Podcast: Bees by the Number

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 12:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bees by the Number

Check out our latest podcast! In this episode, we manage to jump around the bee world by using the numbers 1, 2, 2-3, 26, 500, 20,000, 45,000, and 50,000. That’s a healthy range of handsome numbers!

One queen? Not always. What about zero queens plus laying workers? Or more than one queen? Did you know that some beekeepers quit running two-queen colonies because the hives made so much honey they became impractical to add supers on top?

Two words. Please folks, it is honey bee, not honeybee. Two words. Beehive, one word. Bee yard, two words. We explore why it’s important to use words correctly, then we get into a discussion of ‘robbing’ the bees and all the baggage that the word ‘robbing’ carries. Then we naturally start talking about witches.

Why 2-3 and the numbers 26 and 500? Then we go to some big numbers – 20,000, 45,000 and 50,000. You’ll have to listen to find out what those are about. Curious? Let’s go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Listen here: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst:   ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Bee Biology, Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Culture, or lack thereof, Ecology, Podcasts, Queens, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: Moving Honey Bees, part 2

Posted on September 30, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 11:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Moving Honey Bees, part 2

We begin this podcast with the capture of a swarm, details described in real time. The subject of Hutterites, a Christian religious group, came up when similarities between Hutterite colonies and bee colonies splitting was discussed.

Since we are talking about moving hives of bees, Ron has a neat trick to pick up a single-storey colony (such as a swarm) and move it inside the trunk of a car or back of a van. Simple, fast, cheap, and the bees don’t get out and get lost.

Ron describes a couple harrowing bee-moving incidents that involved truck malfunctions – brake failure on a steep hill and accelerator jamming on a busy toll road. Luckily, no one was hurt.

We talk about the Tesla truck, which probably wouldn’t be much good for hauling bees, then Elon Musk, Twitter, and the future of the planet.

We wrap up with an inside look at a large-scale commercial honey farm, Scandia Honey, and talk shop about the operation of 15,000 colonies of bees on the western Canadian prairies. So, let’s go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Listen here: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst:   ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Ecology, History, Podcasts | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: Honey Harvest Time

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 9: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Honey Harvest Time

After a few minutes pondering how some carpenter ants in Florida choose the profession of surgeon (sawing off sick comrades wounded legs), Bidzina and Ron settle into a honey harvest discussion.

This episode is packed with ideas and suggestions that describe four legal ways to harvest honey and one illegal way.  Then it wraps up with talk about amazingly big crops and the three disastrous ones that helped persuade Ron to move on to a new life. It’s a wild ride, so let’s go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Listen here: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Hive Products, Honey, Podcasts, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Podcast: Dogs that smell bees

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 8: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Dogs That Smell Bees

We talk to Rose-Anne Bouffard, a bee enthusiast who trains dogs to find and rescue wayward bumblebee nests and to locate colonies with American Foulbrood (AFB). 

Dog breeds and their amazing scent sensitivity are discussed. Bloodhounds are best for sniffing out bumblebee nests and honeybee diseases, but that’s not what Rose uses. Humans have five million scent receptors and can smell AFB, but dogs have three hundred million receptors. Dogs also use their floppy ears to stir up scents. The bee-rescuing dogs were trained through find-reward-repeat sessions. We discuss training a tracking dog to find AFB and the huge economic value that brings.

Talking about stings, Rose finds that controlling her breath and going into a meditative state when working around bees is essential. Without the proper mindset, apparently Preparation H helps with the bee stings you will get.

The questions of bee consciousness and a bees’ ability to sense pain come up. We agree that bees probably feel pain.

Finally, there is a big shout out to Alberta Native Bee Council, the Suzuki Butterflyway Project, iNaturalist, and the urgency for action. Rose’s bee and dog projects are looking for collaborators so check out her website to learn how to get involved!

Rose’s website address for Dogs Find Bees is https://dogsfindbees.com/   Let’s go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Bee Biology, Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Diseases and Pests, Friends, Podcasts | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: A Beekeeper’s Journey – Cameroon to Calgary

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 7: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Cameroon to Canada – Patrick’s Bee Journey

In this episode of About Bees, we are joined by Patrick Tefouet Tonlio, who was an agriculture community organizer and teacher in the African nation of Cameroon. Patrick now lives in Calgary where he keeps honey bees and has been working on farm and bee projects with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s Land of Dreams (https://ccisab.ca/land-of-dreams/).
 
During his last year of high school, Patrick learned to work with bees from his grandfather when Patrick moved from the capital city to live in his grandfather’s village. Honey bees in Cameroon are extremely defensive, so most traditional beekeeping consists of making small bamboo hives, coating the boxes with propolis and wax as a lure, then putting the empty hives in trees about 3 metres (ten feet) above ground level. After wild bees occupy the boxes and after the nectar season, honey is harvested. 

Cameroon has commercial beekeepers, including the Fabasso family, friends of Patrick, who operate 15,000 hives. Mr. Fabasso has designed a hive, also made of bamboo, similar to Langstroth hives. The Fabasso honey crop is squeezed by a press invented by the Fabasso family. Pressing the honey yields a high-quality honey that doesn’t need to be extracted and is never heated during processing.(https://teca.apps.fao.org/en/technologies/10140/).  

Beekeepers may harvest 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of honey each year from traditional hives in Cameroon. But the ethnic group sometimes known as Pygmy people (Baka) harvest directly from wild colonies. To reduce stings, they use a special secret herb, rubbed on their skin. The herb? It’s a secret.

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Ecology, Friends, History, Hives and Combs, Honey Plants, Podcasts | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: America’s other weed

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 6: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Sweet Clover: America’s other weed

Legal. Illegal. Legal. Illegal again. Sweet clover has quite a history. Introduced into North America from Europe about 300 years ago, farmers were once fined for having it in their fields. It can be used to feed cattle, but improperly stored, it can become a blood thinner and kill cows. On the other hand, the state of Kentucky was saved from bankruptcy by sweet clover. And so were some beekeepers.

Every acre of sweet clover yields as much as one-thousand pounds of honey from its nectar. Along with alfalfa and a few other choice nectar-producers, it’s a winner in the nectar sweepstakes. But this podcast also looks at an Australian beekeeper who found an even better plant. But we circle back to sweet clover and Bidzina reads a list of “Ten surprising facts about sweet clover.” Number eight is amazing.

Mostly we discuss sweet clover, but bees, horned toads and tobacco are mentioned. Let’s go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Ecology, History, Honey Plants, Podcasts | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: from Beyonce to bee forage and beyond

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Season 1 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Some Bee Buzz

In today’s podcast episode, we jump from moving bees between Alberta and British Columbia to examining a recent paper about the ecology of disappearing bee species. Then, of course, we chat about Beyonce and Hex Art.

Bidzina describes conditions in British Columbia and why he avoided going farther into the mountains to make fireweed honey but instead split his colonies, doubling their number. He tells us a little about moving his bees back to Alberta, driving through the night with a trailer through the Rocky Mountains. In Alberta, he loses most of those hives over the next winter. But two survivor colonies are resilient and develop into strong colonies.

We discuss removing honey by letting the supers stay in the apiary, separated from the hives, allowing the bees to drift out of the honey supers and back to their homes, abandoning the honey. Bidzina also mentions nuisance bees at a wedding held where he was extracting.

Then, Ron talks about his two backyard hives. Both were replacements for colonies that died over winter. One was a package, the other a nuc. It was surprising to see that there was very little difference in strength between them by mid-July.

We drift to talking about trains and the enormous size of Canada. It’s a 7,500-kilometre road trip from Pacific to Atlantic. Maybe it should be tackled by train, not car or plane. Trains are good.

We explore a recent paper about land use changes (farming, urbanization) that are related to declining populations of native and imported bees. Across a huge temperate area, scientists broadly divided landscapes into forested, herbaceous, agricultural, and urban. One of those areas were better for bee health and survival. The results surprised me a little. We discuss the study’s results. See: “Land use changes associated with declining honey bee health across temperate North America”   https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd867

Other news bits include the collapse of insect species diversity, which leads us to wonder about the 2024 reversal of a ban on neonicotinoids in England and the implications for bee survival. Then we lighten up with a visit to Beyonce (the Queen Bey) and a glance at a paper on the prevalence of bees throughout the history of art – have you noticed that hexagons seem to be everywhere we look these day?

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live and die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site

About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/

Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Posted in Bee Biology, Culture, or lack thereof, Ecology, Native Bees, Personal, Podcasts, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Podcast: The Bees’ Ears

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Our latest podcast rambles around the bees’ ears. Available everywhere you grab your podcasts. Enjoy.

Season 1 Episode 4: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – The Bees’ Ears

In this episode, we discover that insects, including bees, can hear. They have three ways of picking up sound – through their antennae, their feet, and through their armour (exoskeleton). Since bees can hear, does music calm the bees and reduce stings? And since bees can hear, does the old tradition of “Telling the Bees” make sense? Is that why, upon Queen Elizabeth’s death, the royal bees were told about her passing by the royal beekeeper? Why?

How do  bees buzz? Do they hear their own buzzing? Is the tone of a happy hive (261 Hz, middle C on a piano) the basis for all western music? If bees aren’t dancing at a party, do they feel left out and get sad? Is it wrong for us to attribute human thoughts and emotions to bees? Should there be bee insect sanctuaries? Where? How would that work? When Asian honey bees do their flash dance, is it noisy?

Finally, why don’t honey bees pollinate tomatoes? They can’t, but bumble bees can. It’s got everything to do with insect size, weight, and something called buzz pollination. Listen to this episode as we compare their buzzing skills.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Posted in Bee Biology, Culture, or lack thereof, History, Podcasts, Pollination, Science, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Podcasting about bees

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Ron Miksha

I considered launching a podcast several times over the past few years. However, I had been a guest on half a dozen shows, so I recognized the enormous amount of effort and time that hosting a podcast entails. It’s a lot of work. The work would be interesting, but my hesitance was due to a lack of time. I have too many fires on my iron.

Then I was a approached by a young fellow here in Calgary, a casual acquaintance in the beekeeping world. We met a couple months ago. He asked if I’d like to co-host a beekeeping podcast. He would take half the work, so why not?

So, the friend – Bidzina Mosiashvili – lined up a studio while I researched the topics and created script outlines. Bidzina is the technical/recording producer and has been loading our chats to our YouTube videocast. Meanwhile, I created the podcast space, found an appropriate platform and edited the audio for the podcasts. Watch our videos if you can put your feet up, otherwise let the podcasts entertain your ears while you are driving, working, or in need of a quick bedtime sedative.

Bidzina and I make a good presentation combination. Bidzina is young and in the start-up years of his life and his beekeeping; meanwhile, after 65 years of bee infatuation, I am phasing out of life and out of bees. Our differing perspectives on everything from bees to philosophy, climate, business, religion, native species, history, literature, and unorthodox beekeeping habits make a lively, interesting discussion on those wide-ranging, fascinating subjects. Bidzina’s refreshing ideas make this podcast great. He’s not afraid to ask simple questions and then, a moment later, make profoundly deep comments.

On August first, we launched these four episodes:
1) Our introduction to the About Bees podcast;
2) A look at the ridiculous myths a lot of us beekeepers believe;
3) The savagery of robber bees from Leo Tolstoy's perspective; and,
4) A discussion about whether bees feel pain. (Sorry, you have to listen to that podcast to find out what happens in a bee's brain when it gets injured.)

A new episode will be set free every week until all the bees in the world go extinct. Then, during mankind’s final four years, we will podcast about Einstein or something.

The About Bees, Culture & Curiosity podcast is easy to find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, GaanaAndroid, Deezer, or wherever you have entrusted your listening habits. Just search About Bees, Culture & Curiosity.

Be forewarned: this is an unusual “bees” podcast. There are a lot of other bees/beekeeping podcasts out there. This one is different. You’ll see. Let me know what you think about this new podcast by commenting below, please.

Posted in Beekeeping, Friends, Personal, Podcasts | Tagged | 7 Comments

Who’s afraid of a few bees?

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Ron Miksha

Yesterday’s New York Times had a lengthy first-person account of the disturbing tale of a home invasion1. Dozens came in, none left alive. According to the author, Sarah Kliff, “Honey bees invaded my house, and no one would help.” This nightmare escalated. The family evacuated to the safe-haven of a hotel.

Ms Kliff carries us along from the first sighting, a bee which she crushed with a cookbook (honey recipes?), through an adventure that ends when the family sucks up the bees with a vacuum cleaner. Along the way, the writer discovers that honey bees are not going extinct, don’t need “saving”, can’t be chased away by the smell of citronella or the sound of Alexa making beeping noises, but may end up becoming permanent residents in her house. She was lucky, the bees moved on, unlike the colony I found in this old house on a Pennsylvania homestead fifty years ago.

The writer also discovers that most people believe that honey bees are endangered – exterminators wouldn’t kill them, but they recommended retrieval by beekeepers. Beekeepers wouldn’t help when they discovered that the bees seemed settled inside the walls of the house, a messy situation that requires a bee rescuer who is also a carpenter. (Beekeepers prefer capturing swarms from low-hanging tree branches.) They also surmised that the bees were scouts, not a settled colony.

Two things in the little article seemed important to me. One was the author’s discovery that honey bees are not disappearing from the planet. They aren’t going extinct. She talked to both Tom Seeley and Vox editor Bryan Walsh about it. Walsh was especially forthcoming when he admitted that his 2013 Time magazine article about the impending disappearance of honey bees had, shall we say, fallen short of apocalyptic expectations. Today, we aren’t living in a world without honey bees. In fact, ten years after that famous cover piece, the world has more honey bees than ever. Bryan Walsh has owned up to the poor prediction that brought worldwide attention. You can read his Vox update here.

The Times author had done her homework and learned that the honey bees in her house wouldn’t tip the balance of the world’s ecological stability, whether they lived or died. However, not all of her neighbours got that memo.

I had a vague sense that honey bees needed saving, and some of my neighbors felt strongly about the issue.“They are so important to our ecosystem,” one neighbor advised on WhatsApp.“Their number is dwindling.” She suggested we call a beekeeper.

The other important take away from the article, for me, was Sarah Kliff’s reminder that not everyone is as comfortable as me when it comes to hanging out with bees. I usually forget about the real fright (and legitimate threat) that bees cause for most people. As we enter another bee season, I’ll try my best not to scoff at folks who are so uncomfortable around bees that they spend a couple hundred dollars and two nights away (with family and dog) to escape a potential mortal threat. I know how I’d feel if several dozen two-legged flightless animals invaded my house and looked intent on staying. I doubt that a cookbook would be enough of a defense, nor would I be returning after just two nights at a hotel.

  1. Thanks to Thomas S. for telling me about this NYT piece! ↩︎
Posted in Beekeeping, Outreach, Save the Bees, Stings | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments