May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox review If you have learned the hard way that honeybees don't like internal combustion engines like lawnmowers You might be a beekeeper If you never ever thought that you'd have anything to do with an electric fence but you live in bear country? Well, you might be a beekeeper. If you don't remember the last time you washed your beekeeping suit, you might
be a beekeeper. Might be stinky too. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Today's guest is the amazing Dr. Tom Seeley. We're going to be all over the place learning about everything from worker bee piping in swarms to the differences between Langstroth hives and honeybee homes in trees to hive insulation, Varroa control, and the one we've all got to try bee lining, also known as bee hunting. First, a quick feel -good story ripped from the headlines of
the world of honey bees. Meet Maple, a former human remains detection dog, is now a beekeeper at Michigan State University's Pollinator Performance Center. She's a very energetic springer spaniel who really likes to work and have a purpose, and so this was a wonderful opportunity for her to continue working. said Sue Stakehall, Maple's owner, canine handler, and trainer. Maple uses her sense of smell to detect American foul brood.
If she detects the bacteria, she sits. And you've got to see the pictures because Sue made Maple a custom doggy beekeeping suit. That is, it's unbelievable. It's awesome. According to Stakehall, Dogs can be trained to detect many things like explosives, narcotics, people, leaking pipelines, even endangered species, she said. People probably don't realize how many different types of detection
dogs are used. and MSU researcher Megan Milbrath says their team is developing an instructive manual for professionals to train dogs to detect harmful honeybee diseases, which saves both bees and time. When you've got tens of thousands of colonies to go through, we have to look at ways that could process a lot of samples quickly, Milbrath said. a dog really can quickly move through a yard and identify ones that need to be inspected. Love it, great story, way to go,
Maple. All right, let's get to the interview. We have an extremely special guest on the show today, Dr. Tom Seeley, coming to us from a beautiful spot in Maine. How are you today, Tom? I'm happy as a clam at high tide, as they say up here. And I know you're from Ithaca, New York. Do you spend summers in Maine? Yes, I spend about three months in Maine. I married a Maine girl. When we got married, she told me, Tom, I'm always
going to need a sea breeze. So I built a little house up here and spend a good part of the year. Well you were kind enough to send me a picture of the view from where you are and it's stunning it's beautiful and I'm glad you're enjoying your summer. Hey for those that don't know who Dr. Sealy is, Tom do you mind if I embarrass you a little bit just by giving people some background? I know the most important thing for you is the fact that you've been beekeeping for 56 years.
You started when you were in high school And that is so cool. And we're going to get into that story in a few minutes, but I want to say Dr. Seeley has been a professor at Cornell University for his career and has studied everything having to do with bees and especially, please correct me if I'm wrong, bee behavior and ecology. Yes, that's exactly right. Both of those things, behavior and ecology. And you're the author of six books? I think that's right, six books. The first one
that I read was Honey Bee Democracy. It sounds a little crazy to say it changed my life, but wow, it just blew open my brain to bees and so much more. And by the way, and I think this is your newest book, I'm in the middle of it right now, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz Runners. We'll find out a little bit about what that means
today, but we're not here to pitch books. We're here to talk beekeeping and talk honeybees and their behavior and I hope that as we get into some of the things that may sound at first glance like, well what does that have to do with me and my beekeeping? The fact that honeybees swarm in this particular way and have these behaviors.
I hope Tom you can help me and our listeners come to where we can take those things and internalize them into how our behavior is with bees just by understanding them better and how we keep them. Do you have any particular place you'd like to start? If not, I've got a thousand questions for you. Well, let's see. You've got more experience in organizing these presentations, so I'll follow
your guidance. Well, I appreciate that. Between this and another podcast, I've interviewed quite a few hundred people, but I've got to tell you, I'm a little nervous because in the beekeeping community, Tom Seeley is it. Okay. I hate to use hyperbole, but is it possible that you know more about bee behavior than anybody else on this planet right now? It's possible. Speaking of embarrassing you, go ahead and answer. Well, I'd say I've made it the focus, the primary focus
of my 50 -some years of studying the bees. And in some sense, it's been a very narrow. There's many ways to study honeybees. And I've really focused on their behavior and also their ecologies. I suppose that does the combination of the many years and the focus, particularly on their behavior, does make me especially well knowledgeable on this topic. But I don't claim by any means to say that we fully, I or anybody else, fully understands
the behavior of worker honeybees. They are the most intelligent of all the insects and they've got a lot of mysteries still. Well, that's one of the things I love about them is we'd never fully figure it out. The bees and things like Varroa and stuff that make beekeeping tough. We never fully have all the answers, I don't believe. Yeah, I like to draw the analogy between
human beings and honeybees. In both cases, we are the most complex behaviorally and cognitively of the primates, and the honeybees are the most complex behaviorally and cognitively of the insects. And in both cases, it's because we live in very complex societies. It's social living, we know. that really builds complex brains. And so that's, that's a real parallel between humans and honeybees. So on that topic, since you just brought it up, I want to read something that you've got posted
on Cornell's website. I was going to save this for later because it sounds very scientific, but I absolutely love this. Here we go. Remarkably, there are intriguing similarities between how the bees in a swarm and the neurons in a brain are organized so that even though each unit, B or neuron, has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first
-rate collective decisions. For example, in both systems the process of making a choice consists of a competition between the options to accumulate support, B visits or neuron firings, Also in both systems the winner of the competition is determined by which option first accumulates a critical level or quorum of support. Consistencies like these indicate that there are general principles of organization for building groups that are smarter than the smartest individuals in them.
I totally get that and I think it is so cool just like In a group of human beings, it takes a hundred different high -tech companies before giant leaps in computer technology happen, for example, and hundreds of people at each of those places to where we now have inventions that one person couldn't come up with every part of. And I think that's what we're talking about. in the consensus of bee colonies is the whole collective
is so much smarter than one individual bee. Can you please explain that better than I just did? Well, let's just use an example. I think it's the colony as a whole. Let's look at its foraging operation. It's spreading its foragers far and wide and in many different directions to gather the food and the water and the resin that it needs. And no one bee can go out and collect the information about all the foraging opportunities
across the countryside. So just right at the level of getting the information about the problem, which we would call the sensory aspect of it, that's dispersed among all of the foragers, so thousands and thousands of bees. And then they have to somehow have a way to use all that information that's been collected, and they do it. in ways where the bees come back and they carefully advertise what they found in terms of its direction and
distance and its desirability. And they adjust the announcement of the dance announcement's strength according to the desirability. So the best things get advertised the most strongly. And so that gives a bias to sending more bees to those locations than to poorer locations. It's a very Very sensible, but at the same time, wonderful system of organizing, deploying the foragers in a colony. Something similar happens in a swarm, but the rules are a little bit different.
And you somehow figured out the rules. That's always the challenge. You see, let's go to a swarm because it's a little simpler. It's easier to envision, I think. You see this mass of bees
hanging from a tree branch. And if you look closely, you'll see Bees these would be the Nessite scouts coming back landing on the surface of the swarm and doing waggle dances and Some of the waggle as the bees do their waggle dance They walk upward and others walk sideways and others walk downward and some are very excited and some are less excited and somehow out of all of that and that's a big body of information that's being collected and Processed there on the surface of the swarm That's
a good example of the collectiveness of it. And then it's basically a race. The best site gets advertised the most strongly. The buildup at that site happens the most rapidly. And it's the first site to get enough popularity for the bees to get nest site scouts to sense, oh, this site is a really good one. Let's cut. We don't need to talk anymore. We've found a really good site. Let's go back and get things organized
to make the move to this new home. So for beekeepers that like to catch swarms, how can they use that information that you just gave us? That's a really valuable question. There's a couple of things
a beekeeper can use. One is if they see bees performing waggle dances that are where the bee as it walks forward and is waggling her body, if they're pointing in all sorts of different directions, straight up or straight down, left or right, That would tell the beekeeper that the nest -site scouts are not close to finishing the decision -making. And so you don't have to really rush. But there's another signal in there, Eric, that is even more valuable for a beekeeper.
It's an acoustical signal called piping. And it's the sound that the nest -site scouts make when they sense that they're ready to The decision has been reached, and they need to go around and tell the other bees, the non -scouts bees in the swarm, to warm up their flight muscles so they can all launch into flight almost within
simultaneously. And that sounds like this. So if you're a beekeeper and you put your ear up next to a swarm and you hear that sound, you know that that swarm's preparing to take off. And it will probably take off within one to five or six minutes. So if you hear that scramble and get a hive and shake those bees into your hive. Now I've also heard that sound in a hive. Can you explain that? If you hear it in a hive, there's queen piping and then there's worker
piping. They're a little hard to tell apart. You might be hearing queen piping and that would be piping between the different virgin queens kind of advertising themselves or it could be worker piping. if the colony is preparing to swarm, because the worker bees make this warm -up or piping signal to get everybody in the hive ready to have their flight muscles warm enough to fly out to form the swarm. So if you hear that, it's either the queens are fighting
or the workers are getting ready to swarm. The first time I heard it, I think it was the queens, that former thing that you discussed, because they weren't ready to swarm. Tell us about how you got into beekeeping. Because this show is all about the love of bees, and to spend your whole career with this, you must have some love. But where did it start? It started when I was a boy, I think I was about 10 years old, and I watched a swarm of bees move into a black walnut
tree near my parents' house. Fortunately, it was about a big old black walnut tree, but with many... big, big tree, but the bees just by chance moved into the bottom most limb. They were moving in. I was initially scared of the bees, but as I got a little more braver or more experienced in watching the bees, I realized I could bring up my father's stepladder and set it up right next to the nest entrance. And I didn't have a bee veil or anything, but I could sit there
quietly and just watch the bees. I think that's what And it was a huge mystery, as I'm sure you can see. You see bees coming and going from a knot hole, and you wonder, what's going on inside there? That really, I think, was the thing that got me going, seeing the bees firsthand and up close and wondering what on earth is going on
inside that tree hollow. I think that says a lot about you, too, frankly, because I can imagine a bunch of 10 -year -old boys Also taking baseball bats to that and seeing who dared hit it and run the fastest. So you must have really been a deep thinker. I don't know if I thought was thinking deeply. I like nature. We lived out in the country, saw a lot of neat things in the natural world. And this was one that was particularly mysterious because there was a lot of action,
but it was out of sight. We'll call it a deep curiosity. How's that? Yeah, that's right. That's it. Exactly. And that was in the Ithaca, New York area. Yeah, it's in the little, a little valley just outside of Ithaca called Ellis Hollow. It's where I still live. In fact, it didn't disperse well. A few years ago we went through Ithaca and talk about a beautiful area. Wow. Green and you've got the finger lakes there and yeah, it's
just beautiful. Yeah. It's remarkable that it has this super duper university in the middle of nowhere. It's because the founder. Ezra Cornell, who made a fortune on telegraph, setting up telegraph systems. That's where he owned land. And he was a good guy. He said, I got all this money. I want to do something good with it. And I'm going to start a university. And he had the brains to realize he didn't know how to do it, but he hired a very smart guy. I forget from where he
came from. The two of them together set up this very remarkable university in the middle of just a tiny little city. And you spent your whole career there. Yeah, I spent a few years. My first job was teaching in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale University. It's where I had a job offer was given to me. It was a rundown city at the time. Now it's rejuvenated, but it was a difficult place to live at the time. Dangerous, in fact.
I once got held up at gunpoint. So that made me think, I don't think I want to stay here too, too long. Quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. Whether you're a beekeeper or not, you know that nutrition is key for healthy honeybees, native bees, and other pollinators. The Man Lake app is a great resource for determining pollinator -friendly plants that thrive in your area, and its plant identification feature is
super helpful and fun. When I see a plant covered in bees, I fire up the app, find out what it is, then plant them in my yard. If you haven't already downloaded the Man Lake app, give it a try today. Oh, and did I mention it's free? And if you're shopping for beekeeping supplies, don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes for $10 off your first $100 purchase. All right, let's switch gears for a
minute. Let's talk about a hobby that I have not taken up yet called bee lining or bee hunting. For those that haven't heard about this. Tell us what in the world this is. Bee lining is an old craft that goes back hundreds of years, whereby before people had bees and hives, before Langstroth invented a hive, the way people got honey was to line bees, to follow bees that you see on
flowers. Follow them back their flight lines home to their hive to their usually in a tree and then collect the nest and steal the honey So bee lining is the process of following the bees from where you first see them on flowers
Back to their home and it's it's a craft. It's a skill and it's another great way to enjoy To have fun with honeybees because when you'd be line, you're just you're feeding bees sugar water and they're happy and you get to watch how they load up and fly away and there's no danger of being stung, anything like that. I'd like to say it takes you to places you wouldn't otherwise go. Can you tell me about the process? You just mentioned sugar water. How do you do this? Do
you just set up in the forest someplace? What do you do? You start by trapping bees in a little box and it could be just a cardboard box or whatever. You go out to find bees on flowers. You trap them in a box. It's called a bee box if you want to have a special one. And once the bees are in there, you put a comb filled with sugar water in your little box. The bee box, a bee hunter's box, has two chambers. You capture bees in the
box. You lure them to the rear chamber. That allows you to put food in the front chamber. And then you let the bees move from the rear chamber to the front chamber. They walk onto your comb that's filled with thick sugar syrup. They think they've found heaven. You leave the box closed for a few minutes. You'll open it up. They come out. They're usually not freaked out. They circle around. They fly home. And then unless there's a honey flow on, they will come
back. And then once you've got a traffic of bees between their home and your bee box, you can then see the direction they're flying home. And you can move your box step by step, maybe once every hour or so, another 100 yards or more if it's open territory. back down their flight line and bit by bit you work your way back to their home. Depending on where you are, it might be in somebody's apiary or it might be a bee tree in somebody's barn, something like that. So how
long does that usually take? You mentioned moving it every hour. Is this a whole day, multiple day? Yeah, that's an important question. I'm just trying to pull up the numbers. I think the shortest bee hunt I ever did was an hour because I started the bee line unknowingly, only about 100 yards from their home. The longest one, I think, took two years. I wasn't working at it
steadily, of course. Two years? Oh my gosh. Well, in the sense that I couldn't find it the first year, and so I went back and tried again and found it in the second year. The bees were... nesting very high up in a hemlock tree. So it took a couple of tries, basically. But on average, I think I've got some words in that book that it usually takes me maybe five hours, something like that. So not a full day, but a good full
morning and part of an afternoon. As I say, the beauty of it is it takes you to places you wouldn't otherwise go to. And there's a kind of an exhilaration or a sense of exuberance you feel when you finally find the bees home. Because if it's in a forested setting, you know, there's thousands of trees out there, but there's only one that the bees are living in. And when you work your way back to it and you find it and you see the bees going in and out of a knothole or crack in that tree,
you realize, I did it! I did it! This is a real accomplishment. That, for the modern bee hunter, is not the honey at the end of the honey. It's the discovery of the bees. But I knew some old timers who didn't have much money. That's how they would get their sweetener. They would find a bee tree. They wouldn't kill the, cut it down and they would usually chop it open and take out some of the honeycombs, put them in a pot and bring it home. That's another approach to
the whole bee hunting endeavor. That sounds like it takes so much patience. It does take patience, but sometimes patience is easy to have. If you're out in nature, you listen to what the birds are calling. You look at the, you study the trees around you. You got these neat little bees coming and going, and they become individuals because you want to figure out how long it takes the bee to go home. and come back, you have to label the bees with little dots of paint, and you get
to really know them as individuals. Some work rapidly and efficiently, and some poke around. If you're an enthusiast, one would find it very interesting. And I think one of the coolest things about it, Eric, as maybe I've mentioned this, maybe I'm repeating myself, you're now looking at the behaviors of individual worker bees. You're not confronted with hundreds of worker bees walking around on a comb in front of you. you really
get to know them as individuals. Yeah and when you're looking at hundreds it's hard to look at them as individuals. Right. It's hard to keep track of just one. Exactly. I try to do that sometimes just observing them outside a hive like I want to watch just one it's circling around is it coming is it going and it can be very distracting when there's a hundred of them doing that it's hard to keep your eye on one. So are you following this bee lining? You're starting with one bee.
Does it come back with some of her friends? Yeah, unless there's a honey flow on, you are usually the best food source around if you're offering honey in a comb. And so yeah, she will go home, maybe not on her first trip home, but sometimes she'll do a dance and advertise your feeder, your comb. Other bees start showing up, unmarked bees. So, you know, those are novices that she's brought to the site. And then you can label them.
As I say, once you've got a nice little good traffic of bees flying between your feeding station and their home, then you can move the feeding station closer in stages, closer and closer to their home. And that's the process of bee lining. Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit because I'm picturing bees inside of a tree. Can you give us an idea of How different is it for bees living in a tree versus these man -made boxes
that we use? I mean, it's obviously a different place, but does it affect their behavior also? Yes, I think it does. You know, the Langstroth hive is a brilliant invention from the perspective of enabling humans to manage in the colonies of bees, but it was designed not with a lot of consideration of the bees. What's ideal for the bees? For example, in nature, when the bees choose a home site, they choose sites that are high off the ground, so they're safe. They're not
likely to be detected by bears. They also choose sites that are relatively small, cavities that are small, only the size of one deep 10 -frame hive body, for example. That's typical in a tree cavity. And that means that they don't produce huge colonies, but they They have enough space to make a colony, to build up, get crowded, produce a swarm, store up honey. They still have enough space to store up about 40 pounds of honey. And as anybody knows, who's got lifted, hefted a
full 10 -frame honey super. The other thing that's really strikingly different is the insulation of the nest. In the wild, I've dissected about 20 bee trees. natural nests. And I think the average wall thickness, wood wall thickness was about, I can't remember, was four inches or six inches, but it much better insulation. So small entrance, smallish cavity, really good insulation and high off the ground, so less conspicuous to predators. So how does that affect their life
cycle and just their overall behavior? Well, with life cycle, the main thing is that Well, one of the two main things that I can think of at this point is one is it means that colonies are gauged or set themselves up for swarming. As we all know, so much of our beekeeping management is swarm prevention. So we give colonies extra space. We also give them extra space for storing honey, more honey than they will need. So the bees in the wild are small. They're apt to swarm.
They only store up as much honey as they need. And the other thing is one that I've mentioned is the safety of being high off the ground and in an inconspicuous nest entrance, for example. And then one last thing is a couple more, actually. Within the nest, they have They will build as much drone comb as they want, which is usually about 15 % of their comb area is devoted to drone
comb. So they will produce, they'll have greater reproductive genetic success because they're rearing more drones in a wild colonies nest than in a managed colonies nest. The other one, maybe I'm repeating myself, is the very good insulation of a wild colonies nest. So how would you suggest hobby or even commercial beekeepers take that information? and use it in their beekeeping.
Now I realize the whole idea of the Langstroth hive is, yes, they do pretty well in it, but it's really convenient for us for getting that honey out, right? So, I mean, for example, it's not practical for us to have a four or six inch thick walls on a bee box, you know, weigh a couple hundred pounds more than it already does. So how do we use that information? Well, if you're a beekeeper in a northern climate, I think one thing you want to do is, or a cold climate, I
should say, is to add insulation. As you said, it doesn't make sense to achieve that insulation by adding solid wood, but you can get very good foam insulation and put it on the outside of a hive, maybe even just for the winter. I've modified my hives. I use eight -frame hives, and I've put two inches of foam insulation on all the sides, and then I've... covered that over, that insulation over with quarter inch plywood. So it makes the hive a little bulkier
than it would have without the insulation. But I live in a cold climate and the bees, they don't even go into a tight cluster in the winter inside that hive because there it stays warm enough in there. That's one way to do it is to just add the blue foam insulation that is used in house construction on the outside walls, put on an inch or two inches of it and then cover it with wood so it's protected. What about ventilation?
Do we seal that thing up pretty tight or do they need ventilation on the bottom and the top both? This has been a controversy on this show. I've had people on talk about really different theories on this. My answer is going to again come. Eric from the bees. The bees tell me they don't want a top entrance because they go out of their way to seal up as everybody beekeeper in the northern cold climates knows. They seal up all those cracks on the with the inner cover and the outer cover.
They don't they don't want a top entrance. And I'll tell you and I learned why they don't. It's because in the winter, at least in a cold climate setting where they can't go outside to get water. They rely on some condensation inside the hive for their winter water need. And I know that because in my office at Cornell, I keep an observation hive. And I like to keep it year round, keep
the colony in there year round. And what I've learned in watching in the winter, because this hive is in a heated room, there's no condensation inside that hive. And those bees get wicked thirsty. And I know that because they, until I got smart enough to realize that I wasn't giving them kind of that they're having a problem. They would go out on the first any warm day in the winter, sunny day. And then when there was snow melting, they'd go out on the dry, the black asphalt and
drink, drink, drink water. Then the most vigorous waggle dances I've ever seen, ever, ever seen were performed by winter water collectors. They were so thirsty and they really wanted to get make sure everybody got the word that the water was available. I guess that's a long answer. I respect the bees. They don't want it. They don't want air leaking out the top of their hive. They seal the top of their hive. If you can let them have some water, don't worry about the condensation.
They want the condensation is useful to the bees, at least in cold climates. That's their winter water source. So we want some. We don't want so much that it's dripping on them. Well, the cluster where it's where the bees are and the cluster is, there's enough warmth that there's not condensation right above the cluster. So it's not dripping on the bees. And if it drips on the combs around the bees, no big deal. That makes the water that they need for the winter
more accessible. Because you have to always keep in mind, what are these poor bees eating all winter? They're eating an 84%, 82 % sugar solution. There's almost no water in honey. And they need water, just as we need water. And so some condensation inside a hive may not look very homey or comfortable. or appealing to a human being, but at least in the cold climates where I live, it's very important to the bees. As I say, it's their winter water
source. I saw that when I intentionally did an experiment where I deprived them of that and how desperate they got for water when they didn't have it in their hive. You mentioned dissecting trees or trees with bees in them. How do you do that? Do you just cut it down and chop it open or what? This is sort of one of the dark sides of my research program. Early on in my studies of investigating how bees live in nature, a key early step was to go out, find bee trees,
cut them down. And here it really gets nasty. I would put cyanide gas in the tree, go up to the tree early in the morning before it was going to be cut down. I put in this material called cyanogas in there. and stuff a rag in the entrance. And I couldn't cut the tree down and collect it and do all that with the bees angry at me.
So I'd come back later in a few hours, come with a chainsaw, cut it down, figure out what section of the tree actually was housing the bees, cut that out of the big tree, bring it back to the lab, split it open, and dissect the nest. And it was very revealing. That's how I learned that in nature, bees devote about 15 % of their comb area. to drone call. It also became clear how important propolis is. Every surface inside those tree cavity nests has a thick coating of propolis.
They very carefully make little passageways. They build their combs wall to wall inside that cavity, unlike in a hive, but they make little galleries, little openings on the ends where the combs hit the walls. They leave openings so they can get around from one side of the comb to the next side. And the entrance is usually at the bottom of the cavity so that the heat isn't going out the top. Please don't feel guilty. for having to do that. You called it the dark
side and things like that. And science needs to do that sometimes or dissect an animal or something. If I wanted to see what the nests were, I had to get the tree down. And if I got the tree down, there's going to be a bajillion, I mean, well, there's going to be thousands of stinging insects. And I just, I couldn't do those. Yeah, that wouldn't have worked. And I wanted to know what the intact colony was. I wanted
to know. how many workers there were, how many drones there were, that sort of thing, how much brood there was. That was a limited scientific thing. The rest of us aren't going to go out and do that kind of thing. We don't need to. We can learn from your science and appreciate it. I know you are specifically, what's the term
I'm looking for? Your focus has been more the behavior of bees, but as far as the physical aspect, Do you have any advice for us on Varroa control and maybe relating it to how bees do it in a natural environment versus in our apiary would give us some direction? Yeah, this is a really tricky topic, Eric, because I'll tell you what I do, but it's not going to work for
most people. I guess about, I can't remember how many years ago, I just went cold turkey and I stopped treating and most of the colonies died off, but the ones that didn't. I made splits from those. Since then, I've not needed to treat for Varroa. I was inspired by this by a beekeeper up in Vermont, Kirk Webster, who's a commercial beekeeper. He runs several hundred colonies, and he did the same thing, but long before I
did. There are colonies that are resistant to Varroa, and what they do, the workers in these colonies, they rip apart the Varroa. If they get a Varroa, they'll pull the legs off, they'll crush the body, and they throw them out. So that resistance does exist out there in nature. And so if you're a small scale beekeeper and you can buy a queen from Kirk Webster, he does sell them. Then that's, that's one room. If you can't do that, then I think, I think you just, you
have to treat your colonies. And it's true that for a lot of beekeepers, that's just not going to be reasonable. And I know of some beekeepers that have said, Hey, I'm going to do that. and they had 10 colonies and all 10 died and spread viroa everywhere else around them too. So that isn't an answer for everybody in ideal situations. I think it's fantastic. Most of us have to treat
in some way. Yeah and even if you're a non -treatment person you want to do some things like you ideally you don't put all your colonies right close together. So if one is collapsing the bees that are are drifting into your adjacent hives. Right, and the treatment -free beekeepers, it doesn't mean they don't do anything. They're doing something like the genetics that you're talking about. They're doing brood breaks. They're doing other things that can help those colonies along, just
maybe not chemically. That's it for part one of our discussion with Tom. Next week's episode will feature the conclusion of our discussion, where we get into a whole other set of topics, you're not going to believe how many, and even find out his favorite wild and crazy beekeeping story. Until then, remember to subscribe and follow this podcast. Also a shout out to V2B
Health for their support of the show. Vida's Varroa control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan extended release oxalic acid strips. Thanks guys, enjoy this beautiful summer, enjoy your bees. Thanks again for joining us on Bee Love Beekeeping presented by our good friends over at Man Lake. 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.