May I have your attention please? The following is not the real Jeff Vox really. If you have more pictures of bees on your phone than pictures of your kids, you might be a beekeeper. If once a year your kitchen becomes sticky from floor to ceiling, you might be a beekeeper. If when you get stung by a bee, you apologize because you did something wrong, you might be a beekeeper. Welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping Podcast presented by our friends over at Man Lake.
At Bee Love we're all about the honey bees and of course the beekeepers. Before we jump into our interview today with Patrick Hardy, an emergency and disaster professional and master beekeeper from California, we have a brand new segment we're just calling Did You Know? We know that honey bees are amazing. On today's Did You Know segment we're going to throw out seven fun facts about these beautiful creatures. Keep track of how many you already know.
Alright, here we go. Did you know that ancient Romans used to throw hives of bees into enemy camps? Or that the words bomb and bee both have the same Latin origin? Did you know that a honey bee can fly up to 15 miles per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second? Did you know that one ounce of honey would fuel a bee's flight all the way around the world? Did you know that a pound of honey is made by two million flower visits?
Did you know that honey bees have super senses of smell because they have 170 odorant receptors? Whatever those are. Did you know that honey bees can do basic math and understand the concept of zero? They can even recognize odd and even numbers. And did you know that a strong colony of around 60,000 bees flies the equivalent distance from the Earth to the Moon every day? Alright, how did you do? Now let's go out to California and our interview with Patrick Hardy.
I would like to welcome to the show today Patrick Hardy coming to us from California, Northern California. How are you Patrick? I'm good. Thank you very much for having me today. By the way, did I say Harding? I meant to say Hardy. Yeah, happens all the time. Yes, it's HRDY. When I was growing up, my mom was a big mystery fan and my mother's name is Nancy. And she used to read the Nancy Drew mysteries when she was young and then she married a man with the last name of Hardy.
And so now she's like, it's like we have Emma and it's my brother and I. So it's like we're the Hardy boys and she's like Nancy Drew. So that's how we tell people to remember it. Or Laurel and Hardy or something. But anyway, apologies for that. Not at all. Patrick Hardy, we're going to cover a couple of things today. But the first one is what's really timely right now. And that is we've had these horrible fires going on in Southern California.
And the human tragedy and everything else is terrible. But we want to talk about the beekeeping side of it because there is a beekeeping side of it. And being in California, I know you're not in that area, but tell us what you know about it and how we can all help. Yeah, what I know about it is so far and I can give an update as of today is that there are a number of beekeepers.
I would provide an exact number for today, but I don't want to do that until probably we're in the disaster recovery phase. But right now we have a number of beekeepers who have essentially lost everything. They've had obviously hives destroyed. They've lost tools. They've lost suits. They've lost foliage. They've lost everything.
And if you look at the pictures, it gives you a good idea because it looks like a bomb's gone off and that their entire areas that are just been clear cut as a result of the wildfire. So that's what we know so far. We're looking into future weeks that there, well, I should say, first of all, this weekend, we are looking at more Santa Ana winds, high winds, unprodictively moving into different directions.
But we're hoping that within a couple of weeks or so we should start to see a basic decline in the spread of the fire so the containment levels should go up. I've been an emergency and disaster professional for 20 plus years and I actually worked in this area and I actually currently have clients there as well. So I will be traveling there in just a few days to talk with clients.
One of the things that I sort of discovered is that because there's been so and so much clear cutting as a result of the wildfire, we know that there are still going to be evacuations. There's still going to be red flag warnings even in even pushing into Southern California down past Los Angeles. So that's one of that. That's really where we're at right now. At some point I would think within the next couple of weeks we're looking at a disaster recovery phase. Okay. Tell me about B-platoon.
What is that? I created a B-platoon. I founded it. I was matriculating through the California Master Beekeeper program and you have to do a capstone project. And they said, what would your capstone project be on? And I said, I want to create a disaster team that is specifically devoted to helping both beekeepers as well as first responders. So actually having a team that is familiar with disaster protocols that can be deployed. And so we're doing it in a few phases.
We have the capability to do preparedness. And that's really one of the things that we're really interested in, which is doing education, doing training. We're actually going to be training first responders. I've contacted, I've been in contact with some folks up north in a few states who have asked if I would actually come up and train EMS professionals. I used to be one myself in Southern California.
And in fact, I worked in many of the areas that actually are currently affected by the wildfires. So I'm very familiar with it and I still have a home in Southern California as well. Thankfully that is untouched. But we do preparedness around the country. So we plan on doing training. That's something we're doing in the spring. I'm going out to Missouri to do a training with first responders. I'm going to the East Coast.
I'll be presenting in Connecticut and working with and just developing the basic groundwork. So, and then the second plank of what we do is response. So we're literally going to be, I anticipate within the next year, we should be able to acquire a truck so that we can assist in evacuations. We can actually assist in moving hives and moving and being able to transport them when a disaster occurs.
Also in the response phase, we also deal with times when there's not a disaster where a truck overturns and then there's bees all over the road. I remember being a first responder. Matter of fact, I used to be a paramedic instructor, actually taught paramedics and EMTs on how to respond. And honeybees were never covered. We never talked about that. We never talked about how to deal with an unusual emergency like this.
I was even a hazardous materials guy and we never talked about dealing with insects on the road. So these policies are so important in the response phase and that's the capability we plan to be able to provide with team members. So we have people who have volunteered all over the country right now. We have volunteers in about 24 states. So we're really excited. So almost half. And I anticipate by the end of the year that we will have almost every state.
So I'm really excited about the capabilities because then we will have people there who first responders can access if there is a response emergency or if there is an anticipated disaster. So we have a hurricane. People have to evacuate and we have people going out who can assist those who otherwise can't help themselves because we have to remember these are not just, you know, we're not talking about all these organizations, not, you know, massive conglomerates. These are small businesses.
These are people who have these in their backyards and so we have to try to help them and give them those resources that they need to be successful. And then the third phase in which is what we're really talking about here at the California wildfires is disaster recovery. So afterward being able to help replace high boxes and tools and suits and doing all those things. And that's really one of the things that I have been planning and working on.
And that's the thing we're going to do in late February. It's going to depend on conditions, so I don't want to provide a precise date, but based on that we do plan on going down there. I will actually be picking up the keeping supplies from up and down California. I have a couple of you halls myself and a colleague of mine. And we're going to fill it up and we're going to take it down to Los Angeles and then we're going to be able to deliver it to beekeepers who need them.
That's really going to be the most important thing. And so today people who are listening to this, if you want to help support this, what we're looking for are people throughout California who are interested in donating supplies of any kind to help us to be able to replace those. Because I was talking to the Los Angeles beekeepers, Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, and they're going to provide me with a spreadsheet of needs. This will be in the coming weeks.
It's not going to be immediate. We don't have that list for maybe two, three weeks, maybe even as much as a month. And then once we get that, then I'm going to, with a colleague, we'll be going up and down California to grab supplies and then deliver them to Los Angeles and do one big disaster recovery day. And that's going to be really exciting.
We also have a GoFundMe page because we want to be able to provide some supplies that otherwise you can't get donated so we can assist in recovering the foliage that is also destroyed and it's so necessary to keep our pollinators healthy. I love seeing somebody actually doing something. We're all watching the news. And by the way, this is being recorded January 15th, 2025. For those that are listening weeks or months later, there's going to be a whole lot of hindsight going on.
Yeah. At that point. But right now it's so fresh and so early. And we all sit around going, oh man, I wish I could help those people. And it's so good, Patrick, to see somebody that's actually doing something about it. And I know it's very early on and we're going to circle back with you in a month or so and learn more about how it went and all of that kind of thing. One thing that stuck out to me that you mentioned a minute ago is preparedness.
And I wonder if that also includes some prevention. And let me just throw something out. And this may be, if it's off topic, just tell me to shut up. That's okay. But I'm in Utah. It's super dry here and come July, August, September. I mean, we have wildfire season here also. And I often get thinking, okay, I've let this tall grass grow up around my hives and kind of a rural area. It's dry. It's brown. I've got a smoker that's lit.
If that thing tips over off the hive stand, it's going to light a fire so fast. I'm not going to be able to do anything about it. So those things have always been in the back of my mind. I need to do better at clearing that area. There are times that I simply don't use a smoker because I just don't feel like it's safe. Any other thoughts on prevention or other kinds of preparedness? Absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned that because I do advise people on what we call mitigation and prevention.
So we do things to mitigate the disaster as well. And that really assists and helps people in understanding how we can prevent these things from spreading. In addition, I also look at hives stands and hives boxes and I say, are these placed in ideal locations? Can we move them? Because they can be very heavy, especially with a honey super, right? These things can be very, very heavy.
But sometimes I say, sometimes we have to move them because there are particularized hazards and it could make things worse because you're absolutely right. I knocked over, as a matter of fact, I was working, I work a lot in the wine industry. So I work with a lot of vineyards in my capacity as a disaster consultant. And in agriculture, one thing I was kind of joking around with one of the ventures and he was telling me, he was saying, you know, I want you to look out that window.
And we looked out the window and there was a passive vineyard. It was all dry brush. And he said, you know, if I took a match and I lit a match out there, no one would know that a wildfire had started until about five acres had burned. Not one person would see it. Not one, because we don't have, we don't have a fire watch there. There's no fire. I know that you see that on TV. That's not the case in most counties that I've ever heard of.
And so what will end up happening is literally five, six, seven, eight, nine acres will burn before anyone sees it. And then all of a sudden, if you have the winds, it starts to pick it up more and more. So you're absolutely right. It's the mitigation portion of it that ensures that we actually can prevent these things from occurring. But there's also basic preparedness steps. One of the things I tell people is you've got to have fire extinguisher, right?
So these are things that these are basic prevention measures as well. It's actually places where I say, actually have a bucket of water out. If you start a small fire, because then that helps to immediately, um, Sanctuinated and then, and then you're at a place where it's extant, Extinguished and it doesn't create any additional threats or hazards. When you get a scare, you really think about it. Three summers ago, we had a wildfire that came right across the street from the end of my driveway.
So it's about a hundred yards or so from my house, 150 yards. And I'll tell you what, it really gets you thinking, okay, we got evacuated, all that sort of stuff. I have some beehives here on my home property, my five acres. And there was nothing I could do. I did not have time to load them up, move them. You know, we were just looking at, okay, let's throw some photographs and computer hard drives and things in the car and the dog and get out of here.
And so, so you leave going, I hope they're okay when I get back. I hope they're, you know, those boxes aren't burned up and stuff. And that is not a pleasant feeling. So we want to prevent that as much as we can, obviously. All right, enough about the depressing stuff. Let's talk about some fun beekeeping. Okay, you're a master beekeeper in Sacramento, correct? What is it like keeping bees there? Well, I actually can't keep bees directly on my property.
So I actually had a mentor who I went through, who helped me through the program as I was matriculating through the master beekeeper program and he keeps my hives for me. It's really a great experience. I actually, actually lived in a place called Lompoc, California. You ever been, you ever been down to the two Santa Barbara, Eric? Okay, so like Lompoc's a little farther north because I worked near the Air Force Base. There it's right by Vandenberg Air Force Base.
And so I was doing a lot of swarm work because where I lived, once again, you couldn't actually keep bees. There was a local ordinance and weirdly enough, even though Lompoc is called the Valley of Flowers, you'd think you'd be able to keep bees, but literally in the subdivision I lived in, in the village, you couldn't keep them. So one of the things I would do is I did a lot of swarm work. And as a result, because I am a consultant, I travel so often.
It's a little bit of a different experience than with other people because I have a great person who helps, you know, maintain the health of the bees. And I come by a couple of times a week, he gave me a key and I can actually get into his backyard area and I can actually manage the bees.
But it's really fun because I actually get to maintain them myself versus just handling swarms because the way I used to do it was I'd get a swarm, I put them in a bee box and I'd be calling beekeepers and saying, you know, would you like a swarm? And that's what I would do. I would take them there because that's really the genesis of all this was as a swarm responder. So how does the weather affect your beekeeping?
With the bees that you do keep, I mean, winters are pretty mild, summers are really hot, right? Really hot. Yeah, over 100 degrees. Yes, you have to be really careful so you have to put them in certain kinds of overhangs. You can't just leave them out where we are. So maintaining the temperature is important, ensuring obviously Varroa is an issue. So, you know, making sure we're, you know, we're watching for that as well. So those are all the kinds of hazards I'm always concerned about.
Actually, this winter we've had, I don't know if you've known that, but in this part of the winter, it's actually gotten rather cold. It's gotten much colder than it has in previous years. So that's actually a consideration as well. And it doesn't help that I've been doing so much traveling. So I've been calling my mentor saying, you know, hey, can you do this? And he goes, oh, don't worry, I'm watching him.
And so it really helps because, you know, when I'm able to go back, he's able to give me a report. Here's what's been going on. Here's the health of the bees. So in the winter, is it most of the time warm enough though that they can get out in forage, but is there any forage? They can. Where he lives, there actually is a lot of forage. Luckily, one of the things that I have done when I've been working with beekeepers north of Sacramento is that sometimes there's not a lot of forage.
If you remember, we had the campfire up north and there were a series of different fires. There was the August complex fire. We had, you know, as I said, we had the campfire up there. We had other fires. And so as a result, you have entire clear cut areas. Now, luckily, there's not a lot of people who live out there. So it's a little bit of a difference. You have to buy pollen patties. You have to do those kinds of things. Otherwise, you just, I mean, it just isn't anything.
Now, where he is, there actually are a number of gardens in the area and he actually has a, and he, of course, he has his own hives. And so he has a pretty active garden. So we make sure that there are flowers out and you make sure that there's, and I, and I ask him about it. I say, you know, if I need to provide something artificially, I will do that. So that's, that's pretty much how I want to handle it as much.
It's, it's a little bit different for me, as I said, but I'm always really careful about ensuring that, you know, when I go out there, I'm, you know, that we're trying to ensure that good health to be as much as we can, especially even if you have a busy lifestyle. I get it. Let me just take a minute here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. I've been asked, does Man Lake provide equipment for commercial beekeepers? Yes. Do they provide equipment for side liners? Yes.
How about beginners? Of course. Protective gear? Yes. Queens, nukes and packages? Yes. Processing equipment? Yes. Yes. And yes. There is a reason that Man Lake is the number one supplier for thousands and thousands of beekeepers. In fact, I could give you a hundred reasons to try them, but let's start with just 10. As in $10 off your first $100 purchase with the discount code MLBLOV10. Don't worry, it's all in the show notes. Seriously, you'll be happy you gave Man Lake a try.
And now back to the guest. So I've seen videos of a beekeeper in Texas that does swarm removals and it all looks so beautiful and lovely. And the bees are always well behaved and you don't need protective gear or anything. Is that what you do, Patrick? You mean like going out without a uniform on or without a suit on? No, no, no, no, no. And I will tell you this, I see this all the time on TikTok. I see this on YouTube far, far too much.
Way too many people who are responding to swarms and they're not trained and they go out there and they're not wearing anything. You know, they're not even wearing or they're barely wearing a veil. I saw a guy on YouTube and I actually ended up contacting him because he was cutting into someone's home and he was actually cutting a hole out of the side of the house.
And he didn't even have a veil on. And when he was talking to the camera, he was saying things like, you know, I know how bees behave. I've been doing this for four generations. I know how how bees are going to do things. And I said, and I think to myself, that is an invitation for problems. When I supervised swarm responders, I ended up at my at my peak, I was supervising about 20 to 25 swarm responders.
And they were people who went all over the central coast because the central coast is a bread basket for California. We have almonds, we have avocados, we have, you know, broccoli, we have all kinds of stuff. We have obviously I mentioned flowers earlier, you know, we have obviously there's wineries. There's a ton of agriculture there. So when we would go out there, I would tell my responders, you've got to wear a B suit at a minimum.
And I'll tell you why I came into that, Eric, because when I was a when I was a hazardous materials guy, we learned very, very early that until you what we call characterize the chemical, you need to assume that it is going to be much worse than you think. So you should always over protect than under protect. So when I go and I approach a swarm, I assume I don't want this to be doom and gloom and blood and guts. But I always think to myself, there's a swarm that could kill me.
I think that all the time that is the assumption I make. And that's what I tell beekeepers all the time. I say, because it only takes once. It only takes one time to make a mistake. And then something's going to happen. When I was a medic, I can't say the number of times I dealt with people who were beekeepers, who they got overwhelmed by bees or what also happens. I tell this to swarm responders, people I see online, they're doing swarm response and they're not blocking the area off.
There's people walking by. There's kids walking by. Kids get interested in this stuff. I've had a swarm response where I was near an elementary school and some of the kids were walking close. And I literally learned after that I'm going to block these areas off so nobody gets close because I don't want the bees stinging them. I don't want it because then that creates a bigger problem.
So one of the things I say to people is I say, you need to treat the bees like they're hazardous material because they are. I mean, they're hazardous material. You just have to treat them in a way that you're going to assume they're going to injure you more, not less. And then you will never, ever, ever be in a position where you are overwhelmed.
I actually saw a really, really great video from, it was a guy from the New Jersey Beekeepers Association and he was handling a highly, highly defensive swarm. I have never seen a swarm that defensive than the one that he showed and it had 6 million views, something like that. So I may, maybe even 7 or 8 at this point, but it was a couple of years I saw this thing. And it was incredible because he took unbelievable steps to protect himself.
But one of the things I noticed is he still got stung multiple times because he didn't do something that actually I do. And I know that some people think it's overkill, but I don't. I actually tape my glove over my suit so that there's no way that a bee can actually slip into the sleeve because that's actually what was happening to him. I have actually responded to swarms that were highly defensive before in Orange County, California.
When I happened to be out there, I went home in a place called Mission Viejo and there are big swarms and they are very defensive. There's a lot of defensive genetics there, a lot. And so I was dealing with a swarm as a favor to a colleague, a place called Irvine, which is just a little north of there. And when I went there, that was a very, very defensive swarm. They had covered the side of a house. So you have to be really careful.
So Eric, when I see a lot of these videos online, what I tell people is, as I say, I was as a zero-global thing for a long time. Even then, I'm always careful. I'm always assuming that it's worse than it's going to be because then I can back down. It's easier to go down and take a step downward than to try to go upward. And plus, besides the fact is that you get hurt by something, you may not be able to get back.
Now, it's different with bees, but you don't want to walk onto a defensive swarm without protection. And I also, I get very, very sensitive when I see people who are doing theatrics with swarms, they do things that they think are funny or they think are interesting. And I tell people, these are serious business and these are insects that we need to protect. And so we need to make sure we're using the right tools and equipment and things, and those are the things that are important.
It doesn't mean yet that professional bee boxes every time. If you can have a cardboard box, that's fine, but you do need to take the necessary protections for yourself and for the people around you. I appreciate that message. I think it needs to get out there. You're also in an area, especially Southern California where there's a lot of Africanized genetics, so there's going to be a lot of defensive behavior going on.
And the thing that people that don't know beekeeping don't see about those videos is that those people that go in there completely unprotected, they probably first off camera went in like what you're talking about, fully suited up, got an idea, okay, oh, this particular swarm, they are just lovely little girls and they're in a good mood today. So I can go ahead and do this stuff. People don't see that. And then they end up in the ER and that just worries me so much that there's too much of that.
It worries me too, Eric, and I'll tell you why. It's not even the experienced beekeepers I worry about. I mean, sometimes I do because sometimes I think they get a little overconfident and then they walk into a scene. But the smart ones know, I put on a suit, I'm going to check it out because that's really what professional swarm responding is really about because you're not an entomologist for the most part.
And even then, there is no way to look at them and say, okay, automatically I know they're going to behave like this. I know they're going to behave like that because I've seen swarms that seemed really docile and then something will happen and they get agitated by something and they will swarm just like that. So it's as well what I also worry about and I have seen this, this happens a lot is that people who are younger who are, you know, they're inexperienced beekeepers.
They've not been around bees. They don't understand their behavioral characteristics. They don't understand the idiosyncrasies and you and I know when I say idiosyncrasies, what I mean by that because bees have a, there is a very specific way that they can respond to swarm responders because, you know, they don't know you ultimately, right? They don't understand what you're trying to do even though they don't realize it, but you're trying to help them in reality. They don't know those things.
But one of the things I do is I see people who are not experienced. They go, that person in Texas, he did it and he didn't have anything on. He was just wearing a t-shirt and jeans and a pair of boots. That's all I need. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a bee brush. I'm going to go pull out an old cardboard box and I'm going to go and take care of swarms in the area and they go on next door or when these apps have seen that before.
They'll go on these apps and say, listen, I'll go ahead and do this because they mean well, right? They want to either collect bees so that they can have them for themselves or they want to create a really great video on their own and then people get hurt that way. I've actually seen this in Riverside, California, which is also a very active area for swarms, very, very, very active.
After the fires, our first deployment as Beepletoom, we actually went out and assisted some first responders because they ran across a massive swarm of bees on a tree and they literally couldn't get past it. The hand crew actually couldn't get past the tree because the swarm was that defensive. We went out there, I was wearing my full suit and it took a while because they were battling me. They did not want to go.
That was why when I see some of these things online and with some beekeepers, I turn to them and go, you understand this is just not responsible behavior. Not because you don't know, just like I think actually, Eric, I like your theory because I have a feeling you're probably right.
I think that probably is what they're doing, which is they go in, they know what these bees, they're either characterized or they're a split from one of their own colonies, they know, and then they know how they're going to behave. Instead, you have people who have no idea about bee physiology, no idea about bee behavior or idiosyncratic characteristics of bees, and then they get stung.
When I was a medic, I can't tell you the number of times I saw kids who were fooling around with swarms and they got stung and it was their very, very first time of getting stung. I think you know where I'm going with this. Sometimes it meant anaphylaxis. Sometimes it meant that they would get a moderate reaction, they would get high, excuse the pun, but they would get hives.
Or what would happen is that they would get stung 10 or 15 or 20 times and it doesn't matter whether you ran anaphylactic or not, when you're a 10-year-old and you get stung 10, 15, 20 times, that can be a serious emergency. Yeah, and kids get stung on the face and then they got stung on the face a few times and then they'll freak out. You know how it is, it's also psychological, right? Because then they'll get nervous.
Yeah. They're, they're hard, we'll start pumping, they're already pumping, their heart's already pumping faster than most adults and now it's even more because they're afraid and then there's more venom coursing through their veins and the impact is much higher. So that's one of the things I tell people when you look at these swarm videos, remember, my mom used to say this when I was a little kid and you know what, it's true today. Don't believe everything you see on television.
Well, and that reaction you're talking about, as you know, it also gets the bees more excited. Absolutely. And more aggravated and more in attack mode. Do you recommend that every beekeeper has an epipan around? I do. I believe that even if you are someone who is that, that you're characterized, in other words, you've been stung before and you know what that, you're not going to have an immediate anaphylactic reaction.
That means nothing because years later you get stung again and you could have an anaphylactic reaction. I mean, I've seen this before too. As I said, there are people who will have those, though, they'll get some kind of cardiac condition or they'll get some kind of other condition. And for one reason or another, there's something about the body's physiology that has now changed. And now if you get stung, something could absolutely happen.
And in addition, you could be, I mean, for example, I've been on bee yards before where I saw 10, 20, 30 people there. And that's not even counting admin workers. This is a commercial operation. And then you have people who are admin people, you have people walking around. These are things where, and we were in rural areas. I don't know where you are in Utah, but I've been in California in areas where an EMS truck was 15, 20 minutes away, easy.
Not even like, and that's assuming here, because here's the other thing. That's assuming the ambulance can get right up to you. That is assuming they're able to drive in a straight line in a sense, in sort of a metaphorical sense, and get right to you and jump out and immediately assess you. Because whenever an EMS professional shows up on scene, the first thing they got to do, they got to assess the scene because they're not going to get stung.
I've actually seen this before where they were demanding EMS professionals to go out in the bee yard. EMS professionals would refuse. They would say, no, they're not going out there. And they'd say, you have to, we cannot move this person. He's 285 pounds. And the EMS professionals goes, well, we're not going out there until all the bees are done. They go, we have 50, 60 high boxes here. We can't move them. And then now that becomes a problem because now you have to drag the person out.
And that creates a huge problem. So that's another tech talk timing. So these are the things that can sometimes be hurried and sometimes others. So one of the things I also say to people is I say, listen, if you have a big bee yard, if you are out in the middle of nowhere, do yourself a favor and do whatever you can. If it's safe, if it's safe, and if the 911 operator says so, move the victim as close as you can.
If you can't do that, you need to make room so that the EMS professionals can go right in and you have to move bees away. You can't have active bees flying around. They're going to look for swarm activity. When I train EMTs, I tell them there are certain cloud characteristics in bees forms you need to look for. Because I've seen this before where the little show up and there's like a cloud of bees. And I'll say, you know, there's things you need to look for.
And that means you need to stay back. You need to stay away until you have characterized it because there's no point to you getting stung too. There's no point to that because you and I both know, I mean, everybody's beekeeper knows, you get stung once, that ceremony is now released. You know what I mean? And then you're going to get stung more and more. And then you can smell that banana oil in sort of extreme situations.
Like I've seen that before where someone got their bee suit stung like, you know, 500, I'm sorry, not 550 to 200 times by a defensive swarm. And you could smell the banana oil. I mean, it smelled like someone had dumped banana oil on them. I mean, that's how bad it was. So that's the reason why I think an EpiPen is a wonderful idea. I believe that every apiary should absolutely have one and you do have to replace them.
Soon as they become cloudy or when the expiration date occurs, you need to replace them. But I believe that that is a necessary cost of doing business. So I'm glad you mentioned that because I completely agree with you. And I think that when you don't have that, you're putting yourself in a position for something to get much worse than it otherwise would. All right, we've talked about all the scary stuff. Time to get away from that. What do you find that you just love about bees?
In college, I was a political scientist. And one of the things that I did was I really enjoyed the study of human organization and governance. So and I really wanted to be an international relations specialist. I ultimately wanted to be a professor. That's really what I wanted to do before I became an emergency manager and then an entrepreneur and all that because I love the way that people organize each other. How they organize their governments, how they organize their cultures and societies.
And so and I wanted to examine better ways of doing that. And one of the things that fascinates me about bees is their organization, how they do diffusion of labor, how they are able to within a new social environment determine who's going to do what and ensure that there is this sort of machination of ensuring that everything runs smoothly year after year after year. And there's so much and I'm going to use the human word. There's so much turnover.
And by turnover, we mean, you know, the bees die, right? And even when the new bees come out, you have to have a kind of continuity of ensuring that there is an adequate diffusion of flavors that they know these bees are doing this. And then you have the scout bees and then you have the guard bees and then you've got the bees that are the crypting bees, the ones that sort of take the dead bees out.
So, you know, these are all things that they do and they maintain that incredible organizational pattern. And I actually read a great book that was written by an entomologist and he was talking about how bees and the way that bees organize themselves can instruct and improve the way the humans do it because they have a certain way of behaving. That's very different. So that's really that that's something that fascinates me and something that I really enjoy and I buy a lot of books.
I look online all the time for books about how bees and their use and their use social behaviors are unique because because there's so much research being done in the area and certain universities and certain scholars. And so I always like to read that stuff because I find that just so interesting is how they're able to organize themselves into a single cohesive unit. You can name that one book if you want to. Absolutely. It's called Honey Bee Democracy and it's written by Thomas Sealy.
It's on Amazon. I highly recommend it. It is very, very interesting and talks a lot about how they have created this sort of democratic structure. And by democratic, I don't mean Democrat versus Republican. I mean Democratic as in a democracy. How they determine who is going to be doing what, how they ensure that they have the right balance. And so those are things that are all very, very important in that in the end he was talking about how bees ultimately make decisions collectively.
It's not one bee making all these decisions. They do that collectively and he said how do they do that? How do they communicate? How do they make these decisions? And he creates a very clever answer. And so it's a it's a wonderful book. I'd recommend it to anybody. Oh, you've read it. Oh, yeah, I've read it. It's definitely worth reading. And I think he refers to the word democracy because as the scout bees go out looking for a new place to live, they come back.
They pitch their place and then everybody sort of votes on it. And the cool thing is, and if we could only do this in our society, once they have voted, they all agree. Okay, we will all jump on board. We will accept that person's decision and we will all go there. And it is that decision making calculus that ensures that they've all considered everyone's quote unquote opinions or their perspectives, right? Because every every bee because of what they do is very different.
They each have their own perspective. This is best for us versus this is best for us. And then in the end, that choice still has to be made and there has to be an ultimate decision. Just like there has to be an ultimate finality in any democratic choice. So I'm glad you've read that book. I have the other one here to the lives of bees, which is also a wonderful book. But hey, Tom, you're going to owe us something for this big plug in your books. I'll ask him for a royalty.
But no, he's very well respected. Everybody knows who Tom Sealy is in. And anyway, okay, before we wrap up, I'm going to give you a chance to tell us some kind of wild and crazy beekeeping story you've had. And doing swarm removal, you probably have a thousand of them. But tell me one or two that stand out to you. I was living in Lompo, California, which is near Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I got a call and they said, you know, we have a swarm. Will you go ahead and help us out?
And I said, sure, I'd be happy to come out. And they gave me the address. So I showed up, I knocked at the door and I did the usual thing. And I said, you know, is it, I assume it's in the backyard, right? Or it's somewhere in the yard here somewhere. I don't see them, but I assume there's some is on where. And she said, no. And she opened the garage door. And there they were inside a Mercedes Benz on the back seat. The bees had covered the entire back seat of the car.
And literally this, this Mercedes was, I mean, this had to be an $80,000 Mercedes. It isn't just like, like one of the, you know, the line once it was like a really nice car and they'd maintained it. And it was obviously waxed and everything. And the thing had had bees all over it. I'd never seen that many bees before get into the inside of a car. And just at the end of it, after I had collected all the bees, I asked the owners, I said, can you think of anything that would have happened?
And they had no idea. And then we finally determined after I sort of asked them some questions that one of them was using a perfume that was very attractive to bees. And so what, and so that's a theory. I mean, we have no idea for sure, but that it was all over the seats because you could actually smell it. So I have a feeling they somehow got in through there and it just covered the back seat of this incredibly expensive car. So that was one.
The other one was I was, I was doing a swarm removal and I got a call out to go to a gun range. The gun range had had a swarm and one of the, one of the people who was paying to be on the range accidentally shot the hive, shot the hive that was there and there was an immediate swarm. And so you have all these guys well armed, ran into the building, close themselves off and you could see the bees banging into the window. That's how much they wanted to get at them.
Yeah, their guns aren't going to do them any good whatsoever. And I just thought it was so funny to see all these guys who were heavily armed, some of these men men men were carrying 45s and they were carrying these different guns and stuff. And they all like ran inside and they had closed all the doors and everything and they thrown like a towel at the bottom of the door because the bees were trying to get from underneath the doorway.
It was just, it's just funny to see all these guys going, keep these bees out. And so, so we had to go out there. Yeah, like a bunch of bunch of screaming little girls. Yeah, because, you know, just like you said, a gun's not going to do anything about anything. So it was just kind of a funny juxtaposition to see all these tough guys and guys were shooting guns, like doing everything they could to keep these little bees from going inside the building. So that was definitely an interesting day.
And those bees are obviously very defensive and it was a very difficult day, but it was a fun call out. I got to have a few of those ones where those were interesting. So those are kind of two, I have other ones also, but those are the two that definitely stand out of my time as a swarm responder. I will tell you this, Eric, being a swarm responder on the central coast is fascinating because you have agriculture and traditional ways people do things. And then you have this high tech stuff.
You have SpaceX, you have Van and Berger forest base and you have the military and you also have the oceans. So it is a very, very interesting place to be a swarm responder because you get to see so many things and people have lived there for generations and generations. So those are just two of the stories. As I said, it's just a really interesting thing.
And so that's one of the reasons why when you and I were talking earlier, I get very protective about that because I want people to respond to swarm safely and effectively for both themselves as well as for the bees. Hey Patrick, it's been a ton of fun. Thank you for joining me today. And we're going to circle back in a month or so and learn a little bit more about the recovery efforts down there in Southern Cal. Eric, thank you so much for having me.
We are at B Platoon, so it's B E E platoon normal spelling dot com. We'd love to have you join the team. All you've got to do is there's a simple sign up on there and come and join us, but we're going to be having a lot of conversations over the next month. So Eric, I would I would love to come back because there's going to be so many great things to talk about because we are going to be organizing the largest disaster recovery in beekeeping history.
So we are really going to do everything possible to help get people back into place so that these pollinators have a way of thriving. Once again, this is an important ecosystem. We can't throw away our pollinators. I know this isn't sheltering people and it's not housing the homeless. It's not doing any of that during a disaster. Those are things that are going to continue on and saving lives and fire suppression.
But once that ends and we're at the recovery phase, we need to put people in a position to be successful. Once again, this is such an important industry and the bees are so important to what we do as human beings. It's that symbiosis that we have with them and I'm glad to be part of it. And I welcome any of you who hear this to join the adventure. It is going to be so much fun. We're learning so much and I would love to hear your input and the way that we can improve those interactions.
Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it and I look forward to speaking to you all once again. Thank you so much for joining us here on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Please right now before you forget, hit that follow or subscribe button, rate and comment on the show. Then be sure to share it with a friend. We're building a community here and we want to hear from you.
Send your crazy stories, guest recommendations, new gadgets or anything else that you'd like to hear about on the show to Eric at BeLoveBeKeeping.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.