New Year's Archive Special: Two Queen Honey Production (S6, E29)

S6, E29 - New Year's Archive Special: Two Queen Honey Production

Wayne: Hi, Jeff, Kim, and Becky. We are the Brown County Beekeepers Association located in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Beekeepers: Go Pack, go.

[music]

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman. Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion, Global Patties crafts protein-packed patties that'll turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture this, strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees and they love it.

Global Patties: Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion, Global Patties crafts protein-packed patties that'll turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture this, strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees and they love it.

Check out their buffet of patties tailor-made for your bees in your specific area. Head over to www.global patties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

Jeff: Hey, a quick shout out to all of our sponsors who 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 250 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.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Thank you Brown County Beekeepers Association and Wayne for that great opening. Is he a Packer? Is he a beekeeper?

What does he mean by 'go Pack, go,' Becky? You should know this is--

Becky: I'm going to just summarize this and say go Vikes go.

Jeff: [laughs] They're a football--

Becky: It's a football team, NFL football team, and happened to be the rivals for the Minnesota Vikings. Brown County is right where Green Bay, Wisconsin is. I like their spirit.

Jeff: I'm glad that I received that opening. Otherwise, if you'd received it, it sounds like it may ever have been recorded or seen the light of day. Oh, we don't need that one, delete. [chuckles]

Becky: I would not have done that. Our map is way too important.

Jeff: That's right.

Becky: That's something that I would've sacrificed my personal football feelings and let it through.

Jeff: [laughs] Fantastic.

Becky: Probably.

Jeff: We have a new state to be represented on our map, Wisconsin. We have 2 down and 48 to go.

Becky: Just a few more to go and US territories and then-

Jeff: Countries around the world.

Becky: -every other country in the world that has honeybees.

Jeff: There you go.

Becky: We're almost there. It's a new year. I bet we can do it.

Jeff: A new year indeed. It's New Year's Day. I wonder how many people are listening to this episode first thing in the morning recounting their resolutions.

Becky: If they are true beekeepers, this is probably on their list of things to do, is learn more about beekeeping and the beekeeping world. Hopefully, they hit play and they are getting some ideas because I bet you've got some good resolutions for 2024.

Jeff: 2023 was such a rough year, and 2024, my resolution is to be a better beekeeper. How about that? I ended up with too many distractions starting mid-summer and through the rest of the year that it was the bees paid the consummate price. As I'm looking at 2024 and planning out my replacements and splits, it's going to be a costly spring. [laughs]

Becky: Oh, goodness.

Jeff: What about you? Have any resolutions?

Becky: I've said it before, but 2024 is the year of honey production in my apiaries. I'm really excited about trying to actually get some surplus honey. I always do, but I've always tried to manage my bees so that I actually draw more new comb or make more splits instead of just focusing on honey production. I'm having fun selling some honey, so I'm really going to put my mind to it and see what can happen.

What probably is going to happen is a huge dearth of nectar and no honey production, but we'll see what happens, right?

Jeff: [laughs] There's a positive outlook for the season. Appropriately then, today's archive special on honey production using two queen systems is right up your alley. Have you ever worked with two queen systems?

Becky: Interestingly, the system that was used for a number of years at the University of Minnesota was a modification of the system. This is a two-queen vertical system that Tom's going to talk about today. Minnesota has done a horizontal two-queen system that is geared to get maximum honey and it's geared to have the best queen survive.

It's a little bit different. I'm 5'3", and so a vertical two-queen system, it takes ladders and it could be a little challenging for somebody of my height. The horizontal two-queen system takes advantage of the fact that I'm not very tall.

Jeff: [laughs] I think a two-queen system for a person of any height is a challenge not only because of the vertical distance but get above your head with the weight of those supers, it's a struggle. I think looking forward to listening again to Tom Theobald. He's originally from Colorado, Niwot near Boulder, where he's perfected the two-queen system.

Tom is no longer with us, but he left some great information. Folks are always asking about two-queen systems for honey production. I wanted to bring this back around for beekeepers thinking about this coming year, this spring, this summer, and their New Year's resolutions.

Becky: Excellent. I'm excited to review it and put it on my list of things to do.

Jeff: Excellent. In this episode, we hear from Kim Flottum, was also on the interview. He was a good friend with Tom, and so this is a great episode to start off the year. Let's listen to that right after this quick word from our friends at Strong Microbials.

[music]

StrongMicrobials: Strong Microbials presents an exciting new product SuperFuel, the probiotic fondant that serves as nectar on demand for our honeybees. SuperFuel is powered by three remarkable bacteria known as bacilli, supporting bees and breaking down complex substances for easy digestion and nutrient absorption. This special energy source provides all the essential amino acids, nutrients, polyphenols, and bioflavonoids, just like natural flower nectar.

Vital for the bee's nutrition and overall health, SuperFuel is the optimal feed for dearth periods over winter survival or whenever supplemental feeding is needed. The big plus is the patties do not get hive beetle larvae, so it offers all bioavailable nutrients without any waste. Visit strongmicrobials.com now to discover more about SuperFuel and get your probiotic fondant today.

Jeff: Hey, Tom, nice to meet you again.

Tom Theobald: Hi. I enjoyed the last time. I'm sure I'll enjoy this time as well.

Jeff: I'm glad to have you back. We were almost neighbors when I lived up in Berthoud and you were down in Hygiene, right?

Tom: Yes.

Jeff: That's probably good.

Tom: We're good. Niwot.

Jeff: Niwot, yes.

Kim Flottum: Tom brought this up to me today was the new version, the 42nd edition of  ABC & XYZ is out this week. I was thumbing through it, and I've got your picture in there with one of those two queen colonies. It's 11 supers tall, so I'm going to sit back and you're going to tell me how you make that work.

Jeff: Before you get into that, Tom, on how you made that 11 supers tall, talk, what is the two-queen system and all the basics behind it?

Tom: I didn't invent the two-queen system. I'm sure that it's in the literature somewhere. I perfected it as I went along. I started beekeeping in 1975, bought 40 colonies of bees from Harlan Henderson in October of '75. The following spring I got 25 packages.

By the end of the first year, I was up to 100 colonies and fairly shortly I was up to 200 colonies. I realized that was about the limit of what I wanted to do work-wise. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled upon the two-queen system and I began to try it out. Basically, what it is, I ran a colony of bees in three deep hive bodies.

That was their standard home. For most beekeepers, it's two deeps. I ran them in three. I'd come in in the spring and basically, I would take a two-frame, three-frame split, and that would go on top of the two lower deep hive bodies with a solid divider between, so that the third hive body was completely separated from the lower two.

The top hive body had an auger hole to the rear. Then I would order queens and that top split would get a queen a day after I've split them. That solid divider would remain until the top queen was well established, was laying well, would have the two or three frames of sealed brood, ideally. Then the next step would be to come in and the books would tell you to put in a double screen to give the hive odors a chance to mingle. I circumvented that. I found that I didn't have to do that.

The next step was I put a queen excluder over the second story, two medium-depth supers, another queen excluder, the new queen in a deep hive body, and then another queen excluder and two or three honey supers. I would let that go until the top queen had pretty much filled her hive body. We were approaching the main honey flow, which at that time here, was the second cutting of the alfalfa. At that point, I would take that whole stack down to the second story.

The third story went on top of the second story, auger hole turned to the front. By then, I usually would have one or two honey supers that were pretty well filled. Those would go above the third story, and they acted as a queen excluder. I didn't need queen excluders anymore. By the time the honey flow really got underway, a colony would have three deeps and seven medium-depth honey supers. That was about the extent to which I could reach. I was 6'2" then, still am I think.

[chuckling]

Tom: I could crack that seven supers and take it off. At times, I would have to have a stepladder, dangerous situation. If you've got medium-depth honey super, gross weight is about 65 pounds. Having that above my head became more and more dangerous the older I got. That would be a typical two-queen colony, three deeps and seven honey supers. Now, here in Colorado, average beekeeper, average year, the surplus would be about 75 pounds. With a two-queen colony, I would expect a two-queen colony when it was dialed in to produce a surplus of between 240 and 260 pounds.

Jeff: Wow.

Tom: The input was labor. It didn't come free, but the return was you've effectively built up a very high field force population before you combine them. Among other things, that large brood population was able to capitalize on brief honey flows. They not only would capitalize on the main honey flow, but they could also take advantage of short honey flows because you had so many fielders at any given time.

As Kim said, he'd like to try it next year. I'm anxious to do a follow-on to this and see how he feels about it because, for 25 years, I was one of the speakers in an eight-week beekeeping class that we did here. Every so often, one of the newer beekeepers would ask about the two-queen system. I tell them what the particulars were. Usually, one year was enough.

Jeff: [laughs] I can see why.

Tom: It took a lot of lifting, a lot of manipulating. You had to be a bull and a little bit stupid. At the end of the season, the reward was a much larger honey crop. That's what kept me in business. We're coming onto year number 46. I got a little information from a man by the name of Gerald Rose. I don't know if Kim ever heard his name or not, but Gerald was the leading beekeeper here in Colorado. He was a double queen beekeeper. He was active in the '40s and the '50s, little bit into the '60s. I got to know Gerald toward the end of his career. He retired and went to Eagle, Colorado over on the Western slope on the other side of the continental divide.

I was making a delivery to Aspen and stopped and talked to Gerald about some of the particulars about how he did the two-queen system. What I found was, I had probably perfected it better than Gerald, but he was one of the only two-queen beekeepers that I was aware of in the country. At this time, I don't know if there were any double queen beekeepers around the country or not, whether I was the only one or not. Not too many did that.

Jeff: Hey, Tom, why would a beekeeper want to run a two-queen system? What are the advantages?

Tom: There are several advantages to doing that, one of which is a very large honey crop. Another advantage is, as you come toward the end of the season, the queens sort out who's going to be the leader. Typically, it's the top queen, the new queen who prevails. In the process of doing the double queening, you're also requeening. I know that because occasionally I would get queens along with a shipment that was destined for hobbyist beekeepers who wanted their queens marked. I typically wouldn't have marked queens, but because I had marked queens by virtue of the hobbyists, I had a pretty good idea of which queen survived. It was usually the young queen that survived.

I never found it very rewarding to squish a queen after the second year to keep a young queen at the head of the colony. That was one of the minor reasons why double queening appealed to me. The queen sorted it out and the young queen was usually the one that prevailed. Another advantage is as the brood hatches out, you wind up in the fall with an enormous amount of pollen stored, which is good for the following spring. When the queen begins to lay again, there's no pollen shortage. There's plenty of pollen for that queen to get going again. That's another very definite advantage to double queening.

[music]

Betterbee: Feeling a bit drained from all the holiday chaos? No worries, beekeepers. Let's turn that blah into brightness with DIY beeswax candles from Betterbee. Don't let the time slip by. Transform your surplus beeswax into heartwarming hand-poured candles. Betterbee's silicone molds make it as easy as saying, "Happy New Year." Classic tapers, funky shapes. You name it. Visit betterbee.com/molds now because who wouldn't want a handmade candle as a gift for, say, Valentine's Day? Let's make the new year brighter with beautiful candles courtesy of Betterbee.

[music]

Jeff: Did you find a preference or a difference in the race of bees? Do you prefer Italians or Caucasians or Carniolans?

Tom: I have my own preferences. I settled on the Caucasians while they were still available and I kept pretty meticulous production records for all the different types of bees that I ran. About year 30, 35, I sat down and I analyzed what the production had been among all those queens. [chuckles] What I found was there was not much difference at all. It didn't make any difference whether they were Caucasians or Carniolans or Italians. Italians have a real disadvantage here in Colorado, in my view, because the Italians are primarily a commercial bee and they're very productive, prolific brood-rearers.

What happens here in Colorado is they will continue raising brood far too long into the fall. What happens is they wind up eating their winter stores and starve out unless you're watching them very closely and feeding them supplemental feed. The Caucasians didn't do that. The Carniolans now are a replacement for the Caucasians, we'll begin to shut down the brood rearing fairly easy, fairly early.

You can't ignore their stores. You have to be on top of what their stores are, but their tendency is to begin to suspend brood rearing in September and October and carry a fairly small brood nest into December. The queen typically would stop laying in mid-September or mid-December here, but I think if the truth be known, that queen is down in that hive surrounded by all those overwintering bees and probably carrying a little bit of brood through the winter.

Some of them would stop completely, but I think some of them continued and didn't begin brewing again until about the third week in February when the early trees begin to bloom.

Kim: All right. Quick question here then, Tom. After you harvest, you're harvesting all that honey, when you put that hive back together, how do you configure all of that?

Tom: I don't do anything after I've pulled the supers. The bees sort it out themselves, so they're in three deeps. The queens determine which one is going to prevail. I typically wouldn't go into them in the fall. You have a very high population of bees, a very productive three-story colony. Lots of pollen, plenty of honey to carry them through the winter. I wouldn't typically mess with them after I've pulled the honey.

Kim: You've got a three-deep colony with a surviving queen and a lot of bees in it.

Tom: Yes.

Kim: Do you leave any extra supers for honey?

Tom: In the fall?

Kim: Yes.

Tom: No.

Kim: Okay. The picture that I just mentioned of a view that we've got in ABC shows that configuration exactly the way you described it. We'll put that on the show notes so that people can see what it looks like.

Tom: I'm not sure how workable two-queen beekeeping is today for a number of reasons. I'm not sure that there's a sufficient crop in most areas to sustain a really strong colony or a whole yard of strong colonies. That's one of the drawbacks, the limitations of the crop. Even more important limitation, though, is the dependability of the queen. That system is based upon two queens, two queen system.

You're not going to take down [chuckles] seven supers to check on the queens to see whether you've got viable queens in both halves and we cannot depend upon the viability of the queens over the course of a season. I think that's a real limitation. Now, you can design mechanical aids to lift those seven supers up and pull them away and check the queens, but I didn't have any of that. I was totally dependent upon those queens surviving and thriving. I don't think we can depend on that today.

Jeff: You're talking about the changes and the queen viability. I was wondering how Varroa has impacted your two queen operation over the years.

Tom: The queen that Varroa showed up in Boulder County in 1995 and our losses as they were over most of the country were pretty substantial. Over the first two or three years, we began to come to terms with how to deal with the Varroa and got that in hand to a degree. What we found was that even though we were controlling the Varroa, the losses continued and even escalated.

Looking back, I think what we were observing but didn't know was the introduction of the first of the Neonicotinoids family of pesticides. Imidacloprid was the first introduced in the United States in about 1994, '95, and it was beginning to establish a larger and larger place in the market, but we weren't aware of the damages it was causing. We do now. We have a much better understanding of the damages caused by the neonicotinoids.

We had a double whammy. We not only had the Varroa mites, but we had the family of neonicotinoids. One of the more damaging was clothianidin, used primarily as a seed treatment on corn. Almost all the commercial corn is treated seed treated with clothianidin or imidaclopridamid. It's a horrible situation. I've said many times that the environmental effect of the neonicotinoids is comparable to the toxic equivalent of about 400 billion pounds of DDT every year on top of what's already in the soil and the groundwater from previous years.

It's a horrible poisoning of the environment. Very few people have grasped that or choose to grasp that. If you use DDT as a reference point of, one, the amount of neonicotinoids that are going into the environment and I had to do the math several times because I thought, Tom, you've got a decimal place off here somewhere and you're going to look like a fool.

I'm going to have to look like a fool for other reasons, but not for that reason, the toxic equivalent of 400 billion pounds of neonicotinoids going into the soil and the groundwater every year. It's a wonder that there's anything alive out there and we attribute most of the losses to the Varroa mites. I don't dismiss the Varroa mites. You have to pay attention to the management of the Varroa mites.

The life expectancy of a colony of bees has gone from several years if you let them replace their own queen and if they're in a hollow tree, but what we've done is we've turned a perennial into an annual. Life expectancy of a colony of bees here in Colorado is about two years.

Kim: It doesn't sound like I'm going to be able to get to be a two-queen colony beekeeper then, Tom. I wonder-- [chuckles]

Tom: I'd like you to try it.

Kim: I like the stepladder idea not very much. I have got to tell you that. I don't bounce like I used to when I fall anymore.

Tom: It became more and more dangerous as the years went by.

Kim: I remember back when I was working USDA in Madison, we had the lead beekeeper at the bee lab there. Emmett Harp was two queen.

Tom: Oh, really?

Kim: Yes, he had the skyscrapers and Wisconsin back then was like Colorado back when news first started. It was just one big honey crop. He had lots and lots of honey. He did it for the same reason you went after it. I'm going to bet that Wisconsin's got the same problem now with queens and pesticides and not enough forage. I don't know. Jeff, can you try it out in Oregon?

Jeff: Washington, Olympia?

Kim: Washington, not Oregon. [laughs]

Jeff: No, and I don't know of anybody who's trying it here.

Tom: I'd encourage you to at least give it a try, Kim, maybe worth two or three colonies and see what your results are.

Kim: I think I wanted to do this because I wanted to figure out again how to do it. I got a guy with a truck that I may be able to get up on top of to get that top super off.

[laughter]

Jeff: I did have a question. When at the end of the season you combine the two colonies, do you just put them together or do you use the same old newspaper method of combining the two colonies?

Tom: No newspaper. You don't wait until the end of the season. You combine them just prior to the major honey flow. The objective is to produce this huge colony of fielders. For us, that would be, oh, shortly after the 4th of July, the second cutting of the alfalfa. No, I would just-- See, by now, all the smells have mingled. The workers can pass from top to bottom without any restriction other than a queen excluder. All the smells have mingled.

Combining, for me, would consist of just taking off all those supers and then taking the third story, turning it so that the auger hole is to the front. That's the extent of it. I use fairly liberally vanilla spray. Little bit of vanilla in a spray bottle helps to make that transition a little bit easier. It's good for a lot of reasons. I always kept a spray bottle with vanilla water in my toolbox for a variety of reasons, but no newspaper method or any of that.

Jeff: You had asked or Kim had asked whether I had tried doing this, and I haven't and Kim you haven't. I'm curious if any of our listeners have tried this two-queen system and their experience. On our new website that we'll be rolling out, they should be able to provide some feedback, both in as a voicemail and call in for us and leave a message with their experience or even just email us at questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com because this sounds like it would be an ideal honey production method if you're in the right area and you want to experiment. I think it'd be fun.

Tom: Yes.

Kim: Tom, when you were combining those colonies, you had an entrance on the bottom facing one direction, and then when you separated those colonies, you'd have another entrance for the top colony facing the other direction.

Tom: When I made a two or three-frame split, that would be the third story. They would have an auger hole entrance to the rear.

Kim: Facing the other direction. Okay.

Tom: Yes.

Kim: Just that auger hole worked out all right.

Tom: It worked out all right as the top queen was building up, but at some point along the way, then I come in and the second story had two medium-depth honey supers on top, and then the new queen, then two or three medium depth honey supers above her with auger holes to the rear.

Kim: [crosstalk] More than one.

Tom: Yes. As she built up the brood, they'd have more than one entrance. The workers could pass through that whole column without fighting, without any competition. Basically, that was the setup.

Kim: I was just wondering about how the entrances were working, but I can see it now. The biology makes perfect sense in terms of what's going on inside the box. Unfortunately, it sounds like the biology outside of the box isn't working so well for us anymore.

Tom: That and the dependability of the queens because the success of the two-queen system is the dependability of the queens, and I don't think that we can depend upon them anymore.

Kim: I know some of the people that raised their own have-- I'm not going to say fixed that problem, but have certainly reduced that problem when you're controlling the local genetics and are able to produce your own queens, but when you're bringing them from someplace else, it can be a crapshoot sometimes. I can see where that might be a real problem with queens not lasting long enough.

Jeff: It can be a problem in a one queen system.

[chuckling]

Tom: Also, it's the labor involved of taking off seven supers-

Kim: Oh, my gosh.

Tom: -to determine whether you've got viable queens in both halves. Now, that can be done, and certainly, you could make some mechanical aid that would lift those up and turn them to the side or something like that. If you're going to determine whether you've got viable queens in both halves, you need to be able to get to them somehow and it involves a lot of lifting for someone like me.

Kim: And me, and me.

Tom: Yes.

[laughter]

Jeff: I think that's about everybody.

Kim: Tom, this is great. I think I got a handle on it now. I've got that picture of the hive, the way you had it set up, and now I understand how you put it together. I might try it this year.

Tom: Yes, give it a try. As Jeff mentioned, I would be interested to see if there are any other beekeepers out there who are doing this or something similar and how they're faring under the current conditions.

Kim: If we get some questions, can we get you to answer them, if we can't--

Tom: Of course, yes.

Kim: All right.

Jeff: Tom, I was going to ask you, did you write this up at any time? The two queen system, do you ever write this up for Kim and  Bee Culture or any of the other beekeeping publications?

Tom: Kim encouraged me to write it up for years and I always managed to [chuckles] avoid that. This is the write-up.

Jeff: [laughs] I'm honored.

Kim: I've been trying for 10 years, Jeff, to get him to tell us how to do this. We finally roped him into doing this, which is good. I appreciate your time. Did we miss anything, Tom?

Tom: I don't think so. I think we've pretty well covered it. For a smaller operation like mine, I considered myself a community beekeeper. I operated within about a 15-mile radius of home and it was basically a honey production operation. At the peak, I probably harvested 3 to 4 tons of high-quality honey using the two-queen system.

It's like going out every day and you got this pile of bales of hay. You got 200 bales in a pile. You dress up like an Eskimo, you go out there in the 90-degree heat, and bale by bale, you move that pile from one place to another. It was a lot of lifting. I was physically fit at the time. I couldn't begin to do what is required of it today.

Kim: You're talking me out of it here, Tom.

[laughter]

Tom: You need a young assistant or two.

Kim: I'll see what I can do. I know some young people with a truck. That's what I need here, Jeff.

Tom: There you go. Yes.

Jeff: Hopefully, one of our listeners will call in or write us and let us know what they're doing. If they've experimented with it, their stories, their success or failures.

Kim: Or not.

Jeff: Yes, or not. We all learn from our failures. I've learned a lot in my life. [chuckles] It's been great, Tom, having you on talking to us about the two queen system.

Kim: Tom, thanks. I appreciate your time. We appreciate your time. Take care of yourself, and once we get some questions, we'll be back in touch.

Tom: Yes, I'd be very interested to see if you get any feedback.

Kim: All right. Take it easy, guy.

Jeff: Take care, Tom.

Tom: Okay.

[music]

Jeff: I really enjoyed listening to Tom, he is a wealth of information. While I knew of him and enjoyed his columns in the little town's newspaper each week when I lived in Berthoud. I met him at a couple of beekeeping meetings there. I didn't spend any time with him and I really wished I had and learned this two queen system of producing honey.

Kim: 250 pounds per colony, I'm tired just talking about it. I can't imagine moving that much honey from one pile of boxes, but he did it for a lot of years. He was real successful. I'll tell you the other thing that we didn't talk about that he does is he makes beautiful candles. He has a lot of wax with that much honey, but he's got his own honey house and he makes candles all winter or made candles all winter and kept bees all summer. He did a great job. I was with him one time out in one of those bee yards and I'm looking at a stack of boxes taller than me.

Jeff: [chuckles] That would've been something. I enjoyed keeping bees there in that area of Colorado. They made it fun to do because there was so much forage for them. A perfect place, I think, for the two-queen system. In my immediate area, I don't think a two-queen system would work. We just don't have the flow here, but I'm sure there are areas around here where the fireweed is and other great nectar sources where it would be really good to have a very strong colony, like a two-queen system would produce.

Kim: Yes, the timing of the flow here in Northeast Ohio would probably work with that, but I think the amount of the flow wouldn't. It comes on right about the right time as both of those populations have reached a peak, but corn and soybeans, that's all we got here, just about. It's not going to be great, but there are places, like you said, where you were, I think probably down in the southeast part of the US and certainly out the Dakotas.

[music]

Jeff: Oh, yes. Even Western Ohio out in the flat areas of Western Ohio where there's a lot of lime in the soil. That would be really good, I think, if it's not all plowed under.

Kim: For now, I'm just going to not climb ladders and keep bees.

Jeff: Sounds like the safe way to go. 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 Podcasts 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 along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and  Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the  Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the 'leave a comment' section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.