May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox release. If you have ever done a happy dance when your bees first emerged in spring, you might be a beekeeper. If you have a love -hate relationship with hay fever season, You might be a beekeeper. If you have ever seen the back of a bee from inside your veil, think about it now. You might be a beekeeper. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our good friends over at Man Lake.
Question for the day, how do you use your beekeeping skills to help others? In today's episode, we're going to have a discussion with two people that have found amazing ways to help underprivileged beekeepers in the Caribbean. But first, a brief update on the huge losses of honeybees here in North America. A while back, We had Chris Hyatt on the podcast discussing how 1 .1 million colonies had been lost this year. More recent polls have increased that figure to 1 .6 million colonies.
Research is still in progress to find the causes and we'll keep you posted as more info becomes available. Let's lighten the mood with a few fun facts about the honey bees that we so much love. Did you know? that honey bees beat their wings an incredible 11 ,400 times per minute, which creates their characteristic buzzing sound. And have you ever wondered if the bees know when you're afraid of them? Well, here's something
maybe you didn't know. Bees can sense the hormone released by scared humans and will attack if they feel their hive is threatened. Did you know that honey bees can recognize human faces? So hey be nice to those bees and hopefully they'll be nice to you. And did you know that Saint Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers and also of love? And we just dubbed him the patron saint of this podcast. I'd like to give a shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support of this
podcast. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. Now, let's have a chat with David and Beau. I'd like to welcome our two guests today. One of them you've met before, David Westerveld, but we have somebody a whole lot more fun than him today. And that is Beau Sturck. How are you, Beau? Good, good. I'm good to go. And David, did you disconnect after I just slammed on you right there? No,
I didn't hang up yet. But when I go back a long ways, we know how to answer each other's questions sometimes before they're even asked. Well, I can tell you guys tease each other. So I just thought I'd jump on both sides to get started today. But we're going to be talking about. Bees Beyond Borders. We'd love to talk about nonprofits from time to time on the show. Before we do that, Bo, tell us a little bit about you and your beekeeping
journey. It goes back quite a while. I've been doing bees for a little over 30 years now, and I started with a friend of mine. I made my living as an artist and had an artist friend in town here. I'm in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in North America, in North Florida, northeast corner. A friend came down with a multiple sclerosis, another artist, and she started needing therapy and found that she started using bees for apotherapy and it was working. At that time in Florida history,
we only had 400 beekeepers in the state. Right now we're around 6 ,500 plus, I think it is. And with that... 400, most of them were commercial and it was hard to get bees up in this area. So there was nobody, backyard beekeepers were pretty rare. So I just raised my hand and said, hey, I'll... I'm not afraid of insects. I had a large insect collection as a kid in high school. I collected coleoptera, beetles. I had a large beetle collection. So I loved insects. And so
I raised my hand. The next thing you know, I'm keeping bees for her, keeping a hive so she could go out and collect bees three times a week. She was doing them in her legs. As we know with apotherapy, the toxins release your body's cortisol, so you get that little cortisone boost. So she had mobility in her legs with the bee stings. And it worked for about three years before the disease caught up with her. But in the meantime, I'm keeping bees at her house. And like all beekeepers, we
start dividing the hives. And before you know it, you've got too many hives. And obviously, now I'm in the bee business and having to learn this crazy trade. and get addictive. And I've got one of those personalities that just keeps saying, well, wait a minute, what does that, what, wait, what, what does that mean? And researching it. And before you know it, I just keep going. Right about then, I started getting involved with the state API inspector that we had in Florida
here at the time. And he was doing some mission work through the state, actually. We had a program with our governor at that point was... aiding and giving, had a separate organization set up a nonprofit called Favica, which was basically a peace corps to the Caribbean. And if something goes on in the Caribbean, usually Florida is the first one being tropical, we're... we catch all the trade and problems and issues that go
down. So they started doing some missions down there and he dragged me along on a mission and said, you know, let's go and we're going to take on Barbados, I think was my first one. And we went down and work with beekeepers and then. A couple of years later, I came down to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and they'd gone down and inspected, found American fowl brood in the country, sent me down the following year, said, we found 100 hives. They all have American fowl brood.
You get to be the bad guy and go down and be the issue of the hammer and start burning colonies. So I volunteered, said, great. Flew down, got down there and couldn't find any bees. I started doing my presentation and told them what was gonna go down and they said, we don't have bees. What are you talking about? We don't have, they haven't been here now for over a year. Sure enough, all the colonies had collapsed. They couldn't grow any crops. I got to see crop failure firsthand.
You go in a restaurant and they'd have little gherkin pickles. You know, fingers, they're using a razor blade on a pickle. for cucumbers on your salad. The Grenadines had none in Bequia. They had no bees at all and they hadn't had them for a couple years because of the failure. And it was a real interesting eye -opener. So we were able to, at that point with that project, we were able to get bees from St. Lucia. We brought them in, we brought 20 hives over on a ferry
into into Grenadines Island of Bequia. We quarantined them there to make sure they were clean and slowly reintroduced bees back on the island. So it was a real learning experience on that end of it. Did you burn the old equipment first? Well, that was the key was everybody had to burn their equipment. Okay, everybody get rid of this old equipment and, you know, we can't use it and going through
the whole steps. And did they? No. We got it up to about 400 hives and then, you know, a couple of years later go by and all of a sudden we're having failure again. Well, what happened? You got rid of that equipment. No, we never did. Sure enough, all that equipment showed its ugly head again and it dropped it back down to under, yeah, maybe like 125 hives. And slowly by now, I was down a little two years ago and they did have most of that was gone. Most of it rotted
away or termites got it. So they've started over. They've got it up to around 500 colonies at this point that I could figure out. I mean, it's hard to get an estimate. There's so many backyard beekeepers down there and they really hide their hives, keep them remote. They are a little bit more defensive with some of that African genetics in it. They're afraid you're going to want to burn them or something. But is that where the idea of bees beyond borders came from? Yeah.
Yeah, it started with that. And so I was going down and then that organization that I was working with slowly was getting phased out with the new governors and the political scene in Florida. It changed and they had to close down. And so I just kind of launched it. I started working with Andrew Coté a little bit in programs with Bees Without Borders. And he wasn't really pushing.
He was pushing more African direction. And there are groups that are working in Africa a little bit more with Bees Abroad and Bees for Development. So I've never worked with those groups, but I have worked, you know, I know Nicole and I know the crews, but they're more African -based. They're based out of the UK. And being in the US here, I felt a real need to work really with the Caribbean and be a little bit closer here, like with that aid back and forth between the country's connections.
There's an old adage, you know, if the U .S. sneezes, they catch a cold. So the Caribbean's really susceptible to a lot of problems that come up. They actually, now it's going to catch the flu. A lot of programs in Haiti, which I'm real fascinated with, but now that's all off limits once again. Sure. Yeah, it's not safe to go into Haiti right now. No. David, tell us a little bit about the need. Well, the need is, you know, education is our main focus going down.
Not really trying to change the way they keep bees, but let's say for like in Haiti where they do a lot of log gums or other methods of keeping bees. So instead of us going down there trying to teach them, well, you need to run Langstroth Ives, we go down and see what they have, what materials, and we try to assist them. And first of all, teaching them what parasites are out there, what diseases, and what all we can help them with without changing their bee techniques.
And so we do the education. And with Bo and I both, we both have that background in agriculture. So we also assist them with other projects like in planning for bee forage and native bee forage and assisting them in learning what plants they need to have out there. And that's the biggest thing, especially in Haiti, where they can't afford to make or buy Langstroth equipment. So top bar or no frame equipment, you know, or minimal
frame equipment works best for them. And we've done a lot of education where you're teaching the farmers in some of the other islands where they're spraying haphazardous all the time, doesn't matter day or night, whatever, we're educating them also. And I mean, we do some outreach here in the U .S. with education, so we do a lot of education. All right, if you could come educate some of my neighbors here, that'd be great, too. You know, I had to do the education here in Florida
being regulatory before. Yeah, I mean, it took us a couple years to educate the general public, you know, the importance of honeybees. And we're seeing that right now in some of the Caribbean islands, where they're scared to death of bees because they're stinging insects. And here in Florida, at least, we're protected under the right to farm and the right the placement of
beehives. That's what we're working with right now, some of the Caribbean islands like Barbados, where they have no laws in protecting where they can put bees. So if the neighbor complains, they could be thrown out of their bee yard, even if it's their own property. So what's the main focus? What is the mission of the organization? Food security. I think it does involve beekeeping is we try to really get rural development and food security for everybody. And the said old
adage of eat local is the key to it all. Most of the islands throughout the Caribbean are basically importing honey at these extraordinary exorbitant prices. And they're getting it from all the wrong sources because they just need drums of honey. And of course, they're getting it in from who knows where. As we all know, we can't control what's in a drum of honey that comes in. We don't know if it's from Vietnam or Ukraine or China or Korea. We just really don't know these sources
anymore and what quality it is. honey, as we all know. Dave and I were also involved with American Bee Federation Education Program, and we're state delegates. So we're involved on all levels of it, trying to keep this economy of bees and honey and everything moving forward. So when you talk about food security, is it mostly honey or is it the fact that they desperately
need the pollinators too? They need the pollinators because most of the crops that they do grow, these farmers are root crops, so they are really looking at a lot of those cubiculates for pollination that they really need. Not as much the fruit, they're really the fruit trees and most of that they have other native pollinators that are out there. We're trying to always make them aware of all the other pollinators in the countries that we visit. But it's really trying to get
pollination and food security honey. Our part in Haiti is getting to even harvest honey. They're looking at the brood like a bare wood as protein. So they actually will take the pupas and the larva and they'll fry it up. So that's a whole different commodity right in itself. So it's really hard to get them to keep bees in a box and understand. you know, to keep your your parent colonies going and not be eating everything there.
Food is a real sick problem. Let me just take a minute here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. One of the things I love about Man Lake is their commitment to education because that commitment shows how much they want you to be successful at beekeeping. One great resource is their mobile app. You know, it's not just
for shopping. It's packed full of all kinds of helpful information, including videos, articles, plus a plant identification feature designed to help beekeepers identify and plant bee healthy plants for their area. It's free, so download the Man Lake app today. And speaking of shopping, don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes for $10 off your first $100 purchase. Now back to the guest. I've worked in all areas of Haiti like Dave has. We've both
worked in different directions. But you get out in the mountains there and still to this day, labor, you're lucky you make a dollar and a half a day for an eight to 10 hour day. Port -au -Prince labor is up since the earthquake there. It's up to around $6 for a 12 -hour day in the sweatshops. So it's a real tough life to grind out. And if you can have something on the side, try to get your food crops up a little bit and have that
honey as an income source. And then they end up with a little bit of wax, hopefully, that they can turn into some cosmetics. We try to teach a little bit of that also. It's amazing the value of honey on almost all the Caribbean islands. 20 years ago, their honey prices were still somewhere around $10 to $15, somewhere around a four ounce bottle. So it takes you about four four ounce bottles to make a pound. And they are still getting anywhere from $25 to $30
a pound for their honey. when they're selling it throughout in Haiti the same way. And some islands even more than that. I mean, it's crazy the numbers that you hear. If you had a dozen hives down there, you could actually make a living. You could fly back and forth and still come out ahead. I mean, it's just nuts. That is crazy. What's your next big project? Do you have something coming up? I do. Right now, I've got one going on. We're going to start one down in Turks and
Caicos. Turks and Caicos lost their bees 30 years ago in a hurricane, and they haven't had any back. We were able to find some bees in the Bahamas. Eight or 10 years back, Ted Dennard from Savannah Bee had taken bees down to Exuma in the southern Bahamas. They've come out pretty clean so far. Jennifer Berry was working on that program. They seem to be pretty mite -free from what we've been able to find out. I'm going to go down here
in this next week. We've got a beekeeper down there that's going to sell us four boxes of bees, and we're going to put them on a private plane, fly them into Turks and Caicos. We've got permission from the chief veterinary officer there to bring them into the country. So we're working with the Bahama government agency for making sure we are allowed to export them and at the same time allowed to bring them into Turks and Caicos. So we're going to do that here in the next month.
and then we have a program Dave and I are going to be doing some teaching up in Arkansas outside of Little Rock. So things like buying bees and flying them to an island someplace sounds pretty expensive. I assume that's where the 501c3 comes in. How do you get donations? How do people donate and what are they used for specifically? Well, we're not getting paid. Dave and I are both strictly volunteers on this whole operation, as we've been doing. But we use it for exactly these kind
of programs. I've got a private donor that said he would put up money for this program. He lives in Turks, and he's a new farmer down there. He has a plot of land and has enough cash on the side that he says, let's go do it. I'll put up the money for it. And so we got his security. The foundation gets money coming in periodically from different sources. I can't say it's anyone in particular, but a lot of private foundations. Grants have gotten really hard to come by anymore,
especially now with the cutbacks. We were starting to work on a new program down in Jamaica. I started one down there in a couple locations, but that grant just fell through. It's gotten so hard. There's so much competition in foundations. funding, especially out of country. So we're just going to take the money and go forward with it. We have a site, a link on our website on the beesbeyondborders .com site that there is a donation location on there and a QR code, I believe still on there
that we can work with. So we get donations that come in and we just kind of put it toward, you know, the programs and move forward. for either for our travel trips or we never work 100 % with a program. Dave and I have gotten stuck with that already or we've gotten pulled into a country and all of a sudden the program wasn't there that they talked about it. So we always have to make them put up, they've got to put up something
to meet in the program to get us enticed. So we try to do a 50 -50 if we can with programs that they've got to have some skin in the game. for us to come in and do the program because it can be real pricing and it's just the logistics and everything are just crazy. Talking about Haiti is you have to have a driver. You just can't drive down there. You need a car and a driver and the costs are just crazy when you start getting into the rentals in these third
world countries like that. Port -au -Prince has no stop signs. There's no stop lights. It's just chaos. You get on the main highway. That's a four lane highway and it has an intersection. And it literally, there's no light. And it's just like the cars, you're just going through this and it vibrates. And all of a sudden you're through it. And you just go, how did I get through a fourth lane, across a four lane highway and
make it? You may have somebody standing in the middle that looks like a police officer directing traffic, but no one follows him. No, no. That's the thing. It's chaos. Or it's just a regular citizen that was trying to cross the street and got stuck. You just can't ever get to the other side until midnight or something. Hey, give us an idea. What has been one of your favorite projects?
Where was it? How did it go? Haiti, actually, I've done a couple programs down there for over the years, quite a few, and I was working in a real remote area up in the mountains and came across a character that had six logs on the ground and had no beekeeping experience. It was taught to him by his grandfather, had never seen a smoker before. No clue. We worked it through that I was able to show him how to build some top bar
hives. He was two and a half hours off road, off the grid, completely up in the mountain. The four -wheel drive couldn't go and we'd walk a half hour from there back into the village. And we were able to get some moped to bring us in some sheets of plywood. And we cut it up with a handsaw, taught them how to do top bar hive with it. I've designed a hive, you get four of them out of a sheet of plywood, top bar hive. And then just get a thick plank of wood and we
just cut our top bars with that. So we had minimal amount of equipment put into it. And after a year, he was up to about 25. And when he got 25 of these colonies going, he was able to get enough money to afford a moped. And the moped got him into school, and then he got it up to 50. And now he was able to go to college, and
he became an agronomist in four years. So all of a sudden it went from having just logs that he had no clue as to what it was to becoming now an agricultural officer in that region of Haiti in the mountains. And he was able to get other people involved to start packaging honey. And before you know, they were able to make a drum of honey and sell it to a candy company in Port -au -Prince. I don't mean to overdo what you're doing or... Throw hyperbole on it, but
you guys are humble about it that story. You just told me Bo Your help has affected generations Hopefully that's not just one person getting a meal tonight. That's long -term Generational help and that is spectacular. Yeah, I know it's it's it's really humbling when you go in and You know after I got the hive then then it became down to okay. No, I've got a guy I've got top bar hive here built take a log and now I've got to stick my arms in this log and pull out the
frames and transfer it. How do you transfer a log, hive into any other equipment? I mean, it was just crazy. Well, especially a guy that wears no protective gear. Yeah, exactly. It was pretty humbling to take a machete and kind of pull these crumbs of froth. frames comb out, and you don't have rubber bands. So I took an old bed sheet and I made little hammocks out of bedsheets and tied them to the top bar. And when you're working in a place like that, where do you stay? It's
pretty, it's pretty remote. I try to get to a hotel. I mean, if you can, that's been kind of my goal anymore. Getting older as I am, I'm in my mid 70s, early 70s there. I just have to have, I need hot water and no bugs. No bedbugs and hot water is what I tell them. And I'm good to go. I've stayed in tin sheds. I mean, you name it, you're just in really remote. In fact, the first time I was down there, the first night,
they put me in a metal building. We shared a light bulb with the people on the other side of the wall, even. And I had a cot in a bucket. And about three in the morning, somebody opens the door, comes walking in, the guy says, My neighbor, I have no idea who it is. Some guys walking in the room and he says, my roommate's snoring. Can I sleep in this other cot at three in the morning? And he's going to wake up and
go, okay. No idea to wake up in the morning to see some guys sitting there combing his hair. It's just the baffling. You never know what you're going to get. And they come in there carrying roosters in there and under their arm. And that's going to be your breakfast. You're just like, what? Okay, here we go. That sounds like a real
adventure. I want to go with you sometime. Hey, David, in some of these remote places, Bo mentioned American Falbrood in another country than that, but do you see the same kind of problems in those countries that you see here? Yeah, American Falbrood isn't as widespread down in the islands, but they're starting to get more Varroa and even small high beetles are starting to get into there.
And most of the islands we deal with, like Haiti, they have agricultural persons down there, like the agronomists that Beau was talking about. They have, like, extension officers. But most of them, if they have any education, they get out of there, come either to the states or to other islands. So it's amazing when we get the lake. We were actually in Haiti. I remember there was an extension agent there that had about 50
hives of bees. And after myself and another person had gone through the bees, we found Varroa mites and we showed him the Varroa mites. He was an extension agent for Haiti, and he was so amazed he had decided he could spend enough time to pull the Varroa mites out of the hive. And we were like, no, you're better to figure out a treatment or, you know, try some different products and get rid of them. But he felt that his time value of the time was low enough that he could
do it by hand and get them out. But then we got the same person we were looking at, and you talk about people they have very little to do with. We looked at his feet, and he had a pair of shoes on, it looked like. But when we really looked at him... He had the top part of the shoes, the soles were totally gone, and he was still, because he wanted to impress us that he had shoes, he was walking around with nothing but the top of
the shoe on. And walking over these, we called them cow horn cacti that they use for fencing, because they've got these big hard cactuses. Those things could pierce through my boots that I wore. And to watch him walk barefoot, well, sort of barefoot over him was amazing to us. And the other, I was going to tell a story from being in the little town of Plaisance, which is in the southeast side of Haiti, sort of middle
part. You're just in the mountain area. We had an educational program we were doing one morning. And we asked the people how far was the furthest distance anybody had come for this training. And we had, I think it was 27 people in the training. One guy had walked 21 miles to get there and actually had started two days before. He'd started in the afternoon, walked during the night to get there and walked two nights to get to that.
So and then stayed. And that was the first meal when we had we buy like Bo was saying we purchase a lot of stuff. So normally the meals are something that we pay for. And that was the first meal he had had in three days. And so it was an honor to give him a smoking tool and a big lighter. It was really funny because he'd never owned or never seen a lighter before. And so, you know. He'd always made fire with either sticks or or had it always going. So yeah, the simple things
in life. I had a guy one time walking four hours each day, each each morning for four days in a row. He walked four to five hours in the morning and at night going home in the mountains. And there's this, you know, it's just all gravel pass up through the mountains. It's not flat land at all. It's pretty rough. So I've made you got rice and beans and peas before he left.
Yeah. That economic situation that brings up a really hard question and that is if you're educating somebody and you're working with them with their bees and for example They have you know, they're overrun with Varroa. I Have a feeling they can't afford to go out and buy some kind of treatment even if it was in the country What do you do? How do you help them in those kind of situations? You teach them methods that they
can do like breaking brood cycles. The biggest thing down in Haiti and most of the Caribbean and islands is they have temperatures pretty much 75 to 90, 95 degrees year round. So they don't go off of seasonal brood breaks. So you end up having the nectar flows. So if you have a dearth, your brood will break. So we also try to teach them to split or, you know, separate the queen out. So you do a queenless split and
allow that brood to break. And then they can do methods of powdered sugar is one, even though they can't afford the powdered sugar. It was so amazing to us. We taught them powdered sugar. They collect the powdered sugar, sift the mites back out of them, or they'd pour it into, you know, let it sift down into water. And then take the water and let it dehydrate to get the powdered sugar, the sugar crystals back out. And it was
amazing to watch them do that. I mean, like Beau said, in Haiti, it's not unusual for it to be less than a dollar a day for income. And so what they can save on, we've had some that try to use botanicals. They have a couple different plants down there. that it seems that if you use the leaves that cause the bees to actually start grooming and removing the mite. So, you know, combination of brood splitting and doing
that can assist. We're trying to get a little bit more research to have them do down there. Also, I mean, here in the States, we always claim that, you know, bees live 40 days down there. They're flying a little bit more. And the bees seem to be a little bit smaller. We believe we're kind of come to the conclusion that the bees gestation period is a little bit quicker. So they don't have quite as much of a mite problem just having that quicker gestation turnaround.
And the bees just don't live as long because they're flying so much more. But we're doing seeing more and more climate change is really taking some little bit of an effect we're seeing. We they've mentioned seasons down there. We're starting to see more of a just a wet season or dry season. We're not seeing these ebb and flows like we used to dry, wet, dry, wet. And so they're really getting to be it's getting harder and harder for them to get a crop of honey in these
dirt seasons. Right now we're just in Barbados here. a couple weeks ago, Dave and I, and it's really in a dirt season again. And it should be more rain should have started or not. So it's really a tough, tough time for everybody. One of our biggest programs, it wasn't our biggest program, but probably the most beneficial one was probably when we did Dominica where, you know, we had them down there. They were making about three pounds of honey per hive per year.
And after Bo and I had spent two trips down there, they were actually up to about 30, 35 pounds of honey. And all of that was actually technique. We taught them not to take the honey right as soon as it was being capped to allow them to store the surplus and then pull that little bit off out of the honey super. It really made a difference, but then they got hit by a humongous hurricane and wiped out about 98 % of their bees. So they're just starting to come back. All right.
Let's end on a fun note here. Bo, you look like someone, and with all your traveling, I bet you've had many multiple wild and crazy beekeeping stories.
uh... man which one do you want which what which direction do you want to go crazy or just are funny let's start with funny and go crazy after that funny funny i had a good one done in indiana uh... it was my first real encounter with african icebees and they dragged us around the island and uh... all of a sudden they got everybody decided this little tour group of ours and about uh... dozen people and they all wanted to go up and look inside of a hive In Guyana, they
take, everybody's ever worked with African bees, they'll actually take 55 -gallon drums and light them on fire around the outsides of the apiaries, the big fields, and they will literally fog the entire basin fields in smoke. Besides having somebody, it's a full -time job for one person to run a smoker, and their smokers are not like ours. They're three times the size. They literally, they look like a two -gallon... two to three gallon cans with a big bellow on it. And their
job is to smoke. And they started smoking it and I said, there's too many people, I'm out of here. I just knew the CO2 coming off their breath was gonna set them off. And sure enough, I got about 100 yards away, if not a little bit more, 120. 120 yards away from it. And man, I could hear the dogs starting to bellow and a goat yelling. And I knew that hell was breaking loose down on the field. And sure enough, out of the thickets comes Jerry Hayes. Everybody
knows Jerry. Yeah, I know Jerry. He comes out of there and pushes, and I said, this ain't looking good. He says, no. And I says, well, I'll tell you what, Jerry. He says, I'm not going to have a job if this starts happening. At that point, he was our chief vaper here in Florida. And he says, I'm going to be out of a job if this happens in Florida. And with that, I said, well, I'm going to have the distributor ship for EpiPens. And he said, man, that's a good idea. You take
the East Coast, and I'll take the West. And man, with that, a guy come running. They had a t -shirt over a guy's head. And he come out of there, Ben, he was so stung up, they ran him to the hospital the next day. His eyes were swollen shut and his lips were as big as cucumbers. I mean, it was crazy to see that environment, how fast African bees can go off on people. And they just yelled, everybody back in the bus, go. They
will track you down. And they have a memory as African bees will remember up to three days later, you can't get near it. And when one colony goes off, it's the one next to it goes off and the next one next to it goes off. So when they all go, it's craziness. Do you think that's because of the pheromone released when stinging is going on? Yeah, absolutely. Or do you think they see the behavior of another hive and react on that?
It's the pheromones in the air. Yeah. The funny part of that was that we had amongst the people there was David Dijon, the African beef genesis from Brazil, and he was with us. And he says that even down in Brazil when they get like that, they'll actually wear a plastic shield in front of their face under their veil. They have a plastic shield because the bees are actually releasing venom in the air and it vaporizes and it'll close your eyes up when it gets really thick. I have
not heard of that. That is, wow. Yes. Okay. Hey, Dave, you also mentioned that wherever Bo goes, swarms go. What do you mean by that? It seems like throughout the travels that we've had, it never fails wherever we're at. I mean, we were driving through, I think it was a Lutheran. All of a sudden, there was a swarm of bees going through the edge of a town. As we drove through the swarm, we had to stop the van we were in and get out and we caught the bees in a box.
And it was so funny because we had to go, Bo went and found a box and we put the bees in the box and everybody was just amazed because I mean, as you know, with the swarm, I don't even think did we have a smoker that day? I just remember. No, no, no. We caught these bees and put them in the back of the van in a cardboard box and everybody was just amazed because that actually
made the news. It had me in a bright yellow shirt that I was wearing and Bo and us just picked up the bees and it was kind of funny because Chikara, who was with us, she's like, wherever y 'all go, bees just coming. That's happened in Arkansas. It's happened in Barbados. It's happened in Freeport, Bahama. Freeport, yeah. Yeah, we were getting a swarm out of the bushes. I was teaching them how to do a removal. They are all, of course, suited up in their white
jumpsuits, and we're coming in. Next thing you know, the news crew shows up. As the news crew shows up, they go, where's the body? They thought we were the coroners going into the bushes looking for a dead body. No, we're just beekeepers. No bodies here except bees. We're trying to get a plug for the beekeeping association. Hey, you two are awesome. I appreciate you being with me today. It's beesbeyondborders .com. Any last
words? Enjoy beekeeping. I think that's always the main thing is find your passion and whatever you like to do with bees and learn. The more you learn, the better off we all become as beekeepers and ambassadors for this wonderful little insect. It's like we talk about here. It's all about the love of bees. David? That's for sure. Well, one thing we do like is training the trainers.
And you know, when we go down to the islands or even into any of the states that we go to, we try to train people so that they can follow through with what we love to do, which is loving bees. Yeah. Now we're getting, we're getting older and we like to train trainers. That's our big goal is we can't do it all. I'm ready to support you and get down there and join you sometime. Thanks again guys. Love having you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Eric. Have a
good one. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Another great place for more information on everything related to this podcast is in our email newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at BeLoveBeekeeping .com And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.