Beekeeping Today Podcast

In Part Three of our five-part Hive Types Series , we talk with Colorado Master Beekeeper and columnist Tina Sebestyen about the Long or Horizontal Langstroth. Horizontal hives are very much like the traditional Langstroth hives, which are vertical stacks of boxes, except horizontal hives are only one box high and about three boxes long. The very best thing about horizontal hives is that you never...

We continue with our five-part series on hive types other than the standard Langstroth, with Christy Hemenway. Christy has been working with top bar hives for just over 14 years now and has developed a good sense of how they work. She started out liking them because – It's all about the wax – clean wax was important to her and top bar hives produce clean wax. No foundation to fuss with and no cont...

This week, we start our multi-part series on hive types  other than the standard Langstroth.  We start with the Flow Hive . In this episode, we talk with Stewart Anderson, who, with his son Cedar imagined and then created the Flow Hive, certainly the most cosmic jump in the technology of honey harvesting developed since the first mechanical honey extractor conceived by Major Franz Elder von Hrusch...

Dr. Sam Ramsey is back with us again, looking at all sorts of questions than bother beekeepers, and working with smart kids and science! Sammy hasn't not let any grass grow under his feet since he was forced to return home from his research in Thailand studying Tropilaelaps mites  ( Tropilaelaps   clareae and T. mercedesae ) so we are ready if and when they arrive in the US. It turns out there is...

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Christina Grozinger, from Penn State's Department of Entomology. Her recent research and paper of climate changes impact on honey bee survival and plant growing season has confirmed many suspicions on the long term impact these changes have on all bees, both native and honey bees. Climate change, growing degree days, too warm, too wet, not wet enough, too cold, no...

In this episode, we have a return visit with Washington State Department of Agriculture's Sven-Erik Spichiger, to see how our honey bees' newest threat, The Giant Asian Hornet, did last season in the Pacific Northwest. The AGH was wildly sensationalized last year, picking up the moniker of "Murder Hornet", which actually helped garner some attention to both this beast and the Department's quest to...

Meet Matt Mulica, Senior Project Director of The Honey Bee Health Coalition a group of more than 50 organizations who have come together to implement solutions to achieve a healthy population of native and managed pollinators. These include beekeepers, growers, researchers, government agencies, agribusiness, conservation groups and production agriculture. Working together, they have identified sev...

John Miller is a commercial beekeeper based in Gackle, North Dakota and New Castle, California.  His family has been keeping bees since 1894. Their season starts each spring when John and his sons take their bees to the almond orchards in Central California. In this episode, John gives us an update on the 2021 almond pollination. For the past three years, John overwintered his thousands of colonie...

In this episode, we invite Dan Conlon back to learn how the Russian Honey Bee Program is progressing, since now is the time to consider trying packages, nucs or queens for the coming season. Arguably, Russians are the most tested breed of honey bee in the US due to the fact that the USDA Honey Bee Genetics Lab has had a hand in the selection and breeding program from the very beginning. Not only t...

Today, we talk with Jessie and Bobby Louque, of Louque Agricultural Enterprises.  Testing the interactions of pesticides and honey bees is what this company does on a daily basis. They have combined their passion for bees with their passion for science. They are what is called a Contract Research Organization , or CRO. Companies hire them to do the specialty research required with honey bees to pr...

Our guest this week is Boris Baer, Professor of Entomology at UC Riverside. Boris is the recent recipient of a $900,000 grant from the University of California's Office of the President.  He is the Principal Investigator of a four-campus network of bee researchers and engineers to boost dwindling honey bee populations working in the Center for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER). Boris is working wit...

Steven Coy, Executive Board Member of American Honey Producers Association  (AHPA)  returns to the podcast. This time, he discusses the USDA-APHIS call for comments on the elimination of the Chinese Tallow Tree and the impact the elimination of this tree could have on honey producers from Texas to Florida. PLEASE NOTE: At the time of the podcast recording, the published comment period ended on Feb...

In today's episode, we talk with Bridget Mendel and Becky Masterman of the University of Minnesota Bee Lab's "Bee Squad".  Dr. Marla Spivak created Bee Squad as an outreach group 10 years ago in the Twin Cities area to help local beekeepers and other people just wanting bees in the backyard, with just a couple of volunteers. It has blossomed into a dynamic, nationally known UMN Extension Program t...

This week we talk with Ellie Symes, CEO of The Bee Corp. We met Ellie at the recent Almond Growers virtual conference. With pollination hives in almonds renting for around $200 each, almond growers want to make sure they are getting good, strong hives so they get maximum production from their orchards. Beekeepers want to make sure they are not spending time and money moving hives that don't measur...

In today's episode we talk with Ben Dictus, beekeeper for Bee Downtown.  The good people in the Bee Downtown organization have taken bees and beekeeping to a new level of education, promotion and opportunity. They have combined beekeeping and leadership training, with business leaders and employees: Bee yards with corporate landscapes. Ben manages about 150 colonies in the Research Triangle area o...

On today's show, we chat with Kaylee Richardson, who runs the Farm on Quail Hollow and posts about her life as a modern-day homesteader @the_honeystead. She shares the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to produce most of your food from your own farm both in beautiful photos and via informative YouTube videos. She's grown her apiary substantially, building up from a couple of hives into a small...

In this episode of Beekeeping Today Podcast, we reconnect with our beekeeping friends from Season 2, Episode 29. They come from across the country including Central North Carolina, North East Ohio, the western slope of the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast of Washington. We talk with them about last season, this winter and what they expect for next season. We start out in North Carolina with Mark...

Marla Spivak is a honey bee researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her work has covered a variety of subjects over the years including queen breeding and disease prevention and lately she has been working on the relationship of honey bees and propolis. Propolis is simply a mixture of resins honey bees collect from a variety of plants. These resins protect these plants from disea...

In this episode, we welcome back Colorado beekeeper, Tom Theobald . Tom had a small commercial operation in Colorado in the late 70's, running up to 200 or so colonies when he first started using two queen colonies. The biology of running two queens in a colony does make sense if you use the technique Tom perfected, but the better you get, the more lifting you are going to do. His finished product...

On this special Holiday Replay, we bring back one of our favorite episodes from the first season, when we invited Dr. Sam Ramsey to the podcast to talk about the Varroa Mite. Sam Ramsey is a life long entomologist. His interests in all things insects started in his youth along with his parent's encouragement and his siblings displeasure! He continued his studies in college (Cornell) and just recen...

On today's episode, we talk with Newfoundland beekeeper, Peter Armitage and Dr. David Peck, a Professor from Cornell University, David Peck.  Those of us south of the Canadian border tend to mispronounce the name of that big Island off the east coast of Quebec and just north of Prince Edward Island. We tend to slur it, saying 'Newfundlund' instead. But that is wrong. How do you say it right? " Und...

QSI–America  is a Germany based company that is in the business of testing honey for anything. Their US lab in Corona, California is led by Tobias Wiezorek, and employs about 35 scientists looking at the biochemical, microbiology, chemical and pollen aspects of the honey and wax samples. They can perform many tests, including moisture content, the presence of antibiotics or pesticides, the HMF con...

In this week's episode, guest host Kirsten Traynor speaks with Emily Bondor of the Santa Cruz Bee Co about how she manages her colonies and those of other beekeepers without chemical intervention. Emily discuss the types of losses beekeepers should expect when foregoing varroa treatments, how to be an ethical treatment-free beekeeper, so that your sick colonies don't impact hives in the vicinity,...

Starting several years ago, Steve Donohoe wanted to find out more about beekeepers and how they kept bees. His travels took him to California, where he talked to Randy Oliver and Ray Olivarez, to Vermont to talk to Mike Palmer, then back the UK to talk to Murry McGregor in Scotland and Peter Little, who used to work with Brother Adam, then on to a New Zealand honey packer and finally to France to...

Protecting pollinators and improving the habitat for honey bees often entails planting nectar and pollen rich plants. In this episode, Kirsten talks with Calvin Ernst, founder of Ernst Seeds , who has been deeply involved with growing native plants for over 50 years. Learn how providing seeds for erosion control to the Department of Transportation helped him start his company and how he transition...