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1. 1

   I WAS A BEEKEEPER for a day!

   Nerdy Jobs season 1, episode 2, 22:36, unlisted. Raven and her co-host, Annika Salzberg, spend a day with the Werner family at Bee Country in Darien Center, New York.

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   Transcript

   Transcribed from the posted video on YouTube.

   The striking purple of prairie asters and the bright orange flowers of marigolds along a roadside or in a field.

   Oh my god.

   I’m excited. I’m nervous, but I’m excited. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Nerdy Jobs. I’m here at Bee Country with the Werners.

   Hello, everybody.

   Thanks for having us here at your farm.

   Thanks for coming.

   With my co-host Annika, and we’re here to learn about bees. So what’s there to know about bees?

   First of all, they’re responsible for a third of our food. They’re extremely important. We need to protect them, and that’s how we got started. We tried to save the bees.

   And when we got, when we got our first hive, we bought our first hive, the guy literally handed it to us, and he was, we understand now, he was so busy that he just handed it to us and went back to work. Really had no idea what we were doing. So when, when Mike got involved, we decided we were going to be there for, for people to help them when they get started, and that’s where the nucleus colonies come in.

   And I was just going to have maybe 50 hives until my son got involved, and now we have between five and seven hundred hives. And there’s, there’s, there’s really a lot of people that have taken up to it, and then they love having a hive or two in the backyard. So that’s where pretty much our business has turned into that, where we’re really trying to gear ourselves towards helping beginner beekeepers.

   So I heard you say nucleus colony, and I’m a molecular biologist, so we study cells and everything in it, and I know the nucleus is where the DNA is. It’s like where they, all the instructions are for the cell. What’s a nucleus colony as it pertains to beekeeping?

   It’s a mini complete hive. It has everything that bees need to expand, and, um, basically it’s a little easier to transport. So that’s how you start people, as you give these, these nucleus colonies to, um, beginners to take home and put in their backyards and start beekeeping in that. It’ll have the queen, the brood, honey, empty frame, just, just everything they need. You know, they don’t have to go and buy a queen and put it in and hope for the best. It’s all set to go.

   A nucleus colony will probably only have maybe five thousand to seven thousand bees in it, which right now the colonies are in the range of sixty thousand bees.

   So where do the other bees come from? Are they born from the hive, or do other bees from other hives migrate to the nucleus colony and then they start being friends?

   That’s where the queen comes in. She’s why, she’s so important to a colony. She’s laying anywhere from like a thousand eggs to 1,500 eggs a day. And right now it’s, it’s so vital because once they start foraging, they only live two weeks. So it’s a, it’s a turnover. Right now there’s just as many bees dying as she’s making. In the springtime, it’s all a build-up thing.

   Okay.

   She makes more than, than actually die.

   So what are these different jobs? What do they mean? Nurse bees, housekeeping bees?

   When they’re first born, that’s nurse bees. Um, they actually, they take care of all the other bees, and, and they basically feed the really young ones. And then there’s actually certain ones that just feed the queen. Doesn’t feed herself. She actually gets fed.

   You might, uh, then protect the hive, or you might just start foraging. It actually depends on what the colony needs. Um, if they need food, then everybody converts to foragers, and, uh, even, even, um, they’ll do it a little quicker than usual, and they’ll have like three weeks of flying. But, uh, most of the time that flying is actually what kills them. They literally fly themselves to death making so many trips, because it takes like, they got to visit like a million flowers to make a teaspoon of honey.

   Oh.

   So I have a question for you, my special co-host. Um, so we just learned that bees can adapt new behaviors based on the needs of a colony, and I want to know, how do they adapt these behaviors? Is it through chemical signaling by pheromones? Is it instinctual? What’s going on there?

   Yeah, so it’s probably a combination of a lot of those things. Bees are constantly communicating with each other. They’re dancing at each other to tell each other what’s going on. But in the case of when do we all decide to become foragers, I would believe it would be like, we just recognize there’s not enough food, it’s getting late, it’s starting to get cold.

   And so surviving that long in a hive, months and months, they’re eating honey. But I’ve heard that honey is bee vomit. Is that true, or is that false?

   That’s not, not necessarily. Bees actually have two stomachs. They don’t have, um, they have a way of transporting and they have a way of ingesting. And that’s actually what the foragers do is, uh, they put it in that, basically, travel stomach, and then when they actually get back to the hive, they will pretty much regurgitate that, I guess, towards the, to the next bee who’s right at the entrance waiting for it, rather than that bee then having to go all the way up in the hive and then come back out.

   It’s all, it’s always efficiency with bees. So if they can be efficient and just pass it off to the next bee and then go back out and forage more, um, it then, it works a little bit better.

   Once it’s honey, so the whole process through, they haven’t vomited any honey?

   Yeah, it’s all the nectar area [unclear], and when it gets to the nectar and they dry the nectar and, and cap it, then it’s honey.

   Yeah. Can we talk about these bee products that you have?

   Sure. These are a little bit more specialized, but we actually do, mostly in Bee Country, we basically supply other people that like to do this stuff. Um, we don’t make these candles, but we, we make a ton of bees, beeswax, which we sell. Um, if, that’s the most specialized product we do have is the comb. Um, that is one that, it takes us a long time to get that perfect, because a consumer won’t buy a 90 percent done piece of comb. They want it 100% done.

   So we do sell a lot of honey in the jars like that, um, locally. Pretty much become more suppliers for other, um, places. Like a lot of people, they make mead. It’s like a honey wine. Um, we got several around here, and they think use a lot of our honey for that.

   Wow. Can’t believe how much we learned about these. Let’s get buzzing out by the hives.

   Okay. All right, well, we’re at the apiary, and, uh, clearly we’re about to get into some missed behavior [unclear].

   Okay, so basically, as soon as you come out here, you might want to make sure you get your smoker going. Um, this is what, uh, pretty much tricks the bees into thinking there’s a wild, um, fire. That’s kind of a trick of beekeeping. Um, pretty much everybody knows that, but they don’t really know why. So you just kind of take the smoker and you smoke the front of it a little bit, make sure that all the guard bees go into the hive and start consuming resources.

   The structure of the hive, so it’s basically, I like to almost visualize from the outside, the bees always surround themselves with the honey and nectar and pollen. They’ll store it right in the cells, and then the brood will always be right in the middle. And that’s basically because they always want to keep it warm. They’re feeding the baby bees, and everything is really nice and tight in there, and that’s kind of, uh, just the way they do it.

   So that’s how you actually start inspecting your hives, is you start with the outside frame, because you don’t want to damage any, any of those baby bees and, or any of the, um, the brood that might be in there.

   And it’s actually, you can see all that shiny stuff. That’s nice brand new nectar that they’re getting from, um, especially right now is goldenrod bloom. So that’s, that’s some of their stores for this winter. They’re going to need a lot more than this, but, uh, it’s a start.

   So how many bees do you think are, are on that, um, tray?

   Um, yeah, this is a, this is a frame. Um, there’s really not that many bees on there. Um, it gets way worse than this. Sometimes you’ll have it where they, they are covering the entire thing, and that’s where you would be getting up into like maybe the, the 2,000 range. And, uh, because there’s not much to look at there, we just gave them this box a little bit ago, we’re just going to go right into this box to show you some other stuff.

   And you can kind of notice that you probably have this different idea in your head of how looking through a beehive would be. You thought probably that they would be bouncing off you like they are.

   Oh my god. Okay. Uh-huh.

   But, uh, they kind of just, they’re still protecting, but they’re not, they’re not really aggressive. It’s more curiosity. And that’s when they start poking up like that, their little, their little heads starting to come up. That’s where you know you got to use a little bit more smoke. This is really your biggest tool as a beekeeper, is using that smoke, because you don’t want to let them get too upset.

   Pretty terrified. Okay. How many times have you both been stung?

   Um, we get stung on a daily basis. Um, it’s basically a numbers thing. We look at so many bees. And you can see like how there’s that many bees covering this frame now. Now this is a, a little bit better interpretation of what a hive should be looking like it this time. Um, there’s basically just bees everywhere. And actually, if you look in here, all that cappings there, there’s actually baby bees under there.

   So what’s the process of looking for the queen? Like, you’re, I see you’re searching through the frame. Is there any characteristics of the behavior?

   The behavior there is, she’s a little bit bigger. Um, she gets mistaken a lot for the male honeybee, which is a little bit bigger as well. But the, the biggest thing is she looks just like a honeybee, and basically her, her abdomen is just longer. That’s our queen right there. She’s got a lovely white dot on her.

   That’s actually a really cool frame, because you can see this side, they’re working it very nicely. And if you actually flip that over...

   Oh, Jesus. Okay.

   They’ll figure it out. But, uh, see this side? See how there’s no bees, no nectar, no, no anything? That’s, that’s basically what it would look like if the bees weren’t taking care of it and weren’t using it.

   Thanks for showing us the nucs. I guess now let’s check out what the nucs grow into. I’m terrified.

   All right, so you’re feeling a little bit of anxiety of being around...

   Just a little bit. You know, just a little bit.

   So it’s totally understandable. Humans, we’re programmed to be scared of things that can hurt us. No one’s taught, like, what does an angry bee look like versus just a bee, because they’re always buzzing.

   Yeah, making noises.

   But the more time you spend around insects, the more you start to learn about them, the more comfortable and familiar you get with those behaviors that you have to look out for. Maybe it’s all about just paying a little closer attention, like getting over a little bit of that fear to look closer at the bug in front of you and think, okay, maybe I can start to recognize, like, what does a beehive sound like when it’s pissed off, versus, oh, that’s just like a noise. That’s just the noise they’re making.

   Yeah, like, like a cat is purring, a beehive’s just buzzing around. Okay, well, maybe I won’t be so afraid next time we get to the hive. Thanks, Annika. I think I’m ready to take on the hive. Let’s do it.

   So we’re gonna go quickly through these first three, but as you can see, and normally we wouldn’t even take this top inner cover off, I was going to show a little bit of just for the camera the difference here of resources. What we just showed you, you’re going to see that this hive is full of beans [unclear] right from bottom to top.

   And then, uh...

   It’s so sticky.

   It is, it’s very...

   It’s so different from the last, the nucs.

   Wow. Now this is because it’s up out of, like, their brood nest is now down here, where I was showing you before. It, the honey always surrounds the brood. This is so big that all the honey is up above the brood nest, and so you can see all the honey there. And you can even see through the cappings here, you can see different colors of honey.

   So this was, they always start kind of up and out, so this was older honey. This is probably a month ago’s honey, and then this darker stuff is what is happening right now, which is probably goldenrod. Um, so, and it’s always hard to tell. I hate putting a label on honey because it takes, I think it’s two million flowers to make a teaspoon of honey.

   So will honey from different types of flowers taste different?

   Yes. Yeah, it’s, it looks different, it tastes different. Um, what we’ve had on the jars on the table is our most common honey that we get and most in demand. People really love the light colored honey. It’s kind of a little bit like maple syrup. Everybody wants to light maple syrup. Um, we actually prefer the dark stuff because the dark has more flavor to it. Um, pretty much the darker it is, probably the more pollen and stuff like that it has in it.

   Um, one of the really cool ones that we make is buckwheat honey, and it is black. You can’t even, you hold it up to the light, you can’t even see through it, compared to that stuff, was really light. Um, and they’re actually doing tests on that, and they actually found that buckwheat is better for you than the manuka honey that everybody pays like a ridiculous amount of money for.

   Now he’s, uh, kind of down into the brood nest here.

   Yeah, I would say this is actually a lot of honey by the weight of this. I say actually just take, take you love there [unclear] and feel the weight of this. It’s going to be heavy.

   Oh, wow. No, that’s really heavy. So what is the, what are the actual honeycomb structures made of? That’s also honey, or is it a different...

   That’s actually beeswax.

   It’s beeswax.

   This is where, see here, this is, this we call burr comb, because it’s not where they normally put it. It’s all wax. And because it’s darker like that, that’s actually recycled wax. They’ve taken it from something else and, and put it in between these, these frames.

   Wow. Okay.

   See how nice, nice and light? Oh, that’s like brand new wax. Okay. Something they just produced, um, recently.

   So where does the wax come from? Like, it’s all coming from...

   It’s not coming from the flowers. It’s coming from actually in, in the long terms, yes, because they actually consume, I think it’s like eight pounds of honey to produce a pound of wax. So when they actually ingest the honey, and actually now, now it’s the other stomach where they’re actually eating it, um, then they’ll actually produce wax, and it comes out of a wax gland in the back of their legs, which is kind of weird. But yeah, they’ll produce that, and then they’ll actually start making those hexagon shapes that all the honey and the pollen and the bees and everything is stored in, those little containers.

   Oh my goodness. So this eventually, if you get enough of it, would be a candle, or could be a candle?

   Yeah.

   Where do you, how do you spin? It’s like a salad spinner?

   Um, it’s not a bad, it’s not a bad, uh, idea. Basically it’s, yeah, it’s a centrifuge. It just, you load them up there, and it’s like a washing machine. You just turn it up, and it spins it so fast that actually all these, all this honey will be stored in there, but these cells are slightly sloped this way. So when you put the frames in there and you spin them really fast, they’ll keep flying out, and then it’ll hit the outside of our spinner and then run down, and we then, we pump it into a barrel.

   Wow.

   And then this is all capped, and what we do is we just take these cappings off like that.

   Whoa.

   Yeah, that’s, that’s what everybody’s used to, is just the honey, and we spin it.

   It breaks so easily.

   It does. It’s very fragile.

   Wow.

   But they’ll, they’ll be able to fix that. They’ll fix that in literally like an hour.

   What? They can fix that?

   Because they don’t want to lose, they put so much time and effort into that honey that they’ll fix that. They’ll be like, top priority when he puts it back in there.

   You know, beekeepers get this rap for essentially stealing too much for them, or, or basically just trying to suck what they can off these bees. What we actually do in our jobs are, are literally going down through and seeing if we can help these bees in any way do what they naturally do. This is what they want to naturally do. They want to make a ridiculous amount of honey, more than they could ever possibly need.

   Pretty much we let bees be bees. They’re very good, they go to what they do. Um, trying to manipulate them and get them to do what people want them to do is not so easy, and you kind of can’t really tell an insect what to do, and they don’t really follow instructions very well.

   Well, I had a question about, uh, bee products. And you all sell, like, pure raw honey from your hives, but what about what’s on the shelves at the grocery stores?

   Um, it’s actually a big problem that, um, America has, is actually importing Chinese honey. It’s not really honey. It’s actually rice syrup a lot of times. Um, and they’ll, they’ll bring it in and they’ll sell it in big chain stores and stuff like that. So the people are buying that little bear, the little squeeze bear that everybody thinks of as honey, probably 90% of the time that, that is not pure honey. That is, that has probably been cut with something, and or maybe it’s a more of a syrup than it is honey.

   So what about the honey jars that it says it’s like from Brazil slash USA slash, like, of many other countries? How can one jar of honey be from so many places?

   That is basically because they buy it from multiple, they buy it as cheap as they possibly can, and then they dump it in this giant thing, and then they bottle it. And so they have no way of telling which, where it actually came from.

   So you study bugs, right? So not specifically bees, but bugs. And bugs pollinate, right?

   Yeah, tons of insects pollinate. So honey bees, huge pollinators, but they’re not actually native to the U.S. And we have a ton of different bee species in the contiguous U.S. In New York State, we have over 400 species of native bees.

   And so when we talk about saving the bees, we can talk about helping out your local beekeeper by buying honey local. We can talk about planting wildflowers, and anything you do that’s like that will also help your native bees. So just don’t mow your back lawn, or don’t mow a strip of it. Leave a bunch of wildflowers out. The honey bees will thank you, the native bees will thank you, and all of the other pollinators that do a lot of stuff that we don’t even sometimes think of as pollinators.

   And by keeping all of your native biodiversity, from flowers, other plants, you’re helping all biodiversity. More different types of plants, more different types of bees, helping your honey bees as well. You just have a healthier ecosystem.

   I love this. Great notes from Annika, our resident entomologist. Thank you, Annika.

   Sure thing.

   Okay, well, thanks, Mike, for having us at the Bee Country Honeybee Farm. We learned so much today, right, Annika?

   Yeah, we learned about, um, hive upkeep, about nucs, about different kinds of honey.

   So much to learn. Yeah, how to maintain hives, all the different types of honey, and it was incredible. I feel like we learned so much, but we also barely scratched the surface, right?

   Yeah, yeah. We’ve been doing it for about 15 years, and we’re, we feel like we’ve just, uh, scratching the surface too. We learn, we learn something new every day.

   It’s a nerdy job.

   It is, but it’s not a job when you love it. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. Um, I think that’s why it makes it a unique sort of thing, and that’s why a lot of people just don’t know about it too. So it’s, uh, it’s really nice that you guys came out and, uh, you got to spotlight this a little bit for us.

   So thanks for having us. And where can we learn more about Bee Country Honeybee Farm?

   Yeah, you can go to, um, beecountry.net, and we have a lot of different stuff on there, all of our products, and, um, pretty much anything we’re involved in is on that website, and it’s a pretty good spot to start.

   Awesome. We’ll definitely check that out. And you can follow Nerdy Jobs to see what other jobs we get into, all the science shenanigans on the way. Uh, follow us on social media, and we’ll see you next time.

   No, I know what APCs [unclear] do. I know them. We’ll see. People are gonna be grossed out that I don’t have socks on, so don’t record this part.