About Bees, Culture & Curiosity

Season 7 Episode 0: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – 2026 Short Trailer   This trailer, our introduction to Season 7, sets the stage for season 7, the About Bees podcast's next 12 episodes. Our winter season. A great time to get caught up. Enjoy.   Recorded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in January 2026. Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.  Podcast web...

Season 6 Episode 12 About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – 2025: Ten Bee News Stories  Links to our ten featured news stories from 2025:  62% Bee Losses Honey Bee Health   https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/survey-reveals-over-1-1-million-honey-bee-colonies-lost-raising-alarm-for-pollination-and-agriculture/ Washington State study on colony losses   https://news.wsu.edu/news/2025/03/25/honey-b...

Season 6 Episode 11:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bees or Greenhouses?   Bees or Greenhouses? Which would make more money as a business?  Ron chats with his brother Joe of Honeymoon Acres , a Wisconsin greenhouse business. We engage in a race to the bottom. I make the case that beekeeping is definitely the less profitable business. Recorded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in December 202...

Season 6 Episode 10:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – A Langstroth Christmas   Let's look at the inventor of the modern North American beehive. It's Christmas and it's L.L. Langstroth's birthday. Hope you enjoy this!  Recorded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in December 2025. Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.  Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.co...

Season 6 Episode 9: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – A Candid Chat with Alberta's (former) Agriculture Minister  In this episode, I enjoy a conversation with the Honorable Oneil Carlier , former Agriculture Minister of Alberta. Alberta is cowboys and ranching and enormous forests and wheat fields and wide-open spaces. Alberta, where I live, is also the biggest honey-producer in Canada. Al...

Season 6 Episode 8: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Buzz Pollination in the Greenhouse  I was looking around for something in bloom here in December to talk about on this podcast, but I didn't feel like stepping outside into the deep snow and arctic temperatures. Then I realized that greenhouses are full of blooming plants – pollinated by bumble bees, mostly. So, that's what we're doing...

Season 6 Episode 7: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – What's it like to run 6,000 hives of bees?   What is it like being responsible for 6,000 colonies, a couple dozen employees, and 150 apiary locations?    And producing and selling over a million pounds of honey each year? Here's your chance to find out. We visit with Murray Hannigan of Hannigan Honey . The operation is in Saskatchewan,...

Season 6 Episode 6: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Is All Manuka Honey Fake?   Is all manuka honey fake? I used to think that manuka is overrated. Not much there , there – if you know what I mean. Yes, of course I'm a cynic, or at least a skeptic. But follow along with this episode and see why I changed. It's a path of discovery. We will cover the fraud fights, the discovery of manuka's...

Season 6 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Philosopher-Beekeeper Richard Taylor   Dr. Richard Taylor's 106th birthday memorial is this week. That's as good of an excuse as any to open up his best-selling book, The Joys of Beekeeping , and chat about his life as a commercial beekeeper and philosophy professor. We look at his life and explore his thoughts on being a better beekeep...

Season 6 Episode 4: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Brother Joe: Bees & Greenhouses  Joe and I talk about neonicotinoids (and other poisons), problems with wax worms, the greenhouse business, our oldest brother, David, and innovations, a BrainPopping drink, politics, economics, and "Why be good?" Hope you enjoy this episode. Recorded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in October 2025. Honeymoon...

Season 6 Episode 3: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – A Halloween Shorty   Do you celebrate Halloween ? Beekeepers should. Listen to find out why. Recorded in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in October 2025. Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.  Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/ Finally:...

Season 6 Episode 2: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Down in October   It's October and things are shutting down here in North America - at least the part of North America that's north of Mexico. Just before it all ends, there are a few final bursts of flowers to treat pollinators of all shapes and sizes. Today, we talk about Asters , the stars of fall, and Brazilian Pepperbush and Melale...

Season 6 Episode 1: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Apimondia 2025   Ron is back from Apimondia Scandinavia 2025. If you missed this world bee event, listen up as we walk through the Global Honey Bar, hundreds of posters, the mega-exhibition hall, and the heart of the conference - the presentations. This is not an exhaustive review, but this overview will give you a sense for the dizzyin...

Season 5 Episode 12:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – The Autumn Flower: Goldenrod. Plus a bonus - the end of human civilization   Goldenrod is the keystone species for plant, animal, and ecological survival in a huge part of North America. It is also suffering from an unexpected problem, which is hurting bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. That's this episode's bonus - the collaps...

Season 5 Episode 11:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bright Shiny Bees   Our guest today is Ilan Domnich of the Alberta Native Bee Council . We dig deeply into the care and appreciation of native bees in North America.  Bright green bees, yellow-faced bees, bees that make cellophane (sort of), mine into the sand, plus tiny, tiny bees. Bees that turn their blood into wine? This episode i...

Season 5 Episode 10:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Apimondia: The World's Bee Meeting     This short introduction to Apimondia will be of interest to all beekeepers, whether attending Apimondia 2025 in Copenhagen or not.  I hope you are among those going to the conference! Apimondia 2025: https://apimondia2025.com/ Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adula...

Season 5 Episode 9:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Beekeeping along Canada's Sunshine Coast      Canada has a sunshine coast. That's where I met up with my friend Steve Clifford . Steve is a honey producer (mostly Himalayan blackberry honey) and he produces and sells queens and nucs. It's a really different part of Canada - a rainforest where it seldom snows, but summers can get hot an...

Season 5 Episode 8:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Chile for Avocado Pollination, Queen Production, and Adventure      Today's guest is Francisco Rey , a Chilean beekeeper and avocado farmer. We talk about the country of Chile, Francisco's 43 years of beekeeping, queen breeding, Francisco's friendship with researcher John Kefuss, Francisco's family-run bee farm, avocado pollination, av...

Season 5 Episode 7:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Buckwheat: Our Favourite August Honey Plant      Buckwheat is quirky. Both the plant and the honey. We look at both - plant and honey - in today's podcast. Especially the black, chokingly-strong honey. Buckwheat, though often mistaken for a cereal grain, is actually a member of the Polygonaceae family, kin to rhubarb and sorrel. First...

Season 5 Episode 6: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Laura Sends us Deep into the Beekeeping Groove      This wide-ranging beekeeping podcast takes us from Wales to New Zealand and then Alberta, Canada, with beekeeper Laura Barritt. We look at commercial beekeeping in New Zealand and touch on Sir Edmund Hillary, manuka honey, queen breeding, package shaking, honey producing by under super...

Season 5 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – World's Most Interesting Bee Museum - and more...       I am just back from a quick trip to central Europe, where I visited bees in Slovenia and family in Hungary. You don't want to miss what this curious beekeeper has to say about what he saw! Among other things,, I explored the world's most interesting beekeeping museum. What would yo...

Season 5 Episode 4: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bees, Greenhouses, and 18-hour Work Days      It takes 18-hour workdays to keep a greenhouse that produces 3 million plants a year, and to keep a dozen hives of bees on the side to pollinate a10-acre pumpkin patch. Our guest is Joe McShaw, of Honeymoon Acres in Wisconsin. Joe is Ron's youngest brother, so we have a lot of fun on this ep...

Season 5 Episode 3: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Ask Me Anything for July 2025       Ask me anything.  I start off with a powerful phrase you can always use when a pesky new beekeeper wants advice with their bees. Keep this phrase in your toolkit. Also, just a bit about putting supers on and taking supers off. Summer management questions, answered in this AMA. This episode was recorde...

Season 5 Episode 2:  About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – July's Best Honey Plant      What's July's best honey plant? In much of the northern hemisphere, if the soil is sweet alkali, the answer is sweet clover.  It's a spectacular honey plant, one of the best in the world, but it originated far away from the western plains. It's invasive. Wild. Part of today's episode considers what this mea...

Season 5 Episode 1: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Beekeeping on Canada Day      It's Canada Day, up Canada way, on the first day of July. We talk bees, sunshine, swarms that refuse to be retrieved, and of course Stompin' Tom Connors. Enjoy, eh? This episode was recorded in July 2025.  Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.  Podcast website: https://...