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. Welcome, welcome to Be Love, Be Keeping
presented by our great friend, Man Lake. First up on the podcast today is our new weekly feature called Inside the Hive and it's brought to you by Primal Bee. When the outside temperatures drop, have you ever wondered exactly what's going on inside a beehive? Imagine if you and 20 ,000 of your best friends were stuck in an ice box. The first thing you'd want to do is all gather close together to share your body heat. Honey
bees are much the same. When the temperatures drop outside, they try to keep warm inside by clustering together. In fact, they cluster in a three -dimensional ball and vibrate similar to our shivering to keep warm. Bees on the inside of the cluster take turns moving to the outside to share the duties of generating heat. At the same time, the bees inside the cluster are uncapping cells of honey and eating their stores which in turn helps them generate heat and keeps them
alive. When honey is depleted in one area of the hive, the entire cluster slowly moves to another area with more honey stores. The colder it is, the more food they need. Winter bees, they are absolutely amazing. Next time on Inside the Hive, we'll look at how a queen bee gets made and it all comes down to what she eats for lunch. Now give a warm welcome to our very special guest. All right, one last time we're here at the North American Honey Bee Expo and we've got
Joshua Scott with us today. Do you go by Joshua or Josh? Josh, thank you. Josh, how are you? I'm doing good. How are you? I'm great. This has been fun. It's the last day. Are you worn out yet? I am worn out. I mean, I tell every new beekeeper that comes to the North American Honey Bee Expo for the first time that it's an absolute marathon. You got to pace yourself. Don't try to get done with everything in one
day. I know they sell a one day ticket, but I don't know how anybody could possibly see everything within just one day. Well, and if you do you're gonna miss all the seminar all the seminars and the honey show and I mean they have the Silent auctions and of course this trade show is absolutely massive. They didn't give me a free pass So I'm not gonna pitch them any more than that. We're done with that No, it's been a lot of fun and
just the energy. There's really a but sorry almost said buzz around here I don't mean to be puns, but Josh you live here in the Louisville area. I do How did you get into beekeeping in the first place? Or I should say why? Well, yeah, so I actually started about five years ago when the pandemic started. And just like a lot of people, you know, that were stuck at home, I was thinking, you know, maybe I need a new hobby. And my mother -in -law visited and she had mentioned to me
that she was going to get a nuke of bees. And I'm an engineer by trade. I'm like, okay, so what is a nuke of bees? And she said, well, it's a nucleus. It's the start of a beehive to be able to keep bees. And that's all it took. And then I immediately went down the rabbit hole and started reading every book on bees I could get my hands on, watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos. And then, of course, getting my first nuke back in 2020. Let's talk about
YouTube videos for a minute. Because I love this topic in so many ways, because it's great and it's horrible both. Oh yeah. Because there's so much of it. There's a lot of it. And as you know, every beekeeper's heard the old thing about you ask 10 beekeepers the same question, you get 11 different answers. YouTube has taken that to the millionth degree. Absolutely. And so I'm wondering if you have advice for people on, without naming specific channels. How do they know what
they can believe on YouTube? Yeah, it's not easy. It's difficult, especially for somebody that's just getting started in beekeeping. The main advice that I generally give people that are just starting out, almost all beekeepers can agree as far as a book that beekeeping for dummies is a great start. So I will point people in that direction. And then when it comes to actual content, I do point people towards the ones, the more
trusted names. We won't name any of them, but those of you probably listening know who I'm talking about. A lot of them are here at the North American Honey Bee Expo. But it's like anything in life. You want to learn from someone that has experience and a lot of experience.
And so that's what I did. So when I first started watching YouTube videos to try to learn... I did some research and I found out who some of the top YouTube beekeeping personalities were, looked at their background to see how many years
they had been keeping bees. A lot of them were commercial beekeepers and that you have to be careful with that because if you just want to start out as a hobbyist, some of the advice that they're going to be giving is going to be geared towards being a commercial beekeeper and not necessarily a backyard beekeeper, but it's a
good place to start. You're not going to be able to get all your information and all you're learning from YouTube, but it is a tremendous resource that we have that beekeepers many years ago never never had never had that opportunity. Yeah, it really can be. If you're thinking, oh, wow, I'm going to do my first split this spring. I don't know how to do it. Well, the split bees. But there is a nice thing about YouTube, and that is that you can learn 10 different methods. Yep.
And then you can look at it and say, this one kind of rings true with me. Yeah. or my mentor here in wherever I live, Minnesota or South Dakota or South Florida recommends doing this kind. Now I can actually see it and do something about it. So that's some of the good things about it, but start with a mentor. Start with somebody local too. Exactly. Yeah, I'd tell, I recommend all new beekeepers. The first thing I do is join your local bee club if you have one in your area.
If they have a Facebook group page, I recommend that they join that Facebook group page because you'll be able to start interacting with them I think it's very important as a new beekeeper that you attend field days if your local club offers though because you truly don't know how you're going to feel or react when you have tens of thousands of bees buzzing and flying around your head until you experience it and Beekeeping can be very expensive to get into So you want
to avoid spending thousands of dollars until you know that you're actually going to be comfortable around a bunch of bees, a bunch of stinging insects, right? And so I always recommend that you participate in your local club's field days to get that experience. And usually, you know, if you truly are going to become a beekeeper, you're going to get hooked. There's something about the love of bees. Well, that's what this is all about, but... What is it? Why do we fall in love with them? They're
just bugs. They're bugs, but they're God's little miracles. I mean, they're so amazing. They're a super organism. How is it that thousands of insects can work in perfect harmony to produce all of these amazing products like beeswax and honey and propolis and do it in complete darkness while silently communicating with each other? and then they can swarm and bivouac out on a tree and find a new colony miles away with pinpoint accuracy because of a thing called the waggle
dance. Eric, I mean, it's it's absolutely mind blowing. And I think anybody that starts to go down the rabbit hole of beekeeping and honeybees quickly becomes fascinated with these creatures. Let's see what we can learn today. Sure. I hear you know a lot about winterization, even midwinter checks and things like that. Let's talk about that. What do you recommend? And again, it's different for wherever you live. That's exactly right. Your winter is not as harsh as mine or
somebody in Canada or something like that. That's exactly right. But give me some recommendations or tips. Yeah. So I mean, I think the main thing when you're preparing, at least and I'm going to speak to this, I'm in the Kentucky Midwest United States region. So we have cold winters, but they're not brutally cold winters. So we only have like maybe two or three months here.
where our bees are truly stuck inside. And so late fall is generally when I'm focused, I've already extracted the honey, and now I'm in the mind frame of preparing my bees for the winter. So what exactly does that mean? Well, the number one thing that you got to make sure is that you're taking care of mites. You know, Varroa destructor, public enemy number one, we've all heard of it. So you absolutely have to get your mite load down in the late summer. an early fall heading
into the winter. The beekeeping calendar starts in August. That's when that queen is going to start raising those fat bees that have the higher fat bodies that have to be able to live for four or five months in the colony all the way through the winter. If those bees are sick, your colony is not going to make it. So the number one thing you have to do, and there's a large variety of ways to kill the Varroa mites, but you have to
get your mite loads down as low as you can. I'm sorry to interject, but I need to emphasize something you said a minute ago. Late summer and fall, do not wait till October. It's too late. To test and then do something about it. That's exactly right. You've got to keep these things under control all year long, especially as you're getting later and later in the summer. And later in the summer, when the bee population is on decline, the Varroa population is actually on the increase
still. So that's why it's extremely important in that time of year to really knock the mites down. Whether you use a formic acid or use a thymol -based treatment or whatever, you need to get a large knockdown and do your mite checks. Now, once you get your mites under control, the other thing that you need to double check and make sure is that your colonies are at the appropriate weight. If you've extracting a lot of the honey or taking most of the honey from the bees, you
need to feed your bees. You have to feed them. You've got to get that colony weight up to where it needs to be heading into winter. Now in my own apiary, I exclusively run single brood management, which means that my target weight for each colony is somewhere in the 60 to 70 pound total weight, everything, including not just the brood chamber,
but everything. And so if I can get my bees, by feeding them a thick two to one syrup and I can get them up to 60 or 70 pounds, I know that that colony is going to be pretty good going into the wintertime. Let's just jump into single brood management for a minute, because a lot of people have never heard of it. I don't know enough about it. You were telling me earlier it's different than the Demery method, which is a form of single brood management. Tell me
how you do it. Yeah, so I mean. Basically, when I first started beekeeping, I think the very first year with my very first colony, I ended up using double deeps, which that means is there's two brood chambers for the queen to lay in, which if you're using the American Langstroth with 10 frames, that's a total of 20 frames. And that can produce some pretty large colonies, which is fine. But as a brand new beekeeper, there are times where you need to find and locate the
queen. And that can be quite challenging. with these supermassive large colonies, right? And so I don't exactly know how I got turned on to it, but I think it was my buddy Cody who actually mentioned he runs some singles as part of his operations. I said, singles, what's that? And he said, oh, just a single brood management. Well, that was enough to pique my interest. So then of course, you know me, I went down the rabbit hole of singer brood management and did
a bunch of research on it. And there's just a lot of advantages with single brood management. Of course, there are some disadvantages and we can talk about that. There's less equipment to maintain. It's easier if you need to find the queen. You're only looking in 10 frames versus 20 or 30 if you run triple deeps. The manipulation is easier. There's just a lot of advantages to
the single brood management. And so I just, Eric, I just turned to single brood management and I never looked back and I've been doing it ever since. using queen excluders above that box. That's correct. So when I place honey supers on, I will place a metal queen excluder right above the brood chamber, and then I'll put my
honey supers on. But if you look at the actual math, and how many cells per frame, you know, you could get, what, 2, 3 ,000 cells per frame, and then you multiply that times 10, that queen has plenty of room to lay in there. Now, that you have to be more active in terms of your management with single brood because one of the downsides is you'll have a lot more swarming behavior.
Because it's quicker for those bees and that queen to run out of room, fill up with brood, that brood pheromone triggers the urge for those bees to want to swarm, so you just have to be careful and you have to really kind of manage the colonies a little closer than if you just had a double deep and you can kind of walk away maybe for a while and come back and check later.
So what do you do if they're filling up? Yeah, if I mean, if they're filling up, generally speaking, I'll make sure that they have enough room for supers. So if my flow is just start right before the flow actually begins, I'll just make sure that I have plenty of drawn comb and that I would say I'll pause there. That's probably the biggest advantage is if you already have drawn comb and you can provide drawn comb to your bees, that's
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to learn more. And so what I will do is if I have a colony that's just absolutely taken off and that queen is laying like crazy and there's brood all over in that brood nest, I can pull some of those brood frames and I can donate it to colonies that are behind or smaller colonies and then I can take a frame that has nothing but drawn open comb, put that in that colony and now that queen has a whole new place to lay.
and that helps suppress that urge to swarm. Explain why the drawn out comb is so important versus just empty frames with foundation. That's right. Well, for one, bees are not going to draw wax unless they have to, right? It takes energy, it consumes resources for the bees, and they're just not going to do it. So they won't draw wax all year round. So we always like to say in the beekeeping world that drawn comb is a beekeeper's gold. because the resource is there and ready
for the bees to use right away. So if you have drawn comb and you put that into a brood chamber or your single deep, your queen is going to immediately seek that out and start to lay in those cells. Now, if the bees also are running out of room, let's say you're in the middle of a nectar flow. And with one of the downsides of single brood management is that your colony can become what's called honey bound or nectar bound easier than in a double deep. you have to keep an eye on
that. If your bees are starting to plug the brood chamber and the nest with nectar during a strong flow, you got to have that drawn comb on hand so you can pull those frames out, put the drawn empty comb back in there so the queen has a place to lay. Yeah. And if the queen sees a frame of just foundation with no drawn comb, She doesn't see it as a place to lay. Correct. She's out of space. That's right. Time to head out. It's time to head out. It's gonna trigger that urge
to swarm. The bees need time. They've got those wax producing glands that are only active during a few days of a worker bee's life. It takes time to draw that comb out. That queen bee is wanting to lay one to two thousand eggs a day during the strong, during a strong flow. And so really only during a strong flow when there's plenty of nectar around. is when the bees are going to want to draw that wax. Outside of that, they're not going to want to draw wax. OK, I know I got
a soft track. Yeah. Let's get back to winter for just a second. Do you do any kind of winter checks? I mean, how do you know come end of January they've got enough to eat in there? No. So I use a device called a Vivaldi board and it is basically it's a quilt box. And every single one of my colonies, I place a Vivaldi board on top of those colonies. Inside the Vivaldi board, I make a custom shim. And now I'm a fan of the
Hive Alive winter fondant patty. So every single one of my colonies gets a fondant patty prophylactically. Meaning, even if that colony, and I do weigh my colonies going into winter, is up to the proper weight, like we talked about, 60 or 70 pounds, There are some colonies that will still chew through and eat a lot of that, and you have to be careful in terms of starvation risks towards
early spring before the flow starts. And so every one of my colonies gets one of those fondant patties, and the Volity Board makes it really easy to where you can open the top, open the inner cover, and you can visually see... if they've started to consume the paddy that's inside of them. So even on a cold day. Even on a cold day, that's like it. And I put insulation inside of a volatility board. So again, it functions in
two ways. It functions as a quilt box, and it also allows me to feed the bees throughout the winter time, which really, I mean, really helps any sort of starvation issues. Yeah, great. All right. Where else do you go? I mean, we talked a little bit about swarms of where we came on camera here. And if this single brood management creates more swarms, are you only trying to control it or are you trying to catch swarms? Are you
doing a lot of splits? What are you doing? Yeah, I don't do a lot as funny because I was just talking to some other beekeepers about this. I don't do a lot of active swarm suppression. I guess in my particular setup, my apiary is on my property, so I'm able to go out there and just visually inspect two or three times a day.
And if I happen to see a swarm, Generally, a lot of times they will bivouac into a tree or a branch that's very close to my apiary before they actually relocate to their final destination and I'll just go capture that swarm and provide them with a new home. So I just don't, I don't actively try to suppress the urge to swarm. Every single colony wants to swarm and it can just, it can be a lot of manipulation to act if you're going to, you know, maybe some people like to
clip their queen's wings. Some people will inspect every frame and if they see swarm cells, they'll go in and pinch those swarm cells. I just kind of keep an eye on them. I can tell the ones that are doing really well that want to swarm. And really, Eric, I just hope to catch them in their biv -lack state within my apiary. I'm sure I lose a few every year that just take off. I just kind of look at it like I'm helping the natural bee population. Cool. Let's talk about your business
a little bit. Sure. Is this a business for you or a hobby? I did officially form it as an LLC last year, but it is just a hobby. So my normal day job, like I mentioned, I'm an engineer. So this is just a hobby for me, but it's, you know, it's just something that kind of took off on its own. And I started participating in the local farmers market and being able to provide value added products like honey and beeswax and propolis and things for my local community. really just
kind of energize me. It makes me feel good when people approach me and say, I love your honey or really appreciate you doing this to provide for the local community. How many colonies are you managing? So I'm currently managing 22 colonies, yeah, by myself. That's a lot for a hobbyist. It is a lot, but you know how B math works. You start with one, then you have four, then you have 10, now you have 20. So it's funny, you actually have to actively try to keep your numbers
down. at a certain point. And so, but yeah. I like it. And you do a lot of educational stuff out there. Yeah. Tell us what you do and why. Okay. So I started a YouTube channel, I think it was a couple years ago called Bees in the Weeds. And with the intent to just try to help out newer beekeepers. So I was getting asked a lot of questions from newer beekeepers. Josh, you know, how do I do a walk away split? Josh, how do I mark a queen? How do I do this? How
do I do that? And I found that I was answering the same questions over and over again. And I thought there's a better way to do this. And so I just I was like, I'm going to record myself. I'm just going to go out there in the bee yard. I'm going to record myself doing a walk away split. I'm going to upload it to YouTube. And the next time I get asked that question, I'm just going to send him the link and say, watch this video. If you have any follow up questions,
reach out to me. I think it's great for business, too. And if people see you there, and they realize, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about. Okay. So, therefore, if I need to get a nuke or something else, he'd be a good guy to talk. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think, you know, credibility is a big thing. Certainly, you have to, I don't know what the right word is, have thick skin and a high tolerance for some of the comments because I'd say one of my biggest pet peeves, Eric, is
when I hear... Beekeepers say that there's only one way to do something. You have to do it this way. There's only the X way to do this wrong. There are so many different ways to successfully keep bees. And I remind people that of all the time. And so I'll get a lot of comments on the channel that, oh, you shouldn't do that. You have to do it this way. And I'm like, no, your way is is correct. Also, both are fine. You know, it's like like beekeepers debating on screen
bottom boards versus solid bottom boards. They both work. There's lots of different ways to successfully keep bees. And so a lot of the education that I do out there is demonstrating one method. This is the method I use. If it speaks to you and you think it seems like a good method you want to try, give it a try. If you don't like it and you want to try something else, great.
But it's like we were talking before we started the podcast that folks that are beekeeping is a very difficult hobby for those that are indecisive because you have to just make a decision and go with it. There is a lot of trial and error with beekeeping. You will fail. Failure is fine. You learn from your failures. And that's what ends up making the really good beekeepers are the ones that learn from the mistakes because you just have to get in there and try. And that's
really what it's all about. That's such a good attitude. How do you know who to trust? How do you if you're brand new? Okay, and maybe you are just a little bit indecisive because It's ten answers to this one question. What do I do? I I don't know. How do you do? Well, how do you decide? I think you have to find a mentor you have to find somebody local that you trust, right?
And if you if you're in an area where you don't have a local bee club or somebody that can mentor you You just have to find maybe a YouTube channel or somebody that speaks to you that's like, I really like the way that they're doing it. It seems like that would work for me. I'm going to give it a try. If it doesn't work, then maybe try a different method and look on YouTube or Google something different and try something else. There's just a lot of trial and error and
beekeeping and that's okay. I think some people get discouraged from that, but you should not be discouraged from that. It's all about learning. And bottom line, You're helping bees. You're helping bees no matter what. And so that's why I try to encourage new beekeepers. You're going to feel overwhelmed. You're going to. It's going to happen. But keep at it. That's why the retention
rate for beekeeping is so low. I want to say I had an EAS Master Beekeeper tell me that, at least in the state of Kentucky, it's as low as 15 % to 20 % the retention rate for new beekeepers because it's challenging and it's frustrating. But you just have to stick with it. You have to want to learn. You have to want to keep learning. And I really believe in using your intuition. Yes. There are times when it's like, both of these will probably work. I just want to try
to be in tune with my bees. And that sounds a little silly. Yeah. And you just can't be afraid to try. You can't. And the best experience is time in your bees. time with your bees. That is the best experience you're going to have. You can watch all the videos, read all the books, go to all the bee conferences that you want, but you're going to learn the most by spending time with your bees. And they may give you a different answer one day than another day. Yeah,
they don't read all the books, Eric. They don't read all the books. I don't really follow the rules, right? And have you noticed their personality changes? It does change. Yeah. Weather can change it, environment, all sorts. I mean, they could turn on you. That's right. Yeah. What happened to my sweet, gentle bees? And then the next day, they're just, it's turned into a hot colony and they're chasing me out of the bee yard all the way back to the truck. Yeah. And that doesn't
mean they need to be requited. Something else may be going on. Maybe a raccoon or a skunk has been bothering them at the night, you know? And so they're extra defensive, you know? So the more time that you spend in your colonies, you're going to be able to read your bees better. And you're going to be able to determine, like, well, this is unusual behavior for this colony right now. I wonder what's going on. And it even could
be genetics. It could be that the particular drone that the queen mated with at that time, that that drone, which the drones carry the defensive characteristics, it could be that that particular drone that was defensive, that those are the bees that are coming out now. And if you just give it time, the different drone, you know, comes out later, and then all of a sudden you have very common gentle bees again, and it's the same queen. Yeah, because your queen's mating
with how many different drones? 15, 20 different drones. And if one of those... So all those different genetics are in there? Exactly right. If one of the genetics is extremely hot and an angry bee, you know, there's going to be a set of workers that comes from that drone that's going to have the aggressive trait. OK, last question. I should have warned you about this up front, Josh. Every beekeeper has had some kind of wild and crazy story happen to them. Okay. Or embarrassing or
painful or hugely mistake or something. Do you mind sharing one or two with us? Sure. I have a video that's called What a Mess. And the reason why it's called that is because one of my colonies, and it's a Langstroth, and I just have it on four by fours on concrete blocks, but... an entire colony decided to take residence underneath of the Langstroth colony. And it's a screen bottom board. And when I mean take residence, I'm talking
a massive open hive. And so they actually built out calm and everything, everything, everything. I mean, it had to be 30, 40 ,000 bees underneath this colony in between four by fours, tons of drawn comb. So this video is me and my friend, Jason, just fumbling around. trying to figure out how to remove this open colony from underneath this existing colony because they're not supposed to be there. Now, I've been asked many questions, Josh, why do you think this happened? The answer
is I don't know. What I think may have happened is a queen returning from her mating flight and she missed the landing board and went underneath. And then all the worker bees were like, well, she's under here. We're going to go under here and we're going to this is our new home. And so they just started building it from there. But it. It was kind of embarrassing just because I neglected it. I looked at it for weeks, and I was like, I don't want to tackle that. Not
today. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. And of course, it didn't fix itself. It's a problem that's not going to fix itself. So eventually, I just had to tackle it. And it took me a little while to get it all corrected. I tried to harvest as much of the brood and the comus I could. I actually found the queen, which was crazy. I didn't think I would find her, but I was like, oh, there she is. rehomed them, put them in a different spot in the apiary, tried to scrape everything away
so that it didn't happen again. What's the most you've ever been stung in one day? Most I've ever been stung in one day. Honestly, it was probably in the apiary during dearthy conditions. I just, you know, sometimes I glove up, sometimes I don't. Just getting into a colony and I could tell right away that they weren't having it. But I had to get in there and do an inspection and they were just kind of... they weren't happy with me and they were letting me know. All right,
Josh Scott, bees in the weeds. Yeah, if you want to check out the channel, bees in the weeds. Thanks for spending time. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. 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 V2B Health for their support. Vita's Viroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Veroxan. 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 email, erik at Be Love Beekeeping dot 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.