Jerry Hayes on Honey Bee Health, Science, and Industry Change (341)

341 - Jerry Hayes on Honey Bee Health, Science, and Industry Change

Audre Dublin: Hi, my name's Andre Dublin. I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. I am the president for the Charleston Area Beekeeping Association, and welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout out to Better Bee 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. Thanks a lot, Andre, from South Carolina. Boy, oh boy, is that a new state?

Becky: It's a new state. I looked at the map, I looked really hard, and it turns out it's a new state for us. Andre was just-- what a delivery. He was very relaxed.

Jeff: We had so many great openers coming in from the North American Honeybee Expo. Andre was one of them. Really enjoyed that. Looking forward to next year's convention. That'll be fun too.

Becky: Our listener map is looking really good, Jeff.

Jeff: There are some open states, some open countries, in fact.

Becky: Why is California neglecting us?

Jeff: Someone from California has to call in.

Becky: North and South Dakota. I'm sorry, I'm just going to name all the states that I can tell without a label.

Jeff: Call them out. We have a really good episode planned. We have Jerry Hayes, editor of Bee Culturemagazine, and before he was at Bee Culture, he had a long and varied past, including some time with-- All good.

Becky: All good, and all with bees, or mostly with bees.

Jeff: None of it checkered. All good.

Becky: People are going to keep listening to this.

Jeff: Including some time with our dear friend, Jim Tew, from Honey Bee Obscura. I know Jerry's out in the green room. Let's invite him in, and we'll get on with that discussion.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table stretching from Mansfield, Ohio to St. Paul, Minnesota to Olympia, Washington. We'd like to welcome back Jerry Hayes. Jerry, welcome back to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jerry Hayes: Oh, this is such an honor, Jeff and Becky, and all the outreach you do to the industry and how much you help them. I'm just really honored. Thank you so much.

Becky: We're so happy to have you join us.

Jerry: Yes.

Jeff: Thanks for joining and being part of the party. Jerry, for our listeners, there might be one or two who don't know who you are and/or your background with bees. They may only know you as the editor of Bee Culture.Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started with bees and what led you to this point? Then we'll go forward from there.

Jerry: This is only a half hour-- [crosstalk]

[laughter]

Jeff: Give us the cliff notes version.

Jerry: [laughs] Golly, I'll give you the short CV version. Probably, 50 years ago, 45 years ago, I started out as a high school teacher and I didn't like it. Decided, well, I'll go into some other business. I started working at this other business. A person I was working with was a beekeeper, actually a beekeeper from Wisconsin. I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Everybody knows about honeybees, but nobody actually knows a beekeeper." I picked this person's brain and asked questions and he told me answers. Next day I'd ask more questions, and this went on.

As probably as most beekeepers, the passion grew, the interest grew. Then I started reading things, and I turned into the consummate backyard beekeeper and I did all the goofy things backyard beekeepers do. I built things and killed queens and all that stuff. It's a learning paradigm. That's how you learn. As the passion grew and it grew and it grew, I had a very patient wife, and I asked her if she wouldn't mind me going back to school to learn more about beekeeping and become a beekeeper. Love her to death, and she said, "Yes, let's go ahead."

I had a couple of options. The option I picked was Dr. Jim Tew at Ohio State University. We picked up and moved there with our one-year-old son and went to Worcester. That was probably one of the top three best things I've ever done with Jim Tew. He was just a marvelous personality, marvelous teacher, just clicked for me and with me. I went through the program. From there, I went to the USDA Bee Breeding and Stock Lab in Baton Rouge. This is when Africanized bees were first coming in and we were figuring out how to identify those with wing venation. Was there for a few months, and actually, I had a better offer then from Dadant & Sons as their branch manager up in Wayland, Michigan. We moved up to Wayland.

Jeff: From Baton Rouge?

Jerry: From Baton Rouge to Wayland, Michigan. There, again, manager of the Dadant branch there. Then Dadant, after about a year, offered me to come down to Hamilton, Illinois to work on new product development and accounts receivable. That's why I started writing the classroom for the ABJ, American Bee Journal, question and answer. I did that for a long time. Then I went from there to Florida. I was the chief of the apiary section for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. That's when Borough had showed up. Africanized bees showed up in Florida. Was there for several years.

Then Dr. Jamie Ellis's office was right next to ours at the University of Florida. We had been approached to work with this Israeli company on RNAi, a biological method of, perhaps, controlling Varroa. Jamie and I worked on that for a couple of years. Monsanto, who everybody hated at the time, bought the company. They asked me to come and do oversight on the research to see if they could develop this product.

We couldn't develop it to my level of need and desire for the industry, and so I left. I was going to retire, actually. Strangely enough, the Bee Culture magazine offered me a job as editor of Bee Culture. "Oh my gosh," I thought, "Who gets offered that job?" I couldn't turn that down. That's why I'm calling you and helping everybody learn about beekeeping from Ohio. I have a great team at Bee Culture. There's only three of us that do this global magazine, but Stephanie and Jen are just amazing, and I couldn't do it without them. Here we are.

Jeff: That's quite a journey.

Becky: That's at least six states of where you've been involved in bees. I'm guessing there might be one or two more?

Jerry: Yes. I've been around, I've talked everywhere and what have you, and everybody looks at me and says, "You can't keep a job?" or what have you. One of the things is, I grew up-- my dad was in the Coast Guard. We moved every three years. I've never been afraid of moving and trying new things and what have you. These opportunities presented themselves, and not to get too religious here, but I really think the good Lord was involved in this because I've learned a tremendous amount. The industry is great, and we all are family and we need to be the best family we can be.

Jeff: I remember when Kim retired. We were doing the podcast and you retired, and you came on board, and that was quite a transition for both of you. You filled some big shoes and a messy office, as I recall.

Jerry: I know. Kim was there for 33 years, I think, and just did a fantastic job, not only in the magazine, but I think he was president of EAS, and he traveled around and spoke. What a great connection to the industry. Then for me to be offered that job, and I'd never been editor of a magazine before. I've written papers and books and things and stuff, but I'd never been magazine. They helped me tremendously, at least stick my toe in the water. I'm going on six years now and I think Bee Culture's a pretty darn good magazine and a pretty darn good product.

Jeff: When you first came on board, it was like drinking, as they say, from a fire hose. Now that you've had six years in, what's the biggest challenge that you face, both as-- well, I'll say as the editor of Bee Culture magazine in today's world as a beekeeper?

Jerry: Yes. I think it's a bigger question than that, Jeff. Golly, we have so many contributors who want to put great articles in Bee Culture every month. We have to work far ahead. In fact, we just sent the July issue off to the printers yesterday. Now we're going to start working on August. We have just tremendous contributors to the hard copy, but this is 2025 and everything is digital, that we know. Our beekeeping industry at all levels is aging, and the younger beekeepers are more comfortable with digital and podcasts, like we're doing right now.

You all are aware of how many national and international magazines actually have gone out of business because nobody wants to spend the time reading a hard copy magazine. They want to go to something else, something verbal. How can we do both? How can we make the transition at Bee Culture from just purely hard copy to digital? We have a digital magazine, but we need to connect more with the younger part of the industry to make it valuable for them.

Jeff: I think you have done a good job preparing with the hard copy and the digital. You've made it really accessible to everybody.

Jerry: It's not over. Every day I learn more, we learn more at Bee Culture because we don't have the resources in order to make a big jump. We're trying to do little baby steps.

Becky: It's interesting, Jerry, because I write for Bee Culture, I do a lot of research when we're writing articles and I often end up with Bee Culture articles that come up in my search engine. Often if I'm going way, way back, I find some fascinating stories that beekeepers are telling in the journal from such a long time ago that actually give me some input that I'm looking for. You're guiding the ship at a really important time of history because you're not just sharing information now, but you're creating content for future beekeepers.

Jerry: Yes, no, and you're absolutely right. We have copies of Bee Culture magazine stored in our warehouse office area going back to the 19-teens hard copies. You're absolutely right, there are so many great articles, and a lot of what we do now basically is a reprint of their ideas and methods and what have you that are modified for right now. Honeybee biology, honeybee activities haven't changed that much, but our understanding of them has gotten better. How can we use that to help beekeepers at all levels be more successful? Meaning that the bees won't die.

Then, of course, you don't want me to mention this, but the number is 1.6 million died over this past winter. How can we make beekeeping sustainable? You've all heard people talk about sustainable agriculture. How can we do sustainable apiculture? All that means so that we can be successful not only individually and as a business, but for [unintelligible 00:15:48] and in agriculture and for the environment. To me, this is a huge story that I don't know has been articulated strongly or openly enough.

Becky: We're happy to talk about it, and you brought it up, so we better go there.

Jerry: Uh-oh.

Becky: No, it's great. I was just reading something that Jeff wrote about it. He summarized it nicely, and Project Apis m. has really taken the coordinating efforts to figure out what's going on as far as those significant losses. You said the number, but maybe, do you want to give us some more context, and any listeners who maybe haven't heard an update of what's going on? Am I putting you on the spot?

Jerry: No, you're not putting me on the spot, but yes, I don't want to overwhelm people, but our industry is struggling. This past winter, there were documented tremendous losses of honeybee colonies. The reason hasn't been fully disclosed as yet. I was talking to a friend at USDA, and hopefully soon they're going to release their data from samples they took, primarily in California, about what's going on. The gossip on the street is obviously Varroa and the Varroa virus legacy and treatments and have some of the viruses mutated so that they're even more destructive, if you will.

One of the numbers that sticks in my head is a lot of commercial beekeepers overwinter colonies in humidity and temperature controlled warehouses, if you will. This beekeeper lost 16,000 colonies. There's no way you can replace 16,000 colonies in a business and have your return on investment be okay. This is tremendous. Then when you add in 1,000 here, 2,000 there, 500 here and what have you, it's really concerning, not only for the commercial industry, but how does this relate to the hobby backyard industry as well? How do we tie all these things together?

There again, I'm going to use this word again, sustainable. How can we be consistent in honeybee health issues? How can we be consistent in products and who's providing those products? What do we need to work together so that we're not so segregated?

Becky: I think it's interesting because, I'll add to it, we're in a livestock industry that still doesn't quite understand what happened in 2008 when significant losses occurred. It feels like the industry is much more organized right now as far as another significant loss. They reacted very quickly. Project Apis m. has been very central to coordinating the communication. At the same time, do you really think they're going to say, "Okay, it's this," instead of telling us that it's pathogens, pesticides, parasites, and habitat issues?

Jerry: No, I don't think so. I like your description of, perhaps, the livestock industry or chickens or what have you. We are the ugly stepsister of agriculture. We are an overhead. We show up at an almond pollination, a million acres of almonds, and they need honeybees to go from point A to point B to make an almond so they can sell millions of tons of almonds. Then those bees disappear and go to maybe pollinator contracts in Washington or Oregon for apples and peaches and cherries and everything else. Some of them will go east and go to Florida again and follow spring and summer north up to cranberries up in Maine. Then all those things in between, or the Dakotas for honey production.

Those bees, they lose bees during the year too and what have you, and they go to almonds because that's the first cash flow for them. They show up again for two weeks and then they leave again. There, again, growers treat them as an overhead, no different than fertilizers or pesticides or irrigation or anything else. We have done a tremendously poor job on building the awareness of honeybees beekeepers value, not only to agriculture, but just think of honeybees foragers that can forge in a two and a half mile radius of their colony.

Look at all the plants that they're pollinating on the roadside, in the forest, in the fields that are producing seeds or nuts or fruits or what have you, the feed squirrels and deer and everything, and able to let them reproduce. Then that's carbon sequestration. Then the roots is water retention. All these things, I think, have a big exclamation mark next to them. We have not done a good enough job in the general population.

There's, supposedly, according to the National Honey Board, about 125,000 of us that are using about 2.7 million colonies of honeybees. There's 330 million people in the United States. How do we get that 330 million on our side so that we can, and it's hard to do now in Washington, but how can we get resources to make the industry sustainable like black Angus cows or chickens or hogs or something else, and be that linchpin for agriculture and in the environment?

Jeff: I think some of that has happened in the past with CDC, when there was campaigns and people were excited about trying to save the bees. With good-hearted people doing the wrong things, trying to maybe keep a beehive in the backyard because they thought that was better for the bees that way, but they never managed the colonies. I think there's a willingness on the general public to support the honeybees. I think we have to give them the right way to proactively be part of it.

Jerry: If I can put the business part of my brain here, we're talking about-- let's call the beekeeping industry a product. The only way people find value in a product is that you advertise it, telling the advantages, the good things, what it can do, how it can help them and longevity. We have not done that, Jeff.

Becky: Do who has been very vocal about honeybees though? Xerces.

Jerry: Xerces has done a tremendous job in embracing government organizations and other bees rather than managed honeybees. We have a lot of people who are aware of the environment who look on Xerces as the place to go for information. Yes, our solitary bees, our native bees are wonderful. Yes, they do a great job pollinating, but you can't put 50,000 of them in a box and load them on a semi and drive them all over the country. They don't forage in a two, two-and-a-half-mile radius, maybe a couple hundred yards, maybe a quarter of a mile. They're great for some things, but they can't fill in for pollinator-dependent commercial agriculture anywhere in the United States or globally.

Yes, we should protect them. We should protect the environment, but let's not point the finger at honeybees that are bad, because that's not true. In fact, Diana Cox-Foster is going to be coming out with a paper where she did some research on the bees and where they forage and how they compete with native bees and what have you. Unless you've got a thousand colonies in one spot, the bees are getting along for the most part if they have enough flowering forage out there.

Becky: We've got a nice episode with Diana that we can include too in the show notes.

Jeff: We've been talking with Jerry Hayes, editor of Bee Culture magazine. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back and continue our conversation, current events with Jerry.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Jerry, the issue that you've addressed talked about a little bit, but I think we can go deeper, is that our industry is not united. I think it's fair if I say that. I see that the time and energy spent with beekeepers judging each other, if it was just directed towards getting the public to support the industry, it would be super helpful. What do as far as a path forward for beekeepers?

Jerry: What's the next question?

[laughter]

Jeff: Pass.

Jerry: Oh my gosh.

Becky: I was hoping you'd solve this for us.

Jerry: [laughs] No, if I could solve it, I would have. There, again, we have local organizations. We have regional beekeeping clubs and organizations. We have national clubs. We have others, PAM, who's great. We have the HBHC. We have the Honey Bee Veterinarian Coalition. We have all these great organizations that have these wonderful connections and niches for themselves. I would like them all to somehow, I hate to say, start another organization, like the United Nations or something, to get together and coalesce all their strengths together.

It's like this group here. We're all talking about things, but I don't know everything about honeybees. Anybody who says they know everything about honeybees is a liar. We need to share-- I need to share with you, Becky, what I know, and you need to share with me, and then we'll share it with Jeff, and then Jeff can share with somebody else. You can't do that unless you somehow have a connection everybody feels is valuable.

For the most part, that probably just takes leadership, but it also takes money and resources to do that. If you're going to go to Washington and talk to people, you need to say, "We have 3,000 people in our state that just signed this petition, and they want--" If you could do that with 50 states, that would be tremendous.

Becky: I think it's so interesting because, honestly, if all beekeepers got together and said, "Let's put together the top five issues that we want our local, state, federal governments to focus on," that would be a pretty easy list to put together. I don't think anybody's going to argue a lot of what comes up to the top.

Jerry: Not to interrupt you, but I think our message that we've talked about, I think our message is incredibly strong, not only for commercial agriculture, but to the environment and to all these other things we talked about, carbon sequestration, all these things. At the end of the day, we want the food supply chain to be secure and our environment to be healthy and well for all of us and everyone else. Yes, you're absolutely right. If you have a good idea, please share it.

Becky: Have you read any of my articles? Because I do tend to go off on this a little bit.

Jerry: I read your articles every month.

Becky: Okay, good. Just checking.

Jerry: Yes, no, and you and Bridget just do just a phenomenal job because I love your voice, I love the humor, but I love the insight and direction that you share. I think it's so valuable.

Becky: Yes, I was looking for that. Thank you.

[laughter]

Jeff: Thank you everybody for joining us.

Becky: There, I got affirmation. We're good. No, thank you. That does mean a lot. We have so much fun writing those articles, and they're supposed to be enjoyable for us to write. Then we try to make each other laugh. Then we try to make you all laugh while learning something or, I don't know, seeing an argument.

Jerry: You have to do that stuff to draw people into the rest of the article, and you do a great job.

Jeff: Beyond solving industry problems, and I'm not making light of, but let's move on to other things because I think there are other smaller issues that we can take action on. This week, and we can touch on this because the information is brand new and we don't have a lot to go off of, but there is an announcement of new treatments options, perhaps announced by the EPA for Varroa. I know that with your work in Monsanto, and you did some of the RNA work originally you mentioned in your introduction and your CV, and I know there's a lot of work in that direction. Do you think that holds water for future directions? I don't know enough about RNA and dsRNA and all that stuff to understand really how it works and whether it's viable.

Speaker 1: Yes. Double-stranded RNA, RNAi is good. RNAi and double-stranded RNA are basically the same thing, just different terminology. The I in RNA stands for intervention. RNA is a cousin of DNA. When you have a cell, and in that cell and that organism that cell needs to produce something, an enzyme or immune suppression thing or something, DNA will send instructions to that cell site where it can make that stuff. It uses RNA, is the message. The message is in RNA to turn on that thing in the cell to start making something because that organism, that body needs it. You can't make that stuff all the time.

When it's made enough or your body has enough, DNA will send another RNAi to that that turns off that mechanism. It's not making it all the time. We had the thought that in Varroa, if you picked certain sites in the Varroa, and we could make or identify RNAi to send to that site in the Varroa to turn off that cell, that metabolism, that ability to sustain life, that we could kill, hurt, damage Varroa without having to use chemicals, synthetic pesticides and all these things.

It was a great idea. Delivery of this to Varroa was the difficult part. Monsanto sold themselves to Bayer, and then Bayer sold the RNAi, double-stranded RNA, to a company called Greenlight, who has developed a product that hopefully will help the industry at some level.

Jeff: When you say RNAi, I thought of the I as being interrupt.

Jerry: Yes. It could be interrupt or intervention or something like that. What it's doing is inserting itself and changing that organelle's ability to do something or not do something.

Jeff: That's amazing. Varroa has been so hard on American beekeeping that to find a good solution for it would be really ideal. That would make such a key difference for those of us who were familiar with beekeeping before Varroa. It'd be nice to go back to those days, but might as well wish in one hand, as they say.

Jerry: I'm going to do this, and hopefully you can edit it out if you want. I always do this when I do a sweep, make a fist. That's a Varroa mite. Put it on your body someplace. You're the honeybee. That's the Varroa mite on a honeybee. Trying to kill a bug on a bug, how do you do that without collateral damage to the big bug? We've been putting pesticides. Yes, dosage makes the poison and you can dose it down to impact the Varroa mite.

Just think of the queens. You have a synthetic chemical to kill Varroa, a pesticide. What bee in the colony lives the longest? It's the queen. Every time you treat, even though those workers might pass out of there every six to eight weeks or a few months in the winter time, the queen gets whacked every time. This is why, back in the day, queens would live three, four or five years. If you can get a queen to live and have accurate Varroa control to live, get that queen to live more than a year, you're a better beekeeper than I am.

Jeff: That is a challenge that everyone complains about. Get a couple of beekeepers together, they start talking about queen longevity. There's a lot of stresses on the queen, a lot of stresses on the bee colony.

Jerry: There, again, there's information out there, the Honeybee Health Coalition and Tools for Varroa Management Guide. HAM has great stuff. Universities have great stuff. One of the problems I think is that the worst thing that's happened to beekeeping is the internet, because, just like me, if I went on the internet to try to look up something about physics or Google Chrome, how would I know if it was correct or not? You have a new beekeeper looking for information, and we all do that, how do they know that that's correct? We need to direct people to accurate information that they can embrace.

Jeff: Our podcast listeners are most informed beekeepers, I think. They're in the top 10% of all beekeepers. [crosstalk]

Becky: I would have to agree.

Jerry: Yes. It's true, but how many podcasts are of your value and level? How many times-- I get 500 emails a day. How many podcasts, how many beekeepers-- I heard a podcast yesterday that said, if I put green jello in a colony, it'll kill the Varroa mite. If you're a new beekeeper, how do you know?

Jeff: We only said that once.

[laughter]

Jerry: Yes, you need to use red jello. There, again, access to accurate information. This is where maybe veterinarians, the Honeybee Vet Coalition comes into. We have the VFD, now veterinarians have to approve pesticides and controls and antibiotics and everything else, but how many veterinarians are out there that know anything about honeybees or want to know anything about honeybees? That's another wrinkle in the thing.

Becky: Jerry, you give a lot of talks to organizations, but I've seen a huge shift. I used to have to go and beg beekeepers to look at Varroa as the reason why their colonies were struggling. Now I walk in and give a talk and I listen to the organization talk with their beekeepers, and they've got the Varroa stuff figured out. They're giving really good local recommendations for how to go ahead and manage. It's not a, "Okay, you might have to do something." It's like, "You got to do something." There might be options, but something has to be done. Otherwise, your colony is going to die. Are you seeing the same thing?

Jerry: To a certain degree. Another thing that's frustrating to me, and boy, do I sound like a whiny old guy, is the key to Varroa control is to sample. If you have more than three mites for a hundred bees, that colony's dead. It just doesn't know it. Then treat with something. In the [unintelligible 00:38:56] management guide, it gives a list of options. It doesn't tell you what to do, it tells you what you can use. Then after that, sample again to see if the stuff actually worked. You just can't sample once or not sample at all and walk away. This is why we have-- back in the day, if you had a 10% or 15% loss, that was normal. Now 40% is normal, for the most part. Some things are good, but, there again, we need to be more consistent and sustainable.

Becky: Can we get back to your 500 emails? I'm really concerned about this, and it's stressing me out. I hope you were exaggerating.

Jerry: Yes, I probably am. 150.

Becky: That's still a lot to handle every day.

Jerry: It is a lot, but by the same token, I appreciate beekeepers at some level having faith and confidence, not only in Bee Culture, but perhaps in some level of my knowledge, skills, and abilities so that they're looking for truth and they're contacting me. Sometimes I tell them, "Yes, that's a great idea." Sometimes I tell them, "No, you're going to kill your colony."

Becky: I actually want to go back to the thresholds. At certain times, I want to make sure that beekeepers know that they should check out the Honey Bee Health Coalition, because they're at-- like springtime with brood, you're at two mites. We're in a day where it used to be so many mites, like 8 to 12, and now we're at 2 could be deadly. I just want to make sure that beekeepers are looking at that.

Jerry: Yes, no, you're absolutely right, because I've had beekeepers in spring, and it's still spring up here, say, "I sampled for mites last week and I only came up with one." Then I have to tell them that two-thirds of the mites, especially in spring, are behind cap cells reproducing. That number probably isn't accurate. This is why you need to keep sampling over time, and then whatever product you use, use it according to label directions, but many of them you can't use when nectar is being brought in and in honey production or what have you.

Then to realize that as the days get shorter in August, the bees realize that and they start producing winter bees, which have more fat bodies so that they can live through a winter. That's what Varroa feeds on, are those fat bodies. This constant sample and treat with something needs to go on. This is where this consistency and sustainability is. Yes, you're right, two mites is better than three and one mite is better than two at certain times of the year.

Jeff: Jerry, this has been a fast episode, and we really appreciate your time. I can't believe our time with you is about over. Is there anything coming up in Bee Culture that you want to talk about, that you want to give us a sneak peek to?

Jerry: I don't know about a sneak peek so much as that we try to have a diverse amount of articles, not only about Varroa control, but honeybee health in general and antibiotics. Then we have history of the beekeeping industry. Then we have all the meetings that are coming up. If you looked at the last few issues, we've been honored to have the American Bee Research Committee share all their student abstracts with us that talk about what research is going on at the university level.

We're trying to tag all the bases because we know our readership just isn't one person with blinders on, it's a lot of people that want an overview of the industry and then might have that aha moment as they read a particular article that they think will impact them the best.

Jeff: It's a good journal. I strongly recommend anybody, even if they're into only digital media, to subscribe to Bee Culture. It's part of history, I think, and I'm slightly biased for having written for it and growing up in the Northern Ohio area, but it is a fine publication and I encourage our listeners to check it out.

Jerry: No, and yes, you can just Google it up. You don't have to Google Chrome. You can just Google it up and take a look at the latest issues and that kind of stuff. We're here to help. That's what we're doing. We're here to help because we are family and we need to work together.

Jeff: Very good words. Thanks, Jerry. I appreciate your time this afternoon.

Jerry: Oh, golly, no. Thank you for listening to me rattle on. I hope I haven't made everybody's eyes roll back in their head. Thank you.

Becky: Oh, Jerry, I had so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jeff: I really enjoyed having Jerry on the podcast. We've had him on in the past when he first started with Bee Culture. It's fun to get his perspective. What did he say? Six years on now. That's amazing.

Becky: Wow, that means I've been writing for Bee Culture for about six years because, I think he called me and invited me to write an article, a column, right about when he started. All those deadlines. Jerry is a very special guy and he's so smart. He knows so much and now we know why because he's basically worked in every part of the industry, and he's really good at explaining it to people, which I just so appreciate his perspective and his ability to communicate.

Jeff: He's really good, and I can't think of a finer choice for editor of Bee Culture after Kim left than Jerry. It's a pleasure to have him back on the show. That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like.

You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab along the top of any web page. We want to thank Better Bee and our regular longtime sponsors Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the BeekeepingToday Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:45:56] [END OF AUDIO]