Selects: The Ins and Outs of Beekeeping

kitchen table, and a beautiful mourn. I hope it does the same for you. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you should Know. The Mellow Gold Edition were talking about Beck Ah, Yeah, sure, but I think beck was really talking about a m soft rock from the seventies, which I gotta say is like right up my alley these days. I love that.

I mean, I've always loved it, but I'm I'm really on a streak right now. Yeah, you were championing, uh the yacht rock thing, which I just I discovered Kenny Loggins, like I knew Kenny Loggins only from the top Gun era, and then that one Caddyshack song, which I was not crazy about. But then even further back, before the caddy Shack thing, it was just beautiful stuff Loggins and Messina. Yeah, I don't know if I've heard any Messina stuff, so I think I'm catching him right after the Messina part,

right before the Caddyshack part. Okay, that's pretty narrow Kenny Loggins window, that's niche right there. But anyway, I'm talking about mellow gold because I think you and I can both agree, Chuck, that even just reading about bee keeping, let alone actually engaging in the act of bee keeping, is about the most mellow, just relaxing thing that you can possibly do on this planet. I think it's just above bird watching and birding because birds don't sting you. Okay,

So so it's less mellow than bird watching. No, no, no, yes, it's less mellow. I think bird watching is the most mellow thing on the planet, Okay. And I think because there's a threat of stinging then bees have to be just slightly more stressful. Yeah, we should probably just go ahead and cut to that particular chase. Like, if you are a beekeeper, you're going to get stinged. Like the bees don't necessarily know you exist, and they certainly don't

learn to love you or anything like that. Um. There's just certain tricks and techniques you can do too vastly cut down on the chance you're going to be strong, but you're going to be stung, like from what I've seen several dozen times a year from working very closely with bees, handling them, interacting with them. Um. And so if you have a b allergy, you probably don't want to take up bee keeping. But but don't turn this episode off because, as we were just saying, even just

reading or hearing about bee keeping is relaxing. Yeah, and it's a it's a great thing to do, uh for the environment now because bees are super important to the environment and they're dying off because people spray for mosquitoes and use herbicides and things like that in their yard and that's not cool. No, But it's not just that. Remember there's there's the Colony clips Disorder episode that we did. Um. No, one ever got to the bottom of what has been

the cause of this. There's like so many different culprits from like round up to um to yeah to uh uh, pest sides to cell phone towers. Was a culprit there for a little while, or suspected culprit, but as far as we know, as far as I know, we don't know exactly what it is that's leading to colony claps disorder. So yeah, it is a good thing to say, you know what, I'm going to oversee a colony of bees and make sure that they are just in hog Heaven

as far as um their little lifespans are concerned. That's right. And we did a full episode on bees in January. What else did we do on We did a a TV show episode on bees. And I sent you a clip from that episode today and uh we we both had a good laugh. I thought it was good. I was like, this is actually pretty good compared to how I remember it. Yeah, I thought it was so bad. Really, that's funny. That's how I used to feel about it. Like I couldn't watch ten seconds strung together of that show.

I was so cringe. E to me, I guess enough time has passed where now I look back on him like, this is actually not nearly as bad as I remember it being. Nostalgia has kicked in. It's the show On effect, I guess. So that's fun, you say, Sean, Not because I was just listening to Sean on yesterday. Yeah, it's that bottom mine half effect, that's what's going down. It's even more astounding because I was listening to bid or bidom Mine Half this morning. So, uh, beekeeping in the

United States is becoming more and more popular these days. Um, here's the stat and this was this is an article from the Old House Stuff Works website, but it's from Dave Rouse, from Dave Ruse, from our very own and that's how I found it because I'm looking for Ruse specific material. Now it's it's just bona fide good stuff, it is. But he had a stat here from where there were about two point six seven million honey bee

colonies in the US. And of course a lot of these are from you know, uh, from Big b Big Honey, but there's a lot of backyard bee keepers doing their best work in going out there with their mellow gold, smoking up those hives and and getting out that sweet see nectar. Yeah, and actually those are good people to buy it from if you believe in immunotherapy like I do,

which apparently is still considered unproven. Who do. But it makes so much sense that you could introduce small amounts of like local pollen that you may develop an allergy to to prevent from getting allergies, Which means that you want to buy honey that's been produced within ten twenty miles maybe of where you live. Um, so you would want to go find one of those small beekeepers who

sells their honey. Yeah. If you're on your your Facebook neighborhood page or your next door neighborhood page, chances are you will see someone pop up every now and then it says I've got honey or eggs or something like that, or goats milk. Just go get that stuff and eat it up right? Who wants goats milk? Who wants goats milk?

You know? The traditional Facebook posts? Um, you can also go to like say what like a street festival in your town or something like that, like a little community festival. You're probably going to find local honey there, or health food store something like that, or goats milk, you know. Yeah, and while beekeeping is for sure fun and this made me want to do it, and I may do it one day. You gotta have some time. It is not the easiest thing in the world to do. It's it.

It kind of came across to me as one of those things that like a lot of like a lot of stuff like this. Your your first batch may not be the best, but like you learn and you learn and you get better and better at it. Yeah, And I want to shout out to also to some of the great resources in addition to this house Stuff Works article, I actually called a guy from Honey Harvest Farms in Glendon, Maryland. His name is Jeff, and Jeff helped me out with

some info that I just couldn't find online. But some of the sites I came across include Carolina Honey Bees, Iron Oak Farm, and Scientific Beekeeping, and all three of those are great resources. But there's a lot of really good resources on the internet to help explain how to do this and um answer more like arcane questions, and there's tons of forms like people who are really into beekeeping I found are called beaks geeks for short, um,

and they they are definitely into this. So there's tons of resources out there UM to to kind of get started and just kind of dive in. But yeah, I got the impression that, like, there's always more to learn, and each colony over the years is um probably has its own personality, I guess, is how you'd put it. Yeah. Should we go back in time though and talk about the history? I think so? Because they found honey that is fifty years old where in Georgia, not our Georgia,

the other Georgia. Yeah, and honey is very famous for not going bad. Um. You know they say if you find old honey like that, you can just heat it up and it will go back to being just delicious honey, even if it's crystallized, right, because yeah, the crystallization is just kind of an unavoidable consequence of aging. But it's easy to reverse, right, just for a little bit of heat. Yeah, it's got honey again flowing. Right. So did they taste

that honey. I'm not sure if they tasted that honey, but they found other old honey that they've tasted, and it's supposed to be pretty good. You know, that's honey tasted like honey I think, right, And it doesn't stores its stores, right, tastes like chicken and its stores forever like literally from what we understand, because it's sterile and it stays generally sterile. Um. But the the earliest depiction of actually rating a bee hive or of bee keeping

is is not really bee keeping. It's basically just a picture of a guy in a cave in Spain, on the cave walls, sticking his hand into a bee hive. And it's from something like, um, I believe eleven thousand years ago, yeah, nine thousand b c E. And uh yeah, stick in his hand in that honeypot, as far as real bee keeping goes, and on a domesticated at level. Um. We all know that they did it in Egypt and about. But of course people think China probably beat us, uh

or not us ony chuck casts is a lot with Egypt. Everybody, it beat us to it here in Egypt. Um. So in Egypt, though eventually, um, they have something like on in Hiero glyph they have like bee hives, clearly depicted honey pots. Um. And then they've also found hives that were human built, clearly human built, made of clay and straw,

from as as late as years ago. In Israel, so we've been into honey for a very long time, and at some point we figured out that you could probably um suffer a lot fewer beastings if you kind of um what's the word insinuated yourself into this bee colony. And that's ultimately what beekeeping is. We'll see it's humans saying, okay, I kind of get this life cycle of the bees

and the bee colony and what's going on here. I'm going to kind of manipulate this or oversee its supervised I guess that's how you put it, um this natural process in order to basically steal the honey from the bees at the end of the summer. That's right in a way that where they can keep making honey. Because in the early days, the very first bee hives that people domesticated, we're holloud out stumps and tree logs and things,

and they would destroy these. They would get that honey and then be like, all right, let's just destroy it and kill everything that gave us this delicious honey. There was a better way forward, uh later, But it also took the skep s k e p. If you've ever seen um, what looks like a a turned over basket with a hole in the bottom as sort of the symbol of beekeeping. That's called a skep, and they still

use them today here and there. I think like the most hardcore old school naturalist beekeepers might use a skep hipster, Yeah, hipsters, he's yess or they outside the developing world. Um, we we rarely use them these days, but they're still around, and you can find pictures of them. And if you look at on images online and uh, they have pictures of them turned over and you can see the combs

stuffed in there. It's kind of cool looking, right yeah. Yeah, And like you said, it's basically like the international kind of homespun symbol of of bee keeping in honey raising, that's right, But that was not any better for the bee because you had to destroy the hive with those as well, right, which is it's bad for the bees, but it's also bad for the beekeeper because you have to re establish a new callony every time you harvest, and you can keep a calling you going for a

lot longer than just one year, you know. Yeah, And things really kind of took a leap forward in Switzerland in the eighteenth century with a man named Francois Huber, who had the first movable hive, the leaf hive, which was it was sort of like a book. It turned like a book would, and uh, this was a good design because you could get the you can get the honey and not the brood, and you can remove these leaves without killing the colony, which was a great step forward.

But it still wasn't like the best design yet, and that one never really caught on. It didn't catch on despite Hubert's um efforts to promote it. He would go into town and say, oh, well, let's see what's on the next page, bees, what's on the next page more bees? Everyone and town folks just never really caught on. But in the nineteenth century there's a guy named Thomas Wildman and he started working with what are called bar hives,

which I have also seen called Kenyan bar hives. So I suspect that Thomas Wildman got the idea from Kenya. But it's like basically a long trough for like, um, you know those standing planters that you can keep a number of plants in, But it's just basically like a long rectangular raised box. It's like one of those. But then if you lift the top of the box. There's just a bunch of bars that stretch across the top inside and that's it. They have like a notch hanging down.

But if you pull that that bar up, you see that the bees have have created combs dangling from those those bars. Which is this This bar hive is still very much in use today, it's just not nearly as widespread as when we're about to talk about. Yes, that would be a man from Pennsylvania, minister named Lorenzo Langstroth, who said I will one day be the father of American beekeeping. That everyone's like, what are you talking about? He said, just pay attention because I have discovered what's

called the B space. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Is this a sermon? He was widely questioned, Like everything he said, he'd be like, I have to go to the bathroom and people be like, what do you mean. So what he discovered is there's this magic space called the B space where bees can really do their things successfully. And he found out that bees would not even build a comb in a space tighter than

one centimeter. And so he's said, this is the B space where they can produce uh, the comb and the right amount and not enough be glue is going to get in the way, Like this is the magic area, and I shall declare it be space and it shall

be fruitful. Yeah. And it was like, believe it or not, Realizing that bees don't build comb or glue in anything tighter than a centimeter revolutionized bee keeping because now with that b space, you could build these, um, these bee hives so that on the edges of them, they were just a centimeter between the sides of say, where the

combs were built. Um, you could keep these these frames or these bars separated by a centimeter, so there's enough space, like you're saying, for the bees of work, but not enough for them to glue together, which was an ongoing, apparently millennium millennia old problem of having to harvest and getting a bunch of combs stuck together at once. With the space, now all of a sudden you had little bits of comb that you could manipulate a lot more easily.

And that was like a huge contribution to be keeping. Strangely enough, that's right, And he got a the first American patent on a movable frame bee hive in October of eighteen fifty two, hooked up with a cabinet maker from Philadelphia, U named Henry Borkwyn and started building these things, started selling him and dead okay, but he found out

that his patent was way too hard to enforce. He tried to for a little while, but it was basically a waste of his time and the patent was just walked all over and he ended up getting no royalties but did revolutionize bee keeping. So a Langstroth hive then, is a proprietary eponym. Is that what you're saying. Well, I mean he got the patent right, and he couldn't enforce it, so it just became like Kleenex sort of

or aspirin. Yeah. I mean if you if you buy a Langstroth hive today, then for sure he's not getting any dough. He's long dead, long dead in the ground. But so this this high this is really cool and we'll talk more about it later, but just put a pin in it that this is the most widespread hive. Like lyon Strouth figured out how to make a bive that's so close to ideal that since the eighteen fifties that's gone virtually unimproved, which is pretty pretty significant. Accomplishment

if you ask me. Yeah, And I looked at these uh war or wear hives W A R R E, which is another kind um, but I didn't. I mean, I'm sure there are differences once you dig in there, but it didn't look that much different to me than the Lyon Struth. Yeah. I couldn't really tell much of the I mean I saw, oh, well this the Lion Struth doesn't have this this quilted thing of like you know,

cardboard shavings or whatever. So there's like, I think it's the very small differences that make a big difference and differentiating between these hives. Yeah, so should we take a break. I think we should, and then chuck. When we come back,

we're going to talk a little bit about B society. Okay, let's do it all right, So I would direct everyone to our ten of ten TV show stuff you should know, and in particular the B's episode, which, by the way, I wrote, I have an executive producer credit on that show from writing that episode. Executive producer credit on every episode. That's true, because that I really earned it on that one. Well, listen, so that's funny because that's how it was explained to me.

At the time. But Chuck, I just want to go on record here. I went to Herculean Links to keep you from getting stung by a b in that episode, and they said, absolutely not. Chuck has to get stung just to make the episode worth watching. He has to get stung. And I thought it was a better idea if you didn't, if we kept building up to it and it never happened, But they said, no, no, we're

not going with that. But I tried really hard to keep you from getting stun that's right, And we had a little fake bees that they put on my eyeball. But I would direct people to the January podcast episode. Instead. Why not? Both? Sure, but if you really want to learn about bees, that's where we dive into it super deep. So I guess we'll just consider this a bit of

a recap. Okay, okay, so um. In the in the world, there's something like twenty thousand species of wild bees, but in honey bee or bee keeping, you're going to find usually one species of b APIs mellifera, which is either the European or the Western honeybee, and there's different varieties they call him races, you know, with like breeds of dogs, we call them breeds, but they're all still the same species Canis lupus. But with bees, they're all the same

species APIs mellifera, but the races are different. So you have like the Italian honeybee or the Carnolean I believe, Carnolian honeybee, the Russian honeybee, but they're all races of European or Western honeybee. That's what you're gonna find everywhere. Yeah, and these things are amazing. I remember at the time, we were just sort of obsessed with bees after that episode, so much so that we wanted to do it for

the TV show. Uh. And one of the main reasons is because they're what's called a super organism, which basically means you take a western honeybe out on its own, and that thing isn't gonna do anything worthwhile with it. Kuldn't order dinner at Roy Rogers restaurant. It's so dumb. No. But when you put all these things together, all these bees have very specific jobs that we're gonna go over here in a second, and all these coordinated actions, and

that is the super organism. They are one hole like sixty thou honey bees acting as one in order to produce honey. Hive mind. It's a hive mind, right, So I mean we get so many hive mind worker bees. All these like things that are in like the our lexicon are all taken from the way bees do their thing right exactly. And so when you put them together, this larger super organism an emergent property of the collective

actions and the instincts that these bees are following. If you put it all together, they interact and form this larger hole and that's the colony. And so on the individual level, you have three different types of bees. You've got worker bees, which make up the vast majority of the population. They're all female, They're all sexually undeveloped females, and they do almost all of the work um as usual around the hive. Um. That includes everything from raising

the a to um creating wax. Um. Uh. They what else do they do? They make the honey, they go collect the pollen, They defend the hive, They serve as guards at the entrance, like they do almost everything. Yeah, they take care of that queen, which is the biggest one. A literally so this all made me nervous. Uh, when I was reading this again, because so much depends on the queen. It all depends on this one. B Wait,

it made you nervous. Yeah, it's not, because it's not like, oh, there's a bunch of queens, so if one of them dies or something happens, then you're fine. You gotta have

that queen and there's just one of them. I can't remember where we heard it, but like somebody said somewhere that like the queen is their slave, and that's actually like kind of true because the queen's whole job, chuck, is to basically keep the colony going and optimistic through this pheromone that she may creates, but also to like lay all of the eggs and fertilize them. Um, but that's a lot of eggs. It's a ton. Like apparently a queen can lay up to a million in her lifetime, right, yeah,

and that's over a few years. But that's about fift eggs a day. But my point is this, the queen is their slave because she does this for them, She keeps the population going, but they decide when it's time for another queen to be born. As far as I know, sure, is that correct? I think? So? Okay, we'll find out the in the listener. Male. Uh, then you got your drones.

Of course, those are the male bees, and they it is funny you have one one queen, You have these males that all they do is mate with a queen, and then these female worker bees do it literally everything else right. But on the other end, the the female worker bees are the ones who get to decide like who lives and who dies, and if you're a male own once you've mated with the queen, which happens in mid air outside of the hive, it is super sexy.

The queen mates with multiple males at once, gathers their sperm and stores it in a little sack which she then goes and like lays eggs and fertilizes the eggs as she sees fit, because I believe unfertilized eggs are drones and fertilized eggs are workers. So the queen is actually keeping an eye on how many of what are needed. But the drones, once they mate, especially when it comes time for winter and all of a sudden, they're starting to hit up their food stores and things are getting scarce.

The drones get pushed out into the cold to go off and die by themselves. That's right, that's a pretty ignomious end. Yeah, and you know that's it's a good time to point out that at different times of the year, bees are going to be more well fed, uh naturally, And as you'll see, when you're beekeeping, you have to keep track of what time of year it is, because, like you said, in the winter it's gonna be super scarce, but even in the fall and early spring, you're gonna

need to supplement their food and take right exactly. Because here's the thing. So so just with this life cycle of bees, in the spring, when the flowers start to bloom and the bees are going crazy, it's what's called the nectar flow. Um, they are producing honey in overtime.

And so what you're doing is the bee capers, you're saying, okay, well here, I want to make sure you have plenty of room to store as much honey as you possibly can, because what the bees are doing is storing honey, literally storing energy away to help get them through the winter. And you're going in and saying, I'm going to take these honey stores that you plan to use to make it through the winter, and I'll leave you some. I'll leave you hopefully just enough so that you don't need any.

But I'll also, as the beekeeper, this human who's insinuating himself for herself, I'll hit you up with some food to to make sure you guys survive happy and comfortably through this winter in exchange for letting me take this honey, because I got some toast inside that's just popped out of the toaster. Man, I had some creamed honey for the first time today. I mean, like, I'm a big time honey guy, but I had not had cream honey before.

And it's like spun honey or is that different. It is a combination of crystallized and liquid honey that's highly spread herble and I got it. It's like just Trader Joe stuff. Who knows where it was made, but um, it's very tasty. At least he's doing nothing for my immune system, but it's doing a lot for my um my limbic system. Yeah, I mean, honey honey sort of one of nature's miracles. It is. And you start talking about Manuka honey and things add like these healing properties

and it's it's pretty great. Stung by a jellyfish put some money on it. Oh yeah, I bet it couldn't hurt. No, at the very least, you can eat some while you're doing that, and it makes things a little better. So should we talk about equipment for a bit? Yeah, I think so so, because this is about beekeeping. That was our brief be overview. But again go back to Janu. Do you want the full scoop on bees? But this is about beekeeping and if you want to be a beekeeper.

We also did a little short on beekeeping one of our little shorts that we used to like for the car commercials when we would go around the different locations, we did a little bee keeping bit because I remember we had smokers and we wore the hat and veil. I remember that too in gloves. I just had forgotten what the context was for. But yeah, it was for one of those shorts. I can't remember what we call them interstitials. That's right, the most dry, scientific clinical name

for those things. Those were good. Surely you like those those? Yeah? I think those? Hold up? Those are fun. So, uh, here's what you're gonna need is new equipment. If you're new to bee keeping, Dave here recommends you get new equipment. Oh, Yeah, you know what you have to because if you get inherited equipment, like once you're on the scene, somebody might be like, hey, like I got an extra smoker, or here some frames I can't use. They open their trench,

they've got a bunch of bee boxes hanging inside. What do you have? What do you want? But as you will find out later on in our section on disease and bacteria and stuff, it's pretty prevalent. So you want to get your new equipment going if you're new to be keeping, just so you start out on the right foot. Yeah, because once a specific kind of bacteria that causes foul brood, once it's in, once it's in your boxes, like your

colony is toast in your boxes are done forever. There's like you need to burn the boxes so they don't end up in somebody's hands because it'll kill just stay in linger and kill everybody. So it's not good. So um, as we kind of said earlier, far and away, the most popular hive among beekeepers is the Langstroth hive, right, So we're gonna just kind of focus on that one. But it is a lot of fun to just go look at exploded diagrams of the different kinds of bee

hives out there. Beekeepers use and see all the different parts or whatever, but there's there's too many of them to really go into. So we're just gonna focus on the Langstroth high even though it's just the length of this introduction to how we're just going to pay attention to the lyngstrave hive. I could have covered two or three other high but we're gonna stick to just the

lionstrave hive. Okay, So you could build one of these things if you were good at this kind of thing, But what I recommend is that you go online or you go to if there happens to be a local apiary store in your village, go buy one there. If you live in a village, there's an apiary store for sure. But yes, they also still sell mustash, wax and beard oils, handmade axes and made axes. Um so yeah, but it is true, like if you have like a quaint hardware store,

that's probably a good place to to look. And then also, um, I guarantee there's a million places online to get them too, and they're relatively cheap too. Yeah, not not too much. You can get into bees for you know, it seems like including the bees for less than five bucks you can kind of get going, right, That's that's what I'm getting. Probably if you really, you know, watched what you're doing, maybe half of that. Yeah, alright, So you get your

your Langstrath hive. And this thing has a big box on the lower half called the hive body or the brood chamber, and this is where the bees are mainly. Yeah, and even even below that, you have a um a stand that the things sitting on. It raises it off the ground and usually it's kind of angled, so it's like a landing pad for the bees. And then it also improves circulation. Then you have the bottom board, which is the floor of the hive, which protects the high

from invaders from above. And then you've got the brood chamber above that the hive body, that's right, and that's where they're gonna be building net comb. That's where the

queen's gonna be layer eggs. That's where're gonna they're gonna raise that brood up, and that's where they're gonna store the honey that they think that they're going to be eating in abundance, Right, and then you've got a really important piece of equipment that it would be very easy to overlook if you don't know what you're doing, but you're gonna have shoes if you don't get it. It's called the queen excluder. So you remember, Chuck, that you said that the queen is about twice the size of

the workers. I don't know, but you definitely did. I'm here to tell you when, um, when when you added queen excluder. All it is is basically like a mesh or slats or something like that that are space far enough apart for the workers to easily make it through, but it's too close together for the queen to make it through. So the queen won't leave the brood chamber

to lay eggs. She'll just use the brood chamber for that, which means though, that the workers can go lay honey in the chamber above the brood chamber, which is called the honey super the box above that. That's right, the honey super not the supper, No, just the super And I didn't see why they call it that, did you know? The honey super position. Maybe it's a nod to quantum physics.

Maybe so, But this is where they're going to store that surplus honey when when the plants are blooming in that neck are is flowing and you're you're skimming some off the top as the beekeeper. Yeah, and like if you did not have that queen excluder, the honey super would be just another brood chamber because the queen wants to use as many places as she can to lay

eggs and then they lay honey around it. So the the eggs, which is where which also serves as the nursery for the brood um and the honey they're all like together in the same combs. But because you put that queen excluder, she's not laying eggs in that honey super, which means it's just sweet, delicious honey in all of the combs. On the frames, which we haven't talked about yet, well, yeah, these are the frames. These are frames that you can take in and out. They hang vertically and these days

it's pretty amazing how far they've come. They are actually pre printed with bees wax or some sort of foundation made of plastic that's just sort of says, here you go, bees, here's a little head start, right, um, But you found some extra interesting stuff about the bees and and their wax making abilities to yeah, I did actually so like it takes about a table spoon of honey to make an ounce of wax, and bees make wax through a gland, right, they eat the honey and secrete wax instead, And so

whenever they create a new brood chamber, they make it, they secrete it as wax and basically a circle, and then they use their body heat to shape it into a hexagon. And the reason they make right, and the reason that they make hexagons is because they don't know this, but structurally it is the most structurally sound um shape

in nature. That um uses the least amount of material, which is just astounding that bees instinctually know to make an um hexagon hexagon right, not octagon right, So they but they use but they start with the circle and then use their body heat to melt it into the shape. Well, anyway, would they have to do this for each a that they put in a brood chamber. They have to do this for each um, each cell that they put honey into. And then they they also make wax to cap the

honey off. So it requires a lot of honey to make that wax, which means logically, if you can give them a leg up, either with preprinted honey or plastic or leaving as much honey as you can from the honey harvest, or leaving as much wax there as you can from after the honey harvest, they don't have to make new wax. They can reuse the old stuff, which means that's less honey that your bees are eating to produce wax, which means it's more honey that you're getting. Yes.

And by the way, if you're typing an email to me right now because I said hexagons or five sided, please stop. It is six sides. Yes, everyone knows that five sided. Uh, structure is a circle. Wait what is a five sided one? Huh? What's a five sided one? Uh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right pentagon. I played enough Dungeons and Dragons as a youth that I should know this, but I don't remember. I get my guns. Uh confused sometimes everyone, Well, Chuck, i'll teach you a little cheat here. Refer to all

of them as polygons, and you're covered real. Oh yeah, so like every hexagon, it's a polygon, that kind of thing, hexagon, triangle, anything with three sides or more. It's a polygon and someone no, not a polygon, that's a circle. But ask someone to debate you. It can't. You'll just shut them down every time. Yeah, and also make new friends at parties, right, come at me, fight me, polygon. Uh. So you're also

gonna have a feeder in this thing. We talked a little bit earlier about the fact that you're you're skimming this honey and taking some for yourself as it's um made in excess, and at other times of the year when it's like especially late summer and winter, they're pollen resources. Resources are gonna be lower obviously because things aren't in full bloom. So you're gonna have to help feed these

little little fell was and little ladies. There are feeders, um Dave here says something about a zip block bag with sugar water with a slit cut. But I've seen that's the most rudimentary thing I can imagine. One small step up is like, uh, sort of an aluminum pan with sugar water that slides in and out of this box. Yeah, and you know those like pet feeders of pet waters

that have like the water something look like that. Yeah, So that's specifically called a boardman feeder, and it's just a mason jar filled with sugar water and um screwed into the mason jar cap which is inverted in a little wooden thing with some slots for the bees to get in and out of, and the cap is perforated, so the sugar water just slowly drips out, and so it's a long, steady supply of water that you slide the wood part that the cap is is inserted upside

down into um into the front entrance of your beehive. So all you have to do is unscrew the mason jar and put more sugar water in every once in a while, and the bees need. It's a really easy way to feed bees, that's right. But specifically you mentioned pollen. I saw something that I didn't realize. But when you reach about the fall, you don't want the bees to

have any pollen if you're feeding them. It has to be like pure sugar water, because if they eat pollen, that will produce solid waste, and bees are really clean and they won't go in their hive. They leave the hive to go evacuate their bowels, which actually ties into

that yellow rain short stuff we did remember that. But they'll go fly away from the hive, but if it's too cold, they can't leave the hive, so they will actually die rather than poop in the in the colony, or some of them will be like, forget it, I'm living. I'm just gonna go ahead and poop. But now the whole colony is spoiled. And the reason why it is because they've eaten too much pollen and they can't make

it until the spring to go outside and poop. So you don't want to feed them any pollen in the fall. That's right, And that is the opposite of our wives who would rather die than poop in a public place. Exactly me too. I basically would as well. Oh I'll put anywhere. I know. Man, it's a it's an admirable quality. I mean, I don't love it, but I certainly won't

put myself at risk. What's your technique to you go to like a happy place and just pretend you're not you're not there, like you just leave your body for a little while. Uh No, I just go kind of primal, you know, Oh yeah, like a lot of grunting, kicking at the walls, just you know, it's like that. You gotta do it. It's the most primal thing you can do to force feces out of your body. And Jerry's eating them very sorry, I know, sorry Jerry Themisa is

just drooling out of the crack of her mouth. I'm not doing it is So let's let's keep going here because we need to move on to the tools, because that's the box. That's the langstroth hive. UM, get a get a good one, make sure it's solid. Yeah, and again, you don't have to break the bank. There's there's a there's you know, a cheap basic langstroth hive isn't going to put you in the poorhouse. And plus one other thing about langstroth hive before we move on. That's so ingenious, Chuck,

is the um. It's modular and scalable, so you can easily like remove the top boxes and put another brood chamber on, put another honey super off, and you know, harvest more and more honey. Um. It's if you break part of it, you can replace parts exactly. So yeah, it's it's like a really good inventor, Like it makes sense that it would have been invented in eighteen fifty and not, you know, really have been changed that much. I agreed. Uh. So we talked a little bit about

the protective clothing that is that veil. You can have the cool little uh sort of safari pith helmet with a veil um, but usually they will just fit over any kind of wide brimmed hat. You want to make sure it's snug. Uh. They some people, you know, it depends on who you are. If you're really used to this, you can build up sensitivity to be stings and you're like, forget the gloves, forget covering my body, I'll just wear the veil. Some people might not even wear the veil

because they're so cool. I think at least they wear the veil. Oh no, I've seen people handling bees without veils. Friend, that's crazy. Yeah, you think old time beekeepers are putting on a veil. All the videos I watched, everyone was wearing veils like they might not have been wearing anything else, but they had a veil. And they had the second thing, a smoker. Well, yeah, you gotta have that smoker. And

that is a very cool device. And I always wanted to hold one, and finally we got to when we made that little video interstitial, and it looks sort of like they've compared it to a elongated metal teapot. Not a bad descriptor. Um. It's just like a metal canister with a with a spout pointing upward, and it's got a handle that has a little little bellows built into it. And what you do is, and I always wonder what

the heck was in there, You're just burning something. You're burning cardboard, or you're burning leaves or something, and use that bellows just to pump a little smoke out, right, And the reason you're pumping the smoke out is to calm the bees, and it calms the bees by masking the pheromones that they that there, say the guard bees or eoting out, which means that the other bees aren't picking up on this alarming pheromone and so they're all

remaining calm. Actually, So it's an essential tool of the trade, is a smoker, that's right. And you're also gonna need a hive tool if you look those up. It's if you've ever used a wonder bar. I think that's probably proprietary name, but it's it's kind of like a kind of like a flat crowbar, and that's exactly what it looks instead of a beefy round crow bar. I atly suggest you get a wonder bar too, because those are just great to have a run the house. Yeah, I

have one of those. You got a wonder bar, I do. I don't know if it's wonderbar, wonder Bar, trademark, pride bar, but it is exactly that. Yeah. Yeah, So this hive tool is sort of the same, and it is used you know, I think I mentioned be glue earlier on. That's propolis and that is uh saliva and bees wax and other like materials from the garden maybe, and they use that to seal up gaps in the hive. But you're gonna need to pry open stuff, uh like get that be glue loose, and that high tool is what

you use because it doesn't destroy your beautiful, beautiful hip box. Yeah, because I mean the frames are where they build these honeycombs, and you need to get the frames out to get

the honey from the honeycombs. So yeah, you're gonna need to pry the frames out sometimes because everything the bees doing is saying please don't take my honey exactly, and we're like, oh, but we have a tool that allows us to do that, right, Yeah, including it up to stinging you to say, please don't take my honey, but yeah, we don't listen. You want to take our second break, Yeah,

let's do it. Okay, we'll be right back, all right. So, if this whole thing has really floated your boat as it did us, because Chuck, I guarantee you both of us are going to be country folk beekeepers by by the time we're dead in our retirement. Right. Um, So if that, if you've been bitten by the bug, the bee, if you've been stung by the beekeeping, Um, there's actually just a few things you want to do to get started.

It's not hard to get into. It's one of those things like, um, have you ever taken scuba diving lessons? You learn how to scuba dive and it takes about thirty minutes, and then the rest of like say, the week long course is to teach you how to stay alive as something goes wrong. Beekeeping is kind of the same way, like it's really easy to get into and learn the basics, but but it takes years of just understanding and learning and picking up new things to to

really become an advanced beekeeper. Yeah, and and it's you can read books, and you can go online and you can take courses, but like with everything, there's nothing like firsthand experience ants. And like you said, it's it's gonna be a while, be a while, I mean to do that. I'm sorry, but in a couple of seasons, you know you you're gonna really know what you're doing to a large degree. Yeah, Dave Rus says, Man, go find a mentor. There's plenty of beekeepers out there who are They're not

gonna yell at you for asking. They'll probably be happy to pass along this knowledge and information. I think. So it seems like a hobby slash job that people want to spread the love of right like creamed honey. So Dave says, though, just there's some basic things to start. Um, you want to pick a location for your hive, and one of the first things you want to do is make sure that you're allowed to have a hive. Depending on where you live. If you live out in the country,

there's probably very few ordinances. Most most ordinances either say you can't have bees here because this is a city and within the city limits, no bees are allowed. They say bees are farm animals, so they belong on a farm. Or bees are non domesticated animals, so same thing. Or heaven forbid you have an e joe, just forget about it. Yeah, literally,

forget about it if you have an h O way. Um, there's one place called Champlaine, Minnesota, and they say, at least as far as the University of Minnesota says that they allow bees so long as quote the neighbors are on board. That's the official from what I understand. I don't know if that's in what in the city code or the county code, but that's that's how it was put on the University of Minnesota website. So that is

a good point, though. You want to make sure your neighbors are cool with it, or at the very least that you have enough land that your neighbors aren't gonna be bothered by the bees. Yeah. But if you have a neighbor that says, you know, I have a I'm definitely allergic to bees, and then I mean tell him to move right. Either that or it's time for you to get into like r C planes. That's right. Um, So you you get your local ordinances all settled, you

pay off your neighbor. And then you want your the the uh you want to direct that be traffic. You know, like where you set it up on your property is important. You don't want to have the hive entrance and exit facing your neighbor's property, right, Uh. You want to have it facing your house, and you want it ideally facing

south or southeast. Yeah. And the reason why you want to have a facing south and southeast is so it gets Also it's a really good morning sun, because that'll wake the bees up and get them going and saying, get off your duff's lazies and get out there and

start foraging and make me some honey. That's right. They also say that it's goodbye if you have a like some bushes or a privet or a fence near the entrance, because when they when they leave the hive, that's gonna make encourage them to go upwards, yeah, rather than to your neighbor's pool. That's right. Um. So you also, in addition to making sure the beehive gets morning sun, you want to protect it from strong winds. Um. You want to make sure that it's definitely protected from afternoon the

worst of the afternoon sun. So say like between two and four. You don't want unobstructed sun just beating down your beehive is gonna cook them. Um. And you also want to make sure that there's a good, you know, all weather cap on the bee hive that's going to protect it from rain and stuff like that too. And speaking of rain, you also want a water source nearby. Yeah, I mean you you made a joke about going to your neighbor's pool, but that could happen because bees need water.

They forage for water and they cool to hive with it. They blend it with pollen to make bee bread, which is pollen, nectar and honey, and that's what they eat. And um, I think that's what the larvae especially feed on. Is that right? Yeah? I think so that be bread. So if you live near a pond, or you gotta like grow up like me and head a creek uh nearby your house, and then you're all you're all set.

You don't need to worry about it. But if you don't, then you're gonna want to put something in Like a bird bath might be nice. Or Dave even says you can just put a large platter of water. Yeah. Dave also says put a zip block of sugar water on your beehive and cut have slid in it. So maybe go a step further beyond a platter. Well, I mean it depends on your esthetic, I think, I guess, but I mean put some water in like a tire that stood up on its side, and I'm like that to

see that in your yard. Why are you picking on day if he's the best, because that was some just genuinely bad. If I still put a platter of water out there, like like, put a little more thought into this. Okay, okay, all right, So you've got everything except bees. And it never occurred to me where you get these bees? Right? You know? I thought you just set this all up in the bees would be attracted to it and fill it up over the course of a decade and then

you can start making honey. You can actually buy bees. Yeah, and they arrive via post postal service what I understand, or probably FedEx these days. But I read a mother Earth News article from ninety four and they were saying, your postman will love you for this, but they're going to arrive in a package a box filled with live bees, probably somewhere around ten thousand of them. Yeah, And amated queen.

That's important. It's not like you have all this and you're like, now I gotta go find the rarest thing in the world, which is a happily mated queen. Right, And so the made this is one of the reasons I called Jeff um over at the farm at Honey Harvest Farm and Glen to Maryland because I was like, well, I couldn't find what made it specifically meant it was called premated, That's what Dave. Dave called it premated, So I was like, does that mean a virgin queen that

hasn't made it yet or has made it beforehand? Yeah? Yeah, the ladder is correct. They both like they they have the queen mate with a bunch of drones and then say you wint and take the queen and put a sequester her so that she can't lay any eggs. And then they put her in a special container with the

rest of the bees and shipped them to you. And then you put the bees together in your own brood chamber with the queen in her sequestered thing, and you peel back a little like piece of tape or something, and that exposes a little candy plug and the workers eat through the candy plug to free the the queen.

It's pretty cool how it works, it really is. And I've also seen that the candy plug which is meant to also keep the queen bee alive during transport, Um, if it comes out or something, you can just plug it with a marshmallow too, which is the most quaint thing I've ever read in my entire line. Uh, you should also try and get your bees locally. Um. If you get them locally, then you know a that they haven't been shipped a long way, which is going to stress them out and be that they're gonna be hip

to your scene. Uh, They're gonna be down with your weather and just cool with the bars and the restaurants that are nearby. They'll know all about the local schools that the parents never stopped talking about, and everyone's just gonna be happier. Right. So also, you hopefully you can

just go pick them up. But I do have the impression that there's tons of mail order bees to Oh sure, but you you, whatever it is you want to order them so that they arrive in early early spring, because your whole goal here is to get this colony up and moving and really hell, the and well populated and rare and to go um by the time the spring

flowering and the nectar flow begins. That's right. Uh, there's another way to do this, what I call the Chuck way, the Chuck version, and that's to buy a nuke, right, And a nuke is a nucleus colony, and that is just sort of like the lazy persons all in one solution. You you buy a hive box. It's preloaded, it's stocked, it's got an active queen, it's got eggs, it's got your brood, it's got your pollen stores, it already has honey, for God's sake. And they call it, like I said,

a short for nucleus colony as a nuke. And you can get a nuke for not much more than this other stuff, right yeah. And I mean so basically it's the brood chamber component that we're talking about with the langstroth hive. That's basically what you're buying is they ship you a like you say, you're ready to go brood chamber, and then you just start putting a queen um excluder and you know, superboxes and all that stuff on top, and there you go. It seems pretty pretty smart to

me to try starting with that as well. When I was looking at the price, I was like, cheeze one of these nukes, like a thousand bucks, and it seems like it was all about fifty dollars more than starting from scratch. But I think you can spend quite a bit on a starter kit of bees if you're, say, um,

looking to have just pure bread bees. Yeah, like just Italian honey bees are just Russian honey bees because um, the different different races have different kind of um tendencies, Like Italian honeybees tend to to keep a larger population over the winter, which means that you need to leave them more honey or feed them more. But they're also

friendly or more docile that kind of stuff. Um. But it's really expensive because those bees are artificially inseminated and like really in a very controlled environment, whereas with most of those ones that you're spending like a hundred two hundred bucks on ten tho, they're what they call mutts, which are just like, you know, a whole whole bunch of different races of the same species of be and they they have a lot of different characteristics, some of

which may actually make them less susceptible the diseases than say, like pure breads are. It's like it's like a normal person compared to um, British Royalty or something. Is that too soon? I don't think so. Okay, So once you've got everything set up, Um, your main job is going to be to feed your bees, try and keep them from swarming, and then making sure they stay healthy from

disease and mites. Um, you're gonna be harvesting that excess honey along the way like we've been talking about, and gonna be feeding them that sugar water to keep them happy. And as you're doing this, you're gonna be learning more and more about just sort of the shorthand of it all, Like like when you go to even lift the back of a box, you're gonna know just by weight, like how heavy with honey that the thing is. You're not gonna have to keep pulling stuff out and looking at

it over and over. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, all these little shortcuts. Um, but we need to talk about swarming because that's a that's a big deal and something that seems like it could happen fairly easily. Um, if you have a good healthy hive going on, and they're producing a lot of brood. It's gonna become overcrowded. So you want to part of avoiding this is to keep your

population in check. But if you don't, then they're going to swarm, which means half of your colony and sometimes all of it is gonna say, come on, queen, let's go.

Let's leave this place. I don't like this apartment anymore because it's too crowded, right, which is just an unavoidable natural process, because if you think about it, what the bees are doing is reproducing and growing their population, and then eventually, when things get crowded, they split into two and go establish a new colony or um leave the old colony behind. Right, So you're you're artificially preventing that from happening by doing things like inspecting the the um chamber.

Four signs of queen cells like little queen larva that are being grown by the by the workers, which means that they're preparing to swarm and start another colony. That looks like a little peanut sort of hanging off of your comb. And if you just go through and pick those off, literally pick just get them out of there. Then the bees are like, Okay, I guess we're not

going to raise another queen now. But there's other things you want to do to Like you want to actually physically get rid of some of the brood to to control the population. You're just basically saying this idea about swarming your you we were We're not going to do that. We're going to make it so that you have more room by controlling the population. Yeah, when you say get rid of the brood, that doesn't mean, uh, take these

frames out and burn them on the fire. You're gonna be involved, hopefully by this time, with other local people in the area that are doing this. You're gonna go in to beekeeper meetings and getting hammered once a month on mead, right, and you're gonna trade with your friends. You're gonna say, hey, let's uh, I got too much going on here. I'm afraid I'm gonna get a swarm happening. So here's some brood frames h if you can, If you can take them, and uh, people are going to

be very grateful for that. Yeah, because it's kind of like getting a free nuke, uh to to to um supplement your your colony. That's maybe not doing so good because there's two problems. One, your colony can be too healthy and then it's gonna swarm, which you want to prevent. Or it can be weak, which means that it can be overwhelmed by robber bees nearby bees that come through and to steal a bunch of stuff and basically kill

off the weak colony. So yeah, just to supplement your numbers with a brood frame that somebody doesn't want because their population is starting to swarm, that would be a very good thing to have. That's right. One other thing about swarming chuck, that's how you make a bee beard. That's right. You take a queen and you tire to your forehead and the bees will come and form a beard or around your face. That's what they're doing with the bee beard. It's pretty funny looking and they will

get stung. But the reason why they're not totally stung is because before they swarm, the bees gorge themselves on honey for their traveling to go establish the new colony, and they're just following the queen, and so if the queen is tied to your forehead, they're just hanging out waiting to see what she's gonna do totally. All right. We need to talk about disease because it is. It

is bad right now. Um, there's something called the Veroa might, which is a parasitic pest and it is very small, came to the United States in the nineteen eighties and is the most common cause of be death and colony failure right now because of commercial beehives. Almost half uh in spring were infected with veroa. It's a bad, bad problem. It is because they will lay their eggs. These mites will lay their eggs on the um larva or the pupa of the bees, and they will feed on the

pupa and either kill them or deform them. They will also attach themselves to adult bees and suck their blood. They spread disease. It's a really bad jam. And so as being a beekeeper, you have to keep an eye out for any kind of might infestation and then treat it accordingly. That's like a basic part of beekeeping, but also something that's a little more advanced than anything we could really go into now. It's just know that part of beekeeping is monitoring for diseases and pests and then

treating them. Yeah, you don't want more than ten, And there are various ways that you can test how many mites you have. Uh that once you get into bee keeping, you're gonna learn on these little tricks. But you don't want any more than ten mites per two bees. And if you have more than that, then you're in trouble. And when you look at a picture of these things like sitting on a bee and feeding on it, it's just you just want to like pride off of their

right and squash it. Right. But then then foul brood, which we mentioned earlier, is another big problem, and there it got its name from the sulfur smell that a brood um, a brood frame will have when you pull it out. And once you have that, your your whole colonies gone. They're goners and you need to burn your your wooden wear. Yeah, I saw dead fish. I was because I saw sulfur and I was like, well, does this swim like farts? Right? But then I saw dead fish was kind of what a lot of people said

it smells like. And if you've got that, then I'm sorry, that's what a letdown. It is a letdown, especially if it happens you know, right around you know, right before they really start producing honey, right, and that's where we find ourselves. Finally you get to that sweet, sweet, mellow gold, which is which is what you're doing this for, and not only to get the honey, but obviously it also do the right thing by encouraging be populations. But harvesting

honey is what everyone's really in it for. Whether you're gonna sell it or just give it away to friends or just have some for your family, that's really the end game here. And so like when you do when you go to to get the honey um, there's actually a pretty clever little thing you put on uh in between the brood chamber and the honey super that you're gonna collect honey from that lets the bees out, but it's it produces a maze for them to try to

get back in. So after forty eight hours, all of bees will clear out and you can take your honey super and all of the frames laden with honey and put them into an extractor, which is definitely going to probably double the amount that you've put into your bee keeping so far. But from everything I've seen is if you're going to harvest honey, this is the way to

do it. Did you see any videos on this. Yeah, I mean you can get mechanical, motorized ones it's like a centrifuge, but the ones I saw were mainly very homespun, just sort of these hand cranked versions literally homespun. Yeah. You you you uncapped and remove the wax, and you'll see in these videos they hold up the frames and just take a knife, like a hot knife, and just sort of cut the wax away from the frame and

then you can literally see the honey there. If you don't have a uh an extractor, you can just do it the old fashioned way and lay it down and just wait for the honey to flow. But you can also stick them down in the extractor. The one I saw held about eight frames and you just crank that thing and it just slings the honey out and filters. You have to have certain sized screens, uh for for honey extraction to filter out the wax bits and be legs and antennae or things, you know, be parts. You

want to get that stuff out of there too. Yeah. But then at the bottom is the catch where they you know, between the the extractor and the screen is a reservoir and there's this bigot on the bottom and you put it up on your countertop and pure honey just flows right out of the bottom. It's pretty awesome.

It's beautiful and the taste delicious. The good thing about the extractor, too, is all you're doing is carving off the top wax cap, but you're leaving the the wax part of the chamber, the bulk of the wax intact, so that the bees can reuse it and they have to eat less honey to produce more wax for the next season. It's pretty great. It is pretty great. That's bee keeping, which is pretty great too. Agreed, you got

anything else right now? I got nothing else? Well, we'll talk about this more later when we get into be keeping. His old man, Okay, yeah, for sure. Uh. Not that you have to be an old man to be into be keeping. This's not at all what I mean. No. Uh. If you want to more about bee keeping, go on a how stuff works and check out this awesome article by Dave Rouse. And there's also tons of other stuff around the internet to help you. I mean, since I said tons of other stuff on the internet, that means

it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this, uh something about our jingle, our theme song. Hey guys, been listening for about eight years. I never had a reason to write in. And you get a lot of emails from couples who sing your jingle back and forth to each other, which is very cute. But my story is less cute. I just moved into a new house and it turns out we have the exact amount of steps on our stairs for me to stomp to your jingle.

Ever since I discovered this a couple of months ago, it's become virtually impossible for me to not stomp your jingle on the stairs, sometimes singing along too. I can't imagine how maddening that is. A couple of days ago, I was thirsty in the middle of the night and went downstairs for some water. I'm sure you can guess what happened next down I go into my front door, chipping a tooth. I was not guessing that that was gonna happen. I wasn't gonna guess that either, But Jamie,

I'm very sorry that happened. Seriously, Jamie is from Sienna College, and uh, I'm sorry. The worst of all earworms right that? But that was the email. It just kind of ended like that. Yeah, I mean it was like I wanted it to be like, and I went to the dentist and the dentist happened to turn out to be a long lost uncle who put me in his will or something. But no, it ended with the chipping of the tooth. That's it, Sorry, Jamie. That's all we can say. Ended

like many of my own stories. If you want to get in touch of this, like Jamie did to let us know you chipped a tooth, or just to say hi, or that an uncle put you in their will, you can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links. There, you can send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, slather it on the behind with honey, and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you

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