Beekeeping Today Podcast

Would you believe varroa mites, carbon dioxide and indoor wintering are working together to make keeping bees easier and more profitable? Well, believe it. Today, we talk with Dr. Brandon Hopkins from Washington State University. His research has shown that if colonies are overwintered in an environmental chamber that can control the levels of the gasses the bees are exposed to, that by adjusting...

Join us for our second episode on the 2022 Project Apis m and CostCo Scholarship Awards. Students who receive this PhD Scholarship award bring new energy, ideas, and expertise to the scientists on the leading edge of bee health research. The award program supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based doctoral degrees in fields of enhancing honey bee health while improving crop pro...

The Minnesota Honey Producers Association has a whole bunch of good things going for them and in this episode we learn about their new Honey Ambassador Program (notice we didn't say Honey Queen Program), plus the state wide habitat program. First off, we talk with Becky Masterman, who've we had as a guest on the podcast in the past. Rebecca is with the University of Minnesota Bee lab and is part o...

In this week's episode, we visit with Cliff Struhl about his thoughts on better ways to keep bees than is generally done today (and the past 170 years). Cliff is owner of Bee Smart Designs and has produced several products that aim to reduce some of the stresses we apply when keeping bees in a standard wooden box. He starts with the boxes we use and compares them to the hollow trees bees prefer. H...

On today's episode we are joined by professor, author and noted speaker Dr. Dewey Caron. Dewey is an active member of the Honey Bee Health Coalition where he helps with the creation and maintenance of the Coalition's Hive Management program. Today he joins us to talk about the just updated, Varroa Management Guide. Varroa management is a very serious problem for beekeepers around the world. Sadly,...

Mark Winston joins us on today's episode. Mark just retired from Simon Frazer University in British Columbia. For many years his research focused on honey bees, beekeeping and agriculture. For about a decade he was a regular contributor to Bee Culture magazine, where he explored the biology of honey bees, and the sociality of beekeepers. His writings include the books The Biology of The Honey Bee,...

Dr. Tracy Farone, joins us in this episode. Tracy is a veterinarian, a professor of biology at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, a board member of the Honey Bee Veterinary Consortium, a beekeeper and a regular contributor to Bee Culture magazine. Veterinarians, you will hear her say, were brought into the beekeeping world because of the diseases bees face and the potential for antimi...

When we started this podcast back in 2018, not only did we want to bring you the known and established voices in beekeeping and honey bee research, we also set out to highlight the new voices. Today's episode we introduce two new researchers. Project Apis m and CostCo established the PAm-Costco Scholarship Awards, in 2013. The students who receive this PhD Scholarship award bring new energy, ideas...

In this archive special episode from November, 2020, Master Beekeeper, Katharina Davitt reveals the nutritional benefits honey bees derive from bananas. Yes, you read that correctly, bananas ! We all know that bananas are good for people. They are full of carbs, minerals, vitamins, are good for digestion and just taste good. But the one thing all beekeepers learn when they start out is that when b...

Bee Culture's Annual October Event is back. After two years of dealing with Covid delays, Editor Jerry Hayes has put together a two day event in Medina, Ohio that you will not want to miss. On today's episode, we talk with Jerry about the thirteen fantastic and inspiring leaders scheduled to talk of their journeys to get to where they are today, and a close look at the projects they are involved i...

On this week's episode, we are joined by Sarah Red-Laird, the Bee Girl and she is on a mission this summer. Sarah is visiting all sorts of people in the Midwest who are trying to do the same thing she is doing from her home in Oregon. All are trying to regenerate bee pasture in one way or another. Her trip is supported by Browning's Honey and a host of individual's who follow her work. She just vi...

This week, Kim and Jeff talk with Jay Feldman, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Beyond Pesticides. Beyond Pesticides is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., which works with allies in protecting public health and the environment to lead the transition to a world free of toxic pesticides.   Beyond Pesticides provides visitors to their website a wealth of informati...

This week we talk with EAS Master Beekeeper, Deborah Klughers. Deb lives out on the eastern end of Long Island where she keeps her own bees and manages colonies for other people in the area. Deb is leading the EAS Conference track on Apitherapy, August first through the fifth.   Apitherapy is the use of hive products to improve a one's health. Everything from propolis, honey, pollen, royal jelly a...

On this episode, we learn share everything you ever wanted to know about Small Hive Beetles, with Drs. Morgan Roth and Aaron Gross, from Virginia Tech. Small hive beetles cause about $3 million dollars damage to US beehives every year. Today we explore their life cycle, how they find your hives, the damage they can do if you don't interfere, how they spread, and most importantly, what you can do t...

On today's episode, we talk with Dwayne Combs about his business Beehive Monitoring USA and the line of beehive sensors, by a Slovakian company manufacturing the HiveHeart monitor. Dave's business is the US distributor of the equipment they produce. The device he sells is called HiveHeart 3.0. You can obtain the HiveHeart internal monitoring device and one of 2 levels of scales you can also purcha...

We're taking the week off to prepare for our July 4th Holiday with our families. We hope you enjoy this special from our first year of the podcast where we introduced many of you to Dr. Jim Tew. Jim cohosts the Honey Bee Obscura podcast with Kim and is a long time contributor to our lead sponsor, Bee Culture. We hope you have a safe and enjoyable long holiday weekend. We invited (mostly retired) D...

First up on today's podcast, Jeff talks with Maya Ajmera, CEO of the Society for Science  who along with the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, host an annual science contest for high school seniors. Maya talks with Jeff about the contest and what it takes and means to be a finalist! Next Kim and Jeff talk with Amara Orth. Amara lives on her family farm in Glenwood Iowa, near Council Bluffs. Her pa...

Dr. Kelly Kulhanek recently moved to Pullman, WA., where she has started her work there on assisting with the Asian Giant Hornet research. In addition to this she is working with the research on indoor wintering of honey bees for commercial beekeepers. All of this will help her with her new role as extension specialist for WSU. In today's episode, Kelly talk with Kim and Jeff about the current sta...

Seven years ago, father and son set out to redesign the way honey is harvested from bee hives. There must be a way, they reasoned, to get the honey from the comb without disturbing the bees and then bottling the honey directly from the hive. They placed their idea on Indiegogo and early orders exceeded all expectations when they topped over $12.5 million US dollars! Today, after over 50 iterations...

This week we talk with professional bike racer, Maghalie Rochette, from Quebec, Canada. She is good. Really good . Maghalie came in 2nd in the Canadian National Championships, September, 2021; Is three-times Canadian Cyclocross Champion, three-times Pan American Cyclocross Champion and a Cyclocross World Cup winner. She has her sights set on greater goals this season! But what, you may be asking,...

Imagine responding to every emergency call into 911 about swarms in New York City - across all five boroughs, including Times Square!   Well, imagine no more because, today's guest, Darren Mays was the Official beekeeper for the New York City Police Department up until he retired.   Darren worked nights as a regular police officer, responding to the calls all police officers responded to. Robberie...

Can you imagine the difficulty in trying to work a standard Langstroth hive when sitting in a wheelchair? Or how about working bees while blind? These are just two of the handicaps that Justin Ruger is working on so that people with handicaps like these can work bees. Justin is in a wheelchair so he knows what he's talking about. His group is a 501 3c charitable program, working to get training ap...

In this replay from the Beekeeping Today Podcast Archive Super, we talk with Dr. Tom D. Seeley. We originally talked with Tom in 2019. Dr. Seeley is a Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell University where he teaches courses on animal behavior, specializing in understanding the social life of honey bees. His scientific research focuses on the phenomenon of swarm intelligence, which is defin...

Drs. Michael Simone-Finstrom and Dr. Frank Rinkevich, are research entomologists at the Baton Rouge Honey Bee Research Laboratory in Baton Rouge, LA. They have completed an extensive set of tests in commercial beekeeping operations on mite resistance, overwintering, honey production and virus loads of the varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) P0L Line of honey bees bred there since the 1990s. The line, c...

On today episode, we welcome Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk ('retired' from the University of Montana) and Rob Seccomb to talk with us about the Bee Health Guru app and the new Commercial Beekeeper Course they are developing in partnership with the SAVE Farm program in Kansas. SAVE ( Service Member Agricultural Vocation Education ) received funding from USDA NIFA under a subcontract from the SAVE Farm in M...