May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox review. If you create more splints than a divorce lawyer, you might be a beekeeper. If you go to the car wash and the attendant there says, I can't get rid of these orange spots on your vehicle. You might be a Vkeeper. If you refer to your very large family as a swarm, you might be a Vkeeper. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our
good buds over at Man Lake. We are so happy you're here today as we're headed down to the southern hemisphere for a really fun discussion with a passionate beekeeper who, of all things, doesn't like honey? What? One of the most fun things about doing this show is getting to know beekeepers from all over the world. It's amazing how much we have in common when it's all centered around the love of bees. But first, let's go to some
headlines. Last month we had a story about Africanized bees killing three horses at a farm in Texas. Now more recently another family in Texas had all nine of their chickens killed by bees. The Stavanoja family in Bryan, Texas was left in shock after a swarm of bees turned aggressive in their backyard. Here's a quote from Jennifer Stavanoja. I get a text from my husband and he says, I think bees are killing our chickens. So I put the baby down and I ran outside and
most of the chickens were already dead. And there was just a swarm of bees stinging all of our chickens. So the poor family lost their entire flock in minutes and now they're wondering what kind of bees would have caused this type of destruction. She said, European honey bees don't normally attack. You want them in your yard. But the idea of this Africanized colony or bad genetics or whatever it was, is that they get aggressive and they go after you. Normal honey bees don't
do these things. So local beekeeper and professional bee remover Chris Barnes was called in. He said this type of behavior most likely has to do with territorial behaviors in bees. The chickens were likely caught in the crossfire of two colonies fighting for hive space. His advice? The first thing is to just leave them alone if bees are attacking or attacking like in this case Distance
is your friend. They're not going to be aggressive as a general rule and the benefit of having the bees around far outweighs the fear that people have now. Even though the beehive is not on their property, the Stavanoha family said that they're taking steps to remove the hive. They also plan to rebuild their chicken flock. Good for them. Now let's go across the pond in Euro news. Spanish beekeepers staged an eye -catching protest in Valencia to plead for financial aid. Okay, this
one you got to see the picture. It just looks a little nuts. And I'm quoting again from the article. Spanish beekeepers are taking to the streets this weekend to demand urgent help for their quote dying sector. Led by farmers union COAG Honey sector workers are demanding aid to help with the unaffordable rise in production costs. They're also protesting against import of low quality honey from countries such as China, which they say is flooding the market and causing
a price crisis. In recent years, a record amount of honey has been imported to Spain. So here's what they did. 300 beekeepers got together in a rally in front of the Valencia Courthouse holding signs that read, S .O .S. Beekeeping in Danger of Extinction. Now here's the best part, protesters then drenched themselves in honey from head to toe to draw attention to their cause. So why
are the beekeepers protesting in Spain? They say that recent high temperatures and varroa mites have reduced Spain's honey harvest by half. And like other industries beekeeping has suffered surging costs due to the war in Ukraine. The amount of aid currently allocated for beekeepers does not cover even one kilo of food per hive they say. and their colonies require about 18 kilograms of honey or sugar syrup to survive
the winter. Protesters are demanding increased quantity and quality controls on honey imports and more transparent labeling on the origin of honey sold in Spain. Go for it guys. And lastly here in the U .S. a headline EPA proposes to register new pesticide for varroa mite control.
The U .S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has proposed to register one technical and two end -use products containing the new active ingredient, vadascana, hope I said that right, a double -stranded RNA for control against varroa mites and honeybee hives. The EPA is prioritizing pesticide applications that target varroa mites to provide beekeepers with a variety of tools to combat the pest. According to them, no risks of concern to human health
or the environment were identified. When used according to the label, risks to bees are not expected because vadascona is highly specific to the targeted gene within varroa mites. Additionally, in March of 2025, the EPA registered a new varroa side product containing iglutamic acid, an active ingredient that has not previously been included in registered products for use in beehives. The agency also intends to register another product containing oxalic acid, a slow release varroa
side within beehives, by July of 2025. Together, these four end -use products are expected to provide new tools, including novel active ingredients, for control of Varroa mites and beehives. Now, hey, just a quick favor. If you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, please do so now and
be sure to share it with a friend. Also, if you want to be part of the show, be sure to reach out to Eric at Be Love Beekeeping dot com with your ideas for guests, your wild and crazy beekeeping stories, and your suggestions for the not real Jeff Foxworthy on why you might be a beekeeper. Thank you, thank you for all that. Now let's head south for today's interview. Hey, welcome,
welcome to the show today, Sarah Cross. And Sarah, I'm going to ask you to answer something that I'm going to have people try to guess where you're from. Oh, OK. I want to know how you got started in beekeeping. All right. Keep it short because then we're going to ask the quiz. No problem. So my start is quite different. So most people in any level of beekeeping, most start as hobbyists, you know, with a couple of hives in the backyard.
I started, so I have a bachelor of science degree from university and I started in insects in general. So not actually the bees. And then I worked at lots of very cool places around my country. And then I came back to my general sort of home area and picked up a job at an apiculture science organization. I had never opened a bee hive in my life. The very first time that I put on a bee suit and did that amazing thing where you open the hive and seal the bees for the first
time was in my job interview. Wow. Yeah, those silly people gave me that job. Good thing you didn't panic and scream and run away. Yeah, yeah. 100%. They said, congratulations, here's 250 beehives to look after. Oh, no. I literally, yeah, my start in beekeeping was literally thrown in the deep end. So I started big. Okay. And now I'm all the way back down to having five hives in the backyard. All right, quiz time. Everybody can answer to whoever's next to them.
Where is Sarah from? Yes, New Zealand. And I'm not going to embarrass myself. Tell us what part of New Zealand. Oh, okay. the language of New Zealand, which is Māori. And so I am from New Zealand, which natively is called Aotearoa. I'm from a region called the Waikato, and my hometown is called Ngāruawahia. That was the part I wanted to say and then didn't dare. I embarrassed myself enough on this show already. I don't need to start off that way today. Anyway, it's really
fun to have you on. You are our first guest from New Zealand, so congratulations on that. That's exciting. And one of the reasons I was interested in New Zealand is because somebody recently was asking about manuka honey. I want to talk about that first and then we're going to jump into a little bit more of your beekeeping journey and what in the world it's like keeping bees there. Oh, I had one other question, geography.
quiz question. Where are you from Auckland? Yeah, half far away from Auckland, only like an hour's drive south. So if you know a little bit, there's the big old what we call the North Island, and Auckland's quite near the top. We are literally kind of smack in the middle. Alrighty. What do you know about Manuka honey? I do not know a lot about the those cool little chemical jargony acronyms we hear about NGOs and GM or whatever they're called, UMFs, only because my apiculture
science background was working on the bees. So it's a fun little thing to get your head around, but my job has never, in all the years of me doing this, has never been to make honey. Which sounds weird, because I just say, oh, I'm a beekeeper. But my job has always been about the bees themselves. But I will tell you one of the reasons why manuka is hard. to get, hard to make, hard for your bees to get. So little old New Zealand is quite a long country. So our temperature gradient goes
sort of down the country like that. And manuka flowers only when the temperature gets warm enough. So we have, in New Zealand here, we have what we call manuka chasers. And they will move their hives in at the top of the country when the manuka is first flowering. And they will have to move those every couple of weeks. And like, but like migratory beekeeping, and then they go all the way down the country. It's not common to do that because New Zealand is a teeny little country.
It's not a common thing to do. And so it's a lot of money and outreach to get all that time, all the effort, all the manpower. Some of them even helicopter them in, the fancy ones. So that's one of the reasons why manuka costs so much. And also the bees themselves don't particularly like it. It's not actually a favorite. So they must drop them in where there's nothing else for them to forage on. That's what they really try to do. Wow. And I'll tell you another weird
little fact. But back in the days, manuka was literally the pest plant. It was the scrub. It was when you bought a block of land, you automatically cut and burned all of the manuka because it was an absolute waste. We used to use it as firewood. And now there are people out there selling little manuka plants for thousands of dollars because people want their whole property planted in it.
So it's that complete... supply and demand thing where suddenly they found this magical honey that comes from Manuka and it's completely flipped. Completely. It's quite odd to think about. Yeah. We used to slash and burn it and now we plant it. That's funny. Yeah. Now, just so we can get an idea of what it's like beekeeping in your area, because as we all know, beekeeping is local.
It's if I live 25 miles from here, it would be different than where it is where I live So give us an idea of what the climate is like all year round So just like you mentioned local New Zealand itself is classed as a temperate climate So we're not having any massive minus 25s kind of you know, Alaska types up and again We don't have highs like Australia. So Here where I am in the Waikato our summertime I'm going to say I'm probably going to have to convert this to Fahrenheit because
I don't know. But in the summertime here, we would be absolutely gasping and dying if it got to 30 degrees Celsius. 30 degrees Celsius is 86 Fahrenheit. So it's always below 86 Fahrenheit. Okay. We would and we are sweating. Okay. And then here where I am in the Waikato would only, gosh, minus two is probably the worst winter day. we would have, sorry, winter night that we would have. That's 28 degrees for us. Wow, that is very mild. Yeah, it's exactly temperate.
It's not very, and even between the days and the nights, it's not a big change as well. And again, that's here in the Waikato. If you go much further down south in New Zealand, they definitely get the big snows and things like that, but it doesn't snow here. It's not ever that cold. So very temperate. So yeah, very different. So I see amazing people overseas wrapping their hives and getting covered in snow. And I'm like... Don't have to do that. But do you have pests?
Warm climate type of pests. We have a lot less than most countries. We do not have small hive beetle, which I know I see in Australia, which is quite a... If that comes over here, we're in big trouble. We have had Varroa, Varroa destructus since the year 2000. So we've had 25 years of dealing with that. We have AFB, so American foul brood, but we do not have European foul brood. So we've got a few less than some people. Yeah. And other things like deform wing virus? Yes.
Any of those viruses? Yeah. 100 % deform wings. Deform wings is the main one. We do have acute paralysis, but none of those are rampant sort of anywhere. Chalk brood, because we are a temperate, quite damp, we will sometimes get a bit of that coming through. But again, nothing that's massively damaging. Of course, like most of the word, varroa is of course our number one vein of our existence. Yeah, how do you deal with it there? Maybe we
can learn something from you. We definitely have moved into the realm of integrated pest management, because again, like most of the country, just throwing in the strips and, you know, taking them out and however many weeks is not working like it used to. So yeah, a lot of all the other, you might have heard New Zealand, we have this number eight wire is called, it's like a, we like to make things, we like to... figure stuff
out. And there's lots of people here in New Zealand who have made their own little bits and pieces to do with, a lot of it's to do with oxalic acid and different ways that we treat with those. There's also a lot of physical, very cool little physical things that a lot of New Zealand engineer beekeeper fellas are doing. One of them is sort of quite specific sort of queen trapping system to make the hive broodless for a little bit so then you can treat and get all the phoretic mites
and things like that. Definitely lots of, and even in the science industry, we've got quite a few people doing insane stuff with like mRNA and things like that of the actual Varroa itself to try and stop its breeding cycle and things like that. But these are very much years and years sort of to come through, but we definitely know as beekeepers that we cannot do what we used to do because it's not working. And that's
a big thing that we're learning here. Again, we should already know it, but you've probably heard about the big bee die off this year in the States. Have you heard about it? Oh, hundred percent. It's very scary. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah. And just a few days ago, well, depending on the date that this podcast comes out, but from when we're recording, it was just a week or so ago, we got some results from some of the first research that's being done. And what they're finding is
two things. Some of the viruses that are passed by Varroa, those are what's killing the hives. But some of the treatment that has been used for a long time is just not very effective anymore. It's been used over and over and over so much and, oh, it's not working so good, we better give a higher dose and then a higher dose. Well,
now it's not working anymore. So the IPM that you're talking about, which everybody knows the term, we all have to do a better job of putting that into, you know, just part of how we bee keep. And you mentioned brood breaks. Yeah. But what is this wire you were talking about? It's just one of the amazing beekeeping outfits is just, I can't remember who calls it, sorry, but it's basically just securing the queen into one
specific area. So not a tiny little queen cage like we do for introductions, but just sort of a sort of a trap to hold her in there. So just on that one frame so that then which can basically cause a brood break and be able to treat the hives as well. Quick break to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. I've found that Man Lake has absolutely everything I need to take care of
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off your first $100 purchase. Can I just ask, sorry, I'm just going to put in and ask you a question here. In terms of the chemicals that you use in the US, is there really only sort of one chemical class that you use for the Varroa treatments? What do you mean by class? Well, so, okay, here in New Zealand we have, we're very, very stressful to say that people, so we treat in the spring and the autumn. And we always tell our new beekeepers to rotate those treatments.
So we have two different chemical classes, I think, and I'm going to blow myself in trouble because I haven't done this role, like fluvalinate and flumethrin, and there's a third one, which I can't remember, amitrase or apitrase, something. And they are in chemical, two different chemical classes. And so we always tell our beekeepers to swap those around. So they're not always getting, like you mentioned, always getting the same chemical throw in that. Is that not something that you
do or? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So for example, formic acid can come in a couple of different ways. So you've got to use that one time and not the other kind of formic another time, but something completely different. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Again, we just need to do a better job of Oh, yeah, because as you know, some things when we treat are easier than
others. And sometimes if you're a bit like me and you're a bit lazy, you sometimes just go, I'll just do the easy, which is not obviously the best way to be, but I fully understand that. So, yeah. So you mentioned oxalic acid, which is very popular here. In what ways do you use it? The least common way is the dribble, as in physically mixed in with sugar syrup, and you just dribble it over the seams on top of the
bees. Very common is what we call the staples, which are soaked in like a cardboard strip, which you then put down over the top of the frames like that. So down in like a staple form. Another one that's gaining a lot of traction now is the fogging. So having a little vaporizer and blasting the fog through there. Those are the three that I can think of right now. But the staples are
really, really common now. And people just leave them in all the time while still doing the other sort of synthetic chemical ones at the same time. So yeah. In fact, one of the sponsors of the show, one of their products is Veroxan, which is exactly what you're talking about. None of ours have brand names. It's quite new. Yeah, it's quite new and the results are sounding very, very positive. And it's just like, say, IPM, you've got to kind of do them all together. Yeah,
absolutely. And the whole brew break thing, I'm a big fan of. That's one reason I love splits. As I try to think about positive things of the very cold winters where I specifically am, that's one of the things that we get a positive out of that winter. If the bees make it through, they've had a brood break. But have you talked to anyone from Australia lately? I have, but it's been a little while. I only say that because Australia has only just got Varroa. Yeah, just
in the last couple of years. Yeah, only just. And that's exactly what I'm really worried about because they, I don't know if you've ever been to Australia in winter. It's not winter. There winter is like my spring day, like it's not cold at all. There is no way that those bees would ever have any kind of food break in terms of being cold. So it really worries me how the Varroa is going to get through Australia. It's actually quite scary. So that's just a little worrying
thing that we... They sure went crazy trying to kill it all off at first. That was unsuccessful. Now they just need to buckle down like the rest of us. But I feel bad for them. I don't wish for on anybody. No, exactly. And they held it off for so long. It was so fantastic. But yeah, it's really quite scary to watch over the ditch. OK, I'm going to backtrack now. What is it like getting a job where you have 250 hives to manage and you've just met bees for the very first time?
Hello, ladies. It's just one of those such a cool memory. And I'm sure lots of people can say that the very first time they might have gone out with a beekeeper and done that big opening up the hive. And I still can't believe that was in my job interview. Yeah, just so getting thrown in the deep end. And it's cool because, I mean, this was my job. So I was opening bee huts every
single day. But I was taught by an amazing gentleman here in New Zealand, Dr Mark Goodwin, who was the head of our apiculture and pollination team for many, many years. And he's amazing. He is my mentor. We still hang out together. We've written some books together about beekeeping and stuff, and he's amazing. And I very much learned from him how to get the science sort
of across. So it was very cool, like don't get me wrong, it was very, very, very cool, high level testing for oral treatments and like toxicology testing, very cool science. But I found that I liked people and stuff more. So that's how I've kind of turned around. And can I say something funny that I didn't realize? So if you see any of my social media stuff now, I barely wear suits, no gloves, things like that. But because I started in commercial, I didn't know people did that.
That had been my only view. I'd only seen commercial beekeepers. fully suited. I shouldn't say making the best crazy, but a lot of times we had a time limit. This was, you know, I've got to get this done. And so it was a little bit more chaotic. And only years and years later did I see the other side and that lovely, calm, hobby side of BKB. So yeah, like I say, my intro to BKB was a little bit different. So yeah. It's a big, big difference. And I don't blame the commercial
beekeepers. It's their business. They have to do what they have to do. Those of us that have the luxury of being able to go slow and take our time. Yes. It's such an enjoyable and different kind of experience. I love it. I absolutely love it. But it's funny to me that I'd never seen it. I'd never seen anyone open beehives with no gloves on. Like it was this mind -boggling thing when I first saw it. So yeah. So what made you think you should all of a sudden do this?
Do the no gloves. Oh, that took years, years and years. And I tell you, this is funny. It was one of our, we got a new scientist and she was from America. And her, she was also doing apiculture. The scale of her beekeeping was a lot smaller. So she was, I would just say a large hobbyist. And yeah, and she was, she wore a lot less gear, barely wore gloves. And it was just this eye opening like, wow, I didn't realize
I could do this. And so it was just a very slow process to from big gloves to slightly smaller to garden gloves to step by step. Yeah. And now I couldn't think to wear gloves ever again. Yeah. It's such a different thing. Yeah. But it's seeing it. You don't know unless you see it. You can gently pull out a frame without squishing anything or anybody. And it makes a big, big difference in how they react to that dexterity that you
can have. And it takes a little bit of getting used to when you feel a bee walking around on your hand and you look and realize she's probably not even going to sting me. She's just looking around. And if she does, it's not the end of the world. It's OK. That's such a learned behavior. So you don't do the 250 hives anymore, right? No. No, I haven't done that for a while. Sometimes I contract to big commercial places, but I haven't done that for a couple of years now. But I did
look at your website, Sarah Sees Bees. Did I get that right? Yeah, Sarah Sees Bees, yeah. Okay. Well, tell us a little bit about what you do for business, a little bit about your business model. I do a lot. I didn't mean to do a lot. Like I say, when I worked in apiculture science, I really did think that was going to be my whole career. You know, that was it. I was going to like lots of scientists in the world. They stay
in the same job for 40, 50 years. But then my wonderful boss, Mark Goodwin, he said he had to retire for medical reasons. And I found out that, I shouldn't say I found out, I kind of already knew, but he really was my reason for going to work. I love that man. And I loved our working relationship. And I just found that it just wasn't as fun without him. So when I used to explain our relationship, he had the big ideas
and I would get things done. And so I left there and I was a bit sort of floating around for a little bit. And a lot of the clients from where I used to work contacted me personally and said, hey, would you run this for us? So I sort of delved into that. But then I realized that I really like to teach beekeeping. I really like to help people and talk to people about what
they're doing it and how they're doing it. And it turned out that I started to help a lot of people with things like disease checks because back where I used to work, we used to breed. AFB, American Fowl Brood, so I know a lot about it, and how they're with disease checking and just general hive maintenance and stuff as well.
And it just kind of snowballed from there. So I now have a lot of clients that I assist either on a subscription as in every single month, I pop out to their hive with them and have a little look or just sort of ad hoc when they ring me when something's gone awry. I also hire hives out to people. There are a lot of people that love the idea of bees. but either don't particularly want to get in there or don't have the time,
and so I'll manage them for them. But one of the very cool things I do is I take bees in a little observation hive out to schools. I dress up like a bee, like literally with the stripes and the wings of the antennae. I saw your pants a minute ago. Yeah, we shot. I don't know if the rest of the world needs to see these pants,
but they're very straby. And I dress up completely like a bee, and I will go and take my little bee talk to anything from kindergartens all the way up to retirement villages and everything in between. And we talk about bees and I explain
the life cycle and what they do. And yeah, it's just a very cool way to get, even though I'd like to say did all this massive high level science and I've come all the way back down because I'm sure you know this Eric, but it amazes me that the majority of the world doesn't even know that our beautiful honeybees are females. Do you know what I mean? Like it's this, I was doing this massive high level staff and yet the general public didn't even know like the bare basics
of all the worker bees are females. So I've kind of turned it around and I do some very cool outreach stuff all around the Waikato. So yeah, fun stuff that I get to do. So a lot of education. Yeah. That is awesome. Are your bees down there very different than ours? Our races, we have Italians and we have Carniolans, et cetera. Yep. There's one that I hear you guys talk about that I've never heard is the buckfast. And I assume that's just like a subspecies because I'd never heard
of that. I think, oh, don't quote me on this. I'm not an expert or a scientist. I believe they're from England and they're not that easy to get here. They're not very well known here. Okay. It's just, like I said, something I saw on social media and I'd never heard of that. But you're right. We have Apis mellipera, mainly the Italian and the Carniola. Okay. So very similar to here. Yeah. Russians are getting a little bit more
popular. Do you have Russians? I don't think so, no. And then even though we don't like it, there are a lot of Africanized bees in the southern United States in the real warm climates. And they have bred with a lot of the local bees. And so there's a lot of hybrids and they're not friendly bees. As you know, the Italians are little sweethearts. I definitely breed my bees for calmness. So that's the thing when people talk about being a beekeeper and making honey.
I don't care if my bees make honey or not. I use my bees for education. I have to go in there all the time, take them out, put them in an observation hive, or I have people over to my apiaries to show them bees as like an introductory. I will literally breed them for calm niceness. I do not care if they make honey, like not my thing. So I don't like honey. I love honey, but I agree with you. I have seen the best beekeepers are the ones that just do it for the bees. I don't
even like honey. I don't know if you have, but I have seen people that are like, Oh, I want to try beekeeping. And, you know, the first or second year all their bees die and they go, I didn't even get any honey. What good is that? Yeah. Fully concur. But they were nice enough to share their varroa with all the rest of us in the meantime. Touche. Correct. Oh, I've, and
that happens everywhere. I mean, we, I still can't believe we had, we have an apiculture conference every year in Little Old New Zealand and all the beekeepers come together. And this is only a couple of years ago. And I remember being there and a lady came up, I don't know, we were talking something about varroa. and the lady at the conference who paid money and came all the way here for this lovely conference stood there and said, what's for Roa? And I just, yeah. So you're right.
We subject to a different level of beekeeping. Did you say, I hope you don't have bees yet. You're just honest in your educational phase. I just, I just walked away. I'm not gonna lie. It was like, it was like too much that I had to give this woman in terms of information. So I just did. Or do I? The alternative would have been too rude. No, yeah, I just. All right. Sarah, can you give me one of your favorite wild and crazy beekeeping stories? I've had many crazy
stories. Oh, gosh. It's probably not a fun one, but I can tell you the worst. I've been stung on nearly every place imaginable, including on the island twice. You'd think I would learn my lesson, but I didn't. That's not ideal. But the worst I ever had. So we're talking about nice, calm bees. So when I was doing apiculture science, we had to go to a lot of big commercial outfits. Not our bees, obviously, someone else's commercial apiaries to do these trials, testing different
things. And we went out to a big, big New Zealand commercial beekeepers apiary. Super angry bees. My gosh, this was just, everyone was completely suited up, very, very scary. And at this point in time, everyone was in the behinds and I was actually being the... the scribe I was writing. I was not even standing that close to the hives. I wasn't even in the hives, but still fully suited. And I was writing with a black pen. And the bees were attacking this moving black pen like their
lives depended on it. They really did. But it's one of those things that I tell to my hobby beekeepers about how wearing dark clothes and moving fast attracts the bees. But I still could not understand how insane that they were going for that black
moving pen. and those same bees are the ones that got me when I someone called me over to have a look on the hive and I'm fully suited you know full veil and everything and I bent down to have a look at something and I've been too far and my little schnoz my nose touched the very edge of the veil just for like you know a second and a bee got me instantly on the tip of the nose so I'm fully in my veil instant snot bogeys running down my face, instant crying and
I'm trapped inside and I'm like, I don't know what to do. And I couldn't even get far enough away for the bees to leave me alone. Well, I just was, yeah, it was not a fun day. Wouldn't recommend. What was it like when you got stung on the eyelid? Wasn't even that bad. Didn't swell up too much? No, I never swell. And the embarrassing thing was I had my students and it was literally either their first or second class of meeting me. because I teach beekeeping as well. We walked
into the apiary. We were far away from the bees because none of us had suits on. And I was explaining how we shouldn't, you know, we don't go near the bees without a suit and at least the veil. Do as I say, not as I do. And we walked around and I kid you not, a bee just must have just been on its flight path and just went straight and stung me straight on the eye. And they all freaked out. And I was like, it'll be fine. This is their first foray into beekeeping and their
teacher gets stung on the eye. I was like. I like to do as I say, not as I do. Oh, that's smart, that's smart. Did the one on the nose hurt a lot? The funny thing is I don't particularly remember the pain. I just remember that instant, you know, when it just throws your whole nasal, you know, just the snot in them. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. You don't swell, but everything just... It was just anything to do with the nose and having, yeah. Yeah, it affected your sinuses
just like that. Yeah. It was, and I was trapped in there, you know, that feeling of, you know, you can't do anything. And I'm like, inside the veil. Oh, it was so bad. Yeah. It's not a good thing. All right. Before I let you go, is there any other words of wisdom that you would love to leave with our listeners? I feel like they probably already know the things. But the one thing that I always teach all my hobby beekeepers is cool, calm, and collected. And it's very much
a learned behavior. Like you sort of talked a little bit about before about bees walking on us. And it's, it's that getting over that. I shouldn't say fear. I mean, you learn to be afraid of them, but it's that what's it called? Maybe desensitization might be the word. Like the more you go into your hives calmly and slowly, the more you realize, like you say, they're not out to get you. They don't want to sting you. It's sort of learning with them rather than sort of
do as I say kind of thing. Yeah. Cool, calm and collected is what I teach my beekeeping students. Yeah. Three C's. I like it. Yeah, yeah. Sarah Cross. Hey, thanks. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you for inviting me. Very cool. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Remember right now to follow or subscribe and share this podcast. Also, a quick shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support.
Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan, Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. 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.