End of Year Wrap-Up: Lessons from 2025 and Looking Ahead (366)

366 - End of Year Wrap-Up: Lessons from 2025 and Looking Ahead

Brian Jack: Hi, this is Brian Jack. I'm the president of the Northwest Iowa Beekeepers Association. Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: And I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors.

You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Thank you, Brian Jack, from Northwestern Iowa, for that fantastic opening. We'll be hearing from Brian shortly because he has a question for us. Hi, Becky, and hi, David Peck, from Betterbee.

Dr. David Peck: Hi there.

Becky: Hi, too. This is going to be a fun recap of whatever year it happens to be right now. [laughter] Where are we?

Jeff: Do we need some reality therapy for you there, Becky?

David: It always takes me about a year to remember that it's the new year, and so at this point, I'm pretty confident it's 2025, but I'm going to be confident it's 2025 for at least another six months.

Jeff: [laughs]

Becky: This is the time of year where I was born, and so for most of every single year, the last number of my age is the actual year that it is-

David: Oh, perfect.

Becky: -so I should have this down. No problem.

David: It's only a few days that your rule doesn't work.

Becky: Right. For the most part, I should always know how old I am, but--

[laughter]

Jeff: Welcome, folks, to Beekeeping Today Podcast, where you can learn all sorts of fascinating ways to manage bees and your life. Oh, this is good.

David: [laughs]

Jeff: We just finished up 2025. There's a lot of fun things that happened. We're going to talk about them and some disruptive things that happened. I guess 2025 could be called the Year of Disruption in many, many ways. We've tried to bring great interviews to the show, great education with David. We did the varroa management and treatment series. It's fun to look back on this year and see how far we've come.

Becky: I agree.

[laughter]

Jeff: Thank you.

Becky: I would just like to extend a thank you because we have really worked hard to bring information to the podcast. David, you have been a really big part of that. You've been so generous with your willingness to spend time recording episodes, and you are just a great go-to when we have a question, so thank you, David.

David: I didn't know you were going to ambush me with an award ceremony,-

Jeff: [laughs]

David: -but [laughs] no it's a great pleasure to be able to work with you guys, and it's so great that Betterbee partnered with the podcast so that we were able to help support you and that Betterbee also supports me, let's me talk with folks you and folks all over the place to try to just make sure that beekeepers are better educated and we're keeping our bees healthier year after year instead of folks just muddling through and then being miserable about it. I think we're all educators of beekeepers, and it's great to be able to work together with you guys as we've been able to do this year.

Becky: Now we better share some really good beekeeping information to make sure everybody keeps listening, [laughter] quick.

Jeff: Well, actually, we do because as we teased earlier, Brian also had a question for us, and let's listen to that question right now, and then with David here, we can discuss an answer.

Brian Jack: Hi, this is Brian Jack. A couple of questions I'd like to hear explored on the podcast are: Are there ways beyond trial and error to evaluate the honey production potential of an apiary location, and while we're at it, what are the best practices when having a conversation about placing bees on a property that you don't own?

Jeff: That's a really good question. When you're looking at a potential bee yard, trying to figure out: Will I get honey off this yard, or will it be better five miles down the road? What are your thoughts, David and Becky, about assessing the success and usefulness of a bee yard?

David: The best information is past information. The only way you'll really know how productive a yard is, is keep bees there for 10 years [laughter] and that'll increase the honey production, and you'll-

Becky: That's best.

David: -get an okay idea of what you can expect the following year. The instinct is to think maybe I'll put one hive there this year, and I'll see how they do, and then I'll decide whether I want to move a whole bunch of bees there the following year. Of course, you might have plenty of forage for one colony and not nearly enough for 10 or 20 colonies to make honey crop on it. I guess to some extent, you want to accept that you can't really know until you know. That's not to say that you can't try to make a more educated guess based on the factors around that hive or that apiary that could influence its productivity.

Becky: I also like to warn new beekeepers that when you start a colony at a location, they've got to build up that beeswax comb. You don't know if that great nectar flow is going to come early in the spring or in the summer, or maybe it's in the fall. If you really want to answer the question, like you were saying, David, you really have to put your bees there to know it, but you also have to give them the opportunity to just engage in honey production.

Don't ask your bees to do more than one thing in the location, and have a standard. If you're expanding your operation as early as possible, move full-size colonies to the location so that you've got the full foraging force and you can better measure when that nectar's coming in and how they're doing throughout the season.

Jeff: Yes, this is a good question. Last February/March, I was looking for a new bee yard because we were moving and I needed to shut down the one where we lived. I took them to a new location, but I really didn't know for sure how good a yard it would be. It was more rural, and there was a stream nearby, and it had a southerly facing direction.

I figured at least a safe place that they wouldn't bother anybody's pool, that there was a lot of foliage along the stream, just empty space with roadside floral sources and a lot of the blackberry bushes around here. It turned out to be all right for the first year, but I'm really looking forward to the second year of the bees that will be there and are established and strong and ready to go after it.

David: That I think is really the heart of it, is if you want to have any sense of what your colony might be able to do, drive around, walk around, look at the landscape around the apiary and if you're going up and down the road and seeing a lot of fields of clover and blackberry bushes on the sides of the gullies or whatever, you've got a pretty good shot of making honey there. The more information you can get about the landscape that surrounds the apiary, the more likely you are to make a good choice.

Jeff: If you see crop dusters, probably not a good thing.

Becky: You say that, but I've got some great, great yards in agricultural areas, and boy, when those farmers aren't able to cut that alfalfa, holy honey flow, that is-- [laughter] I have just never seen so much nectar come into the colony as when I know that there are uncut alfalfa fields. I'll also say that year to year it could be different. If you have a booming basswood crop, it's okay if it doesn't happen every year because when it happens, it happens.

Jeff: It's worth it.

Becky: It's worth it. There's some learning what the resources are and then being prepared for those extra bonus changes when they happen.

Jeff: Same here with the black locust, some years it blooms heavily and there's a lot of flow, and then other years it blooms but there's no flow. You need more than one year. Like David said, 10 years would be ideal. You'd have an idea.

Becky: 10 years is [crosstalk], yes.

[laughter]

David: 20 is even better if you can get it.

[laughter]

Becky: David's doing a longitudinal study.

[laughter]

Jeff: What about online resources? Any online resources that would help?

Becky: We've had that conversation with Christina Groziner about beescape.net, and definitely, I would suggest people go there.

David: Very cool tool to use.

Becky: Very cool. Then the NASA HoneyBeeNet site is also really good to learn what those major and minor nectar flows are in your area.

Jeff: We'll have those in the show notes. They're fun to explore. Drop a pen and take a look around, and say, "Hey, is that accurate? Is it not accurate?"

Becky: Did we say go to your bee meetings and ask the beekeepers?

David: Exactly. Figure out what the flows are in your area. Best way to do it is to talk to the folks in the area. If your beekeeping all takes place in a big valley, and everybody in that valley knows that basswood never delivers the way it does in other areas, don't plant a bunch of basswood [chuckles] trees around your bees, [laughter] it's not going to work.

Jeff: Is sharing favored bee yards and floral sources difficult in some areas? Are some beekeepers really protective of their wildfire honey sites, or--?

David: Maybe something rare like that. I think for the most part, folks will be happy to tell you what varietals they're hitting. They're maybe not going to tell you where the apiary is because you could plunk your bees right down next door and now you're fighting for the same forage. I don't know anybody who would keep it a secret that they've got basswood trees around their apiary. They're just going to tell you where the apiary is.

[laughter]

Jeff: Good point. A new use for those Apple AirTags, put them on your--

[laughter]

David: Put them on your competitor's bee truck and you can figure out where he is going.

Jeff: Thank you, Brian Jack, for that question. I hope that helps you look at your potential bee yards. It's going to take you some time. With those resources and some of that information we've given you, you should have a more educated guest to determine whether that new bee yard is going to be useful.

Becky: I'm just going to say it, since Brian sent us in a message, the Northwest Iowa Beekeepers Association, they're doing some amazing, amazing work as far as local queen rearing. I think we're going to reach out to them to invite them to be guests on the show sometime in 2027.

Jeff: '27 or '26.

Becky: [gasps] See, I don't know what year it is.

David: What year is it?

Becky: What year? No, for sure not '26.

David: We're back on that again.

Becky: I'm booked for 2026.

[laughter]

Jeff: Thank you, Brian Jack, for that question. We will be sending you a HiveIQ hive tool, branded with the Beekeeping Today Podcast logo. It is a fantastic tool. I am sure you'll be happy with it. All right. Let's hear from David's favorite company, Betterbee, and we'll be right back after this message.

David: [laughs]

Betterbee: From all of us at Betterbee, thank you for another great year. To show our appreciation, we're gifting Beekeeping Today Podcast listeners with an exclusive 10% off orders, up to $150 in savings this holiday season. Shop at betterbee.com and use discount SNOW, that's S-N-O-W at checkout. This deal is good through 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time on December 31st, 2025. From the team at Betterbee, we wish you a happy holiday season.

Jeff: What about 2025? It's been a very interesting year.

David: It sure has. There's been ups and downs and I think a lot of news that has kept a fair number of beekeepers more tuned into their news channels than they might have otherwise been. Used to be you could buy a swarm in the spring and not have to talk about beekeeping with anybody for the rest of the year, but there's so much new stuff going on. Good news, bad news that you need to stay plugged in just to make sure you're not missing anything.

Jeff: We started off the year with terrible news about the colonies coming out of the winter storage, and it's just been up and down ever since then. Has anything been determined on those winter losses?

David: A lot of work has been done. The USDA took a number of samples. Other folks have taken some samples and some tests have been run. They were looking for pesticide residues to see if pesticides were killing the bees. They were looking at virus levels. They were looking for other signs of parasites or other problems. The closest thing we have to an answer, which we're all pretty sure isn't the complete answer, is, it does look like higher levels of amitraz resistance in varroa mites contributed to these issues, that viruses seem to have been an important part of the story for why at least some of these colonies died.

For every clear example of where the mites got out of control and the virus levels were too high, you can often find another example of an apiary where their mites were low the whole time. They were monitoring. They know they were low, and they still lost more bees than they should have. I think that there are still a lot of question marks, and the folks I've talked to going into the end of this year, have said that there are some bees that just seem to be dwindling when they shouldn't be dwindling. Whatever's going on, we've learned some, but we haven't learned everything, and unfortunately, it means that there might be another year with heavier losses than we expected.

Jeff: You mean coming out of 2025 into 2026?

David: Coming out of '25, yes. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the news that we get out of at least some of these operations.

Becky: David, we've been saying for a really long time that these losses aren't sustainable. It's been going on for decades. Are these losses sustainable?

[laughter]

David: It sort of depends on what you mean. If your goal is to grow your bees in one year and then make honey on them the next, when they're big, strong, and booming, if your colonies keep dying, that plan doesn't work. If you need to get your bees out for a pollination contract so you can let half your bees die but take the other half and split them in warm weather and move them to cooler weather, where they can pollinate something, there are ways that a beekeeper can make it fit together, make it work.

Bees are remarkable, and with the right weather and the right forage, you can split colonies multiple times, just like a colony in nature will swarm multiple times in a really good year. You can get workable colonies out of that process. How much honey can I make from each of those colonies? Probably a heck of a lot less than if they were a two-year-old colony that had very little meaningful growth to do in year two, other than just making more bees to make more honey.

Becky: Have you heard any talk of larger operations looking at how they're managing a little bit differently? Maybe having a certain amount of colonies that they're going to raise so that the one goal is to get them through the winter, but then have other groups of colonies be maybe the workhorses for the different contracts or honey production.

David: I know a number of beekeepers that do that, and I think more beekeepers are seeing that as a valuable model. If you are a beekeeper who's doing commercial pollination, you're taking these bees into various agricultural settings, you know that they're being exposed to pesticide residues and all that transport stress. Asking those bees to be your healthiest bees that are going to get through the next winter may be a losing gamble. It may be more sustainable to have nice, strong, healthy, happy bees in one spot and then take splits off of those and put them through the wringer as the pollination bees, and if they don't all make it through the following winter, you still got the other operation that's running sustainably. I think that there's more understanding that a bee colony isn't a bee colony. You might have different hives for different purposes, manage them differently, and expect different things out of them.

Jeff: I had never considered that approach.

David: Bees are so adaptable. I think for a long time you didn't have to. It was so easy to just have your bees go through 12 different processes every summer, they'd still make honey for you, and they'd get through the winter okay, but if things become a little bit more tenuous and the colonies are a little more delicate, maybe you need to baby some of them. If any have to be abused, you make sure it's not all of your bees so that you have some who make it through to the following spring.

Becky: I've talked to a lot of serious sideliners who are really interested in those late divides that their only job is to get through the winter and then they do not have that varroa pressure of that honey-producing hive, and so it's those multiple operations at the same time

David: In Betterbee's own beekeeping operation, many years, we put 700-750 colonies to bed in the winter, but of those, about 500 of them are overwintered nukes that we've made the previous season. We've got these overwintered double nukes that get through the cold weather. They generally go and find homes with other beekeepers in the spring. Then we've got 250 or 200 colonies that make it through, which we then split all of those nukes out of and also manage for honey production. We can do that just fine, but what we more often than not find is that the nukes survive the winter better than the big production colonies do. That they seem to struggle more because that many bees means a lot more opportunity for mite growth and you can't always stay perfectly on top of the mites.

Becky: To top it off, even though we've had a very cold December here, but long warm falls are really threatening our colonies because the brood production isn't shutting down, so we don't have that opportunity to do that final varroa control.

David: The bees are active and they're eating their honey. The worst in the world is to have an early frost, a long warm fall after it, and then an early spring thaw, but periodic plunges into cold temperature. The bees try to raise brood, then it all gets chilled, then they try to raise brood, and it all gets chilled. There's nothing better than the sudden arrival of a brutally cold winter that then suddenly leaves and doesn't come back, but unfortunately, that's rarely what you get.

Becky: I love hearing about Betterbee's production. That's fantastic. Those numbers, that's great for a company to have.

David: We do take pride in having a real beekeeping operation. It's nice if somebody says, "Hey, sell this product," and we can say, "All right, we'll put it in 200 hives and if we like it, if our head beekeeper doesn't throw all of these in the dumpster by the end of the season, then there's a chance that it'll be a product."

Jeff: You mentioned the viruses, have they isolated which virus is the predominant bad guy?

David: They have found notably elevated levels of Acute Bee Paralysis Virus. It seems like that is going to be a significant factor in the losses in some of these colonies that have been studied. The thing to remember about virology is that it's really hard. It's really hard to get bees before all of the viruses in their bodies decompose from the apiary to the lab, grind them up, get the viruses out, extract their DNA. If you know what the virus is, if you know that it's deformed wing virus, then you can use the genetic primers, the tools that let you go in and identify it. If you don't know what the virus is, then all of that great work that went into trying to get that bee and get the DNA out of it or the genetic material out of the viruses, you're still shooting in the dark trying to figure out what's going on.

At this point, we know that colonies have had elevated and harmful levels of virus. Zac Lamas did a lot of this work and has been presenting it. He and others, obviously Jay Evans out of the USDA, that lab group. The danger here is, we know that we've learned something, but we also know that we haven't learned everything. We can be informed by that research, but we also can't say, "The research is done. It was these viruses and so bees that don't have it will be fine and that do have, will all be dead." It's not that simple. We know that there's more complexity there.

Becky: Just to follow up for those beekeepers who are worried about 'What do I do to help my bees, protect them from a virus?'

David: Best thing to do is to keep your varroa under control.

Becky: See, that was easy.

David: We don't have antivirals for bees. [laughter] It'd be nice if it'd be great if we had antiviral for bees, but we don't.

Becky: We do in the sense of varroa is such a powerful vector. It's such a powerful vector.

David: Right. Controlling that part of the virus life cycle winds up being incredibly valuable for keeping bees healthy and keeping viruses low. Most viruses.

Jeff: That comes back to 2025. I know we have, as a podcast and as the three of us have focused so much on managing varroa and managing for varroa, that sometimes I feel is producing the show or Becky and I are sitting down talking about our guests feel like, "Oh man, there's varroa overload." Welcome to Varroa TodayPodcast. That's really not what we're trying to become, but there's no getting around the importance from a negative standpoint of varroa on the health of a honeybee colony.

David: Absolutely. This year, I think has been an exciting year for the fight against varroa because we've had new products getting launched, like Norroa, where I guess it's been approved, but folks haven't been able to really get their hands on it yet but it is now going to be available next year. We've got other products like Api-Bioxal RTU, which is an oxalic acid dribble, that was just approved this year, but nobody's got it yet. Things get approved, we find out about them, but nobody can test them yet.

The product that is a step ahead is VarroxSan strips. That was approved last year. It wasn't really available for most people. There were some supply hiccups so folks couldn't get their hands on it. This has been the year, 2025 has been the year that a lot of folks who wanted to play with VarroxSan have gotten a chance to do it. I think a lot of people have had good results from it, at least, especially the ones that expected it to do what it's best at, which is to help keep your mite levels low.

I think if you had really high mites and you threw a strip or two in, you're going to be disappointed because it's not going to be the same thing as a Formic Pro treatment. There are a lot of folks who were really excited to weave these extended-release oxalic acid strips into their varroa control. From the ones I've talked to, they've had pretty good results.

Becky: I really enjoyed the strips, although a colony here and there would either chew them all up and put them out in front of the colony or the hive, or I can't tell you how many strips I found at the bottom of my bottom boards because--

David: Oh, they just chew at the top and it would fly right down.

Becky: Exactly. I'm like, "How did you do that?"

David: "How'd you figure that out?" How do they know to chew just that part?

Becky: It does take a little bit of management. Have you heard anybody report that some of the strips, they might've been a little bit wet, so that might've been a storage issue?

David: Maybe, although inconsistency is a little worrying, but being a little wetter or a little drier, given what goes into those strips, as long as it's not causing a structural failure like the fiberboard decomposes, I wouldn't be as worried about that because the whole point of the glycerin in that mixture is basically just to serve as a wetting agent. As long as those strips are dampish and exposing the oxalic acid to the mites and vice versa, you're in good shape. A bone-dry strip would make me a little more worried.

Becky: I think it's just important to say that these strips, again, the exciting part about it is that it's safe for them to be in the colony while the colony's producing honey. That's very exciting because that's such a tricky time for mite control.

David: For some beekeepers, their honey flows are so long that you do a spring mite treatment, you can't do mite treatments for most of the rest of the season, and then you go and check your mites when you pull your supers and your bees are basically already the walking dead because they have so many mites. This is a really great opportunity to treat and then hold those mite levels down and then come back in and maybe you treat again, maybe you don't, depending upon where the levels are, but it's not the same kind of emergency, which is a real relief.

Jeff: What about Api-Bioxal RTU? RTU- We were joking about this before- that stands for--

David: Oh, yes. Ready To Use.

Jeff: Oh, okay. Ready To Use.

David: Lots of folks are familiar with at least the idea, if not the practice, of an oxalic acid dribble. Mixing oxalic acid and sugar syrup and then dribbling it on your bees. Personally, no matter how many times I check the table and measure this many grams of that and this many liters of that, I always find myself getting bogged down in the math. What I like about this is that there is no math. You don't mix it. You just buy a bottle, it's ready to use, it's ready to dribble right onto your bees. You don't even really have to shake the stuff. It also doesn't contain any sugar, which means it's more shelf-stable and the bees aren't tempted to eat it.

I can dribble this oxalic acid mixture onto my bees and it's going to have that same effect that the dribble would have, but the bees aren't going to be running in and gobbling it all up and so it's going to have more time to have an effect on the mites, and it's a higher concentration of oxalic than the homemade dribble is. It's got a few different advantages. I think the best of them is that I can take that bottle and I can measure out 5 milliliters per space in between my frames and just dribble, dribble, dribble, and the colony is treated. I don't have to worry about it.

Becky: Can you clarify? You said it's a higher percentage of oxalic acid. What is it?

David: Yes. It's 6.2% oxalic mixed into the solution and dissolved.

Becky: It's not quite double, but that's approaching double of--

David: Yes. Nearly double what you can mix with the sugar syrup.

Becky: Do you know the sizes of the bottles that they're going to be selling them in?

David: Yes. There's a 0.5-liter, a 1-liter, and then a 5-liter jug if you're really excited to treat a whole bunch of colonies.

Becky: Could you tell? I was looking for that.

[laughter]

David: There is not a maximum dose like there is on the other product for the homemade sugar dribble. For that, you're only allowed to do 50 milliliters per hive. For this stuff, you're actually allowed to just do 5 milliliters per occupied frame space for as many or as few as you've got. If you're treating nukes, you don't use as much. If you're treating a big hive, then you just use more.

Becky: That's a big deal because a lot of times you've got a strong two-deep colony and you are not treating everything...

David: You treat the bottom box.

Becky: You treat the bottom box.

David: Then you're not allowed to treat the rest because you can only put 50 milliliters. It's really nice to avoid that.

Becky: Unless you do nine frames, and then you've got a steam up on top.

David: Then you have to do math again.

Becky: You're right.

David: Who wants to do math when they're beekeeping?

Jeff: On a hot summer day when sweat's rolling off your nose and down into the bees.

Becky: Oh, that's exciting.

Jeff: That is exciting. I'm like you, David. I like the RTU factor of that. When I go to the bee yard, I'm usually thinking about a lot of different things, plus looking at the clock and trying to figure out how much time I have and everything else. Just having it and being able to not worry about mixing it, just, you're out there, you use it, you're done.

David: Let alone the bee yard. If I say, "All right, I've got an hour and a half to do a beekeeping chore today," I don't want to spend 45 minutes of that chore in my kitchen trying to find my scale and my measuring cups and clean everything out so I don't poison myself later with oxalic acid [crosstalk] powder.

Jeff: Wait, you're allowed to do that in your kitchen? You don't have to go-- [laughs]

David: I have negotiated access to the kitchen with my wife. Yes.

[laughter]

David: I do most of the cooking, so she doesn't have anything to say about it as long as I keep making dinner, too.

Jeff: There you go.

Becky: Just so you know, I literally have some oxalic acid sitting on my microwave right now.

[laughter]

David: We avoid all of that. We can just take the bottle, dribble it on the bees, put the bottle away, and we don't have to deal with it. What's really exciting about this year is that there have been so many new developments, new products that came out last year that people have gotten their hands on this year, stuff that's been approved this year that people can use next year. I have heard some interesting and exciting little rumors about new active ingredients, new mite control strategies, new different things that are probably nowhere close to getting registered and developed into products.

There are some scientists who are finding promising new molecules that might be the next miticide of five years from now or further than that. I think that there's a lot going on in the fight against varroa. We've reached a stride where we're really making progress year after year, and this has been a good year for that.

Jeff: There's so much more to talk about. We'll be right back after these messages.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. David, you and Betterbee have been talking to actual beekeepers and asking them what they thought of 2025. Is that correct?

David: Yes, that's right. I think it's more interesting to hear from more folks than just the three of us, [laughter] so we just put out a little--

Jeff: Wait a minute, let me think about that comment.

Becky: You're really just never around.

David: Well, my point is, we've been talking to each other all year, so we sort of know how each other's year of beekeeping has gone. I wanted to know how some boots-on-the-ground beekeepers felt. We just sent out this survey and let folks chime in, and we wrote a few questions: Where do you live? What was the best thing about 2025 for you and your bees? What was the worst thing? What was the biggest thing, the funniest thing? What are you most looking forward to in 2026?

It was just interesting going through all of these answers and seeing some pretty interesting patterns. Dick from Columbia, Tennessee, wrote in. We said, "What was the best thing about 2025?" He said, "A good fall flow." We said, "What was the worst thing about 2025?" He said, "A really lousy spring flow."

[laughter]

Karen from New Brunswick, Canada, chimed in. What was the best thing? Well, it was really great weather for getting her queen's bread, and you think, "Oh, that's good." What was the worst thing? Well, she was in the middle of a drought. Of course, it's easy to get the queens bred; it never rains.

[laughter]

As usual, it's just beekeepers complaining about the weather. It was an interesting pattern. A lot of people's highs and lows were based on the weather and which flows they got, and which flows they didn't, whether their year was productive or not. That was an interesting pattern. How were your guys' flows this year?

Jeff: Go ahead, Becky.

Becky: No, I was thinking. Let me think on that.

David: Rub my nose in it. Go ahead.

Becky: It's always good. That's what Jeff is talking about. It was a good summer, not an amazing summer. The year before, it was a crazy summer. I did experience, in a number of yards, an amazing fall flow that I did not expect. I had already pulled all the honey. I would come back, and I'd be like, "How did they get so heavy?" They were either robbing, or it was the weather in that alfalfa really helped for some of the colonies, I think, too, they weren't able to cut. I had to think about that. It was good. The bees, luckily, got a really, really nice end-of-the-season feeding by the flowers.

David: How about you, Jeff? How did your bees do?

Jeff: Here in my location, the summer came on early. We get a summer drought or dearth that starts second week of July. That just goes through until- I don't know- March of the following year. Just everything shuts down, and bees shut down. You have to get everything, at least in my location, early spring, and that really ends with the blackberries. That was really good. Blackberries are always really good. Blackberry honey doesn't crystallize. It stays its nice light, amber color. It's super good honey. I could always use more. It was a typical year.

David: The summer came early, you said?

Jeff: Yes, it did, and it stayed.

David: We had a pretty rough spring. None of it was the right weather for a good spring flow, but the summer actually recovered when, normally, there might've been a dearth, things were a little better. Then the fall was, as you say, similar to you, Becky, it was quite nice. It wasn't a banner year for honey production here, but we did pretty well.

Jeff: You said you sent out questions, and so if our listeners weren't aware of those questions or occasional survey from Betterbee, how can they sign up or find out when you post these kind of questions?

David: Well, I think it first went out in our newsletter, which we send out every month. You can just go to the website, and the newsletter sign-up is right there. We probably also put it out on our Facebook page and other social media. Whatever social media you're using, just go ahead and find Betterbe. We've got a page. We try to make sure it's not just us saying, "Hey, buy this hive tool." That's no fun for anybody. It's not fun for us to make a commercial. It's not fun for anybody to see it. If it's us doing something new in the bee yard, we might want to show you that. If it's a cool new miticide that we want to teach you about, that might pop up there as well. Any of our channels, you'll probably wind up seeing access to something fun, like a survey like this.

I actually really want to share some of these funny stories that the beekeepers had given us. It was just fun. When you're asking folks about how things went, it's always cool to hear what goofy stuff happened in the bee yard. A couple of people talked about their wives getting stung. I'm pretty sure that wasn't funny for everybody involved. One person talked about a nuke that swarmed, and it swarmed into a queenless hive that was struggling, and then the swarm took over the colony and integrated, and things went well. It's one of those stories that people talk about, and then every once in a while somebody will say, "Well, that can't happen. That's nonsense. That can't possibly have been it."

Absolutely, hear more and more from credible beekeepers that they're seeing, occasionally, a strong swarm in a weak colony, just bump into each other, and you wind up with one really strong established colony. Another one, which is always fun. This was Kelly from Illinois. Kelly reports that she left a hive tool in her hive, put it back together, had no idea anything was off, but then was beating herself up that she could not find this hive tool. She had no idea what was going wrong.

Becky: No.

David: Drove her absolutely crazy. Then, when she came back through the hives on her next inspection, there it was, propalized onto the frames. If ever there is a reason to always have a spare hive tool or two or three in your beekeeping equipment, you never know when one of them is going to vanish.

Becky: Where you will set it down.

David: You never know when you'll see it again.

Jeff: That's a great story, that one.

Becky: I want the picture. It had to have been hanging or something, right?

David: Yes, absolutely.

Becky: Oh, that's funny.

Jeff: Your story there from the Betterbee customer reminded me this year. I know I had five swarms based on the sensors in my colonies, but three of the swarms went into empty equipment, and that's never happened. They just go directly into empty equipment. That was so much fun to go out to the bee yard and start looking for a swarm in the tree, but then find it's in that hive I set up.

David: There's no work to do. You're all done.

Jeff: That was easy, brush my hands off.

David: It's a problem that solved itself, exactly.

Jeff: That was fun.

David: We sell a fair number of nukes here at Betterbee. To get them all ready for customers to pick up, they get all set out on the hill next to the parking lot, and we're out there inspecting them. Every once in a while, you're a little slow, and you see that one of them has swarmed. Everybody runs around, and you put a little flag or a marker on the hive to make sure we know which one swarmed. There was this weird pattern where we kept seeing swarms, they'd get reported. People would go get the equipment, they'd go out to get the swarm, and the swarm wasn't there.

They were going back and forth, and back and forth, and they thought that it was coming out of this one nuke. There was no swarm that they could find, and then someone would report it the next day. I said, "I feel like I know what's happening. You've got a queen in there and she just can't leave." They're swarming, and then they're unswarming when the queen fails to follow them. It was a jam-packed nuke. Finally, somebody sat out there with some extra frames and some extra boxes. We got everything worked through, and what did we find, but a queen who had two wings on her left and no wings on her right.

The whole swarm took off, she did her best. She'd go stand out at the entrance, didn't really work, and so she'd walk back inside, and the swarm would come back in, and the process would start again the next morning. We moved her into a colony that wasn't ready to swarm and rearranged some things, and everybody was happy at the end of that process.

Jeff: See, there are aspects of beekeeping that are just pure joy. That is fun, maybe not for her, but it's fun for the beekeeper.

David: Well, and another thing about the survey here is we did ask, "What, good or bad, are you most interested in or excited about for 2026?" I really liked the answers because there's a few folks here saying, "Oh, I want to use Norroa. I want to use 4 grams per brood box of vaporized Api-Bioxal in my hives when I'm treating with OA," all this stuff that we might talk about. One of these people just said, "I really want to make comb honey," which is great. It's just so great to know that there's beekeepers, they've never made comb honey, but they've learned about it, they're excited about it, and so now they're going to make comb honey this year.

It's so refreshing to talk to other beekeepers and to see that, yes, the varroa are hard, and yes, there might be a dearth that makes your honey production a little lower this year than it was the year before, but you can also launch into the year with an exciting new project like, "Hey, I've never made comb honey and why haven't I so I'm going to do it." "I've never made creamed honey, so I'm going to learn how to make creamed honey," that kind of stuff. That's always really fun to see.

Becky: Can I put you on the spot? Because I like doing that, David. [laughter] Betterbee sells a swarm lure, correct?

David: Yes, we do.

Becky: I think I was reading a paper about collecting swarms in your own apiary. They were doing the math to figure out how many swarms are occurring and all of that, but they were talking about swarm lures. Is that something that you have a protocol to recommend to beekeepers if they want to--

David: How to make use of a swarm lure?

Becky: Yes. How to use a swarm lure or how to set up a bait hive in your own apiary. How can beekeepers catch their own swarms this year? Right along with cut comb honey, that's a great goal.

David: Absolutely. Let the bees split themselves and don't lose swarms into the trees. There's a couple of principles that I like to remind people of. One of them is that a swarm lure is an invitation. It gets the attention of the swarm scouts towards that box that you've put out. It's not going to make them go to a bad box. It's not going to make them go to a really poor nest site. You need to give them a decent spot to live, something that's actually going to appeal to the swarm and put that in there so that it smells strongly and the swarm scouts will find it and start hanging out in it and investigating. That's part of it.

The other thing is there's really good research that has been done. Actually, the late Justin Schmidt did some really good work on where swarms choose to live. He set up an apiary. He managed the bees to promote swarming. He had bait boxes that went north, south, east, west out over a long distance. There was no real effect of distance other than the fact that the bees were biased against moving into the boxes that were closest to the apiary.

There was a sense that these bees needed to get a little distance between their parent hive and where they were heading off to. In general, what I say is if you hang a bait hive in your apiary, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you've got bears, you've got a bear fence right there to protect it. Getting that bait hive out in your apiary means that you might very well catch swarms from somebody else's apiary or your next apiary down the road.

If you want to catch bees from your apiary, don't put the bait hive right there; put the bait hive somewhere else, a little bit further away, 100 meters, 200 meters away. It doesn't have to be that far. Bees will fly miles away from a hive to get to a new site. A bait hive far away from any known apiaries might still wind up catching a swarm. I think that's it. The swarm lore gets the attention of the scouts. You still need to give them a good offer. Then you just need to wait for the swarming process to do what it does.

Jeff: Quick question on a swarm. If you're using an old hive body, do you fill it with frames and foundation with existing comb? What's the strategy?

David: The problem is that something like a small hive beetle or a wax moth is probably going to be able to sniff out that old, used brood comb faster than the bees will. At the same time, those combs are really attractive to swarm scouts. We know that if a swarm encounters a box that has comb in it, they're much more likely to choose that box. What I personally do is if I'm putting out a bait hive, let's say it's a whole 10-frame box that I'm putting up on the roof of a barn somewhere, let's say, because elevation always helps catch a swarm, what I'm probably going to do is put maybe one or two junky old frames, frames that I'm not going to be too upset if they get eaten by moths, but that I think will get some attention from the bees. Then I'm going to make sure that the rest of that box has frames in it.

It's not so much that a frame with foundation is going to be more attractive to the scouts. They're perfectly happy to move into a big empty void and then fill it up with combs. It's that I don't want to go open up my bait hive and find that they've started building in that big empty void. I want to make sure that they get onto the Langstroth deep frame building system as soon as possible once they've moved into that box.

Jeff: All right. Pretty good.

Becky: It's a contract between you and the swarm. "You'll cover my home, but--"

David: Precisely. Catching a swarm that I need to do a cutout of my bait hive just to install it into equipment is not really that helpful to me. If they move into the equipment and they start building and growing just the way I want them to, now we're off to the races.

Jeff: Let's look forward to 2026. What do we have to look forward to, and what are going to be some of the challenges?

David: Let's not end on bad news. We'll end on the fun stuff, so let's start with the bad news, which I think is that over the course of 2025, there has been a tremendous amount of really valiant work done to try to identify and find and destroy yellow-legged hornet nests in Georgia and South Carolina. Yet, despite all of that work, the hornets have continued to spread.

They just recently announced a case of one of these young wasps, female queen wasp, apparently hitchhiking along with a person and being able to travel basically all the way across the state of South Carolina. It's just luck that they didn't go into a different state with whatever vehicle that wasp had hitchhiked onto. She was able to set up a nest in a totally different region of the state.

I think that unless we get a real combination of hard work from the boots-on-the-ground folks trying to fight these nests, hard work from the scientists trying to develop new tools and a whole heck of a lot of luck, I think that these yellow-legged hornets are going to establish in the United States and beekeepers are just going to have to deal with them as yet another pest going forward.

Any effort that anyone can support to fight these things, we should be supporting. Any research projects that might be able to give us a new tool to fight them, I think we should be pursuing, funding, and advocating for. At the same time, realistically, I think beekeepers need to start learning what these hornets are, how they behave, at the very least, learn how to recognize them, so that if another queen hitchhikes on another truck and winds up in your backyard and you start seeing these hornets bothering your bees, while you're out doing your inspections, you want to be able to recognize it.

You want to be able to identify this so that you can report it as soon as possible and maybe get that nest taken down and, at the very least, slow their spread. For 2026, that's what I'm most worried about. That's the biggest concern I've got, is that there's been a lot of talk in 2025 about Tropilaelaps and how bad they would be if they got here, and that's true. If they get here, it could be really ugly, but they're not here; the hornets are, and they're also big trouble. That's the bad news.

Jeff: Come on.

David: I already said that it's possible that we're going to see more, probably higher losses than beekeepers want or expect coming out of this winter. Can't guarantee that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the pattern that we see. Those are the two most disconcerting things that I can see. Becky, what's going to be good?

Jeff: Yes, what's the sun coming up on this dark horizon?

David: Give us something exciting to look forward to.

Becky: Do you hear the silence? No.

[laughter]

Jeff: I don't.

Becky: You don't. That's a good question. What is going to be good? I will tell you that I think it's the beekeepers. I think that we have so many beekeepers out there, especially, I see it in the organizations who are doing a deep dive into educating and supporting new beekeepers, who are looking to figure out how to create habitat for their colonies, and who are looking to make sure that they're managing their varroa as best that they can. I think that the heroes in all of this are the beekeepers and the organizations that they are working really, really hard to support.

David: I agree. It's Vladimir in Massachusetts who's excited about making comb honey for the first time this year. That's the good news. That's the fun of it, is that there's a lot of beekeeping to be done. If you keep your mites under control, and if the hornets don't show up, or if you learn how to deal with those-- Yes, there's hard stuff. There's hard parts of it. It's easy to get fixated on that because a lot of the new news is bad news. The good news is we still get to keep bees next year. That is a heck of a lot more fun than whatever boring hobbies other people spend their time doing.

Jeff: The hard things make the good times even sweeter. Oh, God.

David: Exactly.

Jeff: That's so bad.

Becky: Oh, no.

Jeff: Forgive me for saying that.

Becky: I get so inspired when I'm learning about somebody's sideliner operation or their commercial operation and the innovation that they're investing into making sure that those bees thrive. Then is there anything better than a new beekeeper who their bees survived the winter? That is such joy.

David: On my survey, a lot of the responses for what was the best thing about the year, and folks just said, "I didn't lose any hives. All of my bees are alive." That's such a great feeling when you can get there.

Jeff: It's going to be a good year. We will be at NAHBE. All three of us will be at NAHBE. The listener, if you're going to be at NAHBE, make sure you swing by our booth. We will be at Booth 805. David, what booth are you in?

David: We're nearby 9-something.

Becky: We're 900.

Jeff: 900, I think.

David: Go find the Beekeeping Today booth, and put your head on a swivel, and you'll see the Betterbee booth. [laughs]

Jeff: We'll all be there. It's going to be a great year. I'm really looking forward to 2026.

David: 2025 has had all sorts of ups and downs, but it was a good year to be a beekeeper, and I think '26 will be a good year to be a beekeeper, too.

Becky: Jeff, it is always so good to have David with us on an episode.

Jeff: Yes, absolutely. You and David go at it, and it's just fun for me to sit back and listen. I learned so much. Thanks, David.

Becky: I know. I really appreciate his presence. Before we forget, we did start going at it, and we did not answer the second half of Brian's question about approaching landowners for bee placement. [chuckles] Kind of neat. I think we've told listeners that you and I wrote a book this year that will be released late in 2026. We did address some of the landowner questions that Brian was asking. We did make that a part of the book. You had some really good insight when it came to that section. Do you want to share what you're thinking? Because we won't make Brian wait until the book release.

[laughter]

Jeff: That's good. I want to clarify that Brian doesn't get two tools for the second question.

Becky: Oh, that would really stack up. People would be asking multi-part questions. [laughs]

Jeff: They would be. I have a question for my friend. Brian, that's a great question, and you don't want to sneak your bees on the property at midnight.

Becky: No, bad start.

Jeff: It's a bad start to the relationship. This year, when we downsized away from our 5 acres, I needed to find a new home for my bees. As a first choice, I went to a farmer who was known for selling organic produce and cider. They had an established farm market, which I had been eyeing as a place to sell honey, and they had lots of multiple-use land all around them. I knew the area was probably good because they had a history of raising pumpkins.

There was a nearby stream with lots of space and unmaintained property lines, and it all looked like a good forage area within a 2 or 3-mile 8 radius. I stopped in and met with the owner and introduced myself as a beekeeper, and asked if they'd ever consider having bees on the property. It turns out that someone once did keep bees there, but only for one season. She'd love to have them again. That was a good sign. We walked back to her property, and she showed me where she felt the bees might go.

Along the way, I was noting the time of day, the position of the sun, the wind direction, tree lines and wind breaks, the shadows, the number of gates when we walked through, and how they were closed. She had goats and sheep that wandered, so I knew I'd have to invest in a solar fencer to keep them out of the bees. While thinking about all this, I asked about bears. She said there hadn't been any sightings lately. As I was making mental notes, I'd ask her qualifying questions.

I knew what my bees needed and what I wanted. A safe space with year-round access to my bees. I asked about key blocks on gates and if I could drive a vehicle out to the bee yard. I asked if I could access the yard at any time of the day or night, and were there any restrictions. I asked her about the use of pesticides. I asked about if the stream flooded, and if it did, how high did the water get. I asked if I could set up an electric fence. It turned out okay. It's not the best place, but I would give it a couple of years to figure out if it's a good location for the bees and for me. About the only thing I did not do is plan to show up with a jar of honey with my question to sweeten the deal.

Becky: I'm going to ask if you sweetened the deal.

[laughter]

Becky: You might want to lead with the honey, and then they'll just say yes.

Jeff: You're right. I should have led with the honey.

Becky: The other question, I don't know if Brian was looking to get this information, but one of the best ways maybe to find a new place to put bees is tell the people where you're already keeping bees, if you do already have some landowners you're working with, that you're looking for new sites because you know they've been sharing the honey that you share for yard rent and they've been talking about how great the bee experience is. They might just have insight into other places that might be willing to host you and your colonies.

Jeff: You made one point that I neglected was yard rent. I've never had to pay cash to place my bees anywhere. I usually pay in honey if I pay anything. Most of the time, they're very happy. Brian, thank you for the questions, and we will be in touch soon. I'll be sending the tool. Happy New Year, Brian.

Becky: Happy New Year, Brian, and to all of the other beekeepers out there.

Jeff: Happy New Year, everybody. That about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today. Before we go, be sure to follow us and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you stream the show. Even better, write a quick review to help other beekeepers discover what you enjoy. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab at the top of any page.

We want to thank Betterbee, our presenting sponsor, for their ongoing support of the podcast. We also appreciate our long-time sponsors: Global Patties, Strong Microbials, BeeSmart Designs, and Northern Bee Books for their support in bringing you each week's episode. Most importantly, thank you for listening and spending time with us. If you have any questions or feedback, just head over to our website and drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again, everybody.

[music]

[00:56:07] [END OF AUDIO]