The Ins and Outs of Beekeeping

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 Candy Shack thing, it was just beautiful stuff. Loggins and Messina. Yeah. I don't know if I've heard any Messina stuff. So 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 chuk 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, than 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 stung. 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 bee 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 beekeeping 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 claps 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 bees? 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. Wow, 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 and I guess enough time has passed. Word 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 shaan On effect, I guess. So that's funny, 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 Bottom 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 Rouse, 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 uh, 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 beekeepers doing their best work in going out there with their mellow gold, smoking up those hives and and getting out that sweet sweet 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 goat's milk. Just go get that stuff and eat it up, right, Who wants goats milk? Cool wants goats milk? You know, the traditional Facebook post grips 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 a

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 uh, 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 for honey harvest farms in Glenda, 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 that 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 in 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 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, you 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 good honey tasted like honey, I think, right, And it doesn't stores. It 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 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 honey pot. As far as real bee keeping, goes and on a domesticated 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 on that Egypt.

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 twenty nine years ago in Israel. So we've been into honey for a very long time, and at some point we've figured out that you could probably um suffer a lot fewer beastings if you kind of um, oh what's the word insinuated yourself into this bee colony. And that's ultimately what beekeeping is. We'll see it's human 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 it 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 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 skeps 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 calling me every time you harvest, and you can keep a colony 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 these you could 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 Kenya 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 one 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. 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 said, this is the B space where they can produce uh, the comb in 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 beekeeping 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 piece 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 Borkwin and started building these things, started selling them 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 revolution I be keeping so a lyon stroth 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 Stroth figured out how to make a beehive that's so close to ideal that since the eighteen fifties that's gone virtually unimproved, which is pretty pretty significant accomplishment if you asked 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 Stroth. Yeah. I couldn't really tell much of that. I mean I saw, well, this the limeshot 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 in 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 alright. 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 exact get a 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 writing it. 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 bee in that episode, and they they said, absolutely not. Chuck has to get stung just to make the 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? If 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 honeybee or bee keeping, you're going to find usually one species of bee APIs mellifera, which is either the European or the Western honeybee. And there's different varieties. They call them races, you know. With like breeds of dogs, we call them breeds, but they're all

still the same species Canus 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 carno Lean I believe, Carnolian honeybe or the Russian honeybee, but they're all races of European or Western honeybee. That's what you're going to 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 In. One of the main reasons is because they're what's called a super organism, which basically means you take a western honey bee out on its own, and that thing isn't gonna do anything worthwhile with it. Couldn'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 this super organism. They are one hole, like sixty thousand honey bees acting as one in order to produce honey hive mind' 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 eggs 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. 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. Be 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 she 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? Okay, we'll find out the in the listener mail. 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 drone, 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

ignominious 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 intake, 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 caepers. 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 say, 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 too, to make sure you guys survive, happy, and comfortably through this winter in exchange for letting me take this honey, right because I've 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's honey is sort

of one of nature's miracles. It is when you start talking about Manuka honey and things at like these healing properties and it's it's pretty great. Stung by 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 Jan

if 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 be keeping, Dave here recommends you get new equipment.

Oh yeah, you know 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 coat and they've got a bunch of bee boxes hanging inside. What do you have? 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 you're calling his toast, and 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 the 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 with just the length of this introduction to how we're just going to pay attention to the Langstroth hive, I could have covered two or three other highs, but we're gonna stick to just the Langstroth 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 axis 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. And 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 going to be building net comb. That's where the queen's gonna be laying or eggs. That's where 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 an 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 issues 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, The honey super position. Maybe it's a nod to quantum physics.

Maybe so, but this is where they're gonna store that surplus honey when when the plants are blooming and that nectar 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 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 kind of perfect to 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. Inn sure 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 but they use but they start with the circle and then use their body heat to melt

it into the shape. Well, anyway, what they have to do this for each egg 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 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? Okay, 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? Is that a pentagon? Yeah? 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. Get my guns? Uh, confused sometimes everyone, Well, chuckle, I'll teach you a little cheat here. Refer to all of them as polygons, and you're covered. 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 asked someone to debate you. It can't. You'll just shut them down every time. Yeah, and also make new friends at parties. Ready, 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, their 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 fellas 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, those pet waters that have like the water, some of them 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 bee hive.

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. 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 him 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 pop 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. Oh 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 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 on, 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, 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 up where, 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 smokeout is to calm the bees, and it calms the bees by masking the pheromones that they that they're say, the guard bees are shooting 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 crow bar, and that's exactly what it looks instead of a beefy round crow bar. I at ly suggest you get a wonder bar too, because those are just

great to have 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 high 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 like get that be glue loose, and that high tool is what you use because it doesn't destroy your beautiful, beautiful hive 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, 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 bee keeping bug. 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. Right. 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. 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 Russ 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. Heaven forbid you have an h O A just forget about it. Yeah, literally, forget about it if you have an h O W A. 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's 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 there. 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 them 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 to southeast is so it gets all sorts of 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 private or a fence near the entrance, because when they when they leave the high 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, son, 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 beehive 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 had 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. 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 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 bath 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 nineteen seventy 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, 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. Me right, yeah, yeah, the latter is correct. They both like they they have the queen mate with a bunch of drones, and then they 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 ship 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 queen. It's

pretty cool work, 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 life. 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 too. 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 healthy 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 brew chamber, and then you just start putting a queen um excluder and you know, super boxes 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 a 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 bee, and they they have a lot of different characteristics, some of which may actually make them less

susceptible to 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 brood 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 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 basically saying this idea about swarming, you'r we 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 be going to beekeeper meetings and getting hammered once a month on mead right, and uh, 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 calling me that's maybe not doing so good because there's two problems. One you're calling he 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 wheat 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 around your face. That's what they're doing with the b 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 ofen were infected with veroa. It's a bad, bad problem. It is because they will

lay their eggs. These mtes 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 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 smell 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 goal, which is which is what you're doing this for, not only to get the honey, but obviously it'd also do the right thing by encouraging bee 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. 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 or mainly very homespun,

just sort of these hand cranked versions literally homespun. Yeah. You you you uncap it 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. In the is 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 taste. The good thing about the extractor too, is all you're doing is carving off the top wax cap, but you're leaving 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 beekeeping, which is pretty great too. Agreed, Got anything else right now? I got nothing else? Well, we'll talk about this more later when we get into bee keeping. His old man, okay for sure. Uh not that you have to be an old man to be into bee keeping, That's not at all what I mean. Uh. If you want to know know more about bee keeping going and 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. And 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 the 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. Jamie is from Sienna College, and uh, I'm sorry you have 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 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. En did 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 did iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio is at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.