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 bee's 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 Keep
being presented by Man Lake. we're going over to Europe again today to discuss a whole new kind of beehive design that creators claim can cut your winter colony losses down to five percent and double your honey yield. And our guest's wild and crazy beekeeping story is one for the ages. But first in beekeeping related news, a really sad story out of Ireland. Board -winning longtime beekeeper Kathleen Devine dies after
suffering multiple stings. This was just earlier this week and details are still a little sketchy. One report has her being stung only twice. Another says it may have been up to 20 times. Either way, how does someone who's been beekeeping for decades suddenly die from a few stings? Well, here's what we do know. Kathleen was in her early 70s and had recently taken a step back from beekeeping because she had quote, suffered some reactions
from stings. Early Monday evening she went to help another beekeeper with his hives and that's when it all happened. She received stings, had a reaction, and was transferred by air ambulance to a hospital where she passed away. A post mortem examination will be carried out. I guess it's just a really sobering reminder that even though you haven't been allergic to bee stings in the past, you can develop an allergy in the future. If you have reactions, especially new ones, don't
take them lightly. Seek proper medical advice. These situations are rare but they do happen so be careful out there and consider having an EpiPen on hand just in case. Mrs. Devine and her husband Des were hobby beekeepers. well loved by the local beekeeping community. They had won numerous prizes for their honey at various agricultural shows country -wide. Sympathies and prayers for
her and her family at this time. On a more upbeat note, British and Danish researchers have just engineered a super food to protect honey bees from growing threats. Their results are published in the weekly science and technology journal Nature. The work we did here represents a major technology breakthrough for the beekeeping industry and for food security and global pollination," noted University of Oxford researcher Professor
Geraldine Wright. The scientists first identified the key compounds in pollen that benefit bees which involve six plant sterols. They then genetically engineered a strain of yeast to produce a precise mixture of these ingredients in a sustainable and affordable way. The colonies fed the superfood thrived and boosted reproduction when compared to the control group. There's a lot of scientific details. If you're interested, we'll post a link to the study in the show notes. Okay, let's get
to our interview. By the way, if you like awesome Italian accents, you're going to love what's coming up. Hey, I'd like to welcome to the show today super special guest all the way coming to us from Italy, Alex Scamberoni. How are you doing today? I'm fine, I'm really very happy. I will harvest my last honey flow next Friday with the Primal Beehive in the mountains. So far so good. And we're going to be talking about
Primal Beehive. That's one thing that I love doing on this show is finding out about new products and new ways to do things before we jump into that. I want to get into a little bit of your history. Tell me what got you into beekeeping and when, and then we'll kind of go from there. Yeah, actually, it's pretty easy. In my home village, we have two long, very long standing traditions, centuries old tradition. One is the silkworms. No one is working with silkworms in
my area anymore. But beekeeping, oh, that's for sure. So since I was in elementary school, my mother would use it to buy honey from local beekeepers. And I always loved the smell of the beeswax of the honey. We mainly have two blossoms here, two main nectar flow. One is the acacia and the other one is the sweet chestnut, which is my preferred honey. So yeah. Years ago when I had finally time free time because I closed my machine tools company and I started to keep bees just
for fun It was love at first sight. It was also a dream come true because Really where every time I I was making breakfast with the milk and honey from my local beekeepers I was always thinking I should have my own bees. So as soon as I was able but it was 2006, so almost 20 years ago, I started keeping bees by my own. So before we started recording, you were telling me about this sweet chestnut honey. Describe the flavor.
What's it like? When it's really, really harvested at the right moment, it's really dense, dark.
It's not black, but it's pretty brown, dark brown, and it has kind of two sensations the first one when you start testing it mainly is the sweet part of the chestnut that comes to you but then when it goes down into the throat it became I'll just say you said before spicy spicy and it's a kind of a second experience after a few seconds that that was I really like the most and yeah it's a It's everywhere here because from the hill behind my village up to the mountains in
Switzerland, this part of the Alps, the valley that goes from the Lago Maggiore up to the main ridge of the Alps, it's full of sweet chestnut forest. So it's something that we really like a lot in the area, both on the Italian and on the Switzerland side. Here in the U .S. there's a thing called hot honey now. It's a spicy honey, but people are doing it by infusing things like
jalapeno peppers in their honey. And it's really good, but I think it's a lot more fun when it just comes directly from the bees with whatever flavor it is. There's just something very special about that. What other kinds of things do they forage on in your area? The very first blossom is the wild cherry, following with apricots. And then we also have another English word for dandelion. Dandelion. Dandelion. And then we have acacia, on which we usually harvest honey.
After acacia, we have wild flowers, different kind. And then it depends from the season. It could be late June, beginning of July, we have the sweet chestnut. Here, at the end of the Alps and the foothill, it's almost the last blossom that we have. Then we move up in the mountains, our colonies, to have a second wave of sweet chestnut and wild flowers until beginning of September, more or less. That's mainly what happened
during the blossoming season. We go to the mountains because it's a time machine, it's a dramatic operation. So we go back in time to harvest more, at least to forage, to have the bee foraging on natural flowers and not feeding syrup so early in the season. Now climate -wise, how cold is it where you are? What are the winters like? It depends, but on average, we have winters that can be as cold as minus seven, minus 10 Celsius.
that is about 14 degrees fahrenheit and then we have a hot summer that can be as hot as 36 celsius which is kind of i think close to 90 or 100 fahrenheit very humid okay and so that's a huge range did you find that you had a lot of winter die -off At the beginning, yes, and the problem was related to the dissipation of the hive. Nowadays, still, people using the dandt langstroth hives, they are used to feed not less than 26, even more, sometimes even 50 liters
of syrup to overwinter colonies. And this comes with other problems like nosema disease because of those very liquid syrups. Since the first industrial prototype that we built, Giammario and I with Primal B, we went down to less than 10 liters of CO2 over winter colony. And we also reduced the winter losses at the same time. In the actual version of the Primal B hive and the test that we did last winter, we went down to no more than 4 liters of syrup and less than
10 % of colony losses. Actually, last winter we lost less than 5%. But on average, I'm comfortable to say that we can work with less than 10 % colony losses during the winter time. So I live in an area where the common losses is at least 50 % per year. It's just, it's very, very, it's very, very cold here in the winter and a lot of snow. And if your bees are weak, you know, from Varroa or whatever, or don't have enough food, they
just, they just don't survive period. Now you were telling me previously that your first three years or so in beekeeping, you had a lot of losses. 100%. Yeah. 100 % is a lot. And that was what led you and your partner into thinking there's got to be a better way. Tell me that story. How did that all come about? Yeah, actually, again, I had a wife and three small kids and I was not able to enjoy my family because of my previous job. I founded and owned a machine tools company
with my brother and we were working. too much, too many hours, even all weekends. So when I decided with my brother to quit the company, to have a better lifetime, and I started to keep busy, I told Gianmario and he said, okay, let's do it together so we can spend more time together because Gianmario and I, we met at high school and I mean, you cannot choose your brothers, but if I could, it would have been John Mario.
So we were always looking for each other to spend time in the mountains, climbing ice falls, ski touring, whatever it could be in the mountains. And bees in our area, they really were the first excuse to meet each other more often and to be outside in the outdoors. So we started together. But At the very beginning, as you said, for three years in a row, we lost everything. We were buying B package, not B package, nucleus at the beginning
of spring. And we tried to harvest honey. We were not able to harvest even one drop of honey. And then by November, more or less, in the best case, it could have been January, all of our colony died. So we were really close to give up and then it was the fourth year and a friend of mine called me, the guy Herman from German origin, he is a professional tree climber and he was cutting down a huge cedar tree in a beautiful
centuries old villa. in the park of this villa and he called me because he's allergic and he said, look, there is a swarm of bees here. I cannot do my job. People are paying me to do this job I cannot do. So just run, come here, grab the swarm and let me work. And when I arrived, that was not a swarm. That was a huge colony
inside this incredible, huge hollow tree. I'm talking about a tree that was two meter maybe more at the bottom and up to 12 more or less 12 meters high there was this hole in the in the hole tree and literally a black pipe of bees coming in and out pretty angry because chainsaw is not something they like they like so I was I was a fool actually because when I saw that thing I was thinking probably this is a I don't
know, kind of a better strain of a queen. So with Hermann, he literally opened a one -meter door with the chain so that we were pushing the chain into the hollow tree until we saw honey coming in, not chips. And also I called Gianmario. Gianmario was giving a lecture at the university, and I remember him telling to the classroom. Okay, guys, the lesson is over. I have more important
stuff to do. And one hour later, he was showing up in the place where Herman and I were trying to understand what was going on inside the tree. If you're a beekeeper like me, we're getting into that favorite time of year, honey harvest. But it can be a lot of work. That's where Man Lake comes in. They have everything you need to make the job easier, cleaner, and more efficient. Removal aids, refractometers, uncapping tools, extractors, tanks, wax melters, even the jars
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off your first $100 purchase. So we tried to move a colony that was with combs that were more than one meter high and there was four or six those huge combs and and we were trying to move this colony into the dam which is pretty much the same of a Langstroth wooden hive and now when I look back of this event I cannot believe how full I was because even in terms of volume that doesn't fit that it was not possible. we killed that colony actually and that was very
very sad. Gianmario didn't sleep he went back to his lab and the day after he woke me up telling me we need to change the box because what we really what he really did was to redesign everything in a three -dimensional software where he can assign mechanical and thermal property to every
component that he designed. He designed the holotree, the combs and the bees in a way that he could apply mathematical simulation, mainly Navier -Stroke's equation to understand what was going on inside, starting from the idea that they need to keep energy in a better way in order to have
those huge combs that we saw. the following morning when he woke me up he told me look in your email so I look at the email and I saw this drawing that he built with the mathematical simulation and the drawing was showing me a different shape mainly a different shape of a comb compared to the dead ant we were working with the same day we started prototyping something that was kind of simulation of the hollow tree And from that moment on, we built many, many different kinds
of prototypes, even from concrete. And you can imagine an empty hive made of concrete, 80 kilo of a prototype. And we were trying to move those empty hives waiting, just the hardware was waiting 80 kilo. And then we put bees inside and swarm and testing. we started really seeing differences in the colony behavior. So we improved our prototype and then as he was and he still was last year a professor at university in Lugano, we were allowed to apply mainly from what is the Swiss
startup ecosystem. We realized after me visiting the U .S. relatives and traveling and asking to meet beekeepers in the U .S., we realized that we may have a business opportunity or something that eventually could be good for the beekeeping community worldwide. But we like the money, so we applied for competition, kind of the shark tanks that you have in the U .S. pretty much everything that we could win in the ecosystem
in Switzerland. And with that money, we built better prototypes and we traveled extensively, I may say, for three weeks from Southern California to Vancouver Island and from Baltimore to Atlanta in three weeks, meeting every beekeeper that was willing to meet us, hobbyists, sideliners, commercials. Everybody that was willing to meet us, we were willing to spend our time and sharing our experience and learning along the way. So when we came back, we decided to build something
better from the previous prototype. And we made the mistake to think that that could be the product to put on the market. And we really under evaluated the amount of time, the amount of effort and
the amount of money that we needed. to enter a market and then the pandemic hit and with the pandemic we were in where I live I live less than one hour from the very hot spot first hot spot of the pandemic in Europe because I am between Milano and Lugano between Italy and Switzerland and the first hot spot was a small village just south was from Milano so we were stuck in our houses no not allowed even to go outside in our street we decided to do something and to redesign
everything from scratch this time knowing what the performance could be but also scaling down the manufacturing cost. Because before the pandemic, when we realized that we can really deliver something better for the colony, we traveled also to test our solution. So we delivered some of the previous version in the very hot Negev desert in Israel, but also we over winter colony in Alaska, few hours. westward from Anchorage on the Kinaipan
Isola. And when we were able to talk again, to travel again and meeting potential suppliers in US and in Europe, we knew that we could deliver a good hive, a primal bee hive at a fair retail price and all the related activity that we needed to do. I just want to catch up and make sure
we're on the same page here. So we've got a couple of brothers living in Italy in Switzerland and the winter is killing off your bees and then you come across this giant hive in a hollow tree end up cutting it apart and realize None of the beehives being made right now are good old buddy Langstroth. It doesn't fit what bees actually do inside a hollow tree. So that's what we're going to do. And we're going to figure out how to do it. So so a couple of you guys, are you
both engineers or just? Your brother. Gianmario is an engineer. I am by college. I am a mechanic, a mechanical technician. I was used to design machine tools, huge CNC machine tools. So our background is both mechanical, but I was more on the manufacturing side and Gianmario was more on the theoretical and simulation side of the mechanical stuff. So you guys know how to design and build things. And you came up with what sounds
like a good design. At what point did you say, hey, this thing weighs way, way, way, way too much to be practical. We're going to shift to polystyrene. What made you think that's the material you wanted to use? Actually, it's a bit different. First, thanks to John Mario's simulation and then to the first prototype that we did, we realized that we have a good explanation. about the whole
system. So the colony, the bees, the hardware where you keep the bees, the hive and the outside temperature, the outside environment, which means mainly temperature and seasonality. From that good explanation, we then decided to build something and we can build with different materials. But when we went down to manufacturing cost, I grade, high density, food grade EPS. It's a technology that is mature, I may say, and can be used at scale. So when we were thinking about the U .S.
market and the huge number that bees are in the U .S. market and in North America, generally speaking, we realized that we really need something that can be used at scale. And so we started the partnering up with one of the best companies in Europe. They are now our first supplier and they manage that technology very well. They manage the technology so well that they are now helping us to move the manufacturing into the U .S. And this is not only because of the wonderful tariff
that we love so much. Yeah, but also because even before that, we are paying transportation costs because now we are shipping containers from Europe to the US and this is killing us
in terms of cost and time to deliver. So the idea to move the manufacturing process in the US was born more than one year ago when we closed our seed round and then we waited to have the first good and not good feedback from the early adopters in the US, not only hobbyist, but also commercial guy, because there are a few features that we really need to change in order to allow those people to work with Primal B and to take
advantage of the results. So now we are planning to have manufacturing up and running by the end of the year in the US. Hopefully, we will be able to deliver from the US in February. On the video version of this podcast, I'm going to insert some pictures of what this actually looks like for those that are just listening to the audio. I want you to describe what does your hive actually look like because it doesn't look like a regular
Langstroth hive or even a top bar hive. Yeah okay in the primal bee hive we changed the nest and the nest only this is the first things that people need to know there's no need to change extraction equipment for our vesting honey because we can put supers above the nest as usual and in our supers the beekeeper can still use the deep or the medium langstroth frames that he's already working with. But the nest itself is a different shape because the shape of the nest
really, really matters. in terms of thermal efficiency. It's much more the shape than the insulation.
You can insulate a lag strut or a double dip as much as you want, as much as you can, but you cannot go... even closer to the performance that we can achieve using LA Primal B Nest which is made by eight frames with the trapezoidal shape they are as high as 70 centimeters 700 millimeters and you have this trapezoidal shape because especially at the spring at the end of the winter in the spring build up The upper part of our frames provide a larger surface for the
colony to develop and a whole single surface from top to bottom. These allow the queen to
lay eggs in a more efficient way. That means that with the same amount of energy, they can have larger surface of brood, which also means every cycle you have more bees that can go back into the system to perform when you have those eight frames one stuck by the other then you have something that is a little bit bigger than a double deep and the external dimensions are such that you can place four primer bee nests on a four -way palette so that the external dimension
is four centimeters wide and 60 cm length. On top of this nest, we put a nest lid, what we call a nest lid, an empty super and a top lid for a total amount of more than 120 air value as a closure of the cross -section of the nest and this provides most of the efficiency that we can deliver to the colony. Did you say 120 R value? Yeah, it depends which kind of empty super you can use, but we are between 120 and 150 as the wall call it winter closure of the
nest, which is made by three components. Nest lead, empty super, one empty super made of a solid APS and the top lid and the nylon strap to tie everything together. The coupling profile between the components is that such which is airtight. So the air inside the empty super provide better insulation. And when we overwinter in Alaska, we instead of just an empty super, we put kind of a mattress of additional EPS as an insulation material to better survive the long
Alaska winter. And the same thing goes when you are in very hot climate. Yeah. Let me just interpret this for everybody a little bit. So this does not look like a normal beehive. You see this EPS material and the brood box, there's not two, there's one, and you call it a nest, which I absolutely love that term, by the way, the frames inside are you said 70 centimeters, which is about 27 and a half inches tall. Exactly. And the width is roughly the regular width. Yeah,
a little shorter, a little bit shorter. Just a little bit shorter. And so in the nest, you're going to be pulling out frames that are 27 and a half inches tall. Now, above that goes a brood box made out of the same material, same kind of insulation. But we can put our regular Langstroth frames in it. Exactly. Which also means we can pull them out and put them in our regular extractors. We don't have to do anything special, different, or anything else to extract honey from them.
That's a big deal. Yeah, and also because we don't want to harvest the honey from the primal bee nest frames, matched with the thermal efficiency of the nest itself, this is why we can really feed less and less compared to every other solution. Because the cluster of the bees during the winter start at the very bottom of the primal bee frames and then the cluster moves very, very little by little upwards when they need some honey for
the winter consumption. But most of the time, between 10 and 12 centimeters of honey on top of the frame is more than enough to overwinter the colony, at least in the place where we made our experiment. Okay, now your R value, you mentioned 120. which I don't know of anything that's that high in our regular length strut hives, which are three quarter inch wood. I believe the R value is like one or two. Yeah, maybe five. It
depends from the thickness of the play. So hardly insulated at all, but a big fat tree has a ton of insulation. So you're trying to reproduce this tree like atmosphere. The last thing I don't want to get too technical here. But could you talk about the thermal dynamics just a little bit? Because we've had various people on the show talking about how important airflow is even when it's really cold in the winter. And other philosophies are, no, shut them down and don't
have very much airflow at all. What's the airflow like on this? The critical point is the dew point. People that are used to open some hole or something on top of the nest, they do so because they think that the circulation of air between the bottom and the top can help the bees to evacuate. to put away the moisture inside the nest. But the real question is why those colonies have moisture inside the nest? And the answer is because the
dew point is inside the nest. So when you provide because of the shape and then the material, you provide such thermal efficiency. we move the dew point outside. That means that they don't need an air flow inside the nest during winter time. They need to stabilize the temperature and to do that with the minimal effort possible, with the minimal possible effort in a way that they really can keep the queen alive at the right temperature, almost just with their metabolic
energy. That goes with the less consumption during the winter passage and at the beginning of spring when the cluster opens up and the queen understands that the queen feels that it's time to lay eggs, this operation to open the cluster and to raise the temperature from the winter queen passage to the brood temperature of 36 degrees comes with the five or even more five times less effort
than compared to the landstock hive. This is key because And this is much more related to the shape of the nest than the material itself. This is one of the things that we struggle the most to communicate because insulation is easy to understand. And even in our own houses, we see that when we put insulation in the house, we can consume less energy to stay warm during
the winter. But the shape is really key. One of the things that Gianmario always try to explain to me first is a comparison between the shape, the small difference in shapes on a race car. When they change millimeters of the spoiler of the wings or whatever, the effect, the downside effect or the differences in the performance, it's huge. And mainly this is the same thing, changing the nest the shape of the nest improve a lot what the bees can do. And the bees, they
know better than us. So when they feel they are in a nest that is well made and easy to manage, they just act doing what they do best. So the conservation of energy and the better use of resources is in their DNA, and they just keep doing what they were able to do for. billions of years, for many, many years, thousands of years. And they go back to do what they were used to do before wrong wooden highs. Have you found that the bees also produce more honey?
And if so, why? Correct. The bees produce more honey because, again, it's in their DNA. They know that when the net flow comes, it's time to put energy let's say in the ziagonal cells for when the winter will come and they don't have a limit. I mean, the limit is the nectar
flow itself. So when they understand by instinct that they don't need so much energy to keep the temperature of the brood inside the nest, they keep going harvesting nectar and this nectar will not be used during the same season, will
be stored for the winter to come. The key point in the primal bee is that using the same last medium or deep to harvest honey and having the nest which consume, which require so less energy compared to what we were used to work with, it's a win -win situation because what we leave into the nest for the colony is enough. or close to enough to survive an average winter everywhere in Europe and I can say everywhere in the US, maybe excluding Alaska or the cold state or the
northeast of the US. But at the same time, we can harvest more honey. And from the comparison that we have already done in Europe and in Israel, On average, we harvest double the quantity compared to the wooden Langstock type. Sometimes it's even more, it depends. There are beekeepers in my area working with Primal Bee. They are already
used to harvest the wild cherry honey. which is something that people forgot about because since the Varroa came in and the colony became weaker and weaker they were not able to harvest the wild cherry which is the very very first blossom that we have but with the primal bee and overwintery a strong colony and now they start going back to collect this honey that has not been collected since the 18 more or less.
Alright, so what I'm gonna say, and I don't want this to sound rude in any way shape or form, you're putting a lot of promises out there, right? Less bee die -off, twice as much honey made. I decided to put this thing to the test and your marketing people were kind enough to send me one of your hives, the whole package, and even though This is going to be close to the end of August before I get bees in it. I'm going to try one this year and see how these bees overwinter.
That's probably not fair because that's not enough of a head start before winter. Now you will need to feed them probably very very dense syrup as dense as honey and not less than probably between 8 and 12 kilo. until they will build at least four or five full comms. And then I'm pretty sure that you will overwinter very well. Okay, I will do that. I'll feed the crap out of them and we'll see how it goes. And our listeners
know here, I'll be very honest. If it works, and I really hope it does, and I think it will because everything you're saying just makes sense, then I'll report on that. And if for some reason it doesn't, then We'll learn and we'll talk about that come spring. I will be traveling again and again in the U .S. we should also create the opportunity for me to visit you in your place. Not only meeting in person in Appimondia, but really, I really would like to visit you in person
so we can share our own experience. Yeah, it would be great. I would love that. That'll be really fun. And we are going to meet at Appimondia coming up here soon. Alex, I hope I remember to warn you of this when we talked previously. Everybody that comes on this show gets to tell about a wild or crazy or embarrassing or painfully unusual beekeeping story that they personally have had. Would you have something you want to
share with us? Yeah, actually, the craziest things that Gianmario and I did when we were using our first prototype was starting moving the colony from where we are up to the mountains on the Switzerland border. In this ballet that it's 25 kilometers long, full of sweet chestnut. It's a valley where you only have sweet chestnut trees. And I remember one night, and we were used to move our hive with my pickup truck. I have an old 99 Dodge pickup truck. It's my hobby. I dismantle,
I modify it. But that night it was not available. So we use the John Mario's car. a old four wheel drive Jeep that has not picked up bad. So we put the hives inside the car. And there were prototypes, so not very well made with bees that can eventually get out. And driving during the
night on this mountain road. every time we were looking for just to see just to because it was fun to see wild boars and deers and actually after that we were going up and in the middle of the road there was a beautiful deer and Giammario loves animals but I was back then I was also
a deer hunter. When Giammario saw the deer he saw a beautiful animal and when I saw the deer I saw mainly uh yeah goulash and uh and steaks and kind of so i i was trying to stop the car and i was shouting to him no don't stop don't stop grab the deal we have space we have room inside for the deal as well so there was a moment of uh doubt and the car was shaking left and right and the eyes the prototypes open up so in a matter of a few seconds we were covered
with thousands of bees and we were forced to stop the car ran out in the middle of the road in the mountains and shouting to each other how full we were. And at the end, we spent the following two hours trying to recover the bees inside the car, close the prototype and go on to the mountain apiary. And when we arrived at home, I was swallowing like, wow, it was the craziest night. as he might be keeping experience, and we still laugh about
that and remember about that. And that was when we decided that we needed a nylon strap to tie everything down and not have these things happening again. That was really crazy. That is an awesome story. I wish we had video of that. I'm just picturing it in my mind. open hives in the car. You know that reminds me of something I'm going to tell this little story real quick. The first time that I ever caught a swarm and it was a really big one. It's one of the biggest swarms
I have ever seen. And I had been told you can just take a cardboard box, shake it from the tree into the box. Well Let's just say it was a big swarm and it took a couple of boxes and I did that. And then I put some tape on the boxes, but I didn't want to make it, you know, airtight. Not that you can really get cardboard airtight, but there were a little teeny gap so that there was air flow going in and out. And I was driving my wife's car. That's a little Toyota hatchback.
And I have these boxes of bees in the back seat. And as I'm driving along, they start getting
out. and one gets out and then two and then three and then thirty and forty and thank goodness they weren't coming after me they wanted to get out so they were against the windows and by the time i got home i couldn't even see out of the back window or the back side windows because they were completely blabbered with colon by bees And, uh, you know, we learned these lessons the hard way and it ended up being fun and a
fun story. Yeah. But honestly, uh, now it's, uh, it's a startup companies with Israeli startup. Uh, we have the team in the U S, uh, all amazing people. They are doing a great job, but, uh, at the bottom, the bottom is when we started working with the bees, uh, there was nothing like working with the bees. in our previous experience. And it's really something that you became addicted to. And even the way we look around on every season changed. We didn't notice flowers before
working with bees. We didn't notice the different blossom of big trees before keeping bees. We didn't look at the nature around us in the same way that we look at now. It's amazing. It's just amazing. That's so true, and one of the beauties of beekeeping. All right, I need to let you go. Alex Gamberoni, thank you so much for being with
me. Best of luck to Primal B. And by the way, we'll stick a link in the show notes if anybody wants to look it up and have a look at exactly what this thing looks like and how it works. And I'll see you at Appimondia. Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much, Eric, to host me in this wonderful conversation. And really, I'm looking forward to meet you in person in Appimondia. I will have those samples of the sweet chestnut for you to taste and bring back home. And yeah. We should
also plan me to visit you in in Huta. Yeah, perfect. You come out here and do some skiing or in the summer and see the bees, either way. Yeah, yeah, I will. Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. If you like this content, I hope you'll share it with a friend. Follow and subscribe to this podcast and even sign up for our newsletter at Be Love Beekeeping dot com. Also, just a shout out to Vita B Health
for their support, we appreciate them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Varroxan, Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys, 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.