in a world brimming with complexity few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless precision she dances from bloom to bloom each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct each act in service to the whole and then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to the bee's needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. Welcome, welcome to Be Love, Be Keep being presented by our great friends over at
Man Lake. Today we're going to be discussing what the future of beekeeping just might look like. Have you ever pictured robotic arms tending hives? Optical recognition sensors inspecting individual frames, cells, and brood? How about generative AI and other high -tech tools evaluating the health of your bees and offering advice for the beekeeper? Cleared back in 1851, Lorenzo Langstroth revolutionized beekeeping by introducing the concept of movable frames and bee space.
This made it easier and more efficient to inspect hives, control swarming, and harvest honey. In the last 200 years there have been oh some small modifications to his original design, but really the basic concept of the Langstroth hive has struggled to have any major advances. Of course there are some different hive designs, the top bar, waray, flow, skep, az, long laying, dartington, layens, etc. In the U .S. it's believed that approximately 80 % or more of total hives are
still the basic Langstroth design. Today we're going to have a conversation with Elia Radziner, one of the founders and developers of BeeWise, a company working with robots, AI, and other tech to revolutionize beekeeping. As always, if you have feedback on what you think about this or other new beekeeping technology discussed on this podcast, hey please shoot me an email eric at beelovebeekeeping .com. We'd love to hear from our listeners. All right, now let's
jump right into it. I'd like to welcome our guest today. This is going to be really fun. This is going to be really different. We have Elia Radziner with us. Elia, how are you? Good. How are you, Eric? I'm happy to be here. Oh, I'm great. I'm glad we can finally do this. We talked quite a while ago and we've come full circle now and we can have this whole discussion that everybody can listen to. Was I close on the pronunciation of your name? Spot on. Yes. All right. I get
some kind of a reward for that, right? In my books, you do. The host of the day award. You can actually pronounce a guest's name. Before we jump into this, we're going to be talking, everybody, we're going to be talking about BeWise today. be home. Some people think this only applies to commercial beekeepers but we're gonna learn all about it anyway whether you are a hobbyist or a sideliner or whatever. This is gonna be cool stuff to learn about. Alia let's start with
your journey just a little bit. What got you into beekeeping? How long have you been doing it? Where did you do it? There's ten questions just go tell us about you and beekeeping. Yeah, so unlike a lot of commercial beekeepers today, I wasn't born into it. So I'm not a second or third generation beekeeper. I was always interested in ag and food and I actually went to an ag school kind of like a UC Davis kind of school where I was getting my bachelor's in plant science.
That's where I was introduced to bees by a friend, you know. Just kind of keeping some bees in his backyard and suggested I could come and kind of lend a hand and help learn about the bees. Honestly, I just fell in love. I took all the courses that I could at university. And after graduating, I kind of took it up full time and started working for a commercial operation as a beekeeper. Always had my own hives on the side
as well. A few years into that, one day out in the field, I had an idea, not really an idea, but more of a thought that computers could do my job better than I could. Oh, ouch. No, that can't be. Beekeeping is two hands on. I've heard that. I didn't know a lot about computer vision and robotics, but I knew a little bit. I had friends working in... you know, high -tech companies and startups and I knew what they were up to. And really, today we know that we can actually
apply existing technologies. We didn't develop any technology at BeWise, any innovative technology. We're using existing technologies that are applied in other industries in beekeeping. Beekeeping is fascinating, you know, and it is hands -on. But with off -the -shelf technologies today like computer vision, machine learning, precision robotics, things are today pretty ubiquitous in other industries. We can actually see what's happening in hives in real time and address it
in real time. Actually address the main challenges that beekeepers face today, which is understanding what's happening in the hives before it's too late. fixing it before it's too late. You know those two things aren't the same, they're separate. I think those are the two main drivers to colony loss today. But that's what we set out to do. It was 2018 when I had that thought. I was very fortunate in kind of meeting the right people to form the founding team of BYs and after that
we were very fortunate. With the fundraising and the continuous, you know development of the team today were about a hundred and fifty people at be wise All dedicated to saving the bees Well, I like how you put it just a minute ago and I'm gonna get this wrong. My memory isn't perfect but Sound like you're diagnosing problems before they become too bad and then you're fixing those problems What were the words that you used? Yeah, I you know identifying the problem Knowing what's
happening in the hive is really key. If you go out and join beekeepers in the field or if you're looking at YouTube videos of what beekeepers are doing, half of the time we're playing detective. I always felt when I went out to the hives and I'm like, Sherlock Holmes, opening this hive and it's not doing as well as the others and like, okay, what's happened to it and why and when, and what I'm looking at, is that just a
symptom or is that the cause? that they lose the queen because there was no food or because the queen was old or there's something else going on. So you're always playing detective. You don't really know what's going on. And even when you do, it's very often too late, which is the devastating part. I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with going out to the bees and finding empty boxes where the bees used to be. And, you know, that's such a hard feeling, such a hard experience.
Or boxes full of dead bees. Yeah. And it's an emotional thing. This principle that you're talking about, I mean, with the big bee die off this year here in North America, it seems like had we diagnosed these things early, we could have fixed a lot of them. And it may not have been so bad, but instead it was Okay, it's January. We're headed to California. Here come the bees open up the boxes and it's too late So but you know what we haven't even told anybody what be
wise is yet. So please give us an overview What are we talking about here? so I'll actually start off with really the challenges that we're trying to solve and it's gonna be a Seamless continuation of the last point we're discussing and that will help us understand what be wise is When I had that thought in 2018 that a computer could do things better, we didn't rush off and build a bee home. We didn't know what we wanted to do.
But very quickly, I had a few people who were interested in the idea of helping bees with technology and understanding what the real problems are. And that's the first thing we did was really try and look and understand. What are the main challenges that beekeepers face today? And we realized that there are three main challenges. The first challenge is what I call distance.
Beekeeping is a distributed system. So unless you have only two hives in your backyard, as soon as you have more than two hives in your backyard, you're talking about a distributed system where you have small groups of hives far away from each other. Now you might be a commercial beekeeper where you're running bees, you know. thousands of hives all across the state. You might be a sideline or a hobbyist with fewer
hives, but they're always spread out. You never have a tremendous number of hives in one place. And this is different than any other type of agriculture, right? You mentioned almonds before. An almond grower, you know, they have a ranch, a thousand acres, all the trees are in one place. So this is distance. This brings us to the second challenge, which is time or timing. because hives are in small groups far away, we don't have an on -site team like the almond ranch, you know,
with the bees all day every day. Rather, we have a team that cycles through the yards. So, you know, today I'm going to visit these couple of yards, tomorrow I'm going to visit another couple of yards, and the next time I'm going to get back to my hives is another couple of weeks, two or three weeks away. The third challenge is expertise. And I think this is a very powerful one, both for commercial beekeepers and hobbyists.
Commercial beekeepers might be very, very experienced beekeepers, but often they're not the ones in the field opening up the hives, trying to determine what's going on with the hives, trying to make decisions. They usually have, you know, labor, employees, often beginning labor. The hobbyists, when I started off as a hobbyist beekeeper, you know, before I got into the commercial aspect,
I felt the same. We didn't really know what we were doing and we would call people who knew and try to ask and try to understand, but you don't really understand what's going on. It takes a lot of expertise. When we kind of looked at these three challenges, we said, okay, bees have their own challenges. Bees are facing them for our mites, pesticides that are being applied in their area and disease and viruses for forage.
Bees are facing all these challenges. But we're trying to help them while we're only visiting the hive less than 10 % of the time with not enough experience and spending 40 % of the time in the car. And suddenly when we looked at the high loss numbers with the tools that we were trying to cope with, it suddenly didn't look so absurd. It was always like... that we're losing 30, 40 % of our bees every year. This was, you know, five, six years ago before we got up to
60%. And it felt like, how could this be? But when we really took the problem apart and kind of looked at why is it so difficult to keep bees alive, we realized that we just didn't have the tools to cope or to help the bees cope with their challenges, which again, the bee challenges and the beekeeper challenges are different. Just to recap, we're talking about distance, time, and expertise. And when we looked at these three, we realized that a concept that could solve this
is what we call today remote beekeeping. What if we could not only see what's happening in the hive, but actually treat it without sending someone out there? It's just a matter. Again, this is before we had the bee home, before we had anything. And we realized that if we had this, we could actually provide professional beekeepers, experienced beekeepers, a tool to manage their hives at scale on a per hive basis. Today, everything is done with a blanket approach.
Blanket feeding, blanket treating of mites, antibiotics, everything is done blanket approach. With this type of approach with remote beekeeping, you can actually treat every hive according to what it needs. If this hive needs feeding today but this hive doesn't, you can feed this hive and not that hive. If this hive is losing its queen, you can introduce brood from another hive, introduce eggs or larvae from another hive, and help that hive along until you get there so it doesn't
become a drone layer. So there are all these things that you can do on a per -hive basis if you have the information and the ability to act. So this true part, right, understand and act is very, very important. So if we go back to this idea of a distributed system, if you can only see what's happening but not be out there in real time, it's not enough. It's not enough.
It will let you know, okay, these hives are, you know, starving or these hives have lost their queen or these hives have been exposed to pesticide or whatever. And you might be able to prioritize this yard over that yard, but it's only going to marginally help. Because when you're losing 60 % of your hives, it means that all the hives are going to face a detrimental challenge throughout the year. Most of them aren't actually going to make it. Most of them are going to die. But
some of them are going to be able to save. You really want to be able to know what's happening early on. When a hive, for example, loses a queen, it's very easy to solve within a few days. If you let it go for a few weeks, it's too late. Same goes for feeding, same goes for mites, same goes for really anything that the bees are coping with. It's all about timing. So you have to know what's going on early on and treat it early on.
If you're a beekeeper like me, we're getting into that favorite time of year, honey harvest. but it can be a lot of work. That's where Manned Light comes in. They have everything you need to make the job easier, cleaner, and more efficient. Removal aids, refractometers, uncapping tools, extractors, tanks, wax melters, even the jars and labels. Plus they have free shipping on glass containers. Whether you're a hobbyist with two hives or a full -blown commercial operation,
Man Lake has it all. And don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes. For $10 off your first $100 purchase. So that was 2018. When we came to this understanding of the problem, we realized the solution. Again, remote beekeeping. And we started working. We raised some money. And very quickly, by the end of that year, we already had a working prototype out in the field, getting feedback from beekeepers that were using
it and working with it. In an iterative process, kind of worked on that until we got to what we have today, which is Bee Home 4. we're always going to be working on new versions of the Behome. But the Behome, in essence, is a device that is half hive, half robot, and allows beekeepers to not only see what's happening in their hives, but actually treat them in real time. So they can actually log into their portfolio devices, log into the device, see what's happening with
all the hives. Every device has up to 10 hives in it. Some have two, three, four, you know, but up to 10 hives. They can see all the frames, they can see the brood, they can see how much pollen and nectar have been coming in or if the hive is now eating their stores, how much is left in the hive and how much has been eaten
over the last couple of weeks. Beekeepers can then make decisions on management of the hives, whether they want to balance out the yards, balance out brood between hives, treat hives for mites, feed hives, move the hives to a different location. That's obviously done manually, but all the rest, treatment, feeding, balancing, that's all done through the system. So basically they make decisions on the computer and those are carried out by the robotic system to the benefit of the bees.
Without anybody ever going there and opening up a box. Well, I wouldn't say ever well Okay, wrong word But generally for a situation like you just described Okay, I could be sitting in Timbuktu somewhere Get on my phone online To I assume you've got some kind of an app and I can say okay this be home right here has eight colonies in it, here's what's going on with three of them, here are my options, do this, and then it will do that for you. Am I saying that right?
Correct. Just to give a couple of scenarios of what you can do on the app and what's left to be done in the field by people. So for example, our beekeepers are notified if there's a queenless hive. And they can actually log in, they can see all the lists with bee homes where there are queenless hives, can log in and see the hives and determine if those hives have enough material, enough bees, enough brood provisions to, you
know, it's worth reinvesting in that hive. They can then actually choose brood frames from other hives for the robot to take into those hives. So the robot can actually move frames with eggs or dail larva from queen right hives into the queenless hives and allow those queenless hives to grow a self -queen, right? They can also send a crew to introduce mated queens if they prefer, you know, if they want to keep the specific genetics.
If they have a team on hand nearby that can get there in time, they can also send, you know, a mated queen. But suddenly, instead of losing 20 % of your hives to, you know, to queenless hives every year, suddenly you can reduce that number to 2 % or 1%. Feeding, there's a syrup tank in the device when the hive's in areas where
we need to supplement feed. Beekeepers can turn on the feeding and the hive, the robots will actually maintain a full feeder frame inside the hives, you know, throughout that period or throughout that location until the beekeeper turns that off. So these are just a couple of examples. What's left to be done in the field again is there's the syrup tank, so we have to
fill it every so often. So we have a team of people, the beekeepers send their syrup crews, but instead of filling every hive, filling the feeder in every hive, all they need to do is fill a syrup container. They don't have to be experienced beekeepers. They don't have to open up the hives. They can just fill a syrup container and the robotic system will take care of the
rest. That's really cool. So for those that are listening to the audio version of this and they can't see the pictures, I'm going to have you in just a second explain what this box looks like. For those that are watching on YouTube, there's going to be some video so they're seeing what you're talking about. So if I've never seen this before, help me picture. And by the way, I'm looking at your website right now next to you, so it's very easy for me to picture. Tell
me How big is the box? What does it look like? Because I don't think you want me to describe it. Because to me, it looks like a couple of big air conditioner units. But tell me, how would you describe it better than that? Beautiful air conditioning units. Beautiful. Yes, they are beautiful. They have colors on them and stuff. Yeah. The unit is about eight feet long, four feet high and four feet deep. So that's about the footprint of it. Essentially, you know, think
of a pallet of hives. You know, a pallet has four hives on it. So think about this, this has up to 10. So I call it a super pallet. And so it's like two and a half pallets long, basically. And above where the hives are, where the bees are, there's an extra space where the robot works. So the robot is actually traveling inside the unit above the hives, and can go eight feet long and four feet deep and access every hive. pull out the frames, inspect them, move them around
if it needs to. So for example, you know, we didn't talk about mites, I'm sure we will, but we have a heat treatment unit for mites. The robot can actually take capped brood frames, shake the bees off, put these frames inside a heat chamber, and treat the mites with heat without affecting the brood, without affecting the bees, and put that frame back in the hive after it's killed all the mites off using heat treat. Instead of chemicals, that's pretty cool. Instead of
chemicals. Going on with what the device looks like, on top we have solar panels. They are doors that allow, you know, humans to come and interact with the hives. So they're like, like the Tesla X model doors that open up what you call those kind of wing doors. Yep. So they open up like that and people can access the hives or the robot for maintenance or for whatever we need. We have different colors at the entrance of the hives to help the bees navigate back to their own hives.
So today, you know, usually hives are just painted white, but it's well known from the literature that different colors actually help bees identify their hives better and reduce drift. It also looks cool. So we kind of added that layer in there. There are different colors above the different entrances. It's kind of like a rainbow across the lower part. The entrances are also controlled by the system. So the system can actually open and close the entrances. This is used both for
transportation. So if we wanted to move hives, the system can close down the entrances during nighttime. And we can come, we don't have to come when it's dark. We can come, you know, seven o 'clock, eight o 'clock in the morning, move the bees. But it's also used to regulate the hive entrance size during different times of the year. So when it's cold, the hive entrance is reduced. When it's warmer, it makes the hive entrance a little bit larger, but also to protect
them from pesticides. So if we're pollinating a crop and we know the farmer or the neighbor are going to be applying pesticides, we can actually close down the entrances for 24 hours and keep the bees safe. and let them go out again once it's safe, 24 hours later or 48 hours later, go out and continue pollination. That helps protect them from pesticides. How do you keep them cool in a situation like that? Is there some ventilation? The floors have two options in them, either mesh
or solid. That's actually done manually. So when we go when it's warm we're going into pollination or into honey production the beekeepers will open all the all the bottom boards basically to mesh and That that keeps the bees ventilated the device itself also knows how to regulate the temperature of the device with fans so it's never too hot in there I hate to say you've thought of everything but You've had a few years to kind of think through this obviously and I'm sure
you've ran into all kinds of issues and the one that I am wondering how in the world do you control this and that is propolis. It seems like it would just gum up your robot and you know, how would it work? So what do you do about that? Yeah, Propolis was the first thing we looked at when we started iterating with the first prototypes. I would say very early on, you know, we were, we had kind of two options that we were considering, two approaches we were considering when it came
to hive manipulation and inspection. The first one was, you know, can we build a system that's going to go inside the hive and perform inspection, perform procedures? We realized that it's too difficult. And the better option was Langstroth had already invented the removable frame. It already invented the B -space, the modern hive that allows us to manipulate the hive by manipulating
the frames. And we realized that if we wanted to be able to carry out all the different beekeeping practices that are practiced today, all we really needed to do is build a robotic arm that was able to extract that frame. If you think about all the different practices that beekeepers do today, whether it's feeding, whether it's inspecting the hives, treating mites, collecting honey, it's all done with some sort of form of manipulating the frames in the hive. That's the base of beekeeping.
You know, in other words, if you look at beekeeping practices before the invention of lag strath, before the invention of the removable frame, 100 % of the practices were different. So beekeeping today is actually a product of the design of the modern hive. And if we wanted to be able to utilize all these practices with remote beekeeping, we wanted to be able to manipulate the frame just like people do. So the robotic system doesn't
actually work inside the hive. All it knows how to do is open up the hive and remove a frame. So even with propolis, that's not a problem. It can... Remove a frame, move a frame. There were a lot of problems that we came up against in the first couple of years of iterating on this ability. But once you solve that, that kind of opens up everything else. And a lot of IP in the company is around dealing with the properties.
We have a lot of design principles, I guess, on you know, what we're allowed to do when interacting with the hive, when designing, if we're designing, you know, a special cover for the hive or, you know, an adapter for the hive on how to get it to work with, you know, with the bees and not against the bees and not gum up and stick with too much propolis. All right. I've got a ton of questions that I just keep writing down here. Is this using regular length trough frames inside?
Yes. Deep frames? Medium frames? Only deep frames. Only deep frames. So I could take frames right out of a hive that I already have in a wooden box and put them right into BeWise. Sorry, BeHome, which is actually the product, okay? Do you have a whole bunch of these in use already? You know, you've proved this concept that it works. So today we have about 1 ,200 of them fully in use, about 12 ,000 knives or 10 to 12 ,000 knives already in the units. How's it going? I don't
mind asking the hard questions here. Is it working as good as you expect? Let me put it that way. It's one of those things that is both very difficult and very rewarding at the same time. Everything we're doing is for the first time. I just went out this week. We had a couple of new hires that I took down to see one of the yards here in California. I told you before about how beekeepers can log in and make decisions. Now we're working on, can we get the AI to make some of those decisions?
And we went down to look at a yard where the AI is actually managing the balancing for the entire yard. So you go out there, it's a B yard. It's a large B yard. I know there are a couple of hundred hives out there in B homes. And you're just listening and you can hear the robots move inside the units. So we open up some units to see what the robots are doing. They're inspecting. They're just doing their thing. They're inspecting the hives. Everything is done very, very slowly,
very, very gently. They're identifying the hives, the weaker hives that need extra brood or extra honey or pollen. They're identifying the stronger hives that can actually donate on an honey or brood. And they're making those decisions and moving. And we're measuring to see the outcome. Is the AI actually able to help the bees better than beekeepers, better than humans? So obviously, to get to this point, we've already had Beom
4 out in the field for almost two years. And only now we're getting to the point where we're working on this feature. So everything is a long process to get it to the point where it's working. But when it works, when you go out there and see this just working, you're making history. This is the first time that something like this has been done. I think the team and everybody we're working with, you know, understands how important and big this is. Let's talk honey.
Are the bees able to make much honey inside these hives? And the second part of the question is, is it hard to harvest? Yeah. So honey is one of those things that is still done manually. So again, think of those palettes that I described earlier, those super palettes, the bee homes, when it comes to time for the honey flow, we actually super the hives inside there with regular supers. For that time being, for those couple of months, six, eight weeks when we have honey
supers on, the robot is actually disabled. The bees are doing their thing collecting the honey and then we, you know, collecting the honey is just the same as collecting the honey from regular hives. That's all done manually. So the robot really is there to help you prepare for the season. Make sure that all the hives are balanced, are treated for mites, are queen right, are ready to go, are optimized for honey production. And
then during the season, it's disabled. After you take the supers off, the robot goes in there again, makes sure, you know, to find the hives that have gone queenless during the honey season, find the hives that have gone broodless, have plugged out or whatever, start balancing, start treating mites right away, then prepare the hives for overwintering. So would you leave the hives in to be homes over winter? Yeah. Once they go in there, there's no reason to take them out.
Yeah. Might as well. Seems like it makes a lot of sense during pollination. I mean, these, um, you can lift with a regular forklift, right? Put them on a, put them on a truck just like you're doing with pallets of hive boxes. Okay. So tell me about some of the other research that's being done. How is this helping with research, for example? Yeah, so first of all, explain the main data that we're acquiring on Hives. So there are a lot of data points that we're getting.
We're weighing the frames and we're measuring the temperature every day of every frame. But the main data points that we're using for our system, the unit actually picks out frames and takes an image of the frame, a scan, frame scan. And then the AI, the machine learning looks at the frame and identifies every cell on every frame and categorizes it for what it is. If you know a little bit about AI, you need a lot of data points. So every one of our frame is like
6 ,000 data points, right? There are about 3 ,000 cells on each side of the frame. Each one can be empty or full of something. It could have honey in it. It could have brood. It could be drawn out or not drawn out. It could be drone brood or regular brood. It could be a queen cell. And then all together, the pattern also has additional data points, right? Is it spotty brood? Is there wax moth in my frame? Is there a pattern of disease? What is the queen laying pattern look like? So
all this information in every frame. And today we have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these frames, each one containing 6 ,000 data points over the course of several years, same seasons and thousands of hives. This type of data is something that has never imagined trying to create this type of data without robotics. So that's kind of the background of this. Now
we're doing different researches. We collaborated with UC Davis around pollination, where they had a look at bee activity in the bee homes versus regular hives during almond pollination. We did another activity with Auburn University around heat treatment, both with tropylae labs in Thailand
and with veromites here in California. So I think if you're someone that's listening to this and you care about bees and you're concerned about what we can do as humanity to make sure that bees are still here tomorrow, this is something that can really help, can really change and help us help the bees overcome their challenges. And this is why the hobbyists should care about this
also. Is this ever going to be in the kind of production and the kind of price where a sideliner might say, Hey, yeah, I need 10 of these things. Or is it just makes sense for the really large commercial guys? So I think as time progresses, we're still out there kind of proving our go to market, proving our price point, proving the business model, proving the technology, right?
We're still in that phase. When we get to the point where It just makes more sense economically to keep bees with a bee home than with a wooden box. I think it will almost become, you know, that we're always going to have, which is a good thing, I think, beekeepers who want to keep bees, you know, boutique beekeepers in wooden hives or different types of hives. You know, today there are thousands of different designs for
hives and beekeeping. There's only one that's ubiquitous with commercial beekeepers, which is, you know, the Langstroth hive. But there are hundreds of different designs that beekeepers can choose and work with, and you're always going to have that plethora of options, which is fantastic. But for people who are doing this for economic reasons, as well as working with bees, I think at some point it's just going to become the standard
way of keeping bees. So it's just like... It used to be standard to get from one place to the other with a horse and carriage. Today it's standard to do it with a car. It's just going to be the same, you know. Today it's standard to keep bees with a smoker and a hive tool in a wooden box. And tomorrow it's going to be standard to do it with, you know, with modern technology because that's how we do everything. Totally
makes sense. All right, before I let you go, even a high tech person like you has got to have some kind of wild and crazy beekeeping story. Can you think of one or two? I'll tell a story of how I got introduced to bees. This must be embarrassing. I can tell the look on your face. Go ahead. You wanted something juicy. So I said that a friend had asked me to kind of help him
out with his backyard hives. So the first day he called me like it was, hey, I'm going to go and get this swarm out of the tree at the campus. Do you want to come and help me? I didn't know anything about bees at this point. I was like, okay. So we go there. I don't know, it's like 20 feet up in a tree. The campus put up a nesting box for some bird or something was screwed to the tree and a swarm had gone into that box.
No birds, just a ton of bees. So I go up the ladder and I've got this bee suit on that doesn't really fit me. You know, it's short on the legs. You know, I'm six feet tall. My friend is... Little bit shorter and I you know, it's his suit first time first time with bees first time anything so I got up there I tried to unhinge the the box from the tree and I realized you know, I
tried to tear it off. It kind of kind of comes half off But I realized that it's it's screwed to the tree from the inside of the box, which is full of bees And this is not a swarm that came in yesterday and we can kind of just like take out. It's been living there for months probably. Anyway, somehow I'm able to kind of detach it from the tree just with brute force. And I'm carrying it down on my shoulder, down this 20 -foot ladder. I obviously got stung a ton of
times. But we got it done. I covered it with a net first, you know, to try and keep the bees inside and kind of try to seal all the openings. Of course, a lot of bees were flying around, so it got stung a ton of times. But we got into the car, we got into his backyard, got it into standard equipment, kind of cut out the comb and put it into standard frames. And he already had a couple of hives, so this was like a third
one. It was huge. We had to use like two or three different boxes to transfer it into regular hives. After that, I was like, okay, what's next? And he was like, now we'll keep them alive and see if we can make some honey. And that's kind of how I got into beekeeping. I need some video of you on the ladder trying to carry that thing down with your ankles exposed. I'm just picturing the whole thing in my mind here. Sounds awesome.
Yeah. Thankfully there was no, we might have some, some photos of it, but there's no video. I'll take a photo. Anyway, hey, Elia, I really appreciate your time today and looking towards the future. It's fun to see what's coming ahead. And what we've been using here has been used for 200 years or whatever. It's very low tech. I have no problem with things changing and getting better. So it must be fun to be part of that whole process going on. It's a humbling experience
for sure. Propolis will humble you every time. That's right. Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. If you like this content I hope you'll share it with a friend, follow and subscribe to this podcast, and even sign up for our newsletter at BeLoveBeekeeping .com Also just a shout out to Vita B Health for their support, we appreciate them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apagard, and now Varroxan, extended release oxalic acid
strips. Thanks guys, and remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.