The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Bee-Mindful, Interview with owner Nathalie B. regarding why a Top Bar Hive may be a great choice for YOU!

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Frederick Dunn Interviewed Nathalie on March 3rd. This is the audio track from the YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/M6tMZV56NUA    

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. Today's March the 4th, and my very special guest is Natalie B, the creator and owner of Be Mindful in the state of Texas. She is an Ohio State MBA grad and a Texas master beekeeper managing more than 400 colonies of honeybees. Natalie B is a contributor to Bee Culture Magazine and the founder of the first natural beekeeping club in Texas. Her voice may be familiar to you as she's also the co-host of the popular beekeeping podcast, The Hive Jive.

In this interview, we also delve into her experiences in Congo, Nigeria, and discuss why top bar hives are accessible to all beekeepers and so much more. Here's Natalie. Natalie, hello and thank you so much for joining me for an episode of beekeeping with experts. This is fantastic because we met down at Austin, Texas at the State Beekeepers Association. So I want to thank you so much for introducing yourself there and also for the presentation that you've done. And if you would, please just tell us where you are right now and what you're doing. I am in Driftwood, Texas, near Dripping Springs in the Heart of Texas, which is really southwest of Austin in the held country. And I've lived here for over 20 years. And what I do is I have a bee school

and farm. We offer services in ag valuation because in Texas, you're allowed to use bee keeping as a qualifying activity to get an ag valuation. And I also offer education services. So we have workshops, apprenticeships, and we sell hives, horizontal hives and bees. Wow, you said a lot in a very short amount of time. So a lot of people, the people that I met there, including your brand new president of the state beekeepers Association, they are involved in that ag exemption that everyone's talking about there. Yes, sir. It's turned into an industry for beekeepers. It really has. I mean, it's a, it's a way for a lot of the commercial beekeepers, especially, and initially to find space to put their thousands of beehives in spaces.

where they're going to overwinter them, basically in warmer climates, and bring them back from the almond pollination. And it turned into something that was now accessible to all kinds of beekeepers. And a lot of people, so you cannot get an act valuation, usually between five and 20 acres. That's too small. And with cattle, you need to have a lot more land. So what happened is a lot of landowners decided that they could, thanks to a special law that was introduced about 12, 14 years ago,

they could also get what we call open space special land valuation, which is a way to keep the land somewhat open in terms of intensity of exploitation and development. So you don't have to fight so much and have some space. So that's kind of how it came about. So do I understand that you also teach people how to implement or place beehives and help landowners get that? exemption? Yes, that's how we make our income for the most part, along with the education services. We offer those services in terms of leasing bee hives. We bring our bees and our hives

on people's land and we manage them at all time because it's the land that qualifies, not the landowner, so they can hire a beekeeper to do that for them. And that gives a space to put, I have almost 400 colonies, most of which in horizontal tabar hives, and that allows me to put them somewhere while still producing some honey and just kind of bees as well because we sell some bees. So how many beehives that someone have to have on their land to qualify for that? Is there a minimum number? They have to have four or six? Yes, so in Texas you have to have a minimum of six colonies, and the minimum acreage is five. acres plus one acre if you have a homestead or some buildings on the land but um everything

depends on the county every county has different rules and degrees of intensity that you need to satisfy and uh yeah you need so this between five and 20 acres and uh i think the maximum number of colonies is in our county that you need to have to qualify up to 20 acres and that's 16 colonies on those 20 acres So is this because land value taxes are so high that this is appealing to them? Yeah, to landowner, especially around the big cities where the taxes just exploded, it became really hard to pay tax bills. But by helping the beekeepers and bring in more pollinators and providing space that's not so developed, they can also get tax, you know, help to help, the beekeepers do that as well.

So there's a win-win for both sides. Okay. So that's really interesting. We have something similar in the state of Pennsylvania where I am where you get cleaning green. So if you have 10 or more acres and it's agricultural, you get a 50% cut on your property taxes. That's a lot. It would be a very interesting model, though, if we could have this. this bee thing because I have eight and a half acres of land, so I'm paying full taxes.

If I could just have a couple of be hives and that would help me out, that would be fantastic. Yeah, because I kept hearing about this ag exemption from so many people there when I was talking and meeting people at the conference that that's kind of how they really expanded their business was because of that. So you mentioned that they're parking, some commercial keepers are parking their hives on different landowners' property because it's warmer. I mean that they're also collecting them later and taking them off for pollination services and things like that. So the commercial migratory beekeepers will take the hives part of the years to bring them to California, mostly, in other states.

In our case, in a lot of the local beekeepers, we leave them on those lands for the year that the leasing contract is valid. And as soon as they get their eye valuation, they can sometimes rotate out and turn it into wildlife, which their grandfather didn't. into which they couldn't otherwise get because their land is on a smaller acreage. But it took some lobbying from very smart people to get this law passed. It's very specific to Texas. I think that by organizing, you might be able to get some traction on that as well where you are. Wow.

That's really interesting. Did you say organizing? Yes. Good luck. So this is all really interesting. part of the country that you're in. And one of the things I want to talk about, of course, I want to find out more about your background because you have some substantial things that you've done specifically in Africa. Now, is this before you started Be Mindful or is this something

that they reached out to you? How did you end up going to that continent? Yeah. So that's something I had already started being mindful. So the way I started in beekeeping was about 14 years ago. I started with single worry, put some bees in there, didn't know what I was doing. And fast forward, I started getting fascinated and created the first treatment-free beekeeping club in Texas that grew exponentially. About eight years ago, I started that. And then I put so much time and effort into it that my friends were telling me you need to start a business. And that's how Be Mindful was started about, I would say, four or five years ago. And about a year and a half into it, as I was just really, you know, initially a business is hard and you don't have a lot of money and bandwidth,

but the government, the Republic of, I was hired by the Congolese government to design and lead their nationwide beekeeping training programs for the trade schools across the country. And so I spent the best part of 2019 actually doing that and driving up and down. I have some slides if you want to kind of take a look at that. I'm happy to show them to you. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see that. Yeah, let me kind of move over and share this. Sharing is not turned down, so I'm going to send your request.

And once I get that, I decided I will allow that. That's good. Okay, that's very good. I really appreciate it. So let me try this again. Oops, share. And then I'm going to go to here, share, go back to my presentation, then go and go and do this. Oh, I forgot to mention.

I did the Hive Jive Podcasts as well. But so, yeah, I got hired by the Minister of Technical and Professional Education that does the trade training and employment at the time. And I got to travel across the country with armed guards because we went to some areas that were a little bit touch and go in terms of safety. So I didn't travel by myself. But I went up and down east and west, north and south. I went all over the country to do this.

And I met with some wonderful people, kind of learned a little bit about how they did their beekeeping and managed to set up teaching apiaries by building horizontal tabaheis because I had, it's relatively easy to build those. Basically, they are just five pieces of wood to make a trough and then you cut some bars, right? So resources are very limited in Africa and access to some of the Langstroth. components, for example, is very difficult and expensive. So that was my way to kind of make this available and sustainable for the local populations. You could also make them in different materials, including mud and wicker and things like in barrels, actually. But I decided that because I had some access to some resources, I was going to buy some wood and make them more durable. So we had to clear some land and just set up very basic ones in rain cover.

And I didn't put them on lake because I didn't want termites eating through them. So I used cinder blocks. It doesn't look as pretty as the ones that we have in the United States. But it works just as well. It's a trough with barge. And so we did that. And I caught some swarms and I did some cutouts. You see here I was catching a swarm on the balcony.

And it was fascinating. Of course, I'm speaking French, whereas I'm doing that, but we did a lot of gathering locally adapted survivor stock and free bees that we put in our boxes. And that worked out really well because there's a lot of bees in Africa.

And so from that standpoint, they even move into, this was the minister's bungalow at the river that I did a cut out into. And what means, you know, just basic vacuum cleaner and buckets and things that I went and brought at the market. It was fun, but bees are doing really, really well over there.

So it's largely an untapped market, by the way. So they try to produce honey, but it's very non-standard. They have traditionally a way to collect honey that's going to be a slash-and-go. They're going to destroy the nest, and they're just going to grab the resources. Even when they have hives, they tend to cut out a little bit, brood and just everything is kind of a mess. So I kind of want to learn from the traditional beekeeping methods, but also help out with some quality standards in terms of honey production. And that was the goal as well. So what can you tell me about that? Are we talking Apis Serrana?

Are we talking Malifera? What is the stock there? This is Apis Melifera, but we have subspecies that we're dealing with like the ones I forgot the names and now I'm just kind of drawing a blank there's the ones that are that we talk about when we talk about African ice bees and

we have Adonsoni which I think is the one and then we have I was talking I was working with the local subspecies African bees that I tend to be a little bit more defensive, but are also very productive in terms of brood and somewhat in honey. They're not, because they're in a tropical climate, they tend to not be hoarding as much honey as our European honeybees. And they tend to also be a little bit more prone to taking off in absconding sometimes several times throughout the season in search of better food.

or to escape predators. And, you know, people say that African bees can be really hyper-defensive, and that's true in some times, but I've found that that's not always the case, and some of those bees were just fine. And so it was interesting to work with them. But they're the same size, maybe a little bit smaller, than the ones that we work with in the United States, and they're meliferra. Now, you mentioned that they swarm a lot.

Do they ever practice usurpation? Do they ever take over existing colonies like that? So I am not quite sure if they do that over there. I know they do that in the United States. From the Africanized genetics, they tend to do that with our European genetics because they're very, I would say, beautifully assertive is the way I would describe them. And they tend to be able to insert themselves in another colony that way. I would think that's not something that just appeared out of the clear blue sky,

and that's something that they do as well in Africa. Now, I don't know a lot about the Congo region, which is just cool to say. Let me say that. It's something I only know from cartoons as a child. But do they have elephants there? They have elephants. Absolutely. They do have African elephants.

So now, do they use bees as? a barrier against elephants or to keep them out of gardens and things? They sure do. They do that to kind of keep the elephants outside of the villages or to protect their crops. The elephants are looking, when they're looking for food, they tend to go and help themselves because they're very smart. There's free food right there. And they'll go and trample and destroy the crops from the villagers.

So there's a really tense interaction sometimes. at the edges of the villages. And so you can set up a perimeter of honey beehives around the villages and around the crops. You suspend them on strings or metal wires so that they're not damaged by the termites. And so that they are kind of at waste level and workable that way. But they also provide a living fence against the elephants who are very smart and know that they don't want to mess with the bees because they will, they will get their trunks stung up and they don't do well.

It's like horses. They don't like getting stung by the bees. Wow. That is really interesting. What are the rules regarding African elements, elephants, when they're in an area, what are people allowed to do to protect their property? Well, they are not supposed to shoot the elephants. They're not supposed to hurt them.

They're endangered and they should, they're not supposed to. to poach them. There's a little bit of reaction sometimes that's a little bit past what they're supposed to do. But we don't want people that get hurt and we don't want the elephants to get hurt. So I think that the living fence is a great way to kind of mitigate those issues and prevent the problems from happening in the first place. Prevention is better than intervention, kind of a thing. Yeah, absolutely. All right, a random question. Did you ever see a movie from way back. It's called Elephant Walk. No. Is it an American movie? Because I've only been here for about 30 years. Yeah, it's an American movie and it goes way back to my childhood, but it was about rich people

building their homes in an area where the elephants used to travel. So they were interrupting the elephant, you know, time honored transit routes and things. And so it would just would have been interesting if you'd seen it because in the end, the elephants basically just tore down the houses and went their way and went through. Yeah, they are very... I wonder how much, you know, human expansion and habitation is interrupting these kind of traditional elephant areas, and they're kind of creating a high stress area when they do that. Well, and to be honest with you, one of the reasons I was hired to do the beekeeping

and try to leverage that through the government was because the government was trying to protect the forest as well, which is the happen. of the elephants and the bees. And so the idea was by creating an alternative source of income, especially out of the vegetable season, they would help people not burn the forest to open fields and do agriculture in a larger scale. And so provide an income that way that also had added value

with the beeswax and the brood and the honey. So there was a lot of reasons why they thought that was a great way to protect the ecosystem, including the elephant's habitat. Did the top bar hive originate in Africa? No, they didn't. The concept has been around since antiquity, since the Greeks, right? They were using baskets and top bars. So intuitively, they didn't know exactly what bee space was,

but intuitively they were using the concept to have bee halves that were inspectable and they were horizontal beehives with top bars. And so over the years, that kind of evolved into something that was a little bit more modern. And in the 70s, I think it was Kenya and Tanzania used the concept. There was a couple of people that developed their own version of those, what we call now top our hives, the horizontal top of hives. The Kenyan one has the slanted walls underneath the bars and the Tanzanian. has a straight up and down walls, but still with tab bars.

And that kind of got, that design of the Kenyan Tabahive got brought into the United States because it worked really well in the bees. We're less prone to attach the comb to the side walls. And it was played with by several beekeepers, including Les Crowder, who designed some plants that were leveraging somewhat the 30-degree angle. and that he went on and helped basically propagate the concept of top archives in the United States back in the, I think it was the 80s. And I was lucky enough to, by the way, take some classes with him when I first got started.

And it's made so much sense to me that I decided that's what I wanted to do. And I helped redesign. I mean, I basically redesigned this plan with his, approval and did some math. I just kind of like playing with some, you know, angles and trigonometry. Remember math class? Because I did engineering when I was young and I love that stuff. And it was driving me crazy that some of, so the measurements were making the angles 27 and a half to 31 degree. So things were not interchangeable. And that's one of the biggest drawbacks so far of top bars is because they haven't been interchangeable and standard.

those, they were not, people were not able to share resources or sell nukes or find nukes to populate their behalf. So they were stuck with like packages or swarms or in some instances I've seen people hacking the comb from a lankstras to make it fit in the shape of the top bar. So I decided I was going to put the 30 degree angle and the dimensions on paper to be exactly the same. And my goal was to standardize all the internal cavity dimensions so that you could and really exchange everything and create a network not only just where we are, but across the country of providers of top bar hives that follow that standard, and therefore nukes of bees that follow that standard as well.

So that's the whole thing. And we're going to get more into top bars, but I have more questions first. So people in the United States to come to the Congo to do this work for their government, how do they find you? Oh, that's a good question, right? Why me? Well, first of all, I'm French citizens, so I speak French. And also my brother, who is basically a colonel in the French gendarmerie, which is a military branch, was stationed over there in the capital Brazzaville. And I got to spend a holiday season with him and made some contacts. And that's kind of how I was invited to come in. And I was a good fit for that. So that worked out. But that was not. right away that happened a year or two later. That's really interesting. So your brother's in the French military, does he know anything about the French Foreign Legion? Of course, yes. Yeah, because I know those guys from Marseille. Yes. And also from their proven grounds down in

French Guiana, where they have training courses, all run by the French Foreign Legion. And if you talk to people today, nobody seems to know who the French Foreign Legion is. Or did they disappear? What's happened to those guys? You know, you're right. I used to hear about them all the time, and I don't know. I should ask my dad. So my dad, that's the reason my brother is doing what he's doing. He's a retired general in that Jean-Denri,

and he was working with French Guiana. Okay, cool. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. See, and if I don't ask, I wouldn't get to know all these cool things. Okay, so people should also know that you did some important work there also to translate books. or guides or instructions into French? Yes, I was working on a new manual,

all written in French, for beekeeping in that area to be accessible and easy to get started in beekeeping and kind of transfer some information about bee biology and how to manage to increase apiaries and do splits and harvest honey and all this stuff. So yes. So now you're continuing to support them

by you do fundraisers, or you have on your website. Yes. I do several things. And not just with the Congo. I also, oops, right there. I helped starting the Shamboyam. I need a farm of peace for a Congolese refugee women and children in Houston. So that's one of the things that kind of, my initial Congo trip basically led me to this.

and they've got a farm with vegetables and fruits from the Congo, and they're helped. It's a nonprofit. And we installed a bunch of bee hives and taught them how to build the hives. And I also did some virtual training in Ikom, Nigeria. When the pandemic was happening, I couldn't travel. So I was like, well, I still want to help. And I got to work with ECM and with Win Rock,

Wenrock, which is a nonprofit, an NGO that helps training agricultural themes such as Bekeeping in this case. And it was really cool because they put my name and logo on their banners over there. And we stayed in touch with some of the people over there. And it was really, really fun. But it was an intensive week for an entire week. I was teaching at night and preparing some. of the materials during the day. So I basically didn't sleep for a week, but it was cool.

Wow. That is, that's impressive stuff. I, maybe I'm the first one to talk about this stuff with you. I hope so because it makes my interview more interesting. So, but that's, no, that's really cool. And so you're doing, you're supporting them, you're doing charity work, you've been all over the place. Now, will you go back? Do you have plans to? I'm, I'm going to go back as soon as I have the Right now, I'm working on some things. I'm going to go and I've got some potential to go help out a community in Honduras. And I speak Spanish enough that I can also do that in Spanish. I'm going to go. I've been invited to do a workshop in Fiji. So I want to help a young lady named Littilat gets her agri-tourism started. And there's other opportunities that are kind of like piling on. And I want to go back to Africa, but I also want to help in other countries. is not just Africa. Wow. I don't think you're,

I don't think you're very settled. I think you're a world traveler and it's just in you to do that. I don't leave my yard. That's funny. Well, by the way, if anybody in Australia and you have Brisbane and Sydney

is in that area at the end of August, I've been invited to talk over there as well. It's not for community outreach, but that should be fun. I'm excited because this is my first time in Australia and it was only the time. Yeah.

That's a great area. Are you going to go to New South Wales? I'm going to try to and see what's going on with the beekeeping down there and travel a little bit around to see the state of beekeeping. You're referring to their recent adoption of our mites? Well, yeah, that's, I mean, that's not the only reason to go, but yeah, that's definitely a problem there. But is that something that you plan to help with? Yeah, I want to try to see if I can help out a little bit and just kind of, I'm focused on ways to do the, you know, select for fitness and just kind of try to do things sustainably. So I want to try to see if I can help that way. So resistant genetics and things like that.

Okay, before we came on, you said that you're not afraid of very much. So I have to ask, when you were, let's go back to Africa because it's just so. You know, in my head, there's like wildlife everywhere because that's what we've been shown. Was there anything there that made you nervous? Or was there any kind of animal around that you were even the slightest bit afraid of? Well, hypopathymus are really dangerous. You can't go on the canoes over there because they will kill people. And they're very territorial and defensive.

So that's probably the one that scared me the most. there's really brutal ants over there but my encounter with them was kind of a funny story where I was crossing a path of them in the forest trying to go to an observatory post to see if I could see elephants and my family was with me and we got bitten really bad and we started running and people were taking their clothes off

and trying to get rid of the ants and there was kind of an interesting event. Are those the ants that they use? Like when you get a cut, they call them suture ants and they'll pinch their heads and you can just... Bullet ants, I think they're called or something. Oh, is that what they were? Do you know what kind they were? I think they were bullet ants.

They're with their huge heads. And yes, they use them for sutures and things like that. Yeah. Wow. And a lot of people don't know. Those are related to bees. Yeah, that's true. And it's a super organism just as well.

Yep. And they swarm, too. They fly. And they will take over the earth. It's very interesting. This is all super interesting. So I want to take it to your childhood really quick. Oh. Yeah, because I want to know what your interest level was in the great outdoors. Did you, did your parents have to hunt you down? Or were you just indoor child? How'd it go? No, no, no, no. I was always outdoors. I loved books and I loved being outside and I loved basically farms and things like that. And so what happened is that when I was about eight years old, I wrote a report. on the fascinating communication language of bees.

And I got really, they'd left an impression with me, but I think bugs were already kind of in my blood and it just really enjoyed the stories. And I was always very protective of the insects. I would feed wasps that were looking like they were kind of dying and I was trying to revive them and things like my brother, on the other hand, he would see a spider and scream bloody murder. the one that's a general now that's in court it's only 13 months younger than I am and I was kind of like he has a bona fide phobia though so I shouldn't laugh about that's well now you've told everyone what his phobia is so I think that's that's super interesting so was there someone that mentored you was there anyone that you could credit with you know taking you aside and really teaching you useful things several people

But mostly Les Crowder initially when I was started, I thought his philosophy and the way he was keeping bees in the horizontal tabarhas was making total sense. And it was very, I call that the less is more approach. It's a very frugal, very simple, no fuss, no must, and just kind of really tuning into the bees, which is kind of leading to that fascination and being able to observe them and learn from them rather than impose. things on them that kind of came from that but but really I only took like a I took maybe a couple three classes with him but really fast I was reading things about natural beekeeping anything from federal azoutine and Kirk Webster and Michael Bush and also bekeeping with a smile and all of that yeah that the federal legislation book that was edited by Dr.

Rushkin, who's not one of my friends. Webster is one of my friends now, and Michael Bush is one of my friends. So I really got to read and aspire myself from a lot of that, those people that were trailblazers in that fields, but I also started developing. I got my master beekeeping certification, but I wanted to kind of bring in some of that natural

way to deal with the bees into the industry. So I started, I mean, honestly, I started focusing on selecting for fitness. And that kind of informed everything I do and I develop my own style that way. Just kind of trying to make logical sense of it in a holistic fashion, which makes sense, kind of a thing. And so now we can get to what's going to make some of my viewers happy. They've been after me for why don't I have a top arm? hive. Why don't I have that in my apiary? I have the

Dr. Leo Sharashkin. I've got the horizontal hives and I've got a long Langstroth hive. So now thanks to you I have a top bar hive and I'm going to be using that this summer and so of all

the different hive configurations that are out there I think you said did you say you started out with a national hive or something a warre hive? A a whore hive. And so So what, of all these different hive, and of course the most popular hive is the Langstroth hive, the vertical assembly. The ubiquitous is common. Was it these people like Dr. Leo and these others that were more holistic in their approach to bees that kind of got you thinking in a horizontal way?

And then, knowing that you have other horizontal options, why a top bar hive ahead of all others? That's a great question. So really what got me, that was not, I didn't start with Layans. I got Layans later. What I did is I did have the Warri initial, which by the way is a vertical top bar hive. And I realized it was not really easily manageable because it's heavy. I had to lift boxes. And then I discovered the concept of the top ar hive through the class that I took with less. And I realized that it was really super easy to make. So I was able to make one myself with the plans from his book, which, by the way, if you have his book, the standard is no longer the plans that are in his book. The standards are what we worked on published on the Be Mindful website that has the standard dimensions. Oh, are you saying that he updated his angles and everything after you got involved? No, he hasn't updated the book. We're writing a book together.

he hasn't updated the plans on this book. So what I'm saying is that what I redesigned from these plans, and we work together, right? We work together all the time. I talk to him every day and we're inspecting the bees together. Like he takes some of the routes. I take some of the routes and we see each other. We host events together.

We do apprenticeships together. So we are really working closely together. But the plans that are in the book, I redesigned them with, It's really close to what he had, but by doing the math, we're not using both of us, are using these plans so that it's really easy to build and we assemble them upside down so that the dimensions internally are exactly the same. So that's why I'm mentioning the plans that are on the website is the ones that you want to use if you're going to want to be part of the standardization kind of it.

So when will this new revised edition be published? As soon as we're done editing and just working on things, it's been a crazy year. And so both Les and I have been super busy. But he's writing, he's writing some of the chapters. And I'm kind of contributing some, but mostly I'm helping him on this one, editing some of the stuff and adding some of the new concepts that kind of came up with. I'm in particular, I've got a what I call a Flex 5, which is a conversion from Langstroth to Top Bar, where you can use. Yes.

Yeah, you have pictures of that, I believe, on your website. Is that right? Yes, I do, and I have better than that. I have the concept. Well, there it is. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. So this is basically attaching the top bar that you remove to one of the sides and you attach to Lexstrough and cut open.

but you leave a little ledge here and there to make sure that it's going to be stopping the bar. So this is the concept that it came up with that we're using a lot of now to put our bees into so we can have the best of both worlds. So is that brand new? Is that something you've just come out with? No, it's been a couple of years now. And I started with the easy JZ nukes that are like the corrugated plastic ones. I need something brand new that no one has seen or heard of.

It needs to be announced during this. You want a special announcement in your show. Is that what you want? That's all I want. It's no big deal. But anyway, I have a special announcement for you. Okay, good. What is it?

Yeah, I came up with this too, which is a theater. Okay. So does it work for a special announcement? Has anyone seen it before? Well, we had it at the B-school. Yes, this weekend. Okay, but is that the first time? At the B-school, you.

Yes, I believe it is. Do you sell that through your website? We do now. You know, so I need to tell you something. All the hives and the equipment that we sell now between the feeders, the top bar swarm traps slash nooks, and the actual full-sized top bar hives that are actually this thick, which is almost two-inch thick,

and they're made out of a beautiful pine wood with rough stone on the inside of the hives, We're getting those cuts by, I'm supporting an Amish community that's, we're creating some jobs for them and they ship the equipment by the palette to us or two locations that won them. And then I sell them at cost because I make my money on the services, right? And I want to support and democratize the hive. So I try to keep the pricing down on my end while still creating jobs for them and giving them something to do. Where are they located? I am not supposed to say because they don't want to be. We have Amish people all over the place out here.

It's not Pennsylvania. It's not in Texas either, by the way. Well, I was wondering where this Amish community is in Texas. it doesn't feel like there would be there. They do have in Beaville, Texas, there's an Amish community in particular, but I think they're more. In Beaville, Texas?

Yeah, it's called Beaville. Can you believe that? That's funny. Okay, so you've shown us that we have this so we can have Langstroth, deep frames, and you've got that adapter that's connected so we can start off with our top our hives. And we know that you sell topar hives on your site.

provide plans if people are handy and can do it themselves? Yes, sir. So if you go to the website and click on their resources and go to plans, or if you do B-Mindful.com slash plans, the plans that I've redesigned and I've put in PDFs and everything are posted there for anyone to use. And if you want to use them for production of top-bar hives or tub-ar nukes, I mean, I tell people all the time, look, I'll help you, promo that business by putting it, we have a locator map on our website that indicates

where people that produce those well. So basically we're making it available for free and usable across the world so that we can create that standard. So how receptive are others who sell Top Our Hives to this new standard that you're trying to get accepted? So people that have been doing their own tabah half plans might not want to change necessarily, but anybody that's kind of started and is seeing the value of the standardization and the simplicity of the plan, the plans that we have. It takes, I'm not a woodworker. And using those plans, it takes me less than two hours to make a tabahe from scratch that I can use as a double and put two colonies. for if I buy the wood myself and make it from scratch,

it cost me about $60. So $30 per colony, right? And so it makes it very accessible to anyone to make those hives. And if they don't have the only tools that you need is a table saw and maybe a circular saw. If you don't have that, you're bound to know somebody that does and can use it really simply, right? So what I like also is that they can be made out of reclaimed wood

because there's no precision wood mailing, right? There's no frames, there's no things like that, and it's a simple trough. So from that standpoint, I say it's been really well received, and we have that network of providers and people that are adopting it, including in bee supplies now, that are seeing the value of the top bar beekeeping for backyard beekeepers. So yes, the vast majority of bee hives in the United States,

are owned by commercial beekeepers, but the vast majority of beekeepers in the United States are actually backyard, small-scale beekeepers that own anywhere between one and maybe like 30 hives. And so they're very well adapted to conditions where you're not moving them. They're not as well adapted to migratory beekeeping. Less Crowder has done it with 200 hives on the trailer,

and I move mine all the time, and Les moves some as well. he helps me sometimes sometimes I do it by myself if they're not too heavy and you have to have a technique to do that and a pickup truck helps too but but other than that you know for static yards that they're not going to you're not going to take them to pollination contracts or anything and as most of us they work really well because they're cost effective and they're good they're they're they help you protect not only your budget but also your back because you're working at waste level and you're not lifting those heavy boxes.

Some of them, I think when you have honey in a 10-frame, it can weigh up to 100 pounds. And so you're not doing twisting your back and you're not bending over. And so we're noticing that a lot of youth, women, and people with limited mobility are really interested into that alternative to the commercial boxes that require

sometimes a lot of heavy lifting. And we're noticing also that people that have been beekeeping for a long time with Langstroth, some of them, their backs are given out and they have to get out of beekeeping. And by switching to something like this, it's helping them prolong the amount of time that they can stay into the bees. And I think you asked me about why Tabar versus other horizontal configurations. And I think that definitely the cost, because when you're doing an endy self-reliable,

alliance because you can cut it basically bars are just a stick of wood right it's just something that's very simple that's going to last you 30 years or so it's unless you leave it on the ground like I do sometimes don't tell anyone and then because it's so thick you end up having a lot of insulation at the top and horizontally you can do that in the box for all the other hives as well but this is your roof right they all touch the bars are all touching you can see kind of right here, they fall the roof and you have an entrance at the bottom of the height. So that thermal mass and insulation is really helping the bees absorb some of the fluctuations of temperature.

Right. And because it's a bar and not a frame, and especially because we're not using foundation, these can cost like $4. These will cost you about zero to 33 cents to make yourself. So that's 10 times more money for a frame, and that's a Langstrath frame. The lay-ons frames are even more expensive.

I think they cost like $7. So that's like 25 times more than the top bar, right? And so from that standpoint, you can save a lot of money. I would give you an example for 30 colonies over 30 years. You could save close to $27,000 because the cost of the bars is so much cheaper than the cost of the frames. And I noticed I did look up some top bar configurations and older designs and things like that, even from the 60s in Africa. And they were putting wedges on the bottom side. And is there a reason that you decided not to do that?

Do you find they just use B space and off they go? So that's a great question. So the reason people do that is to give the bees an indication so that they build center of the bar, right? Otherwise, they would build whichever way they want. The bees tend to do whatever they want, and they don't always read the books, right? So by putting, so some people would put wedges like these to indicate to the bees the center of the bar, and the bees tend to use that vertical line to build their comb, especially if it's rubbed with a little bees wax. You can also use, they use some more complicated cuts, creating wedges on the bar.

a rich. I like that. That looks good. I made out those. And, you know, if you know how to use a table saw, very simple ways to do this and maybe have a bandsaw to cut the edges, it doesn't take too long, but it takes still a lot longer than not having to do that. So some of the things that you can do is you can take a band with skewer and glue it in the center right there and maybe rub some beeswax. or you can use a piece of yarn that you dip into beeswax and stretch in the center of the bar so when it's dry and cold it's sticky to it and you have something equivalent to the bamboo skewer

in the center of the bar. And that gives the bees an indication on how to start straight. So that's if you have nothing. Your first-time beekeeper, you don't have access to somebody that's producing tabar nukes that fit in your tab bar. You're putting in a package or a swarm in there and you don't have anything that you can do with that. My favorite guide though, because you want to make sure that you'll illustrate, is anything

that has already some comb that you might have cut out for cut comb or some other things, or maybe that was broken or the wax mouth kind of got a little bit of that. But this is going to be a great guide to get the bees started and even better what I really like the best, because when you put bees in the box, they tend to want to abstain if there's nothing in there. I like a full-size comb that's going to be already straight and that's going to be the best guide that you can give them. But when you're first starting in Tabarbykeeping, you don't necessarily have that. So that's interesting. So how did you arrive at the depth of the trough? So the depth of the trough is so more than the depth of the trough, I think the angle,

and that's what Les was kind of going with, is 30-E was going towards a 30-degree angle. Now we're exact on the nose 30 degree angle. And that's, if you think about it, that's the angle of the hexagon. And these hives, as you can see, they're basically the shape of a half hexagon, right? Like this feeder has a shape. See it. Yeah, I like that story. Right.

And so what happens is that a lot of the top bar hives have dimensions with shorter bars and deeper depth, which means the center of gravity when you calculate it is much lower. There's less attachment. That means they tend to break off the bar quite a bit more, especially when you put a telescopic cover

and you leave them in the sun, and especially when you're in Texas. So then top bar has a bad rep, usually. But with this 30 degree angle and the depth of, basically the length of the side was the standardization, and then the depth was a consequence

of that. But that center of gravity is much higher, closer to the top of the bar, and your attachment to the bar is much longer with a shorter depth. That means your comb is better attached. That also means that 30-degree angle, the bees do not glue the side of the combs to the side of the walls. So the more vertical you go, like in the Tanzanian, the more that natural comb will need additional structural integrity. So the bees will tend to attach to the size. And that's why you see a lot of pictures of tab bars that are not standardized to the 30 degree angle where the bees are attaching, especially to the windows, you know, the viewing windows. They love to attach the comb to that. But that's partly because of the steeper slope, if you will. And have you noticed how close to

the bottom are they drawing out the comb? What's, are they leaving a pinch? B-space. B-spaced. Three and seven inch? Mm-hmm. And so even like at the bottom? Mm-hmm. They will build to that and you'll have three eights all around the sides and the bottom.

That's interesting. That's what they do. That's all super interesting. Mm-hmm. And so with your holistic approach and thinking about the materials that you're using and everything else, what is your preferred finish for your beehive? I tend to be doing less. my favorite thing is less is more

and so I don't typically finish them I like to let them kind of look natural in all reality those are slanted underneath the roof and the awning if you will

and they're they're not exposed the walls are not exposed to sun or rain and so they don't really need any kind of treatments and so I like to let them kind of turn gray

but for our customer something times I will paint them on the outside only. You don't want to pin them on the inside because that's the space for the bees. And that can help, you know, a little bit. But these will last about 20, 30 years, especially because it's so thick and there's very few. You're not prying the boxes apart. You're not, you know, there's no stress getting put onto the box all the time. So they last a lot longer and they're a lot thicker, which helps as well. Now, your top bars are nice and thick. What about the side walls?

The side walls, I'm going to show you kind of that. This is, again, think of it in the terms of the large hives, they're going to be twice as thick. This is almost one inch. This is for the little mini versions of them that follow by the way the exact same internal dimension. So it doesn't matter

what kind of thickness of what you are using. By using the plans on the website, you're making sure that you're assembling them upside down. So the distance from here to under the bar is going to be always the same. So that means any kind of thickness of wood you can use and that's going to be the same plants. So this one happens to be for our swarm trap slash nook

where you can do splits and things like that. And we like to use, thanks to our Amish friends, they leaving one side rough zone. So the outside is going to be plain, but the inside is going to be rough zone. And that's really my favorite because that encourages the bees to propelize more which helps with their immune system and their health. And so you showed us a frame feeder that looks really handy. What do you plan to do to the interior of that to keep it from getting mold and things like that? So that's a great question. So first of all, I made sure that these had a plug,

which, by the way, you can feed the bees from outside the house without even opening it, right? Because it replaces couple bars and the roof is not open. the bees is not exposed. They don't even know you're coming in. So when you remove the plug, you have enough space there. It's long enough that you could wash inside and you could cock the edges if you'd like. But what I'm planning on doing is probably dip in it in beeswax and maybe boiling it in these beeswax to waterproof it.

But thinking about that when I do that, I'm losing some of the roughness here, which prevents the bees from drowning. They can climb right up. And so I might have to add a little bit of hardware cloth or sticks to make sure they don't drown and can get back in. We don't feed a whole lot. We use a lot of equalization and giving from the halves to the have-nots. And when we do feed for emergency purposes, we provide some much thicker syrup, like four-to-one kind of a consistency. That's closer to the consistency of honey, by the way.

that's about 20% water content. And so it doesn't, it's thicker and it doesn't run so much, right? And I think the thicker the syrup, like if you're using something like fructose syrup, the less, the thicker that's going to be. So we found that they don't really leak so much, but you could also make it out of marine boards or something a little bit more, I forget what that's called, some materials that could be plexiglass if you want to see through it, right? And we're going to put the plans on the website as well.

well because the goal is to really make it easy for anybody to do top our hives. But we're going to probably think about something. What would you do if you were to kind of waterproof this? I don't know. I don't put, I don't use frame feeders. So I just had that concern. The other thing is you mentioned using a really heavy syrup. Any surface area when you have a really heavy syrup, the bees just get stuck in it so fast. It's almost like they can't escape it. That's why. Oh, they're sticky. Yeah, it's really kind of puts them in jeopardy. But it'll be interesting because I know you'll try all that and see how it works

and come up with different things from that alone. So that's super interesting too. So I'm sure, now I've noticed that you put a cover on that that's corrugated metal. Is that your standard? So, and I can share an image that was from, that has an image of the top bar hive. Would you like me to kind of put it up so that you have a visual with this? Let me share as well. and this one share.

And so basically here at the bottom, and this was, don't look at the rest, but the hive that our Amish friends are building for us from the plants, there's a hinged roof. It's kind of a concept I was working with because I didn't like putting the corrugated board on top and then tying it to the hive with straps

and you would pull it tight enough that it would start bowing. The goal was to have enough airflow underneath so that it would not cook the bars and keep the nest from melting into the tabar hive. Right. So there's a lot of airflow under the roof, the rain cover. And with the, with the, um, this style of, um, have you have a lot of airflow over the bars.

So that prevents that cooking, right? So a lot of the telescopic covers that you see on top of hives tend to trap the heat right there under the roof and keep it right over the bars that are typically much thinner. They're like about like this thickness that is like really thin. And so that combination of things tend to make the comb detach itself from the bars, which is a huge inconvenience. And part of the reason why in the past top bars might have gotten bad reputation, right? Yeah. So yeah. Now that space that you have there over the top bars and then to the inner surface of that cover that you're showing. Depending on where you're located, do you have any problems with wasps moving in and building

their nests right into that space? No, we don't because the only place where they can get in is under the roof of the hive and not in the hive. And there's enough airflow underneath that they don't really take residence. I've never had any problems with wasps. Okay. So, this leads to the next question. I'm sure people want to know because everyone likes to say this hive does not work in cold weather. This hive does not work in the desert southwest. Where is the top bar hive best suited? I would say everywhere and I'm going to tell you exactly because I was speaking in Wisconsin at the Midwest Honeybee Expo and I had that question come up quite a bit about the cold weather. And so the way I was explaining it is first of all these are twice as in.

as most of the Langstraff, because they are not vertical, so you don't have to lift anything, so you can have that additional weight and thermal mass. So you have already that coming into play, but also that horizontal configuration means you don't have a chimney effect where the brood's nest is losing the heat that it's generating to the stack and it's rising above their heads, right? So it makes it a little bit harder for them to keep the heat where they are. And you might also have, if you don't have your top insulated properly, you might have condensation that creates issues as well.

So that's why I always recommend our Langstroth's beekeepers to put insulation at the top, at the very top of that stack, at the very least, to prevent that condensation issue. And also it helps with the heat, right? kind of insulation works both ways. But now you have a horizontal configuration with top bars that are super thick and you have not that much

depth. So the bees are going to be clustered on the comb, which by the way, I don't know if you can see this lighter band right at the top where the bees are keeping their honey right around the brood's nest usually. And so that heat is pulling under the bars

where the bees are. So that keeps them warm and they don't lose that heat, it stays with them. And also they usually, I don't know if you can see right there, there's a hole right there that the bees naturally put under the bar that allows them to communicate between the various combs horizontally. So they will keep that warmth and travel horizontally and go through their resources that way.

And it turns out that we have beekeepers that are in Wisconsin and Nebraska and the state of New York that are using those hives and those plants with that thickness, and they're reporting fantastic survival because of it, because it's actually thermodynamically more efficient for the bees. And it basically mimics a fallen trunk of a cavity in the wild. So my next question, I don't know if it was very clear when you showed the pictures. Where is your entrance and what size is it? I can bring it back up if I can figure out how to do this again.

and there's my presentation. So basically we are doing the entrances in our case. I mean, personally, I've seen entrances in all kinds of configuration. I know Felchandler likes to use the entrances and, basically what we call warm, I mean sorry, yeah, warm configuration. So do you see my screen? Yeah, I can see it. Okay, so you see the image in the bottom.

By the way, that image at the bottom right. Oh, it's at the very end. Okay. Yes, it's at the very end on the side. And if you can see the image on the, in the center, there's a little round to the right of the hive. That would be where I would put the entrance. Actually, I'm sorry, look at the two little rounds from the opposites. And that would be the entrances at the bottom. and of the long wall is where we put them.

And I need to give credit for that image that you see on the bottom right. That's from our friend Corwin Bell, which has done the graphic design, and so I wanted to make sure I gave him credit for that. But it's a very good way to illustrate. What's very interesting is when you have the entrance, like that what we call the front of the avenue,

the end piece, is that the bees will put naturally around any entrances there's going to be typically a comb of honey, maybe a comb of pollen during the season. And then they're going to build their brood's nest right where the entrances to allow for better airflow. And then there will close around that brood's nest

another layer of pollen and honey. And then in the back of that, if there's more space, they will start building more comb. That's going to be more like just for honey, the larger cells. And they're going to store their surplus in the back of the hive,

which is to the right here. So that makes it super easy. When you inspect, you're going to smoke the entrance, and then you're going to start opening one bar at a time in the back of the hive, where you see right there the three diminishing combs are on the right side, and you're going to travel the hole that you're opening towards the front, and you're going to counter some comb that's going to have some honey maybe, so you'll know really quickly if they have food.

And then you kind of like slide them, and travel that opening all the way to the edge of your brood's nest here where the pollen is. And that allows you to see the edge of the brood's nest and see if they've got brood, what the pattern looks like, if they're healthy, if they have enough bees. And most of the time, you don't have to go through the rest of the nest to know the size of your brood's nest, right? Because you know how many bars it features, and you know how well they're doing if they're brooding up. and you don't have to crack open the whole lid to see what's going on.

You know right there that makes your inspections, by the way, take very little time and the bees barely know you're there. So that makes those hives actually quite calmer. I remember I had a friend who came with me in one of my yards. I had 20 top of hives and 20 langstroth. And we went through the top of hives first and the langstroth next. And she was like, I, my mind is blown because the tabar hives were totally manageable and calm. Some of them were maybe, you know, the larger ones might have been a little bit more picky about the visit.

But the Langstrass were all a lot more defensive from the intrusion. So she was very impressed that it kept them a lot calmer, basically. Oh, yeah. Keeping your bees covered while you work is. Yes. It calms them down. So my next question, too, is I don't see any vivid. venting so your only airflow source is also the entrance? So correct.

Their ventilation is going through the entrances at the bottom end of the hive. There's the hive box itself is well insulated. There's a high thermal mass and there's airflow over the bars. So that helps with any kind of heat. Just as well as it helps with the cold, by the way. People think that, you know, insulation is just for the cold. But no, it works both ways, right? It's a way to absorb the sharp fluctuations of temperature

and allow them to not work as hard to maintain the conditions in the half. By having just smaller entrances like these, and you can do that in any hive styles, by the way, the bees are much more, they're master airflow controllers, right? And they will do really well circulating the airflow through the nest and much more efficiently when their entrances are that small, because it's kind of imagine trying to air-condition your house by leaving the front door open, right?

Or any kind of draft way, if you have the back windows and the front door open, that's even worse, right? But that allows them to control tightly the pool of the air. So you'll see them in the summer very often. Well, you're not going to have that much bearding in a thicker hive because they don't work so hard. But you might see in periods where it's a little bit more. humid, they're going to try to pull out the moisture out of the hive.

And you'll see them kind of like collecting around the entrance and down the legs and kind of all pointing to that entrance and they're going to start fainting their wings. And what it does is that creates a current of air that pulls the air out, literally pulls it out of the hive. But they can't really do that if the entrance is too wide, right? is kind of like working much harder. So actually it helps with air circulation. So then the last part is how do you harvest your honey?

That's a good question. So there's three ways to harvest honey, right? So you can take the comb and I'm going to stop sharing this. Hang on if I can figure it out, stop sharing, and then I'm back with the image. So there's three ways to harvest honey. By the way, you have either light colored comb or darker colored comb that's been had some brood over time. It gets a lot darker, right?

But the way to harvest honey, you would probably use, you have three ways. You can, the one that everybody hears about when you're talking about tabal hives, you're going to cut the comb, put it in the bucket, and crush and strain it over a calendar in your kitchen, which, by the way, everybody has, right? You don't need an extractor for that. But you can also, if you want liquid honey specifically, you can also, when the comb is not the brand new comb that's like white, fresh and really fragile, but something that's a little bit more solid.

You can uncap it. So one of my favorite tools for doing that is a serrated knife. Everything I do with Talbarbekeeping, it just love working with the serrated knife. It works really super well. It cuts through comb. It does help me lift the bars if I forget my hive tools, which I do regularly. I leave them in the bee yards.

But you can also uncap with a roller. Anyway, you can uncap on both sides, and then you can do the let it drain in the warm room, or you can actually pop it into an extractor. And I would recommend a radial extractor as opposed to a tangential extractor with the bar on the outside of the drum and you start them slow

and then you start picking up the speed as the honey flings out, there's less mass that's pushing on the comb and the ragel really helps kind of not putting stress laterally on the comb and just kind of the honey comes right out. And then you can put it back on the beehive. So you do it a little bit more gentler

but you can absolutely extract honey on the older comb, liquid honey. My favorite part, though, is I take the comb back home, and I'm going to take my knife and I'm going to cut squares 4 inch by 4 inch or rectangles 4 inch by 2 inch. And I'll put them in those little cassettes and sell them at cut comb. So in my neck of the wood, Fred, that sell this 4x4 square. It will sell $45 to $50 a square. So it's really much work. My grandson sells those for $12.

$12. Well, you know, I mean, I would encourage me. I hope he watches this. He needs to up his game. That's right. Well, you know, anytime you have a niche market like your grandson has with a comb, honey, you can kind of commend a little bit more price for your product because it's in high demand sometimes and low supply, right? So you get to kind of raise your prices.

I would recommend he does raise these prices because Comrade sells for three times the amount of liquid honey. Anyway, yeah, he's already a little, he calls me constantly about his clients waiting for honey. Anyway, he's watching. I know he's watching this. When you cut a four by four section of that and you put it in a cassette, is that nine ounces of honey? What's it weigh on average? I do not remember now. I think it's about, it's probably about 10 ounces or 12 ounces of more than normal. Yes, yes. It's heavy. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting. And that you're

right, if you're going to cut the comb, if you're going to damage the comb, you might as well make cut comb. Absolutely. Presented that way. Have you, how long do you keep these brood frames? How many years before you swap those? out. That's a good question. So initially these frames start with light comb, right, light color, and then it turned a little bit darker. And you can see, by the way, I wanted to bring up something here. You have worker-sized cells on this one side, and then you have what used to be drone cells on the side of it, and then they turned that into honey storage. So they use those large cells as a much more efficient way to store honey. But as you get more and more generations of bees into the worker size cells, you end up having much darker comb. And so their horizontal

configuration helps you kind of cycle out some of that when it gets really dark and you can't see the sun through it anymore. We tend to remove it. And it's about three years, three, four years to cycle out. And what it does is that it helps cycle out the old bird's nest and bringing it new fresh comb into the bird's nest. So the sanitary conditions are a lot better. And makes for healthier bees in a way. Yeah, and there are concentrated pesticides and things like that. Correct. What else can we ask about?

Oh, that's what I want to know. With your hives, you have over 400. With everyone talking about their losses this year, how are you faring with that? We're not doing too bad. We had higher losses than usual. So doing it naturally, we have about 5 to 10%. and usually on losses every year. And usually in like first year colonies.

This year, the first year colonies suffered a little bit more. The established ones were fine. The first year colonies because we had a lack of nutrition last year in our neck of the, we have very harsh conditions in the hill country. And we grow cacti and rocks and juniper and oaks. And some areas are really hard. And we had a lot of rain in the spring every couple of days. the nectar flu cut washed away quite a bit.

So it was a little bit harder. So we lost probably 15%. Oh, people are static to only lose 15% of their bees. Right. Yeah. So that was a little bit higher. I think there's some yards in the harsher condition areas that might have gone up to 20. Now, do you notice any difference in those that are keeping Langstroth hives in the same areas

and their losses being any different? Do you think there's any benefit survivorship-wise? I can see from the difference between my hives. I do have Langstroth, right? So I do have some that were kind of legacy from earlier days or stuff that might recover from donations or people that don't want to use those and prefer to switch over.

So I end up with some of them. But the survival, I would say, is better in the top bars by probably a factor. I wouldn't be able to put actually a factor on that, but we notice the bees do better. They seem less stressed out. So I would say we lose maybe 5, 10% more in the Langstrass would be my guesstimate.

Now, you know, it's interesting that you say that because studies have actually been done on stressed bees, stress colonies that are harassed or uncomfortable in the cavity that they're in. And it does affect their longevity. it affects their forage ability. In fact, it affects how well they remember forage locations. It's kind of like people, if you're up all night and you wake up, you don't function at 100%. So those studies have been done.

And if that can be assigned to a hive configuration or management style that also reduces the stress or the amount of time you spend invading their space, then that would result long term in improved overall health, well-being. of course, performance, right? Mostly. And Honey Production, if you think about it, because they have to work less hard. And so some of their stuff is put back into the production. So if the name of the game is Honey Production, that helps as well. Okay. All right. Well, you know what? I want to really thank you for taking us through all

of this tonight because this is all super interesting. And you've helped me because the people that are asking me to talk about top bars, see, now we've done it. And I brought you. I brought brought you in. And do you have any closing statements, anything you just like to share about, any program? And of course, people should know if you're watching or listening, the links will be down in the video description to this website, to the Hives. And of course, when the book publishes, we'll put that link down there too, so you can be sure to get that. I appreciate it. Anybody that wants to ask us about Tabar Hives, you can find us on B-Mindful.com. and we're happy to answer anybody's questions and help you get started with Tabars and the plans are available on the website again.

We have, for the people that are not too far, every month we do an apprenticeship for six or 12 months. It's a full day where we put you into. So our teaching apiaries have all kinds of hives, by the way. We do Wari, Layans, Langstroth, Long, Cliffs, Comfort hives, sun hives. We even have some skips. and of course talk about hives. I even have an ivory bee hive.

I'm a collector of hives. So our teaching apieries kind of show you a little bit of everything. But then we also have, and that's what I think people that come from far away might be interested in. We do several times a year in the spring

in the fall workshops, three-day workshops, where for the cost of a Amish hive, you walk away with that hive and three days worth of teaching, including bee biology and integrated pest management and basically the equivalent of a full day in the beehives with us.

So that's kind of what if you are interested in coming to learn with us and see it for yourself, come on down and visit us. We're happy to see you. Okay, I'm not going to let you go now because you cycled through something really quick there that I'm going to go back to. You said comfort hive. Yes. What is a comfort hive?

This better not be that thing where Dr. Leo gets in his hive sauna. is that that would be comfort hive I guess in a way what's a comfort hive my friend Sam Comfort who I forgot to mention earlier

as one of my inspiration you know heroes Sam Comfort is also a treatment free beekeeper and he has put together his own version of the

frugal beehives and he uses two by sixes and a screw on four sides to make square boxes that he can stack vertically. And it's basically the equivalent of a warrior hive, but simplified because he's using bamboo skewers or in this case, bamboo skewers are mostly paint stirers. And it's a vertical top bar hives as well.

So it's a version of a top bar hive that uses skewers in a vertical configuration. That's interesting. So I do have to ask you then, you know the hive I'm talking about that Dr. Leo has that it's a sauna? Yes, I've been to his workshops several times. Have you ever tried one out? Can you describe what that experience was? So I haven't tried it with bees.

There was no bees in it. I'm going to make one for our apiaries, but I will make it with top our hives. And basically, what it is is that it's a sauna-like wooden bed that you are filling with colonies of bees and putting screens on top to be able to, you can lay it down on top of it. So you feel the vibrations, you hear the sounds of the bees, which is very soothing but also healing. And the screens allow you to kind of have the vapor, the propolis vapor compounds and the smells of the yeast and of the pollen and everything, basically invade the space.

And it has therapeutic properties and probably all. also healing properties in terms of meditative, you know, just, you know, it smells good and it makes you feel like aromatherapy kind of a thing. Yeah, so it's like an immersive experience. And I believe one side of it's glass, right? So you can see nature, whatever. Yes, he has basically a cabin with a mini cabin that's the size of a big bed with doors. And he has a glass window to be able to see the outside as well. And you're in your building one. I'm building my own version of it that's going to work with the top bar hives and kind of the I constantly tinker and come up with other things.

So I'm going to have a different version. It would be interesting if we could get, you know, baseline vital signs and things like that of before and before, during, and after that experience. That would be. Yeah, it's an interesting thought. All right. Well, there again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it and we've learned a lot. So I'm looking forward to this year with the top bar hive. Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to talk about my favorite thing, which is the horizontal top of our hives. Yes, thank you. Okay, great. And that wraps up another episode of interviews with experts. Thank you so much for listening.

And if you find the programming like this useful, please consider subscribing. You'll find several links and updated information down in the video description. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be.