The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - What can Bleach do for your Honey Bees? Quite a lot actually! Adam Strickland shares the results.

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Frederick Dunn's Interview with Adam Strickland about a recent field study involving bleach in sugar syrup:  https://youtu.be/7SnFIqt5xuQ

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. Today, my special guest is going to be Adam Strickland. Adam is the owner and operator of Strickland Honey Farms LLC in Pennsylvania, a Penn State Biology alum and executive board member of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association. He's a rising figure in apiculture research, particularly focusing on practical solutions for commercial and hobbyist beekeepers. His recent study, which received funding through a 2004 Northeast Sare Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Grant, addresses a common headache for beekeepers. Black mold.

I'm Frederick Dunn, and here's Adam. So here we are with Adam Strickland. Adam, thank you and welcome to The Way to Be podcast. Interviews with experts, I'm really glad to have you here. Now, full disclosure, we know each other already. We're in the same bee club, both local and the state organization. And they're just like you to take a minute and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, where you're located, and how things are going for you there.

Sure. So my name is Adam Strickland. I am in the same bee club as Fred, unfortunately, or fortunately. I'm based out of Oil City, Pennsylvania. It's in northwestern PA. And I got into beekeeping about 10 years ago. I came home from college for the summer. And unbeknownst to me, my mom had purchased a nucleus colony of bees.

And I just kind of fell in love with them right then. That fall semester, when I went back, I joined the Penn State student beekeeping club. And the rest is history. Ever since then, I've been trying to learn as much as I can about bees. I'm a lifelong learner. And it's funny, I would study bees so much in college that my roommates thought that I was taking a course on beekeeping, actually. I think they saw me study more for bees than they did any of my classes. So, yeah, and then I graduated from Penn State with a degree in biology.

I moved back to home here. I kept beekeeping in the background as I continued to grow my numbers and work some different jobs. And then last May, I went full-time beekeeping. So I'm running around 300 colonies right now. I do a big one for me is selling nukes, honey production. And I also do some instrumental insemination. I got training for that through the epic program. That was through Penn State.

Shout out to Dr. Robin Underwood and Kate Anton. They ran an excellent program for that. And yeah, I got I-I-I training. I studied under Corey Stevens. We went to Penn State University for that, and that was an awesome experience. The networking in that was awesome as well. I got to meet some really cool beekeepers from

all over the northeast United States that I still network with today. Yeah, that's about it for now, just gearing up for the season ahead. We're recording this in April, and kind of a weird year so far, the bees are already trying to swarm on me. Yeah, early season, it seems. They should. And were you recently down with Bob Benny? I was.

Yeah, I went down there. in the last week of March. I shot Bob an email. I think it was at like midnight one night. And he called me at, I think it was, you know, 6 a.m. the next day. And I was just sitting there waking up, drinking my coffee. And I get this phone call from a strange number. And I probably sounded a bit gruff to him.

I said, yeah, who's this? He said, oh, this Adam Strickland. And I said, yeah, who is this? Oh, this is Bob Benny. And I'm like, oh, I got real apologetic. Bob, I'm sorry. I should have recognized your voice. But yeah, we had a nice little conversation, and I emailed him to see if I could go down and just kind of shadow them for three, four days. And he said, yeah, sure, come on down. So we set a date. And I did that. And it was an amazing experience.

Really great time. I recommend anybody who's aspiring to become a better beekeeper, or if you want to to, you know, try to make a living off of it or at least turn a profit. It doesn't have to be Bob, you know. It could just be anyone local to you. So there's people all over that would love to come and have you help them lift boxes for three or four days for free. Yeah. Give Salina those people a break there. Yeah. Oh, they're all, that whole crew was just amazing. Really great crew down there. You know them as well, I'm sure. Selina's very, very very kind John Seth or are a hoot really fun guys they have a new worker down there Cody great guy so yeah really really good crew it was can't say it enough

awesome experience were there any people from the University of Georgia Department of Entomology there they tend to be out in Bob's apiary's quite a bit no I didn't I didn't see any while I was there all right well I'm glad that you're here and we're going to have a really good discussion because this is super interesting to me personally, of course. You gave this presentation at Enroo University at our monthly meeting once, and it was really, really eye-opening for me. So this is going to be exciting. I hope it is for those who are listening. If you're viewing right now, but you'd rather listen and do something else, you can go to the podcast, which is the way to be podcast. Just Google it. It's on IHeart Radio.

It's on Audible and everything else. So you can find it and not wreck your vehicle. but there are going to be some visuals here that you're going to want to look at later. Also, Adam mentioned briefly that he did some instrumental insemination. We did a full video on that, so that link is also going to be down in the description. We did that thanks to Ernst Seeds giving us their area there. So that was a great intro. What I'm going to do is we're just going to let you do your presentation, Adam, and we'll have questions later maybe as we go.

I'll make my notes and then of course later people can write their comments down in the description or down in the comment section and Maybe Adam will peruse those later and give some direct responses. I don't know sounds pretty busy Yeah, no I can do that for sure Okay, if you'd interject at any time too Fred, you know, I'd like a Discussional type of conversation rather than just me up here presenting but whatever you want to do is good by me too as if you're like like me unless you write it down you're going to forget what your question was in two seconds i'm taking notes as we go i have the memory of a goldfish so all right adam you go ahead and just take it away here tell us well all right yeah let's kick it off so i i wrote a sarah grant uh this was funded by the northeast

sear which is a USDA funded research um and educational department uh i studied bleat in sugar syrup. I don't know if you can you see my mouse as well Fred? Yep sure can okay cool I guess I don't need to narrate it though but uh yeah so chlorinated germicidal feed for honey bees and there's all the legal jargon that you can look at there so if I say anything controversial it's not the opinion of the USDA or northeast serr and all right so why do we feed bees sugar syrup in the first place personally I do it a lot for queen rearing I always like to feed a thin sugar syrup so that they better produce wax to dry out those queen cells like you see there and you know Bob Benny has done a lot of talking about this on his channel and has presented some pretty cool research that the thinner syrup you feed to an extent has some really interesting benefits

over, say, like, two to one, which is better for pre-winter feed, something like that, whereas the thin syrups have an extremely stimulative effect. But getting a little off topic there, but you could also feed sugar syrup to improve queen acceptance, whether you're introducing a queen cell or a mated queen or a virgin queen, for that matter. faster growth rate if you want to accelerate your nuke growth growth rate so that you can sell them quicker to your customers. Really important to feed through the summer durf, I think. For me, that hits in my area around the middle of July, typically, and it'll usually last until the knotweed blooms, bamboo, middle of August. And colonies can really kind of start to tumble downhill if they don't have some.

some reserves there. So I really like to feed during the summer dearth. And that, I'll kind of speak on this later too, but that really prepares them to take advantage of that fall nectar flow that we are so fortunate to have in our area. Winter prep, you know, feed them two to one sugar syrup to get them heavy for winter. I'm a big believer that the feed for winter should be in the comb where it's meant to be. Not, you know, Of course, if you have to, you know, Mountain Camp Method or Fondup Patty, Sive Alive, whatever, great stuff if you have to. But ideally, I think that feed, the honey should be in the comb above the cluster,

where it's been for eons for those bees. That's what they're used to. That's what they know. And that seems to really help winter survivability. Poor weather is a big one, especially in spring. I'm sure you've got the same weather as me. last night, Fred. We had a dusting of snow. Yeah. Just let you know it's 26 degrees here. Yeah. And I frost-seated a bunch of plants last night because I knew that's going to happen. Yeah.

So yeah. Some earth's pollinator mix. What's that? Some Ernst pollinator mix. It was actually clover that I'm going to mess up the name of it. Loden maybe. What's that called? Do you know what I'm talking about? The taller clover that works in wetter soils. Oh, like sweet clover, you mean? No. It's a white clover. It's the standard, but I think this is called Loden or something like that. Okay.

It's the taller, bigger blooms, more nectar, but needs a lot of moisture. So I have a lot of wetlands here, so it's actually going to be really good. Well, plenty of moisture this year. It's been raining in northwest Pennsylvania. Pretty much every day, it seems, which is good. we need water for nectar right um yeah next bullet point there climate change you know i talked to some older beekeepers and they say i used to be able to know when the nectar flow would start within a day or two you know oh it would start may 9th that's when the uh tulipopoplar trees would

bloom or what have you now it's just today it seems so much more variable um i mean i have i have bush honeysuckle blooming down my way and usually that doesn't start until two, two, three weeks from now. So with climate change, it just seems very, makes things very erratic as far as bloom time. So feeding sugar syrup can help us, you know, kind of better prepare ourselves for that. Decreasing pollinator habitat, another good reason to feed sugar syrup with ever-increasing population and intensive agricultural farming, we have decreasing pollinator habitat. So, yeah, that's why we feed sugar syrup.

And, oh, shoot, I meant to take this slide out. I'm sorry, Fred. I'll skip over that one. For those that are just listening, it started the title was, why I'm a better beekeeper than Fred, part one. Apparently, it's a multi-part. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's...

Taking me down topic by topic. Part two is in there later. All right. Back to seriousness. Okay, previous work. So a lot of beekeepers feed chlorinated sugar syrup, sugar syrup with bleaching it already. But there was really no existing data showing whether this was beneficial for the bees

or, you know, harmful to the bees. Randy said a little bleach in the sugar syrup keeps gunk from growing and that he'd like to see some of the bee labs test this. Even though I'm not a bee lab, I figured, well, why can't I do this? There was some interesting research done back in the 70s by Lackett at all. They found that 10 to 100 parts per million of chlorine provided bees with the greatest survival. So this was not on a colony level, if my memory serves me correctly, that they did this study. They had bees in a lab with little cohorts that they would feed varying concentrations of chlorinated sugar syrup. And that was the Goldilocksone that they found.

Any greater or lower concentrations of chlorine resulted in shorter lifespans for the honeybees. So with my study, I did one teaspoon per gleeves. gallon of sugar syrup, one teaspoon of bleach per gallon of sugar syrup, which is roughly 32 parts per million, falls pretty squarely in the middle of that Goldilocks zone. Cain, 2021 was another study that found some potential issues with microbial growth in sugar syrup. There's live yeasts, and they thought maybe even nozima was reproducing. in there. So those live yeast can create mycotoxins as byproducts, which can result in

dysentery. And we all know what Nozema can do. It can wreck havoc on a colony. It can stifen spring buildup and even increase winter mortality as well. So yeah, last bullet point there, widespread use, but there was really no good data. There was a huge gap in the research that kind of stuck out to me like I I need to investigate this so I hope that this will be really helpful for you know hobbyists like you said hobbyists all the way up to commercial beekeepers I think that this just quickly just so people that are wondering about the Randy Oliver initial statements about that it's scientific beekeeping.com if you guys want to check that out his studies are very searchable and easy to find out and I'm glad that we did this because it's his he's the reason that I've

recommended this for so long also but I know what some people who are anxious are you probably going to address it later but what's the best bleach to use because bleach comes with a lot of things people don't realize and there's concentrated there's do we have a specific bleach source that people should be looking at or do you talk about that later yeah I think it's oh yeah right here well this this is the one that I used for this study I mean I could do a whole different study as you just kind of led into there on different types of bleach that I could use.

The one that I used was chlorox germicidal bleach. It was 7.55% sodium hypochlorite. They do have different concentrations of bleach, like I said. Just regular bleach is maybe 6% sodium hypochlorite, but the one that I did was 7.5%. But yeah, going back to like you said about Randy Oliver, he kind of turned me on to this through his scientific beekeeping website.

Great website, by the way. Everyone should visit that. And check out his Excel spreadsheets. He has some really cool stuff on there. Have you used any of those, Fred? Any of his Excel spreadsheets? No. No?

I don't use his spreadsheets, but I, of course, Lazy Man's reference. You know, I just link Randy Oliver every time I bring up something that he's delved into. It's much better. easier because one of the reasons I don't directly reference even his proportions, he updates his stuff fairly often. So I'd rather send them to the source because then if there's an update, they're going to see that. Absolutely. But yeah, like I said, he has some really cool Excel

spreadsheets and one of them is a sugar syrup calculator so you can type in your desired sugar content and it'll pop out, you know, all of your water-needed amount of sugar-needed in pounds. So he really brings it down to a science, which is what I used for this as well. But getting back to the study, my materials, I used half-gallon plastic jars, which were inverted and placed over the colonies with a hole in the lid so that the bees could access it. I standardized the feeder holes on the lid for every colony so that there was no. difference on that, make it an even playing field. Each one got three one-16th-inch holes in the lid. I needed sugar. I used a postal scale to weigh the colonies. Weight gain was one of my metrics in this study.

And I needed materials for the nozima quantification, too, which I'll dive into a bit later as well. So for the study, I had 42 colonies that were dedicated to this experiment, and I had three treatment groups, 14 into the bleach sugar syrup, 14 into the regular sugar syrup, and 14 as a control group. They received no supplemental feeding. I had two different apiaries, 21 colonies in each area apiary. So seven colonies from each experimental group were in each apiary. These apiaries were probably four or five miles apart. I wanted to make sure that there was no apiary dependence on this study, so I thought it would be a good idea to have two. Colonies were formed on June 16th and June 18th of 2024,

and they were given a mated queen from, the same queen mother. I wanted to make sure again that this was an even plain field and that there were no differences based on perhaps the genetics of the queen that I gave these colonies. To introduce these queens, I created a hopelessly queenless environment so that I would get a really good acceptance. I made up the nukes, returned five or six days later, and went through every frame in that nuke, shook off the bees, got rid of any emergency cells that they created, which made them hopelessly queenless, and then I gave them their mated queen. And this method resulted in 100% acceptance rate.

So that turned out really well. So for anyone out there hoping to introduce queens kind of with a surefire way, make up your nukes, wait, five, six, seven days, get rid of all the emergency cells so that they have to accept your queen. They have really nothing else to pick at that point. And I know the podcast listeners won't be able to see it, but here's the two apiaries that I set up on the right over here. Metrics that I measured were colony population growth that was in frames of brood.

I did weight gain, rate of consumption, how fast did they drink down the sugar syrup, the brood pattern on a scale of one to three, one being the worst, three being the best. microbial growth did bleach prevent the proliferation of black mold in the syrup jars, nozima levels, winter survival from October to March, and remunerative advantages, which is just a big fancy word for, is it profitable to add bleach to your sugar syrup? So let's get into the results. Here is a graph for frames of brood, and I measured. this in one-quarter increments. So you can kind of see here on the graph that the colonies

that were fed bleach and in their sugar syrup had, on average, way more frames of brood, probably about one and a half more frames of brood on average. And both of the control groups that were fed sugar syrup had significantly more brood. I'm sorry, both of the experimental groups that were fed sugar syrup had significantly more brood than the control group that was not fed at all. You can see in the graph a really big dip, especially during the summer dearth. And this was statistically significant. Over here, I had a bleach versus the control was a really low P value. bleach versus regular sugar syrup was a 0.006 p value,

so this was highly statistically significant that bleach did result in more frames of brood. And I took, let's see, six data points. Every two weeks I would go in and measure these colonies, frames of brood. I also did weight gain. I used this. I did this using a postal scale, which was pretty regrettable.

It was easy at first, but towards the end, when the goldenrod flow kicked in, some of these colonies got quite heavy, and it was kind of backbreaking work to lift them onto a postal scale, but we got it done. I added boxes as needed to accommodate the colony's growth throughout the season. And once again here, you can see that the bleach sugar syrup slightly outperformed the regular sugar series. Europe and both of the bleach and regular outperform the control group, which received no supplemental feeding. And you can kind of see here, sorry podcast listeners, but through July and August, there was not much difference. And I kind of alluded to this earlier, but what this feeding did was it really prepared the bees to be able to take advantage of the knotweed and goldenrod when it started to bloom middle to early.

September, middle of August, early September. So there wasn't much difference until about the middle of August there. And then you can see them really start to diverge. So I think Randy Oliver once said that colonies need about a half a gallon of sugar syrup for every week, just to kind of maintain themselves and not start to decline. So you kind of see that in this graph here in terms of weight gain. so going back yeah

almost a pound a day we're saying I guess it would be yeah and the other thing I just have a question it looks like all of your

configurations are five frame nucleus boxes yeah I did that for this study I thought maybe I could keep them

smaller to an extent so that it would be easier to lift onto that postal scale but still at the end of this study I mean some of them

ended up weighing you know over 40 kilograms which is gosh, what is that in pounds? 80, 90 pounds, I believe. Something like that. I should have just used pounds.

I was trying to be all fancy and scientific. Don't be too inclusive. Don't be too inclusive. But another question any thought on whether or not the growth would have been different, even with different configurations. For those of us that use the nucleus boxes,

we're all kind of saying the same thing. Man, they really build up fast in those smaller spaces or in that tall, narrow column. And I realize it is an even playing field because your control group was in the same configuration. But in the future, any ideas about maybe using different size brute boxes? Sure, I'm actually going to add that to my list. I didn't even really consider that.

But like you said, it wasn't even playing field, right? Even the control group was in the same style, but they were all in the same style boxes. So if I had to gander a guess, I would say that the results would be similar. You know, it doesn't matter on the hive style per se. Maybe they wouldn't do as well in a flow hive, but I'm just jabbing at you, Fred. Okay. I really liked that flow hive you brought in, by the way.

That was very cool to the meeting on Saturday. Very nice. Yeah. And, but yeah, so you can see here, all these results were against statistically significant. The bleach outperformed the regular sugar syrup and the control. Rate of consumption, that was one of the metrics that I was going to study. However, I needed more frequent measurements. Whenever I got back to, like I said, I did these measurements every 10 to 14 days.

Whenever I got back, all of the jars were empty. it was not feasible for me to drive to these apiaries every, I think really to do this right, I'd have to be there every one or two days to measure the rate of consumption. And these two apiaries were 25, 30 minutes away from me. And that would just have been a huge cost that I didn't write for in the grant. So maybe that's another thing we can do down the road as future research. brood pattern. Like I said, I did a scale one to three, one being the worst, three being a rock star. There was no real difference in brood pattern between the bleach and regular sugar syrup.

However, with the control that received no supplemental feeding, you can see that big dip during the summer dearth. So yet another reason to ensure that your bees have good nutrition is make sure that they have that sugar syrup so that they maintain and stay healthy. healthy throughout the year. Microbial growth. I tried to take photos of the same three jars throughout the whole season here. Got two regulars, two regular sugar syrup jars on each side and a bleach in the middle. And you can see the microbial growth progression through the summer that the regular sugar syrup jars, the black mold grew all up the sides. It kind of starts in the bottom of the jars and grows up the sides. And black mold did grow in the bleach sugar syrup jar. It did not totally prevent it. However, as you can see in the photos here, it's extremely

minimal compared to the regular sugar syrup. So maybe that's another thing I can do in the future is would higher concentrations completely prevent that? Or is it even worth it? Because it's kind of hard to tell in the photos, but I mean, there were just a couple specks of black mold there, but it still didn't prevent it, totally. And I think that maybe part of the reason that this works is as that sugar syrup draws down, and this is just me spitball in here, but I think that as that chlorine off gases out of the sugar syrup, there is chlorine gas maybe trapped in the vacuum of that jar, which I think is what maybe helps prevent some of that black mold growth.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because left to a large open surface, you would lose the bleached scent even pretty quickly, right? But then there is a lasting effect on the sugar syrup even after that volatility has passed, right? Yes, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, you can see it bleaches it. The sugar syrup turns clear, whereas the regular syrup just kind of keeps that kind of golden color to it. But yeah, the germicidal properties don't go away from the research that I've read. Yep. I also did nozima quantification for this, which was really fun, but time-consuming.

So I did three, let's see, I did three samples out of each colony through over the course of this study. Nozema, as I kind of said before, is strongly associated with an increase in winter and spring mortality. and it can be really hard on the bees trying to perform that spring turnover, right? When all those winter bees are aging out and they're trying to produce that next generation to carry them into this season, Zima can really do a number on them then. So, yeah, I did three samples, 100 bees sample each time, which was meticulous. As you can see in the bottom left photo here, I took the samples, put them into isopropal alcohol, and then processed them at home.

And I had to count out 100 Bs for each sample. I followed University of Florida's protocol for Nozima testing, if anyone is interested, which is 100 Bs. Count them out. You put them into a Ziploc bag, crush them up with a roller pin, which is just not fun. And then you add one millimeter of water per bee,

so 100 millimeters of water. you homogenize that in the bag until it creates a beautiful brownish sludge. And then from that, I take one drop using a micropipeat, and I drop it onto a hemocytometer, which is pictured here. This is used in the scientific world to count cells, essentially. So the University of Florida Protocol was you count the nozema spores in five cells. as you can see here and this is what a nozima spore looks like on the right of the screen it looks like a little grain of rice kind of and here are the results for

nozima which is now called varamorpha is my understanding if you heard about that good yeah they reclassified it yeah I just need to know in case somebody asked me because that right well now you know Veramorpha, apparently. And spell that, please, for the listeners. Yeah, varamorpha. V-A-I-R-I-M-O-R-P-H-A. Veramorpha.

Thank you. Yeah, welcome. So for the nozema, this did not come out statistically significant. As you can see, the bleach did have lower nozema levels, but with the stats that I ran on it, the P value was actually quite large. So not statistically significant, but was it biologically significant, which means did this have real-world value? And I think that maybe these lower nozema levels could explain maybe why they had that more frames of brood. or the higher weight gain. I would like to do some future research on this as well.

As you can see on the graph here, these samples were taken in early August, early September and early October. I would really like to do some continuation of those samples and see what they look like in winter and see what they look like coming out of winter into spring if those lower nozema levels maintained or what happened. So, yeah, unfortunately, as a scientist, you know, you always want to see significant results, right?

But in this case, it was not statistically significant. But it might have some real-world effects, however. Winter survival, the control experimental groups that were fed, did survive winter better, 93% winter survival compared to the control group, which received no supplemental feeding. They had a 79% winter survival rate. Yet again, another reason to feed your bees, especially through that summer dearth so that they can capitalize on that fall flow.

And this was just all using one-to-one sugar syrup. I'm not sure if I mentioned that or not, but the ratio that I used in this experiment was one-to-one sugar syrup. So remunerative advantages. Is it profitable to add bleach to your sugar syrup? Based on this study, it is. One and a half more frames of brood per colony costs about five seconds, right, to dump in that one teaspoon of bleach and a penny, which now the penny is out of production. So if we're rounding down, this costs zero cents, right, to do this, or a nickel.

Yeah, bleach and syrup colonies average three frames of brood more than the control, and one and a half more frames than the regular sugar syrup. Time cleaning these jars, if you're going to be cleaning these jars every year, I timed this. I cleaned 10 jars from both the bleach group and the regular group. It took me on average about one minute to clean the bleach jars and about two and a quarter minutes to clean the regular sugar syrup jars, which might not sound like a lot,

but if you're cleaning 100 of these, this adds up to maybe two hours difference. And time is very valuable. It's our most valuable asset. So if I have two more hours to spend with my family or dogs or to do more B work, that's way worth it to me. I'd like to add something to that. Randy Oliver, to quote him again, sometimes we have rapid rounds or these larger reservoir-style feeders, which of course weren't part of the study.

but that was one of his early suggestions was that by putting bleach in your sugar syrup when you filled those you saved yourself from having to withdraw the feeder and do this cleansing so you were actually using your sugar syrup as your cleanser with the bleach act so i kind of like that idea because who wants to take off just as you've described washing these things takes up time and if we can make ourselves feel good just by putting the sugar syrup with bleach already in it as a sanitizer for our reservoirs, then maybe we have something there too. What do you think? I agree. Absolutely. Anything to save time, you know, to an extent. All right. Bleach syrup colonies weighed more as well, as you saw. They averaged five pounds more than the regular sugar syrup group, and the bleach sugar

syrup colonies weighed on average 26 more pounds than the control group. So that supplemental feeding made a huge difference in their weight going into winter as well. So there are definitely some remunerative advantage to this. For pennies on the dollar, you can really increase the profitability of your beekeeping outfit. Verroa populations. So when I took those samples of bees for the Zima quantification, I had all of these bees in isopropyl alcohol, and I felt terrible from those 100 bees. All I did was take one little drop out of that sample and put it on a hemacitometer. And I thought, what else can I do with all of these bees to make their sacrifice a little

more worth it, right? I thought, well, I essentially did an alcohol wash in all of these colonies as well. and what I found was that the bleach group had a lot more varroa mites than the control and surprisingly the regular. I'm not quite sure why that happened. But this is kind of to be expected, right, because the bleach group did have more frames of brood, more bees, more weight gain. So as your colony grows, so too does varroa mites. So just keep that in mind that as your colony is getting big in populous, so is the varroa mites. so is the varroa mite population.

So important to keep those under control. I'm not quite sure why the regular sugar syrup had, you know, lower varroa than the control. Maybe that's another study we could do. I didn't run statistics on this. But yet again, another research question we could investigate in the future. So did you do a varroa count with every sampling through the year, or did you wait until the end of the year

or just every time you sampled even for Nozima you also did Varroa? Yes, correct. And then I just totaled it up. Okay. Yep. Wow, that's disappointing. I really wanted the bleach to be a

Varroa spanker. I know, me too, but no, it made more Varroa, actually. Okay. And what about sampling drones? For Varroa? nosema. Yeah.

Not for the Nogamites themselves. I mean, if they're on the workers, again, we're comparing across the board all the same sampling, but I guess it doesn't make a difference. Yeah, I didn't sample drones specifically. And Dr. Zachary Lamas has done a lot of interesting work. Is it Lammas? It's not Lamas? Lomas.

You're probably right. It's probably my oil city access. I just saw him and I was calling him, Zach Llamas. He didn't correct me. It's probably Lomas. It's La Mace, like here's the Moss,

like La Mose? It's probably, you're probably right, Fred. Okay. I have a weird accent. You do. I wasn't going to point it out, but now since you're hitting yourself.

We're at an interesting intersection here in PA. We have the New England accent, meeting Appalachia, meeting Midwestern. It's a weird crossover area. All right. Back on track. Yeah. Back on track. Discussion. So there appears to be no harmful effects to adding bleach to sugar syrup. It actually seemed to result in slightly better performance. It resulted in more bees, healthier bees, and more honey.

So it made my operation more profitable do this for very little effort and very little money. The feeder types that I did use, like I mentioned, were those jars. And, yeah, I would like to do some more future research on different feeder types. I would like to do varying concentrations of bleach to see if that makes a difference. Some people have also approached me about apple cider vinegar, thyme all. That would also be cool to study that, see what that does. Rate of consumption, I mentioned that. I would really like to do this at some closer bee yards that I have so that I can see if bleach is sucked down faster by the bees or not.

I would like to do a two to one, see if this is beneficial in different sugar-to-water ratio sugar syrups. I had a lot of people ask me if any of the bleach or chlorine ends up in the honey, and this is just my hunch. I really don't think it does. going back to kind of what Randy Oliver said, bees need about a half a gallon of sugar syrup per week or so to just sustain function and kind of maintain. So I really doubt that any of that sugar syrup got converted into honey, but there's a non-zero chance that it did. So I think that's something that I could look at in the future as well, which would be fairly

simple, right? Just some chlorine test strips in the honey. And some future Nozima research as well to see if those beneficial effects of bleach potentially persist throughout the winter and into the spring. Oh, there's part two of why I'm a better beekeeper than Fred. What? Flip through that too fast. You want to see that? Sure, I want to hear it all.

Your bees respect you. What does that mean? Mine don't respect me? No. Yeah, they've told me otherwise. You light your smoker faster. Okay. Really?

Because I flip a switch and I'm smoking and then I turn the switch off and I'm done. Oh, you're using that new fancy one. Apisalis. Apisalus. But of course, we have to, we should plug something here too. If you're smoking, then the traditional way, I would like to recommend the switchgrass pellets from Ernst Seed, sold for the Western Pennsylvania, beekeeping association, non-profit organization, longest, burning, dense smoke, cool, and your bees react to it nicely, and your smoker will not go out on you all day long. Okay. Don't need glasses? Hey, that's a hit right there. Okay, et cetera. Okay,

that's good enough. There we go. I got my hits in on you. Sorry, Fred. No, that's okay. And that's the end of this presentation. This is going to sound like an Oscar acceptance speech or something, but I just wanted to thank some of my friends and colleagues. Jeff Bertha, beekeeper down in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. He's written multiple Sair Grants before, and he let me bounce ideas off of him, and he gave me some experimental design advice, which was very valuable. Charlie Voresek, whom you know well, he allowed me to use some of his mating yards so that I could produce the 42 mated queens needed for this study.

Dr. Robin Underwood at Penn State Extension was my academic advisor for this study. She was very helpful, excellent. Patterson and Staub families, which is where I set up these two apiaries. And Sandy and David Strickland, my parents, they've just always supported their crazy son going on this beekeeping adventure. So, yeah, I really appreciate all of these people. They made this possible. And I'll have to add Fred Dunn to this.

list now for helping me disseminate this information. Oh, okay. Sorry, Fred. No early inspiration on my, okay, it's fine. I'm sorry. So that's all, is that it? That's it. Yeah, we can talk a little bit about Sarah grants, how people, some tips and tricks.

I mean, I've only been awarded one, but I've learned a lot from that one and just some tips and tricks and some ideas because I think they're great, you know, they put power and money into the hands of farmers, beekeepers, people in agriculture, to explore some of these ideas and, you know, experimental thoughts that they have about what they're in, you know, eight hours a day, 10 hours a day. So, yeah, we can do that now if you'd like, or you had any questions or? Well, I do actually. I know there's a question that somebody probably has watched and listened to this and is dying to comment, but I'll head them off at the past. since we're giving them sugar syrup and of course it has bleach in it which is not necessarily a big part of that but you also mentioned honey production in the colonies the weight gain being up so when we say weight gain

we're talking bees and resources right the whole shebang so we're not telling people to sell that honey that's made while we have sugar syrup on no yeah don't do that we just want to make sure make that clarification because I saw dollar signs on eyelids and people were just getting excited. If I just put bleach water sugar syrup, Adam told me that I can double my income and we can, you know, let's head that off. Absolutely. Yeah, don't sell, you know, fake honey. There's already enough of that out there, right? But what I meant by that was that by feeding during that summer dearth and by prepping the bees for that fall flow in our area, that they, They made a lot more honey because of that because they had the stage set for them.

Oh, yeah. Right. And a bigger population, bigger production. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Yep. Yep. So let's ground level.

Somebody wants to find out if there is even a grant available because they post these, right, and you can kind of see a list and see if you can match up with anything that's being offered. How would they do that? Yeah, you can just go to USDA SAIR. So there's different regions, depending on. where you live. We live in the northeast Sear region. There's also Southern Serre. Oh, you know, I forget what they are. Midwestern Serer.

Yeah, make sure that you look at your Serre region that you are in. And on there, you can find basically a calendar of when things are due. The Farmer Grant, Sarah Farmer Grant, which is what this was is typically due in November. So you have some time. and if you do want to write that, you know, it takes a little bit of time. It probably took me 40 hours to write this up, something like that, to do it right. I think I have a slide here. So what are Sarah Farmer grants funded by the USDA, multiple regions?

And they are reimbursement-based, so they're not going to give you money ahead of time. Just keep that in mind. And nothing against Sarah. It's just the way that it works. but it takes a little time for that check to come in, even after you build them. So you kind of have to have that all financially planned out as well. Some tips for writing a farmer grant. The best place to get started if you want to do stuff like this is find gaps in research,

kind of like what I did. You don't have to come up with a super novel, interesting, brand new idea. It just has to be that there's maybe no data on this thing, which is just as valuable as the new ideas, but it's really important to fill in the gaps and fairly easy to identify those gaps as well. It helps to have some scientific writing experience. So I got some in college,

getting my degree in biology, writing papers, stuff like that. There's certain language that I think these grant awarders like to see. It's almost like its own language in a way. So having some experience in that, really helps. You need some connections to write a Sarah Grant with an academic advisor. You need to know a PhD. Like mine was Dr. Robin Underwood. They want you attached to someone like that. And it's basically them

signing off like, hey, I vouch for this guy. I'll oversee his work and just make sure that everything is done in a scientific manner. So if you're interested in this, start to establish those connections with someone. Usually, like a great place to get started is your local land grant university, like Penn State. For me, it's good to be involved in your local clubs, like Northwestern PA beekeepers, so that maybe you can have some collaborators as well. Some of my buddies wanted to be collaborators on this with me, but it was my first one. I didn't want to get overly involved. I just did this one by myself, but in the future I could even have, you know,

collaborators join in on this with me to help me collect even more data, create a richer data set. When you're writing this grant and figuring out your money that you're requesting, make sure that you pay yourself for the hours that you do your research. So I paid myself per hour to collect the data and also have realistic expenses. So don't write in there the cheapest, absolute cheapest sugar, for example, that you can find. Because whenever you get awarded this down the road six months, sugar syrup might have doubled in, or sugar might have doubled in price for all we know. So, you know, you don't have to pick the most expensive one either, but pick kind of the middle ground would be my suggestion for that.

and just going back to paying yourself too, I forgot to write in to my grant to pay myself for my nozima quantification. So I did about 40 hours of nozema quantification pro bono because I forgot to write that in. It was a big boo-boo, but you live and learn. And when you're writing this, really think everything through and try to think of all the time that you're going to be spending on this. Because, like I said, our time is extremely valuable. Take meticulous notes and copious photos if you do get awarded it. Even photos, notes that you think you may not need are super valuable in the future.

And have a plan for dissemination of your information, too. I was lucky enough to know that Fred was in my club and that he would probably be willing to have me on. And going back to the connections, Robin Underwood is going to put out. a pamphlet on this so that beekeepers can go and look at it and have easily accessible information on how to add this bleach to your sugar syrup. And yeah, I think that's about it as far as for tips and writing these. So I have another question. Yeah.

Because I'm trying to head off as many questions as they can from the viewers and listeners. some people there's this big discussion which I don't think makes a difference but I'm going to ask your opinion anyway beet sugar versus cane sugar once it's been through processing it's basically the same thing but do you know which you used for this experiment this was beat sugar it was just Walmart great value and from the research that I've seen there's absolutely zero difference you don't want to feed them raw sugar, you know, brown sugar, whatever, but domino's sugar, which is cane versus great value. From what I've seen, there's no difference.

It becomes a selling point to where if it says cane sugar on it, you're pretty sure. If it doesn't say what the source of the white processed sugar is, pretty sure it's going to be beat sugar. Probably beat, yeah. Okay. And so what are the most common questions you get about this study? I'm sure you've probably addressed them all here because that would help you put your presentation together. But have you had any surprise questions?

Well, an excellent question that I got was, what was my water source for making the sugar syrup? I got this at our club meeting where I presented these results. And it was, I used oil city tap water. And the question was, oh, is there chlorine in that? Yeah. So I, you know, that was an excellent question. I forget who asked that, but it was a very astute question. I went and researched that and Oil City has extremely low chlorine levels in our water.

It's 0.89 parts per million. So at the concentration that I was doing, 32 parts per million, it's very low and would not make a difference, in my opinion. as far as the coin. If you had it to do over again, would you use like a zero water? I don't know if I would. I mean, 0.89 is so low. I could, but again, I don't know if it would make a difference. But it was a very good question.

What about fluoride? How is the dental report on the bees afterwards? Their mandibles looked good. yep good mandible care which by the way mandible wear is a means of aging your bees if you're looking at them under a microscope i just want to throw that in there okay yeah that's cool i was reading that uh what's that fred not part of the study i'm just checking no it wasn't uh kind of going on mandible wear though another reason to get that feed in the comb before winter hits is i saw that when you feed dry sugar to your bees it really wears down their mandibles. I'm not sure if you've seen that before or not, but...

I have a whole series of videos showing them sugar breaks, dry sugar, fonding, and of course syrup is the quickest, but we don't put that on in winter. But the other thing is the gloss of the hairs being stripped away. Because while they work, they work just these little holes, anyone who's looked at a block of sugar that's been worked by bees, it looks like little drill holes that they rub their tongues through constantly. So then the easiest thing to do is to, of course, cut that block out, put that under a microscope and look for hairs. I did not know about the mandible scraping away on the sugars, though.

That's very interesting. Is that something that people can find and look at? Yeah, I think it was a study. Maybe I can put it in the comments or something, but I think it was out of China, I believe. They did that study. I'm sure we can find that. So, yeah, that was pretty interesting. Yep.

So link if we can find it. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, you know what? This is all super interesting. What are, now that the study's over, and it was interesting to me that you kind of bid it, right? So there's, is there a set amount of financial resource that's been assigned and you're just kind of pitching your trying to get your piece of that pie? and is it just broken down to multiple studies or how does that work?

Because you say you have to make sure and bid correctly. Yeah, there is a limit to how much you can request to fund your Sarah grant. I think it's like 40 or 50 grand, $40,000 or $50,000, something like that. Mine was on the extreme low end, which might have helped its acceptance. I think I got roughly $5,500 for this study. which paid out for my time, sugar syrup, these jars that I used, things like that, the Nozima quantification tools. Yeah.

So I think it helps if possible. You'll probably get a higher acceptance rate if you don't request as much money would just be my guess. Because they do have a budget set for this, right? So then when you do get things under a grant, sometimes equipment's part of it. Like some people might even include microscopes and things like that. When it's over and you've submitted all of your results, what happens to the gear that you purchased under the grant? It's yours to keep. It's yours to keep.

Yes, that's what I wanted to hear. It's yours to keep. So you bought some camera equipment, I hope? No, I should have. Should have written that in. It's about to be impressed. Okay. Well, Adam, I want to thank you for your time.

I think this is going to be really interesting, and it's something that I was impressed when you gave the presentation at Edinburgh University, and I'm glad you've brought all this together, and that you have also a way forward maybe with some variables, so you can continue this. Without a grant, are you going to continue some of this on your own?

No, I'd really like to do it with a grant, I think, just because some of this is so intensive, especially the Nozema quantification, is a huge time drain. for me. So, yeah, I really would like to proceed with a grant again, if possible. But if not, you know, I'll try to truck along. So that's actually another level.

This was your first grant. It was. Yeah. Okay. So now once you've done one and publish your results and had Dr. Robin Underwood's endorsement, does that set you up in a better position for future grants? I don't know. That's a good question. Maybe it was first, you know, first time luck. I'm not sure. And you said that you. Yeah. Yeah. I do have a bunch of more grant ideas written on the notes in my phone that I would like to pursue. So once I wrap this one up, I think maybe I'll write another one, maybe this fall.

Now you're doing this in addition to your regular work, which is primarily the beekeeping or do you have a day job? What's going on? No, right now it's primarily beekeeping. I went full-time last May. So 300 colonies is enough to keep you going? Don't you need triple that? I mean, I guess ideally. I would just like to see you put in more hours than you're currently putting in personally.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think about... But you're selling bees, you're selling queens and packages as well, or nucleus? No, no packages. What are you selling? No packages, just nukes, nukes and lots of honey as well. Okay, so somebody we're asking right now, how can I get a nucleus colony from Adam? What would it run?

Yeah, $1.99 per nuke. Oh, that's not bad. Not bad. It comes in a wooden nuke box, nice wooden nuke box, not an easy nuke, nothing wrong with those, but it's yours to keep. It comes with five frames, brood, resources, 2026 or, you know, current years, queen, produced from my best instrumentally inseminated breeder stock. I try to bring in some cool, interesting genetics. So I have some mite biter genetics in my operation from Purdue University. I've brought back genetics from some

other beekeepers that I've visited around the eastern United States. And honey is a big one for me. Goldenrod being a major honey producer for me. I also do alongside with Charlie Vorosek some pollination for Ernst seeds. So I've been able to make some really interesting and cool monofloral honeies that maybe only a couple beekeepers in the whole maybe country can produce, such as burgomot honey or milkweed honey,

just some really interesting honey. that are quite rare. I'm glad you mentioned milkweed honey. Most people won't know that they have it. And one of the ways that we validate what honey is, where the nectar came from, is the pollen. How are we doing that with milkweed honey since there's no pollen in it from the milkweed? Well, I think doesn't it have like a very weird looking pollen grain? It's like black, right?

It's actually amber colored and it looks like. like little flippers and it glues itself to their feet. Yeah. The bees can't metabolize it. It's on my radar this year because I film it, photograph it every year, because the bees are the champions of milkweed. And we know they're after the nectar that the pollen is just not even usable. So how are we identifying the milkweed honey?

How do I identify it? There's some tribal knowledge there, right? like maybe, yeah, like maybe I'll taste some of Charlie's milkweed honey. So, you know, as beekeepers, we kind of train our palate almost to learn what the different honeies tastes like. Are you a honey, are you a honey somalier? I am. I am. You are.

Okay. Far from it. All right. But also, it can be pretty obvious when you set your bees down on a, you know, 30-acre plot of milkweed and they bring in this light mono-fluoral honey. it's like, well, this kind of has to be it, right? Or the Bergmont, like I mentioned. And when you walk out in the field and it's just a buzz with bees, it's just, you know, you connect all these dots to ascertain that.

Now let's talk about crystallization. I would anticipate that milkweed honey would stay clear longer. What are your thoughts? I would agree with that. One of the worst is golden rod. It granulates extremely. quickly and it turns i mean it gets rock hard i mean it becomes like a weapon at that point so yeah they're mixed in with aster's right they're kind of at the same time somewhat yeah i've i've been

able to secure some locations where i can get pretty pure goldenrod honey so that's a that's a big misconception about goldenrod honey that may be all to spell here and that's people think that goldenrod honey is a darker honey and maybe it is based on your area but in my area you Golden Rod is extremely light in color and has kind of like a beautiful golden hue to it. So I think when people think they're getting goldenrod honey, they're actually getting aster and not wheat mixed in with that as well. But yeah, if you can get pure goldenrod honey, it's very, very light in color. And I love that smell. It smells like ka-ching to me, money coming in the front door.

Is it touching or touching? You said cutching. In my area, it's Caching. Oh, it's Caching where you live? Okay. Because the old cash register is shishing. It was like a, it didn't have a,

I would think it's time to replace your register if it was making the Couching. Yeah. Maybe a little WD 40. Okay. So there are like 20 varieties of goldenrod. How do you know which one your bees are really working? Or which one is best for the bees?

So what I found is the taller, the better. Okay. Yeah. When I was down in Georgia, going back to Bob Binney's, they have goldenrod down there. And, you know, we were talking and they asked me what my major nectar source honey producer was. And I told them goldenrod. And they were kind of taken aback. Like, wow, you actually make honey off of that.

Because down there, they just get a pollen off of it. And I said, well, how tall is it down here? You know, they have a different variety. It's shorter. It's maybe, you know, only three or so feet high. Whereas in my locale and your locale, I mean, it can get over our heads in some locations. And I forget, maybe is that the Canada goldenrod? I know there's a bunch of different varieties.

But long story short, I've found that the bigger, the taller the golden rod plants, whatever varieties those are seem to produce more honey. Because one is even called early golden rod. That's right. Blooms in like July, July 4th. Doesn't this feel early to you? It should. Happens every year.

Yeah. So, yeah, because people lump it all together and it's very different. If you had acreage under your control and you could plant anything you want in that, that would give you the longest resource return, what would it be? Can I give you like three? Yeah, give me your top three. Okay. Bergamont would be one.

Monarda fistilosa. It's our native bee bomb. It's bloom is purple, kind of pinkish blue in color. It blooms perfect. Monarda, fistilosa. Yeah, it blooms at the perfect time of year. Kind of in July when we're having that summer dearth, and it produces a really light, beautiful, almost minty tasting honey.

another one for me would be Fesilia people grow it as a cover crop in some locations it's a purple flowering plant and I've done a little research on that and there's some claims that it produces extremely high yields of honey per acre

I did plant some one year Is that the common name for that? What is Fecilia? Are you using botany terms on me? No, that's its common name. Facilia. P-H-H-H-H-E-P-H-H-M. A C-E-L-I-A. That's also its Latin name, too.

Facilia, Facilia-Tan-Suf. Oh, I'm going to mess it up. But, yeah. And that's a beautiful plant. Oh, it's what? It's a beautiful plant, too. The bees get like a purple pollen from it,

produces a fairly light honey. Yeah. I think that... Go ahead. If you know Richard Nol, the beekeeper in France over there, I think some farmers over his way will plant plots of that. And I'm fairly jealous of him for that.

Okay. Yeah. Well, look at his processing building for starters. Oh, my gosh. It's beautiful. You talk about something to be jealous about. Oh, I know. He really thought that out well, too.

I mean, he thought of everything. Well, yeah. But it's beautiful. His personal comfort is what he did because he sure did. It's got a cappuccino machine. It's got everything. All right. One more plant.

If I could add one more. would be sweet clover. So Dutch clover? Dutch clover? No sweet. Oh wait, sweet clover. It's a really tall yellow. Yeah.

Yeah. Tall, there's a yellow and a white variety. It doesn't even look like clover, really. It's actually not even a true clover. It's not in the trifoleum. Yeah. Yeah, genus. It's a, yeah, mellolotus would be its genus, I guess.

Okay. And a beautiful plant and an excellent honey producer. If people want to read more about that one, pick up Frank Pellett's American honey plants. If anyone has ever read that book, he gives some really detailed great information on sweet clover. How about we link that? Put that on your list of things we can link people to. That's valuable because I always recommend the top 100 pollinator plants by the Zerxes Society. That's another book.

But that's all, of course. We're focusing a little bit on honeybees here. But you mentioned like Minarda, bee bomb, the bees can reach that. Is that right? Because I've thought the honeybees didn't have a long enough tongue

to get the nectaries on those, but they do. Well, that's a great point, Fred. Maybe it's the type of bees that I'm running. The genetic background may be. Your bees have longer tongues? Maybe. Maybe they're the Richard Simmons of the bee world.

Oh, you did not. You did not go there. For people that are, watching who understand knights in Satan's service okay all right but there are bees that have longer tongues that can access more resources do we know what those genetic lines are is it the carnica Caucasian I think might have longer than the Italian yeah is it significantly longer like how much are we talking well I'm not sure don't I don't know the answer to that all right so We'll have question marks over our heads here.

All right. There's another research study. So you wouldn't plant any of the hyssups or agostachi or anis or any of that? I mean, you could. I just said I don't really have any experience with those. If you had a feel, the stuff that you said is what you're sticking with, those top three. Yeah, those three are great. And trees.

If I can throw in one more thing, trees. A tree. It's a longer term investment, but I mean, if you can plant some bass wood and you have the time, I mean, what a beautiful tree that is. Excellent community producer. Linden. It's a linden tree. Yep. Yep.

But yeah, beautiful tree. You know, black locusts, tulip poplar. If you're lucky, maybe some sour wood like Bob has down there. Yeah, that's all Bob talks about is sour wood. I think he gets most of his crop from that, right? yeah that's that's his big one for sure and he can get a premium price for it too because it's really only made in kind of that region of the united states and of course i took home some sourwood honey that he he gifted to me and it's it's absolutely delicious okay would you say that even if he wasn't going to listen yeah i would okay all right i just got to run it by

sure okay what piece of equipment do you not currently have that you wish you did. Hmm. Oh boy, that's a good question. I would say a brand new B truck. Right now I'm doing all my beekeeping with my 2012 Toyota Tacoma. So if I could have a RAM 3,500 flatbed, I think I'd take that. That's your whole B truck.

What about some big fancy trailer that you pull behind it? Sure. Yeah, I use a trailer from time to time. Because you've seen those trailers that have the fancy, like, they can turn. and they've got all this control. The wheels will actually turn, and then the trailer goes. Have you seen those?

No, I haven't seen that adaptive steering trailers. It's amazing. Well, they get out and they kick these releases around, and the whole trailer will, like, pivot, because they use them to deliver prefab buildings. Okay. I haven't heard of those. I was thinking if somebody was a beekeeper,

that would be at the high end. Boy, yeah. I liked that box lifter that you brought in as well. I thought that was a pretty cool gadget. Very cool. That does work really well. Because as beekeepers, our backs are the first thing to go. You know, I'm seeing a chiropractor right now for lower back issues.

Yeah, particularly for the frail. For the frail beekeeper lifting. You called me frail, Fred? I didn't say that. I was using it as a generic term. It's nothing I've personally experienced, but I've heard about it. And that's why I'm looking out for people that do not have great structural ability when it comes to picking things up and putting things down.

Was that an Arnold Schwarzenegger reference there? Actually, I think that was on Saturday Night Live when they made fun of weight lifting. Like, I'd pick things up, I put things down. Yeah, yeah, that's right. What do you do? Okay. All right, well, that's a lot of fun. I'm sure everybody's really happy to be listening to that.

I hope so. I want to thank you for joining us, Adam. And I hope that the listeners found this useful and that you like this format. So if you like it, of course, thumbs up, subscribe, whatever you do, and leave a comment down in the comment section. So thanks a lot, Adam. We appreciate it. Thank you, Fred. Great to be on here. Really appreciate it. Yep, anytime. And that wraps up another episode of interviews with experts.

I hope you won't forget to go down in the video description and visit all the links and extra information that we've provided there. If you like the series, don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel for more. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be.