Regional Beekeepers: Spring 2025 (333)

333 - Regional Beekeepers: Spring 2025

Leon: This is Leon from northeast Ohio, second-year beekeeper. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.Woo-ah.

[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.

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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 episodes 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. Hey, Leon, from northeast Ohio, what a wonderful opening. That's exciting.

Becky: Leon has got lots of enthusiasm. That's what we like. My husband's from northeast Ohio.

Jeff: Jim Tew from Honey Bee Obscura is from northeast Ohio.

Becky: Can we talk about Jim Tew? I am 100% obsessed with having a bee room in my house now after listening to his podcast. I have some really old houses, and I'm really curious if I have an existing bee room someplace, although I don't think I do. Bee room, had you heard about it, Jeff?

Jeff: No. It's interesting. If I had heard about it when I lived in Ohio, I'd forgotten about it, and it's possible that that's the case. I talked to Jim about bee rooms when he recorded that episode, and we'll include the URL for that episode in our show notes for Honey Bee Obscura. and He said there were quite a few of them around him, around Booster, around Seville in that northeast Ohio area. It's really interesting to go up in those houses, and they're Victorian houses. I know exactly what they looked like. Those rooms in the attic had, apparently, cubbyholes or special rooms where the beehives lived with an exit to the outside. Amazing.

Becky: It was so fun to hear that he had seen evidence of the bees, they just were allowed to drop home in the space. It wasn't like a managed hive. Nothing organized like an easy hive. It was just wild. Then to think that it was somebody's job to go get honey for dinner or breakfast, or whatever, it's just-- anyway, I'm a little bit obsessed. Okay, I'm a lot obsessed and I want a bee room so badly.

Jeff: I can see that. Hey, coming up in just mere moments is our regular episode with our regional beekeepers, our five beekeepers from around the country talking about their past season just passed, and their plans for the coming season. I'm looking forward to having them on.

Becky: I love our regional beekeepers, so I can't wait to hear how they're doing.

Jeff: I know they're out there in the green room. Let's let them in right after this quick word from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey everybody, welcome back. We had to put the leaves in on this table because we have a large group of beekeepers sitting around it. Sitting around, big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table, we have four beekeepers plus Becky and me, and our regional biannual beekeepers gathering. I am going to ask you to go around the table and just say who you are, what area in that state you are in, and how many bees you run, and we'll just pass it along. You all have been on the show before. You were in the fall, and you were on last spring, so our listeners can listen to those episodes as well. Ang, do you want to start?

Ang Roell: All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Ang from They Keep Bees. Our home base is in Montague, Massachusetts, but we have been migrating for the past seven years. We take about 100 hives south to Florida each year and do an extra queen season. We just wrapped that up yesterday. Feels a little--

Becky: [laughs] You're not in Florida.

Ang: No, I'm now in Massachusetts. It feels like time travel. You move backwards in spring, like up the coast. You're like, when you stop in South Carolina, it's like the flowers are blooming and there's pollen everywhere, and then as you go up, more and more trees are closed or things are just starting to bud, so it's like, whoa, where am I? Since last fall, we had bees in North Carolina and Florida, and Massachusetts. We lost our bees in North Carolina to the hurricane there, and some of our bees in Florida, because there was like a hurricane, a hurricane, a tornado, and then the wintertime. It's just been a while time around here.

We have really good overwintering survival in Massachusetts. We just checked those today. I was trying to do the calculation on my phone. I think it's actually around 70%, which is shocking to us because everyone else is reporting rough numbers. I have seen an increase in Nosema. We did a trial this winter with a climate-controlled shed, and we had a big Nosema issue in that but also in some nucs that we've overwintered, and we overwinter them just like everybody else. One whole yard showed a high sign of Nosema. I've been following along with what's going on nationally, and interested in hearing what the results are and seeing if I can get a measurement of how that might have impacted us here. Other than natural disasters, my bees are doing pretty well.

Jeff: Thank you. Thank you, Ang. Bonnie?

Bonnie Morse: I'm Bonnie Morse. I'm located in San Rafael, California, so just north of San Francisco. We help manage about 300, 350 colonies.

Jeff: Duane.

Duane Combs: Hi. Duane Combs, Arizona Beekeepers LLC. I am in Phoenix, Arizona, the Sonoran Desert. We sell out 200 nucs a year, although this year it's only going to be 100.

Jeff: Jay.

Jay Williams: Hi, my name is Jay. I run Williams Honey Farm. We manage a couple hundred hives. I work pretty heavily in agritourism, and I'm based just south of Nashville, Tennessee.

Jeff: Jay's been on the show enough. You're going to have to join the podcasting union just so that--

Jay: I got the tattoo.

[laughter]

Becky: We're missing Paul Longwell, but Jeff keeps bees very close to where Paul keeps bees. Jeff, you're going to hopefully share what's going on in the Pacific Northwest for us.

Jeff: I'll try to represent this part of the Pacific Northwest as well as Paul can. Thank you. That's really good. Becky, where are you located? Just for the record.

Becky: I'm sorry I can't disclose that information.

[laughter]

Becky: I'm in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis St. Paul, where winter has not yet stopped.

Jeff: Thank you, everybody, for joining. This is agriculture, really, so every year has its own challenges. This year we started out with extra news, some extra excitement. Let's just go around the table real quick. Ang, you told us about your 70%, so I'm going to jump past you, Ang, and go to Bonnie. Bonnie, if you can talk about your winter season and what you experienced, how you're coming out of the winter into spring.

Bonnie: It starts early here. It's a pretty mild winter. We're seeing 85%, 90% overwinter survival, which is great. I'm definitely not going to complain about it but it brings other kinds of challenges, like what to do with all these extra bees. We had pretty early warm weather, so the colonies really started building quickly. Then we keep getting rained in for a few days, so we basically got, right now, a lot of monster colonies with very little food. Once the rains stop, which it looks like-- The weather forecast has been terrible this year. It says it's going to be nice the next week, and then we get five days of rain.

It's been really hard to plan anything. I have weather forecast-induced insanity right now because it's been really difficult. If and when it does stop, these bees, there's so much forage out there for them. We can only be in so many places at any given time. Actually, just one. I anticipate we're going to be seeing monster swarms out there because these colonies are just huge. It's been hard to try to split them down because they just really go through so much food when they get stuck inside with rain. That's our challenge right now.

Becky: You're going to skip divide season and just go straight to swarm season?

Bonnie: I'm hoping we can start splitting. We've been splitting as we need to. If we see swarm cells, we're going to split and we're going to feed heavily. I think next week is going to be their first opportunity. Usually, we've got all of our nucs out in yards by now. It just didn't seem reasonable to be doing that. I think this next week is going to be the first really intensive week of splitting of the season. Hopefully we'll catch them before they take off. That's the hope.

Jeff: Thank you, Bonnie. Duane?

Duane: 2024 was a great year. We sold 200 nucs. We produced some honey, so we made some money on some honey. The only challenge we had was there was no rain from August until March of this year, the last two weeks of March this year. Because we were going to be more profitable than normal, I decided to buy 108-frame doubles from California in October. I bought my bees for $19,000, picked them up, delivered them. Since then, I've suffered a 70% loss on those bees. I've been spending $100 a week to feed the bees.

By buying them last year, I sheltered last year's money, and the idea was I was going to make the money this year because I was going to have lower costs. The reality is I don't have to worry about those lower costs or making money. We are selling 100 nucs this year. I'm also going to be selling some hives and equipment because I've got more equipment than I need right now. Anybody want eight-frame boxes? No, I'm going to 8-frame boxes, so I want to sell 10-frame boxes. Bonnie, if you all want to get rid of those bees, I'll certainly take them here in Arizona. You have to--

Bonnie: I was going to say bring your truck up. Help yourself. Just come up and help yourself.

Duane: Oh, for free.

Becky: By yourself.

Duane: What are doing tomorrow morning? You're, what, 14 hours away from me? I can be there by--

Bonnie: I think so.

Duane: I could be there by 11:00.

Bonnie: Come on up.

Duane: The good news about Arizona, and I'll tell everybody the good news, we have two things. One is when it does rain, we have more flowers in a longer period of time. If you move your hives to where the flowers are, because we have microclimates than anywhere else in the continental United States, and the good news is, we can breed bees year round except for about December 15th to January 15th. I'm in the Sonoran Desert. I live in Litchfield Park, which is a suburb of Phoenix. I have bees anywhere from Casa Grande to Camp Verde. We'll get more into that.

Jeff: Very good. Jay.

Jay: I think I'm in the Bonnie camp. I'm very, very grateful that-- I've heard of so many people that have lost and have really suffered this year. We're looking at around 96% survival, 97% maybe. It's really, really good year so far, and so I'm really grateful for that. At the same time, I don't know the right way to coin this term, but we're spring punchy. In other words, it's insane. All of a sudden overnight, everything is a boom. I feel like you open up a hive and you see eight swarm cells and you're just like, what are you going to do? It's just like you got to roll with it, so everybody just is really good at punching, just like, I don't know, you got to react right away.

It's a great problem, but the bees are brooding up so fast right now that we're just-- The first swarm came in just a few days ago and we're going to be doing grafting next week. It's all ramping up overnight. It's a great situation to be in. I'm really, really happy with it. I don't know about you guys. Do you ever feel like you're on top of things? Like. the season's ahead of me, but nothing's really started blooming yet. Then all of a sudden, in 24 hours, you're like, "Holy cow, I'm three weeks behind. I have all these things to do." It just all of a sudden hits you or whatever. It's pretty funny and it's pretty much clockwork. I'm right there with every other year I've ever been doing this now for 18 years. I'm consistent in that way.

I go to sleep at night and I see double screen boards in my eyelids. I need to see a therapist about it. It's a great thing. I'm loving it every single day. Definitely, it's go mode. We're like, bring your A game. Every day, it's the sun up to sundown, we are hitting it hard because everything is breeding out fast. They're hungry, just like you guys are saying. We've been boosting ours for about five or six weeks now, our breeders and stuff. We've been giving them some extra 4% pollen, but for the most part, we are scaling back on all of our stimulation feed because everything is coming on just this week as the dogwoods last couple weeks has been the red button and it's been very, very strong. No complaints at all.

Jeff: Sounds like for the most part for this group it's been a fairly decent winter spring so far.

Duane: Except for Arizona.

Jeff: I will just say for the Pacific Northwest, just to represent the area,is that for me and for Paul, the losses have been just slightly more than-- Actually, mine were less. We're doing survival rates, so I have probably 70% survival, 60% survival rate. There are a couple that may be on life support right now, so that might slip down. There's a little bit less, but it's better than last year, so I'm happy with that. It's been a cool relatively wet spring even for this area in the Pacific Northwest, but the bees are active. They're moving and they're building up, so that's holding hopes for the rest of the spring for everybody else. Becky, what about you? Oh, you can't get to your bees, but what do you know about your bees?

Becky: I know that we had one warm day where I know I lost a few and it was a queen issues, but I really, really don't know what they're doing, so it's a mystery to me. I wish I knew. Usually, I'm able to actually get in there and do some pretty good work by now, but it has just been a very unfriendly spring. That's compared to last year, which was way above normal. I could have done divides if I had queens in March last year, but not this year.

Jeff: Ang, I cut you off early on. After listening to everybody else, do you have anything you wanted to add to your experience coming into the spring?

Ang: Yes. Florida spring came on really, really fast and then it got really, really cold. The weather was beautiful for humaning, but the tropical flowers definitely got slowed down a bit. I was seeing a lot of what Bonnie is describing, that overbuild before there's the food sources out there to really sustain it. That left us a little bit like, should we or shouldn't we when it came time for mapping out our queen season. Definitel, was lower production for us because we don't generally want to feed all those tiny little hives.

Jeff: What part of Florida do you over winter in? Northern Florida? Mid Florida?

Ang: I had bees in Massachusetts and Florida simultaneously. The ones in Florida are in Central Florida, East Coast.

Jeff: Orlando would be more towards the west, so east would be more towards Fort--

Ang: Fort Pierce.

Jeff: I was just ready to say Pierce. There's several forts along. Very good. Let's take a quick break here from our sponsors and we'll be right back with more from our regional beekeepers.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. I'm actually excited to talk about varroa early on in this episode because I want to know if anybody here is going to try any of those new varroa treatments out there.

Ang: I don't have a plan to do anything differently than I've been doing. I use oxalic, sometimes formic, as well as a lot of root breaks for queen production, and that tends to keep our bees pretty clean. We also do a lot of selection for varroa-sensitive hygiene and brood assays to make decisions about improving our genetics so that we don't have to just rely on chemical inputs, because we all know that one-legged approach is not really an approach with varroa. We really have to be working on both genetics and treatment, at least in the places that I am.

I think that maybe that's true in places that have a milder winter, but in Massachusetts the winter is so long and so intense and such a stress event in and of itself that we really do have to have varroa under control in the fall or you see a definite increase in loss going into the winter. We are happy with our survival rates here, and we're happy with our selection. We're going to keep doing that. Last year, I did a training in instrumental insemination, and so I'm going to start doing that in our population this year, and I'm looking forward to stepping into that role a little bit more.

Becky: I know a while back, I asked you for a quote for an article I wrote about honey production, and you talked about how you do walkaway splits early in the season, and that way you get that brood break, and then you get some early spring honey. Do you still do that?

Ang: I do that for some of my bees. Some bees are on a queen production cycle, which means they're smaller hives that are getting split into even smaller hives to make queens. Those are getting queen cells. Then we have hives that get a split made from them, that's a walkaway split, and then they produce honey. We have hives in both models set up, but the walkaway split ones generally are drone-producing colonies and also honey-producing colonies.

Becky: Bonnie, how about you? Anything new in your approach this year?

Bonnie: Do you pronounce it VarroxSan, the new product?

Becky: Oh, VarroxSan?

Bonnie: Yes. Technically, it's not available for sale in California, because I would really like to try it, but I think when I'm in Nevada next time, I might pick some up. Has anyone else used that yet?

Jay: Yes. I used it this past season for the first time. I'm very hesitant to say this thing is your answer or whatever it is. I'm very, very hesitant to endorse one thing over another, but I will say that I started using it this past year in almost all of our hives, and I'm now sitting at a 3% loss or a 4% loss. I don't know if that was it. I don't know if the fact that I basically put a pack of fondant on every single one of my hives, just in case they needed it, if that helped.

I don't know if finally the queen breeding is starting to catch up, and we're starting to reap the benefits of it, but I do feel like those strips definitely maintained a lower varroa count. I don't think they dropped the numbers, but they maintained a lower, and I think that is a tool that at least the listeners should definitely be using. Again, I think I said this last time, I don't think that's the answer, or that's a standalone answer, but I do feel like it's a great tool in your toolbox, and it seemed to do pretty well for me this year.

Duane: I'm going to do one round of them this coming year only because I want to support the product. My problem is in the lawless West, I can do my own sponge. It's for a lot less money.

Ang: Same. We make our own. We use oxalic both on sponges and as a dribble, and we make all our own treatments. It's more cost-effective, and I think those treatments are great. I also think that there's been some research indicating that oxalic really only manages varroa infestation. It doesn't really kill a heavy mite infestation. If you're not also working on genetics, which I've heard several people mention, it's not a one-stop treatment.

Becky: I think I've heard from some that there is a good drop from VarroxSan.

Ang: Interesting.

Becky: Yes. I can't talk about it anymore.

[laughter]

Ang: Top secret.

Becky: I've heard good things, but again, that's why we look at mites before and after.

Duane: I bought a battery vaporizer, so I'm going to vaporize to get my numbers down and then put the pads in again, looking to maintain the numbers.

Ang: Yes. That's our approach. When we have a cell, you have a period of painlessness, and then you can treat during that period with the sponges, and we see a pretty significant growth from that moment, if that makes sense, a response to that treatment.

Bonnie: Hey, Jay. Can I ask you something? When you talked about the fondant, and you also said the 4% pollen, are you talking about HiveAlive?

Jay: Yes. I was talking about HiveAlive, not overly feeding, but I was putting in there just as an insurance package thing. Then, for our breeders, I was trying to stimulate them early. We also do a one-to-one feed for about a three-week period, generally between the purple deadnettle and when the red buds start showing that they're going to be popping soon. All that doing on our side, at least, is to stimulate the queens to start laying a little bit more.

Then the double screen board, like what Ang's saying, acts as my brood break, but at the same time, the ones that I'm really following or that have gone really, really well, I'm on all eight-frame mediums. They're generally hitting the fourth super up. One through four an hour are completely packed with brood. I make a double screen split, start them, knock them back a little bit, stop the brood break, throw the queen up above and then make queens on the bottom and if the queens aren't any good or whatever, then I'll remove the queen and remarry the hive and they've gotten their swarm expression out. Then I'm off to the races when the black locust blooms, which is in my area about two, three weeks from now.

Becky: That makes me tired.

[laughter]

Jay: Makes me tired, too. Oh, let me tell you. They're a little too poplar in the mix, get ready.

Duane: Anybody using Complete? I've started using it. I don't have an opinion at this point.

Becky: What is that?

Ange: It's one of the additives. It's three of their products combined, and it's supposed to do all kinds of wonderful things for your bees, make them healthier, make them grow faster.

Jeff: Strong bodies.

Duane: Pretty smiles, the whole deal. Perfect bees.

Jay: Has anybody ever heard of the new RNA treatment, or Becky, do you know anything about it, because it's all the rage here. I've never used it, but I was teaching a bee school this past weekend, and that was the talk of the town.

Becky: You talking about [unintelligible 00:27:35]

Jay: Yes. I think that's what it is. It's a new RNA treatment that is--

Becky: It's not approved yet.

Jay: I don't know anything about it, but it's got a little Jurassic Park-esque to it, and I think it's cool. The talk on the street is that it's doing really, really well and that it's better than VarroxSan and some other stuff. I don't know. I was curious if you knew anything coming down the pipe about it.

Becky: I've been in contact with somebody from the company, and as soon as they get approval, we are going to get it out on this podcast because we're very excited about it. It's technology that's been around for a very long time. They were trying to use this to control varroa years ago, but they were looking at the blood instead of the fat bodies. Remember when we didn't know how varroa fed until Dr. Sammy Ramsey told us.

Ang: Sure do.

Becky: Anyway, it's been around for a long time. They're close, but they still have to get the approval, and as soon as they do, it'll be out. Adam is going to be speaking at the Minnesota Honey Producers in July. I've got him booked. Like I said, we'll have him on the podcast as soon as we've got good information about it.

Jeff: We had Adam as one of our guest speakers when we were sitting at the North American Honeybee Expo. We had a quick little intro into this technology during that time. It's a really interesting episode, I encourage people to go listen to.

Becky: Maybe we could put that in the show note.

Jeff: We can definitely put that in the show note.

Jay: I have a question for a couple people. I don't know if you want to wait till the end or not. We are finding that our average-- our oldest queen now is a yellow, so 2022. I'm curious, if Ang, if you have similar or yours are older, or is there an average age of your queens now? We mark all the queens, so we know the age of all of them. I was curious if you are experiencing longer lifespans than you used to. I feel like five years ago it was a little bit shorter and now I feel like our queens are still productive after a few more years than they used to be, or if we're just in a silo here or other people are experiencing the same thing.

Duane: I don't know. I go through queens so fast that mine are always the current year.

Ang: Jay, are these your queens that you raised?

Jay: Yes. We're more Carnie. I don't know if it has to do with this. I don't know. We're more Carnie, a lot less Italian, a little bit of Russian in there, but there's more yellows that we're noticing than ever before. There's some reds. Red actually isn't-- there wasn't a great year around here. '23 was not a great year. I don't know. Across the board, it wasn't. '24 was pretty decent, but I'm just really surprised when I opened the hives and I see a yellow and she's still rocking it.

Ang: That's cool. I think my oldest are four. Is that 2022?

Jeff: Yes, that'd be the same thing.

Ang: My oldest are four. I did a trial this year where I tried to bank queens over winter, but we put them in the shed and they didn't make it. I had a five-year-old queen in that bank. I'm kicking myself about that, but here we are. I think that's the thing that you notice when you start doing a lot more selection and intentional crossing is an increase. I think the oldest I've heard from customers thus far is also four years old, and they have queens for four years. It's a cool thing when that starts to happen, and you really get to see over a lifetime what a queen is supposed to be like.

Jeff: Or what it used to be like.

Becky: It's the old days, everybody.

Ang: That's true. That's impressive. It's not all of them. It's a percentage of them. It's just interesting to see how much you really need things at a population scale to see the impacts of what you're selecting for and against. Then the other interesting thing I see is I see more red queens in the Carnie lines that survive in the south and the southeast, and more of the dark, black, silver, gray Carnies survive in the northeast. Actually, those might be from our pol-lines. There's a copper and black.

Jay: Not a Caucasian? It's not a Carnie-Caucasian mix?

Ang: I don't know. I'm very curious about that. I really want to get this DNA sequence so I can know what it is because I don't know if it's that a cordovan, Italian from the pol-lines, but they survive in the northeast and in the southeast. I'm like, these are the bees that can do both, but I don't know what they are anymore.

Jeff: That's really encouraging to hear that the group is saying, except for Duane, Duane, that the queens are lasting a little bit longer. It's a little bit different than what we've heard in the last several years that oh, queens, I can barely get a year out of them before I'm having to replace them. Maybe this is a good thing to look forward to.

Duane: Now, one thing I did do this year, Jeff, is I banked a bunch of queens, bought them in October to use them in the spring, because the problem I have, I need them in February, and that means I've got to go Hawaii, and that means they want $40 to $45 for a queen, which hurts the numbers. We banked them and used them in March and only lost about 11% or 12% of them.

Ang: Overwinter banking feels really promising for doing things like early splits and growing and dealing with this issue we're all talking about where spring is coming later. We don't have as much of that. We have the buildup, but not as much nectar. I think banking queens is a really interesting and promising thing for a lot of regions.

Becky: One of the things I wanted to ask you about and you naturally went there, which I'm excited about, is queens. Could you unpack it a little bit more for our listeners because there was a lot of information there? If you're not an expert, people might have not caught exactly what you're talking about. Ang, would you start with you're doing the pol-line or the pollination line from USDA. Would you go through what kind of stock you use and like?

Ang: Thanks for asking. I get real jargony sometimes, and then I forget people have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm like, oh yes, I spend a lot of time in a field by myself.

[laughter]

Becky: It's just it's such great information. Don't apologize for going there, believe me.

Ang: Mostly at this point, I raise Carniolan and Pol-line queens, so open mate. I get some of my stock from the mixers down in Central Florida as well. Then some of it is our overwintered stock from Massachusetts that we work with in Massachusetts and Florida. Those are mostly Carniolans that we selected over the last six years or so. Before that, I had a lot of Russians. I don't really have much of that in our stock anymore. As the bees have survived over several years and we've built up this stock, I've been curious.

I know a network we're a part of is going to try to do some DNA sequencing because at some point, you don't know what's what. You can recognize the different colors of different stock lines or different features of different stock lines, but I'd like to have a better sense of who does well where, if that makes sense. I love selecting for the doctor, Carniolans. In the Northeast, I really see the benefit of that. They're just beautiful bees. That's what I'm up to.

Becky: Great. Duane, do you want to share your stock preferences?

Duane: I have the opposite problem in that in Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, we have African feral bees and so I can't open mate queens, or at least that's what everybody believes here. I'm buying queens. For me, I love the pol-line 2.2s, but you're talking about spending $33, and I can get an Italian Carniolan cross, that's equal-equal mix, and buy those for as cheap as $24, $26. I've been buying a lot of the crosses. I've got a guy that I work with, and what I'm trying to get him to do is we're going to start open mating queens and look at various procedures just to see how bad the African influence is.

I've read some articles where in the lab, they've been able to produce 90% European, 10% African genetics in the bees. That would be a manageable mix for us. One of the things we'd love to do is our local bees are more adapted to our harsh environment than any bee in Northern California, Georgia, Minnesota, wherever. We would like to be able to, but our problem is Africans and tough bees.

Becky: Have you all thought about doing any instrumental insemination?

Duane: Yes, I've got a guy that's been trained in it that's supposed to do it. The problem is the cost factor when you're figure in the labor and everything. If you're talking about doing your first line that you draw from, that makes economic sense, but if you want to inseminate every queen you use, then I think it's cost prohibitive.

Becky: No, but you can create a population from which you can draw a drone. You can create a closed population if you can saturate an area enough, and that will give you--

Duane: We're looking at a couple things. We want to do monthly queen production to look at if there's a variant, if weather, time of year makes a factor. One of the things we're talking about is we can raise the bees in Southern Arizona or Phoenix, and then take them up to Northern Arizona before drones are produced by the native hives and try that. If we can get a Sears grant, we're going to try to come up testing five or six different things to see what happens.

Becky: Jay, tell us about your queens, please.

Jeff: Just like everybody else, I started with Italians way back in the day. Now that I have gray hair or lost all my hair, I'm more onto the Carnie line. I started with Italians, I mixed in some Russian, and then now I'm a huge fan of Carnie. I love propolis. I love the darker bee. For whenever I give tours, I describe them as your favorite aunt. Someone who's super supportive, great to be around, and productive at the same time because she knows where she's going, what she's doing. My Italians, back in the day, they love to party. They love to mange a lot.

As a result, my honey stores went down, is how I describe it. My aunt, she's a good hard worker. That's what I do. We flood our area, similar to what Ang has talked. I feel like Ang and I have a lot in common because I flood my areas with my drones so that I'm pushing out, I call them Amazon bees, all the bees that someone just ordered online and doesn't know the history of them and are infiltrating a lot of my breeding areas. I'm also very fortunate because I have a pretty giant hauler or bowl that I do a lot of my work in. I flood the heck out of that thing with everything I can possibly throw at it.

I run a ratio of about 4 to 1 production to drone producers. I've been doing AI or II for about two years now. Artificial insemination through Sue Colby in Washington, and that's who trained me, and she's awesome. I'm a big fan of that. I'm with Duane, though. I would never inseminate every queen that we have or anything like that. It's more that when I find someone I really like, then I try and, not straight line that genetic variety, but I really try and hone what I love from all these different places.

It's just collecting the drones will take you, it takes six hours or so for me to really get 400 drones, which is the equivalent to maybe seven microliters worth. It's a fairly labor-intensive practice, but it's also really challenging, really fun, really rewarding at the same time. In the end, that's a long way of saying it's a hodgepodge, but in the end, the predominant gene that I'm a huge fan of that. I want to promote as much as possible is that Carnie because they're the rock stars, in my opinion.

Becky: We need II work parties where people come catch your drones for you so you can just--

Jay: Seriously, right?

Ang: That's a lot of open [unintelligible 00:40:00]

Jay: With the right music and some beers, yes.

Ang: It's like a weekend of drone collection and queen insemination that you could prepare for. It's something a few of us have been talking about because it's just like, it's so much work, you know, and you really need--

Jay: It's so much work, but it's so rewarding though.When you finally do it, you're like, holy cow, she never left the house and she's set. She's a mated queen forever. I love it.

Ang: Yes. It's a great way to hold on to good genetic material and have diversity.

Duane: I got to ask you all a question about your Carnies because my fear is in my hot environment, I don't know that they do well. I'm afraid each one's going to have to have an umbrella to keep the sun off of them.

Ang: Really? I have them in Florida and they do fine. They're a little more susceptible to the hive beetle, I think, because they tend to brood smaller. If the hive beetle season is really bad, last year into this year was really bad and you see more Carnie absconction. That's what I noticed.

Jay: They're not for the faint of heart.

Duane: When you have sand and high temperatures and dry environment, what's a hive beetle? We do have them, but they're only in irrigated areas.

Ang: Oh yes. We have a swamp, they're a monster. They're such a bear.

Jay: I don't know about you guys, but we're overwintering more nucs than ever before. Part of, I think the reason that we're successfully overwintering so many nucs is the Carnie. It's because what Angie's saying is they overwinter so small that-- I say they're not for the faint of heart because you come into the early spring and you're like, holy cow, there's like nothing here.

How are they ever going to survive? They're in a single brood. Then all of a sudden, kapow, it's party central and they're in four supers or whatever. To me, in my opinion, they have that Russian in them where they're so reactive. Where they can overwinter on nothing, and then all of a sudden they're super huge. They just aren't as aggressive as my Russian experience is where they're a little bit more easy going.

Becky: I'm also going to say for the cold climates, sometimes it's nice to have some Italians who could care less what the temperatures are and are going through and going forward and replacing their population aggressively despite cold conditions. Every few years when we have a really cold spring, I usually run pretty dark bees and they get really small. They build up quickly, but it's sometimes it's nice to have part of your operation in something that could care less about the weather and the temperature and will do--

Jay: Likes to party.

Becky: Likes to party. I've already got some on order along with a lot of other queens.

Duane: I like the Italians too. It's just when you do the crosses, they're a lot better. My ideal would be 90% Italian, 10% Carniolan.

Jay: Let me say one more quick thing. You know what I wish a lot of listeners, if they're not doing artificial insemination or they don't kind of understand a lot of this jargon and lingo, I think the takeaway here for a lot of the newer beekeepers should be get to know who you're buying your queens from. Really, who are they? Where are those lines coming from? Get to know a bee that works for your environment and your approach to beekeeping. Are you a chilled, laissez-faire, it's all good? Or do you really want a lot of honey out of it? Do you want to have a large overwintered cluster or colony?

Not worry about like, I have to know every single little thing about queen breeding. In the end, you got to remember that this should be a fun hobby, not something that really stresses you out. Sometimes when you have the right queens, it's amazing. When you have the wrong queens, this hobby stresses you out and that's not worth it. That'd be my takeaway for someone who's entering this that hasn't done what Angie is doing, and in the end just sort of wants a relaxed queen, well then you should know what's out there and do your research and then it'll pay off.

Ang: That's a really good point.

Duane: What I do is I sell queens to my club and that way, individual-- because if you're buying a queen at a time, it's very expensive. If you can buy 100 queens at a time, it's much cheaper. We will buy a large quantity and then sell individual. Michael charges them $5 to mark the queen for them because they come in unmarked. I agree with Jay. You need to try a variety and that's what I did when I started out.

Ang: I think we talked a lot about scenario planning in our apiary. In order to keep these well, you have to know what do you want out of it and what are the different scenarios for how you could get there, and then take the approach that's going to work the best for you and your goals and objectives. If you can't do that well, then beekeeping is always going to be a little miserable because there's so much variation on what could happen at any given moment.

Unless you're able to be like, I really like doing these things, I'm going to look for a bee that I can rely on to do these things so I can have an enjoyable experience, then it's going to be an uphill battle. I'm for find the queens and bees that work for you where you are and really build community with other beekeepers so that y'all are keeping them alive there, that you're making splits from them and exchanging genetics. That's what makes it fun. You don't have to know all of the things, but you get to have a community of people doing that agricultural work with.

Jeff: It's been a fun conversation with everybody again this spring. I'm looking forward and I hope everyone can join us in the fall and we'll talk about if the summer met expectations and how the winter looks for you. Hopefully everybody can join us back end of August, September timeframe.

Duane: Hey Jeff, can I add some hope for Arizona? Because I'm doing some really exciting things coming up. This summer I'm working with Carl Hayden Bee Lab in Tucson. We're going to put 30 hives testing the ApiMaye hive, the BeeMax hive, and the wood hive in a gourd field in Casa Grande, measuring heat, humidity, and the whole nine yards trying to figure out solutions to summer. Then the second thing I'm doing is I've made a deal with a rancher in northern Arizona to move bees to his property to see what the effect is of lowering the temperature 15 degrees on the bees.

Jeff: That'll be fun. I'd be interested to hear the results of your hive study and the heat.

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Duane: We'll get it published.

Jeff: Appreciate everyone's participation this afternoon. We'll talk to you again this fall. Thanks a lot. Always fun talking to all the regional beekeepers. It was a stormy spring for our beekeepers. We have one missing in action, one got dropped in the middle, and one left early because of the tornado warnings.

Becky: Weather is definitely a theme this year and hopefully weather does not have to play a major factor unless it's a positive one for the rest of the season. I think we would all appreciate that.

Jeff: The thing I like about the regional episodes we do is-- I know I do and I know most beekeepers, I would think, unless you're migratory, gets focused on our own yards and what's going on in that yard and the cycles, and everything that happens on the calendar in our own yards. For many of us, we never leave that yard with our bees. Hearing the troubles and challenges, and the successes of beekeepers in other parts of the country at different times of the year, different floral, different climates, different microclimates, it's always fun. It adds to our knowledge to realize that it's an exciting group of beekeepers we have.

Becky: You definitely learn more about bees when you understand how very much weather impacts them and how very much availability of forage impacts them. Our regional beekeepers are so generous as far as sharing their time and their insight, and some of their secrets. We got to hear some of that today. It's really fun.

Jeff: 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 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'd 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 Betterbee 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 Beekeeping Today 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.

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