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, Be Keeping presented by our great friends over at Man Lake.
By the way, if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. Today's guest is a really fun and super knowledgeable beekeeper from Ohio. We'll be discussing a range of topics, everything from apotherapy, including a how -to on bee venom therapy, propolis, swarm removals, and drone races. drone races. I very much appreciate you putting up with my voice today. I promise
you won't catch anything from listening. We could have waited a few days until it cleared up, but hey, we promised a new episode every Thursday and we deliver a new episode every Thursday. So here we go. I'd like to welcome, warm welcome to our very special guest today, Emily Mueller. How are you today, Emily? Good, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. We have so much to talk about and so I'm gonna just...
Forget all the pleasantries and talking about the weather and just jump into it and and we could start anywhere But I was interested that you do a lot of education things like in schools Can you tell us a little bit about that first
off? Yeah, so my heart was with my you know with teaching young children because I feel like if you start with people with children especially at a young age then they'll grow up with less fear of certain insects and especially flying insects that sting and so kind of bringing honeybees to these school rooms and walking through the process and allowing them to see them up close and learn about how they only sting if they're threatened and the comparison of honeybees versus
yellow jackets which are the ones that go after your pop or at the trash can at the fair. So just kind of explaining all those differences to kids so that they are fully aware of it. One of my favorite things to do though is a drone race. Have you ever heard of a drone race? No,
tell us about it. So what you do is you take, if you live within a two mile radius of the location that you're teaching at, so for my local school district, I can go to one of my hives and collect a handful of drones and I take them to the school. I do the presentation and then I split the kids into groups and I allow them to pick a color
from my queen marking pens. We mark one of the drones and then the teacher and the children go outside and I go home because I'm so close to the location and I text the teacher and I say release the drones and they release the drones and I video record the front of the hive and the first drone to make it back is the winner for the end of the program and they just automatically go straight back to the hive most of them do yeah you typically I didn't know drones were
that smart yeah that's because they are out foraging so they know where you know what high they're coming from now they can't hop drunk and hop hives but for the most part they return Sure. Oh, I bet the kids love that. They do. Yeah, I love it. I love watching that happen. You know, just being amazed every time. Like, here they come, you know. If you're, say, a half a mile away, about how long does it take? Oh, minutes of that. Like, that's about how far I am from
the local school is about a half mile. And they're there within five minutes at the most. I would say probably one to two minutes. They're back. That's what I would have guessed. Oh, that is so fun. Yeah. Well, you know, it takes the creativity to get the kids attention. So that's fantastic. Then are they just full of questions after that? It depends on the age. Older children, not so much. Maybe they'll ask a couple of questions. Younger children, they usually tell me about
every time they've ever been stung. And so like I have a question. I was stung one time, you know, like that's not a question. Let's answer a question. One of my Oh, things that I'm just most interested in is everything apotherapy. And I know you do a little bit of it. Can you tell us what background you have what you do
with it? Okay, so I am a certified master herbalist and in medicine and so I went to school for integrative health sciences I just completed my master's last semester and I just started my doctorate as well in the same field integrative health sciences and Prior to that I had done just a lot of self -taught education about herbs and bee products in general and I kind of because I teach I teach a lot of classes and I didn't want to offer the same basic classes that everybody
is teaching and so I started to learn more about apotherapy especially you know how honey it can be healing how pollen can be healing and I tell people those things in the markets when I used to sell in the markets you know like oh vitamin B there's an excessive amount in pollen where it's meeting your nutritional needs and you know things like that just to kind of spread education and awareness about it. But then I realized I
could actually teach a class. So I started teaching a class and a lot of people wanted to know more about bee venom. I have personally been stinging myself and my husband for probably close to 10 years. He has scoliosis and I had symptoms of Lyme disease as well as just other issues. You know anything that hurts I'm willing to sting it. And so we have personally used it in our family for quite some time, but I started to
expand into helping other people as well. So anybody that is willing to ask and to sign a waiver to come to my house, I'm willing to help them with bee venom therapy. But they're so, Propolis is amazing. I learned firsthand how
healing propolis can be for oral issues. So cavities, there's a lot of research out there showing that it can help stop and reverse cavities because strep is the leading cause of cavities in the teeth and the antibacterial, antifungal, antimicrobial benefits of propolis actually stop and reverse the cavities that are being formed in the mouth.
Now you can't repair the tooth if there is damage like holes in the teeth, but you can use propolis to stop teeth pain and bacteria and all sorts of amazing things in with dealing with mouth issues. Emily you might want to look up about six months ago I had Dr. Stefan Stangichu on and he's do you know who he is? I've heard of his name I haven't I've seen pictures of him but I haven't been able his name keeps coming up in my life so I know I got it. got to find
him. A lot of people know him as the world's leading authority on everything apotherapy and I know you and I say it different and that's
okay and he lives in Romania. He's a doctor over there and back in December in fact we made it a three part episode of everything apotherapy and it was absolutely fascinating and people when they hear the term they often just think of bee stings or venom bee venom therapy and it's so much more to that in fact last fall for the first time we made some propolis tincture and you can tell i've got a little bug right now and i've been two or three times a day gargling
with this propolis tincture and it's I'm not gonna say it tastes great it's kind of nasty but this this isn't turning into things that the people I got it from ended up with and and I thought that was pretty cool I also had a little sore in my mouth at the same time a little canker sore and didn't even think about it and it went away and it just happened to be while I was using this propolis tincture, so there's some amazing stuff there. It really is absolutely phenomenal
and very healing to the body. And you can use it on cavities. You can use it on ulcers. You can use it. One of the research articles I cite in a presentation I give is on how it actually helps with HSV 1 and 2. So the herpes simplex virus, which can cause mouth cold sores and things like that. It's just it's really awesome stuff. Okay, I want to ask you a couple more things about bee venom therapy before we move on and I do want to preface this with obviously Lawyers
out there. We're not giving medical advice It is always a good idea to have an EpiPen on hand if you're doing anything like this or frankly even if you're not because as a beekeeper you're more likely to get stung and If you're going to try something like bee sting therapy Work into it very very slowly. That's one of the things
that dr. Stangich you talked about a lot is You start with a little bit See how you react a little bit more and a little bit more and work up to it to be very very careful with this So we don't want people to just go into a willy -nilly like oh I've got such -and -such and Emily and Eric said I should just sting myself ten times over here and No, let's be a lot more careful than that. Okay Now that the legal jargon's over,
Emily, tell me how you got started with it. You mentioned about 10 years ago, and was it for your husband first? Actually... I've thought really hard about this and I can't remember what
made me start thinking about it. I don't know if it was somebody I've heard because I was a county inspector for a few years and I think just networking with beekeepers and them telling me oh you know like we my grandpa used to do it for his joints and arthritis and I think that's kind of where it started and then I broke my foot I was supposed to run a 5k so I thought hey I'm gonna sting my foot and see what happens and it healed very quickly, much faster than
what I was, you know, they told me that it would. They even asked me, they were like, what did you do different? And I said, to be honest, I was stinging my foot. They think I'm crazy. Then my husband had a lot of back pain and I told him like, hey, if it's working for me, I think that this would also be beneficial for him. Now it's not going to do, you know, we're not reversing things like scoliosis, but he does find relief in his joints, especially through the back pain
he has when I do venom treatment. on his back and especially his hips. His hips hurt pretty often and so we will just you know sting certain areas related to those. Like you said you know this wasn't a you just jump in and start doing multiple stings. There's a whole protocol there. It's a very slow process. You want to first make sure that you're not going to have a reaction but always know you can have a reaction later
on even though you haven't had one prior. So it is a you know it's it's not just a willy -nilly kind of thing. really need to know what you're doing. Okay and how has it worked for you? I - Almost died actually a few years ago. I they still don't know what it caught what like what happened But my body broke out in these strange hives and I had a lot of nerve die -off in my right foot I was in excruciating pain. It was
horrible. And then I got sepsis and like none of it made sense I'm a very holistic very natural person and so not like it was very hard for me I was trying all the natural things to like overcome it and then they I ended up in the ER Obviously and they tried all these different antibiotics to try to help they use some of the strongest is all I remember I couldn't tell you all of them except one of them was doxycycline and I did respond very well to doxycycline which is
typically used for Lyme they did do a I think it's called a blot test to see if I would test positive for Lyme and at the time I was not I've never tested positive for Lyme However, that's kind of one of the things that you find when you do research is that you may never actually test positive on certain testing methods that
they use. However, after two things that I noticed, now I went through this two different times a year apart and still have no idea why, but when these... symptoms arose, I was not being stung. I'm stung often because I used to do cutouts, so cutting bees out of houses. And then I'm just a very irresponsible beekeeper who doesn't always wear a suit. And so I'm stung pretty often. And these both timeframes that this happened to me were winter or very, very early spring prior
to getting stung. I never have these symptoms during the summer when I'm stung regularly. And so I started learning more about how it can, there's a potential. ability for venom. in in vitro studies to break down bacteria. Well, Lyme disease is a bacteria and so it can cause cell lysis where it puts holes in the bacteria and causes the bacteria to collapse and so that is
why I started stinging myself. I sting down my spine five times three days a week and it hasn't always been that steady but usually through the summer I try to keep up with it and I'm trying to find a way to have hides on my porch through the winter so that I can maintain those stains through the winter as well so that I can avoid
any future issues like I had come across. But that's what I use it for is potential Lyme issues as well as weird joint pain that I have just threw out because after that sepsis issue and the nerve die off I had a lot of pain. And if you can't figure out your own bees for the winter, there are beekeepers out there that you can buy them from specifically for this, and they overnight them to you, and it works really well. Yeah, Trish Thompson, I think, from Pollen Peddlers.
I just got to meet her recently. I talked to her for quite some time, but yes, she does ship. She's in North Carolina, and so when the weather is okay for them to ship, they can ship them to you, and they are a great business. I'm sure there's probably others, but that's the one that I'm very well aware of. Yeah, there are a few others. I don't know all of them. I don't endorse one over another or anything like that. Just one more thing on this topic before we move on.
If somebody wants to try this the first time, themself, as someone who has done quite a bit of this, I can tell you it is not an easy thing to sting yourself the very first time. It's like... It's like everything in your DNA is saying, do not do this. We are supposed to run from stinging things. And you take a bee with these little, what do you call the little tweezer thingers
you use? Reverse tweezers. Yeah. And you take these and, and you figure out how to catch a bee and you hold it with this and you decide where you need it. And doing that for the very first time is not easy. There just is a mental thing for most of us that I find fascinating. In myself, I'm like, why this shouldn't be so hard. I've been stung a million times, but doing
it to yourself is. Any advice? I would say that if I could go back and if I had to do, I mean, there's, there's opinions that we give for people who aren't beekeepers versus who are beekeepers. And, um, but the The biggest thing I would say is have somebody else sting you first so that you can kind of feel that pain and go through the process. I encourage people to ice it first because that does reduce the burning sensation that you typically get for a while. Quick break
to discuss what just might be on your mind. Right
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code MLBlove10. It will hurt if you use your appendages that they're being stung on like if you're using your feet you're gonna swell more you know so I always encourage people to do it in the evening and then put their feet up if they're doing their legs or or towards their feet area but as far as it really is it is hard to force yourself to sting yourself because you know that it's going to it isn't comfortable you know it it is a little bit painful I don't
know, you get used to it, you really do. I had to do Lovenox injections when I was pregnant and it was very similar where I didn't want to do it and then nine months later I'm like, you know, I can hit my stomach anytime, no big deal. It just, it takes time and you are completely normal even if you have bees and you've been getting stung and you're still nervous to do it. And how long do people need to leave the stinger in to get the full venom effect? That's
one thing some people don't know. You don't just scrape the stinger out immediately like when you get stung out in the field. It's recommended 15 minutes but I just kind of watch and see when it's done pulsating and once it's done pulsating
I'm okay with pulling them out. I would say at least good seven to ten minutes you're pretty good you you have most of the dose at least and you can if you're trying to hurry along because I have people who are they have busy schedules and they're just stopping here as quick as they can because they're coming three days a week sometimes and so we will sting them and then I only have them hang out for about ten minutes and then we pull the stinger out I have a couple
people who are beekeepers and they're comfortable with pulling the stingers out themselves so I just sting them in the area and then they get in their car and they leave And hopefully don't have a reaction. It's never a new patient and I wouldn't say patient. It's never a new client. It's never somebody that I haven't gone through the whole experience with them sat and watched them multiple times. Very smart. Back to propolis. I noticed on your website you have a propolis
mineral paste. What is that and what does it
do? I had a Let's see like the whole story. So I had to have a CT scan when I was pregnant because they thought I had a brain bleed and When I went through that it would have been the development time for my child I was pregnant with to have the teeth development happening Well, once he was born it was about I don't you know when the teeth they're coming in the front teeth I couldn't tell you right off the bat, but by 18 months He had some major issues with his forefront teeth
and we couldn't figure out what the cause was and so they we believe it was likely exposure to that scan that caused issues for his just his baby teeth and so the dentist wanted to do surgery and they wanted to put him under to extract all four of those teeth and I did as much research as I could because as a mom with young children I didn't want to put him under and I found out that you can do something called remineralizing your teeth so you are putting different products
most of them like a clay aloe, powder, different things created that will help with that process in addition to propolis has these benefits as well. And so it made sense to me to look up and research all of the ingredients that would be beneficial to remineralizing your teeth. and then add propolis to it. And so that's what I did. And we were actually able to buy about two and a half years. He was four and a half when
we finally did do the surgery. So it didn't, you know, like I mentioned before, it doesn't repair the damage there, but it will slow bacteria growth and it will stop certain bacteria from forming and causing further decay to the teeth. I feel very blessed that that was something that happened for us. And a friend of mine reached out and said, Hey, my daughter has a cavity in
her mole. And she you know, like we try to take her to the dentist and she lost her mind and so they Recommended putting her under do you
have what was your experience? So I gave her some of it and the cavity disappeared after about six weeks like completely gone and They did not actually ever have to do anything further with the tooth I still see that little girl pretty often and she never had to have anything done to that tooth after that And so it kind of blew my mind to know that was a possibility and I started selling it online. I've sold over, I don't know, 6 ,000 jars of it at this point.
I have a lot of repeat customers and a lot of people who reach out to me and say, hey, this stopped my tooth pain, this stopped this issue or that issue, or I was able to use it for X, Y, or Z. It's really awesome. The base is just bentonite clay and then it has aloe powder in it as well as propolis. I still see that little girl after her mom had used that and she's never ever had to have anything. done to that tooth further and she no longer has the cavity in the
tooth. That is very cool. What is everybody else using it for? Like what would I buy it for? For
oral health or something else? Some people use it just to apply like for brushing for sensitivity for gingivitis But most people are purchasing it for remineralizing teeth and then I market it towards children specifically because a lot of parents don't want to put their children under or Take a medical route unless absolutely necessary and so this is a way to kind of buy time Until they're a little bit older and can have something
further done. I would never encourage a parent to only use this, still see the dentist, still ask their opinion, still have them watch it, still do x -rays because you can get an abscess still. That's always a possibility and that is actually what ended up happening with our son is that he started getting abscesses. So we were able to ward it off until it became unsafe and then once it becomes unsafe then you need to act further. All right. Let's jump away from
medical for a minute. Let's talk about some of the other beekeeping things that you do. By the way, how many hives do you run? Right now I have probably close to 30. All at one place or do you spread them out? And I don't think I mentioned this up front. You're in Ohio, right, in the United States? Yes. Okay, so are these spread out over a few different locations? Do I have
four different locations? My main hub is my home where I bring in all my swarms and then once I establish them as a healthy thriving colony I will move them to an out yard and that way if I ever bring anything in To my yard then only a minimal amount of them are exposed But yeah, and then this is also where I do I don't graft Queens, but I do produce Queens I do it naturally through the hive breaking them down and things and so this is where I mate the Queens are mated
and then I move them to Can you give us a little more explanation on that? take us really step by step through that process. So to make my own queens, what I would usually do is I will wait for one of my strongest colonies to start showing signs of swarming behavior and developing cups. And once they have cups, or especially if they have eggs in them, then if it's a large colony, and I typically run four mediums for winter.
I do not care for deep boxes. I use all eight frame medium equipment because everything is interchangeable. So I will take basically each box off as long as they all have eggs and brood. I will make sure that there is a queen cup or queen cell in each one and I will divide that
large colony into four. In addition to that, I make sure that I have a frame feeder in there so that they have a lot of carbohydrates and then I will put a pollen patty in as well for protein because they cannot produce a good queen or a lot of royal jelly unless they have the protein from the pollen patty. The one additional thing is when I divide them, wherever I'm placing them, I don't leave one hive in the same location that it came from. I will typically move one
at least a foot or two feet to the right. And then the new one I'll put two feet or whatever to the left. And that way when the foragers are returning, they are choosing a hive to go to instead of all the foragers returning to one. or I will take them to an out yard so that they're not, so that the population stays well because I want them to create a very good healthy queen. I love it. We're learning a lot today. Would you be willing to share with us some kind of
wild and crazy beekeeping story you've had? So I've been thinking about this for a few days and I just am like oh I know so many wild crazy things have happened like um one time my husband was on the end of a 50 -foot ladder at the top of this very old historic building and he what we thought was just a swarm was actually a bee's building comb so then it turned into now he has to cut this comb off the outside of the building carry it down this really long ladder and on
the way down the the queen was in it and like flies out and he's standing there and he can see the queen flying around he's like the queen is like out of the box and I climb up the ladder and I literally like snatched her in the air with my hand and I was like how did that even happen but then we put her in the bucket you know and she stayed in there with them but it was just the process of being cut from the wall that caused her to fly out other than that I
mean I have bad stories like dropping hives on accident, trying to transport them, trying to look professional and definitely didn't. I think we've all done that kind of thing this morning for me. Yeah, luckily a bunch of people weren't watching, but. Mistakes definitely happen. Wow, I'm picturing that. That is a super tall ladder. Yes. And I'm impressed with your superhuman ability to catch a queen right out of the air. That is very impressive. And not squisher. Yeah, and
that's the biggest thing. Oh, I mean, how about that whole thing of accidentally killing your favorite queens? I mean, I've done that, too. All right. Tell us a little bit more about the swarm removals that you do. Is this something that's part of your business or you're just rescuing bees or what's the story? So my business is called Mueller Honey Bee Rescue, and that was the whole. To be honest, I'm a mom. I'm a stay -at -home.
Well, I was a stay -at -home mom and I homeschool my kids and so I couldn't budget -wise afford this very expensive hobby because beekeeping is not cheap, to be honest. And so I really wanted to be a beekeeper and I only had one empty hive and we caught a swarm first. That was the way we became beekeepers. And then I decided I wanted to grow. We found some equipment used at an auction.
We brought that home to use. So I decided that I would start advertising free swarm removal which free swarm removal turned into cutouts because in the beginning I thought oh Well, we'll just cut these bees out of the wall and now we'll have free bees and that was quite the opposite
It's a lot of work. We ended up going down to Mississippi and training under some really good well -known people I don't know if you're familiar with JP the bee man or yappy, but they both trained me and my husband on how to do cutouts and then we came back up to Ohio and we started you know zero experience other than Doing them down there with them. We came up here and we started a whole I started a whole business like oh, hey now I
am a cutout professional. It's kind of what I thought we did Oh gosh, probably over a hundred cutouts over several years and it just once we had our last child I decided like it's too much to do but now yes, we do swarm removal or I do I am the the owner of the company and I do pretty much everything sometimes I drag kids with me, but they don't like to be in the car with stinging insects I go out like I was just at a swarm before this phone call I ran 30 minutes which I usually
don't drive that far but I'm trying to get bees in my mother -in -law's hives which are technically mine so this swarm was near her house and I went to shake them in the box and when I did so they dispersed into the air and flew away and I was like wow what a waste of an hour of my life so that's part of the fun of it isn't it Yeah, I don't know about fun, but bees teach me. They teach me patience, they teach me appreciation, and I am thankful for at least those experiences.
But that's super unusual. I mean, usually when you shake them from a branch, they just fall, as if they can't fly. A few will start flying, but in general, they fall down in your box or whatever you have for them to land in. Why do you think they just took off? Now, what happened was they actually arrived yesterday early evening and the people didn't call until today. And by the time I got to it, it was almost noon. And so it was warming up. And I think that they were
ready to move on. They were about to. And I just helped them along a little bit sooner than what they anticipated. But yeah, they just they flew right off the branch and flew away. I've only ever had that happen one other time. Typically, it's a matter of when they fly away, it's because I'm not there in enough time, you know, I can't get there or by the time I get there, they fly away. It is very rare for them to fly away while I'm trying to collect them. Do you also use swarm
traps? I don't so much. I'm I should. I really should. And I don't. But I have them. I have them sitting outside next to all of my other
equipment. It's just that I have so much. so many other things going on I really wish that someone could just come take my swarm traps and hang them up for me and then I will go pull them down but time is of the essence for me I have four children and I'm just always always busy plus I'm doing full -time my doctorate and I have two part -time jobs plus run my company and help my husband with his company and uh so yeah I'm burning the candle at multiple ends
Well, based on all of that, I really, really appreciate you taking the time today to meet with us because we've all been able to learn something from this. And just as a wrap up, is there any piece of advice that you'd like to share? Or just why does Emily love bees? Oh, man. Why do I love bees? Like I connect with them, like the crazy cat lady, I'm the crazy bee lady. Like I connect with them on a level
that I cannot explain. Somebody was here yesterday and they were observing my hives and they said, do your hives recognize you? And I said, I don't think that they recognize me, but they can feel my energy and that I'm not afraid of them because I can, like we are standing there and all of a sudden a bee came up to the one lady's head
and started circling her head. And I put my hand out and I told the bee, like I stopped, in its way like so that it had to like reroute and I said stop it and then like the bee just disappear and flew away and so you know like that kind of most people aren't willing to do that aren't willing to like risk getting stung to tell a bee to stop acting like that but like when I mow by them they don't irritate me I I talk to them which you know I'm Not bad words sometimes
But I love bees. I love bees on a level. I never thought could even be possible and I just really appreciate what it can do for the central nervous system in particular helping center and calm people in general, but me myself I I grew up in a very traumatic way and I carried a lot of that into adulthood and Being able to get into bee hives puts you on this meditational state and this calming center that I never could obtain
prior to beekeeping. And so it has changed my entire life and it just is a really truly amazing experience. Thanks again for joining us on Bee Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to V2B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acids Trips. 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 BeLoveBekeeping .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.