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 Beekeeping presented by our great friends over at Man Lake. Today's guest has an apiary and beekeeping business
on the big island of Hawaii. Yes, I'm still there and it is raining in paradise today, but that's okay. Our guest and his partner focus solely on regenerative and treatment free beekeeping. Now, I know, I know you're saying, Eric, you've just opened up a giant can of worms by discussing one of the most polarizing topics in beekeeping. Okay. Let's all just take a breath. If you're new to the show, let me explain something. We are not here to tell you how you must do your
beekeeping. We're here to share information. Then it's up to you to decide what's best for your bees and the style of beekeeping that feels most right to you. It's been said that beekeeping is a blend of science and soul. So do your homework, get in touch with your bees and do what your soul tells you. Before we jump into that, I know we've all heard about, read about, and seen with our own two eyes, most of us, the wackle dance that bees do. Well, we can always learn more.
There is a new research study out where the waggle dance of the honey bees was researched. It's always been thought that the waggle dance is something that just points the direction for the bees in which they should go to find sources of nectar and pollen. But a recent study published in Current Biology investigated the remarkable communication strategy to a whole new level.
Some of what they learned is that bees use their own memory of the topography, the terrain around them, as they interpret this waggle dance, and the two work together. Let me just quote from some of it. Did the dance teach the bees? If you can imagine a bee moving with fear, though emotion didn't play into its study, to anticipate a bump in the road at a specific point on the journey. Are the bees in fact pantomiming the
way itself? I'm getting wet. Researchers trained a small group of foragers to visit a feeder location north of a hive along a gravel road. However, they released the bees from three different sites and what they discovered is that the dance was even more complex and detailed than they had originally understood. In a diagram of the dance, we learned that it includes spatial expectations, not just directions, a truly intelligent and
efficient form of communication. Researchers placed a feeder with a sugar solution north of the hive along a gravel road and trained foraging bees to visit it. One site, as reported, had a distinct path whereas another lacked these types of markers. Then they let the bees perform their magic trick of dancing to show their friends and indicate where the food was located. They
had never visited the hive themselves. Researchers awaited to determine whether any information about the landscape what to anticipate on the flight itself if any of that was communicated in the waggle. In a quote they said, we employed harmonic radar tracking, a powerful tool for recording the detailed light trajectory of individual
bees. Researchers found that the receivers of the dance weren't just following the direction and distance indicated by the waggle dance, They integrated the dance's vector information with the memory of landscape features that they might encounter along the way. In the absence of an expected landmark, their search behavior became more exploratory. They flew farther and in less straight paths. They're calling this a multifaceted
form of communication. In conclusion, the author states, our experiments address the question of whether the vector information conveyed by the dance is integrated into a recruits spatial representation constructed from its own experience and whether this integration occurs within a common frame of spatial reference shared by both the reported symbolically communicated vector
and self -experienced locations. What they found is that the cognitive structure at play here is most adequately conceptualized as a cognitive map. So bees are even more impressive than we had already given them credit for. These intelligent bees aren't just following the vector, they retain a spatial layout of the environment and incorporate it into their navigation. Last quote from the scientists, our study reveals a higher level of cognitive complexity in bee communication.
With the waddle dance, bees don't simply follow a blind vector instruction. They integrate it with a cognitive map of their surroundings built during earlier exploration flights. This allows them to form expectations and navigate more efficiently. What do we take away from this besides the fact that these little girls are, you know, even smarter than we ever give them credit for? When we talk about orientation flights, Usually we're just thinking of them circling around right in front
of the hive and going up. But it appears something that's been learned is that they're orienting a lot more of their surroundings around them. For example, they know where high hedges are. They know where roads are. They know where trails are. They know where trees and bushes and other things are going to be in their way. And is there reading or receiving a waggle dance? They're putting all that information in together with what they're learning from the waggle and mapping
this whole thing out. It appears consciously, cognitively before they actually take their flight. They know where they're going. It is amazing. All right, let's get on with our guests. This is going to be a lot of fun today. I'd like to welcome to the show today with a great big aloha, Kevin O 'Connor. Good morning, Kevin. Morning. Aloha, Eric. How are you? I'm fantastic. Are you kidding? What's not to love about being in this beautiful place? Speaking of beautiful places,
you are in Waiohinu, Hawaii, correct? Yes, down close to South Point on the Big Island, which is the southernmost point of the United States
of America, by the way. Yes. OK. and there's a lot of businesses that will remind you of that including our favorite punalu bakery and by the way they're not giving me anything free for saying that but uh you can't drive through without getting some sweet bread and a malasada anyway hey i met you at the farmers market the other day and today we're going to talk about farmers markets we're going to talk about treatment free beekeeping regenerative beekeeping all kinds of things and
If you don't mind, give me a little bit of background first. Yeah. Like when did you start beekeeping? Why? What do you love about it? Yeah, so I started beekeeping in 2006, this spring. I came out to Hawaii that winter and then got a job while I was out here catching queen bees. I love about beekeeping, the dynamic aspect of it, how it's like really kind of connects you with nature.
I've always been a gardener ever since I was a kid and then made a business out of it and always also been, you know, attracted to just the natural cycles of nature, the seasonal changes, the different flowers and how they interact with each other and how beautiful they can be when you arrange them, you know, in a garden and landscape
certain ways. and always kind of appreciated that different environments and ecosystems require different plants and they have different aspects that how they contribute to the ecosystem, what have you. And honeybees beekeeping is like a natural extension to gardening, because honeybees are so integral to the garden, as well, of course, as other pollinators. But honeybees are something that you can actually manage and work with and interact with on a more intimate and in -depth
level. It was interesting catching queens. I had not really known anything about beekeeping and it was a really quick like deep dive into beekeeping because you get to know all about all the different aspects of beekeeping and queen rearing which kind of is just like a quick deep dive into beekeeping and one of the things that was like concerning to me at that time we started having a lot of like we were calling them blowouts where the little nukes weren't surviving two
weeks to even allow that virgin queen to go mate come back and be caught to sent along around
the world. We were concerned that as one of the first jobs we had in the morning of the beekeeping the day we would have a 55 gallon drum and dump like seven bags of sugar into that, mix it with water and then the fumigillin and stuff like that and I was scratching my head like what is this all about and you know feeding the bees and kind of understood that because it's so intensive with allowing that little nuke to raise the queen we needed to do that and that got me interested
in natural beekeeping and other beekeeping methods that wasn't so Intensive and stressful on the bees cuz we're seeing that they weren't surviving there was this kind of drop off in the nukes lasting and the queens being able to be caught in thousand two thousand six which is like right at the beginning of colony collapse. So yeah that was kind of our start of beekeeping. So for people that. don't know. Some of the largest queen producers in the world and some of the
best are here on the big island of Hawaii. So were you working for one of them? Yeah, back in 2006. Okay, and then you've just sort of taken your own journey from there. Your company is called B -Boys. So it's you and how many other boys? Just me and Ryan, just two of us right now. Alright. Yeah. And then we do have, we work with a couple other beekeepers, Artemis Smiles
down on South Point. She does very similar beekeeping practices and because our, you know, we've grown a bit so and we can't handle all of the... demand so which is good we're able to work with other beekeepers and and grow in that way because we only because of the style of beekeeping it's very labor intensive you know beekeeper can't really manage many colonies as many colonies as large commercial beekeepers do because of the labor the difference the different approach
that we take Well, let's talk about that style of beekeeping as long as you brought it up. And if you don't mind, I'm going to read something straight from your website. Okay. So hopefully this still applies. And oh man, this is where the controversy begins. And I love controversy. No, we like telling both sides of the story on this show. So here we go. Your apiary says our apiary is 100 % treatment free. We encourage hygienic behavior in our bees. We allow our bees
to raise their own queens. Bees are encouraged to constantly build their own comb. We do not use plastic foundation. We do not use beeswax foundation. Bees are allowed to swarm and not collected. Absolutely no plastic in the hives. This includes plastic frames, feeders, and any component of the hive. We do not paint hives. We do not spin honey or reuse honeycomb. We refrain from pesticide and herbicide use completely.
We do not feed our bees ever. We do not move bees for pollination services or nectar sources. We follow biodynamic principles and apply instinctual beekeeping methods. I'm almost done. We do not purchase commercial bee stock or collect swarms. We maintain an eight -year line of genetics. All our current colonies came from the same colony eight years ago. Our entire apiary is a true family. Okay, where do we jump in? How do you
want to explain that? So, yeah, we keep bees basically how they were kept hundreds of years ago before we got too smart for ourselves. You know, we found that through all of our intense research about colony collapse disorder and engaging interacting with the honey bees, you know, it's a big one. lesson we learned was in 2010. So we became keeping bees in Hawaii and then suburbs of Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania. We don't keep bees in southeastern Pennsylvania
anymore. We stopped in like about eight years ago. And the biggest lesson we learned in southeastern Pennsylvania was our bees were always kind of struggling until the economy kind of started collapsing in 2008, seven, eight. One of the first things that our neighbors did, because we're in suburbs, you know, it's not agriculture, but it's similar within there's a lot of chemicals
used in the garden and on the lawn. And one of the first things that people stopped doing because it was easy to cut and save hundreds of dollars a month, not using the herbicide, the chemlon, I think they call it true green now, and all of the different strong chemicals to make that
golf course green lawn. And what started happening is in our neighborhood, all the dandelions started popping up, all the ground ivy, which is a beautiful little purple flower, clover, violets, all the little wildflowers that live in the lawn that makes for a healthier lawn, it kept it greener, longer. during the droughts of the summer, and our bees were thriving in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We had swarms. We were collecting gallons and gallons of honey per colony and not using treatments.
Yes, we were planting thyme in front of the hive, the bees all around in the gardens and stuff, because the bees collect the thyme. rosins, propolis, to create their own medicines for the varroa mite. And there's many different facets of it with being treatment free and having them build their own honeycomb. They start making their cell size smaller and all these different things.
And also, yes, you're going to lose bees during the process because the genetics that aren't strong to survive all these different changes and stressors will fall away. And the genetics that are strong and are able to adapt will come forward. Are you a beekeeper who loves sharing tips, asking questions and showing off your latest honey haul? Then join the hive introducing the Man Lake beekeeping community on Facebook, your
new go -to for everything honey bees. Whether you're struggling with mites, trying a new winterization method, or just need to know what that weird thing on your frame is, our group is a supportive, spam -free zone for beginners and pros alike. Stop scrolling through endless forums and connect directly with beekeepers and the professionals at Man Lake in one buzzing place. We'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Just click
over and join up. And that's using nature's way instead of you know, getting in the microscope and grafting or doing all that stuff to create, you know, oh, we want this desirable trade or that desirable trade. We allowed the bees to do it because they know how to be better than we do. So that's the approach that we took and
that we found success. And then in 2010, in suburbs of Philadelphia, the economy started coming back and people started using the true green again and spraying their trees because all these ornamental gardens are, you know, they require all these chemical intervention, which isn't necessary. But anyway, people started doing it, you know, good marketing, stronger, healthier, happier gardens and lawns that are all golf course again. And the bees could not collect enough nectar
to make the comb to make the honey. or to store the honey for the winter. So we found ourselves scrambling, feeding our bees, which we hadn't done for quite a few years. And we were using like a tea mixture, sugar water, with this biodynamic preparation of like mint and thyme and a little sea salt and chamomile and to make it a little
easier for the bees to digest the sugar. And we were looking at each other having this conversation about like, well, if our bees cannot survive in this situation, what makes because we've always heard the honeybees are the canary in the coal mine. What makes us think that this is a healthy environment for us? So that's when we kind of made the decision to move full time to Big Island, Hawaii. It sounds so perfect and idyllic. And it doesn't work for everybody, Kevin. No, of
course not. It works as long as you're willing to take the risks and suffer the losses for the long -term gain. And that's what it is. We're looking at it long -term. We're not looking at it this year, these few months. We're looking at it intergenerationally so that the genetics of the bees is stronger. And yes, if you have thousands of colonies that you're trying to maintain with only a couple dozen employees, you cannot
do it how we do it. You're also not going to get the quality of honey and wax and the strength and integrity and genetics in the bees. Because there's going to be, it's like a patchwork. We think we know, but we cannot comprehend the complexity of genetics and honeybee genetics and the flexibility and fluidity and plasticity that it has as well and its ability to adapt. So what we're working on is creating like a land race bee where we're located. Because we don't move them around, we
don't do the pollination services. Yes, right now, the bee industry, it's geared towards pollination services. It's honey. How much, how many dollars a pound is the honey? It is so cheap right now. None of the commercial guys are making a living on honey. It doesn't work. Yeah. And then also, so then, so you have the other aspect, the agricultural
aspect, the pollination services. If we were to work with the orchard tenders and be like, say hey you know an idea would be why don't we park these bees here we'll have some in -house beekeepers ours yours we'll train whatever and then you also have forage for the bees that you plant inter -row depending upon how it is or maybe take out a few acres of almonds to plant some mixed diverse plantings but it's it's like a it's a slippery slope because the agricultural
industry is so intertwined with big big chemical, big ag, genetic engineering, genetic manipulation, all that stuff, and they don't want to turn that spigot off. And I get that. You know, once you do something, you create something, it's like we put all this time and energy in creating this product. We want to be able to sell it. We want to ensure that that market's there. And, however, that way of doing business is really destroying
our ecosystem and destroying our bees. Like, 70 % loss last year, across the continent, that's not sustainable. It was crazy how high it was. The initial numbers were 62%. Nobody knows exactly what it was, but it was well over a million colonies, and it may have been 70%. And in some areas,
it was even higher than that. And some people were saying, some people told me in the industry, the reason it was that way is because beekeepers didn't use enough chemicals enough treatment for varroa and you're saying it's the opposite and i'm not the judge here okay i love what you guys are doing i want to play devil's advocate for a second because i'm sure you hear it there are some areas depending on the climate and stuff like where i am hard winters if varroa levels
are hardly anything they don't make it through winter period So that's that's thing number one is can everybody do it where they live what you're doing. And thing number two that i always hear. And i don't know what stock to put in this is oh well if you're doing that you're sending for all bombs over to my hives and so i'm getting for all bomb by you so thanks a lot you jerk. Yeah yeah. And there's everything in between
i wish we could all do it how you do it. But we don't all, we either don't all know how or we just can't where we live. What is it? So it's both of those. Well, yes, you can everywhere. However, it's going to take time. It's not, we can't do it overnight because it's taken us years and lots of losses at the beginning. And now our losses, we keep around 50 colonies and maybe we'll lose two a year. Our losses are really low. And that's genetics, right? That's how that's
what I attribute it to. That's genetic and that's what other treatment -free beekeepers tell me. The ones that can do it are like, hey, we have bred for this. The ones that can't deal with it, they die. That's okay to us. It's hard. It's still hard to lose a beehive. Sure it is because we feel responsible because we're the beekeepers even though out there, you know, in the forest, that's exactly what's going to happen. The survival
of the fittest kind of thing. And I couldn't imagine how hard it would be being a larger beekeeper, having thousands, managing thousands of colonies and losing half of them. It's like so difficult. Sleepless nights, I imagine. So one of the things I think that not only the genetics, not only are we allowing them to build their own honeycomb, which shrinks, they start making a smaller cell size. shrinks the honeybee just a little bit, just a little bit smaller of a gestation period,
smaller, a little feistier bee. That part is great, that part is what we have control over, and but we're on a tiny little quarter acre, but we're surrounded by thousands of acres of open space. That's not, it used to be old pasture land that's kind of been gone back to forest, and it's like Christmas berry, which is an introduced species, and as well as something they call hollycoa,
which is another introduced species. But because we have all of this open space that's not treated by that many chemicals and we have an abundant amount of forage through many seasons throughout the year, our bees have the food stock that they need to thrive and they have the diversity. to enable themselves to get the different types of rosins, the propolis, and the different pollens to give them a good, healthy, diverse diet. It's
like you think about the diet of a person. You want to have, you know, a healthy diet, well -balanced, all that stuff. We want the same thing for a bee. So when you have bees eating in monocultures,
they're not getting a diverse diet. And then when you're feeding them on top of that, it's like eating you know popcorn is your main diet and then drinking soda and french fries and that's your that's what you got and that's big ag unfortunately and also in a lot of these different areas we have changed the ecosystem across the country by cutting down forests or raising prairies you know plowing all that stuff and not allowing for the natural cycles to balance and regulate
and offer a diverse amount of forage for all throughout the year. And a lot of other regenerative beekeepers are starting to, I mean, not just beekeepers, sorry, land tenders, farmers, they're starting to not till the land. They're starting to allow the ecosystem to develop. and they're preventing soil erosion. And what that does for beekeepers is it creates all those wildflower habitat. So the bees are going to have the opportunity
to have more diverse food. So you have those two things go hand in hand, allowing the bees to kind of do what they do best is them, be them. and then ensure that we have a diverse, healthy ecosystem for the bees to forage. Once you have both of those, and that's what we have here in Hawaii, then you can do the natural beekeeping, allow them to build their own honeycomb. And I did want to talk some transitional tips and
ideas. When you just go like you want to okay, I'm gonna be tremendously foundational foundationless rather the bees because over multi -generations
They've always been given this foundation. They kind of Forget how to build like parallel and all that stuff when you have a swarm though There's something unique and we don't collect swarms as a different story, but we used to when you have a swarm they for some reason are able they it's like when they swarm something resets when they come back you catch them or or you know you put them in a box and we do use Langstroth boxes with uh but we call it top bar methods
sometimes we have the full frame sometimes just the top bar sometimes the top and just the sides deep boxes medium boxes both deeps and mediums uh deeps for the brood we try to do two deep brood uh chambers and then we'll build depending upon the year and the age and vigor of the colony will put, will build small boxes on them. And that too, like we allow the bees to take their own pace. Some bees will, and we do walk away splits, but I want to get back to the comb building.
If you're starting with a managed colony that's, that you already have the foundation in there, you can start in the super by doing like every
other frame, one foundation. one empty that way they have that like straight like avenue to build in and if they start building in an arch which they they like to you can like turn them around so that they'll straighten it back out and you get a little snake in there and also they love facing southeast or south southeast and they need to be level because if you have it's it's crooked the bees build they festoon they hold from the top and they build And they use gravity,
like law of chains or something, where they will build that comb. And if it's at an angle, that comb will come down at an angle, so that's important to be level. Also, just keep an eye if you do want parallel frames to flip them back and forth. And then you can get into the brew chamber. You can take the honey frames from the top that they built and put them on the sides. And you can take out maybe one or two frames in there and
do the same thing, allow them to build. they're generally on a when they're on the nectar flow they'll build that out real quick with within a day or two and the bee and the queen will will be laying in there shortly and you can always do that when you're calling for pollen or or make sure that the the brew chamber is not honey bound and things like that okay so patients be willing to let some bees die guess what a lot of people's bees die even if they're not willing
to let them die so is it really that different The fact that you're willing to let them swarm I think is a big deal too because you've got brute breaks. It's not like you guys are just lazy and doing nothing. You're actually doing a lot. It just doesn't happen to be chemical treatment. A lot of monitoring, a lot of just seeing where the bees are. you know, if they're starting to separate doing the queen cell building, we'll let them do that. And we let them, we stopped
collecting swarms for two reasons. In Hawaii, when the small hive beetle and varroa mite got here, the county decided that they wanted to kill all of the feral colonies and the trees and the caves because they thought there would be vectors spreading varroa mite and small hive beetles. So they destroyed a lot of the feral.
stock that the queen beaters were kind of depending upon that they didn't realize for their genetics because the the virgin queen will go out and then she'll mate with all the drones not just the managed drones but the feral drones as well and that brings some good and genetic integrity but when you have you know that that bottleneck it doesn't allow that so we're allowing the um the swarms to fly to repopulate the area again to create those feral colonies that are essential.
And then another reason we don't collect swarms is because when we started collecting swarms, or we're collecting swarms, and then we noticed there was this tendency where they weren't swarms. They looked like swarms, but they were abscantions. And that's a colony because a small high beetle got in there, slimed them out, they flew away,
and they were looking for a new home. but they're not swarms, so when you grab them, when you collect them and put them in a box, when you collect them and put them in a box, they weren't having that, there was just this chaos, they didn't have, they weren't building, they were in this like panic mode, and then they would fly away
again. And so that's when we stopped collecting swarms, because we don't know, we would go through all this trouble, you know, put up the ladder, climb, and you know, collect and take a few hours and all this time, and then they continue to fly away. So we just decided to let them, let them be. And to do, we multiply our colonies through what we call walkaway splits. So we'll take three frames of the three stages of brood, egg, egg larva and cat brood, and then a couple
frames of honey. And then we'll, sometimes the queen comes with them. Sometimes she doesn't. We're not always that good at making sure we know where the queen is when we do this, which in which case. if we do bring the queen with us, then it gives a brood break for the larger colony, and then it creates a very vigorous new, what do you call it? New nuke, new colony. Yeah, new colony. I mean, a walk away split, it could
be either side. Yeah. Right? It could be either the side you left or the side that you took and moved. In fact, in a regular swarm, the queen is going to leave. Yeah. So, I think it's funny that people think a walk -away split should never have a queen in it or any kind of split for that matter should never have the original queen. I'm like okay once again we're not working how the beans work for some reason because we know better. Anyway let's shift gears for a minute
before we run out of time here. Tell me about farmers markets and a little bit about your business because I think there are a lot of beekeepers that are Sideliners or hobbyists that maybe want to move up to sideline or want to learn how to make a few bucks doing what they love and They know about farmers markets, but what advice do you have for them? How did what work good? Yeah
before I answer that question. I do wanted to touch base real quick on the the mite bomb, small hive beetle bomb that you mentioned about treatment -free beekeepers, because that was really a big thing. We were getting a lot of that feedback when we started telling other beekeepers, oh, we're going to be doing this treatment -free. And they were telling us that exact thing. Oh, you're going to be reeling our bees and all that.
And cut to eight years later in Hawaii Island, all the queen breeders, they've kind of tried to move down here. And even though it's not working out for them, it's really windy, hard to breed queens down here. they're asking us for our genetics. They're like, can we have a few drones? So the opposite has happened over time. Well, and you're also in an area where there's not a lot of other beekeepers right around you that you're going to be mite bombing if that indeed is a thing.
So the opposite has happened. Actually, we find that when the migratory beekeepers move in, the mite count and the small high beetle count skyrockets. And that's kind of like the washing time, like when that happens, the strong genetics really shows and the weak genetics falls away. So, but luckily our bees aren't having much fall away anymore. And then, so yeah, to speak to farmers markets, it's such a great way to connect with your community. It's a great way to let people
know. that you're there, that you want a healthy ecosystem, and that it's all of our responsibility to ensure that we have a healthy ecosystem. And the nicer that you keep your property, the cleaner and purer your beeswax and honey is going to be for our skincare products and what have you. So that's one way, a great way to interact with the community. And different products we do, you know, the beeswax, we make a lot of skincare
products with it. We find that skincare, we get better bang for the buck for making our own salves and balms. And we use all organic ingredients, our beeswax. And because every time we're harvesting our honey, we're cutting out the honeycomb. And we're literally crushing it, straining it, letting
the gravity pull it out. And then... Pressing it a little bit and then we wash that wax with that water We make June for ourselves to drink and and share with our friends We don't sell that just yet And we also make vinegar honey vinegars from that and then we with the beeswax We make the skincare products and we do you know cold infusions and or heat infusions of different herbs and botanicals We grow a lot and we basically replaced our medicine cabinet with all of the
different salves and balms that we make from bath body beauty care, you know, age -defying salves, long -lasting deodorants, pain relievers, and that's all from different flowers, botanicals, and some minerals like zinc and stuff like that. Basically, you start small. We started with two salves and we were doing candles. You know, we were pouring our own foundation and rolling them.
That's very time -consuming, but you know you put your Value yourself value your time and the community values you your time and your products
too, and they actually work. It's the same We're you know working with arnica and cayenne and calendula Come free these are herbs chamomile that we've been people have been using and are relatively familiar with and they work Instead of using things that are synthesized from the drugstore we can use the herbs and botanicals that, you know, have stood the test of time. This is what our great -grandparents were using. And people, there's like an attractiveness to
that again. Because there's this big, you know, AI and data center and all this smart technology. It's creating this big disconnect that we have. You know, right now we're actually having this conversation on a smarty -phone, you know, visi -phone instead of in person. And that's where I think Farmer's Markets kind of puts that personal
touch back onto it. And it gives so much more value when you actually know the person that's making your products and keeping your bees and where they're keeping them and what they're doing. And it's just exciting. You know what I mean? People like you who are also really interested in honey bees. That's awesome. And I just want to add one thing about the Farmer's Markets. And that is if someone listening is not a beekeeper yet, please Don't don't go get your honey at
the grocery store. Go to the local farmers market where you can talk to the beekeeper. You can ask questions. What kinds of what kinds of chemicals are you using? What are the bees feeding on? You can ask them any kinds of questions that you want. Feel very comfortable about what you're doing and you're going to learn something. Beekeepers are so good at sharing information. You know, I could probably say, hey, Kevin, why do you
put propolis in this one salve? And I'll bet you could go on for 20 minutes telling me why and it would be good stuff. Yeah. So that's an encouragement as well. And hey, you know, I mean, I don't want this to sound. to sound too capitalistic, but you're also making top dollar at those farmers markets because there's no middleman. It's just you straight there at hopefully a good full retail fair price. And that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And
people appreciate that. They'd rather pay good money to somebody in their community than pay it to a big company that's, you know, brought it in from China. You know, no offense to China, but I mean, like they're getting beat up, right? Well, but that's a generic. A lot of the honey that you're buying in the supermarket comes from out of the country. And frankly, the technology
is not there yet to know what all is in it. They're finding a lot of stuff is cut with high fructose corn syrup with, you know, additives like that that are super, super cheap. And so it's really cheap. And that's the other reason why for beekeepers, it's so hard to make money selling honey. Well, that's why we charge top dollar, you know, completely honest, $45 for a pint of honey is what we charge
and $50 if we put the comb in there. And that's a reflection of the time and energy that it's taken over a couple decades to figure this out. and also that creates that higher quality product and you can taste the difference and also speaking to like if you are conventional or if you're in transition or even organic standards which can use plastic foundation and use some treatments even if you are those beekeepers it's still awesome to offer that honey i'm not saying it's it's
it's not worth offering to the community. It's excellent. It's better honey than what you're just saying. It's better honey than what you can get at the grocery store. And you can talk to the people about their seasonal allergies, what time of season do they have it, and then you have the honey. You have the cure for them, the medicine for them. And also, honey's been shown to kill staph, you know, the MRSA. Like, it's better than some antibiotics. And propolis
kills COVID. You know, it's like, it's been proven. There's scientists, there's studies out there that show these things. And this is, instead of using these crazy chemicals on us too, we can use the medicine that the bees are using, and the bees are collecting. It's excellent, it's amazing. We've done a couple episodes on everything apotherapy. From bee stings, to propolis, to a lot of this other stuff, and I'm all for experimenting on myself with all this, and I
do. and I'll tell you what I had a bad burn on my arm a couple of months ago just from hitting the side of the oven you know because I'm really good at that kind of stuff and and oddly it just wasn't healing it just was was deep and kind of bad and after a few days I'm like I'm just gonna put some of our good raw honey right on this and I was thinking maybe i should do propolis i don't happen to have any around here i'm going to just throw honey right on it put a big band
-aid over it so it's not getting everything sticky yeah two days later unbelievable recovery this whole thing had closed off and was almost completely healed and this is not us legally not giving any medical advice of course these are our experiences we're not telling you no these are our personal experiences but it's amazing and and i do do some bee stings for some things too and love it and um i would encourage people to to if you feel like experimenting with some of that beekeepers
out there go for it everything in the hive is good for you except maybe small hive beetles but that's not from the bees I haven't heard of any tincture for that yet. Hey, we're running out of time. Kevin, I have to give you a chance to tell us one of your favorite wild and crazy beekeeping stories. Have you thought of anything? Well, fascinating, the kind of a highlight of my beekeeping career was, so we go to Molokai as well. It's a beautiful small island, a couple
islands north of us. And Novoroamite's there. No, exactly. There's no beekeeping industry. It's very small, like home backyard type stuff, as well as a massive amount of feral colonies. There was, and a lot of, you know, because of that, you're going to get a lot of extractions
from structures and what have you. And so we were called, we were asked, and this is, you know, we normally don't do this, but they asked us to help them remove a colony from a church, a small wooden church that was built by St. Damien. Exactly. Well, the church was not there. The church was up on the top side, they call it. But he had built the church there. But yeah, he'd ministered to the lepers in, or sorry, the
afflicted in Kalapapa. And he had come up and he built this wooden church in like the 1800s.
It was a double wall construction. So the bees had built a colony in there and we worked with some carpenters who removed the wood and and we extracted the colony from there and re you know put it into boxes and and relocated it and then sealed it up and that was amazing that was like an ethereal experience with the bees and in the church with the history of this ancient structure yeah that was that was just fascinating and then otherwise kind of more of a funny story
I I still am afraid of getting stung Right, honeybees? It's like, I think, I don't know if it's just me, but it's still, it hurts a lot. You know, it's like a burn. It's like a hot needle and it radiates for me. So it's like, I don't know if I'm just working it up. So anytime I do get stung, I, you know, kind of, I don't cry like a little baby, but I quickly move away. But you
scream like a little girl. Yes. So it's yeah, I do not like getting stung between the pain and then also the loss of you know, the B hits Yeah, it's all only cuz the loss of the B. Hey, you're human and And this is built into our DNA and that's why the first time that you do a sting on purpose to treat something I've never done that. It must be a different experience. I'm gonna come to your place and show you how It's
a different experience. It is so hard to do the first time because everything in your DNA is saying no, no, no, no, no, no. And you have to overcome that. It's crazy hard. It gets easier, but it's really hard the first time. to do a self inflicted. Hey, Kevin, we could talk for hours. I'm going to put your website down in the show notes in case people want to find you or reach out to you or order anything from you, which I would highly encourage the area that
your bees are in. I've been down to that area. It's absolutely beautiful. It is so green. It's kind of what you picture of Hawaii. It's just
green. It's not like this green desert behind me, which Has no bees by the way because who knows what all chemicals they use out there But I'm gonna give you the last word just one last piece of advice or why you just love beekeeping I love beekeeping because you never know what you're gonna get each seasons different each harvest is different and also have faith in the miraculous You know the honeybees they have been here for tens of millions of years They're gonna
work it through this this little blip on there genetic radar, the quicker that we come together as a community to overcome this, you know, kind of self -inflicted wound because we're creating the problem that we can solve. And we can solve it through beekeeping and coming together and appreciating the natural flow and ebb and flow of nature and the beautiful world that we're so lucky to be part of. Beautiful. Mahalo, my
friend. Thank you. Aloha. 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, Apigard, and now Veroxen, 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.