I know there are several places that use their venom. I just don't know how to donate the box to the people, to the right people or how to get that to them. But every year we have dozens of boxes or bags of deceased. Yellow jackets,
yeah. I figure honey bees we save and we keep alive and we rehabilitate, but yellow jackets, I couldn't imagine them being around my property or putting them on someone else's property. No. No, they end up deceased, but I don't use chemicals to do it. So you're not saturating your land or your other stuff with chemicals. Well, I'm glad to hear you're not just moving them someplace else for them to live. No. We have enough of them. Yeah, we put them out of their misery.
And if anybody can answer Tristan's question, because I don't know the answer. I know how to harvest honey bee venom, but from yellow jackets or dead yellow jackets, I have no idea. So if anybody out there knows, email me, eric at be love beekeeping dot com. And we'll disseminate the information. We'll get it back to Tristan and to anybody else that's interested. That'd be great. That's the community we have here. All right. Let's jump into the big fun topic
that we have for today. How did you first hear about the truck rollover? So I first heard about it. It was actually a jackknifing. And I heard about it on the Rogue Valley Scanner, I believe it's called, or Medford. scanner, something on Facebook, scanner, right? And I went on there and I saw that there was this story. It was like pollinators lost, blah, blah, blah. There was like six comments and then it kind of disappeared.
And so I assumed that it got taken care of. That was the assumption from most of the people in the area was, oh, it's an accident and there are protocols in place to take care of that. And it happened very far out and it's gone. But you found out that that wasn't the case. How many hives were on that truck? ODOT reported that the driver said there was 420 the night
of the accident. From my beekeeping experience deductions, I would say that they had just been split because we found a bunch of queen cages that were still pretty fresh. So I'd imagine they went down for pollination, got their brood pretty good, and then split and headed up to the next field. So was anybody able to get a hold of the owners? To my knowledge the only time that the owners have come up was with an
article through the Rogue Valley Times. I didn't even know their names or anything about them until that point. I know there are insurance reasons why commercial beekeepers often don't try to recover these loads. I don't know enough detail about that if you know no more detail on that. let me know. But it is a little hard for me to understand why the owners don't put a big effort into recovering this stuff. So can
you shed a little more light on that? The only things that I do know, and I'm a very, I'll say it if I kind of know it person, so I could be incorrect, but the only thing I do know about it is that the owners didn't kill them, right? The first... option that Oregon Department of Transportation has and that any beekeeper has that has a rack like that is to just foam the bees to death. Bang. Done. There's no more liability of anybody getting stung or hurt or whatever.
And then the cleanup happens. And so personally for me, I'm just saying thank you to Oregon's Department of Transportation or thank you to Oregon State Police or thank you to the owners for not killing them. because if they had just killed them, then this would be not an issue and we wouldn't even be talking about it today. So thank you for not killing them. The accident happened on the 17th. I showed up whatever day
consecutively. I'm a small business owner myself, so I actually work in days of the week, not dates. So the accident was on the 17th and I showed up on the following Sunday. whatever the following Sunday was from that accident. My significant other and I ended up going out as a date. I was like, hey, let's go look and see what that looks like, you know, because it's only a two hour drive and it's right past some really cool stops
along the way for visual nature seeing. And so we actually went out there to see like, did they scrimp the guard rail? Did they hit the tree? What's it look like out there? So that's how I found out about it. And were people already cleaning it up? I have been told that there were at least half a dozen people who were aware of it and did go out there and they basically took
a box or took a queen or took something. But at that point, everybody that I'm aware of was worried about the legality of that, that that might be like a felony or something. And so as far as I know, nobody took much before that. I know that there were some people who were into getting firewood for a living that were out there, really pulling some boxes out of there. But nobody that was up there before me said, we got to get
these bees out of here. And unfortunately, or fortunately as it may be, I'm kind of a, what do they call that? Toot toot, you know, let's do this. I saw it and my first thought was. I cannot stand for this. I cannot do it. I'm going to take a video and then I'm going to start writing boxes. I'm going to start putting them up and putting them back because what I saw was just scattered and I thought these bees are going
to die of exposure. And Tristan, if you have some video that you can share for the video version of this podcast, we'll insert some of that in. Yeah. but just explain explain the terrain because it was a very steep hill that all these boxes went down right yes i've been told it was a 30 degree angle and i don't know who figured that out but it's basically when you are looking at the ground, you're only looking at like one foot
ahead of you. It is so steep. And so I think that led, that was part of the reason why the bees didn't get foamed was because they deemed the terrain too dangerous, maybe. I'm not really sure, but we're just thankful that they didn't get foamed. So you were tooting the horn about this whole problem. What did you do? You took some video and how did you get the word out? Yeah. So we went out there and it's date day. And basically I said, this cannot stand. I took
a video. Just, I just panned once like this. And then I put my phone in my pocket and I started moving boxes. We did take a bee suit. So, and actually we took my significant others bee suit, my bee suit, and we brought an extra in case there was anybody there that like couldn't or whatever. So we started moving boxes. And about an hour later, a gentleman who I don't know if he wants to be named, so I won't name him, but he showed up and he said, yeah, we're doing this.
Here's my hay rope. And so we just started moving boxes about half an hour later. Some guy in a big black diesel truck showed up and he said, are you guys okay? Is there a car accident here? And I said, no, we're just trying to save these bees. And he says, well, I did bees. and he put on my spare bee suit and that core group of people we just moved probably 50 to 60 boxes all into place so that the bees would hopefully settle into them. You have to understand it was so loud
that we couldn't talk to one another. The bees frames were scattered all on the ground and so They had hidden under the wreckage and I would assume they tried, the queens tried to stay away from one another or they fought. I don't know, but you've got individual bees that wake up around, the sun didn't hit the spot until about noon. So it would start to warm up and then right around two or three in the afternoon, it was, you couldn't
hear each other until about four. But that's literally all the sunlight they got was like
two to four. all that powerful good like get things moving sunlight and then it starts to chill down immediately because the trees on the other hill are creating no sun again and so the limited time for them to get into a box first of all was ridiculous i mean i was i was walking down where i had put boxes and i would literally see queens getting balled on the ground i don't know if that's because they tried to swarm into the box and none of the bees recognize them.
I mean, there's probably a lot of anatomy and logistics for bees involved in that. But my thinking was, okay, in a disaster like this, the strongest survive, but they won't survive if I don't give them this equipment. So we just lined the equipment up, took the feeders out because I figured that was dead space in the box that they didn't need.
And so we would take the feeder out. put two of the emptiest frames or one big thick honey frame on one side and then move everything over and put one big thick honey on the other side. I figured that was more insulative than anything else. And we just stacked those boxes in what we call the train. It would be a tree at the base so that you knew that the boxes weren't gonna slide down the hill because otherwise they did. And then we'd put one box, one box, one
box, one box, one box. We did about 40 or 50 of those the four or five of us me my significant other and the two unnamed Was there a time that you said let's well, and I know a lot of the boxes were broken too. They were trashed Yeah, let's take the boxes at work We can't just leave these bees here forever and let's take them home find them new homes or whatever Yeah, we actually one of the guys had brought a bunch of nukes And so we just started filling those. He had
a trainee or a mentee with him. And so we filled up the truck and the other guy didn't take anything that day. He just wanted to help. And I took one of those nukes as well. I also took a lot of just blank frames. I was like, I don't necessarily know where the bees are. And I didn't want to break the frames apart to look through the clusters to get to the queens. I didn't want to break that. I figured, no, let's leave the cluster.
You can move it over and put that honey frame in, but don't break their cluster because I wasn't necessarily sure that they were getting warm enough to break their own cluster. And so I was against that. I didn't want to do that. We didn't do that. When we did transfer them into the nukes, we would grab three and four frames and lower those into the nukes without breaking that cluster. So we had no idea if there was a queen in there
or not. But it just you can you is a beekeeper you can you can look at it and say oh, this is the cluster These are the frames and you can move that directly over and so you did all this in one day or a couple days or what? No, I did all this on Sunday night became our Sunday from about noon until about I don't know we worked till 7 or 8 p .m. And it was just got it was like not only are you exhausted because you've never well You haven't done this kind of stuff
since you're 22. Uh -huh and and you're just tired and there's no you're gonna get hurt and so it's and if you want to come back tomorrow you better go home now and so we all called it and we had filled his nukes and I had one of them and he gave me the box I admit a pet peeve of mine is that it seems all beehives are white yeah boring old white and just when I get a pet peeve man Lake comes to the rescue with their new color collection The vibrant new line of
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primalbee .com slash be love and use code be love at checkout and again we didn't know if we like when we went down to the bottom of that hill we weren't sure like are we gonna catch felonies for this are we gonna be in trouble for this and i was like you know what You can't
save something that's dead. They can argue about whether I'm committing a crime After I save some of these bees and I didn't think when I looked at it I didn't think I was gonna be able to save very many I didn't occur to me at that moment But I just wanted to do as much as I could and then I was like I know like six or eight beekeepers who would come out with me here tomorrow if I described the situation to them I knew I had taken that video in awe of the situation before
I touched anything. So I was like yeah, we're going to be able to do this. And then Oregon State Police pulled over into the pullout. And I told my guy, I said, I'm going down there because they won't come get me. You go talk to them. because I'm not the person that should be talking to anybody about anything. I'm very gruff and I'm very opinionated. And so I sent him to talk to the police and I was like, you're going to
have to come pull me out of this. And so he talked to them and they were like, no, this, that's fine. It's a salvage situation. You are, you are saving things as long as none of this gets sold. If it gets sold, it's now insurance fraud and you will be in a lot of trouble. But I don't think anybody had their mind on any kind of monetization except for how much it was. going to take to fill up the gas tank to get back up there to do more work at that time. I bet that was a little
peace of mind to know that. It makes sense, the salvage whole aspect, legal aspect of it. Plus you're, I mean, you're not only saving bees, you're salvaging stuff. And you're cleaning up what really could be a lot of litter, a lot of big mess. And consider what happens to a fire crew that's dependent on that road to get through to the next fire and a fire hits that wax. That's a, I don't know how hot it would get, but I know it'd get a lot hotter than just timber. You know
what I'm saying? That was a serious concern for me personally. I'm like, I can't breathe hardly any summer anyway, the wildfires that come through here. I know that they probably have systems and maps where they know that stuff like this happened, but can you imagine if it got like overlooked and they couldn't figure out why it got so hot? Like that would be, it's just like a little map for disaster. So I was like, yeah, no, we've got to get the garbage out of here
too. It's not just about the bees, but at that moment it was definitely like bees first, wax later in my head. Yeah totally makes sense. So did you go back the next day? So that night actually I posted that short video to Facebook and I thought and I told myself okay I'm gonna post this and I'm not gonna post any kind of explanation or content or anything I'm just gonna post the video and say ew this is disgusting because the internet tends to feed off of negativity. I hadn't noticed.
So I sat there on this adrenaline junkie high because I had just been I mean that was a lot of physical effort and the way that I respond to that is fight or flight I'm in it like let's go and so my body was tired but my mind was so there's no other word for it I was I was high off of that feeling all of that adrenaline all of that work that I had just performed and so I posted it to the internet And I sat there responding to every comment because people were like, well,
what happened without context? This is AI. That looks like a bear. That looks like a hurricane. Leave the bees alone. They'll be fine. And I would go through there and say it was a semi -truck accident. And the key is that you have to have at least six words in your comment for the algorithm to care about. You can't just say bees, bear, buh -buh. You have to like... you
have to give it some context. So I was literally just responding to these people to get the algorithm to pick it up because I wanted my local people to see it and come out and help. But I didn't think to say that. The first video that I put out was just this raw. This happened. This is where it's at. And I didn't think to say, I'll be going out there tomorrow to deal with it.
And that was, if you are responding to a disaster and you're posting it to social media, make sure that you tell them this is happening now and you can still help. Otherwise they're going to look at it. And I just learned about this yesterday from my friend, Amanda Metcalf. She says it's called bystander apathy. It's when somebody, it looks at a situation that's happening and says, Oh, there's nothing I can do to help. And someone else watches that person feel that way.
and it excuses them from any accountability, roughly. That's the rough definition of it as I took it. So unfortunately, these people didn't realize that this was an ongoing right now help situation. So I responded to all those comments. I think I had like 600 ,000 views that night on that video alone when I went to bed. When I woke up, it was 1 .8 million. And was that just posted on Facebook or elsewhere? I did not
have TikTok. I didn't have anything else. I think it links to my Instagram automatically, but then I went back and looked later and it didn't for whatever reason. I am not a tech person. People have asked me, did you want to go viral? No. What I wanted was people in my area to see and respond. But when I woke up, it was 1 .8 million views. So what did I do? I sat there and responded to every comment because I wanted people to know, you know, this has happened. Help me, help me,
help me. And then I left. I left and went back out there. I had my friend Teresa. She's amazing. She's a little bit elderly and yet not elderly. She's a little bit older. And yet she, I told her, I was like, my arms hurt so much. I don't think I can drive. Can you drive me out there? And she was like, absolutely. And we went out there and we, boxes up the hill all day up the hill because I wanted to get them into the sun.
You got to understand the bottom of that canyon does not get sun at this time of year at all because the trees the way that everything works the sun does not hit it and so I thought well if I can get the equipment from the bottom to the top and get those feeders out and get that honey on the sides they have a chance of making
it overnight themselves. You got to take the lids and put the lids on We had no bottoms, but we were kind of sifting them into the dirt and then putting lids on them or stacking honey frames on top of them to give as much insulation as we possibly could because, you know, there's 420 boxes. That means there's only 420 lids and half of them are destroyed. So we were just taking wax foundations that had honey on them out and placing them on top. And you're doing that because
it's getting real cold at night, right? It gets so cold at four or five p .m. and I'm working my butt off and I'm still starting to like chatter a little bit. I don't know exactly how cold we should totally find out. I tried not to think about it while I was out there. You know, I just tried to like don't think about the negative Nancy's. Don't think about anything negative. Don't I mean, I came home and my guy said something about school and how they had just done something
with our kid. And I was like, I can't hear anything negative right now. I just have to keep going. Otherwise, I can't do it. So, and he was very supportive about that turned around. We did. We were positive with it. Every comment you can see on my Facebook, I'm either like snarky, which to me is positive. Even if it isn't, even if it's a negative response, it, it lights up my brain or like, thank you. Please help get the
word out. And so that night I made more videos and I posted saying tomorrow, please come help. That's what you have to do. You can't just say look at this disaster. You have to say look at this disaster I'm cleaning it up tomorrow on this day at this time. That's what will get people out there And how many people showed up when Teresa took me out there the day after the video.
It was just us the next day 50 plus people showed up I would say I couldn't count them because I was at the very bottom of the hill and it's hard to See? But I was sitting there watching more equipment move than I had been able to move in an entire day happen in 10 minutes. We were daisy chaining like crazy. Everybody was there to help. Nobody was there to be persnickety or stingy or I mean it was just this and the people who showed up were amazing. And nobody's there
to get paid either. They're just trying to help out the beat. spent 40 bucks in gas to get there. It's not about that at that point. At that point it's, and there's a lot of people saying like, oh, you're not going to be able to save them. They're getting too cold. Maybe they're infertile now. And it's like, yeah, but a worker bee doesn't know that she's infertile. She just knows she has a job to do and she wants to do it. And we saved like probably millions of those individual
worker bees. And maybe that doesn't count too. everyone else, but it counted everyone on that hill. Everyone on that hill cared that we, every bee we could save, we were saving. So it might seem ridiculous to the hive mind, but we cared about that. We were like, you know what? We're, we're saving that bee cared, that bee wanted to live. So we got them up to the top of the hill and it was pretty amazing. Wow. I appreciate
you doing that. The last time that we had a truck roll over like that, around where I am and it was about it was only about 20 miles from me the highway patrol and it was along a major interstate corridor yeah and the highway patrol put out a notice even if you're a beekeeper do not come to try to help we don't want other people here Yeah, I can imagine why. I mean, it's a huge liability, probably for the insurance company. Honestly, we were probably a huge liability up
on that mountain, too. I do want to point out no one got hurt. Everybody was very careful with each other. We were all very aware of the situation. And beekeepers are tough, man. We were out there to get the job done and we did. Tough nerds, right? That's right. Again, I appreciate that you did it. It was our pleasure. I have a question. I want everybody listening. to put themselves into your shoes for a minute, into your bee suit
for a minute. I talked to somebody else about a year ago that was part of one of these rescue operations and he said it was exhausting in a couple of ways. One was you're not used to the sound of that many bees. You mentioned how loud
it got. Another was he and everybody else that was working on the cleanup, I think he said there were six or eight people, They weren't down a steep hill like you or this was just really on the side of a road You're lifting a lot of boxes You're lifting a lot of weight and even though
they were very careful. They took a lot of stings They they duct tape their zippers and their cuffs and did all that kind of stuff and they still took a lot of stings You mentioned the adrenaline and the sound how were you feeling in the middle of all this? I have experience with yellow jackets. Yellow jackets will find any hole and they will all go into it and then they will line up on your body and wait and start synchronized stinging sessions. They're horrible. Honey bees do not
do that. If you are well suited, if you have the proper equipment, I did not take one sting. Not one. I wore that. I didn't take a single sting. When I go to my extractions, I don't take a single sting. When I go to do yellow jackets, duct tape is my friend. The only time that I got stung in this whole thing was at the end when I had taken my glove off up at the top. It was after the incident as far as I'm concerned.
I wore that. and it stopped me from getting stung and I use that when I'm doing anything and then also to be aware if you are doing bald -faced hornets you have to wear eye protection as well because they can actually spit venom at you out of their whatever orifice that is and they're pretty good too my glasses get wet with venom What do bald -faced hornets look like compared to other hornets, wasps, yellow jackets? They all look a lot alike, but they sound like bombers.
Instead of little jets. Yellow jackets are like jets. Honey bees are like commercial planes. And bald -faced hornets are like bombers. They are just... They're huge. And they don't care about you. Until you know, they're the ones that the little kids throw a rock and the little kid ends up deceased It's those are the ones because they come out and they are going to kill you.
It's it's intense. It's gnarly It's an adrenaline rush and at this point I've done enough bald -faced hornist extractions That I actually don't mind them because you can sneak up on them and wrap a bag around and tie it off real quick versus yellow jackets who You can't sneak up on you cannot sneak up on yellow jackets and they want to kill you. It's pretty gnarly What does the
nest look like for the bald -faced hornets? The bald -faced hornets is the ones that looks like they're about the size of basketballs generally and they're very smooth on the outside yellow jackets have those little pleats in them and Please if somebody out there has a better way of describing or a more scientific way But the way I describe it is the yellow jackets have pleating on the outside. The bald -faced hornets are generally smooth And the yellow jackets are
in the ground. They do. Yeah. Yellow jackets are in the ground as well. And they will find a hole in your suit. If you have a hole anywhere, they will find it. They are literally searching and honey bees are funny. They'll get on you and they'll do that motion where they're trying to sting and trying to sting and trying to sting and trying to sting. I had bees all over me trying to sting. Not one. Proper equipment. But you asked how I felt. My business is called Southern
Oregon Swarms. because swarms are my passion I think that there is something magical about the feeling in the air around swarms you've got medicine men who talk about toning and they bang the gong and that gives a certain swarms do that too they they emanate this Just it's just it's
incredible. I think that catching a swarm should be on everyone's bucket list whether they want it or not I'm one of those people and so I I take people around the valley We'll get a swarm call and I'll say hey, you've never caught a swarm Let's go and I'll catch the swarm with them just to be a part of it The bees go home with them and I go home happy inside of me. And so when I was out there The first two or three hours was really rough because when we got there,
there was no motion whatsoever. And I thought, oh my God, what if they're all dead? And then there was this like, not like your hives sound at home when they're waking up, but like there was this other sound that was very sad. And I imagine that's the sound that your guys are talking about where it's like, it's depressing. You can tell that this is not okay. And the bees know it and you can hear it that there it's something
is wrong. But then. About 2 p .m. They started sounding like swarms like genuine like there's a swarm somewhere in the vicinity There's a swarm and then there was two and then there was ten and the energy from that was just I Wouldn't doubt if it could cure some ailment like it was incredible and it was hopeful I May be a Maluni, but I could feel that there was hope And we're picking up, this is ridiculous. It's a beekeeper
thing, right? But we're picking up hives and we're moving nukes and we're doing all of this stuff. And yet what am I staring at? I'm staring at that swarm right there. And all I want to do is go catch that swarm. I refrained. I was like, you know what? I'm here to move equipment. That's what I'm here to do. But several of the beekeepers out there were like, oh swarm. And
we got, you know, very distracting. Alright before I let you go, I know you've been telling us this whole time about a wild and crazy honeybee story, but you said you have another one. Let's hear a wild and crazy beekeeping story. So my hope is that it's as inspirational as it was for me, but my wild crazy bee story is actually how I
got into bees. I was not interested in honey bees whatsoever, but my friend at the pool hall, his name is John Lucas, his wife had cancer and she would come in late at night and she would have ice cream with us. And I got to know her a little bit and then she passed away. And John came to me one day and he said, I can't tell you how much they want for her tombstone, but I think that's absolutely ridiculous. He said, can I buy you all of the equipment it would take
for you to keep a hive alive for Shirley? And so all of my bees come from him wanting to keep his wife's memory instead of a rock. So. So beautiful. It's beautiful. Thank you. He did that. And I wonder if a cemetery would allow us to have a beehive instead of a headstone. I don't think so. I don't think so either, but. Yep. Man, that'd be cool too, wouldn't it? All right. Well, I appreciate all of what you're doing and you're sharing these fun stories with us and touching
story too. That's a neat way to get started. Yeah. All right. Tristan, take care. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you so much. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips.
Hey thanks a lot guys. And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to 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 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.