From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Giving You The Buzz On All Things Bees!

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The Duffys recently welcomed some new neighbors into their backyard: a colony of bees! That's right, Sean's recently taken up beekeeping -- so it only felt right for them to have a beekeeper join the kitchen table to give them, and all of you, all the tips, tricks, and fun facts about bees (and honey!) that are sure to leave you in dis-bee-lief!   Fourth generation beekeeper & CEO and Founder of Bee Downtown, Leigh-Kathryn Bonner joins to explain why there's currently so much buzz surrounding bees, gives Sean tips on how to make sure his hives thrives, and lets you know how to tell if the honey you're getting at the store is the real deal (spoiler alert: there's a good chance it isn't).   Follow Sean & Rachel on X: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. So if you're just listening to us via audio, you can't see the big smile on my face and the even bigger smile on Sean's face because the day has arrived. Your bee episode is here, Sean. My bees came like three, four weeks ago,

but now the bee episode is here. Well, I didn't really do it't, I was kind of like, Oh, you wanted your B episode. And I said, we're going to make it happen. I gently said, well, maybe we could do a B episode. I was a little, I was a little, a little tentative. Then you're like, yes, we can do a B episode. That's the Midwestern, that's the Midwestern nice way of saying,

I want a damn B episode. And so we sent our, our producers, I said, well, you know, if we're going to do a bee episode, we need the premier bee person. I want you to scour this beautiful country of ours and find the preeminent bee person that you can find. And we don't want someone who's done this for a year, a couple years. We want someone who is generationally involved. Yes, invested in bees. In beekeeping. The way you dream to one day be.

The way that you dream that generations from now, people will see you as the papa of beekeeping in the Duffy family. So after scouring everywhere in the United States and coming up with the person, boy, we came up with a great person. Well, I shouldn't say I did. Our awesome producers did, and they are awesome. So today we have with us here Lee Catherine Bonner. She's a fourth generation beekeeper.

Fourth generation, Lee Catherine. And she's the CEO and the founder of Bee Downtown, but that's B-E-E, downtown. Bee Downtown. There's going to be a lot of bee puns, I think, in this episode. Which installs and maintains beehives on corporate campuses across the southeast. We're going to ask her all about that. Who knew that corporate campuses, that there was a demand for bees?

She has, by the way, been named the Southerner of the Year by Southern Living, which is one of my favorite magazines, and was named both the Inc. Magazines and Forbes Magazine 30 under 30. And you can't see her. I can. She's young and beautiful as well. So without further ado, here is Lee Catherine to share all the buzz about bees. This is beautiful. I did. I forgot that one. That was so waiting for me.

It was a low-hanging fruit. So Lee Catherine, again, we're having a lot of fun with this, but actually I have been so excited on the journey that I've gone into bees. But I want to start off with you, I mean in in kind of your history and your family's history with bees and why didn't then talk about you know this corporate angle to to to beekeeping and what it's done for for for campuses and communities and cultural businesses that you've kind of tapped into across the country so if if you just start with us, tell us who you are and, and maybe a little bit of family history and then, and then about the company. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Lee Catherine. I'm a fourth generation beekeeper,

founder and CEO of a business or beesness as we like to call it. And yep, there'll be lots of fundss i appreciate that you're ready for that um i grew up in raleigh durham in north carolina so all the opportunities and amenities that a city has to offer but my family's farm that's been in my family for generations was about an hour away and i always tell people that i had the privilege of growing up with a farm in my life and learning about from my grandfather and my uncle what it means to love the earth and take something from seed to harvest and to cultivate the earth in a way where you give back versus solely take and animal husbandry and I genuinely believe it shaped who I became as an

adult as a human where I just wanted to make a difference in the world in a positive way I wanted to be outside and and to get my hands dirty and work and honor my family's history in agriculture, especially in our southern states. That's so many people's histories in agriculture and their family, their stories. And we're getting one too many generations removed in cities from really being able to connect back to agriculture and understand farmers are some of the hardest working people that we have. And they're some of the smartest people that we have as well. And so for me, taking my family's, the inspiration from my family's rural history and agriculture and shifting that into a new light as a young farmer and a young beekeeper at the time to continue to honor my family but do it in a different way um was to bring the bees to the

city and uh companies i the idea was i just wanted to put a beehive at my apartment complex when i was in college um and everyone wants to do that in college right right can i just have a hive yeah in my head it was made so much sense in looking back i'm like yeah no wonder they said no um 21 year old can I put bees on a balcony? No, you may not. But the company I was interning for said, why not put some bees here? And let's introduce you to one of the companies at the end of the bay. And it was Burt's Beesboro headquarters.

And so when we brought bees to Burt's, the media picked up on it and other companies in the region started saying, hey, we're looking for a sustainable program that can get people excited. Could you put bees on our campus too? And it has over the last nine years just snowballed into so much more than I ever thought it would ever become in the best way possible. But it's been quite the adventure and over the last almost decade? So first of all, I love American dream stories that are like this, where you just have this love of something and, you know, somehow, and in your case, a mean landlord who ended up changing your life, right? Yes.

Or maybe a really sensible one, I don't know, who decided that, you know, you took this, you didn't take that no for an answer and you found another way to, you know, have these bees and then that grew into this company. So I want to tell you one thing and then I have a question. So first of all, my husband, Sean, prior to being a wannabe beekeeper or wannabe farmer, was a member of Congress. And this may not be surprising to you, Lee Catherine, but most people listening will be surprised to know that you think about all the problems in America. There's a lot of problems, right? Right, Lee Catherine?

There's a lot of problems in America? There's a lot. The number one issue that my husband got letters on in Congress was bees. And when I remember him coming home and going, it's so weird. Like the, you know, we have like a war in the Middle East and we have, you know, all these problems in Congress. And the number one thing people are writing me about are bees. And so he started his education on bees and why people care about bees very early on. And so I think this is kind of a full circle moment for him. I was a little bit, actually, I thought they were kind of kooky at the start.

Because I was getting the chemtrail, you know, in the emails and letters. It didn't make a whole lot of sense. And there was ramblings. They're starting to make sense now. Maybe like Ted Kaczynski-esque writings. And then I got all these bees ones too. And I'm like, bees were dying, right? And people were freaking out about the death of all these bees across the country.

And for a very limited time, I took it lightly. But then we said, okay, we should probably look at what's happening with bees. Yeah, why are these people writing? And lo and behold, it was a problem and without bees um lee catherine we don't feed america we don't feed the world without bees it's an integral part to making sure that american agriculture actually functions right yeah so honeybees are um a not only an indicator species so they can understand and they react to what's happening in our environment when our environment becomes out of balance at a faster pace than humans do,

but they're also a keystone species. So if they were to disappear, that would create massive ripple effects in the world that we don't really fully even know how it would all work or comprehend it. And honeybees are super important. They're a managed agricultural population, so they're not going to go extinct because we can, even if bees are declining, we can bring more honeybees every year back by splitting beehives. But native pollinators, native bees are super important. They don't get the same care in regards to beekeeper maintenance because a lot of them are solitary or semi-solitary beings. For us, the honeybees, being able to study them

as a managed agricultural population shows us what's happening with native pollinators as well. For example, when Sean was in Congress and the bees were dying off, I'm sure you've seen other episodes where there's concerns about bees. Is there something that we're doing in our environment? What is happening? Like, is this a spontaneous, like, you know, just bee population declines and we just have to do something to make it grow? Or is there something humans do? What is the parasite? What's happening?

Yeah, so researchers like to say that there's the four Ps to honeybee decline or pollinator decline. It's pests, pesticides, poor management and poor nutrition. So the pest is the Varroa destructor mite. So you're right with that. It's a parasitic mite that is about the size of a paper plate on a human. That's what the size would be on the bee. It came from Asia. It causes deformed wing virus. It causes the colonies to crash and fail. And so that is a really big part of being a beekeeper today is managing those mite populations. If anyone says, I don't have a row of mite, then they're not testing appropriately because they have it. And poor management. We have more beekeepers than we've ever had before. But there is an education gap on when you now that you have your bees you are a farmer you have to love your craft cultivate your craft learn your craft find mentors the best beekeepers are the beekeepers that love to learn you're going to

lose your bees it's inevitable but what do you do to learn don Catherine, don't talk like that. Do not talk like that on my podcast. I'm starting to love the bees. And actually, I think I've been replaced as the queen bee. It is. They become like your, I mean, they're your family. And so for beekeepers, if you, you know, if you commit to learning and educating yourself and finding people that really know what they're doing, we have a better retention rate. We don't need necessarily everyone to become a beekeeper. We need really good, committed farmers that understand beekeeping.

And then we also need to feed the bees. That's a huge thing. Our cities and our urban environments, we don't have nearly as much food for the bees as we used to. So that's a huge, huge piece. So tell people what bees, what do bees eat? Yeah, so honeybees and other bees, but honeybees, what they eat is the nectar from flowers. So they turn that into honey. They dehydrate it less than 18.6% water content and the nectar turns into honey and it'll

never go bad. They also eat the pollen. Pollen is the most complete protein source that we have. It's only missing one essential amino acid. So that's their protein. The honey is their carbohydrate that they eat. And they just produce excess of it for humans to be able to enjoy as well. That's so kind of them. And it's also good for allergies. So they eat the pollen, but they say that if you eat the local honey, it will help you with your own allergies. Can you explain that? Yes. So it's a lot of what makes us have allergies is actually pollens that aren't going to be in the honey, but honey is a superfood. And so putting a superfood, very rarely do we intentionally put a superfood into our body every single day. At the same time, multiple times times a day we don't often do that anymore as humans and so by adding a superfood into our diet every day it increases so many different factors within

our bodies and our body's ability to feel healthy and strong essentially also during our pollen seasons as well so local honey is really important most of the honey in the united states is not real honey we didn't do what the maple syrup industry did by, unless it's tapped from a maple tree, it is not able to be called maple syrup. You can name anything honey essentially. And so most of the honey you'll find at the grocery store is not real. So you'll definitely want to go get some Duffy's honey when your first crop comes in. Sounds like Sean needs to start the honey lobby. So well, Lee Catherine, to that point, there's a lot of information out there

about how much of the honey in the grocery store is not real honey. And so I have taken to finding local farmers who I know actually are getting their honey from hives. And I know I'm getting real honey, but it takes some effort. And just, I mean, I think it's, you're fascinating. You made a really good point about you shouldn't just wing, wing bees.

That was no, um, because listen, I've, I have literally spent hours and hours and hours watching YouTube videos. Just about there. You also have a bee mentor. And I have a mentor as well. But just even for the arrival of my packager bees, the amount of videos I watched on what I do when I get them, how do I get the queen out?

I mean, like the whole process. How do I set up my hives? What kind of hives should I have? Like it's a really involved process. And also, I think to your point, the learning continues every single day. And it's a really, what's interesting is you said, if you have bees, you're a farmer. And a lot of people go, look, I don't have property for a farm, right? I can't be a farmer.

But what you found is a lot of people who I think have a passion with their bees and they don't have a lot of land. They have a small piece of property and they're into their hives and they're into their honey. And you can do it in, frankly, a pretty small space, right? You can. And that's one of the reasons when I started Be Downtown, that was, I didn't have land in the city, but corporations did. And they were looking for these opportunities to be more sustainable. And so what we could do is bring small bits of agriculture back onto corporate campuses for employees to see and learn about. We put them in suits.

They get to work the hives with us. They get to do honey tastings and learn how to become sommeliers of honey. And we have about 500 hives now up and down the East Coast. Sommeliers of honey. Yeah. I love it. So wait a minute. This is so interesting.

So what do people, so you get these workers, like human workers. Yes. And now they have these, like human workers. Yes. And now they have these bee workers on campus. Yes. What do humans get, you know, from, there must be something that they get that corporations think it's worthwhile to hire you to have this. Because actually, I want to know what I get from it because I love it. I love watching them. And I've got to stay out of the hive, but I would go in the hive every day if I could.

And I know I don't. I'm going in once a week right now. We're a man. Right? But I still will go like, I'll kind of stand out there and watch them. They go in and out. And anyway, what do people get? Yeah.

Emotionally, psychologically, et cetera. Yeah. It's taken some time because a lot of times, you know, corporations, it's gotten a lot easier over the years, but corporations would say, what's my ROI? What is it? I want to know exactly what it is. It's hard to put an ROI on... That's their rate of return. Yes. On bettering the environment and creating a place where employees are proud to work. 96% of employees that do our Be Downtown programming. So we manage the hives. Some of the best beekeepers in the country on our team, something I'm very proud of.

We manage the hives. Employees get to do the fun stuff. I like to call them field trips. Just because we're adults, we should still get to go on field trips. And it's fun with focus. And so we put them in suits. Their teams get to work the bees together. And we talk about how do you build a high performing team just like the beehive. And 96% of employees who participate in our programming are more committed to their company, knowing that they participate in B Downtown programming. We keep the Bs for Delta, Chick-fil-A, the New York Stock Exchange, Microsoft, Cisco, MetLife, Georgia Power, Dominion Energy, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

And we have less than 1% churn in 10 years because the Bs become part of the culture of the organizations that we serve. They have, they renamed conference rooms to be called the apiary or the hive, where you get bee socks with the company's logo and the bees and the employees get all the honey the hives produce. And so it just, they're, they're proud. And, and they get to see these hives, just like you said, they don't go in them every day, but they can stand by them and have Delta now has picnic tables all around their beehives and shade structures and native plants for people to learn and have lunch outside by the bees because they're quite mesmerizing and very calming. It's very meditative process to be a beekeeper. We'll be right back with much more

after this. Hi, everybody. It's Brian Kilmeade. I want you to join me weekdays at 9 a.m. East as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers. And, of course, what you think. Listen live or get the podcast now at BrianKilmeadeShow.com. You would think that it would be nerve wracking because you're by bees. Yes. I don't want to get stung. And you're actually right. It's very calming. It's very relaxing.

It's so counterintuitive. Especially when you feel, it took me a little while to feel comfortable going by them and making sure I wasn't going to get stung. But, you know, I can go right up to them and I'm fine and I can watch them. They leave me alone. I leave them alone. Today, Sean took me out to see the hives and

this is the first time I've been, you know, I've been enjoying just watching him enjoy it. And I watch him from the kitchen window and I see him out there in his bee suit. But I said, you know, I need to go and see this really, really up close. Like I need to inspect this before we have Catherine Lee, Catherine on. And so I put the bee stuff on yes the bee suit on but but he did not and he and I was like are you sure you don't want to put it on he's like no I'm fine and he I can see that he's becoming friends with the bees so we just took I just took the the the cover off and the inner cover off so she could just see into the frames we didn't take them out

but you can see how they're they're um the what is it the larva has been kept now and i've all my little bees are getting ready to come out we're gonna multiply these hives so i'm a little trivia that rachel doesn't know and and lee catherine you probably don't know either and this and this is probably a place that you should pitch because on the roof of the fox news building do you know have? No, I've never been up there in all these years. We have bees. We do? I didn't. And they must not be Lee Catherine's bees,

but we should have Lee Catherine's bees up there. But yes, so I was talking, I was walking through and someone was like, I saw your bee. We're talking about bees. We have bees on the roof. I'm like. Who knew this was a New York thing? But you know what?

I love this, Lee Catherine. Maybe you started this trend. But I love the idea that especially in cities, especially in New York City, people are very disconnected from the food stores. And I think, you know, Sean and I interview a lot of farmers on this show, a lot of ranchers who have been affected by public policy on ranching, on farming. who have been affected by public policy on ranching, on farming. And what really frustrates them is that a lot of the people who have a lot of opinions about policy regarding food policy and livestock policy and environmental policy in general don't actually know anything about the environment, have never had that generational connection to the land that you have.

And so how important is it for you as somebody on some level? I mean, you your whole life has been sort of formed by this, but it's easy to take for granted when you grew up the way you did. That there are people that think food just shows up in a grocery store. It's no connection at all. To me, it is a privilege that i got to have that growing up um and it is there's there's such a disconnect and where food comes from and the intelligence and the hard work that goes into producing food um and for me what we always say at be downtown is a little bit of education goes a long way you know anybody that ever has um

disagreeing thoughts with my grandfather, my grandfather would just say, come out to the farm, just come, come out. Anytime I say I've had a long work day and I'm exhausted, my mom, I say, you don't know a long work day until you've got school shut down so you could pick tobacco. You don't know a hard day's work until you've picked tobacco. But you don't unless someone invites you to it. And so that's a huge thing for us is bringing these bees into cities. And we have bees in Soho, at Microsoft, and at one of their other locations in New York. So we've got a couple New York hives. But people, they become, what I found is the honeybees are this beautiful bridge.

It doesn't matter your political affiliation, any sort of thoughts and processes that you think that are different than somebody else's. What we do at Be Downtown is our job is to be the bridge for people that there is a common ground that people can find in life around something that makes the world a better place. And it's bees. And so that's one of the huge things for us is just education goes a really long way for people. And they're so proud to have agriculture back in their lives because someone in their family was a farmer at one point. And it gives them this beautiful tie back to their family that they might have never had otherwise. So, Lee Catherine, if you would do our listeners a favor, and I think this is fascinating, and I didn't know until I started to explore the world of bees. Yes.

But talk to us about how beehives actually work. Talk about the queen, the females, the males. Who works the males versus the females? Yes. How many eggs do queens lay? How do queens mate? How often do they mate? I know the answer to all these questions, but lay out what happens in a hive and how it works.

I want you to do that because I do think when you talk about this, you can see why a corporate culture could learn something from a hive. Yes, I will do my best to not be long-winded with this. No, go for it. This is an episode about bees. You can be as self-indulgent as you want. Okay, amazing. So a colony of bees, that is the superorganism, lives in a beehive. So there's a beehive and the colony.

The colony lives within the hive. The colony has the queen bee, Beyonce, or Big Booty Judy. It has over, in peak season, about 60,000 bees. The majority of those bees are worker bees. Those are the girl bees. Everybody thinks the only, a lot of times people think the only female is the queen. However, it's actually the feminine makeup of a structure of superorganism. However, it's actually a feminine makeup of a structure of superorganism. And then about 5% to 0% are drone bees, boy bees, depending on the time of the year. So not everything correlates to building high-performing teams.

I will say that right now. Because when it's wintertime, the girl bees who cook, clean, take care of the babies, they defend the colony, they bring in all the food. The boy bees who can't sting, don't do anything besides reproduce, and can't feed themselves and eat twice the amount as girls come wintertime when it's time to store resources and hunker down and basically penguin huddle to keep the colony warm in the winter. They kick all the boy bees out. So beekeepers know it's time for winter and the colony is prepping for winter when we see all the boy bees dead at the front of the beehive.

And so oftentimes women are like, yeah, I could crush it as a bee. Like, I don't know what you think, but reproduction, you're like, yeah, but come winter, mother nature's quite cruel to you. So that's the makeup of the colony. We in the U.S. have essentially, usually it's a mixture, kind of like a mutt-style dog of bee genetics. But they're mostly Italian honeybees in the United States is the predominant bee. So in the hive, yep, so they're calm. They make good honey. They're Italian. They're chill. They have chill. They have food.

They know food. Hey, welcome. Come into my home and enjoy the day. Stay for a while. So they're great bees to manage. And then beekeepers, anytime they open up the hive, there's frames in a beehive that are full of beeswax that the bees make. That's those hexagons. And you can remove the frames. And that's a key part of beekeeping today because you have to be able to give them medicine. And you have to be able to check and make sure your queen is still there, that she's laying eggs. As the sole reproductive unit of the colony, the queen lays about 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day. The worker bees live about six to eight weeks.

The boy bees live about three months. And the queen can live on average about two, two and a half years because she's fed a different substance. It's called royal jelly. It's a secretion from the top of the baby bees heads. It's in a lot of beauty products. So because every bee is fed at three days and lives, you know, three months, two months, but the queen is fed and bathed in it all 16 days of her development. She can live for two and a half years. I'm like, yes, I will take any royal jelly beauty product that you have or supplement because it's got to be good. And so the bees are producing beeswax from their underbellies of their abdomens to make

those hexagons. They have to work as a team unit to build that wax. Otherwise, they can't do it together or on their own. And then they're filling that with bees that are with eggs, the queen slaying eggs. They're filling it with pollen and with honey. And then as the honey flow progresses, you're adding boxes to your beehive so that your colony of bees can grow and keep storing honey. And then when the honey flows over, you remove those boxes and you process your honey. But as a beekeeper, you never go into a beehive without a plan or a purpose. You're always looking at your notes from the previous check because you might say, there wasn't, the

queen's laying pattern was kind of spotty. It looks like popcorn. She might not be very healthy. I probably need to put some medicine on the beehive to help her get healthy. So that's what your job is. What is the medicine that you give these bees? Yes, there's different types of medicine and you have to follow Department of Agriculture guidelines to make sure that you're providing medicine at the time in which you are allowed to. And a lot of them have temperature caps or temperature restrictions on them. So a lot of it is like a fume that you put into the beehive and it will kill that Varroa destructor mite. It's what you're trying to remove out of the hive as much as possible.

And then at times you also have to feed your bees. I say if you can make a daiquiri, you can feed a bee. It's one part water, one part sugar. It's essentially simple syrup. And then, Sean, for you, a good hack, put food coloring in your simple syrup that you feed to the bees because then you'll always know what's honey and what simple syrup because again a lot of honey you think it's honey but it's not so if it's bright red you know oh that's my simple syrup that's not honey i won't take that from the beehive and bottle it that is a good hack but this so so this this comes back to

what what sean was one of the shocking things that I learned when Sean's like, all honey is not alike. So he said that a lot of the honey at the store, as he had mentioned, was like coming from China and was, I guess, like simple syrup versus the real deal. Or mixtures of real syrup and the real honey and the syrup. Is there a move to help us decipher that at the store? What's going on in bee world? Yes. Because consumers are becoming more sophisticated. They are, which I'm grateful for because those simple syrup honeys drive down the cost of honey significantly.

honeys drive down the cost of honey significantly and that makes it so that it's almost impossible for beekeepers to make a living because our honey flows have gotten so volatile over the years that there's oftentimes beekeepers put a whole year's worth of work into honey and a hurricane comes through blows off the blooms on the flower and then they have they they don't have anything to produce for the year so So what I always tell people, they're kind of like little hacks. It doesn't matter the size of your jar. If the honey crystallizes, so it becomes a solid state, it's real honey. That's a win. People oftentimes think that that means it's gone bad. You just put it in hot water, not boiling and don't microwave it, it'll kill the healthy properties, but hot water, and it'll just loosen it back up to a viscous state. And no matter the size of the jar, this is where you look real

bougie and kind of crazy at the grocery store, you flip the jar upside down, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, that bubble, no matter the size jar, should take about two seconds to settle. If when you flip it at room temperature, it just goes right to the top, too much water content in it. So it's probably simple syrup or the beekeeper pulled the honey too soon. That's a great hack. And go bad. And then I always say, Sean, just like you said, find a local keeper, ask them about their bees, find the worst designed label you can find on the end cap at the grocery store, like with an earthlink email address and bees and cowboy boots with like the clip art logo across it because they didn't have the money to

like take the clip art logo across slapped sideways because they're too busy to put a logo on straight um that's honey that's real look for that and you'll you'll you'll be gold um and don't pay extra for organic because we don't know where the bees are flying. There's chemicals and agriculture all over the place. So there's very few places in the world that have organic designations. It literally just adds $2 to the price point. And Manuka honey, which is uncontested the best honey for you in the world out of New Zealand, you are not going to buy a pound jar of

Manuka honey at Costco for $20. It's just, it's not, it's not real. It's too good to be true. Yeah, exactly. So be, be, be a conscious consumer and, and support your local farmers because every time someone buys a jar of honey off of our website, it brings us joy as a team. And I know we're in a place where we're more fortunate to have a lot more stability as a company than most farmers do. So buy local. It really will make their day and make their lives a lot easier. It's great. By the way, it's not cheap, actually.

I think I've paid anywhere from, I think at the least was 12 which was cheap but it's 12 to 17 i think for a pound of honey um but again i think it's worth it i we've i i'm getting a real thing and um i don't use it i'm not like you know like honey on everything but but it's it's great to have um the good and the right stuff talk about, just I want to go back to the bees, how the queen mates and how she gets the strongest male bee to mate with her. Yes. So queen bees mate. The original recent or up until recently, we thought about, so she goes on mating flights. A queen bee is larger than the other bees

in the beehive because she's a spermatheca. So she can store sperm for her lifetime in her body, which is why her abdomen is larger than the other bees. And so she goes out and they thought she went on about 12 mating flights in her early life as a queen. But really we think now it's like listed at 24 plus. And there are areas, this is where beekeeping, it's just wild. And you just have to believe it. Somehow it's possible. They're called drone congregation areas. So these are areas where drone bees will fly to from different colonies,

the same geographical location day after day. But you have to remember that most of all the drone bees get kicked out of the hive at the end of the year. So how drone bees know every year to go back to the exact same geographical location is just wild. But they do. And these are the same places every single year. And so the purpose is genetic diversity. We have to have diversity for our corporations to thrive, for our lives, for nature to thrive. Nowhere in nature is there naturally occurring monoculture. So they go there, they all have different gene pools. And then the queen also flies to that drone congregation area as a virgin queen, and she will mate multiple

times over. When she mates with a drone bee, the drone actually dies and will fall out of the sky. So he has like one hurrah, and then he's done for life. But he is looking, and the whole purpose is to increase that genetic diversity in the colony for her to come back. And when she comes back to the hive, she will actually bring back the genitals of the last boy bee to show the hive she mated because it's important for the colony to know she mated and she mated well. Because if she doesn't mate well, they will get rid of her and they will bring in a new queen bee. So it's a pretty wild world that the bees are a part of, but it is all, everything a honeybee does, they do for the good

of the colony. Where do they find the new queen bee if they kick the one out because she didn't mate well? How does that happen? Great question. So either that's when Sean steps in and realizes, I don't have a queen or I don't have a well-mated queen. I need to get a new queen. And he goes and he buys a queen from a queen breeder. Or he says, hey, there's a lot of eggs in my colony. They're going to rear their own queen. And so what they'll do is they'll take a one-day-old larva and they'll flip the hexagon from being vertical to horizontal. And the queen cell grows about the size of a Georgia peanut in the beehive.

And they'll make multiple. So one of the things that we talk about within our corporations is you have to be, you have to have succession planning in place for a corporation to thrive. You can't put all your eggs in one basket for one person because we see people more than ever are moving companies. And so you have to build up lots of leaders so that one can successfully take over. And so they'll rear multiple queens at once and they'll make multiple queens. And then what happens is the queen that emerges first will go around and she'll tap the other queen cells. And if a queen is far enough in her development that she taps back, she will sting the cell over and over. She's the only bee that can sting multiple times, but she's only going to sting another queen. And so she'll sting the cell to kill the queen

because she knows only one queen can survive in the hive. Or if two queens emerge at the same time, they will quack and you'll hear it. Sean, if you ever hear it, it's pretty awesome. They go, and they're finding each other amidst these 65,000 bees It's pretty awesome. They go, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. And they're finding each other amidst these 65,000 bees. And they will hunger wolves, fight to the death.

And the strongest queen becomes the new queen of the colony. Wow. Amazing. So when I got my packages, I've had two, like, there was. They come in the mail, by the way. I mean, this is like kind of i i was shocked and i should have got i should have gotten a a nuke which is already a frames that are built out and and i just but i got the packages so i started from the beginning at three they're like three pounds um in two of the packages like almost all the bees were alive

they're really lively and one of the packages probably half of the bees um alive. They're really lively. And one of the packages, probably half of the bees were dead. And in that package, so I poured all the bees into the hive. And then I take the queen cage, the queen's in a separate cage, and you put the queen inside the hive. And there's candy that the other bees and the queen will eat through. It takes about three days before she's released. And hopefully the queen's accepted by the other bees. And queen will eat through. It takes about three days before she's released, and hopefully the queen's accepted by the other bees, and it's one big happy family. But my question is, I thought that my queen was dead. I thought, because she wasn't released, the candy was too hard.

And can the female bees, if they don't have a queen... Was she dead or not? No, I think she's alive. She's laying eggs, and they're gone, so she's alive. But if you don't have a queen, can the females lay eggs and can they lay a new queen? Or do you need a queen to lay the next queen? That's a really great question. So oftentimes you will see new beekeepers think they have a queen and they don't.

And it's because worker bees can lay eggs, but their abdomens are too short to get all the way through to the back of that hexagonal cell. And they will misfire and they will lay like four eggs in one cell. And it's called laying workers. Girl bees, the worker bees, they are sterile. So they cannot, they can lay eggs, but they're sterile eggs. So it's just the queen. She's the only reproductive unit in the colony. So if you have laying workers, that's a whole like different issue because once they get in the mindset of laying workers, it can be an issue. So you can have new beekeepers think like, oh, I've got eggs,

I've got tons of them. And then they never cap. Like you said, you now see the capped larva in your hive. They never cap off. And then the colony, you know, if a queen is laying 2000 eggs a day, every day you go out, go without a queen, your colony is reducing in size. And so that is the biggest thing. That's why, depending on the time of year, if you lose a queen, it's no big deal. But if you lose a queen in the late fall, it's a mad dash to try to find a queen that's left because they won't be able to mate as well because they'll be starting to kick out the drone bees. Or you have to combine that hive and turn two hives into one for the winter

and then split it back out in the spring. So if I have the capping, I got a queen. Yes, if it's capped, you're good. So what's the craziest, either the craziest story about bees you could tell us or the craziest thing that people don't know about bees that we haven't already talked about? craziest thing that people don't know about bees that we haven't already talked about? There's so much that I could say about bees that are left to be said. But I come from a family of storytellers. And since we were talking about queens, I can share this. This is an example of why I love what we do at Bee Downtown. One of our corporate partners in Orlando, Florida,

do at Be Downtown. One of our corporate partners in Orlando, Florida, their apartment or their property owner, our main contact there, I went to go see her while I was on site. And she said she was going to have to step away for a minute because her mother was about to pass away. And she was the daughter kind of taking over for the family. And she was trying to get all of, you know, everything in place for her mom to be able to pass away peacefully. And so I said, okay, yes, yes, ma'am, I understand. I'll, you know, go outside and work the bees. And when I went out into that beehive, it was the one time I've ever seen two queens in the colony. And so typically when a mother queen stops laying well they will remove her and they will rear new queens so her daughters essentially to take over but in this colony at

this location at this very specific time in this woman's life there was um i opened up the hive and there's very rarely they will let the mother queen live out the rest of her days and the daughter queen start and they'll lay together and so she will be they'll get to be a duo for just just long enough for the other queen to get the hang of it and then they'll let her you know as she'll eventually her wings will break down and she'll she'll be done um but it was this really beautiful moment of for our corporate partner that was happening in her life. And in the beehive, her beehive, the same thing was happening. And so I always say that bees bring people stories and they bring people together in really beautiful ways because it's quite rare to see them with a daughter.

Yeah. So that's just a story about just the magic of the bees. My grandfather says every time you open up a hive, you have the opportunity to learn something new if you're willing to listen. And for me, that has really resonated with me in my whole life of trying to always understand you never know everything. If you think you are, it's the day you become a bad beekeeper. It's the day you become a bad friend, a bad partner, Um, it's the day you become a bad friend, a bad partner, uh, if you have nothing left to learn. Um, and so that has always been something that really, I try, I try to take through

beekeeping into my, my personal life as well. If we can always learn something, if we're, we're willing to listen and just, just slow down long enough to learn. So it's a, it's a big learning curve in beekeeping though. It is, but it's also such a window into just sort of really into God's creation and just how complex it is and how beautiful it is, how beautiful nature is. mono, you know, culture, agriculture, you know, how we need this back, go back to this bio diversity and lots of different, instead of just one crop, you know, these bees thrive when there's a diversity of crops. I think people are not just becoming more sophisticated about agriculture and where our food comes from and the role of bees. And

there's an interest, you know, there's, there's a lot of people becoming more interested in bees. Sean's not alone in this. I just think that people are, as things get crazier in the world, the simplicity and beauty and sort of just infinite knowledge that we can learn from mother nature just becomes all the more interesting right it's it's magic and lee catherine we we have uh we have nine kids um and so what's been remarkable through this process and again i think i've learned a lot um and to your point i i i still have a lot to learn but i would as i as the bees were about to come, I would sit at night and tell the kids what was going to happen, as the package was going to come, and what we have to do with the queen cage, and what the queen's role is.

And we talked about what the females do and all the work they do, and that the boys don't do anything, and they kill the boys before winter. They love these stories. They were mesmerized by the story of bees. And then once the queen left her cage or brought the queen cage in and was able to show them this is where we had her and we want to make sure the queen is accepted

by the colony and vice versa. And like the stories for kids are remarkable. And I was- So true. And one very simple thing. Can one bee live by itself or does it die? It dies. It dies.

They live in truly a colony. They need each other. They're like us. We're a colony. It's true. You need others to survive and to thrive. And I think they're like, oh, yeah, a bee can't live by itself. It needs to have a colony.

Anyway, I guess my point with that is. There's so many lessons in this. I'm just amazed. With kids, it's a really great way to kind of talk about nature, but also about how remarkable these little insects are. Lots of people just have a backyard and they could do it. It never occurred to me. That's what people just have a backyard and they could do it i it never occurred to me we have a backyard i never imagined that we would be a candidate for having bees for three hives for three hives um but it has to do it's it's been really interesting

i'll i'll say i was very nervous about the kids and bees but you know again getting over that fear i mean it's it's nature right and um no one has a bee allergy here so that's how it's important to know and that's important that's important um but it's it's just been beautiful and and and i just think awe-inspiring and just a window into god as well there's there are lots of spiritual lessons in this. We'll have more of this conversation after this. So Lee Catherine, give us your website again. And do you, by the way,

do you sell honey? If someone wants to buy honey from a fourth generation bee farmer, can they do that as well as they can find your, your, your, your, yeah, maybe they have a company they want to propose having this service brought

to. Yes. Our website is B Edowntown.com. And then our Instagram is just at bee-downtown. And we do a lot of educational posts and fun videos on the Instagram. And then we do sell honey and some bee team swag on the site, too. We just launched a hot honey. And I want to tell you, it's real hot. It is real, real hot.

It's ghost pepper and habanero honey, but if you put it on a pizza or pad thai or spaghetti sauce, it's real good. But it's all on our website. But for us, it's, yeah, I really appreciate you asking. Do you do educational stuff for schools as well? So do you do educational stuff for schools as well? We have educational curriculum for grades, I think actually pre-K all the way up to eighth grade that we worked with teachers on to provide. So if teachers are looking for curriculum that's already built out, we did build it for North Carolina teacher guidelines. But it's still a lot of really awesome educational material. So we can also send that to teachers as well.

Well, that's wonderful. You are a wealth of knowledge. Um, you're an American dream story. Um, you can just tell you have a sweet nature and I think it's all the honey in your life.

I do. I do. I think it's all, you have just a sweet nature. You can tell that you're somebody that's connected to the earth, connected to nature. And you're a great example of what can happen to people's personalities and perspective on life when they are connected to nature. And boy, people looking for that these days in this crazy world we're living in. And so I can't thank you enough.

I think if we keep you any longer, my husband's going to adopt you. that these days in this crazy world we're living in. And so I can't, I can't thank you enough. I think if we keep you any longer, my husband's going to adopt you. We might just do that. He looks at you with, I guess he looks at you the same way he looks at our daughter, like, oh, she's so smart. Catherine, thank you for being with us at the Kitchen Table. We appreciate it. And you sharing your knowledge with us. And I think it's great that, that you're being with us at the Kitchen Table. We appreciate it. And you sharing your knowledge with us. And I think it's great that you're doing the work to bring bees to places that they normally wouldn't go,

which is in cities and to corporations and what communities can learn from the community of bees. So thank you for being with us and thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. Just a delight to have you on. Thank you for the opportunity. And best of luck with your bees. If you have any questions, you got my email. I'm happy to help. Oh, watch out.

Oh, Lee Catherine. You know, we have a barbecue expert that we know. And boy, he gets a few calls a year. I'm like, it's Memorial Day. Big John, little John, I'm calling to get some to get they're actually coming on the podcast oh lee catherine so great we might have a part two as sean moves along his journey um just just love it and and hope everyone visits your website and if you have a corporation um what a great way to bring nature and and fun and education into into that environment so thanks

so much lee catherine yeah you. Have a great day. I have to say our producers delivered. She was fantastic. She was, she was, she was wonderful. You know, she just knows everything about it. Yeah. And she's, what I, what I love is that she's, she's taken her passion and to your point, made, made the American dream out of it yeah and i think she's making people's lives better i think she said something interesting about people that have all these different viewpoints come by the bees and they can they can actually for a moment share

a common bond on on that enjoyment yeah and at a time when people are so divided, so divisive, so much hate that goes on. You might think I'm crazy. I'll actually just go out there and stand and watch what they're doing. It sounds bizarre, but she mentioned that's what happens too in the corporate culture and you get people from far left and far right

probably going, we're just going to enjoy this moment. Maybe have a cup of coffee and watch our bees on the roof. It's a really cool but also a very powerful thing. You know, Sean, it used to be that there was a time, and some kids still live like this, but not as many anymore. I know I did. I remember that I would sit outside and watch the ants for hours

and how they would build their little home. And I would watch them carry things on their backs that I thought were way too big for them. And I learned so much just watching them. But, you know, there's so much busyness and there's so much stupid shit we do on our phone all day. And like this idea that you can just sit and observe nature and observe, you know, it, you know, whether you're laying,

remember laying on your back as a kid and just watching leaves and, you know, the trees or watching the clouds and, and guessing what they look like. There is not enough of that in our kids' life, but even in adults' lives, you know. And I just think that connection, you know, it actually warms my heart thinking, you know, I watch you out there in your B-suit. I don't know what you're doing out there sometimes. But that you're just sitting there observing them, that makes me happy. And I'm sure that it is calming and it is centering. And it does give you a better understanding of your place in the universe. You know, we start to think that like our job or just us are so important.

And when you see who we are in the scheme of this, that, you know, that truly in the scheme of this world that we're living in, you know, bees are actually more important than me. That's right. And by the way, they, they, they've been around for like a million years. They've been around forever. Much longer than us.

Yeah. I mean, and, um, so I was, I was getting stressed out about something that was happening in my hive. And I was like, you know,

cause I used to trust out. Like I've, it's just kind of a bit of a passion. don't want them to you don't want it to die you've invested so much and my my mentor was like listen they figured out they've been around for a million years yeah don't think that you can tell the bees like you know what the bees they're gonna they're gonna make it that's why they call it the birds and the bees they know what to do but i do this and we've kind of been on a journey of of late um where we're like you know let's let's let's let's do some more things and i gotta tell you just as we've started the process we've a little bit we've talked a little bit i've enjoyed i've planted from seed tomatoes and peppers and lettuce.

And it's now been, it's now planted out in my garden. We're doing bees. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. But going back to that, going back to doing simple things. And the kids, by the way, the kids have been part of a lot of this. Yeah. And there's, I mean, they're not, haven't been as involved as I have been.

But to see the process actually work for them, I think, is really important for kids. And if there's just video games and TV and sports, that's all they get. Yeah, this is so much better. They're missing a segment of what we all got as young kids. Yeah. And so, though I've enjoyed it, I think a good part of this has also been what it's offered to the kids as well. When I grew up, my mom had the biggest garden. By the way, I would hear her complain all the time about her garden. So if you had a mom who had a garden, did she complain? Because mine did, because she had a big one, and it was a lot of work, right, to weed her garden. Like, it was, it is a big

project. Can I tell my Duffy story about the garden? You can, but it's going to be in a second. I have a Duffy garden story in a second. Um, but the, the vegetables that came out of that garden, like everybody loved them. Um, and it was pretty awesome. So, okay, this is, this is, I grew up as a kind of city girl, suburban girl. Um, not, not as much nature as I have had in my life since I married you, which is actually one of the most wonderful things about you, about being married to someone like you is, you know, we spend a lot of time in nature, especially in the summer, and I have better, bigger appreciation for nature because of you. Thank you. Um, but when I married you, I was living in Beverly Hills

and, um, I left Beverly Hills, um, in a beautiful place in Beverly Hills. Um, I actually lived in a castle. I took care of some rich man's castle with some of my friends. So I lived in a castle in the Hills. I know it sounds crazy, but it's actually true. Um, hills. I know it sounds crazy, but it's actually true. Um, and then I went from there to marrying you and, and, and moving to Hayward, Wisconsin, which had, you know, population 2000 people in the North woods. Yeah. Well, I'm a pretty adaptable person cause I'm, I'm a military brat. So it wasn't that crazy. But at one point, I was living with you in Minneapolis first, and then you had to study for the bar, and we hadn't bought a house yet. So I moved in with your parents because I wanted to be by the lake

because you have a beautiful little cabin by the lake, you and your parents. And so I said I moved in with them. So I lived there, and your parents go to bed very early. They always did. They did. And so I would sit up at night. Early to bed, early to rise. Early to bed, early they always did they did and so i would sit up at early to bed early to rise early to bed early to rise i was still a night owl i was in my 20s and um i was up at night and on the kitchen table i don't know what i was doing hanging out um somebody else was

there a friend or relative friend or relative that was visiting your family so this was it was dusk though the sun was starting to go down well it was dark it. So this was, it was dusk though. The sun was starting to go down. Well, it was dark. It was, no, it was dark. It was starting, it was getting, it was getting dark. And, um, all of a sudden I see Sean's dad run across the kitchen out towards, because from the kitchen, there's like a screen porch and he's carrying a shotgun and he's in tidy whiteys. He's in his underwear. And I was so shocked. And then I saw him leave out the kitchen,

out the screen door, out to the backyard. And he shoots the, the, the, the rifle or whatever the gun he had was a long gun. And I just thought, is the beverly hillbillies like what the hell just happened like was that what was that what was that what was the dad on it was uh it was jeffro and um was the dad's name oh my god and i was like what just happened well it turned out that the duffies had a garden in the back and somehow your dad must have looked out the window and saw that there was a rabbit and he was not going to let the rabbit eat his garden and so he went out there and shot the rabbit so he grabbed his head at 22 so he grabbed his 22 and didn't listen he was he saw the rabbit say hi he didn't say hi on the way back he just went right back to bed he didn't put on his pants

no he didn't put on his pants he didn't put on his underwear. No, he didn't put on his pants. He didn't put on his underwear. It was the crazy... I was like, okay, I'm not in Beverly Hills anymore. I am in northern Wisconsin. Ran outside. It was the best story. My dad is a great shot. So, I'm sure he got that rabbit. He went back satisfied to bed. So, it wasn't two shots. It was one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was one shot.

He was done. He was gone. And then, I got a call that Rachel was like, you won't believe what just happened i'm like where am i it was a little bit green acres there but anyway in any case um it was this i'm so glad you brought the beekeeper on i'm so glad we did this what a fun episode i hope all of you guys learned um i hope if you're thinking about having a bee um situation in your home or your backyard or your corporation i hope this has inspired you so two things if you're thinking about having a bee situation in your home or your backyard or your corporation, I hope this has inspired you. So two things.

If you ever thought about getting bees, you don't need a lot of land to do it. No. Right? Number one. And number two, if you're going to buy honey, make sure you're buying real honey. This was something new that we've just gone to. We're buying real honey now, and it costs a little bit more. But why would I pay a lot of money for something that's not honey?

I'm like, I'll pay a little more and get the guarantee that I'm getting real honey from a real beekeeper, which is what we've done. So thank you all for being with us on what I would think, you know, listen, once in a while, we do a lot about the royals. We'll do a lot about politics, about J-Lo and Ben, but this time we got to do bees

and I appreciate you doing this episode with us. J-Lo is a. But this time we've got to do bees. And I appreciate you doing this episode with us. J-Lo is a different kind of queen bee. She is a very different kind. So is Meghan Markle. We talked about the real queen bees. So anyway, great stuff. They sting a lot of bees around them. They do a lot of stinging.

Anyway, thanks for being with us at the Kitchen Table. If you like our podcast, you can rate, review, subscribe, wherever you you get your podcasts you can always find us at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts please subscribe spotify yeah that's right subscribe get a notice every time we drop wednesday thursdays and fridays until next time have a great day bye everybody, everybody. Be good. That's good. Bye. Listen ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple podcast and Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad free on the Amazon Music app. Jason in the house, the Jason Chaffetz podcast.

Dive deeper than the headlines and the party lines as I take on American life, politics, and entertainment. Subscribe now on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts.