May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox review. If you have ever considered sewing little tiny uniforms for your scout bees, you might be a beekeeper. that a bee vacuum is really too big for bees to use to clean the floors in their hive. You might be a beekeeper. If you have ever said, it'll feel good to get stung for the first time this spring, and you weren't being sarcastic, you might be a beekeeper. You might also be nuts.
Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Our question of the day is this, have you ever created something for your own beekeeping or maybe modified equipment to better fit your needs? Lots of beekeepers do. Today our guest is Dan Long and we'll find out how his creativity and his 3D printer created something better and more useful for his queen rearing
operation. But first, While scientists are still working hard to figure out the cause of the great bee die -off here in the states, another theory comes in from some new studies about microplastics. Recent studies have shown that tiny pieces of plastic, which may originate from everyday products such as food packaging, disposable cutlery, or plastic toys, anything out there that's plastic can make bees more susceptible to bacteria and
viruses. When, say, a plastic water bottle ends up in a ditch or in a river, it disintegrates with the help of the sun, water, and wind into even smaller pieces which float into the air, seep into soils, and settle on vegetation. Other microplastics are made minuscule from the start, such as glitter or microbeads and body scrubs. They make it washed off from our skin into wastewater,
which is then used for irrigation of crops. Bees can accumulate microplastics from many sources, like air, water, soil, and also flowers, said David Baracci, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Florence in Italy. In 2021, a study conducted in Denmark detected 13 types of microplastics on honey bees' bodies. Since then, other studies have confirmed that bees are often covered in tiny plastics, which stick to their wings, their
heads, and their abdomens. Bees can swallow microplastics with nectar, too, so that they accumulate in their guts. The consequences may be serious. A 2024 study by Baracci and his colleagues found that certain microplastics mixed together may kill bees. In other studies, honey bees fed microplastics developed worse infections with a pathogen that's been linked with colony collapse. Microplastics can also reach honeybee brains and may affect
their thinking and memory. Microplastic -laden bees can also mean microplastic -laden honey. Oh man. When Turkish scientists tested samples of honey, they discovered that a vast majority contained microplastics, with single flower honeys the most affected. In Germany, commercial honey contained almost 300 pieces of microplastics per pound, or about five pieces in each teaspoonful.
In short, research shows microplastics can enter bees' guts and brains, damaging memory, weakening immune responses, and increasing death rates. Folks, let's get this thing figured out. Alright, on a lighter note, let's have some fun. Let's head to the southeastern United States for our discussion today with beekeeper Dan Long. Hey, Dan, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me on. Good. And we're going all the way out to Athens, Georgia, home of the famous Georgia
Bulldogs. And you're their number one fan, aren't you? I'm sorry. I set you in a trap for that one. Well, I've been down here for 15 years now, and I've learned that that is the equivalent of sun. You just got here. So I'm a Northerner in Georgia. Sounds like where I live I have people down the street from me in their 90s that have lived here their entire life and Their parents were here their entire life and we've been here 10 or 12 years. We will always be the newbies
and Yep. Oh, well, that's life. Hey, we're gonna be talking about all kinds of fun stuff today Queen rearing we're gonna talk about your crazy mad professor Isms that you have developed which is awesome and a lot of beekeepers have a new product that you've developed and how and why and But first if you wouldn't mind, can you give us a very brief? What got you started in beekeeping? How many hives do you run? Give us an idea of
who Dan is. Sure. Well, I started beekeeping officially in 1996, but I wasn't really serious about it until I moved to Georgia again about about 15 years ago. And it was essentially born out of the idea of homesteading. You know, we have a big vegetable garden. We have some fruit trees that have chickens, that kind of thing. And I thought, well, you know, I need a couple of hives and. I found I absolutely loved it. It is challenging, frustrating, hot, sweaty,
hard lifting, getting stung. But when you get the hang of it, it's absolutely wonderful. You have really hot summers out there, don't you? We do. It gets pretty brutal here in the summertime. So what's it like? quote overwintering, since you don't have a real winter, but you certainly have a downtime. Do you do your bees run through
a long dearth during the winter? Actually, we get a pretty short nectar flow followed by a long summer dearth, and then it stays warm enough that the queens often don't shut down entirely. But we hit brood minimum, you know, right around the just before the winter solstice. which is obviously a great time to treat with oxalic acid. Yeah. We haven't talked much about queen rearing on this show yet. That's something that you have
some experience with. If somebody has never done it before, can you give us a little background? And I know you're not like a professor, but from your experience, what kind of method do you like to use? How does it work? Give us a little tutorial. Sure. Well, what's really cool about it is that the beekeeper can work with the bees own instinctive responses to being queenless in order to generate new queens in various ways. Basically, when she's gone, they know it right away and they can start
to raise their own replacement queens. And if you do that under the right conditions, you can use a colony or you can set up a particular box. to create high quality queens at larger numbers than they would normally do. It wouldn't be a unreasonable thing for a backyard beekeeper to produce 30 queens at a time. I guess I've tried different techniques before. I tend to fall back on the cloak board method. Harry Cloak, I believe
out of New Zealand, developed this. And it's essentially an opening and closing double screen board technique. where you create, the hive is called a starter finisher at that point, and you create a queen -less condition in the upper box of a double deep. You can use an 8 frame or a 10 frame. You create a queen -less condition with a lot of young bees up top. You feed them very well, and then you graft, and then sort
of graft frame into that top box. and they go to town on it, and you leave it there for usually 24, sometimes 48 hours. Then you reintegrate the lower box by opening up the door, in essence, and it becomes just queen excluder there. So it becomes queen right, which tends to finish better. And then after a few days, they've capped those off. You can pull them out to an incubator. You can protect them with cages in the finisher if you want. There are different techniques used
from there to finish. You use some terms that some people haven't heard of yet. And by the way, we have on this podcast, we have listeners that are commercial beekeepers that know a hundred times more than I ever will. We also have beginners. So give us an idea what the heck is grafting and a couple of the other terms you used. Sure, right. Yeah, grafting. is basically transferring larvae from a frame that you've chosen. And they have to be very young larvae, just one day hatched,
basically. You want them, if you're looking visually, you can see how larvae are. They're C -shaped when they develop. You want to get them when they are comma -shaped, not even a C -shape yet. So very, very young, recently hatched larvae. And you carefully scoop them out of the cell.
and you put them into a cell that you choose that is on a bar that then faces vertically downward like a queen cell, they will under those conditions I mentioned before about good nutrition and being queenless, they will create a queen cell from that and you can put whole bars of 15, 30, 45 at a time depending on the strength of your starter. the strength is determined by how many nurse bees you can pack in. So that's grafting. Double
screen board, I mentioned that. It's important in this starter -finisher box that if you're going to have a queen in it, in the lower box, they can't communicate pheromones to the upper box. So in the case of the cloak board, there's actually a slide that acts as a door that closes the upper box from the lower box so that Pheromone is no longer being transmitted back and forth. They believe they're queenless upstairs and they
will then generate queen cells. You don't want to provide them with any brood of their own to do that. You want the larvae that you have chosen only. Not only because you're looking for your favorite queen, your favorite hive, the genetics you're after, various other selected traits, but you want them to focus only on the larvae that you have put in there for that. If you leave other open larvae in the upper box, they'll continue
to feed them. And you want those nurse bees, those worker bees, to do nothing but focus on your grafts. And how are they going to be doing that? What exactly are they going to do to your grafts? They are going to feed the heck out of
them with royal jelly. and they're going to pack those cells full of royal jelly hopefully more than the larvae will ever possibly consume and they're going to make a big beefy happy virgin queen for you all right any secrets after that you've got these virgin queens what are you doing next well if you once you open that slide door back up again you want to finish off those cells for a few days until they're capped now there's some Conditions that can occur in there, cold
nights, sometimes workers will tear cells back down again, sometimes you can get a rogue queen flying into the upper box. There are any number of things that can put those cells at risk. So what I like to do after they're capped, all they need is warmth and humidity. I like to pull them out and put them into an incubator. I prefer 93 Fahrenheit. Some people go a little warmer, some people go a little cooler. And the choice
of incubator is up to you. It depends on how many you have, whether you need portability. Some commercial guys have giant ones that look like the size of a refrigerator. Some people use chicken egg incubators, for example, or reptile egg incubators. Anything will work as long as it holds a steady temperature. And then these queens hatch. And then what are you doing with them so they go out and get mated? Right. So once they emerge, Sorry, emerge, not hatch. Thank
you for correcting me on that one. I didn't mean to use the wrong term there. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Eggs hatch, virgins emerge. Yeah. So the virgins will emerge. I like to emerge them and look at them. Now you talk to the commercial guys and they're like, no, that's a lot of extra work. We don't have time for that. And they're right. Time is money. In my case, what I really like to do, I like to emerge those virgins. I
like to get a good look at them. make sure they've got all six legs, all their wings are looking good, they're big fat healthy girls, and cull the ones that don't meet the standard. 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. So once I've got those virgins, I can put them into mating
nukes. And a mating nuke is just a nucleus colony that you've got set aside. that you rotate virgins in and mated queens out. Mating nucs are on a commercial scale or teeny tiny little styrofoam things, but it can be a full -size colony if you really want it to. What I prefer is a five frame nuc box with a gallon and a half feeder in place. So I've really got a three frame box, but I can put some feed in there when needed. I like working with the deep frames. I like a
bigger mating nuc than normal. It is a little harder to find the queen, but you've got a little buffer here and there on the timing on pulling those queens back out again once they're mated. I find it's a little more comfortable to use three deep frames. How do you know when those queens have successfully mated? Oh, well, you definitely check back on them after a while. It takes them a little time to mature. Then they go on mating flights and then they come back.
What I like is to see a really good pattern of brood. You need to make sure they're not drone layers. You need to make sure they've come back from their mating flight. Sometimes they don't make it home. They get pecked off by a bird or something. And I like to see a good pattern develop. I believe the science has shown that the queen will be healthier if she's got a three -week cycle between installing and pulling or catching.
That there is some maturation. You can see that she's a good queen after a couple of weeks, but waiting a little bit longer. she'll mature a little bit more. So it takes a little bit longer. Again, time is money. And the commercial beekeepers are like, no, we don't have time for that. We see that she's a good queen. We can we can send her on. I'm not on such a tight schedule. So I like a three week schedule. All right. I like
it. I called you earlier mad scientist. That was a loving term, not a discriminatory kind of thing. OK, let's explain why now, because like a lot of beekeepers, you found, oh, here's something I like, but I can make it better. Go for it. Tell us what you've created. Right, right. Well, a lot of us, you know, beekeepers were tinkerers in a lot of different ways. We were either building boxes or making gizmos and gadgets. And I'm a big fan of the JZBZ Queen Cell Cup.
That's for grafting. That's the larval transfer we talked about. But JZBZ does not manufacture a corresponding cage. So I had to rig up this and that and use other manufacturers' components to properly cage those cells to emerge the virgins safely to protect them from each other. Because as you know, but maybe some of the audience don't know, when those virgins emerge, if they're out there running around with each other, they're
going to fight each other to the death. So I want to protect them from each other and from being torn down in the finish or all that So I fiddled with this and that and the other thing, you know duct tape and wire mesh and what we call roller cages and a few other ideas and then I learned how to 3d print and Then I learned how to design 3d models for 3d printing and Developed over time and with help and input from other beekeepers a cage that works very well for the
JZBZ Queen Cell Cup and goes on the bar and since then I've developed an entire line of accessories to help make your beekeeping, help make your queen rearing easier. And I named it EZPZ. You can keep going. Well, I think you can tell us more about it. I'm looking at your website right now, and that'll be in the show notes, by the way, so everybody can look it up. I know these aren't in mass production yet. In other words, a lot of the suppliers are not going to have
these. They're going to have to go to your website if they want to take a look at them because they're individually 3D printed at this point. But yeah, I'm scrolling through. This stuff looks pretty cool. Tell us about some of the things you have. Sure. Well, it all started with the cage and the original idea of protecting the virgin when she emerged. But then I realized, well, now that
same cage could be used for introduction. So I developed a candy cap that you take the JZBZ cell cup out and plug it with the candy cap so that it can be used either for releasing the virgin slowly, which isn't normally necessary, or for releasing a mated queen slowly. can also be used for transport. Then I got a different kind of incubator and realized that a tray to hold these cages would be really handy. And so there's a tray that goes with it as well now.
And then I designed and built a bracket device that holds the JZBZ cell bars and a little grafting stand, you know, You can buy a really, really fancy grafting stand or grafting station as they're called, but all you really need is something that'll hold your frame for grafting. You just prop it up just nicely, and it doesn't have to be all that fancy to work right. So those are the main products, and more and more things have
kind of spawned from that. I don't know if you know about the yellow -legged hornet down here. We've talked about it on the show. Yeah, it's pretty scary. It's coming over from Europe, originally from Asia. Tell us how much of it's going on there. Well, it's confined so far to the coastal area of Georgia and South Carolina down near Savannah. What I did was I developed an easy little track device that works with mason jars and donated a bunch of them to beekeepers down
in the Savannah area. In order to help them monitor it was a it's a monitoring device. I suppose that you could spin it out for a full effective not eradication, but reduction of The population of the actual insect I just wanted some kind of a zapper right one of those yellow -legged Hornets gets around one of my colonies. I just want to zap it Can you develop that for me? If only it could be that selective, that would be pretty awesome. And that simple, nothing is.
A couple of the other things that I've developed with the input from other beekeepers, oftentimes existing customers will say, well, you know, I'd really like to do this. Once those queens are mated, a lot of folks like to bank them in either a queenless upper or a queenless hive entirely. And so I developed the banker that goes on a frame, either a Langstroth deep or a Langstroth medium that will hold a number of
the easy peasy cages. And then just recently, this is a really fun thing, just recently I was contacted by a guy in Florida who's really good
at cutting queen cells off of foundation. And he said, I really want to try to figure out a way to make your cage work so that I can... do more, you know, when I've got five really nice looking cells on a frame, in order to really get the most out of that, instead of just putting that whole frame into a queen -less nuke, I want to be able to make five queen -less nukes out
of that instead. And so I developed a cage that you put the, you harvest the queen cell off of the foundation, and you put it in the cage and it closes over clamshell fashion. and you can emerge the virgin safely in that cage as well. I call that one the cut cell cage. That's something I haven't done yet. Once you cut those cells, how difficult is that to successfully stick them to another frame somewhere or foundation? That's just it. It's depending on how it is hanging.
You can put it on another frame. You can kind of mash it in there as long as you don't mash the cell itself. But what he likes to do is he also likes to emerge those virgins just as if he wanted to use the easy peasy cage. But I developed this entire cage that it closes over. Instead of trying to stick it down the opening, it closes over the entire cell and encases it and holds it steady for that virgin to emerge in the cage.
It's been surprisingly popular. We're going to have to start adding video to this podcast in the future so that you can actually demonstrate some of that stuff. It would be cool to see. It would be. It would be. Tell us about Tallahassee Highlands. Oh, sure. Well, that's the the name of the official name of the area is Tallahassee Highlands Apiary. The area right here is high ground just outside of Athens, Georgia. We're
right at the edge of the county. The Talisie King was a Native American chief who lived here many, many years ago. And the area is, it's really informally known as Talisie Highlands, but we liked it a lot. So we chose that as the apiary name. I like it. Do you mind telling us what you know, you don't have to tell us any secrets or anything, but I think it's good for beekeepers to hear a little bit about the business model of other beekeepers. Or is this your full time
gig? And if so, how do you make money? I like to refer to it as my obsession. I actually I own and operate a mail order plant nursery. So I am. super busy in the springtime. I probably shouldn't even be a beekeeper, but I can't help myself. I just, I love it way too much. So I manage about 50 colonies and I would say 25 of them are what I would consider to be in actual honey production. And our nectar flow is on right now. It's on strong right now. It won't last
very long. And I am a small producer. I produce in the hundreds of pounds, not the thousands of pounds. The local wildflower honey is pretty tasty here. And then I also will, after we pull supers and bottle up the local wildflower honey, I will take a number of hives up into the Blue Ridge Mountains for the sourwood flow. and it's a lot of work hauling bees. And to ask any migratory beekeeper, it's a lot of work and I don't even move that many, but I just, I love sourwood honey
and it commands a premium price. I'm a little low for boutique. I'm at $12 a pound for the wildflower and $18 a pound for the sourwood, but it's profitable enough for me. I make a decent amount of money on it. Most years I'll sell a couple of dozen nukes as well. as a part of swarm prevention, and it's profitable. I like selling bees. And then hopefully I'm going to be ramping up queen sales. I've had a bit of a rough time getting started this spring for various reasons,
but hopefully we'll get going. This year, I hope to produce 150 vaccinated queens. From Dalen? Yes, the Dalen vaccine. Yeah, they've been on this podcast too. So if anybody wants to hear more about the vaccine, Go back to that episode. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but we had a couple of people from Dalen on and they were excellent explaining how that works and explaining how you don't have to catch each queen and get a needle and vaccinator like that.
All right. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff they're doing. It's time, Dan. Have you thought of a wild and crazy story yet? Oh, no, no. You know, again, migratory beekeepers would say, oh, that's nothing. But I always think of how crazy it is driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains with a trailer load full of bees weaving and turning in the mountain roads at night. And it's classed as a temperate rainforest. So it's usually pretty
wet up there, too. And we haven't lost anything yet, but it gets a little bit hairy sometimes. I wish I had something better for you. I really You keep thinking about it for a minute Anyway, I need to try that sour wood honey. I'll have to can I order some from your website? I'd be
happy to send you some it's it's delicious. I can't wait to try it I love tasting honey from all over Every place that I travel it is so fun to try different honeys and I don't mean infused honeys because you can do that anywhere, but honey's from Different local pollination so and in different nectar flows. So anyway back to your wild and crazy beekeeping story Can you tell me what is the most times you've been stung
in one day? Oh, well, there was the time my wife had my veil and jacket in the back of the truck and There was a swarm it had it had formed the bivouac on a branch very high up I it was early on in my beekeeping. I think I had probably had you know, just a few years under my belt and I needed that swarm. I needed it badly. You know how it is. Got my Poland bucket and got it extended up and it was right near a power line too. So I was being a little bit careful how I was handling
things. I bopped that branch with the bucket and I missed and the entire bivouac came down. It seemed like about half of it came down on me. You know a bivouac is pretty peaceful until it drops 30 feet down hard. Yeah. I got stung up, as they say here in Georgia, I got ed up. Probably, I don't know, probably 25, 30 stings before I got out of there. Yeah, that's a that's
a pretty crazy thing. When you're up there and you're not suited up and all of a sudden you realize that thousands of bees are falling on you. You know, at least I didn't climb 30 feet in the air. You know, I always I hear these people that have fallen off of their ladder over. You know, a swarm is a beautiful thing, but it's not worth a trip to the hospital. Now, the long poles make a lot more sense than 20 foot tall ladders. Yeah. Yeah. Safety wise. Absolutely.
Hey, Dan, I appreciate your time today. Your knowledge, your insights. Thank you so very much. Keep in touch with the show. People can find you in the show notes and we'll talk again soon. All right. Thanks very much. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping, presented by Man Lake. Remember right now to follow or subscribe and share this podcast. Also a quick shout out to Vita Bee Health for their support.
Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. Enjoy spring everybody, enjoy your bees, 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.