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 Beekeeping presented by our great friends and partners in
beekeeping. Man Lake. Today we're traveling to Gloucestershire, England to have a conversation with a beekeeper slash inventor who's created a chemical -free way to help bees get rid of varroa mites. This is pretty cool. But first it's time for our inside the hive feature presented by Primal Bee. We talk a lot about how bees stay warm in winter, but what about when it's 100 degrees outside and there are babies in there that can die if they're overheated? Turns out
bees basically invented air conditioning. Here's how they do it. First, water foragers fly out and collect water from wherever they can find it. You know where they go, puddles, creeks, bird baths, or swimming pool. They bring it back and spread thin films of it across the comb. Then hundreds of bees line up, fan their wings in a coordinated pattern, creating airflow that evaporates the water and pulls heat out of the
hive. Same principle as sweating. It's evaporative cooling invented by insects millions of years before we even figured it out. On really hot days you'll see bees hanging on the outside of the hive in what beekeepers call bearding. It looks kind of alarming but they're actually helping. You see fewer bodies inside means less heat for the cooling crew to deal with. All of this takes energy and worker hours that could be going towards
foraging and making honey. Temperature management isn't just a winter problem, it's an all year round situation. Next time on Inside the Hive, we'll get into why bees build comb in the weirdest places and what they're actually trying to tell you. Now let's go across the pond and have a great discussion with our inventor friend, Stuart. I'd like to welcome our very special guest to the show today, Stuart Rohith. Did I pronounce that right? You got it right. Good. Well, here's
the part I'm going to pronounce wrong. You're from Gloucestershire. Got that right too. Yes. All right. Over in England, we'll clear across the pond today and welcome, welcome. It's good to see you. Thanks. Good to be here. We're going to be talking about all kinds of things today, including your invention, the Bee Gym. which is very cool. I saw it at Appamondia a few months ago. But you know what? Let's talk beekeeping first and then we'll get into this cool thing.
Give me just a little bit of background, Stuart. How'd you get going in beekeeping and what do you love about it? Well, I was completely new to beekeeping in 2012 and I was making a little film with some some kind of underprivileged kids in the East End of London. They're called NEETs, they're not in education, employment or training. And this company called The Golden Company, we're training them up as beekeepers to give them some responsibility, you know, teach them some skills.
So I was making a film about these young people from my website, Bright Green Kids. I did an extended interview with, I think it was a 13 -year -old beekeeper called Abe. And he was so knowledgeable on the subject. And I was really intrigued by what he was saying, because I showed some interest in what he was saying. His father, who is an experienced beekeeper, his name's Peter Buckhoek, he sort of showed up at my doorstep two weeks later. And you've probably had this
sort of thing yourself. He showed up with a little cardboard box with some holes in the top, a little warm cardboard box. It was a small swamp. And he said he knew I was interested in, and in the back of the car, he had a little meek box. So he said, this is the best way to get into beekeeping is to make a fast start. And I mean, that would be difficult in a way, but he became my mentor answering lots of my questions on the subject.
And he kind of oversaw all my little problems in the first year and gave me lots of advice. So yeah, that's how I made a start. What do you love about it? Did you get hooked on it? Yeah, I I got hooked on beekeeping I got hooked in the sense of I just find the life of the colony
Absolutely fascinating. So I was reading a lot of books I think the first book I read was by Butler and it's called the world of the honeybee and it's a very unassuming title, but it's brilliantly written with some fantastic insights, especially into the life of the Queen. As a first book to introduce you to the subject, it's just ideal. I've never lost that fascination. I don't think I'm your typical beekeeper in the sense that I don't want 20 hives or 100 hives in the yard.
I think I'll always be a beekeeper, but I just find it so fascinating. Two or three hives is plenty for me because as we know it's really time -consuming But I just love to watch them. We actually had a sunny day believe it or not two days ago in Gloucestershire. We had 16 degrees Celsius Which I'm not very good at converting into Fahrenheit a nice sunny day. So t -shirt weather I Opened up a hive in the garden for the first time and it's just so joyful seeing
them at this time of year. They're looking really good. They built up much more than I thought they would, because we've had quite a long, damp, cold winter. And it's a joyful experience. I love the smells. I love getting the smoke going. I love the smells of harvesting wax and honey. It's just fantastic. But yeah, I don't think I'll ever be... commercial beekeeper in any sense
at all? That's okay. A lot of us love to stay a hobbyist where we can just enjoy it and not have it be a business and really spend time with the bees. And when you're a commercial beekeeper, yeah, it becomes a business. And they're great people and a lot of them love their bees too, but it's it's wham -bam. We've got to keep moving here quickly. Yep, and not so much time to enjoy
it. So by the way 16c is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit That was either done in my brain or Google one or the other I'll let you decide so along your journey at some point you run into this horrible thing called varroa mites and Your thought is I know Instead of bombing them with chemicals, I'm going to figure out how to get those darn mites off the bees. So tell us a little bit about what you came up with. Well, this is a long story.
Um, but it started with one of these young beekeepers I was working with was telling me about Puroa and he showed me a bee actually on a flower with a Varroa mite on its back. So there must've been quite a serious infestation in one of the hives nearby, because you don't tend to see Varroa mites on the back of bees very often. I was absolutely blown away by the relative size of the mite in relation to the bee. I was just thinking, I'd assumed that it was barely visible to the naked
eye. I just thought, nobody's going to enjoy putting basically a sort of insecticide into a box full of insects. And even these young beekeepers were saying that, you know, it's really problematic. It's the side of beekeeping that they don't really want to have to deal with, you know, becoming an expert in miticides. I was just thinking, like immediately I did have a gut feeling that there must be some mechanical way of separating the mite from the bee. My first approach was
to put a an entrance over the hive. So a sort of restriction over the entrance, which meant that any bees coming and going from the hive just had a very, very fine thread, which is actually made of cotton, which was suspended. There was a bunch of them, like a kind of violin bow, suspended in the entrance of the hive, allowing a small gap. So every time a bee came and went, one of these threads would be pulled along its back. and that meant if there was a mite on the bee's
back it could be pulled off. It was incredibly successful in a way because the day after we trialled it there was 172, sorry, 119 mites in the little collection tray underneath. I didn't know enough about the subject to realise that that was a big strong hive in September with a big mite population inside. So the results are not remarkable, but it was really interesting, like a really good start, and it certainly gave
me a lot of enthusiasm to carry on. And various bee inspectors, their interest was piqued as well. So I made quite a few of these kind of entrance traps and handed them out to bee inspectors in England, getting really good feedback from them. But I mean, sorry, this goes on and on and on, I'm afraid. The most useful feedback was that actually the real problem is that the mites are holding on underneath the bee's abdomen.
The bee has protective plates under its abdomen and the mites do an amazing job of tucking in under these plates. I've actually taken a bee with a mite on it and taken a mascara brush and tried to brush one off. And it's incredible how well those little Varroa mites hold on in that position. So I guess that's partly their success, but certainly not the success of my invention because it wasn't targeting those mites at all.
And also it's a problematic idea. I mean, what happens with the drones and the queens if there's a restriction over the entrance? So yeah, but it did get me thinking and it led to the next idea Well, it's also not getting to the nurse bees because they're not flying in and out the entrance With the bees that were coming in was
it also pulling off the pollen? No, it wasn't actually because the This kind of violin bow affair was only running over their backs So it didn't cause a problem from that point of view. But as you say, it doesn't target the nurse bees which we know are much more likely to have those, they call them phoretic mites, don't they? They're much more likely to have the mites attached to
them. I mean, it was an interesting start. And what it led to was that I noticed, I was doing a lot of video at the time, and I noticed that quite a few of the bees seemed to go through underneath my kind of violin bow type thing repeatedly.
They go through turn around come back out upside down and I was thinking oh they seem to be quite enjoying this So I made a version that was completely voluntary so they could come and go as they want or they could go and use the the kind of restricted entrance and Loads of the bees were using the restricted entrance. So I was thinking this is really interesting. They seem to be grooming or attempting to groom off these rower mics. And that was the kind of a start that led me
into the various versions. And that's a super interesting behavioral thing that I had not really heard of before, and that is that they, I don't know, they get some kind of enjoyment out of a tool that helps them groom. Yeah. I mean, cows be the same thing. You often see And it's becoming
more popular. You see in a milking parlour, when the cows come in, I've noticed that the dairy hands attach brushes and these kind of rubbery spikes and things to the wall of the milking parlour, and the cows just go and have a really good scratch on them. Yeah, we just don't think about that with little bugs, though. So that's really interesting. OK, so that led to the next step. Yeah, I mean, one thing about honeybees is that everyone is always telling me how intelligent
they are, and they can do all these tricks. Scientists do all these studies and get them to, you know, tell the difference between this button and that button, and they get a sugary treat or whatever. So it's not a quantum leap to imagine that they might want to go and scrap chop a parasol. Okay. Well, what came next? What came next was a much smaller version of the idea that was inside the
hive. Because I was thinking if there's a voluntary aspect to this, if the bees want to go and have a scratch and hopefully rid themselves of some Varroa, then it doesn't have to be compulsory. It doesn't have to be a sort of entrance restriction. Are you planning on expanding your apiary this year? Or are you a beginner thinking about jumping into beekeeping for the very first time? Take it from someone who's purchased beekeeping equipment
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just for Bee Love listeners. Click on over to PrimalBee .com forward slash Bee Love and use discount code Bee Love at checkout. Once again that's PrimalBee .com slash Bee Love and use discount code Bee Love at checkout. So I made a version of what I produce now. a basic version of the kind of square B -Gym that sits on the floor of the hive. And then we started doing various trials to see what effect it was having. Well, let's fast forward to the finished products
that you have now. Tell us what they are and how they work and what they look like. So there's two versions of the B -Gym at the moment. The first one is a square frame and it has various little plastic flippers, a little bit like fingernails that stick up from the surface of this square frame. It also has some little spikes on it and it also has some little wires and what I've observed and filmed, which I can show you the film of them using it, we've observed them going and
having a scratch. Unfortunately I don't have the kind of million dollar shot of a bee kind of on one of these flippers, flipping off a Varroa mite that then sort of flies out of frame, you know, screaming. I don't have that shot. That's what AI is for. Yeah. Yeah, that is tempting, but you know, you've got to be completely honest in these things in my opinion. Yes. What I do have is a really interesting study. from 2016,
which actually Vita did in Argentina. And what it shows is that that square version of the Bee Gym, when it was put into a controlled trial, it created a huge amount of Varroa mite drop, much more than the control hives. Statistically, it's really impressive. But the one thing that didn't go particularly well is that After the controlled trial, all of the hives were given a chemical shock. I'm not sure exactly with what might aside, but basically they were given a
controlled chemical shock. All of the varroa mites were counted from the B -Gym hives and the control hives. And the B -Gym hives had produced a vast amount of mitre drop that was all counted. But what they hadn't really done... was solved the whole problem. It's almost as if the mites had started multiplying faster. So this was 2016, trialling the square version of the B -Gym. Really quite impressive results, except for the fact that it hadn't emptied the hive of Varroa mites.
Yeah, so that was 2016. That's the square version of the B -Gym. After a lot of experimentation and trials, we came up with a much thinner, smaller version of the Bee Gym, which is basically a sort of a plate with various of these devices, especially these little flippers, which are like kind of flexible kind of fingernails in a long row. This plate is attached, it's suspended from
the brood frames. down in amongst the combs in the brood box, partly for that reason you were talking about earlier of really targeting the nurse bees, which we know have a greater incidence of Varroa on them. So a few of these kind of flat bee jim plates, we call them the bee jim slim, are suspended amongst your brood combs. What we have now From 2023, we have a really good controlled trial from a group here in the West of England called the Devon Apicultural
Research Group. We have a really good trial of 135 hives, which I'm not sure all the beekeepers stayed the whole of the trial. which is a tough thing to do. It's really not so easy to organise a big trial, but they had a really good response rate of 110 beekeepers stayed the whole course of the 19 -week trial. So there's loads and loads of data in that trial. Basically, the hives were divided in two with half of the hive was the control side, the bee jim device was on the other
half. So it was a comparison of mite drop from one hive. one half of the hive compared to the other. These slim, medium slims that are suspended amongst the brood frames had a much, much higher incidence of mitrop on their side. For me, it's become a really useful trial because instead of just imagining what to do next, imagining how to make these things better. There's a real kind of benchmark with this trial to say that the bees are definitely using it. It's resulting
in a higher mite drop. So this isn't brand new. This thing's been around a few years. It's been trialed. Is it distributed through Vita Bee Health? That's right. It's distributed through Vita Europe Limited. In the UK and the US, I think Dadan are the supplier in the U .S. So I just want to make sure I'm clear and I'm looking at your website right now. So I still see the Square Bee Jim and I see the Bee Jim Slim. I like that. Do we need both? Do we need one or the other?
If somebody wants to give it a try. It's interesting. I've put so much effort into producing the Bee Jim Slim and it's got this really good trial behind it. But most of my sales are actually of the old. square version of the bee tomb. And I think it appeals to people because it sits on the floor of the hive. It sits on the open mesh floor. Any mites that the bees might scrape off fall through the mesh floor immediately.
So it's got that nice, there's a nice idea of the benefits of dislodging some of these mites result in the mite just disappearing out the hive. Some beekeepers have said that. It sells really well and beekeepers come back for more time and time again. But we have this new version which targets the nurse bees. It's right in amongst the combs and it has this really good trial, has this really good kind of results attached
to it. So I'm just hoping that people will read the study and the study is available from my website and Vita do have a link to this study. But yeah. Yeah, that's where we're at at the moment. Well, I appreciate your very soft sell approach. Some people would be pushing this down our throats and I and I always tell guests this is not an infomercial, so don't go there. But but I appreciate it. And just to give a little background on, I have a fairly good pulse of
a lot of beekeepers out there. And there's a couple of bottom lines going on here. One is for always a thing. If you're new to beekeeping and you think you could ignore it, you can't. Okay? But you have to do what you're comfortable with and a lot of people are comfortable with some of the I'll just call them chemical miticides that are out there. Some of them work very well. Some people are not comfortable with that and
so they're looking for alternative methods. of getting rid of those mites this would be one of those alternative methods and like everything else that you use the key is test before and then test after and if it worked for you great if it worked but maybe you need something else then do something else too and in your situation may be a little different than the guy's down
the street. So experiment, try different things, be open -minded to sometimes I might need a miticide, sometimes something like this or like a more organic type of miticide might be the answer, or it may be a combination. So be open -minded, test, test, test, see what works for you. And if you want another tool in your box, Here's another tool. Give it a shot. I think that's a really good approach to to see what works for you. Some beekeepers are going to be more comfortable
working with non -chemical approaches. I would say personally be open -minded because if you suddenly have a really big infestation of Varroa, then you might have to do all it takes to get rid of them. But at the same time, like you said, So many beekeepers are at their heart, experimentational. They're people who can fix things and love to make things and come up with new ideas. So I would suggest if they want to try the Bee Gym approach, maybe try it in conjunction with other
approaches as well. There's other sort of non -chemical approaches to do with bee husbandry. Those work well together. Yeah, it's a tool. That you can use in your arsenal of other tools That's where I'm coming from. Well, I appreciate that Hey Stuart, there's something that I ask all of our guests and I should have warned you upfront But I didn't so I'm gonna let you take a minute to think about this next one if you want to Every beekeeper has had some kind of
wild and crazy beekeeping experience. Maybe a hundred of them I want you to think of something that you've had that you can share. This is something that could be funny or painful or just ridiculous in some way. Do you have a story you can share with us? I've got a few stories I'm just thinking through. It can be more than one, that's okay. Last year I had a novel beekeeping experience. for me. And that is, you can probably tell from my approach that I'm really into experimentation
and I find honey bees really fascinating. So in a way, I don't need loads of hives. I just, I just observe honey bees. I do a lot of filming. I do a lot of thinking about how I might improve
my invention for instance. But this guy was calling me from From Bristol, which is a city not so far away from here It's like 30 miles away from here and he really wanted me to come and remove some bees from his roof and So I think it's what you call a cutout and the bees have been there some time and this is quite unusual for a kind of Wild hive in the UK. It had really prospered. I didn't want to do it because it's not really my thing and I I suggested quite a few other
beekeepers, really experienced beekeepers. Somebody quoted him like 8 ,000 pounds to take the bees out and he wasn't going to do it at that price. And what I was really impressed with is that he wasn't going to, he needed to remove the bees, but he wasn't going to kill them. He was going to do anything he could to get them out alive.
So eventually I agreed to go and do it and he built a little scaffold he had a little tower there he had a roofer who had peeled away all the roof tiles and then it was my job to remove the colony but it's not really my thing i i love working with swarms and collecting swarms and stuff but this was something else it was just rafter after rafter after rafter in the roof was full of comb and the comb just went on and
on. I had a bee vac with me but it was full and I was trying to empty it into other boxes and and it was just buckets of honey, buckets of comb, not really something from my beekeeping experience. I mean in the end I did manage it and I got the bees into a whopping great big hive back where I am in Gloucestershire. But at the end of the day, I was exhausted and I just could never do that again. Hats off to people who do that for a living. I didn't get a single
sting. The bees were just so well mannered and really, really passive. I hardly used any smoke. It was a great experience from that point of view, but the sheer effort was something I never
want to do again. I can add another hats off to people that do that in places like Texas where it's a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and and nearly a hundred percent humidity Imagine if it was that hot I'll bet it wasn't that hot where you are or if you're in an area that has Africanized bees, so they are really mean and We've had people on the show that do cutouts and removals from places like that. And yeah, they don't get paid enough. That is a skill in itself, really. Yeah.
Hats off to people who can do that because fundamentally they're trying to save a colony. It's really good, a really good practice. Well, and here in the States, there are quite a few States where it's actually become illegal to just call an exterminator to kill them, to just spray them with poison, which is Wonderful that that's illegal, but it's not illegal everywhere. And so there are people that will go and they don't know the difference between bees hornets wasps or whatever.
So they'll just call an exterminator and say just kill it. It's a lot cheaper than paying somebody like Stewart 8 ,000 pounds. You wish to come and remove this big thing. So, you know, hats off to everybody that's saving the bees out there. Absolutely. There's so impressive that that kind of work. And as you say, the economics of it, I mean, killing all the bees and buying a nuke to replace them would be a fraction of the cost. But it's really such a poor thing to
do. And the opposite is a really great gesture that you value insects in that way. I won't be doing it again. Lesson learned and they're not all that big not all of them are as difficult as the one that you're talking about That thing sounds huge. If you have pictures Send me a picture
too. I'd love to see it. Anyway, let's just wrap up with this This show is all about the love of honeybees and I can tell that you have that love Leave us with some kind of great message either of love for the bees or just some good advice Yeah, I mean I've never seen myself to be a sort of professional beekeeper. I'm really interested in honeybees and I'm really interested in just having them and working with them and what I can learn from them. I think if I had
any advice to give is to really... Enjoy working with honeybees, but also we don't we haven't learned everything about them. I would experiment and think about what they're doing and and Yeah trying to improve your beekeeping experience by really getting to know them and maybe not necessarily worry too much about the quantity of of honey you're gonna Get from the hives I'd say even with one hive you can you can sit by the hive entrance and watch them. And you can
just learn so much stuff. I mean, sometimes to the extent that you might not need to open up the hive, you can just see so much from their behavior. And I think for me, apart from swarming, which is just amazing, the watching what they're doing as they're coming and going, what are they bringing back with them? Their behavior is what I really love. And I lied. I have one more question. We'll call it a bonus question. You mentioned that you like filming the bees. Give us an idea
of how you do it. Like what kind of equipment, how hard is it to do? I think some of us that have tried have not done a very good job. So give us some advice on that. Yeah, I started filming my honeybee colonies right from the start. My first approach was to build a brood box with some cutout panels and Perspex sort of inserted so that you could look into the combs. That kind of worked. I was using a conventional camera, a video camera that had quite a good macro lens.
So I could actually zero in on a fairly small area of a comb and record that. I think I had more success with one of these plug -in microscopes. So you can get these kind of low power video microscopes that plug into a USB port in your computer. And what I have done in the past is kind of cover them in sort of cling film or plastic or something and embed them within the hive. If you're thinking about a particular spot you might want to film. In my case, I removed one
of the broodcombs and had the camera. built into a brood frame. Some of these cameras have little LED lighting rings around the lens. So it's actually you've got everything you need there. You've got the camera, you've got your little lighting set up. You can vary the power of the LED lights and then it feeds back into your computer into various apps that can record on that. It's quite a commitment to actually kind of embed a little Micro camera into the hive, but you can get great
results. You're gonna get a really sticky camera when you Yeah, yeah, I'd say that's that's one way to go. I mean some people use observation hives for me that's Interesting, but I don't really I don't have an observation hive and I don't really have anywhere to put it But yeah, I had really good results from this this way of embedding I think the brand is Celestron or something. They make these low -powered microscopes.
And the little cameras, there's all kinds of, we used to call them lipstick cameras because they were about that size. They make them now that are on little, you've probably seen them in some kind of spy movie or something, but I think plumbers and other people use them. They're a little teeny camera on the end of a bendable. Deal and so you can stick them up and in and around but remember you need lights pretty dark in there but another fun experimental thing to
do with your bees. Yeah absolutely and again you might observe things that nobody else's observed it could happen we know their behaviors is really. Quite extraordinary you might. get some really good original video. I like the sound of these little cameras you're talking about they're probably more practical than kind of embedding a video microscope but you know the times have changed and by the sound of it you can get a more appropriate
camera. One thing that you mentioned that is so important is to get some light in there but you can use an external light again if you had a cutout panel in your brood box with a perspex side on it you could bring a light in from the side. feasibly and that would make it a huge difference. I guess if you've got an open mesh floor, you could put a light in from below, but I never tried that. I'm not not sure exactly how that would work, but yeah. They make little
lights. In fact, I have one when I do this podcast remotely sometimes instead of these little studio lights that I have to plug in. They make little LEDs that are about this big that are rechargeable just through a USB port. And I would think you could take off either the inner cover or if you had like a feeder box on top, you could just stick it in there, aim it down, put the cover back on. Beekeepers are smart and they're inventive. Share with us everybody some of the things that
you're using out there. And anyway, Stuart, I will let you go. It's been fun to see you again after seeing you in Copenhagen last fall. And let's do it again sometime. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Eric. And yeah, good luck to everybody out there watching the podcast. 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 Bee 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 Be Love Beekeeping dot 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, eric 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.