Bear Grease - Ep. 356: Backwoods University - The Humble Pollinator

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

On this episode, we are taking a look at one the smallest, often overlooked, but essential pieces of our ecosystem: pollinators. With effects ranging from agricultural yields and native plant success, down to something as specific as the hunting quality on your family's property, pollinators play a huge role in all of it. Come along as we get hands-on experience with a beekeeper and have a great conversation with author and environmental historian, Sara Dant. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're going to learn about one of the most vital but commonly overlooked elements of our ecosystem, pollinators. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, man, that sounds an awful lot like a beehive. Well, and I would say to you, that's a keen ear you got there, because it is definitely. a beehive. And if you're also sitting there thinking, it sure sounds like that dude's awful close to it,

then I would say, well, you might as well be an NHL goalie because nothing's getting past you today. I am indeed very close to it. It's a beautiful mid-July morning, roughly 7.30 a.m. And I am on a mission to learn more about pollinators and their vital role in our wild ecosystems. And I thought to myself,

what better way to do that than get some hands-on experience with the most widely known pollinator in all the land, the honeybee. So this is a frame that you would harvest. Okay. Because it is 100% cap. Luckily for me, I didn't have to look far to get this experience. The mother of my wife's lifelong best friend, Ms. Linda Easterling, has been beekeeping for the better part of a decade.

And she was nice enough to have me over one morning, lend me a beekeeping suit, and give me a crash course in this unique hobby. So when the nectar that they put in the seals is ready, they cap it. It has to be a certain water content to it. Gotcha. When that wonderful content drops, then it's ready to cap. They know somebody's in the hive, so they are starting to store, they're loading up on honey in case something happens to their house.

I see. So, now, I don't know how you can feel it with love hands. Miss Linda and I just opened up a beehive, and now she is showing me a honey super that is ready to harvest. You'll be able to see this interaction fully on the YouTube video, but for my audio-only listeners, imagine a rectangular box lined across with wooden slats that maybe have an inch spacing between each of them. These wooden slats are honey supers. They match the boxes length and depth and essentially provide framing for the bees to make and store honey.

We pulled a fully capped super to get a closer look. The most shocking thing for me holding this in my hands, you know, besides the hundreds of bees flying around my head, was the weight of it. An empty honey super weighs maybe three to four pounds. But this fully capped honey super weighed closer to 30 pounds. These bees had been busy. pun very much intended.

Oh, yeah. I would not expect it to be that heavy. Yeah, so it's heavy. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. And since I kind of messed it up a little bit, they're on your microphone, too. You're going to hear some good buzzing.

That's what I was hoping for. Can I take this and hold it in front of the camera there? Okay. Yeah. Mostly honey production. Yeah. It would be easier to see the brood in that box. Yeah.

Go to that box. Once we get through looking at this full honey super, Miss Linda wants to show me a different, smaller hive that will have much less honey production and will allow us to see the brood. It was when we went to the next hive that we had a little bit of excitement. Now that's the part that make people nervous. When they're coming up at Feele of your bail, you're kind of get seed.

One's in my veil. This is near? Yeah, I'm going to back up and let her out. Yep, you heard that correctly. A single bee has broken the four. And is now inside the veil of my bee suit. Thankfully, Miss Linda walked me through what to do in case this very thing happens. I'm supposed to back away from the hive, pull open my veil, and calmly waft the bee out of there.

Without getting stung is the key part of all this. Let's see how this goes. We're still in there? Yeah, she hadn't stung me. Come on, sweetie. Get out of there. She's right there. See her?

Right here. I thought I'm sorry to come out either way. Despite our best attempts, we just can't seem to get this single bee to fly back out. And at that point is when we get another little dose of excitement. Well, she, I almost has another one getting in. Not that one just got to eat. It'll be a right. Right, there goes one.

But there goes one's right in. Unbeknownst to us, a few bees followed me over when I backed away from the hive. And when I opened the veil of my face mask up, to let the bee out, more flew in. At one point, I had three Bs inside of my face net at once, and I am more than happy to report that I managed to get out of this small snafu with zero stings. The key component to all of this was just staying calm. Small side mission of this episode, I will always and forever have a soft spot for critters that are often misunderstood.

And while the main premise of this episode is to explain why pollinies, are of crucial importance to our landscape, I also want to rid the mindset of every bee you see is on a mission to sting you. They most definitely are not. At one point, one of those three bees landed right on top of my ear, and it's still withheld fire. I think my point proves itself. I spent the rest of the time with Miss Linda with no more bees inside my headnet and taking a look into the rest of the beehives that she had on her property. And let me tell you, if you ever get to experience what I experienced that morning, you'll never wonder again where common terms like busy as a bee or that person's a regular worker bee comes from. These hives are constant work in

motion. Bees making and capping honey. Bees constantly flying in and out of the hive. One of the coolest parts was watching some of the bees fly back into the hive with visible pollen that they had collected and brought back. The work for them really never stops. Big shout out to Ms. Linda Easterling for giving me such a cool experience. If any of y'all ever get the chance to tag along with the beekeeper, I promise you it's worth your time. But let's zoom out on all of this. You may be sitting there wondering why I'm making such a big deal about pollinators and honeybees

in particular. You've probably heard people mention that pollinators are important, but have you ever heard the answer as to why? I've learned over the years that in many areas of wildlife and habitat management, the smaller the organism is, the easier it seems to be for us to overlook it. regardless of how important of a role it plays. So sit back, turn the volume up a notch, and listen in. Because you're about to learn how vital these little bugs are to not just our wildlife and wild places, but to our own health as well.

I promise you this at the very least. By the end of this episode, you'll never feel the same about going and picking up a jar of honey. That's for sure. Sarah Dant is an American historian that specializes in the environmental history of the American West. She's also a distinguished professor, an experienced beekeeper, and the author of one of my new favorite books, Losing Eden. Truly, it's a fascinating read. Y'all should check it out. I want to open up the conversation with Professor Sarah Dant, coming right out the gate with the fact about honeybees that most people don't know and are very surprised to learn.

Honeybees in particular are unique. There were no native colony building bees in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. You know, you do have like small groups of bumblebees. They tend to live, but only in groups of like 10 or 15. Nothing like the big honey producing, home building, hives and colonies that you see with honeybees. Those are European bees that came over with Europeans. I'm sure y'all heard that the first time. But just in case you didn't, or you need to hear it again for the sake of making sure you heard it right,

I'm going to repeat it for y'all. Honeybees, one of the most famous insects in the entire country. One of the few bugs that proliferate themselves in American pop culture by being mentioned in nursery rhymes, folklore, and song lyrics, are not native to America. So how did they get here? Did the European settlers bring them here on purpose? Absolutely, they did. Absolutely brought bees, because you think about it. Some of the most addictive substances that we know of are sugar and salt. And sugar is not a naturally occurring in any kind of great quantity commodity in the natural world. It's one of the reasons we crave it because it's such a great source of energy. And we forget that nowadays. You know, with high fructose corn syrup and Halloween and soda pop and McDonald's, we forget that.

If you think about it in nature, sugar is really rare. And so when people, I mean, and we're talking about people as far back as Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, they're cultivating bees because bees make honey. And honey is delicious. And if sugar is a rare commodity, then you want to do whatever you can to facilitate your access to a So when Europeans came to the Americas, starting with the pilgrims are really who we think are one of the first groups to bring honeybees with them. Absolutely, they deliberately brought them because they wanted to bring with them that wonderful, rare source of sugar. But bees being bees, they swarmed and moved away from human habitation into the wild.

So you have both. You have wild bees and you have kept domestic bees by colonists. And they're so successful that Native people actually called them English flies because they absolutely associated the presence of honeybees with the arrival of Europeans. That really is some wild information we just got there. Humans have been colonizing bees for the collection of honey, for thousands of years, with evidence dating back to the ancient Egyptians. Bees were so successful when they were brought to the Americas by the European settlers that Native Americans referred to them as English flies.

And here's one factor I want to focus on next. In that last bit, you heard Professor Dan used the term swarming. Her exact words were, they swarmed and moved away from human habitation. That fact is very important to the whole point of this story. And let's break down the many reasons why. A swarm of bees is oftentimes brought up in a negative connotation, usually associated with people getting attacked, stung, and all sorts of other horrors, when in fact, bee swarms serve a very specific purpose that has nothing to do with such horrors.

And I think we should learn what that actually is. Well, one of the things that I think some people may be familiar with is a bee swarm. And why do bees swarm? What does it mean? All of that, to me, that's really interesting. And it's one of the, for me, it was always one of the great teaching moments when I would get a call for a swarm because actually what I did was I gave my name and number to a couple of pest control companies and the 911 people. Because people would either call them and say, oh my God, do you can I come spray these bees or they would call 911? Oh, my God, we were being invaded.

And fortunately all those groups would say, okay, let me give you somebody to call. And so I would go out and get the swarm. And it was a great opportunity to interact with people who were completely freaked out that there was this big wad of bees in the tree in their yard. And here's this girl with no gloves on and a veil, just kind of walking out there in jeans. And not freaked out at all with 50,000 bees. around and yeah it sort of makes you feel like a superhero so what happens is in a hive they'll get really too crowded they've been successful there are too many bees in a hive they need to split up

so the queen that's in the hive will take a portion of the bees and they'll fly usually somewhere within a hundred yards or so of the hive itself. So when you see a big, you know, basketball of bees, what you're seeing is solid bees and in the middle is the queen. They're all around her. She's in the middle. And they're just hanging out, usually literally in a tree. And they've got scouts going out all over the countryside,

looking for a new home. In the meantime, in the hive, they have started the process of making a new queen. And you have to feed baby bees, a certain substance called royal jelly. And if you keep feeding it to them, they'll grow into queens. You can only have one queen in a hive.

And so whichever one comes out first, goes through the hive, finds every other gestating queen, and kills her. So I'm number one, and that's it. And then she becomes the new queen, but at that point, she's infertile. So the swarm is up in the tree with the original queen, a wad of bees, and at this point, they're most vulnerable. They're also pretty easy to manipulate because they don't have anything to lose except the queen. So if you've ever seen the thing where somebody does like a beard of bees, that's what they're doing. They're messing around with a swarm.

They don't have a hive. They don't have honey. They don't have brood. They have nothing that they need to protect. So they're up in the tree. They've got scouts going out, looking for a good place to go. And when one of the scouts comes back and says, I found it. This is the place. Brigham Young, like, this is the place we got to go. Then they all fly. And so if you've ever seen, a swarm, it's pretty exciting in a tree. They're just kind of up there like a basketball. But then when they decide to go, they all go. And the din is incredible. It's really loud. They're all moving. And then they'll be gone. So the moral of that story is if you see a swarm, you don't have to panic because they're not going to stay. They're looking for a new place. And at the most, they're going to be there for two or three

days. They don't have food. They don't have water. They're sending people out to get that, but they don't have that. So their motivation is to find a new house. Important honeybee fact number one, and it's mainly tied to a function. Bees swarm

when they're trying to move to a new home or a new hive might be a better term. And we heard earlier that bees were so successful when brought to the Americas that they swarmed and left places of human habitation. And here's why that's interesting. Think Briefly back to the last episode on Mississippi Black Bears, right?

Remember the historical record we read from the book by James T. McCafferty? It had a documented Delta Pioneer making use of wild honey in the 1800s. Think about that for a second. I don't know about y'all, but that leads me to ask the question, how quickly can these tiny bugs spread? Probably the pilgrims bring these with them. I don't think the Spanish conquisitors did, who would have come before that, But the first pilgrims come, you know, Jamestown is in the early 1600s.

And we do know that by the 1850s, there are bees in California. So it just does not take very long at all for them to move and to move pretty efficiently and quickly across the continent. Not only is a swarm the bees function for spreading, but it's an incredibly efficient function for spreading. By that quick math, it means that honeybees managed to cover the entire country from east to west in around 250 years time. And when you think about how tiny those bugs are, that's quite an impressive feat. But now we have to address why that's important. I think the way we could sort of sum up what we're going to talk about here today is like this. Pollinators need you and you need pollinators.

When we're talking about pollinators, we're talking about a really broad, group of insects and even small mammals, of which bees are certainly one. But, you know, bats are pollinators, birds are pollinators, there's bees, there's other kinds of insects, all kinds of animals pollinate. They are so essential. And that basic service that they provide accounts for one out of every three bites of food that one of us takes. So you think about that the next time you're at a meal and you go, okay, one bite of food, two bite of food, third bite you have to say, thank you, pollinator. Every third bite of food, you have to be saying, man, thank you pollinator.

That's how essential they are to the world around us. And they're not charismatic megafauna, you know? So if you've got an elk or a bear or something like that, people want to type of, this is a bug. And it's a bug that stings you sometimes. So it's one of those really essential things that people just kind of take for granted. But, well, of course, I have fruits and vegetables and various cooking oils. And you don't ever really stop the thing.

So what made that possible? And the answer is if it came from something that flowers or makes seeds, it needed a pollinator to make that happen. You need pollinators because without them, suddenly most of the food in the world is going to get shut off. Okay, so we now know that honeybees and all pollinators are important to us. And it truly affects everything, facilitating plant reproduction, food reproduction, agriculture, biodiversity, wild plant success, and ecosystem health. As you can imagine, this affects a whole lot from something as large as row crop yields, to something as specific as the deer hunting quality on your property. And that's no joke.

But here's where the story gets deeper and more nuanced. Y'all ready? I hope so, because we're diving in. One of the first big and interesting facts we learned about honeybees is that they were not a native species to North America. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time, when you hear a story about an exotic species being brought to North America, it commonly ends with a negative outcome.

But that's not the case with honeybees. And why is that? Native pollinators in particular have been suffering for the last 100 years, I would say. A lot of that has to do with, again, development, agricultural expansion, the use to pesticides and other kinds of poisons. But, you know, it's really hard when the plants that they evolve to pollinate are, are not there, not there because we've mowed them down, we've plowed over them, we've paved over them, or, you know, again, going back to this idea of climate change, as the Earth warms up,

we're seeing plant regimes moving. And when those plant regimes move, the pollinators don't necessarily know to go with them. It may be too far to fly. It may be all of them. It may be all those things. And if it's warming, sometimes those plants are blooming earlier than they used to. Before the pollinator has typically whatever hatched out or moved into the area. So we have these mistined bloom and fertilization issues that are the consequence of climate change. And again, we don't even think about those kinds of things, but several species of nature. Bumblebees, for example, had declined in geographic range and their numbers in the last 20 years. I think I talked about in my book, four Western states now no longer have bumblebees, Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon.

They don't have bumblebees. Bumblebees were native to the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. Now they're gone completely in those states. And that matters because the native plants that they co-evolved with now don't have this fundamentally important pollinator to go with them. And so honeybees in particular, the number of hives in the Americas just, you know, to sort of ballpark it. between the 1940s and now, the number of managed hives has dropped by about half. And that's in part because it's really frustrating to be a beekeeper, even a hobby beekeeper. Since about 2006, as I wrote about in my book, there is this phenomenon that scientists called

Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. and they're mystified by it, not quite sure what causes it. Is it pathogens? Is it parasites? Is it pesticides? But, and we don't know. It could be, again, this kind of perfect storm of all of them coming together. But what it means is that every year on the order of one-third to one-half

and sometimes as much as 75% of domestic bee hives don't make it every year. And it just breaks your heart. You know, you go out, you work your bees one week in like September. The hive is thriving. You've got brood. You've got a queen. They've got honey. Everything is good.

And two weeks later, you go out to check on your hive, and there's nothing there. they're just gone. And they can't leave in late September. That's not when they swarm. They're not going to be able to make a hive, gather enough food, get themselves through the winter. So they're all going to die, but they don't die at your hive. They're just gone.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right?

That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So why are we so focused in celebrating the success of the honeybee, a non-native insect, because our native pollinators have been severely depleted.

Some studies show up to one-fifth of our North American native pollinators at an elevated risk of extinction. And honeybees aren't exactly thriving right now either. So what are the implications of this? Is there anything we can do to combat it? And honestly, why isn't it being talked about more? I run into this, especially also when we were talking about quail. It does seem like, you know, talking about it being, you know,

them not being charismatic megafauna. There has to be some sort of connection there because it's like the smaller the object, the smaller it seems in like objective life. Like there's not people interacting with honeybees or bumblebees every day. And so they're easy to forget about because they're so small. And it's not all the time in front of us how beneficial they are to us in our environment. And the thing is like one of the biggest eye-opening things. things for me. And I even, you know, I knew what pollinators were. I knew that bees played a huge

role in our ecosystem and an ecosystem health and native plans. But I have a thing for me was being able to actually see it, right? And the first time that I saw it was a place that I get to go to just about every year in South Florida, in the Mayaca Prairie. And, man, it's going to sound like I'm indulging the story a little bit. When you go to a place like that, like they have bees, they produce honey off of that. It's called my Acker Prairie Honey.

My friends at Blackbeard's Ranch put it out. It's great stuff, obviously. But it's not just the bees. Like that whole area, like, is permeated, and it's just teeming with life. The plants, there's gopher tortoises, there's turkeys, there's ephemeral wetlands,

and there's ducks in there. There's all sorts of waterbirds, and it just all, like, congruently works with one another. The instant issue that I see there is I'm like, man, I know what this does to me when I see it, but you can't, how do you get everybody to see that? You can't walk everybody in the world and everybody that dwells in the cities and everybody that doesn't know this stuff. You can't walk them out to a prayer like that and go, see, I wish you could, but you can't. Well, and I think you're onto a really important idea. And it's something that, you know, I certainly see that you're doing with this entire podcast, which is people care about what they know. But sometimes they don't know what to pay attention to and why, what they see might matter. And so when people can know more about something,

as simple as a honeybee or a pollinator bee, then they start looking for it. And once you pay attention, you see it. It's like when you learn a new word, and then all of a sudden, oh, my God, the thing is everywhere. It's just that you weren't paying attention before. And so the great thing about pollinators and honeybees in particular, you can see them anywhere. You can see them out on a prairie, you can see them right in downtown where you are. And if you don't see them, that ought to be a good indicator that something's off here. Bees and pollinators in general are really good ecosystem indicators. They're the ones who tell you this is working or it's not working. And I'll add my little anecdote to your story. I got to go to Central Park

in New York City a few years ago. And it was in the spring. And, I mean, the park was just erupting in bloom. And the host that we were with was just exclaiming about, oh, this is so wonderful and its nature in the city and da-da-da-da-da. So I was under a crab apple tree, and it was a giant. It must have been 150 years old. It was huge into the air.

the branches draped all the way to the ground, and I was surrounded by pink. The air was pink because of all the blames. And there was not a bee to be heard. There was not. And that thing should have just been humming. So I'm at our place in Phoenix right now, and in the backyard is Alverdi tree that was just blooming, covered in yellow flowers. And, I mean, there's a din. from the bees up in that tree.

It should have been like that, but it was in the middle of Central Park. And so I thought, yeah, it looks like nature, but it's not complete nature because you're missing this really essential player. And so when people start to pay attention, just like you're talking about, when you pay attention, you realize, man, that is so cool. look at this one, and then when you pay attention, you realize, okay, there's six different kinds of things working on these flowers. It isn't all just a bee. It's lots of different things. So, yeah, I love to encourage people to pay attention, because when you do, you learn,

and when you learn, you care. If you haven't caught on yet, one thing that I really like to do when someone drops some seriously good information on us is to key in on one or two phrases. that stick with me. Professor Danz said, people care about what they know, and to pay attention, because when you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care. I can tell you from a quick personal anecdote. When my wife Lacey and I bought the home that we currently reside in, it, like many other homes, consisted of a front and back lawn made up of completely exotic plants that offered little to no value to any sort of wildlife. And in the springtime, when all of it was in bloom, it was void of any bugs, birds, or really anything living besides the plants themselves.

In the past few years, I've gotten rid of many of those exotics and planted some native pollinator plants like butterfly weed, blazing star, eastern cone flower, prairie flocks, and partridge peas. And let me tell you something. It's borderline silly how happy I get when I walk outside or look through the window and see a bee or moth buzzing around those plants. it's a lot easier to appreciate and love something when you understand it. I want to round this episode off by letting Professor Dent give us her opinion on the future of pollinators here in the U.S., as well as things that we can all do to help preserve them. And if it's all right with y'all, I then want to go back to the beehives with Ms. Linda. So now that we know there's a problem, how do we address it?

And a good place to start is with paying attention where we actually consciously look for the pollinators that are all around us. And we think about what can I do to make a difference? And I think a lot of people get really frustrated because they think, oh, my God, all these problems are so huge and I don't know how to solve them. And it's like, look, I'm going to give you a get out of jail free card. You do not have to solve climate change, the loss of pollinators. You didn't single-handedly cause them, so therefore you don't have to solve them. But the idea is each of us does our part. It's what I like to call the triumph of the commons, because when we each do our part, then collectively, we make a real difference.

And so it starts with paying attention and caring about what you know. Pollinator Week is sponsored by pollinator.org. And so you can go to their website, and they have all kinds of different resources for people who are interested in pollinators just, you know, a little bit or maybe a lot. And they're very committed to this idea of providing information for people whose livelihoods depend on the land. So if you're a farmer or you're a rancher, this is not, oh, you guys are the bad guys. far from it. It's how do we integrate pollinator planning into healthy agriculture, sustainable ranching, farming, that kind of thing. And they also have just planting for pollinators.

Coming up with what are the native plants that are from this region, and if you don't know, this website has maps and eco zones that can tell you about that. But you can plant for pollinators. You can reduce or even eliminate your use of pesticides and herbicides. But I would say another thing that a lot of people don't think about is supporting your local beekeepers. I mean, most of us live in places where there's a farmer's market. And most of us have people who show up with the farmer's market who are selling honey. Man, if you have never had local honey, you're in for a real tree and it depends on the time of year that you buy it. The honey that I would collect in the spring would be this really light, thin. I realize this sounds redundant, but very sweet honey

because it was all of the fruit trees that were blooming. But then in the late summer when I would collect and the bees were on, the rabbit brush, the Chinisa, the sage brush, that is like a dark amber beer is really almost spicy, is delicious. And added bonus, if you suffer from allergies, from any of the things that are blooming in your area, if you get local honey that was harvested roughly at the time that whatever makes you sneeze was blooming, it acts as kind of a natural antihistamine and helps you not sneeze and wease so much. I like to tell people to do their best to buy local, support local farmers, local ranchers, people who are doing good, honest, sustainable work on the land itself.

Those are the kinds of people who deserve our support. Plant a few cone flowers in your flower bed. Buy local honey from the farmer's market and just pay a little more attention to the world around us. That little bit of effort from each of us could really make a difference. And just a heads up, some of the most beneficial and popular land management practices like prescribed burning

helps promote native plants that help pollinators as well. To wrap this up, like I mentioned earlier, I want to go back to the beehives with Ms. Linda as we watched honey bees come and go from the hive carrying in new pollen to make honey. That's crazy to me that little bit of bee will range out three miles.

Two to three miles. That's wild. Depending on what they're at. So they're out working something. Yeah. And we may be able to see them bringing pollen in. But that one landed, had some. So something is blooming, and that's one of the things that you look at in the springtime

to make sure they're bringing in honey. I mean, or pollen. That one right there, they just went in there, had yellow all over. Like a bright yellow. And they're just fascinating little creatures. That's cool. fascinating little creatures indeed, indispensable ones as well.

I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece and this country life. And I want to give a big shout out to Onex Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode, share it with the buddy, or even a family member that you don't like that much. They probably could benefit from a good podcast episode anyway. And stick around, because if this podcast was a beehive, the honey is only going to get sweeter.

We'll see y'all next time. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right?

that's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.