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. Well, this is going to be totally different today. By the way, welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping. Normally we start off in the studio,
today we're outside. Our show today is going to focus on the concept of sustainability and beekeeping. And one of the points of that is not having to buy bees. For a lot of people, we're doing splits, we're catching swarms, we're doing swarm removals, we're doing all kinds of things. And I just wanted to tell you about here in my woodshed, I keep equipment. over the winter when there's extra room and there's just various parts and pieces in there and I clean those up
and use them from time to time. And one of the things that I pulled out was a swarm trap that I made just a few years ago and I cleaned it all out, got it beautiful and pristine inside, put some frames inside that had some drawn out comb, put some lemongrass oil in, made it just all perfect. I hung this thing on the perfect spot on the chicken coop and it's, oh by the way, hi chickens, on the chicken coop and it is ready to go and it gets morning sun and there's
not a single bee looking at it. Oh well, they don't come. Let's go back to the wood shed because I had a little surprise yesterday. I have another swarm trap just like that that I didn't clean up. The lid on it's broken. It has old gross comb inside and I didn't do anything to make it nice. I didn't bait it. I didn't hang it up eight feet in the air or anything like that. It's just in this woodshed and yesterday I came out here and I saw some bees flying around. I'm
like what's going on? So I got closer and this old swarm trap that was just on the floor has bees going in and out. No swarm commander, no lemongrass oil, no nothing. It's falling apart and let's just take off the lid and see if anything's going on in here. Uh yeah. So sometimes bees surprise us. They don't do things the way that we ask them to do, but we get some fun surprises. So yeah sure enough a whole swarm moved in there and um and they're just having a good old time
in this old woodshed. making a new home. So that's all part of sustainability, and it's all part of the fun. I love when they surprise us. When we think we're doing everything right, they'll say, oh, you silly beekeeper, just let us do what we want. I'd like to welcome to the show today, Michael Scott, who's coming to us from Indiana, Pennsylvania. That sounds like two states in a row. What's going on there, Michael? It's just meant to confuse people, but it's pretty
effective. You are some kind of an expert on sustainability with beekeeping, and that's going to be our main topic today. I did have one quick question before we jump in. I was just looking at your website and I'm seeing honey that you have for sale. that on one end it is a super, super light amber color, and then you also have some very, very dark honey. Tell me about those. What are your bees foraging on that's making
the differences? Typically what we'll have with the really light honey, like I have three different bee yards that can give something that's really light but Apple would be some of them and I don't get much of that because I have an Apple orchard and you know we've we just lost all of the blossoms
this year because of the cold snap. I have another bee yard that has linden trees and has 150 linden trees and that's a nice light yellow color and if I can time things right where like that one comes into bloom just about the summer solstice and that's also the time that the second swarms come in so it's one of those words hit and miss. But the really big one would be tulip poplar.
And tulip poplar trees, when they go into bloom, the flower you can actually take the flower and do this and shake it and nectar will come out on the ground. And that is our like biggest flow of the season. And that one's the same light golden color. It has kind of a citrusy flavor to it too. It's part of the magnolia family. But it is a really good tasting honey. And you know, having that light colored people aren't used to seeing that they're used to seeing the
just the mid row cloven. When does that come on? When does that flow? That's the tool of poplar. And that happens pretty much at the end of June. You'll have that happening somewhere around June 15th. And that's like During that time, the colonies are just building up like crazy. They can bring in so much nectar, it's unreal. I've noticed that something that's happened recently is that some of my bigger colonies will get honey bound.
And instead of doing what beekeepers were told to do, where you expand, I just let them kind of... Get honey bound and do that with sustainable beekeeping You're looking at brood breaks is one of the things that helps control the mite problem and getting bees to have better winter survival So these large colonies are getting
honey bound. It's giving them a long brood break during what would be like a dearth I mean, we don't I don't think we have a dearth But we have a time where it slows down and it's where you're that in between period of trees and shrubs into the weeds But when they get honey -bound like that, they just basically shut down. During that time, they render the nectar into honey, and then they're right on track for the fall flow.
They have a long brood break, and I have some hives that have been, well, this is the fourth year that they haven't swarmed on me, and they've just done that from being honey -bound. So before we get off this topic, there was the really dark -colored honey. When is that and what's that from? That's knotweed. Knotweed is a, it looks like a bamboo. It grows along stream banks for the most part. It is a really sweet honey, does
not crystallize. And it's in late August, early September, but it is one of the other big flows that we have. And, you know, even though it's an invasive plant, If we didn't have that, I don't know how well our bees would do because that is one of the best honeys that they can get. Not weeding in itself is a medicinal plant and you know you have to wonder if some of that medicinal property doesn't transfer over into
the honey and the nectar. I know in our cabinet where my wife keeps a million and one supplements of every variety. Japanese knotweed is one of them in there. I've seen it. So I believe you on that. Anyway, you had mentioned something about brood breaks. Let's get back to sustainability. When I hear brood breaks for varroa control,
I think of treatment free beekeeping. So if you'd give us just a minute about quote, sustainable beekeeping, and then how does that relate to treatment free and other types of beekeeping? Let's start there. When it comes to sustainable beekeeping, I think you have to look at it from, most people think of it just simply as they don't have to buy bees. And by definition, that would
be accurate, but that's for the individual. And if you look at, for the individual, you could have sustainable beekeeping and still be treating your bees but you're reaching your goal by not having to buy new bees and it still fits the definition. But then you can take it to the other level where it's that you're not just thinking about yourself you're thinking about the bees
and everything around you. So my definition of sustainable beekeeping would be that in the long term your relationship with the bees is better for your bees and the bees that are surrounding you, especially the feral bee population, then it would be if they didn't have that relationship with you. And that's when you're getting into what I think real sustainable beekeeping is.
Now, treatment -free beekeeping is one of those things where by definition, if you decide to do nothing, that is your decision on what treatment you're going to give your bees. That really can't be treatment free because you're making that decision to do it or not. But real treatment free would be, in a sense, sustainable beekeeping, where you've got the area doing so well that you don't have to make a decision to treat or
not. It's that everything is working the way it's supposed to work, the way that nature kind of intended it. And in that, you don't have to treat, you don't have to even think about treating.
So I know a little bit about the term sustainable farming and that concept, which to my understanding, and I probably am not going to abbreviate this very well, but the general idea is you have cows grazing here and they're depositing waste there, which is fertilizer and everything is, you know, it makes it so you don't need to use a lot of chemicals and a lot of fertilizer. And it's just sort of animals and the land. interacting how they're supposed to, how Mother Nature intended.
Right. Is that sort of what we're talking about with sustainable beekeeping? In some ways with the cattle, what they do now is it's called paddock farming. And what they're doing is they're setting
up different small areas. and the cows will go into that area graze it to the point where they're not just eating the things they like they're eating everything and then they move them to the next paddock because in the wild in natural circumstances they would have really large herds that would go into the area eat everything and move on and in that they would like deposit the manure and it would just keep like recycling that would be the sustainability of it all with
beekeeping It's more or less where you kind of have to like you can't really have sustainable beekeeping when you don't have everybody on board with the idea. So where I have isolated yards, I do really well. I have one yard that just lost its first colony in four years and I keep somewhere around eight to nine colonies there every year. That's without doing any kind of chemical treatments.
I actually stopped doing any of the bird breaks that I was forcing, you know, by getting rid of the queen or doing splits, I was just letting them propagate the area. But in that kind of situation, you're not introducing new genetics that aren't really from the area. You're not introducing viruses and bacterias that, you know, like you'll have from commercial yards where they basically can keep the bees alive with those problems and then sort of spread them throughout.
the country every spring whenever people are buying bees. So what I look at with the sustainable beekeeping is that you can only really do it if you're isolated or you get everybody in your area to do the same kind of things that you're doing and to look at it as the bigger picture, not just that these are my bees and I need my bees to live. It's more of you want all the bees in the area to do well. What else is there to it that we should know? I mean I'm thinking like
feeding for example. If it's sustainable I shouldn't be buying sugar and feeding them right? Yeah that's one of those things where too if you need to feed them that means that the feral bee population isn't being taken care of in the same way that your bees are being taken care of. It means that you're over the threshold of what the area can
support. I mean I was looking at some of the posts last year or the year before we had a a kind of dry summer and there were people that were complaining about how there was no nectar flow in the fall and you know weeds pretty much produce nectar all the time even though we had a drought they're still going to be able to do that because they have really deep root systems but then the one person I remember them posting a video of their bee yard and they had 50 colonies
there and it wasn't that that was a dry summer I mean maybe that contributed a little bit to it but It was that they had 50 colonies. They did. But what about the bees that are around? Because I think there's a lot more feral population than people know. And so you have those 50 and you might have another like 10 or 15 more. So you have to look at this from a perspective of every area has a trajectory and every area has a threshold. And you need to be keeping your
bees on that trajectory. where they're ready for the different flows and they have that downtime in the middle of the summer where if they don't have any brood to raise they don't use up the resources. So they can do it with much less honey going into winter like you know having to bring in more and you don't have to feed. The other thing about feeding is that Whenever you do it, it's going to affect the gut microbiome of the
honeybee. So are you really doing something that's good for the bees and trying to prepare them for winter with having more winter stores? Or are you doing more harm by creating a problem with their gut microbiome, which is part of their immune system, right before they go into winter?
I guess another factor too with the feeding aspect is that have colonies that are in my swarm boxes and that's I catch them in those I keep them in those for that first year but these are deep narrow boxes and they get sunlight on all through like on the three sides of the box so the Sun is kind of aiding in the process just like it would in a tree But those colonies are only using about 6 to 10 pounds of honey over the winter
because it's a more efficient system. So when you have people who are using Langstroth boxes still using ventilation, They are trying to get that 150 pounds of honey that they were told to get, not realizing they created a thermal mass in there that's going to get just as cold inside as it is outside because of the ventilation.
Their bees are going to have to work harder to stay warm, and they're going to use up more honey, but at the same time, they're going to use up more of their lifespan, and they have less chance of making it through winter. If you do things in a way where it's more efficient, like the bees are living in nature, there's not that much need for feeding because they aren't really going to need to use that much honey. And they'll come out of winter with plenty of extra honey to get
started for the next year. I feel like I'm so messed up. I don't know. How am I doing everything wrong? Now, I don't feed my bees in the fall. I leave them lots of honey. But in the spring, I get paranoid. Oh, no, are they going to starve now that it's spring? And I tend to feed them then. But I also look, get a little feel for the weight. If you've got a ton of honey, I'm not going to feed you. Why would I feed you?
And people do anyway. And they do anyway. And they know that they have it and they know that it doesn't make sense. But You know, it's like Mark Twain said, it's easier to fool somebody than to convince them they've been fooled. And so once you get something established, getting them to like forget what they learned to learn what they should have in the first place, it's very difficult. There are so many different philosophies on beekeeping. They're just the whole thing about
ask 10 beekeepers, get 11 answers. It is so much worse than that. It just is way beyond. What people don't realize is that if you ask 10 beekeepers a question you get like 11 or 12 different answers. Most of those answers are probably going to be wrong. Quick break to discuss what just might be on your mind. Right now come on admit it.
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.com. Discount code MLBlove10. that's the one thing that you really have to get into your brain that yes there are different ways of doing things but does that mean that it's the best way I mean in anything there's only going to be one best way and that best way is going to be most effective, efficient, successful but there are other ways that you can do it that aren't going to be as good but A lot of people attach to an idea. They join a tribe of beekeepers and whatever the adjective
is that they use, that's their tribe. And a lot of those tribal things, they don't really want you to talk about anything that's outside of the tribe. And whenever they get you really indoctrinated, you're going to defend that to your death. because you just don't want to let go of it. It's become part of your identity. And I think people need to kind of let go of the identity and start putting the bees, the population around them, and the
whole country basically is the goal. You want that to be doing great, not just you doing great or you being acknowledged in your group. And what works for you in Pennsylvania may not work for Mary in Florida. Probably won't in fact. I have different mic different climates five miles apart Like where I am here is going to be ten Maybe fifteen degrees warmer on the cold winter nights than it is five miles away from me So, you know each area is going to take a
little bit of a different turn. It's going to Have the the trees going into bloom at different times So yeah, I mean it's like what happens in pennsylvania isn't going to be the same in north carolina Definitely not in florida But as I said earlier every area has its own trajectory and you have to learn what the trajectory is in your area Now if I can kind of jump on this soap box with you I want to mention when we were formulating this podcast one of the names that
we were looking at was intuitive beekeeping because I'm a big believer on just all these things you've just said how do I know which one to pick which one is going to make sense for me and my bees and somehow we have to get in tune with our bees enough to be able to feel or communicate or in somehow intuitively know this philosophy is going to work for these bees here. Yeah, that's like when I was talking about with the bees getting
honey bound. And, you know, I was using my intuitive sense on that, that they might know what they're doing. I'm not going to expand the space because in the past, I'd expanded before only to find out that all they were going to do is put on more nectar. They weren't going to like. Most beekeepers are putting in more space so they'll raise brood, but they don't, they don't, they're not thinking that way. And just kind of trusting my instincts on it that what are they going to
teach me here? Like, what is it that I'm, I've been missing? And you go by the logic or the
beekeeping aspect. It's like, the other day somebody came up here they just showed up out of the blue it's like are you the beekeeper and i'm like yeah and she said well you know i thought i'd take a ride up and she's from 50 miles away and she had told me that she wants to get into beekeeping and she got certified and and i was like well that's that's great but all you learned about was beekeeping you didn't learn anything about bees and now you're going to have to learn about
the bees and the best way to learn about the bees is to let them teach you Yeah, love it. Alright, the other day when we were chatting, you used the term, and I wrote it down, ethical beekeeping. What is that and how does it fit into all the things we've just talked about? Well, I think that we have to start taking more responsibility for our bees. Not just in that idea that you have to keep them alive, because in keeping them alive, you might be hurting the
rest of the bee population around you. So... You know, that colony that wouldn't have been able to survive winter is now survived winter because you put your individual ideas first and you didn't put the area in that decision making process. But the next year then you'll have weak genetics that are now going to be breeding with the new queens. that would never have had that
chance. It's like this winter we had a really really bad winter and I mean we had a long time with really cold and it took out a lot of the bee population but it took out the weak bees and that in a really strange sense is kind of like a gift from nature. Most people won't look at it that way but it made it to where the viruses and bacterias that were there that were going to contribute to the deaths of the bees died
off with the bees. And if we would have just left it alone at that and let the bees rebuild with the bees that were left and not bring bees in, we wouldn't be bringing in bad genetics that couldn't survive the area. We wouldn't be bringing in the viruses and bacteria. And where we would have had this gift and we would have had better
bees because of the process. Instead, we had lot of people getting bees from out of the area from commercial yards more so than they would in normal years and Instead of things getting way better. It's going to like Take a hit it's gonna make it worse. So we have to look at it from an ethical standpoint. That's Looking at nature and nature doesn't really have the same
kind of discernment. We have it's looking at survival of the fittest It's not survival of my bees If I could just interject something on
the ethics and this is me personally. Everybody has their own set of morals and ethics and one of the things that I read when I was first into beekeeping 12 years ago, it was a book that was put out by a university and I won't name their name but they're in the upper Midwest and their recommendation was in the fall take 100 % of the honey and just let your bees die because they're probably going to die over winter anyway
and next spring buy a new package of bees. That just didn't ring right with me personally, with my personal beliefs of how to do things. I want to at least try to help them get through winter. I don't know if that figures in your ethics,
what do you think of that? Well, I mean if you look back before the removable frames that's what they were doing then too You know that poem a swarm in May is worth a load of hay a swarm in June It was worth a silver spoon the swarm in July is worth it isn't worth a fly You know, that was I think a 17th century poem That was
about how they did beekeeping at that time. They had them in skeps and in the fall they would kill them with sulfur by burning it in front of the hive and they would harvest all the honey and then in the spring they would let swarms come in and the swarm in May would produce honey. Swarm in June would still produce some honey but a swarm that they got in July wouldn't. And people are still using that poem today thinking that a swarm in July is bad but we're in a completely
different set of circumstances now. I can get a swarm in July and get them to survive winter. And if it's a colony that looks like they're not going to make it, sometimes they really surprise you. And it was just because their trajectory was off and you as the beekeeper kind of take that ethical responsibility to learn the trajectory of your area and get them back on the right trajectory so that they can go into the fall the way they should and go into the winter the way they should.
we just have to start looking at things from a more nature kind of way of doing things. I like it. All right my last question on this topic and that is if you could just wave a magic wand for all of the beekeepers in the whole world and say please do your beekeeping this way what would one or two pieces of advice be? That's a good question. I think my first thing would be to never buy bees from out of the state. In
fact, not even out of your area. If you've lost your bees and you aren't going to have any bees until like maybe mid -summer, maybe even next year, like you need to sit on it and wait until that time. You don't have to have bees and that bringing bees in from out of the area is one of the worst things that we are doing and it really just needs to stop. The other thing I think would be that you have to put the bees outside of your area in part of the equation.
You just can't focus on your bees and that your well even just your financial like investment in it or the financial return that you're looking for. I think that's one of the problems that we have is that when we start putting financial things in there we make our decisions differently and poorly. Alright, let's switch topics a little bit. Let's talk about, and I warned you of this, I would love to hear a wild and crazy beekeeping story from Michael. Can you think of one? Yeah,
yeah. When I started beekeeping, and that was 12 years ago, just like you, I had a friend that started at that time too. Now this friend, he at that time rode a bicycle and had a cart that he pulled behind on his bicycle. He was an interesting
character. I had been talking to him because I had a mentor at the time, an older gentleman who was like in his 90s, and I wasn't really learning much from him, but he was going to help me with a B removal that I had been watching for, like it was an old garage that I was gonna do my first removal with. And every day he was like, oh, it's just not right, it's just not right. And so finally I was like, okay. It's
getting late. I'm just I just need to do it and I told my friend that it's like I'm just gonna I'm gonna have to do this on my own and When I got back from lunch, there's my friend with his bicycle and his cart and all of his B stuff and he's like, let's go I'm like I didn't mean
today and and like but Alright, let's go. And so we went there didn't really have the tools for this didn't really know What we were getting into I mean between the two of us We still didn't have enough knowledge to attempt this and I really don't recommend it But you know it was like these bees Would move into this wall every year and they would die every year because it was a garage that had lost its roof And it was just too exposed and I was like it has to be done And so we got
out there had some like hand tools because we didn't have any electric there I had a smoker and at that time all I had were gloves and a
veil. and I'd been watching these bees for a long time so they were always really pretty gentle and I just I'd never been stung I would just sit there and watch them and watch them and and so I did my first kind of cut and got the board ready and and as I pulled that first board off and it made that snap now I didn't know that that snap is something that can trigger them and this really gentle colony of bees went into ballistic mode and I didn't have any idea that
this would happen or could happen or what to do and I know that there are lots of other beekeepers that have done this and it's that run where you're slapping your legs and you're running like this and if you had a video of you like doing the run with the slap trying to get the bees that are like getting you everywhere on your legs and as I got like about 50 yards away they're still attacking me so I'm down on the ground doing the drop and roll and I finally it was
like I got them off and then went back because it's like, okay, we're going to do this. And we finished the removal, but we didn't get the queen. The queen was still up there and I didn't know any better at the time of what to do and how to just like, you know, grab them and put them into the other box. And so instead of just like kind of letting them stay up there on their own, what I did was I built an insulated wall and I put that up for them as opposed to the
boards that were up there before. And then I put insulation on the other side and that colony rebuilt and they were in there until they tore the garage down. So that's my story. I like it. That's unusual enough. And I have a term that I use for that running and slapping. We call it flailing. Flailing because all body parts are just kind of running and flapping all over the place. Yeah, it's it's pretty it's kind of like the Tahitian dancing. Yeah, where everything
is like shaking all at once. And by the way, the bees love that, do they? Because they yeah, it makes it easier to find where I want to stay. And by the way, if some gigantic monster of a of an animal came and cut the side of my house and then ripped a whole wall off, I would attack him too. So I can't blame the bees at all for how they behave in these kinds of situations. Yeah, and I'm quite like I was like yesterday I had a removal and it was one where I got stung
one time and that was just my fault. I had like grabbed onto something and the bee was under it. It does amaze me sometimes that They're fine. Like even when you use a chainsaw on a tree, you know, like the tree is dropped and you're using this chainsaw and you'd think that they'd all go ballistic on you and they they don't come out. And then other days you open the lid and they're just going to kill you. Some guard bees really know how to do their job. That's for sure.
We're just about out of time. I looked at some of the things that you created on your website, which is thethrivinghive .com, and I'd recommend people go over there. Can you take just a minute or two to talk about your Renaissance hive and what it looks like and how it works? What I was doing, because I've been doing bee removals for 12 years now, I noticed that there are a lot of things that are going to be kind of like...
Universal in the way that bees build and if it's not the way that it's universally done There's usually a really good reason why they've done it differently So they they are looking at the way that the Sun is hitting everything and how they can use that as a thermal mass like for instance typically you're going to have Your brood close to the entrance when you do a removal.
So let's say you have a floor space and that floor space The entrance is right on the outside of the building and there will be brood right there in the front and then everything that's behind that will go into honey. One time and only one time that I ever see where the brood wasn't by the entrance and it was a brick house and that's because the entrance was right by the brick house and it would have been harder
for them to manage the temperature. that because of the brick being absorbing the sunlight all the time, you can kind of gauge things as well. What's the purpose of it by looking at those two different things? So the Renaissance hive was just the idea that if the bees were going to build a box using a Langstroth frame, how would they do it? And that's kind of how I build it. And I started looking at, OK, how big are
the colonies that I do removals from? How do you make that kind of space better for them? And how do you make more thermal mass? Like, the roof of the box sticks out just far enough where it shades the whole box during the, like, heat of the day. So, like, if you face the box towards the south, and this was actually based off the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi Indians. I had read a book about it years ago and how
they utilized that. And so you create shade during the summertime, but whenever the sun is low in the wintertime, the box, I paint mine black and it's absorbing more heat. And I have it set up in a way where it actually kind of is able to move that heat through the box through channels.
so that it's heating down below the box or below the hive so it gives them a few extra degrees depending on what the outside temperature is but if you add that few extra degrees up over like the course of the winter that can make a big difference also having the two entrances and having them on each side and having the frames going in the way where they're able to like defend
the hive better. It also is allowing the airflow to go much better so that they usually will be using one entrance to go in and out of and the other entrance to blow air in or blow air out so they can regulate the temperatures better. So that's kind of the basics of the Renaissance Box. Super interesting. Anyway, Michael Scott, I appreciate it. We need more beekeepers like you in the world. Well, thanks. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love,
Be Keeping presented by Manlite. Another big thank you goes to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Hey thanks a lot guys. And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeKeeping .com to sign up for
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