in a world brimming with complexity few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless precision she dances from bloom to bloom each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct each act in service to the whole and then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to the bees' needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their
journey. I recently attended the North American Honey Bee Expo and while there had the pleasure of conducting a few interviews for this podcast just a quick heads up these interviews were in a very busy noisy expo hall with thousands of people milling around so our audio and video quality may be a little bit below our regular standards but I think you'll find the content well worth it and we'll be back in the studio shortly and speaking of the expo Huge thank yous
to all the listeners who came up and introduced themselves. It was really fun meeting so many of you. So over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from beekeepers with various backgrounds and beekeeping experiences, discussing new products, new methodologies, and of course, some fun stories. I hope you'll enjoy as we kick off today's episode with someone who really knows his stuff and has the PhD to prove it, Dr. Jason Graham. All right, we're back here at the North American Honey Bee
Expo. We've got Dr. Jason Graham with us today. Jason, how are you? I'm excellent, Eric. How are you? Fantastic. Great. I say, I say doctor. Is that medical? Is that PhD? What's it is? PhD. Yeah. And I go by Dr. J or, you know, I went, I went to get out of the Philadelphia area. So Dr. J was, you know, my, my I was a big fan of basketball and I thought if I ever become a doctor, that's what I'd tell the kids. You know, you call me Dr. J, so. Can you slam it like Dr. J?
Yeah, I could try. I mean, he was such an early pioneer in that kind of in that kind of basketball. That was kind of fun. So some of these young people, if you don't know who Dr. J is, Julius Irving. Yeah, yeah. Look him up. OK, but we're here to talk about bees today, not NBA basketball. So what is your PhD in? It's in entomology and nematology. I earned the PhD at University of
Florida. I got my master's there as well, but I went on for my PhD. And so I learned about all things insects and also nematodes, which are almost microscopic worms that live in the soil. And some are very beneficial and some are pests to our agriculture. So I kind of learned both realms there. but bees were my specialty. So when you're an entomologist you almost pick a specialty, a different insect or maybe a different
aspect of entomology. Some are looking at pests and diseases, others are looking medical entomology. I really got excited about beneficial insects and of course bees I think are the most beneficial. So that's always my focus. So with you having a PhD, we're going to get into some really boring data today. I'll try. No, we're not. That never happens on this show. We try not. No, we want practical advice for beekeepers at all levels.
Tell me about your beekeeping first. Sure. So I first got into beekeeping actually at University of Delaware. I was looking for an easy science class. So may sound strange now, I am a PhD, but at the time I had been a high school dropout. Took about 10 years off. I worked lots of different jobs. And I was a little intimidated to go back to school. And I was always looking for an easy science. I wasn't ready to dive into biochemistry or anything like that yet, but I saw a beekeeping
class. And so I wanted to try it out and... I met Dewey Karen there. He's a pretty famous beekeeping teacher and researcher and educator and great guy. I'm learning from him and the first time I opened up the hive, I was hooked. I wanted to do beekeeping for life. I think that's a big part of it is taking the PhD, the heavy science and trying to share that with folks so it's not so intimidating and more interesting and relatable
to them is a big part of what I try to do. What was it about him that made you fall in love immediately? We had a lab portion of the class and also a lecture portion. So in the lecture portion, we learned all the book stuff, you know, the biology of the bee. But he kept it very interesting. You know, he's shared the life of the bee, you know, even from a human perspective, what they were doing, you know, how they were changing careers throughout their their lifespan and different
things like that. They were relatable to me. He one day dressed up as a bee and came in and. showed everyone he demonstrated the waggle dance as a professor in a classroom full of, you know, college students and a great professor is amazing. So I ended up his teacher assistant the following year. And I decided I was going to make my major. I was switched it from business, what I was thinking
to entomology. And I thought I was only going to go for my bachelor's and ended up, you know, I was talking to him and I was like, you know, I'm going to get out and get a job. He said, why don't you stick in and go for your master's and PhD? And he kind of talked me into reaching out to Jamie Ellis at University of Florida. He was just getting his lab started up and was looking for new graduate students and right timing. I went down and visited with Jamie. He drove
me around the campus. We had lunch and talked and he ended up bringing me on as a research assistant. That helped out with my school, you know, payments, tuition and whatnot. Yeah, I got some amazing experience working with him. We started the Master Beekeeping program there in Florida. We started Bee College, which is a really successful other conference that happens, you know, in spring now, summer and multiple times a year in Florida. So I got to work with...
Beekeepers that had been keeping bees longer than I had but still being able to share new things with them and learn from them along the way So yeah, I feel really blessed to have kind of fell it into the path that I have I like it. You mentioned the lifespan of bees This is something
we haven't talked a lot about on the show. Okay, let's so let's dig into that one Yeah, let's talk about first a little bit about what people call bee time or bee calendar or bee mass Okay, let's talk about And I don't want to get too scientific. But the life cycle. From the day an egg is laid, what happens and how long does it take? OK, so after the egg is laid, then you have about two, three days while that egg turns into a very young larva that they're fed both
royal jelly and also pollen and nectar. And for that three days, that egg, if it's a female egg, so if it's been fertilized, then it's going to be a female. If it's unfertilized, it'll become a male on a drone bait. So the fertilized eggs, if it's a female larva, then it could potentially be a queen while it's still on royal jelly. When they turn it onto pollen and nectar after the third day, then it's going to end up being a worker and not a queen. It becomes a larva. It
eats all of its royal jelly. Then it becomes the larva. It's fed the pollen and nectar mixture, gets older, goes into pupation. And when it emerges out as a adult bee for the first time, its first job is to go and clean its cell out. So it's that I do a lot of talks with elementary school students and families and things like that. And so I like to tell the kids, you know, their first job is to clean their room, probably like, you
know, the kids first job. So they clean their room and then they clean their sister's rooms. They go around and start cleaning those. And
then they're a cleaner bee for a few days. then they become a a nurse bee where they're feeding their sisters and their their glands develop differently so they have the glands where they're able to actually feed their sisters royal jelly the the young larva they can sense and smell when those larvae are hungry and go over and feed the hungry ones it's pretty amazing and then they get a little bit older and they start doing other tasks in the in the hive other you
know chores jobs they move on to being wax maker bees honey store bees. So as the foragers come in, they take that nectar and take it up to the the nectary and they fan their wings and turn it into honey. They cap wax the, put the wax cappings on that to preserve it as honey. Some are processing the bee bread from pollen as a bee bread and most of the jobs kind of work from that center of the hive, the heart of the hive,
the nursery out towards the entrance. So eventually they become guard bees and they're spending a lot more time out on the porch. and that's when they're about 18 days old. So the 18 year olds, the teenagers, they're getting new glands and they're actually able to defend the hive with alarm pheromone at that point. And they also are doing some orientation flights and when they become foragers, that's kind of the elder bees, the about 21 day olds, and they'll forage for
the rest of their lives. So if you see a bee out on a flower, then it's one of the the oldest bees in the hive, the elders that are going and getting resources for the other bees. How about some of the other tasks like the what we call the morticians? Yeah. They're cleaning out the dead bees. Yeah, the undertakers. Do they all have a chance to do that at some point in their life or are there some just assigned to that? I think we're not 100 % sure. And there's some
flexibility there. So we're talking about the undertaker bees. And so they're very important for helping to clean the hive and get rid of the you know, the dead decaying bees, some bees that may have, they're also kind of nurse, maybe not say nurse bees, but healthcare bees that are going around to check inside the cells for bees that have some type of a pathogen or illness. So they would take out those bees as well. And so this is helping to keep the hive healthy.
And I'm not sure that all the bees do all of
the tasks. The way that they can tell a lot of this information is they'll mark the bees with little stickers different color codes numbers letters and have them in observation hives where they're watching you know what's going on in the life of these bees and taking notes on okay we saw number 48a uh you know taking a dead bee out and things like that and so i'm not sure that someone's watched every you know bee in a hive for their entire lifespan to make sure
that this happens regularly but there is a lot of flexibility so if at one point they need more foragers They could, you know, bring some of the guard bees faster. Or if, you know, they need more guards, some of the foragers may stay behind and guard. So much flexibility in the bee colony. Here's what I don't get and part of what really, really fascinates me. How do they make the decision on who's going to do what? Now, you would think that would be the queen's
job. We know that's not realistic. Right. Is it just do they somehow instinctively know there's a need there, I'm gonna go do it. Or is there some boss in charge that's saying, you do that, you do that, you do that? Well, a lot of it is very pheromone controlled. They're getting a lot of their input through smells. So when nurse bees are looking for which bees to feed, they're
smelling which bees are hungriest. When the guard bees are trying to see who they need to defend against, they're smelling for alarm pheromone.
Queens... produce queen pheromone and this goes through the entire hive because bees pass nectar from each other and along with that they're also passing pheromones so if you have a very big hive that queen pheromone might not get around to all of the bees but it does a pretty good job because the way they pass the food along so I think pheromones is one of the key things. It could be instincts, but this is one of the great mysteries of life, you know, that we're
all trying to learn. How do the bees know what they're doing and making decisions? And I think a lot of it is they're just walking around looking for what needs to be done or sensing what needs to be done and jumping in and doing it. It's one of the things I love about honey bees is we don't know at all. We just see them. make amazing decisions, work as this perfect community somehow. And we're like, as people, we haven't figured out how to do that yet. Not even close.
Our government's all screwed up. Our elections are messed up and stuff. And they somehow figured out, although... It's really good, but it's not perfect. Let's talk about swarming for a second. I've read a bunch of Tom Seeley stuff, including Honey Bee Democracy. I've had him on the show. We've got a couple episodes with him. He's fantastic and just the nicest gentleman. I really like him a lot. But there still are a few missing
pieces. That's one of the exciting things for me too is constantly learning whether it's techniques in beekeeping or our new equipment coming out that we're learning how to use or Older equipment we're finding out about you know that that is coming out again Nectar sources for bees because you when you get into beekeeping you start to become a miner in botany because you're learning What flowers are nearby when the blooms are but yeah, there's there's so much to learn. It's
amazing swarming. It's a is really interesting was the bee's natural instinct as a colony. So one of the things Jamie was teaching us, you know, when I was a graduate student was you can also think of the honeybee colony on the individual level, each worker, you know, going and doing its individual thing. But if you look at the hive itself, you can think of it as a super organism. This hive is... has its own circulatory system, its own nervous system and its own immune system.
It's defending against pathogens coming in almost on an individual level, individual organism level. Also has its reproductive system and swarming is kind of the reproductive system of the hive. They want to get their goal is to get as big as they can and then reproduce. So they send half their colony out somewhere else. And somehow they know when it's time to do that. They know how to get the queen prepared. Yes. Will you tell us some of the things, some of what they
do to get the queen prepared? They of course have to start making the next queen, the next generation. So they pick out the worker that this, you know, the egg that they're going to turn into queen. They make some queen cells in preparation for the swarm. And then they'll chase the queen around and stop feeding her as much.
The queen doesn't really feed. From the the honey or pollen, I guess on her own She actually needs the attendant bees to follow her around and feed her and groom her and so they kind of put her on a diet stop feeding her so much and keep her moving so that she loses some weight and is ready to fly and Yeah, it kind of stops that egg production
for a little while, but it is fascinating. Yeah, it's hilarious Okay, let's talk about drones for a second And I just read something and and we may talk about it earlier about how drones can't feed themselves. Tell me how that works. Who feeds them, why, when? Right, so the worker bees will feed the drones and the drones are voracious eaters. They're constantly hungry too, but they're not really contributing much to the food stores. They're not foraging at all. Zero?
Zero. Okay, not much, it's zero. Zero, it's actually probably negative because of how much they eat too. It may seem early, but right now is a great time to order your live bees for 2026 because they do sell out and because Man Lake is offering a discount for B -Luv podcast listeners. Wait, what? I know you're saying live bees, they never go on sale. Well, they are now. Click on over to Man Lake, order your bees any variety. nukes or packages, and anything in the beginner essentials
category. And when you check out, use the code GETSTARTEDINBEEZ, it's down in the show notes so you don't have to remember, for a discount on everything. So get your orders in early and save. But the drones aren't very important because if the colony dies, if we lose the queen, what happens is the workers are now able to lay eggs. But they're laying unfertilized eggs because they never mated. So those unfertilized eggs will become drones. Those drones will end up
flying out. And even if that hive crashes and totally dies, they were not able to make a new queen. The genetics from that hive are carried on by those drones to other hives in the county. So yeah, it is still the survival of the fittest and the mating really carries on those genes. I call drones the teenage boys living in the basement. Yeah, it is. It is very similar. Yep. They don't produce anything. Right. All they want to do is go out and mate. And when they
do, they just die. And if they don't mate, they also die. Right. So they either go out with a bag or not so much, fizzle out. That is a crazy thing. You mentioned new equipment a minute ago. Tell me, I don't know how much you've walked around this expo yet, but what are some of the new things that you've seen over the last even a couple of years? to get you excited. Sure. So actually, I was working, teaching folks in the Bay Area. I'm in Silicon Valley in California.
And so I was just working with a nonprofit. We had sponsors like Google and Genentech. And so some of these high tech companies would have us come in and they would have their own hives on campus. And so the employees wanted to learn more and more about beekeeping. and one of them had asked if we could do a presentation on innovations
in beekeeping. Some of the new innovations that I came across while doing research on this was Primal Bee, which is the company that I'm now with, and I could talk a little bit about that. BeeWise is another I've worked with them, and so I'll kind of scale into each of them a little bit more in detail, but there's a lot of new sensors that are going into hives, like Broodminder, which is looking at... the temperature and humidity inside of hives, the number of bees coming in
and out. We're just learning so much with the internet of things. The BeeWise is a large box that has multiple hives inside of it that uses AI and robotics to lift frames up, take pictures of what's going on inside the hive, identify the queen, look for pathogens, and that's a pretty exciting, interesting thing. I've had them on the show, by the way. So if somebody wants to hear a whole episode with them, we'll try to
remember to stick it in the show notes. So you can go back a little ways and see it was fascinating. I've met the founder going into those hives and check them out. And they're amazing. Did some work with them. I'm working with Primal B right now, and that's a thermodynamic hive. I'm looking at the insulation and the brood space. It has a triple deep frame in the bottom. So we're getting really large populations. And I think it's an incredible innovation. You've also had Primal
B on the show. We've had Alex on the show all the way from Italy. He was awesome and so fun and actually one of our largest audiences. People loved Alex. Alex is great and the whole team is really great with Primal B. They're coming out with some amazing things and folks should definitely check that out. And I'm trying one of those hives myself right now. I think it's fascinating. I can't wait to see how the bees
over winter and over summer. Yeah. Because a lot of insulation has got to make it easier on the bees also when it's hot. They're not expending as much energy trying to cool everything. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in California, so it's pretty mild there. We don't have to worry about snow where I'm at. We might get frost or freeze. But I do have a primal beehive right outside my kitchen and I have a Langstroth wooden hive right next to it and I keep an eye on both of them. I also
have a tap bar hive and a few other styles. But my primal beehive I noticed in the heat wave when we had 104, 105 degree. days for a week or two at a time, my Langstroth, wooden hive out front, would all the bees we had outside try to ventilate and keep it cool and bearding up on the outside of the hive. Whereas the primal bee hive, it was still active, but they weren't hanging out on the front of the hive. They were comfortable inside. They got out earlier in the
morning. They came back later at night because they didn't have to worry about keeping a lot of bees in or out in order to keep the hive. at a comfortable temperature inside for the brood. Tell me about thermodynamics. And one of the big questions that I have, because I get differing opinions all the time. Welcome to beekeeping.
Right. For example, in winter, do I need to get my hive as closed up as possible and have an entrance reducer where they can only get in something this big so that it's really warm, but also realizing What's going to happen? Moisture is going to build up inside. And so I worry about that. Right. Sure. And then there's other people that tell me, no, air circulation is really important. You can get too much moisture. Sure. Tell me
what the heck you know about this. OK. So I'm also I don't have all the answers, but I'm still learning along the way what I've learned so far that that makes a lot of sense to me. The condensation. will run down the sides of the walls a lot of times. These actually need a lot of water also during the wintertime, right? And it may be less accessible to them because they're not leaving the hive to go look for water if it's too cold
outside. So they'll actually go to the side walls and pull some of that moisture off of the side walls. So it is important to have some condensation inside the hive so that your bees can stay hydrated.
There's also On the primal beehive there's a screen bottom board and there's a head space of about four inches or so between the bottom board and the bottom of the first frame and this air and the way that the shape of the inside of the hive is is designed really for the you know keep the perfect humidity perfect temperature in there for the brood so the queen has a great nursery and you know the incubation is perfect
for the bees. You could also wrap a hive with insulation but it's going to be very difficult to get the same level of thermal efficiency with a jacket around the hive and different things like that. The material that we're working with is EPS and it's at 80 % density and very strong and it's made specifically for this purpose for insulation. I'm just of the attitude of let's
look at bees where they came from. When they live in the wild, and I'm talking honey bees still, not native bees, because some of them nest in the ground and things like that. But your honey bees, they seek out hollow trees. This isn't just a Winnie the Pooh thing. Right. They seek out hollow trees. In fact, Dr. Tom Seeley was telling me about when he was doing some of his study, he actually cut down trees. and then cut them open to see exactly how the
bees were working inside. Yes. And I think as close to that natural environment as we can get, the better. True. That's nature. Yes. That's how they like it. I agree. Yeah. I have a feeling that the boxes that we came up with over 150 years ago, and I'm not slamming on anything, it's very old technology, but is that the preferred place for a bee? or is it something more like
inside a tree? And if it's more like inside a tree, what can we do to make whatever kind of bee setup we have a little bit more like that? Right. So when you just look at what the trees are and the same thing with even cutouts, we can look at what bees prefer to go to when they swarm. Sometimes they'll end up in the wall of someone's house. So we can look at what the bees are looking for, whether it's in. natural materials
or artificial materials. Some bees also go into caves or underground, you know, things like that. I had a friend, Anthony Baldo, who went from University of Florida that actually went and studied with Tom Seeley for a bit before he went to Africa to see. what different bees were doing there. Some were cave nesters and some were in trees. It seems they want a large space in order
to start making their comb. They want to have a very small defendable entrance where they're keeping robbers from coming in or pests or thieves from coming in and stealing the honey. Yeah, they want to be able to control the environment inside their hive so they're able to ventilate
and take care of everything inside. I think the primal beehive for me was the first that I saw that really kind of captured that pretty well with artificial materials and had the ventilation, has the small entrances, has the large volume for the bees to build as much as they want. When we look at a cutout, you know, it's from a wall that bees have moved into someone's house, a lot of times they'll use as much space as they
possibly can. to have continuous brood so the queen doesn't have to jump over one frame and onto another she just has lots and lots of space to lay eggs and the nurse bees no obstacles for them to get around to be able to make sure all the bees are fed yeah it does a great job at that we have so many options yeah as beekeepers you do and i love experimenting yes some people just want just tell me how to do it and i'm just going to go do it and make some honey right and
that's awesome yeah if that's what you're into that's awesome I like to try this new stuff. I haven't used top bar hives yet. I hear they're pretty difficult in our cold climate. But that's another thing that I want to do. Yeah. And and that's fun. And how to do it and experiment around. So before I let you go, Jason or Dr. Jay, sorry. I want to hear a wild and crazy beekeeping story. You've been around all kinds of things. What
do you got or more than one? Yeah, sure. So I actually I really got into native bees as well. I can speak to that for a minute. So I. was in Dr. Ellis's lab, Jamie Ellis, University of Florida, and it's a honeybee program. It's funded by both the state, you know, for honeybee research and by beekeepers putting money into beekeeping research. And I loved the beekeeping aspect of it. I still do, you know, continue beekeeping. But I also was really interested in the diversity of bees.
There's 20 ,000 different species of bees in the world. 20 ,000, you know, and the honeybee, Apis mellifera. is just one of them. There's a couple different apis species, but there's so many more. So I wanted to learn more about bumblebees. And Jamie was very kind in letting me also explore these other bees as well, as long as I also tied it into honeybees in some way. So I looked at bumblebees and I was interested in if small hive beetles went into bumblebee
colonies. And if so, those small hive beetles could be reproducing in bumblebee colonies and we could do everything we could to keep them out of honeybees, but they would come from the bumblebees back into the honeybee colonies. So I really wanted to see if small hive beetles could live in bumblebee colonies. And so I would go out and put some stuff up on Craig's list,
you know, back in the day. And I said, if anybody sees a bumblebee colony in your back yard, let me know and I'll come and remove it so that I can look into it to see if there's any small hive beetles. I got some commercial bumblebee colonies and I put them out on blueberries for a season. And then I open them up to see if there are small hive beetles in them and to open them. I was actually working with the USDA. We had a lab inside the USDA building, and I brought
aquatic bumblebees into the USDA building. And for those that don't know, honeybee workers are the only ones that have a sting that after they sting you once, they're done, right? They try to fly away, their stinger gets stuck in your skin, and they die. Well, not the case with bumblebees.
They can sting you. as many times as they want they can you know put the stinger in move somewhere else put stinger in so anyway i had the bumblebees open in a lab and i had a piece of paper on the door that said you know bumblebees live bumblebees inside you know please don't open the door and I was opening four or five colonies. I was collecting all the bumblebees into one jar, all their pollen into another jar, all their honey into another jar, so I could test that and looking for small
high beetles all the way along. And a couple bumblebees got into my bee suit inside this lab. They're loose. I got 20, 30 bumblebees flying around in the lab, trying to catch them with butterfly net and forceps. Love it. Love it couple getting inside my suit and I learned that lesson really You know quick that they can sting as many times as they want and yeah It was it was painful a different kind of painful that honeybee stings in what way? How does it feel different?
Guess honeybee felt more like a burn honeybee sting kind of feels like a match burn or something like that This was it was almost more like a sharp poke and then yeah like fire under your skin But it didn't go away quite as quickly as as honey bees did and I had a different feel There's different chemistry there. So I'm sure my body was fighting different types of chemicals and it was doing different things But yeah, it was it's interesting. They they also have an
alarm pheromone bumblebees. So, you know, they would have a different smell to them than honey bees did. All right, if you could leave one tip or one piece of advice for everybody before we sign off. And I know that's hard to come up with just one, but what would that be? I think one recommendation is to get to know the other bees in your area as well, and also the flowers, the
flower sources that your bees have. Not everyone gets interested in the flowers and things like that, but there's an app that's very helpful. So I've used field guides in the past to be able to tell what flower is which and when's it blooming and things like that. But there's an app called iNaturalist that's made by National Geographic and California Academy of Science. It's a free app. You can take a picture of any living thing.
bees or flowers or fish or birds and it'll identify it for you and link off to a wikipedia type page that tells you their life cycle and all kinds of information about it so i use that a lot of times if i'm trying to figure out what honeybees are on different flowers in my yard i also use it for citizen science to figure out what the diversity of bees are in different areas so that's a great great tool and so i'd recommend that to folks it's one that i've enjoyed along the
way All right, thanks a lot, Dr. J. I appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for joining us on Bee Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends over at Man Lake. Hey, and don't forget to order your bees. and a shout out to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic
Acid Strips. Thank you so much guys. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion or topic that you'd like discussed on the show, shoot me an 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.