[Bonus] Short - HiveAlive with Dara Scott: Winter Survival Insights

[Bonus] Short - HiveAlive with Dara Scott: Winter Survival Insights

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Jeff: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky: In 20 minutes or less, we'll bring you one important story, keeping you informed and up to date.

Jeff: No fluff, no fillers, just the news you need.

Becky: Brought to you by Betterbee, your partners in better beekeeping.

Jeff: Hey, everybody. Hey, Becky. Hey, Dara. How are you guys doing?

Dara Scott: All good. How are you?

Jeff: Doing well. We've invited Dara back. Dara's been with us a couple of times, most recently back in January, talking about his beekeeping in Ireland, which is a fascinating episode. If you want to go listen to that, that's episode 317. A year ago, you were on talking about a HiveAlive product, the development of the seaweed extract and its impact on honeybees, and that's kind of following up on that topic today on the research that you've done, or recent survey, I should say.

Dara: Yes. It's lovely to be back again to chat to you guys again. Yes, we did some work-- we did research with our customers and put it out there to see how they were getting on with HiveAlive, especially over the disastrous last winter, and to see what sort of results they were getting.

Becky: Can we take a quick step back? Can you tell us what's special about the HiveAlive feed and supplement, and just tell us also a little bit about the origin story? I know we don't have a lot of time, but I think that the origin story of why seaweed extract is interesting and worth talking about.

Dara: Sure. Where do I start? Okay, let's start with seaweed extract. What's unique about our product is that we use seaweed extracts, not just taking seaweed, but actually, the extracts from seaweed. The seaweed extracts that we're pulling out are things that are antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, immune-stimulatory. That, along with lemongrass and the thymol and thyme, basically makes a combination of a product that keeps colonies healthier-- individual bees, plus colonies healthier. We are very unique in that we have a lot of science to back that up, we have long-term trials that show that basically, the colonies do better with it. We know that they overwinter better, we know that they build up quicker, and as a result of that, they make more honey and they're stronger colonies.

On top of that, it's been shown to keep Nosema levels low long-term. It's like the only product really that keeps Nosema levels long-term in the world. We've done in vitro studies as well that show that if spores are held within the syrup that has the HiveAlive concentrate in it, those spores break down, so things like chalkbrood, Nosema again, and the foulbrood. By storing HiveAlive syrup in your colonies, you're breaking down spore walls. Essentially, not just taking care of the bees, but you're taking care of the colony itself, the environment within it, so it's a cleaner, healthier environment for the bee within, because that's how they get all the spores that they get, from moving around honey and stuff like that, and then feeding it back to each other. Basically, bees do better with HiveAlive. You're keeping them healthier and stronger and less vulnerable to diseases and stuff like that.

Jeff: You did a survey of your customers after the release of the Project Apis M results of the colony losses of 2024/25. Is that correct?

Dara: Yes, we did. Obviously, it was big news back in April, the extent of the colony losses that were going on. It was averaging 60% losses across, from hobbyists, to sideliners, to commercial. They were all huge off-the-chart losses. I think it is the biggest loss that's ever been seen. We just weren't hearing that from our customers, and we were curious. We were like, what's going on here? Are we seeing some sort of overwintering effect? I mean, we knew we had a good overwintering effect, but we weren't hearing from any of them, so we decided to run a survey. That's what we did, we ran a survey with all our customers. We got over 300 responses back, which really wasn't bad, considering that Project Apis M, which is obviously the national study there, had 800. We had nearly half of what they had in respondents, and we'll talk about it. We saw dramatic differences between users of HiveAlive versus non-users of HiveAlive.

Becky: Did you ask them-- how many colonies was that in those 300?

Dara: I don't know, I have to check that out. I don't know offhand, to be honest. We had some commercial beekeepers in there as well, so you're well up into the thousands anyway. I would guess off the top of my head, you're talking 6,000 or 7,000 colonies. That's off the top of my head. It could be more, actually. I don't know.

Jeff: What did you find out about the survey, or what did your survey results indicate?

Dara: Well, as a spoiler alert, basically half the losses that the Project Apis M was seeing. The national average was about 60% of losses, and we were seeing losses of about 23%. That's less than half. If you had 100 colonies going into winter, if you didn't feed HiveAlive, technically, you'd be losing 40 of them. If you used HiveAlive, you'd only be losing about 20-- just over 20 of them, so you have 20 more colonies in your yard, which is a significant amount of colonies. We saw that, and that was across the board. We broke it down in the same group that Project Apis M did, which is the hobbyists, the sideliners, and the commercial, and we were seeing around the same, between 19% and 26%. The hobbyists were 51% in Project Apis and 24% with us. Sideliners, 54% losses with Project Apis, and only 19% with us. The commercials were 62% national average, and we were 26%, so there are big differences in losses.

Becky: It would be interesting to ask these beekeepers. I know it's really hard to ask beekeepers to participate in an experiment, but to take their colonies and feed half of them with HiveAlive, and then leave half as a control, and see if you could pull out that difference in that, and then you would account for management. It'd be interesting to take that a step further and see if-- when you're looking at those specific beekeepers, if they're seeing a difference in their survival based upon feeding versus not feeding. Does that make sense? I mean, you might just have super-duper beekeepers who are investing in care for their colonies. When they're buying HiveAlive, they might be doing whatever they can do to make sure that those bees are staying alive, and so it'd be cool to really pinpoint it.

Dara: Yes, I think that if we did a breakdown of what the losses were for and stuff like that, you would see the spread of loss, but I don't think it's that we have excellent beekeepers only that buy HiveAlive--

Becky: [chuckles] Come on.

Dara: Only the best beekeepers buy HiveAlive.

[laughter]

Becky: That could be your new slogan, Dara.

Dara: Yes. It's difficult to do a 50-50 with smaller scale-- We tell commercial beekeepers to do that because they've got big numbers, and it's much easier to see a comparison at that point. But if you have 10 hives and 5-- the error bars don't make sense in that space because there's just too many variables at that point. That's why I liked the fact there was 304 in the survey, because it's a fairly robust survey. We also broke it out over the fondant and the syrup, and both the fondant and the syrup were about the same when it came to colony losses, about the same percentage, so the same reduction. That was good too.

Becky: Is there a difference between feeding HiveAlive in the spring versus fall?

Dara: Yes. I would always say, if you want to spend your money on HiveAlive only in one season, I would do it in the fall, because in the fall-- A couple of reasons, but the main reason is they'll be eating it for longer over the winter time. The other reason is what I mentioned earlier about breaking down the spore walls. If you're feeding them syrup in the autumn time, it's going to be stored in the comb for longer. The longer it's stored in the comb wall, the better it will be at breaking down the spore walls, so that makes your colony-- Especially coming out of spring, you don't want lots of pathogens when the bees are at their weakest point coming out of spring. You want them to be strong and not threatened by potential diseases. That's why I would say, always, the fall is the most important time to feed.

Becky: Interesting. You did a survey of your customers, but those must be customers that are signed up to a newsletter or have purchased from a specific location, right?

Dara: Yes. We sent to everyone who would have bought or signed up to us in the past. Yes.

Becky: Yes, because I bet there are a lot of other HiveAlive customers throughout the country that didn't get the survey.

Dara: Oh, yes, there would have been.

Becky: Yes, so you've got a-- It doesn't mean anything, but it is like you've got a subset of beekeepers. Do you have a HiveAlive newsletter?

Dara: Yes, we do.

Becky: Okay. Because I bet every beekeeper who is using HiveAlive is probably not signed up for that newsletter, so--

Dara: No, they would be buying from retailers directly, and they may never-- they wouldn't know anything about us, for all I know.

Becky: Right, so we could also include a link to that newsletter, because if people are interested in this product-- It sounds like an advertisement, but I'm always fascinated about--

Dara: Keep going. Keep going.

Becky: [chuckles] Yes. Okay, here's the bummer, everybody, I'm not getting free HiveAlive for this. No, I'm kidding. I don't want it, because I want it to be neutral, but I will say this, that the seaweed extract is so interesting to me because this is something that is used across managed livestock, that they have found that the nutritional benefits do help the health of the animal. I'm always really interested in this, so I just wanted to put it out there that this is-- One, I wanted to point out that I think you have a newsletter that is supporting product information and everything. I'm assuming the survey is shared on your website, is it?

Dara: Yes, it is.

Becky: So people can take a look at it for themselves.

Dara: Of course. People can look at it, yes. It is, yes. Going back to the seaweed thing, seaweed extracts-- Before, people would just feed seaweed, which some companies still do, but most of them have evolved in that and they're pulling extracts out. If you look on the web for papers on animal feeds and seaweeds, there are hundreds of them, all showing significant differences, and they're not just-- Like, it can be from shrimp, to turkeys, to race horses, you name it, they all benefit from it.

Becky: It is super interesting that it is across the spectrum. Anyway, I just wanted to point all that out. It would be cool too if beekeepers signed up for your newsletter, and even more beekeepers if you decided to do a survey next year. I'm not holding you to it, but if you decide to do a survey next year, it'd be interesting to get even more beekeepers to be a part of it who tried it.

Dara: Yes, 100%. By all means, sign up. We aren't a hard sell on our newsletters. We try and get lots of different information. Actually, I'm starting to do a new one. I want to do a new one that's kind of once every couple of months that puts out [unintelligible 00:12:00] the papers and maybe makes it more approachable for the average beekeeper, you know? Kind of summarize it and make it easier for people to understand. That'll be part of the newsletters as well, because there's always new stuff coming out, and some of it is really interesting, but some of it can be hard to pull out what the interesting part is, so that can be cool.

Becky: The nice thing too is that so many of the papers coming out are accessible now. They used to be behind a paywall, but a good portion of them are not. It's nice to have somebody pull out that information and highlight it, and then go ahead and share the actual paper if people want to take a look themselves.

Dara: Yes. Just an aside, I don't know why that's changed. It used to be a lot of them being very paywalled, and now it does seem to be a lot more relaxed about that.

Becky: Yes. It's definitely a change in science, which I'm guessing that the great World Wide Web has made that a big deal. I remember when I was in graduate school, we used to have to send postcards. We'd fill out our name and address, and then we'd mail them to the author, and the authors had to buy a bunch of reprints. In fact, my PhD research papers I published are in papers. Like, I just got a stack of them, and then I'd mail them to people who wanted to read them. We're in a much better place right now as far as accessibility. [chuckles]

Dara: Yes.

Jeff: Now you just send links.

Becky: You don't even have to send links. The author's are not even a part of it right now.

Jeff: Dara, in your survey, you put out a lot of different information, asked a lot of questions. Was there any surprise results that you discovered?

Dara: Yes. I suppose one of the most interesting things was, we kind of broke down-- Just sort of trying to get some interesting stories out of it, we asked beekeepers why they thought their colonies perished. There was a number of reasons, and the usual reasons, what you'd expect. The ones who had the most losses, most percentages of losses, there was what you'd kind of expect; mites, or inexperience, and starvation. Of course, starvation, just putting the fondant on deals with that, whether there's HiveAlive in it or not. Putting some sort of food and making sure they have food so they don't starve, that's an easy no-brainer.

Then we looked at the ones that had the lowest amount of losses, percentage of colony losses, and their main reason that stuck out was queen losses. It wasn't starvation or any of those other things. It was queen losses. It was like, the guys and girls who had the lowest losses, I guess, are-- we could say they are the better beekeepers, but they're limited in what they can do with their queens because it's the queens that are failing on them, but they've done everything else correctly. I thought that was interesting.

Jeff: We've talked about that in the past too, in other episodes, that queen failures are higher now than they appear to have been in the past. Seeing that come up again is interesting.

Dara: Yes, it is. It shouldn't be happening to the scale it's happening at. Queens should be living four or five years, that's what they used to live to. They don't do that anymore.

Becky: Yes, the difference between lifespan and then what we're seeing in the colonies is interesting. I mean, I know that if I'm requeening and I need that queen to mate, and then all of a sudden the rain comes day after day-- which doesn't happen in Minnesota, but it did this year as much as it does in other places, Jeff, but that window, that can impact them. Then there obviously are other issues that can impact them; their own sperm, the quality of that. There are lots of things facing those queens.

Dara: Yes, but the weather has always been there. Look, I live in a place that's awful for weather, and I do sometimes get poorly-mated queens if it's a bad run. But generally, if they're mated and it's a normal mating-- To be fair, I still expect them to live four or five years in Ireland. They still do. I don't have queens that live-- I don't, because I move them on now, but I used to regularly go, "Oh, how old is that queen? What color is she? Oh my God, she's five years old." I would rarely lose a colony from queen failure. Yes, I don't actually ever think-- I'm sure I must have, but certainly, that was never an issue.

Becky: Do you have to repaint your queens? Because that's a long time for paint to hold on.

Dara: Yes, you could barely make it out, and you don't have the right freaking pen at the time. You're like, "Oh, it'll confuse me if I don't paint it that color because I'll never know." I tend to write on the boxes now as well, so I just write on the box with the same pen.

Becky: Okay. Yes, I have a special paint color for supersedure. It's orange. I have a fair number of supersedures this year with the queens I've introduced, so--

Dara: Interesting. Supersedure is cool. I've had overwintered two queens-- maybe I said it before in one of the talks, where the supersedure must have been before winter, and the two of them overwintered.

Becky: They can coexist.

Dara: Yes, it's mad. It doesn't make sense.

Becky: Although it does, because they're in trouble if they don't have a successful queen event.

Dara: Yes. I suppose for me, it doesn't make sense, how do they negotiate that within the colony? Like, "We're not kicking that queen out yet because we're not really sure. Let's take a vote."

[laughter]

Jeff: Well, Dara, it's been great having you back on the show talking about the survey and the impact that HiveAlive makes as part of a strong management practice with bees going through the winter. That's wonderful. Thank you so much.

Dara: It's a pleasure, as always, to be on with you guys.

Becky: Nice to see you again, Dara.

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