The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.41: Chris Marquardt on Commercial Beekeeping

Episode Date: March 20, 2015

This episode: friend Chris Marquardt talks about the commercial beekeeping program he took that led to a happy career as a full-time apiarist. We also discuss big versus small beekeeping, colony collapse disorder, and what Chris loves, and hates, about his job. You will also learn what kind of bees produce milk, if you don't already know.

There's a lot of people that think that just, I think it's great that a lot of people are getting interested in beekeeping, the more the merrier, but I think a lot of people think that to help out and to save the bees, so-called, because the CCD is to become a beekeeper, when sure, that may be a good thing, but in terms, it's just reducing like what type of pesticides you use and planting way more forage for the bees and helping them out in that regard. This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant website and podcast is devoted to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. I hope you'll check it out. You can visit us at theruminant.ca and you can find the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, and other great podcasting apps. I'm also on Twitter at at ruminant blog. You can write to me at editor at theruminant.ca. Okay, let's do a podcast.

Hey everybody. So once again, I'm a day late releasing the show. This time I have a pretty good excuse. I got in after a very, very long day on the farm last night and the power was out. So all my plans of completing all the office work, including getting this episode out were for naught. So here I am Thursday morning, just bashing this thing out. I think you're going to like today's conversation. It is with Chris Marquart, who is a friend of mine who is a commercial beekeeper, and he graciously agreed to get on the phone and tell me and you about what he does. Coming up in future episodes of The Ruminant, you're going to hear from Molly Haviland, who is a colleague of Elaine Ingham, the person perhaps most associated with the soil food web approach to soil health. And that should be really interesting. As well, I've got booked to come on the show pretty soon, Peter McCoy, who is with a website

called Radical Mycology, and he's going to talk about fungi. And I'm very excited for that. I also recorded a question and answer session at Permaculture Voices 2 conference featuring Curtis Stone and Jean-Martin Fortier. So that's coming up in the near future. I got all kinds of other great guests that I'm slowly lining up and I'm excited to bring to you. What else can I say? I want you to consider calling my Skype number and telling me and the listenership about a good idea you have for their farm. If you call 310-734-8426, you will get a voicemail and on the voicemail, you can record a message for me. That's what Dan Brisbois did in last week's episode and I really hope you'll consider doing

it too. 310-734-8426 and just tell us about something cool you're doing on your farm. That would be great. All right, so who are we talking to today? Hello, my name is Chris Marquardt. I work as a commercial beekeeper in Alberta, Canada, and I've been doing this. This will be my third season now working as a commercial beekeeper. Chris Marquardt, thanks a lot for coming on the ruminant podcast no problem thanks for having me uh i haven't yet to meet a commercial beekeeper before uh it's an area of farming i know very little about and i'm

just curious like how you got into that can you give a little bit can you go further back in your in your biography and tell us about how this happened sure absolutely i've always since i can remember since high school i've always been interested in bees but i never really pursued it until i was probably in my 30s um the reason for that is just because i wanted something more than just a just beekeeping. I wanted to go more in depth, more about the sciences, more about apiculture in general and botany and areas of study like that. So when I was traveling in New Zealand, I found a course specifically geared towards commercial beekeeping. And then when I came back to Canada, I started

researching courses such as that, like the one in New Zealand. And I found a course that had been re-initiated and applied for that. And three years later, I've been working as a commercial beekeeper. So prior to that, did you have no experience in beekeeping? None whatsoever. No, I've read articles and magazines, but none whatsoever. Well, yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's a similar trajectory for a lot of young, small scale veggie growers these days. Like myself, I didn't have any experience before I got interested in it. And I came to it as a as an adult but um so where do you where would you say that inspiration came from um first of all but just my love for honey um specifically like i just i can't get enough of that i much prefer it over sugar

over anything um and just the varieties that you can acquire what the bees make from the nectar sources that they they can get um and then just um reading reading about bees and what they can do and it's quite interesting the type of uh species of bees that they have and just went from there so chris would you say there were many you encountered many surprises as you went like given that that you came from no background in beekeeping, as you went through the formal program, were there any big surprises in terms of what you learned versus your conceptions about beekeeping? There weren't any huge surprises, no.

I mean, just when we're studying bees, I mean, specifically what they can do in terms of finding nectar resources and what they do as a superorganism in the hive to maintain their quality and temperature and different things of that sort was pretty interesting when you get down to really studying them. But in general, there wasn't really too, too much of a surprise from what I already read just in passing with articles and whatnot. How about, was there much of a difference between how you envision the work you'd be doing at the scale you'd be doing it versus what you're doing now?

Yeah, the scale is something to be, for sure, completely different. I mean, if you're just a hobby beekeeper or backyard beekeeper with maybe two hives upwards to 50, and what we deal with is upwards of thousands of hives. It's quite a huge scale, and it's just your time management. That was the biggest process. I mean, you can't just – if you have a couple hives in your backyard, it's great. You can just watch them daily and check them once a week or something. But when you're on our scale,'s there's way way more management and stuff you need to look out for well and i assume we haven't talked about it yet but i assume you

work for is it like is this is this a company you applied to or is this a family connection or how did you get involved in this job when i took the commercial beekeeping course they um they choose a beekeeper that you get to work for and it has to be a commercial beekeeper so somebody that has more than 500 hives because it's a commercial beekeeping course so they you write a little almost like a bio of like how you got into beekeeping why you wanted to get into it where you see yourself in the future. And then based on that criteria, they kind of pick a beekeeper that would be suitable for your shooting towards where you want to be in the future.

And then you get placed with a beekeeper like that for your practicum. I see. And is that definition 500 hives? Is that a standard definition to divide kind of commercial beekeeping from more forms that are more like hobby? I mean, there must be smaller operations that are still trying to make a living. hives and it's just a family run operation and they consider themselves they might consider themselves I should say commercial beekeepers or they just might consider themselves hobby beekeepers the commercial guys it's it's kind of a little bit of a joke I mean if they're in a nice mood then they might consider them somebody with a hundred hives a commercial beekeeper or and if they're not if they're kind of in a grumpy mood, then they might just consider them a hobby beekeeper because they don't have upwards of thousands of hives. And okay, so it sounds like there's a similar type of tension or antithopy that exists in other forms of farming, you know, the prairie

farmer laughing at guys like me, and maybe guys like me criticizing the prairie farmer for being too industrial or something yeah yeah yeah you could you could see that yeah i mean it's all it's all in good spirit though i mean everyone's willing to help each other in the community but it's still just kind of ribbing or poking fun at people but that's about it so so it is a pretty a fairly collegial uh culture overall like if you walk into a gathering of beekeepers and it's all beekeepers with 50 hives or less, are they judging you for working for a company with over 500 or is it pretty friendly? It's pretty friendly. I mean, when I went to a smaller beekeeping

conference, I guess it was, or semi-annual conference, a lot of people there, they only had, there was maybe one or two people that had upwards of 1,000 hives. And for the majority, I should say, actually, they only had about one or two hives or 20 to 50 hives. And when they found out that myself or my colleagues worked on big commercial farms, they wanted to know how we managed it and what we did for our processes after, I guess, bee hives injury and how we did things. And it was curious to know because I wanted to know what they did as smaller beekeepers because they had more time to inspect their hives and make a decision on what they were going to do towards if there was pest management or just making more honey or if they're breeding queens

or certain things like that. So it's kind of quite friendly, but I mean, the commercial guys, the big, big commercial guys, some of them are a little bit secretive. I bet. So I don't want to dwell on this topic too long, although I was really interested in asking you about the level of collegiality among the different scales. I'll just end on on this this question um if you were going to respectfully criticize like common mistakes or or bad practices of really small beekeepers

uh what would you say and conversely what do you think those same what would what would those small beekeepers respectfully criticize about the really large companies? That's a tough one. I'd say the smaller beekeepers, if you're looking to get into it, I would say try to find a mentor or somebody that has been doing beekeeping for a few years. That's coming from a commercial standpoint. That's coming from a commercial standpoint. The other thing that there's a lot of beekeepers that want to do is they want to be all organic with their bees,

and that's something that's really difficult to do nowadays because you can't. They want to have organic techniques towards their beekeeping, and that's fine, but a lot of people, the first time they do it, they just go straight into it, and in some ways, you just can't survive. If you don't know what you're doing, then your bees might perish or might not get through the first season. And conversely, for large-scale beekeepers, it's basically, I would say it's us, the way we treat our bees, specifically if we're doing pollination,

and just keeping them alive and maintaining them so they can pollinate crops, orchards, and just the way that we feed them or just treat them, I guess, move them around. Yeah, there's a lot of people that don't agree with that. Is it mostly the movement? Is it just that they believe it's hard on the bees to be doing that? It does stress them out.

I mean, it takes, like anything, I mean, any type of livestock that you're moving, it stresses them out, and then it takes them a little while to settle back down. But when you move them from one location to another location, they're pretty angry for the first few days. Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, let's, let's, let's move on and talk about your business, the business of commercial beekeeping. So you work for a company. How many, how many beekeepers in the company? The company, I'm not too sure specifically with with my location that i work at uh well i don't know tell me a bit about the company maybe maybe that's the better question

to start like uh what you know yeah just describe the company a bit and what they do and what their scale of operations are we're pretty i'd say we're're a pretty large scale company or farm. We have about, I think, 3,000 to 4,000 hives. And I'm not too sure how many nucs that we have. In total, we have, there's myself, maybe about four or five people in the spring that help us out. And then hopefully we can get, once honey flow starts happening and we start pulling honey, we usually have about three to four more people just helping out, just extracting honey and pulling honey just so that we can get it off the hives.

just because so that we can get it off the hives. In total, I'd say we have about 7 to maybe 12 people during the season from March until, I'd say, September working for us. Okay. And would you say, because I've been doing a little bit of reading leading up to this interview, would you say that for this company, its bread and butter is in renting out the hives to farmers who need the pollination? Or is it primarily the honey that drives income? I'd say, depending on the crops that you get to pollinate, it depends if that's your bread and butter or not.

And you do, it's kind of both, depending on, renting your crops out for pollination and acquiring the honey would both be your bread and butter. But if you have a bad season towards your nectar flow, then renting out your hives, you're still going to have bread and butter from that. So it's 50-50 between the both of them, I'd say. I mean, you could have a really good year and then still rent your hives out. have a really good year and then still rent you a hard boat. See, I think a lot of ignorant bee people like me, until recently, I really didn't appreciate that the pollination business is an important part of the beekeeping business in modern beekeeping. I would have assumed it was all about the honey.

No, no, no, no. It's huge. I mean, farmers rely on us just as much as we honey. No, no, no, no. It's huge. I mean, farmers rely on us just as much as we rely on them, or orchardists even, yeah. So, Chris, you're about to kind of get going again after, I mean, we're talking in late January, and you've just had a bit of a break. So maybe you could take us through your yearly cycle briefly.

You're going to be leaving in a few days to go back to work. So maybe starting in early February and taking us through the year, can you talk about what your job entails when you're working? Sure. So February and March, the bees usually aren't there. I mean, they're not hibernating, but they're just eating their winter stores and waiting until it warms up a lot more. And because it's Alberta, the weather can be not too good sometimes.

So usually for a month and a half, we're usually inside building boxes, making frames, doing maintenance on the extracting line if it needs being fixed, and maintaining the trucks, checking to make sure that everything's in running order, making sure the housing for the foreign workers that we have coming in is up to standards with the person that comes to inspect it. And then once March comes, and the snow has melted quite a bit, we unwrap the hives and we check to see quickly just how well the bees have survived over the winter and mark to see how many are dead.

So we put a pollen patty on, and we usually drench them with some sugar syrup. And the pollen patty kind of builds them up for the spring, so it gets them ready. It kind of tricks them into thinking that it gives them more food, and the sugar kind of tricks them into thinking that there's a little bit of a nectar flow. So when we do actually take the covers off

and flowers start to come up, they're ready and strong to go for getting honey. So March and then April, May, we're starting to put, once we've got all the covers off the hives, we're starting to check all the hives, make sure, clean out any deads, because if they're dead, then it could have just been from starvation or it could have been from like a disease

or fungus or something like that. So we take the dead hives, we take them out of the yard because we don't want the stronger hives robbing the hives out and then acquiring the said disease or whatever the bees passed on from. And we come May, we start putting supers onto them

and getting them ready for pollination. And then once there's a couple supers on the hives, then we... Excuse me, Chris, what's a super? A super is just a honey super. So it's basically an empty box with comb already drawn onto it. Ah, okay. And that's what the bees are going to fill up with honey. Yeah.

So we put that on, and then once all those are done, then we let them sit for a little bit, and then once they're ready for pollination, then we take them down for pollination. Then we put more supers onto them. And then once pollination is done, once the agrologist or agronomist says it's good, it's usually, depending on the variety of plants or whichever crop your bees are pollinating, it's usually two to three weeks that the bees are down there pollinating.

And then they say that's good. Everything looks like it's been pollinating. And then they say that's good. Everything looks like it's been pollinated. We move our bees back up to their yards that they've been residing at, their permanent yards. And they stay there for the rest of the summer. And then we start taking down all the supers and start getting them ready for winter. This is usually around end of August, September. We're finishing up on extracting all the honey that we've had through the summer. And then we start medicating them and giving them a little bit of extra sugar. It's just sucrose.

So like it's made from beets. So it's just concentrated sugar. We start giving them that just to give them a little bit more for wintertime. And then once they've taken down all that sucrose, then we get them ready for winter by just taking all the lids off and putting their insulated black tarps back on and pushing them up. And that's about October, November, by the time we're all finished. Okay. Well, briefly take me back to the pollination part of the season.

Like how many moves are you, like how many miles are the bees covering? I mean, in the trucks, like how many times, like, as I understand, a lot of beekeeping operations end up moving their bees through the through the pollination season to just always have them on different uh flowering fields yeah yeah there's lots of guys um specifically us we just do one move down to i don't know how many miles it is about kilometers it might be about 400 500 kilometers down to where we take them to be pollen for pollination um and that's just the one move that we do so taking them down and then just taking them back um but there's other commercial beekeepers that they will specifically here

in western canada they'll come down from uh um northern northern bc and northern alberta all the way down to the lower mainland in Vancouver to pollinate blueberries and then they will work their way up through the Okanagan and then once Okanagan and then once around May, June hits they're back up north

and then they come back down south for pollination of other crops in Alberta. Okay, so what is the difference between your operation and theirs that they feel the need or incentive to do that? I mean, when you tell me that you guys do one move, that's got to be a lot nicer, just a lot less disruptive and a lot less work for you and the bees. So why are the other large beekeepers moving so much more?

There's just a demand for it. I mean, specifically with blueberry pollination, there's just not enough beekeepers that are willing, that are able to be in the lower mainland to pollinate the blueberries. The blueberry farmers know that if they have bees pollinating their bushes, then they're going to gain way more crop than if they didn't have bees in their yard. So a lot of guys, they just go down there and they help out by bringing their bees down. They do get paid, compensated for pollination of blueberries, and then they just keep moving them. So why doesn't your company company do that i guess i'm just trying to tease out like do you just happen to have an awesome setup where you have enough um pollination

potential in your one area that you just don't need to do it or or do you know what i mean like like if if these other companies are going after that profit incentive what allows you to stay put and i should say i asked just because of the some of the reading i've done gave me the impression that a lot of large companies are doing a lot of moving. You know, I was reading about the almond harvest in California and how each year, like three quarters of America's commercial bee companies end up in California to help pollinate the over a million acres of almond trees there. Yeah, yeah. the over a million acres of almond trees there. Yeah, yeah.

Specifically for us, I don't know. I think it's just, I mean, it is a lot of work moving your bees. And if you have a big, there's some guys that actually have big transport trucks, like big 53-foot trailers with a semi towing their bees. And that's great for them. But, I mean, if you only have a smaller truck with a semi towing their bees um and that's that's great for them but i mean if we're if you only have a smaller truck and you're only going a couple hours or a couple miles then it doesn't really make sense to truck them for us anyways it doesn't make sense to to truck them all over the place i don't know specifically what a lot of the guys that do follow the the

pollination trail what their incentive is but i think it's just pollination, and then they get honey from that as well. So maybe we can move on, Chris, and talk for a little bit about colony collapse disorder. I mean, I think anyone who's concerned about agriculture and food security, they have a sense that there's been a big problem in the first 15 years of uh of uh the 2000s can you can you talk about where we're at is is colony collapse disorder still a big problem or is it was it is it kind of less of a problem now? I don't really know. I mean, to be honest, and it's all my personal opinion, but there's 40 different things that are killing the bees and bee colonies. I can't specifically say that it's one thing

and that it's given a name like colony collapse disorder. There was, I mean, that huge period where the bees were dying off and we didn't know what it was and since then we still don't know what it is we've had ideas thinking it's it's been a mite or it's been systemic pesticides or or other things that it's just been monoculture crops but it's we do as beekeepers we do can we can regain back our hives like from the losses that we've had over winter if it's upwards of 10 to maybe 20 of our hives we can it's called splitting the hives so when the hive gets bigger um you take a bunch of bees and then you just introduce a new queen and then from one hive you can have maybe one or two new hives.

So we can recoup, but it's hard to say if this colony collapse disorder is still apparent or still happening. I honestly couldn't tell you. But it sounds like it's not something that is a major threat to your company's business. No, not at the moment. I mean, if we have, we usually like to keep our losses around like 5% to 10%, and anything over that is really bad. We consider it really, really bad.

Okay, so one last topic I just want to talk about briefly is just as agriculture has progressed, as it's become more and more modernized, we, we tend to see, like certain technologies have allowed farmers to, to plow up more and more land into what tend to be monocultures. And I'm wondering what effect the loss of diverse pollen and nectar, loss of diversity of the kinds that bees have access to, how that affects their nutrition, if at all, in your opinion. It affects their nutrition, if at all, in your opinion? It affects their nutrition hugely. I mean, if they're just on one crop or one area for miles around

that just has one flower source, then that's all they're eating. And that one flower source could not have enough nutrients to sustain the bees. It'd be like us eating one food or one vegetable for weeks at a time. And then once that vegetable's gone, we don't have anything else. So it does affect them, but I mean, they're really resilient to bees. I mean, if there's one specific crop that they have that you're pollinating, they'll find other crops and other flowers elsewhere for food. So I didn't ask you, what is your bees' primary pollen source?

Like, is it canola? Is that what they're generally feeding on during their main time in the summer? When we do pollination, that's specifically what we pollinate. When they're at their resting yards or their permanent yards, they're taking everything in from wildflowers to some farmers that we have our yards at. They just let their hay fields just bloom before they cut it. And so there's lots of hay fields, a little bit of canola, some alfalfa, lots of wildflowers. But when we take them down for the couple weeks of pollination,

that's specifically all they have is just canola. And that kind of leads me to wonder, like you must have some pretty strong opinions about what makes for the best honey. What are your personal preferences? If you could choose where the bees producing your honey were pollinating, what would you like? Here in Canada, specifically wildflower or buckwheat. Buckwheat doesn't really grow too well in Western Canada. Wildflower would be the best, I think.

It's good on the bees and they do really well on it and it tastes pretty good once you extract it. Interesting. Okay, so I have one more question for you. It's a question that I should have asked at the start because it's going to test your credibility as a beekeeper. Okay. Okay. It's a multiple choice question. And so here's the question. Which one of these is not a nickname for the honeybee that has been used in the last couple hundred years? Which one of these is a nickname for the honeybee that has been used in the last couple hundred years.

Which one of these is a nickname for the honeybee that has not been used in the last couple hundred years? Are you ready, Chris? I'll do my best. Okay, A, flying penises. B, white man's fly. C, flower oysters. So which one is not? Which one has not been used to describe the honeybee in the last couple hundred years?

A, flying penises. B, white man's fly. C, flower oysters. I'm going to go with A A I don't know why no I'm sorry Chris it was C flower oysters uh this is only according to one article I read but apparently actually it makes sense I would think flying penises you know they're going around kind of fertilizing all these flowers as if they were some kind of insect penis. Uh, and then, and then white man's fly apparently was what native Americans used to refer to the honeybee as because, um, they were, they associated honeybees with the, the influx of, of white settlers. And I made the third one up completely.

So even though you failed that question, I think you gained credibility from all the other questions. So your story does check out, but I'm still a little bit disappointed in you for that last error, Chris. Sorry, that was definitely a new one for me. I've never heard of that one. I mean, I know flowers

do have some sort of phallic symbol towards them. I mean, there's always the male stamen that's sticking out and there's ovaries for the plant, for the flower, but flying penises, it's interesting. Hey, I thought of one more question, Chris, you know, there's so many young people who for

different reasons want to get into agriculture. Uh, and the easiest entry seems to be vegetables. What are the prospects for, for doing what you did? it was is it still feasible uh are there job opportunities in beekeeping if people want to to take a course like you did with with an end to to working for a beekeeping operation absolutely there's so it's it's probably um i'd say one of the most in-demand jobs in agriculture this this moment, at this time, is beekeeping. It's such an easy, specifically for myself, it's one reason why I got into agriculture because for a young person like myself,

trying to invest in land was so much money. But just to have a couple of hives, it can cost you less than $500 to get started up and have your bees and get some honey and start selling that honey and actually make some money towards that. And then in regards to jobs, just in Canada, there's classifieds in all the bee journals, in all provincial bee journals, specifically everybody's looking, any type of beekeeper, Specifically, everybody's looking, any type of beekeeper, small or very large scale, like the one I work for, is always looking for just beekeepers or somebody that can help out extracting honey or anything.

So not even in Canada, but also worldwide, too. There's a huge call for beekeepers in different countries. So can you name one or two schools that someone might look into if they want to learn the trade? The school that I went to was Grand Prairie Regional College and it's the commercial beekeeping course. I know there's another course similar to ours and it's in New

Zealand. I don't know which technical school it's at. I know there's weekend courses, three-day courses or just certain courses geared towards certain aspects of beekeeping in Vancouver. I don't know exactly the places or who teaches them, but I know there's two places. I just can't remember the names of them. If you do a quick search on the internet, then you can definitely find courses. And how long was your course, the intensive course? intensive course it was 11 months so it was started in january and that was your courses it's mainly just a lot of book studies and learning about the bees and biology and a lot of dissecting of bees and under the microscope and it was from january to march was the first three months, and then middle of March, end of March, you're at your placement until September, end of September, and then you return to school for another two months, two and a half months, I think it is, for the business portion. And during, I think it's June or July, you go back to school for two weeks

for a queen rearing course. Okay, so I think, Chris, I have four more questions. Can you handle that? Sure. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, best three things about being a beekeeper? Best three things about being a beekeeper best three things would be

you're working with insects they don't talk back to you you get to you get to taste honey some of the best honey and you get to work outside during the summer time granted you get to work outside during the summertime granted you're in white coveralls so it can get pretty hot

but it's actually pretty peaceful when you're just in the hives and the bees are flying all around you and all you hear is buzzing and you're just working away and trying to help them out as much as you can or stealing their honey so those would be the three best things I'd say

I knew you'd say. I knew you'd say honey. I thought you would have included the glamour of being a beekeeper as one of them. But obviously you are a humble person. Okay, your three least favorite things about being a beekeeper? Getting stung for sure. I mean, the hundredth time you become stungung by a bee it still feels like the first time um it it never goes away and second would be um it's probably for my company it's probably the easiest thing that we're doing and it's just

moving bees because you're just loading the bees up and moving them from one place. But you have to do it in the middle of the night when the bees aren't flying. So it's just midnight runs, and you're really tired, and that can be pretty exhausting. And I'd say the third one is pulling honey supers in 35 degree heat. When a honey super weighs about anywhere from 70 to, or I'd say 60 to 80 pounds, and it's full of honey, and it's about, I'm about 5'9", so it's about, the tallest super would be about up to my chest, maybe just up to my nose and you have to pull that off

and then walk it over to the truck and put it on the truck. That can get really heavy. That sounds pretty difficult. When you mentioned number two, the getting up in the middle of the night to move the bees, I just immediately had the image of like an annoying co-worker beekeeper who like right when you're creeping up to the hive like pulls out a crinkly old bag of chips and starts making noise and then it wakes up the bees and you know then you're in trouble

no no they are they're usually by the time dusk, they're usually in their eyes and they're just hanging out. Yeah. Well, I guess that's okay then. Okay, that was the first two of the four questions. Third question, do you plan or have any interest in having your own commercial operation? Or is this what you want? Is this what you're going to keep doing forevermore?

I think absolutely. I'd love to have my own commercial operation. I don't know if I would go to the size that I'm working at right now. It just seems like it's a lot of work and when you're at that size, you need more than one full-time employee year round and I'd personally just like to have myself do it or one or two other people help out

and I can have a better handle on the management of my bees and what's happening with them but I'd like to I'd also like to go to another country and see how they do their beekeeping I mean I know that we do it commercially here and in America they do it similar to what we do in Canada but maybe somewhere else like I don't know Africa or India would be interesting to see how they do it or even Japan, just because they have different bees and the species. It's almost like you're describing taking some sort of sabitical. Anyway, and I hope you do.

I hope you get to go on a sabitical someday. Okay, I said four questions. This is the last one, Chris. Ready? Ready? Okay. someday uh okay i said four questions this is the last one chris ready ready okay last last question chris what kind of bees produce milk what kind of bees produce milk yeah i i have no idea is this like the multiple choice question no there's only one answer Chris it's boobies

I thought you'd get that one for sure I thought that would have been day one of a beekeeper course but I mean I guess if I was the dean of a beekeeper school i would structure things differently you might have caught me on an off day and i've only had one cup of coffee today so it could be around just wait till you wait and see how popular gonna be when you take all my bee humor back to the boys and and and maybe gals of of your company uh they're you guys are going to just

be rolling around on the floor i sure hope so yeah yeah uh chris thanks a lot for coming on the podcast i really appreciate it no thank you for for having me and asking me some questions okay so that's it please visit the ruminant.ca for all kinds of great content please call 310-734-8426 if you want to leave a message for the listenership about something cool you're doing on your farm or in your garden at ruminant blog is where i'm at on twitter editor at the ruminant.ca if you want to write me and it's about time to once again thank my wife, Vanessa, for all the music that you hear at the start and at the end of these episodes. Thanks for listening, folks.

Talk to you next week. life like it was meant to be because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking some real soul searching

and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and gr. We'll keep close quarters

with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be. Bye.