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 bee's 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 Keep being presented by our good friends over at Man
Lake. It's fall here in the northern hemisphere and that means it's time to get your bees ready for winter. If you're in a cold climate, feed, feed, feed. Decide if wrapping or insulating the hives makes sense for you. And no matter where you live, test and treat if necessary to make sure Varroa is under control. Mites and the pathogens they carry are the number one reason
for winter hive loss. And speaking of Varroa, today we're traveling thousands of miles across the oceans to meet with Shaden Hinvies, a beekeeper on an island that is still Varroa free, and to find out what they're doing to keep it that way. If my voice will hold up, how about a bit of news from around the world of beekeeping? And this may be a big one. Greenlight Biosciences just received EPA approval for Nuroa, the first
RNA -based treatment for Varroa mites. They describe it as the first ever nature -based treatment specifically designed to combat Varroa. This comes at a time when USDA researchers are blaming declining efficacy of existing miticides as a leading cause of honeybee colony loss. You can't buy it quite yet. It will be available soon. In the meantime, we'll get someone from Greenlight Biosciences on the podcast in the next couple of weeks to tell us all about it. All right,
let's have some fun. Let's head down under for a delightful discussion about Ligurian bees, kangaroos, and a whole bunch more. I'd like to welcome to the show today, Sean Hindbees. And Sean, I think you are further away than anybody else that we've had on the show before. So congratulations. I feel honored. That's great. Say hi and tell us where you live. Hello everyone who's watching,
wherever you are. I live on an island off the southern coast of Australia and we call the island Kangaroo Island and I'm a beekeeper over here and that's pretty much my sole occupation and that keeps me very busy. We run about 350 hives. The island is the third largest island off Australia. It's about 160 kilometers long. I can't work that out in miles for you. You'd have to work that out. And about 90 kilometers wide. So there's about four and a half thousand people. Yeah.
I'm going to say roughly 50 miles wide, 90 miles long. Okay. Yep. Yep. We have listeners all over the world. So metric is great for a lot of people. How far off the coast of Australia are you? We're around, I think it's 16 to 18 kilometers off the coast. So eight, nine miles, something like that. Anyway, that's going to lead into what we're talking about today. Australia is such an interesting place. I've been watching it over the years because for so many years we were all
jealous that Australia had no Varroa mites. But you can no longer be jealous. No need to be jealous anymore. But I believe about three years ago they were discovered in Australia. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, that is correct. Yes, and they've taken over really quickly and I know the people in Australia the beekeepers They've done everything they can think of to eradicate it. But I believe at this point it's okay We can't eradicate them. So let's control let's
learn to live with them. Is that pretty much the scenario? That's a scenario But from conversations I've had with people If the eradication program was remained in place and everyone abide by the rules, it was possible that they may have been able to eradicate it. But people weren't, you know, people were moving hives illegally and, you know, over 48 ,000 hives were killed to try and control it. And it got to the stage, I think, where they're sort of like, well, you know, what
do we do now? Basically, people keep moving their hive and spreading it. And so I think they just, they got fed up and decided to well that's it we'll just manage it. Well and that's the problem is them moving if they had all stayed in one spot I imagine they could have done something about it. Do you have people that do pollination and move to different areas for pollination? There's a lot of pollination contracts that happen within Australia itself, yes. Here on Kangaroo
Island, there is no pollination contract. And for me myself, I actually avoid pollination, trying to keep my bees off of monocrops and farming agricultural land where possible, and just target the native flower. Good for you. Well, let's talk about the difference with your island, because my understanding is you don't have roa there yet, correct? No, that is correct. I'm sorry to put in the word yet. You don't have a row
a period. Hopefully you never will. We hope so too, but that's a likely possibility in the future. Yes. You're far enough off the mainland that the bees can't fly that far, but you have fairies that go over a few times a day. Yeah. Up to 10 to 15 trips a day. How do you keep bees from hitchhiking on a ferry? That is the next problem. We've got bar security officers. on the Cape before the ferry leaves the mainland, and their powers are not as strong as we'd like them to
be. I'm actually meeting with Senator Scriven from the Agriculture, she's the Agriculture Minister here in South Australia, and are trying to work out ways we can strengthen the biosecurity so that we can take measures to limit the possibility of Varroa reaching us eventually. Good luck. All I can say is good luck. I hope you're successful. The hardest thing that I think with Varroa though is, from what I've been told, the Varroa mite
can live about five days without a host. So, you know, if a car drives through a swarm of bees and they've got Varroa on them and a number of bees are trapped in the radiator, that Varroa mite could stay there for three or four days and be brought to the island on a car. You know, it's just, it's that possible. Yeah. It's like a terrible disease. Yeah. Yeah. It just spreads. So anyway, I wanted to ask you, is there anything else that's being done to keep the Varroa away?
I mean, you can inspect cars and people. I don't know how closely, how reasonable that is. I mean, you probably have hundreds of cars going back and forth every day. Possibly at times, almost a thousand cars a day, possibly. I think that the ferry holds, I think about 80, 80 to 90 cars, I think. And, and if they're doing 10 trips a day, then there's close to a thousand cars there a day, traveling to the island. We're going to
try and ask if there's a wash down station. So if someone pulls up and the inspector notices that there's some bees in the radiator, that they get a chance to take a car up and wash the radiator out or something, something like that. You know, it's, it's nerve wracking and uh, We don't want to go down the path of using chemicals to manage Varroa, so we're going to have to try and work out ways of doing it a little bit more organically. All right, let's talk about your
island. I hear you have an unusual kind of bee. Well, for us it's not unusual, but apparently for other people it is. So we have what's known as the Ligurian Bee. It was imported to the island back in 1884, and at that time that is when the island was settled. uh, by the colonialists from, from England. And, uh, and they were trying to, they settled New South Wales, they settled Victoria, they came around the Bight and they started to settle South Australia. And they realized there
was no honeybee on Kangaroo Island. So they imported a number of hives from Liguria in Italy. So it's an Italian bee. And, um, in 1885, the island was declared a a bee sanctuary to preserve the genetics of the Ligurian bee. But be mindful, at that stage, there was no honeybee on the island until the Ligurian bee was introduced. And because we have a very Mediterranean type climate, very similar to Italy, the Ligurian bees have done
very well here. And I know of recent, within the last, I think, 10 years, we've been DNA tested with other patches of Ligurian bee around the world. and we've been recognized as the most pure strain of Ligurian bees left in the world. Tell me about the Ligurian bees. Are they friendly? Are they mean? What are they like? No, no, they're a gentle bee. They're very hygienic. Some of their hygienic abilities are some of the strongest
that many researchers have seen anywhere. We're hoping that they may actually be... a help to controlling Varroa long term. There's a beekeeper over here that breached Queens that has sent some bees off to some other countries. I think the Philippines he sent them off to, he's received letters back stating that they've been helping with the control of Varroa within some of their hives. So their hygienic ability is very, very high. And they're also quite a good producer.
Probably not as good as the aggressive type bees, but... We've found that the Lagerian bees are very, very productive. We can, we can have some pretty good honey flows sometime. And what do they forage on, on your island? So we were about a third national park. Uh, so it's nothing but native flora and fauna. I shouldn't say fauna. Fauna is my flora and fauna. Yeah, fauna is animals, isn't it? Thinking about it. I'd stick with flora if I were you. Yeah, that's true. And, um, and
so. Being a third national park, that's a huge amount of land that is just native, what we would call scrub or bushland. A lot of reserves, a lot of native heritage land, and a lot of landowners that have their livestock here also keep lots and lots of patches of native wild trees present. Tree clearing isn't a common practice here. The trees that protect the paddocks also play an important part in the agriculture. Tell me a
little bit about your bee business. Are you making money just on honey since you're not doing pollination or do you have other ways of... So we are making money with honey. Obviously there is no pollination paid contracts. There are people that produce canola crops here and fava beans and lupins and all the myriad of plants that need some form of pollination. but there's no contract for it. We have a very high population of feral colonies, which obviously Varroa would play a big impact
on if it ever did get here. We are GM -free. There are no GM crops allowed on Kangaroo Island currently, so that also ticks a few boxes, I think. We run about 350 hives. Going back to just before 2020, we were producing somewhere between 20 and 25 tonne per season. 2020, we had the largest bushfire ever on Kangaroo Island and it burnt just on half of the island. Pretty much all the national parks and so forth were taken out, which consists of about 70 % of our
productive area. Since the fires, we're sitting on somewhere between five and nine tonne per season. We still haven't yet recovered from that. The trees are still in regrowth. Since the fires, we've gone into a drought situation. And so there's just not as much regrowth as there could be. So the trees are being halted in that regards. As you know, 2020, we were hit with COVID. So after the fires, we had to diversify because there was no real honey for at least 18 months.
And so we sort of went down the line of doing beekeeping tours and experiences. We opened a farm gate shop so that we could have people come to the farm so we can do a bit of retail. And then COVID stopped all that. So because everyone was locked down. We just basically went along with COVID and did what we had to do and we've worked our way through that. The tourism business has taken off. We're doing really well with that.
That's providing an extra income, which we didn't have, but we don't have as much honey as we used to. And so we play it by ear and go from there. We do currently supply about 40 to 50 stores on the mainland, which I go to Adelaide. Adelaide is the capital center of South Australia. Go to Adelaide once a month and do my deliveries there. So we've sort of got our fingers in lots of little holes. We do retail, we do wholesale, we do tourism. It's provided enough income to
stay in the black, which is good. Glad to hear it. We had somebody on the show recently in Hawaii and the agritourism is an important part of their business there as well. So I'm glad it's worked out for you. Sorry, I can't help but ask probably the dumbest question ever. It's called Kangaroo Island. Does that mean you have a lot of kangaroos on the island? We do. We actually have two pet kangaroos ourselves. If I stand up a little bit and just show you off my porch here, we've got
to look out over the farm a little bit. And if you look down the hill a little bit, you see the two kangaroos having a bit of a play there. They're just under that big tree. So they're two of our pet kangaroos. So it was called Kangaroo Island because when the island was settled... That was probably a lot of the diet of the settlers. They were hunting and eating the kangaroos because there's a large population of them here. So I guess, anciently, the kangaroos swam that eight
or nine miles from the mainland over. Kangaroos can swim, but I don't think that they swam to the island. When the island broke off of the mainland, however many thousands of years ago, you'll find there's actually They're a subspecies of the Western Grey Kangaroo on the mainland. So over here, they're more brown. They're thicker set. They're not as skinny as the ones on the mainland. They're a subspecies of the Western Grey, which would have been on the island when
the island broke off from the mainland. If you're a beekeeper like me, we're getting into that favorite time of year, honey harvest. But it can be a lot of work. That's where Man Lake comes in. They have everything you need to make the job easier, cleaner, and more efficient. Removal aids, refractometers, uncapping tools, extractors, tanks, wax melters, even the jars and labels. Plus they have free shipping on glass containers.
Whether you're a hobbyist with two hives or a full -blown commercial operation, Man Lake has it all. And don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes. For $10 off your first $100 purchase. Here I've gotten totally off track. We're talking about the wrong animal today. Normally I've got bees. I'm wondering what else we can learn from you. Do you have any other pests there?
Small high beetles, anything like that? Straight after the fires, there was a big push to feed the wildlife because when half an island burns out, there's not the feed there to help feed the wildlife. So there's a lot of fruits and vegetables brought to the island and spread out the paddocks for the wildlife to eat for quite a period of time. And not long Probably a year after that happened there was a beekeeper out west who found several hives that had small hive
beetle in it. Now for small hive beetle to get the western end it would have to have been brought to the island by either someone bringing a hive over illegally or the small hive beetle coming from an area where it was found in the fruit that was brought to the island. So apparently small hive beetle can be found in fruit sometimes. So that's a possibility. But those hives that it was found in were frozen. They were put into a freezer. And we haven't found small hive beetle
on the island since. It just sounds too easy. Except for the fires and COVID and the fact that you're trying to keep feroa out of there. Sounds like a pretty easy place to keep bees. Yeah,
well, we don't have European fowl brood. We've only had ASB on the island for the last I think two years and So there's a small patch of the island where it's been there was one beekeeper found it in his hives and he'd spread it to a few different areas and so several beekeepers ended up getting a few hives and there's an outbreak in the main township called Kingscote here on the island and they haven't quite eradicated it properly, but all the honey samplings and
everything that's gone in lately, there's been no detection of AFB at the moment. It might be lurking in the background, but we're hoping long term to eradicate it from the island again. Yeah. I wonder how in the world it got there. Tell me about your honey. Is it just a regular, what we call wildflower honey, meaning that these are out foraging on all kinds of things and it's just a nice sweet amber kind of color? Our honeys
vary a lot. So a lot of our trees are Eucalyptus, Melaleucas, a lot of Australian native scrubland. Some of our coastal honey can almost be a mauve purple color or a deep red. Often it's just an amber color. Yes, sometimes we have a light. Our sugar gums and our cup gums are quite a light color. We don't get anything really, really clear and we don't get anything really, really dark. Yeah, but that red color sounds interesting. Yeah, well, it's sort of a deep red, deep red,
almost a slight purpley color at times. That's the coastal flower. There's a couple of plants there, the bubealibush, the coastal heath. A few of them really give it a dark color and a really amazing flavor. I just got back from Appamondia and they had the world honey tasting bar. So there were countries from all over the world, including Australia. In Australia, I'm trying to remember. I know they had a few different kinds of honey. Is there something called Burberry
or something like that? It's possible. It's possible, but we don't have it on Kangaroo Island. Now, just for you to understand, I've never kept bees on the mainland. I've only ever kept bees while on Kangaroo Island. I've been keeping bees crass for 25 years. And so there's lots of things I'm not aware of that happen on the mainland because we just don't do it here. Do you have any swarm removal needs? Yes, yes, I spent a lot of time
playing with that. I have a YouTube channel which I'm very, very slow in adding videos to of me removing swarms and from buildings and barbecues and I've got a list of things I've got to edit to put up. But we have a bit of fun with that. I do a little bit of TV presentation occasionally. A few shows come through and get a video of me doing an experience with them and done a UK show last year and yeah. Dapple a little bit with
the with the film crews. All right. Give me a link to that YouTube channel We'll post it for you. So Ki living honey our YouTube forward slash Ki for kangaroo island. So Ki living honey We'll stick it in the show notes. So people don't have to try to remember be keeping that long I'm guessing you've got some kind of a wild and crazy story. Have you ever had anything crazy happen to you? Yeah I've got lots of little stories. Nothing
really big stands out to me. But you know, when I first was starting out with bees, I probably had 10 hives. There was one hive that was so aggressive, I almost gave up beekeeping. And I would actually wear two suits to go through the hive. And I was still fearful. Since then, you know, I hardly even put a veil on and... I never wear gloves and I've got holes in all my clothes. I've been stung pretty much on every
part of my body at some stage. And the most painful areas is like the inside your nostrils and on your eyelids and, you know, little things like that. The groin area isn't as painful as other areas. But that's all part of having holes in your pants when you're out with the bees. Learn
by experience. Oh yeah, that's right. I've been out with people moving bees and it was pitch black and all of a sudden the box twists and all the bees fly out and you're covered in bees and they're attacking you because they don't
like to be moved obviously. But then there's other times, you know, you're sitting down, you're going through a hive, you've got 20 cows just sitting behind you, watching what you're doing and then you've got the... that the trees next to you, and then you've got the ocean in the distance, and it's just beautiful weather, and just, you know, sometimes you wouldn't want to be doing anything else. It's an amazing lifestyle.
We have our ups, we have our downs, and story -wise, yeah, there's lots of stories, lots of stories. How about with some of the tourists that you have? You do some kind of tours of your apiary, and what do you do with them exactly? So we'll have what we call an education tour which is talking about the bees and their life cycle and what we do as beekeepers and why we do it and how we do it and that's an education
thing. It takes about an hour. We show them the facility and how it all works and how the extraction and the packing works and then they have a tasting and then they have an opportunity to buy some product if they'd like to. If we're doing an experience Once we've done the tour with them, we then take them out. We've got six hives here near the house that we will take them through the hive and show them everything we talked about. Everything from seeing the nectar, the honey,
the pollen. We watch a bee being, you know, hatching from its cell. We check out the workers, the drones, the queen. We go through the whole cycle and we, you know, for me, I'm not one that pushes time, you know, you've got to be in by nine, out by 11 type thing. If they want to talk and ask questions, we'll spend two, three hours going through it all. And they lead with their mind completely blown, you know? And then they end up wanting to have a beehive too. And so then
I can supply them some bees later. And lots of things are happening that way too. Yeah, sounds great. Do you ever have some of those people that sort of panic? They can't all be calm and collected. No, no, no. Some people come through to do it to try and face their fears. And so there's some people and some... But I get them all to hold frames of live bees. They're all suited up. They've got gloves on. You know, the
chance of getting stung is very slim. And we've only ever had one sting in the field in the last five years. And that's because one lady decided to not wear socks. And that was a choice that she made. I've had one family group came through. If the father was to get stung, he would have to be rushed off to hospital because he was anaphylactic and he could possibly die. And so he was going to do the tour inside the shed. and that the rest of his family go off and do the experience
part of it. I said to him, I said, if you'd like, I can put a suit on you and you can watch from the car park. And so he said, yeah, you will do that. Well, by the end of the experience, he was actually in there holding frames of bees too. And his mind was blown. And you know, it literally changes people's lives when they see one little insect and the impact that they make on us as humans. Leave us with one thought. Why do you love bees? Why do I love bees? It's something
I've sort of fallen into. All right. So when I first started, I was in a job. I was a tire fitter and we're a liner in a workshop. We've got five children. We lived on the farm here. And in my job, there was no option of earning more income. So we were always trying to find ways of saving money. So, you know, we've got milking goats. So in the morning before the kids went to school, I'd milk the goats and they'd have fresh warm milk on their breakfast. There's
the chickens for the eggs and the meat. We had our cows, we'd butcher our own livestock, we'd butcher our own sheep. We'd eat the kangaroos, we'd grow a lot of our own vegetables. And then getting a beehive was just another thing for us to sort of save a bit of money. That's where it all started. And then I just fell in love with how they work, what they produce, what they do for us. And so one became five and 10 and 20. In the beginning stages, we actually had
no electricity on our home. So back in 2000, we lived here with five children. no electricity, not even a generator for the house. We only had gas lanterns, gas stove, gas hot water, and everything was gravity fed. We don't have mains water. We don't have mains sewage. It was whatever we can collect and get rid of ourselves. And so the bees have has been, it's pulled me out of where I was to where I am now. We were able to sell the honey to another beekeeper. And so we built
our numbers up. So I'd work the bees on the weekend and And then we had the job in the week and then I weaned off of the job and worked in bees longer and longer. Eventually we were full time. And now we've got an income here that's sustained just quite comfortably. And I just love the smells, the sounds, the environment, the produce that they make. It's transformed my life and I watch it do the same to other people. Great answer. Sorry. I said that was the last question, but
I've got one more. You mentioned eating kangaroos. What do they taste like? Well, whenever someone says they eat meat, everyone says it tastes like chicken, but kangaroo does not taste like chicken. Are you familiar with what lamb tastes like? Yes. So it's stronger than lamb and it's going down the path possibly of deer. It's a bit gamier, but it's not as strong as wild pig. If you sort of know what I mean. Can you tell me what honey tastes like? Yeah, it's sweet. Harder question.
Just tell me what salt tastes like. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. But when it comes to salt, I can't tell what it tastes like, but everything you add it to tastes better. Kangaroos, we would have a lot of kangaroo mince when the kids were young. You don't actually notice the difference when you add your vegetables and your spices and your herbs and all that sort of stuff. So it's not an overpowering meat. but it's definitely stronger than lamb, but probably not, probably
not as strong as goat. Okay, gamey and needs salt. Alright, Sean Hinvis, thanks so much for being with me today. I appreciate it. Loved having a chat with you. All the best and all the best for your, your show and what you do. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. If you like this content I hope you'll share it with a friend, follow and subscribe to this podcast and even sign up for our newsletter
at BeLoveBeekeeping .com Also, just a shout out to Vita B Health for their support, we appreciate them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Veroxen, 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.