Men At Work Podcast - How Many Bee Stings Can a Human Survive?

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Kyle and Matt sit down with a beekeeper to learn about the bee black market, how many bee stings would it take to kill a human being, nukes, drones, queens, and the bootleg honey trade in China. Check out Eli's website: https://www.elishoneybees.com/home About Us: The Men At Work Podcast asks one question: What do you do for work? After that the conversation flows from there. We’ve met substitute teachers, Bangladeshi t-shirt moguls, a real estate broker tight with LeBron James, and more. And we’ll record anywhere. Random sidewalks during an eclipse, a baseball game, a bar crawl, casino, and more. We like to find out what people do for a living. If you want us to come to your event email us at: [e-mail] Watch the episode on YouTube every Wednesday at 4pm: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMlLhOM6_fPAhFXjOMfkf0A If you want more bonus content from every episode check out our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/menatworkpod *If you subscribe to the Patreon consider subscribing on a desktop or website or an android device, NOT THROUGH iOS (Apple) APP. Apple takes 30% of every month you're subscribed (yea they suck). Follow Us: The Pod: https://www.tiktok.com/@menatpodcast https://www.instagram.com/menatpod/ Follow Matt: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattpeoplescomedy https://www.instagram.com/mattpeoplescomedy/ Follow Kyle: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kylepagancb/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kylepagancb Follow Vito: https://www.instagram.com/vito_visuals/?hl=en

We're here with with Eli from Eli's Honey Bees. Eli's Honey Bees. The beekeeper. Happy to be here. Now, I'll be honest with you, brother. I want to know why you become a beekeeper, because like I look at bees and I'm like terrorists. They're the terrorists of the animal kingdom.

And I think for this next hour, hour 15, you're going to do a lot of convincing our viewers and stuff about like why bees are necessary. Yeah, bees are necessary. Yeah. Bees are definitely necessary both for pollinating crops and also for producing delicious honey, which I actually brought some for you guys. Oh, my God. Thanks. And but also they're they're fascinating creatures. I'm not going to lie. There's certain times when you have an entire beehive that you get it mad enough that it hasn't happened to me in a few years because I've gotten a little better at it over the years where they're all trying to sting you. And at those times I'd be inclined to be a little nervous around them.

But just like I often compare bees to people where like you see a person walking down the street, they're not going to run up and attack you. You see a dog walking down the street, it's not going to bite you. You break into somebody's house like you do when you keep bees, you open up a beehive. So there's no homeless bees in the bee kingdom? Not honeybees. Honeybees all have hives and they'll sting to protect their hives. But they tend to be a lot more gentle than like, say, a bear would be protecting its den or a person.

So if you kind of compare it to that, they're actually not too scary. But I actually – so I got into bees. To answer your actual question, I got into bees when I was 12 years old. I was homeschooled and I went on a field trip, which every, you know, a lot of my schooling being homeschooled was. What did those schoolers go to field trip? The backyard? The same places that the school kids go on field trips. It's just that you go, there's, you know, six people instead of 40.

And so you can get all those same like really cool field trips, but you don't have to like spend half your time trying to stay with your class. Did you like being homeschooled? For me, it worked great. I really enjoyed it a lot. I had a large friend group of other homeschoolers, which I think was really important. And so it really let me pursue some of the things that I was interested in, which was kind of everything, and not get bogged down with like taking a bus here and there and the homeroom and all this other stuff wake up go down to the kitchen or go to someone else's house and learn curriculum yep yep that was and so like that day the field trip was we went to historic heriton

house um put on bee suits and went through beehive uh which is probably more involved than you could do if you had a class of 40 children you probably wouldn't be able to do something that involved but um we were able to open up the hives i had tons of questions i saw it was super cool i was one of those kids that was just really into everything um and so when i got home i was like mom dad i'm having b i want to keep bees i want to be a beekeeper and you know the day before i wanted to be a buffalo farmer because there was a buffalo farmer at the farmer's market and the day before that i wanted to be a sailor and the day before that i wanted to be a firefighter and you know i'm a sailor a firefighter and a beekeeper now i'm still working on the buffalo farming we'll get there one day

i probably got some bison by the way never stop dreaming but uh yeah so it's um so i i started my first hive the next year and was able to teach you know that that field trip and and others and then every year i would shovel snow and mow lawns and do all the you know normal businesses that a kid can do to make extra money to buy beehives um how do you start a hive so the way you start is you you buy the equipment so the actual hive boxes and then you still got to assemble it nail it together things like that um and then you buy the bees it was called a nucleus which is five frames of bees basically a miniature beehive um and then you put that into the big beehive and they go out, they gather nectar from flowers and build up through the course of the year.

And then you're, you're off and running. And now I help other people do that. So, but this is, so you're 12 years old and you're able to go to your parents and say, I'm 12 years old. I'm going to buy 1000 bees. And they were like, cool. Let's see how this goes. Like, were they hesitant that there's a large scale operation like that?

I started with about 10,000. Oh, Jesus. All right. Which is one hive. Okay. One hive is 10,000 bees? One hive to start is 10,000 bees. By mid-summer is 80,000.

Oh, my God. Damn, what a bee. Like, what's the, is it gestation period? Like, what's the period on that for like a pregnant bee? So the queen can lay about 2 000 eggs a day and then those eggs are going to take two to three weeks to become to hatch as adult bees um and so the queen's job in the hive one of them the queen's jobs is to um increase and decrease the population by how many eggs she lays um with a mind to the future so like right now, my hives are overwintering.

So the queen isn't laying very many eggs because that's eggs you got to keep warm and feed and there's no nectar to produce. But as soon as the early spring, you know, two or three weeks before it gets warm, she needs to really start ramping up the egg production and lay 2000 eggs a day so that we go into spring with really big, strong hives that we can then split and sell and produce honey and do all the things we do to actually make money for the business. Does she carry those 2,000 bees or do they get put into a comb?

Yeah. So she'll lay each. So if you think about honeycomb, it's a bunch of little cells. Yeah. She'll lay one in each cell and then the workers will come feed them and then do the rest of raising them then they'll emerge from the cell fully grown as like looking like an adult bee um and then they live in the summer might be only a month of just that bee will live in the winter they can overwinter the whole winter because they're not working as hard those bees are meant to just survive over the winter in the hive so it's one

it's one bee controlling the entire like they're the sole one reproducing like it's just some dude comes up and knocks her up and then she's the lone female like how does she get in that position yeah so what happens with a hive is let's say a new beekeeper is going through the hive and they accidentally crush the queen. Yeah. What the bees will do is they'll take a one-day-old egg, which is microscopic. It's too small to be able to see. Yeah. And they will – at least for us to see.

And they'll fill that cell with royal jelly, which is a little bit like honey, but it's a substance they make just to feed to the bees as they – just to the queen. And then she – they'll build that cell bigger and so she'll emerge bigger and stronger. And then they'll do that with as many cells as they can. Then the first one to hatch will sting the other ones to death through the wall of the cell. If two hatch at the same time they'll actually fight and two queen bees will fight and then whoever wins they'll go on a mating flight and so that queen will fly out she'll mate with maybe 18 different drones which are the male bees then she'll fly back and it's pretty incredible she can actually choose whether to lay a fertilized or unfertilized egg unfertilized eggs will become our haploid cells and will become

the uh male bees the drones okay and fertilized eggs will become the female bees it's different than other biology works yeah i heard the female bees run shit in the colonies too that's what it seems like it seems like the males are just there to just fuck that's pretty much how it works so the pretty sweet um the the female bees do all the work um so the worker bees um they will um be the hats yeah so the drones the drones will they'll fly out and they'll try to mate with with queens from other hives and that's important for the colony's genetics because um they're haploid cells which means their genetic clone the male bee is a genetic clone of the female queen and so it's the way that the hive reproduces as a super organism um in the winter they get kicked out of the hive though yeah so the where do they go do they just

die uh yep they'll just they'll die off and then in the spring the queen will lay more eggs for more male bees. And once you start seeing those, then you know that you can start breeding your own queens to split hives. And that's part of what I do is, in addition to selling honey, is I'll actually sell bees. And then I'll help people get started with beekeeping. So I have 75 locations where people say, I want bees in my yard. And I come and I bring beehives and boxes and teach them. And typically the homeowner will pay me either just to do everything to have bees there and give them a share of the honey or they'll pay me to teach them how to keep bees and go through that whole process with them. So that's a big part of the business. Um, over the last year, one thing that's

changed is when, um, bees get into people's walls and they're living in people's walls. Yeah. There's a big shortage of people who know how to cut bees out of walls because it's such a specialized thing, uh, that I started doing that in my company. Uh, and that's really expanded a lot. So I have a dedicated crew that that's what they do is they'll go out and go into somebody's house. You'll have bees in the walls. We cut them out of the wall, re-hive them. We've dedicated special bee vacuums that will actually vacuum up the extra bees that are flying around. And you'll be working inside someone's house like this. We'll cut actually a hole in their drywall and then cut the honeycomb out. So it's a really specialized skill. Most beekeepers don't do it. Um, I didn't do it for about 10 years. Um, my first 10 years to be

keeping, I was like, I don't want to be inside someone else's house with people getting stung and running around. And, and, you know, now after having a lot of experience and the right tools for it, I'm able to do it with a really high degree of accuracy so that it goes really well for the customer and the bees. And then we re-hive those bees and we make honey from them. Wow, that's kind of a... Yo. Hello, Kyle. What are you doing?

Nothing. Sitting here watching the game. Smoking some Thrive. Are you all alone? Waza. Waza. Who's that? Yo, pick up the phone. Waza.

Waza. Waza. Waza. Yo, Cheeto. Pick up the phone. Yo. Waza. Waza.

Waza. Waza. Waza. Waza up? What you doing, son? Nothing. Just chilling. Killing. True. True. My buddy, we just had my buddy on and he's an exterminator.

So is that like a main competition for you guys? Are you guys looking at him like they're taking some of our business? Yeah. So the way that I like to look at it is instead of, you know, and similarly to how the bees, you know, go about the world is instead of it being competition, I try to do everything like symbiotically. So with exterminators, we don't do a whole lot of yellow jacket removals. So I'd send those calls to them. They don't typically do a lot of honeybee removals because they can't kill honeybees yeah so

often i mean exterminators and they they'll actually send me calls for honeybees exterminators they can't as in like they don't have the equipment or they're literally not allowed to do it yeah so it's a little bit of both um there's the bee smoke they don't have the bee smoke they can't keep up with the hunts yeah i don't want that smoke i've seen the bee smoke yeah so they're so honeybees have all different protections. There's federal, state, local, legal protections around honeybees because they're so important. No shit. So you're not really supposed to just spray a can of Raid into a bee's nest.

The other problem is you could have 100 pounds of honey in your walls. If you just kill those bees, you still have 100 pounds of honey in your walls. And when it gets up to 95 degrees in the summer, that starts dripping out of your walls. And then you get mold and you get roaches like that honey and ants. And it just becomes a huge mess. So you really need someone who cuts it open and takes it out. Are you saying my dad was breaking federal law when he was spraying rain into my basketball hoop? Yeah, that's exactly it. So if it's a basket, most 9 out of 10 times they see it in a basketball hoop it's yellow jackets yeah so there were tell them my dad's dead he's not gonna be

the fed's not gonna dig them up they're they're likely likely with basketball hoops and like things where it's smaller honeybees like uh much bigger dark dry space so maybe if it was like in the wall of a house or something it would be honeybe. I'd suspect they're likely yellow jackets in that case. What's the penalties for breaking the federal law going after the bees? I'm not sure what the exact rule is. I imagine that a lot of it's at the discretion of the agencies that decide to go after it for it. Who's the secret bee agency that goes after it for it. Who's the secret B agency that goes after it? The first one that pest control agencies worry about is the... I could be wrong. I think it's by the Attorney General's office who regulate... So pest control is a regulated

industry. Right. When you spray a chemical, you have a license to spray that. If they find out that they're spraying something they shouldn't or they're doing it in a way they shouldn't that license can be taken away interesting yeah if i'm a yellow jacket i would hate honeybees they seem like they're kind of like the cool protected class and the yellow jacket just get a bad rap but maybe justified yellow jackets do seem like they are just kind of dicks yeah we're wasps and i hope they're in i hope they're in the box yeah

not a wasp yeah so i I kind of agree on both counts. Like yellow jackets do get a bad rap because like everyone says, oh, I just want pollinators. Well, most things like insects that fly are pollinating to some degree. Yeah. But also I agree that yellow jackets and wasps in general are just kind of obnoxious. Like the main difference biologically is a honeybee has a barbed stinger like a fish hook so if a honeybee stings you it's only going to sting you to protect its hive but then it will die after it stings you so and as it flies away it actually rips its intestines out and so it's

really bad for the honeybee as much as it hurts to get stung it hurts the bee a lot worse so honeybees really don't want to sting um they will if they're protecting their hive and most of the time i'm working on a hive the bees think they're protecting it right um yellow jackets and and different and and wasps in general um typically have a smooth stinger so that means they can go in and they can sting you 10 times in a row with the same baby okay and fly away and be just fine um and so they are much less hesitant to sting and um their stings can be just as bad uh the biggest thing i actually ever got stung by was uh one of those cicada killers they're like three inches long yeah they come out of the ground like uh every few years or something and they'll actually eat an

entire cicada and they're actually not geared towards stinging people like they're not gonna go after you and sting you like they sting to kill their prey and eat it yeah um but there's there i was in the attic of a garage cleaning out some beekeeping equipment there was one and i was leaving it alone and it was leaving me alone um and because it sounds kind of funny, but like bees have body language, same as like mammals do. Sure. You can tell if a dog's friendly or aggressive. I can do that with bees.

What's a telltale, like some signs of aggression? It's straight at your face and in a straight line. Not hard to read. But if it's going zigzag back and forth it's it's buzzing up to a flower and then continuing on that's a bee looking for nectar bees flying straight at your face and crashing into you are actually warning you and then straight and landing and holding on and trying to bend over and sting that's a bee trying to sting you yeah the java bees the java bees the java yeah true it's the most honorable death yeah so. So I try to make a – I make a split-second decision when – if I'm not in a bee suit and something like that happens where if a bee lands on me, depending on the buzzing sound it's making and the direction – the way that it's flying, whether to try to brush it away or just leave it.

Oh, wow. just leave it um oh wow because if it's and and usually i can have pretty high um consistency of whether or not that bee's trying to get me do you think bees smell other bees on you no but you're less entitled to get stinged on so alarm so alarm pheromones are definitely um you know it's a big part of how they communicate is through pheromones so if you have a day where you just get covered in bees and they're all trying to sting you and then you wear that same bee suit the next day out to the bee yard, you'll get close to the hives and they'll all go for you. So like one of the things I do is I have four bee suits and I wash them regularly. Um, so that, that same scent, a lot of hobby beekeepers that I consult for, they have one bee suit and they wear it and you know an hour every two weeks so it doesn't get washed that often and um so they'll call me out and be like hey that might have super aggressive

and there's a list of things that i'll go through and one of them is wash your suit because that alarm pheromone could be on it this cicada killer actually landed on the back of my neck and i was getting down out of this loft and i felt it and i grabbed it and it stung me right in the spine and it felt like a framing nail it was just the biggest it wasn't so there's no they don't have venom in the way that honeybees do right but the actual sting was very painful yeah i've been right in the spine too and just psychologically pulling something that's an entire handful off yeah throwing on the ground that's crazy i mean with that being back to like honeybees this is what a question i have for you how much of a psycho did the first guy who tried to get honey have to be to see bees flying all

over having no idea what it is it's just like a like a gelatinous liquid that he's like i have to eat that yeah so it's funny honey uh harvesting is actually one of the oldest goes all the way back before agriculture to hunter-gatherer cultures because basically like i'm sure the it's um you know who we think of like as cavemen like the prehistoric man walking around in the woods basically just taking bites out of everything to see what's edible. Whatever is, then they tell the rest of the tribe. And the idea is – so honeybees live in hollow trees in nature. And if one of those hollow trees tend to fall down, and then eventually the hive leaves.

And so probably this person was going along and ate some of this honey. Now, the hollow trees also fill up with water. And so when honey is exposed to a lot of water, it has natural yeast and will ferment into mead. And so the oldest form of alcohol is actually mead. People think it's beer because water got into grain storage and then people drank it anyway. And that's kind of how beer started but mead uh alcohol made from honey actually predates um beer by potentially centuries because you didn't grain storage wasn't even around for long long after that so they drank that and ate that and you know so yeah then i guess it's totally worth it not only do you get to taste one of the most delectable things probably in prehistoric times then you can

find out later you get hammered off of it yeah i can i can see why they keep going back yeah okay that makes more sense then i would capture so many bees if i was back then yeah 100 have bees evolved like you know like going back in the day where it's like you had like your mastodons and you're at like you're like they even said flies were maybe like five feet back then and they'd stingers and stuff have bees evolved since like prehistoric times absolutely and they're you know one of the things about um how things evolve is the smaller something is and the faster it reproduces the faster it can evolve so um in college we did a study with fruit flies because they reproduce like every two days or something ridiculous um and if you stick half of the population of fruit flies in free a freezer for longer and longer amount of times you can

breed fruit flies that can last longer and longer in the freezer over the course of a couple of weeks because they just breed so quickly um honeybees are kind of interesting because they evolve they the size of a honeybee is bee is determined by the cell it's raised in. And so one of the ways that they've changed in recent history was we started making bigger cells by putting bigger foundation into the hive. So kind of encouraging the bees to build bigger cells. That created bigger bees. And the idea was that bigger is better for the bees. And it turns out that actually the small cell, the bees have certain advantages with they are raised faster, become adult bees faster, and they're more resistant to mites and some of the diseases and stuff um that they what's the life expectancy of bees uh it's not very long in the summer it could be about a month if they're working for the individual bee uh because they're just working

really really hard all day uh in the winter it can be several months but the hive itself can live indefinitely because the queen can live two to four years okay and when she dies they can replace her they can uh find a day old egg feed it royal jelly and then um create a new queen that'll then fight um with the other queens to see the ladies are kind of the big dogs don't hear about like bees more like women talking about bees being like we got to be more like the bees yeah you would think well i think it seems like liberal women are just a queen bee in their head queen bees they should they should be like they decide the votings decide who to kick out they mate but they teamed in dudes and then bring it back to the house yeah what a life that's pretty cool who is it who's so going back to like the

evolution of it my understanding would be they would need for evolution. There would have to be like a natural predator. Like who's a bees predator? Is there anything out there that's eating single just bees? So there's unfortunately several things. Right now, the Varroa destructor mite, which talk about a middle name destructor. It's pretty sweet. The Varroa destructor mite is pretty bad.

It's basically kind of like a tick for honeybees right but if you scaled a honeybee up to the size of a person that might would be scaled up to the size of a rabbit so imagine a tick the size of a rabbit so they're really bad obviously um they infest hives and we treat with a variety of things to prevent them there's a lot of people who are trying to breed treatment-free bees or basically just have bees that are more resistant to those mites. And the problem with that is if you've got a hundred hives and you're trying to breed resistant bees and you don't treat them with anything, then you might have 98 hives die, and then you

have to have enough money to get another 100 hives or breed those last two to slowly get something that's more and more resistant. Randy Oliver with Scientific Beekeeping is a person who works with doing a lot of those tests in a scientific way. And then the Department of Agriculture regulates what you're allowed to do and what you're allowed to treat them with. On a bigger scale, bears are a huge threat to honeybees in areas where we have bears. Thankfully, of my 75 locations where I help people keep bees, we don't have – I had one location that had bear for a a couple years and uh northern pennsylvania

and we were able to put that one in like a courtyard because i was like i'm not messing with bears third one christopher robin yeah it's a sleepy bear yeah with a t-shirt on a no but bears will knock over a hive they're mostly looking for the brood uh but also i'm sure they're not turning down the honey. Sure. The brood is the young bees and they're very rich in, in fats and proteins. And they're just scarving.

Yep. And then the stinger too, the stinger while they eat, it has no. So bears fur is thick enough that typically, I mean, they don't like it, but they can't,

they're not, the bees aren't stinging through very much. It's mostly their face that's getting stung. It's kind of like a horsefly on a cow, right? Same kind of deal, yeah. So I'm fortunate that there isn't a lot of bears. And then in the area that I have bees is mostly suburban backyards in Delaware County, Montgomery County, and Chester County. Shout out, Monco.

Yeah, so then we have the hive beetle, which is a small beetle that goes into the hives. That's an interesting one because it's been around since before I started keeping bees, but everybody always would say it's a nuisance. It's not really a threat. And in the last three years with the mild winters we've been having, it really became a threat and they just started obliterating hives and so now we're working on ways to uh destroy the hive beetles um so they don't this one has been cold as shit is this good for the bees so it's a mixed bag because it will help take out a lot of those hive beetles that are in the ground and in the colonies but at the same time the bees have to eat more

honey to stay warm and they have to um cluster closer and they have to have more bees just to create body heat so there's a trade-off there what about like a bee greenhouse to keep them warm it sounds like it sounds like winter and women are their only – It's the story of my life. Winter and women are real. It's every guy that's ever lived in the Northeast. Winter and women. So there's a variety of different things people have tried to get bees through the winter more successfully. Greenhouses specifically are a little tough just because bees don't deal with glass that well.

They just buzz against it until they die um there's people in in um the midwest who will put bees in in big potato cellars and they'll actually move their colonies inside for the winter and try to have them in a more stable temperature range and then move them back out for um for the for the summer around here. That's not very common. We, we insulate the hives. I insulate the top half of the hive. I'm actually testing this year with a solid six inches of insulation on, uh, on top of each of my hives to make sure that they have enough top insulation. Um, and then if that goes well, I may increase the amount of side insulation that I have for them, but heat rises and also condensation is going to form on the coldest surface. We want that to be the walls where it drips down and the bees can drink it if they need extra water and not the top like ceiling.

So that drips down onto the bees because then they can't stay as warm if they're wet. This is something I wondered, and this is, we ask a lot of dumb guy questions so bear with us but like the big thing that goes to honeybees is that they pollinate then it spreads across crops and then crops grow from that yes it couldn't I just do that like what couldn't I just walk around with like a pocketful and just kind of dish it out like what is the what does a honeybee have that they couldn't just like industry in, they actually had this situation where they killed off enough of the bee population that they needed to do hand pollination. Oh, OK. And so they had kids climb trees with paintbrushes and literally go from flower to flower moving the pollen. this in like a small backyard or like if you want to grow um plants where you just have a few of

them you know then it's easier to hand pollinate um is the thing that people people do the the real thing is that honeybees can fly they can pollinate uh from to make this one pound of honey they pollinated two million flowers how long does that take um so it took 864 bees their entire lifetime to make that one month but a month yeah okay um now over the course of a whole hive i might get 20 20 to 50 pounds of honey from a hive so you figure 80 000 bees in a hive pollinating millions of flowers and then the migratory pollinators which are really the um the beekeepers who are focused on pollination they put 408 hives with 80 000 bees each onto a tractor trailer and they'll drive it to california pollinate the almond groves

then they'll drive it to you know up um the coast a little bit do more pollination they have a whole loop that they do i don't do migratory pollination but could you imagine that truck overturning oh just a swarm of bees i mean that would be my nightmare my bees got loose how do you you can't keep track of them they're they're now though i guess they're just out or would they return back would they go back speaking of the pheromones to like a familiar place yeah so we're actually working with a group to put together a national beekeeping disaster task force for situations like that so we're gonna have we're gonna have not a pandemic response task force but we will have a bee task force so yeah it's what a place it's um you start tagging bees yeah yeah so when those trucks tip over it's it's more common in californ in California just because the nature of the agriculture there, they use more bees.

But it happened a few years ago in Delaware. And it's really bad. We have also a nationally certified firefighter. And fire gear is – they're not stinging through the bunker jacket. But the Nomex hoods that you wear, They're able to sting through that if they need to. So basically what they do is the local fire department tries to get people to roll up their windows and direct traffic. And everyone kind of avoids the area. And then they try to get local beekeepers out there with the full bee suits. And you put a lot of smoke because we have the smokers.

What's the smoke? I just burn pine needles. What's it do? So it kind of does a lot of smoke because we have the smokers. What's the smoke? I just burn pine needles. Yeah. What's it do? So it's kind of does a couple of things. It's similar to if you're sitting around a campfire and smoke goes in your eyes, you move to a different spot. So it moves the bees.

It also blocks that alarm pheromone that we're talking about. So they're not if one bees angry at you and letting off all this alarm pheromone, it's being blocked with a smoke. So the other bees aren't going to go after you. And then the other thing they do is they eat a lot of honey when there's smoke because if there's a forest fire and they need to evacuate the hive,

they want to be filled up with honey. And when a bee's stomach's filled with honey, it can't sting as effectively. I can relate to that. Yeah. I can't do anything effectively when I have to eat. So I guess that makes sense. Yeah. So by't do anything effectively when I have to hurry. So I guess that makes sense. Yeah. So by filling up, by smoking the whole area and the beehives,

you can kind of start getting things put back together. Bees in an environment like that will clump up, and so you try to get those little clumps kind of into some kind of a hive. And then several of the swarms if if the disaster is bad enough we'll try to fly away and um you may have a wild swarm which is something we we catch a lot of where right either hives abandoned bees are abandoning a hive that um was on a truck that crashed or um if a tree falls down it has a hive in it a lot of times they'll leave or uh if a tree falls down and it has a hive in it, a lot of times they'll leave. Or if a hive is just naturally splitting, the queen will fly away with half the bees.

They'll form a new queen. Then we'll have a huge clump of bees on a bush and people call me out to rescue those as well. Has there ever been like a bee 9-11? Like I'm just thinking like you guys obviously study like different cases and stuff. I'm excited about it. Yeah, it's good. So I just don't know. Like when you're in college, you're learning about different cases and stuff. I'm excited about it. Yeah, it's good. So I just don't know. Like when you're in college, you're learning about this stuff and everything. Has there ever been like, holy shit, a truck tipped over in California and 800,000 bees just got loose or died?

So the trucks tipping over is definitely one of the bigger bee incidents that we deal with. Colony collapse disorder is kind of starting around the time I was starting beekeeping basically some commercial beekeepers would go out to their hives and a third of them would just be gone the problem is if your hives get sprayed with pesticides and all the bees die, you can take those bees, you can send them to the lab and they can test them and say, these bees have pesticide on them. That's what killed them. The problem with colony collapse

disorder, and they're still doing studies and trying to understand it, is that whatever the bees were eating, it affected their ability to navigate. So bees have a very complex navigation system. A bee will leave the hive and find some flowers, and then they'll navigate back to the hive and tell by the shortest possible route, even if that's not the route they took to get there. And then they'll tell the other bees where that nectar source was by using triangulation between the hive, the nectar source, and the sun. And they'll communicate all of that by dancing on a vertical surface in the pitch dark and then they'll regurgitate some of the nectar to show them what kind of nectar it was which has no idea where they went because the navigation system so often so what was happening with colony collapse disorder was the bees just weren't making it back to the hive so you did just have these

hives that were just empty and so then if it's empty you can't test the bees and see what happened with uh you know what kind of pesticide they had in their system and things like that because they they just weren't in the hive they're just completely gone it's like bees on rumspringer kind of yeah you're just you're just describing veto after a couple of strawberry martinis just totally just totally like where do i live we can't find him he's not coming back if he's margarita sorry not martinis his belly's full of honey thanks for the correction yeah please yeah i mean he gets out he gets out of delco as a couple strawberry margaritas he's like where's the hotel where's the where's so that was that was definitely a bigger

like situation where it took a long time and i think that a lot of um right after that um the um vero destructor might started coming in as a really big culprit in killing off hives, reinfesting hives. And then just when we started getting a handle on the Varroa destructor mite, hive beetle is now coming up as the next big challenge. Right. Now, for my business, because I teach beekeeping and I help people with their hives. Um, each time there's a challenge like that. And because it's my full-time job, I can devote a lot of time and energy to finding the best solutions that are out there. Um, you know, I'm not usually doing the cutting edge research, but I can call it up and talk

to the people who are, and then develop that as a plan for people in our whole area to do. And then I can package each individual part of that as a service. So for example, the small hive beetle, I was able to do a lot of research and there's beetle traps that you can use and there's beneficial nematodes, which are basically, um, worms, microscopic worms that eat hive beetle larvae and hive beetle larvaes in the ground. And so I actually have that shipped in cold. I look through a microscope, you could see it like them wiggling around, dilute them into water and go out and put them all around my hives. But as soon as I figured that method out for myself, I post out to the entire beekeeping community and i tell them you know if anyone

else wants this you can pay me to come out and do it on your property or i'll just talk people through it for free right because if we all treat for the hive beetles the next year there's fewer hive beetles yeah so i wonder this might be another dumb one but like you said you were burning pine cones and that elicits a smoke that like disrupts. Would it become more legalized? Would like burning weed have any effect that mellows them so you can navigate things better? So there's a story where the founding fathers actually who were, you know, they'd go to Philadelphia and they'd have their meetings about constitutions and stuff. And then they would go out to their country estates and a lot of them were beekeepers because it was kind of considered like a gentleman's profession. And they were also coincidentally growing hemp for the Navy.

And so there was an idea that they would actually burn hemp, um, which is a little different than what people are smoking today. Um, and the bees would be very calm and easy to work and things like that. Um, personally, I have never, I've never tried it. Um, I don't know how much it would cost to fill a smoker with, um, a little smoke in your dog's face. Yeah. I have gotten the bees drunk once

accidentally though oh so um so i was trying to make mead um trying to get in with the queen bee and i like that yeah so i was trying to make uh mead by basically adding water to honey with natural yeast in it um and um then you stir it every couple of days so that the, it aerates it. I was using a big pickle jar and the metal spoon I was using hit the side of the glass jar and it broke it. And so it spilled sticky honey water mead all over the floor. And it was kind of bummed cause it was working on it for like a couple of weeks. Um, so I took all these towels and I was kind of like you know when you make a mess in your mom's kitchen you're just kind of like throwing towels on moving around like just

trying to get it sort of clean um and then after i had all these sticky towels i just threw them out in the back porch uh and i was like oh the bees will clean it off so the bees found it like i was talking about one bees finds it and they tell the other bees. And so there's all these bees flying around. And I was like, they're acting pretty weird. And they're buzzing back and forth. They're bumping into things. And then they settle down.

And yeah, it turned out that I had gotten the bees drunk, which I'm sure doesn't take a whole lot of alcohol. They're lightweight, too. That's got to be. Thank God people know you're a beekeeper because if they see you throwing out sticky towels in your backyard they're like something bad's going on in there yeah how about that i get i always wonder if like the like that's the question that i had about weed if like those kind of things still affect them but i guess pretty universally it'll hit you yeah i'm sure i'm sure the i mean bees cognitive processes are a

little different but i'm sure it would have a somewhat similar effect for bees and other creatures. So it's 30 degrees and you're wearing sandals. Are you just a sandals all year round guy? We were just talking about this, yeah. Yep. I'm sandals all year round. With bees and with – I used to do a lot more barefoot beekeeping and beekeeping with sandals.

I typically these days wear closed toe shoes of some kind when i'm what do you like about the barefoot beekeeping uh i just i really enjoy being barefoot um on the the hippier uh like kind of a more of a hippie idea but bees have a thing where they and i'm not saying this is scientifically proven, but it was an interesting theory I came across where bees, when they land on a flower, they change the electromagnetic field of that flower. And then the next bee can tell that that flower has already been landed on and the bees already eaten the nectar. So they just move on. It's like one of the ways that they navigate the world.

So bees have a very strong sense of electromagnetic field. And if you combine that with the idea of grounding, which is people reinventing the idea of being barefoot. I didn't need to reinvent it because I've been barefoot all along. Then your electromagnetic field is kind of grounded to the earth so that all that to say is there might be a positive benefit to being barefoot i just like prefer being barefoot or letting you know wearing sandals there's definitely a positive effect you scrape your feet along the floor then you're gonna touch somebody get the shock oh yeah yep that's that's a lot going on

yeah but if they're pheromone sensitive you got to be careful to not have some stinky bitters down there i bet you gotta wash those bad boys the feet haven't feet haven't been as big a deal i definitely think there's a correlation sometimes if it's like a detergents like different detergents that i put on my clothes or stuff it's like something you get the last thing i want is some kind of cologne that smells like alarm pheromone and all the bees going after me. Panic by Gucci. Can the bees see color? So they see closer to like the infrared spectrum. So they see color, but they don't see the same colors that we see.

So like if I'm like night vision goggles? It's more similar to that. Do you like the bee movie? I prefer the beekeeper, you know. Statham movie. Statham, yeah. I prefer The Beekeeper. State the movie. Yeah. State the movie. Yeah. Basically, they took John Wick and they remade it as – they basically took John Wick, made him a beekeeper, made him go after phone scammers and – I don't believe me. I would love the hot beekeeper movie way more than Jerry Seinfeld's animated cartoon. Yeah.

Jerry Seinfeld's voice the entire time is a tough one. Yeah. Yeah. It was – it's definitely a tough movie because a lot of times it's like the only thing people know about beekeeping sure and so it's like the bee movie i've never seen it so like what do people like what do they come after you they first they say well um that according to physics bees can't fly which if that were true bees wouldn't fly um it kind of disproves, in beekeeping. I think

it dates back to a originally some scientific person who was like, I don't know how this works. Um, and you know, people are like, oh, it's impossible for it to happen even though it's happening. And it's similar to the Varroa destructormite we were talking about earlier. Pretty much every article and book you read on it will say that it drinks the blood of the bees. But it turns out that that was an assumption made by a Russian scientist like a long, long time ago. And it's just been circularly quoted on so many sources that it's now taken as fact even though they just – more recent studies are showing that they eat the bees' fatty tissue. As beekeepers, it doesn't really matter. Like they hurt the bees.

They're still dead, yeah. They're still dead, yeah. They're still dead. But it's really interesting to see that like something that is considered scientific fact has been disproven. But because there's so many circular quotes where basically they quote this as a source and this is quoting this as a source and it just kind of goes in that pattern for sometimes 100 years where where they just assume this this is true but nobody's actually gone back and proven it yet and a lot of times when they do they disprove it are bees responsible for carrying around or like transmitting like viruses or like any kind of like bacteria that affect humans or is that not anything that they can really do so it's not typically things that affect humans most the biggest thing that a bee will

biggest way that a bee will affect humans negatively is if you get stung yeah um there's definitely diseases that transmit between bees and that's one of the problems that we have these days um is that because of the way that agriculture works in our country so instead of a farm that grows 10 different things we have farms that grow hundreds of thousands of acres of one thing. In order to do that, you need to truck in bees with the migratory beekeeping. And then so a huge percentage of the bees in the country go to California for the almond season

because you can make a lot of money pollinating almonds, which is a great way to make a living keeping bees but then they all spread out back across the country so if there's one tiny pest that's in some random hives in oregon and then those hives all the hives get together in um california and then they all spread out again it's similar math to how pandemics and everything else works where um that disease or past or whatever it is has been spread across the country um will the queen bee carry any stds and she's fucking so much true no that's not as much of a concern with with honeybees um but they definitely um especially because it's just the one mating flight and drones die after they mate so it's

you know a pretty effective way to avoid those sorts of things. Yeah. You got to envy it, dude. What a lifestyle. Live for a month. Have a bunch of sex. Not be relied on. It's got to be tough if you're like the one drone who's bragging about the queen and they're all like, yeah, we did too.

It's like, god damn it. Yeah. They tend to die immediately after having sex with the queen. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, so it's not like the queen. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, so it's not like the praying mantis, right? The praying mantis. Yeah.

The woman bites the male's head off. Yeah. This one, it's just part of the process that they die. And there's actually specific areas where they will go meet up, like where drones will congregate and find the queen. So a lot of times when you're trying to breed really healthy queens, you take hives that have tons and tons of drones in them, and you put those out around the hives that you're trying to mate, and there'll be an area where you'll have tons of drones

and you'll have a really well-mated queen. And then I also sell queens. Really? What's a queen go for nowadays? So it really depends on the scale. So if you're doing hundreds and hundreds of hives, you can sell – people sell you 100 queens for $2,000 or something where it's like $20 a queen. For me, it tends to be smaller scale services. It tends to be people who have two hives in their backyard.

One is missing a queen. They need it today and they need someone to help them install it. And so I sell queens for like $100, $150. But then I bring it out and install it. Yeah, this is queen bees, not queens. This is not like an Epstein operation. When I used to – It's not bee-bitty.

Oh, there he is. We're looking for it yeah when i used to um before i drove and i took public transit a lot i'd always be on my cell phone and talking about bees there's so much uh so many different words we're talking about queens and you're talking about nukes so a nucleus colony we call them nukes yeah so i will have a very sincere conversation on the phone about buying and selling nukes and it's like it's a very different conversation than if you're joking about it or you're talking so people get kind of concerned that i'm seriously i'm like yeah i can buy the and sometimes i'm talking about russian nukes because there's no doubt you're on the list

they the people who breed them will breed they're're all kind of European honeybees is what we have. They're smallpox? They don't have smallpox currently. But they sell like Italian honeybees and Russian honeybees. That's just going to bad temper. They – Of course. Yeah.

So they're – so and then those different strains have, are associated with different temperaments. Now the reality is the queens are out there mating, the drones are out there mating. Everything that's currently for sale is pretty much a mix unless you're doing the artificially inseminated queens, which are like the breeder queens. You can artificially inseminate a bee? Yep. I don't personally do it. You need like a laboratory and stuff.

Um, and they do it for, yeah, they do it. You need like a laboratory and stuff. And they do it for – yeah, they do it with – I think they put them to sleep with like – I want to say liquid nitrogen, but it's the cold gas. Cold gas. Yeah. And then – but they do that for if you're trying to breed like – it's just like horses you get the racehorse that like breeds is going to breed really good racehorses thousands and thousands of dollars for um you know even the the offspring of that horse um it's the same thing with bees you get a breeder queen that does that um how do you identify your secretariat of bees well mostly how much honey they produce and stuff and i'll see queen i'll see bees for sale and they say oh it's the great granddaughter of this queen by this beekeeper some people get really into it

um nepo bees it's it's hard to know exactly because there isn't the money in it that there is in horse racing you're not microchipping them yeah um well yet you do want to start that microchipping bees would be interesting i think the technology would have to be a little smaller we do marker queens we use a little paint uh and some people do a number they you can do a sticky number on the back of the queen um but it was funny when uh the russia ukraine thing happened everybody who's selling russian bees russia got a really bad rap and all of a sudden those sellers are all selling ukrainian bees now because you know there there's some there's some like historical thing about uh the different strains of bees but i think a lot of it these days is more of a marketing thing of like it

russian bees tend to be better producers italians are supposed to be gentler uh but most bees that you're buying are a mix um kind of fits like the real world people stereotypes yeah italians are gentle folks the russians are a little more you know in your face and then like not making the distinction anymore between russia and ukraine for the bees is kind of like what i think russia is doing right now so from igor to ivan true yeah it's all the same family man is there a bee black market so uh there's bee rustling um so in california if you've uh 408 hives what fits on a semi truck yeah uh and if you have those on pallets and they get dropped in a field where there's nobody's watching them you have no internet service or anything and then you go back to the hotel and this is a little different side

of the industry than i i do uh because i don't do migratory beekeepers but another person will drive up in a truck with a forklift and they will load up their those hives of bees they can steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in a truck load for a crime that at least now they're starting to take it a little more seriously but for a long time you know people wouldn't take um it's as seriously as cattle or something else just because it's not a something people are used to um now we're putting you know people put gps trackers in the hives and people go after be rustling the same way people go after cattle rustling um not nicely not like dog fighting too yeah it's uh so it's it's very uh you know but people would be able to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars

of bees and equipment overnight um and so that was that was a big concern honey laundering is also a thing where you will have uh so like importing honey from China kept on flooding the market with rice syrup and corn syrup and really low quality honey. And so the government was like, OK, we're not buying honey from China anymore. And a lot of this is oversimplified. But so China ships it to Vietnam and Vietnam. Now it's imported and sold here in like big supermarkets that ran with Walmart um I'll never buy my honey from Walmart ever as um as Vietnamese honey or Mexican honey because that's where it was bottled but it wasn't actually produced there yeah and so then it's corn

syrup and rice syrup and things like that whereas when when I sell my honey, I don't even mix honey from different yards together. If my honey from the yard in Havertown isn't mixed with my yard media, and then I'll often label the actual front of the bottle of where the honey comes from. Where's this honey you're giving us? Let's see. Yeah, let's see. I would like to see a little bit. Yeah, so this is my media, this media honey.

A little Delco honey. I like that. A little media. That's beautiful. I have a Havertown one. Yeah, so this is my media, this media honey. A little doco honey, I like that. A little media, that's beautiful. I have a Haverstown one. Oh, yeah? Which one's better? I like them both. I've never really had bad honey.

Nice. But. Are you, is this an issue that people are feeding kids below the age of one honey? And what happens with that? Yeah, so belief is that uh kids below one aren't um are more susceptible to botulism um what's that botulism is like a developmental i don't know all that much about it it's a developmental illness that really young children have now kids under one typically don't eat solid food yeah that's so they're not eating like broccoli and getting botulism from there.

But everybody thinks like, oh, honey, like the kid can like eat a little bit of honey and their immune systems just aren't built up enough. That being said – Is it going to be like a TBI or something like that? What would it do if you have some honey underneath one? It's – well, if it happened to have – the idea is that if it happened to have botulism and their immune system was weak enough, then the kid could get botulism, which is not a good thing. Sure, yeah. But the catch there is that you can't ethically take 100 kids under one and feed them all honey and see how many get botulism.

So they have to – like a lot of warning labels, we have to put it on everything because you can't ethically test how big of a risk it would be. It seems like a very low – high risk, low reward to begin with right it's not even so it's just i put it on the labels because that's the the management you know the best practices in the industry most these days most parents who have a kid like if a lesson like that they'll have the the mommy and me classes and all that stuff will have already gone over like all the stuff not to feed them and all the little things that they could put in their mouth and choke on and everything else so it's typically a an added level of uh protection but it's nice that we can fit it on the label because that's about the only case that you ever see honey being an issue it

doesn't go bad they found some in the egyptian tombs that was still good no way wow yeah so it'll crystallize over time if it's real raw honey um this is from this year it hasn't crystallized yet but um over time it'll it'll kind of solidify it makes really good and warm toast but when they went to the egyptian tombs there was still honey in there that was good wow that's crazy what i we haven't talked about this one yet what's the deal with carpenter bees are they just like kind of the big dumb cousin of the the real doll like what is up with that i feel like they get the worst rep that's what it feels like yeah so carpenter bees are interesting they um they are obviously they're different than honeybees um but they chew into wood and they can over time with enough of them, they can do real damage.

But it's not like termites where it's like your entire house sold right away. The ones that will go after you with carpenter bees are the male bees are the aggressive ones, but they can't sting. The female ones can sting, but they're not really aggressive. They're kind of hanging out in the hive. And carpenter bees don't like any kind of vibration. So if you put a boom box right next to it, their colony, they'll sometimes leave. But yeah, I don't deal with carpenter bees.

I don't deal with carpenter bees a whole lot. I do, bold-faced hornets are one that I've started to do a little bit of work with in terms of removing them. They make these massive papery nests and they – one day you'll just go outside and all of a sudden there's this huge nest there. But I don't do anything that I have to spray, any kind of chemical. And so I use a large commercial shop vac and we'll – I actually shop vac the bees that are coming out. And I have a microphone stand that I'll put up right in front of their entrance. And then I hit on the nest and all the bees that are coming back to the nest will go in.

All the bold-faced hornets and all the ones that are out will go into the vacuum. And then I'll slowly kind of tear the nest down and get all the bees out of it eventually just freeze the whatever's left um were you like every kid where you would try to trap a bee and try to trap a fly in the same glass yeah i'm dull and then put a put a little uh a cover on it and then watch them fight like we were no i've never i've never done that specific experiment i think i was too busy with the you know 80 000 bees in the high a little more time like trying to i'm catching this fly and this fly is going to go yeah you have more nefarious intentions with my bees dude yeah i don't know if i ever had the patience to like line the two up try to get them to fight what

about there's a i can't think of the name of the flies but the ones that are like an invasive species that came over like on a cargo ship spotted lanternfly spotted lanternflies do they interface with the bees at all is there any issues with you being in the area no so what they'll actually do about a good 12 round fight yeah that's what i'm saying spotted lanternfly oh yeah aren't they like they're blind and they just can't really do anything beneficial is that they seem to hop well but so when spotted lanternflies eat the the trees that they like to eat they produce this um basically what they poop out uh is honeydew uh which is like this sticky resin and what we found the year that they were really bad in this area they were only like here for like it seemed like

they were super bad for a year or two and then they were just gone i don't know if they ate all the food crops or they found better ways of controlling them but um the bees would actually eat the honeydew and produce spotted lanternfly like the honeybees would eat the honeydew and produce honey out of it and so some of the other beekeepers in the areas are actually marketing and selling spotted lanternfly honey. Oh, that sounds like a way worse one. Some people don't. I don't think it kind of has a darker color. I don't think that many of mine, I didn't really notice that many of mine had a big effect on it.

That seems like a tough marketing to be like the bees are eating spider lanternfly shit and then we're making honey making honey from it yes line up at the store that's all for you guys i don't know how that's like a big selling yeah i i never tried to use it as a sales pitch uh but i've known a couple other people who say it sells really well so maybe if they if they come back maybe that's something i'll try different strokes i guess real or. So killer bees are real. Um, there's, so there's two different kinds of categories that people confuse. There's the Africanized killer bees. Basically people took, uh, Italian honeybees and African honeybees, and they tried to breed them together to make a gentle, good producing honeybee.

And then everybody says, oh, they escaped, but honeybees are usually free-range, so that's probably just swarmed. And then they actually got into the country in two different, by the coast and up through Mexico. And so down south, you'll get hives that look just like honeybees, normal honeybees. They produce honey, you take care of them,

but the genetics are just such that you, they flip a switch and they just go berserk on you. Um, I've dealt with one hive that was, um, had come up from down South and I believe it was probably kind of Africanized, uh, which is the term for when for when you get some of those genes. So it's not like it's the specific bees coming up. It's those bees are breeding with these bees and you get some of those genes. Same thing if you have dogs, that dog, you know, people think pit bulls are more aggressive. If the dog has a little bit of pit bull in it, it might be a more aggressive.

Yeah. You know, it's just a genetic thing. So you're saying the migrant bees are terrorizing the u.s in a way not in so many words but yeah um but yeah so aurora colorado has never been the same they're taking american jobs yeah i told them i could pollinate and they're doing it for me with the honeybees they will like normal honeybees if you go into a hive i there's a bunch of different phases that i went through named one year it's like the first they're just curious you know they don't care that you're there then they're curious about you being there then they're like defensive they're warning you they're flying then they're actually defensive and then it goes all the way up to like total wars like if you just go up to a hive you kick

it over and you just like get them really mad you know you don't you usually do that sort of thing but i've been working on hives sometimes where something moves and accidentally the hive falls over all of a sudden the bees are pretty mad uh and then you might have like a hundred bees trying to sting you whereas like africanized bees you go up to the hive you take the lid off and all of a sudden you have you,000 bees trying to sting you. They're just all – and then you walk away from the hive. Normal honeybees, as you get further away, they get less and less interested in following you. When you have bees that are more aggressive, you will get – they'll actually chase you for further and stuff like that.

I heard that if you jump in in if a certain bee is chasing you and you jump into a pool they will just hover above the pool until you come out yeah it's with honeybees i think they would do that if you got them you'd have to get them really mad for them to do that most honeybees are going to lose interest because for the most part honeybees are purely defensive they're really people who say, oh, these bees are really aggressive. No, they're really just defensive. They're only trying to defend their hive. They might be aggressive towards another hive that they're trying to rob honey from, but they're not going to be aggressive towards people.

They'll really only be defensive towards people. Whereas when you get some of the more aggressive genes in there, you can get hives that are pretty bad so when i breed hives i'm you know if a hive is nice and gentle then that's the hive that i'm trying to build up uh split from make those you know those hives uh be better okay have you ever seen the movie my girl no i don't think so movie in the 90s about Macaulay Culkin was in it and he starred alongside another like young child actress. And the whole movie is just them becoming friends. And then it's normal, kind of like their parents don't want them to see each other. And then the big thing of the movie is that randomly, I don't know where Macaulay Culkin gets stung to death by bees.

It's a totally out of nowhere. Don't know why that had to happen kind of thing. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty rare i think the the number that i heard several years ago when i looked it up for mass envenomation which is basically like you get stung today there's like something like 10 stings per pound for like every pound of body weight you have it takes 10 stings now with allergies and things like that there's other factors i mean there's people who you can get stung once and die but um and you can develop allergies to sting so that's something that i

um you know watch out for very carefully that's why i wear a full b-suit every time you know for the majority of the time so i'm going out to the hives because if i develop an allergy to stings this whole business that i've spent my entire life building becomes a whole lot harder. Right. So are you doing regular allergy tests where you're going and getting like those kind of little pricks in your back or whatever they do? No, the allergy test is when I get stung. If I throw glasses out, that's a pretty big trial and error there, dude. I can't breathe.

That's the allergy test. That's a tough, yeah. But I did actually do the full allergy testing before I started keeping bees as a kid because when I was a really young child, I got stung by something and had a bad reaction. So we made sure I wasn't allergic to bees before starting beekeeping. Yeah, that makes sense. And my parents made me read a lot of books on it and stuff before I was able to start up my first hive. Were they excited about it? Were they when you kind of seemed like it was – as you got this was going to really become your career what do they think they probably were

somewhat excited about it but they like as a kid you just want them to be like yeah like sure you can keep bees and here's the bees and here's the hive like you kind of just want the thing that you want sure uh and they had more of the approach of like here's an encyclopedia of bees we'll read this together if you're still interested which is kind of a good way to do it because i was interested in so many different things as a kid yeah you know we went through one book on it and then grew interested so we went through another and then for christmas they gave me like a bee suit and then i was able to start one hive at the same historic site and um then do that successfully and i sold the honey and i was able to to buy another hive and um it was actually several years before we actually kept bees at my

parents house i started it uh at that historic site um so that i could kind of have a place for they were worried about the neighbors and you know things like that so okay makes sense so i'll show you this this lady she's like pretty big on tiktok texas bee lady yeah do you know her yeah what do you thought if well if there's any like we have to understand about the beekeeping world is like if somebody if something's online about bees and it gets more than like 100 views probably 10 people send it to me um so but yeah it's it's similar work to what i do with removing bees from walls um i don't quite have the voice for tiktok uh or the flowing blonde hair it's true she's hot certainly helps yeah but 11 million followers holy moly um yes they're very it's also hard for me to know how popular

something is because like everybody will send me a beekeeping thing so i'll just assume that everyone in the world knows about something but it's just that everyone who's seen it sends it to me yeah so why did she get stung she's gone total like raw dog for this which is really so it's you why doesn't she get stung if you go slowly and carefully enough and use enough smoke you can do that she probably does get stung i'd be very surprised if she'd never gotten stung yeah um what the bees are doing here is they're going in to follow that queen so a lot of it she's following the body language of of the bees um and there's a couple of reasons that i do things a little differently one of the main

reasons that i use the full suit and when she does not is because i'm often teaching a second person and if i i don't mind going through a hive without a full suit on because I, I know I'm not allergic. I know what it feels like to get stung. I'm not that worried about it. It's often a better, I'd rather risk getting stung than being in a bee suit when it's 95 degrees out. But I found that as soon as I don't wear a bee suit, especially in those hot days, the

clients who are coming out, I was like, oh, I'll be fine too. It's like, well, but if you get stung, then like, that's going to be a more negative experience. And so I do it as kind of a, um, as kind of like taking every precaution because I'm teaching. If I'm just going through my own hives, my own backyard, I would def or if, even if I'm just going through one hive in a day, I'll go through and not wear the whole suit. Do you get indoctrinated into this stuff? Did you have to get stung? Because you know how like when police go through police academy, they have to get tased.

Like, well, is that kind of like – Oh, yeah. Like joining a gang. You got to tell somebody. Joining the beekeeper gang. Yeah, it's a very – it's kind of just naturally you'll get stung very quickly especially when i started out i i think i had a smoker and a hive tool which is a little pry bar used to go through the hive um and i did not have a good bee suit i had uh those tyvek painting suits

and real makeshift if you get stung through that the stinger gets stuck in the tyvek and so every time you brush against it you get a little half sting so you get these little clusters of sticker bush and then you're like brushing your pants off and you're getting like yeah and then the the uh seams would rip and so i'd have all these holes in it um and so i learned to do a lot of beekeeping without a bee suit where you have to use a lot more smoke in the hive. If you use a, like when I do removals,

I don't use the smoker at all when I'm removing bees from a wall. It tends to drive them further into the spaces. And whereas when I'm working through a hive, I'll use a little bit of smoke, but I don't, you have to use as much cause I still have the suit on. If a couple of bees get angry, I can still finish up what I'm doing there. And then the other thing is speed and efficiency. I need to, you know, get through a lot of hives very quickly. It's nice to have the suit on. You don't have to worry about every single individual bee that might possibly want to sting you.

You just have to kind of be going through the hives and um go through a lot of people wear suits and then no gloves um and they you can you've you know you want to have that dexterity when you're going through the hives um for me i wear the full thing when i'm teaching just to have the best best practices and then for a lot of years i didn't use any smoke so then i used the full the full suit so i'm done i think uh do you have anything else any any issues with uh beyonce's fans getting confused with your industry the beehive and all and it seems like they're going down a rough turn now too yeah so i actually have, once over the summer I had somebody call me, I just launched

Google ads for, uh, removing, you know, doing removals and teaching beekeeping and stuff. Uh, and I had this lady call me and she was very confused and she was wondering why some cleaning service that was like, you know, help her honeybees or something hadn't shown up. And I was like, I'm really sorry. I'm not that sorry, but she's been so old and confused. I was trying to like, I go on my phone and find her the right number. I was like, it's definitely not the right number, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. I love it. Where can people find you? What do you do and how can you help people? So I'm at elishoneybees.com. I do everything involving beekeeping. So if you're looking at learning honeybees uh learning how to

keep bees on your property just having someone come and do the whole thing for you and give you custom labeled honey or if you have bees in your walls or if you want to buy honey beeswax candles um i i do it all if it involves honeybees i can i either probably do it or can point you to somebody who can perfect nice well hey man thank you so much yeah this is great thanks for having me very much we appreciate it seriously yeah that was awesome