21,000+ Bee Colonies Removed & Saved

0:00 In a world brimming with complexity, few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee. With tireless precision, she dances from bloom to bloom, each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct, each act in service to the whole. And then... There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy, and curly, tending to the bees' needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. Welcome, welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping presented by our good friends over at Man Lake.

1:27 Today we'll be discussing bee removals from a safe and gentle approach. We'll also touch on Africanized bees and the business of bee removals. And of course an amazing wild and crazy beekeeping story. But first let's take just a minute to recognize everyone out there working on new creative ways of dealing with Varroa mites. Last week's episode included a conversation on what I like to call Varroa birth control. This week in the news I found a Florida teenager who's invented a way to use CO2 to kill Varroa in a hive without hurting the bees. He's already tested it across 60 hives and found it to be safe, effective, and even beneficial to the bees. His device is designed to fit onto a standard beehive and connect to a regulated carbon monoxide tank. A custom airtight lid distributes a carefully controlled concentration of the CO2 through the hive. The gas moves downward through the stacked boxes, exposing the bees and mites to the treatment.

2:34 Now you have to realize honey bees are able to withstand a high amount of CO2 for a short amount of time, but Varroa can't. And because the gas dissipates rather than leaving a chemical residue, the approach really could offer beekeepers a cleaner alternative to a lot of the traditional mite treatments out there. As an added benefit these treated colonies also showed an increased honey production and improved overall hive health compared with colonies exposed to conventional chemical treatments. I have seen a bunch of other new methods out there they all have a lot of potential. Some include using heat to a specific point that kills Varroa, but not high enough to kill the bee brood. Another one that fogs bees with ionized essential oils. The list goes on and on. Hey, everybody, let's keep it up.

3:28 This is a battle we will win. I'd like to welcome our very special guest today, Bee Man Dan, coming to us from Southern California. How are you, Dan? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Or to keep it short, do I call you be man or be your man? Dan's fine. Any and all of the above. Well, I tell you, we're going to get into all kinds of things you and your company do be removals, and we're going to be talking about that and many other things. But I'm going to jump right in with the thing that drew me to you. made me want to reach out to you and that was a comment that I saw you make online the other day about how you don't need to put a queen in a hive for the rest of the bees to follow. Now we're talking about when we're doing swarm removal or some kind of a bee removal. It's assumed and nearly everything that you see on YouTube I'll say people are saying hey I catch the queen I stick her in a box and then all the rest of the bees march right in. And you're saying, hmm, maybe not necessarily.

4:42 So please explain. Yeah, this is from, I think to date, my team's rescued over 21 ,000 colonies and I'm batting this year. I'm going to break probably 6 ,500 removals myself. And I've just been able to see the bees from a slightly different perspective from what people are accustomed to. And the first time it happened, it was in Claremont down in San Diego. I got the swarm and then I was on the same adage that I have to find the queen, right? But all the bees cruised, it was on this little rose bush on the ground. So all the complications of the process went away. So I put the box down, the bees ran into the box and the queen was probably the last, maybe 10 bees that were still on the rose bush. And that was the very first time I witnessed this. This was probably 15 years ago. And I'm like, huh, that's weird. And so it just kept happening every once in a while. Not all the time because I couldn't always find the queen. Didn't always see her.

5:41 So I flipped the script on it a bit because we had to train beekeepers. Sorry, we didn't train beekeepers. I just grabbed guys randomly off the street per se. We were trying to fill numbers and get some warm bodies to work. And I had to figure out how to do it methodically. that didn't take five hours to do like a shed where we can get it down to like two hours with a very methodical process. So it came about that we literally kidnapped the babies. The brood, I got flame for that one too. So I call them babies because it's easier to talk to clients that way, is they understand babies, grab the babies, bees follow the babies, queen follows the bees. And that works every single time. like 99 % of the time. But seriously, I got flamed for calling them babies. I know there's no babies, but for people who relate to, it's just the easiest thing that everyone can understand. I've made the mistake of calling them being born, things like that, so it's okay.

6:39 Right. And it's fine. I mean, we're all friends here and we're talking about the same thing. And if you talk about brood, then you might also have to talk about... eggs and larvae and all these other things. Exactly. But do you find that capped brood work the best or any stage along the way? It's a great question. I go for capped brood. I call them shelf stable. Where in Southern California we're subject to temperatures, the bees, as you know, need a consistent at least over 85 degrees or so to stay warm to incubate. So what I found is when you chill the brood too much during removal, There's a point where the brood won't stay alive. So if you grab the young Lara, they literally die because it's too cold.

7:26 And then the whole hive just up to guns. They're like, screw this, we're out of here because one is too much. It's too stressful. And the second factor is they're trying to keep too much going on. Try and keep all the babies warm. And then when the babies die, then there's a point where they can't clean down enough and they'll just bounce. And so I found that we need to get fresh eggs. and cat brood and literally nothing in between. And then the bees are going to follow. They're going to fan some pheromones telling all the rest of the bees, follow us, follow us. And then you just see the queen in there someplace just marching along with everybody else. Yeah. So that video you saw was me talking to the client and I'm videoing it for them so that they can see up close what's going on. And I didn't see the queen in the video because I was busy yapping with them. And I only saw her when I was taking the video. That's why I cut it off at like 30, 33 seconds because I just got the footages I wanted, which was to watch the bees cruise in.

8:28 But when I reviewed and started to do the video edit, then I'm like, oh, Queen's there. Let's post it. Why not? Now, for somebody less experienced that maybe has a hard time spotting a queen or is busy talking to somebody or busy keeping people away or something like that. Is there a point where you could just assume the queen has made it in? Yeah. Or do you need to take the box apart and look all over for her to make sure? I honestly never, I literally never looked for her after the first, after my conclusion that the bees don't follow the queen, then it opened my perspective completely to where I don't even bother looking for her. And she only comes out when she wants to, and I'm good with that. But the idea is...

9:13 So long as you eliminate the reason that they would go, let's say a shed. So if you're working on a shed, you cut it open, you cut out all the brood, the babies, move that into your box, and now you've eliminated their shed, their former home as a source for going back to, then it kind of ushers them into some other spot, which would be where the babies are. And basically, I'm just eliminating their home as being a factor. And if you can get like 99 % of the bees flying around, it's pretty good odds that you have the queen. Oh, yeah. Now, with that many removals, how many people work for you? What size of business is this? At our peak, we had probably 21, 22 employees.

9:59 Right now, I'm running nine, but they're more specialized, they're smarter, better looking. Okay. Yeah. No, so back when... I never wanted employees, I honestly never wanted to grow this business the way it has. But I realized that in order for me to have impact and in order for me to convince the extermination guys locally to stop killing bees, I need to have an alternative. And we needed to be a proof of concept that bees can be saved instead of just exterminated. And so we probably subcontract for at least a dozen pest control companies that don't want to kill bees anymore. So they refer to us. But you can't be just some Yahoo in his garage touting, gotta say, the bees when you have nothing to demonstrate or give them something substantial to work with.

10:49 And if it's as a solo guy, I realized I capped out at how many rescues I can do a year. And that's not significant enough if we're actually going to do something for the bees. At first, it was just something cool to do. I was playing with bugs and climbing trees and stuff like that. And then I realized that I had a bigger calling. And in order to have a big calling, I needed a bigger team. And so I at some point had 21 guys, but I would rotate them, two people per team. But this is, again, I had no idea what I was doing, no idea about employees and stuff like that. But now the teams are just super, super dialed in and focused, and I'm good with that. All right. Here's something else that may just in a little bit of a way blow people away.

11:33 Your website mentions gentle hands -on approach and no bee vacuums. Yep. So how do you get everything out of a wall, a ceiling, or whatever without a bee vacuum? So I was trained by Daoist and Buddhist monks for beekeeping. So the approach was a little bit different. And I think you had touched upon this question. But so my instructor, he didn't train me like, here are the techniques. Here's what you do specifically. But the Taoist way is experiential. And the concept is, it applies to the golden rule of life, is do unto others as you want, done unto yourself. If I were a bee, how would I want to be handled through this process? And it's not through a vacuum. That spurred me on this journey to literally, we have zero vacuums, unless it's to pick up trash, but vacuums are allowed and they're not even allowed as a secondary backup option because I refuse to give into that. And so every so 21 ,000 removals has been completely by hand. And by doing that, by forcing us not to have that option, it really taught us to pay attention to how they behave, how they respond without coercing them, but to encourage them to go from one place to another.

12:50 So it literally goes back to what I was saying is grab the babies, bees will follow the babies and then queen follows the bees. and that works very methodically. Tell me more about that Daoist philosophy. It's finding our place with nature. The Daoist philosophy is balance and harmony within our surroundings and being stewards instead of keepers. The animals don't need us to keep them. My cat doesn't really need me, my dog doesn't really need me, and the bees don't need us. but we're working with them in a relationship. And if you're having a relationship with somebody or something, then you have to treat that as if we're buddies, right? You and I are humans and we have a sort of respect for each other and we work with each other in a way that should extend to all life forms that we have within our sphere of influence, if that kind of makes sense. Yeah. What do you say we just throw out the term beekeeper, come up with something new?

13:50 Stewardship. Be steward? Yeah. My instructor calls us either stewards of the animals or land steward. And so my house here, I'm just steward of this land for as long as I'm alive. And my job is to make sure it's better than how I found it. Now with that many hundreds and thousands of removals then and with this whole approach and I love this approach by the way it's fantastic I mean it just fits what we talk about on this show it's about the love of the bees which means respect and and other things what do you do with the bees after they're removed from somebody's home shed whatever fantastic question so from there they literally go into my garage for half a day And so the rescues from yesterday were picked up by my beekeeper this morning. And then he's going to take them to one of our apiaries where we have all the rescues come in. And they're kind of pampered there. They're fed. They're housed. We do inspections afterwards, make sure they're viable. And we take really diligent notes on all of our colonies. So we note their temperament.

14:58 We note the brood, how well they're doing. Queen, no queen. Verified, I should say. And from there, then we... find backyard beekeepers or other farmers to take him in. So we just stocked up a farm up in Lake Elsnor, I'm sure you're not familiar, but up north of Temecula, but he has a bunch of winter melons and a bunch of other squash and whatnot. So we got probably eight colonies out to him. We tried to find a good balance where we're not taking so many bees out that we need to feed them. So if we have to feed them, in my opinion, you shouldn't touch their honey. And so we have them in these places where we can find an equilibrium where they can sustain themselves and not overcompute with the natives and everyone's happy and we're creating good ecosystems instead of lopsided, whatever you want to call it. Let's shift a little bit, talk about Africanized bees. I've spoken with other beekeepers in Southern California. The consensus that I'm getting, and tell me if this is your opinion or not, is that pretty much all of the honeybees in Southern California are some kind of a mixture, a natural hybrid with some Africanized genes in our regular European honeybees. Is that what you're finding also? Yeah. And we got reached out by UCSD for genetic research on the bees because we have such a unique tabs on where we get our bees. So not just San Diego, we cover

16:29 Orange County, Riverside, pretty much all Southern California. So I was talking with Boris out in UCR, but he wanted what he called our survivor bees. I recently had two people on the show from UC Riverside. Oh, nice. When I was just looking up their names, Genesis Chung and Owen Wagner, they're doing some research on these, they just call them Southern California bees. They are finding that they're more Varroa resistant. than most regular European honeybees around the country. So anyway, I didn't know if you had anything to do with that or not. Yeah, not those. So Boris, when he first got imported to the university, he wanted the survivor bees. He called them survivor bees, and I love the term because they're unmanaged.

17:18 And usually we try to find them old colonies and really, really gentle temperament. So we, I think we supplied him with, I think it was ended up being 33 colonies. He found that they were more varroa resistant and they were thriving, but they can still be docile and gentle at the same times. But sooner or later, one of them might turn a little ornery. He said, and don't quote me on this one, but he was saying that 50 % of their genetics is probably mixed with Africanized genes. And so they're all, in my opinion, they're all hybridized. Quick break to discuss what just might be on your mind. Right now come on admit it. You're imagining the upcoming honey harvest Because no matter where you live in the world It's either here now or it will be in the near future and Man Lake is making it so easy to plan for Click on over to Man Lake's website for an amazing selection of extractors filters bottling supplies Uncapping knives supplies for a comb honey everything and I mean everything you'll need. But if you aren't there quite yet and the honey flows right around the corner, make sure you have extra supers on hand. You never can have too many or be too prepared. And right now Man Lake is offering podcast listeners $10 off your next order. Just enter code MLBlove10 at checkout. That's manlakeltd .com. Discount code MLBlove10. As Americans, we've imported,

18:50 I forgot the number, somewhere between 14 and 18 different species from around the world. And so they're all mixed anyways. I don't know if you remember, probably like 13, 15 years ago, you would see really pure strains of bees that were brought in, like the Italians that were just golden, golden, yellow, orange. And nowadays people classify them as Italians, but they look nothing like what I remember. I wonder if we can still get any of those more pure genes or if we want to. It sounds like nature is taking care of some issues all by herself and I'm talking about Varroa and other things and sometimes we need to forget us beekeepers who maybe aren't the best bee stewards ought to take a step back and let bees take care of bees. Yeah, that's why I love the ferals. I work exclusively with ferals and I swear by them, but they are just so hardy and like any of our hives we never medicate, we don't treat them for anything. Sometimes we'll have to intervene with like recently I had one calling get wiped out by hive beetles. But outside of that, most of the time if you give them good land, good areas, and all the resources they need, boxes, bees before expansion, they generally do just fine. I can't tell you how many colonies that we literally will set on a person's property and go back years later and they're just fine,

20:20 just peachy. Probably not whatever beekeeper wants to hear, but... You have great weather down there for that too, right? I mean, they have at least some forage all year long. They have water all year long. It's not minus 10 degrees outside and that kind of stuff. Helps, but it can also help Varroa if... if the bees don't know how to deal with it. So yeah, keep learning. Let the bees be bees. So as part of your business or just your personal beekeeping, are you also managing a bunch of colonies, harvesting honey, or do you just focus on bee rescue? Probably 99 % of our work is bee rescue. And then we do have clients that, you know, invariably we do the rescue. and then they want to keep the bees and so we'll take on those clients and then we have probably the most the biggest conversion that we get for beekeeping is usually when the bees turn aggressive or they get Africanized and then they call us because they need someone to tag in and don't tell them Eric but probably 80 % of those are just fine uh it's just a matter of not working with them properly or not I guess approaching it not smoking them enough or whatever it is or getting too gruff with them, and that's usually what upsets them. So we end up taking those clients on because they're like, ooh, this is crazy. This is great. But for us, it's just another Tuesday or Thursday. Today happens to be Thursday, the day that we're recording. And

21:53 a lot of people would just say, oh, it's a hot hive. Squish that coin, replace her. And you're saying a lot of the time that doesn't need to happen. Not so much. It's for also, you know, we're responsible. So. My take on training our beekeepers is that we're suited up, we're fine, but it has everything to do with what happens afterwards. Like when some of our clients will disturb a hive and it will get calls for, hey, I've got bees flying all over my yard. We tracked this one down. It happened to be one of our clients, but they had done an inspection of the backyard. We got a call from a house, 10 houses down. about them getting mauled in their backyard and they were panicking. But when I drove through the street, I'm like, oh, I know exactly what happened.

22:42 So during their inspection, things went chaotic. And then the whole neighborhood just got tagged by bees. And that's not good. So. No, your neighbors can really turn on you that way. Yeah. The HOA can put in new rules and all kinds of stuff when that happens. I just talked to somebody last week. just a friend that was saying her husband gets stung every time he goes out and mows the lawn. Well, their next door neighbor, and these are small, you know, 0 .2 acre lots or whatever, their next door neighbor has bees, has had bees for a long time, but recently moved the bees right over so they're next to the fence with this neighbor. Right. And we all know how much bees love internal combustion engines. Yeah.

23:31 Yeah, the ferret. She's like, well, what can he do? First of all, talk to the neighbor. If the neighbor is a jerk, there's not that much you can do except start off with buying an electric mower and put a bee suit on when you're out mowing. Unfortunately, the guy's allergic and so he has to do something. But it's just a reminder for all the beekeepers, especially in suburban areas. Just be a good neighbor. Yeah, you know, we don't need the bad reputation and for for the bees to have the bad reputation That's actually how we got started. This was 20 years ago I bought a house in Escondido and I didn't know at the time but Sorry, I was a young homeowner. So I was 24 You don't know what you're looking for and you don't know what you're doing. So I bought the house It was a fixer -upper, but apparently came with a beehive in the shed and I didn't notice that So they were probably a couple years old at that point. We got visited by code enforcement because some person was walking their dog and got stung. And so it became this whole dealio.

24:39 It's in Eskandio, it's illegal to have bees anywhere on property of man -designed mites. They don't really care. So they came out probably two times, slapping on the wrist a little bit. I'm like, whatever. I'm 24, so I didn't really care. And you're not keeping them on purpose. No. Yeah. My take on it is they moved in naturally. So what am I supposed to do? Again, I'm 24, knock the head. They sent the sheriff. So sheriff came out with a subpoena. It was $2 ,000 or jail time or get the bees out. So I had my buddy from the Kung Fu school where I learned all the beekeeping. So he had a mentor who was doing commercial beekeeping came out, did the removal. I didn't see much. I was standing like 20 feet away, but I just thought it was coolest thing in the world. So I asked him if I can tag along with them. I grabbed myself a veil, some gloves, and then I just never stopped. By the way, you just uttered a line we've never heard on this show before. And that is Kung Fu school. That's where I learned all my beekeeping. Yeah, and you probably won't hear that much. No, that's an unusual one. Congratulations.

25:42 Thanks. So I've been studying White Tiger Kung Fu for the last 20 years. Our system is half Taoist, half Buddhist with origins going back to ancient China. But we learn herbology, meditations, folklore. And so my instructor, the reason why I got into it was we couldn't find good honey locally. And my instructor uses it for tonics for basically herbal Chinese medicines, but all we could find was really horrible honey mixed with high fructose orange syrup or just off flavors and tastes. I think the worst one we sampled tasted just like car exhaust. We got into beekeeping for that and then that just kind of snowballed from there. So it'll probably be another podcast itself, but we can talk about meditations, vibrations with the bees. When we're working with the bees, especially with heated hives, to be able to calm them down and keep them pretty mellow is kind of my cheat code. Yes, I'd love to do a whole episode on it. But give us just the overview.

26:43 How do you calm a hive? The idea is you've seen Tai Chi guys, like old people doing Tai Chi in the park and stuff like that. It's slow, meditative. And if you're talking about vibration, it's a really low base, kind of like petting a cat. So when you're petting a cat, it's somewhere between 80 and 150 Hz. And the bees, typically when they're calm, they're at roughly 330 Hz or so, give or take like 50. But when the bees are at that state, they're calm, everything's good. When they agitated, they spiked that up, and now there are a little higher vibration. But if you can emulate a lower vibration, they'll pick up on that vibe and meet you somewhere halfway in between. So instead of being ultra pissy, they'll just bring down, they'll tone it down to where they're manageable. So that's the low down. I love that. I tell new beekeepers, think of Tai Chi. No fast sudden movements and just me personally. When I go out to the apiary, I've had a busy, crazy day. So I'm hobby beekeeper.

27:48 I'm not doing this all day, every day. When I go out to see the bees, I want everything to be calm. Mm -hmm, and I and I remind myself when I get maybe 20 feet away. Okay stop I'm gonna take a minute. I'm gonna breathe. I'm gonna settle myself down Lower my vibration. I think you know, I I don't know exactly where I'm at, but I Just breathe and be calm and when I'm ready Then I approach the bees they appreciate it. Absolutely 100 % only on board that A quick little fun thing is the Indian monks, when they're learning chanting and meditations, they would sit with the bees to learn to emulate that vibration. So like the Om chanting, the Om, if they can't nail it, they just need to mimic the bees to get the similar status, status. And if they can do that long enough, then they literally become one with the bees and it's all peaceful. I never saw that on the old Kung Fu TV show. No. Now I assume that vibrational thing also we know just by listening because when they're upset that tone goes up which means the vibration is rising and it means okay you know now if you lift the lid and that tone goes up quickly you know something's going on now you have a choice you can smoke the crap out of them which I'm not a big fan of personally

29:21 Or you can deal with them however you choose to, or you can shut the lid and go back the next day. Maybe they'll be in a better mood, or maybe you'll be in the right frame of mind that they're dealing with you better. That's exactly it. Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other. Part of my thing about smoke, by the way, is I live in an area that's a really high wildfire danger and so I have to be super, super careful of it. And like this year, I just can't use a smoker in the summer. It's just the way it is. So I have to learn how to deal without it. Okay, a couple of things before I let you go. One, save the bees on your t -shirt. Where does that come from? Back when hashtags first popped out, this was the first thing I used for all of our... This is before I knew anything about anything, but for Instagram, that's what I used for all of our stuff was save the bees. Can we still find you there? Maybe.

30:16 I don't think they use hashtags as much, but we also stop using it. So you'll see it pop up every once in a while, but we played around with the algorithm and you know how that works. And by the way, YouTube channel, you've got over 500 videos if people want to look at them. We'll stick a link to your website or to there down in the show notes for people. Appreciate it. Before I let you go. Our listeners know everybody that comes on gets to talk about one or two of their favorite wild and crazy beekeeping stories. Dan, doing removals, you must have a million of them. Do you have any that stand out? Yeah, probably my iconic one was done in Claremont as well. This was an owl box. I think it was like 50 feet up. This is before I had measuring tools, but it was probably 50 feet up in a tree.

31:03 And it was a present from her husband. and I kid you not maybe a month later after they got installed bees moved into the damn thing and she didn't want to leave it there so she called us. So I took my 32 foot ladder and strapped it against the tree and I lashed it so it was vertical. The worst part is the guy I took with me was scared of heights so he was completely useless. He was just on ground support. He literally did nothing besides making sure the ladder didn't fall over. 32 foot ladder goes straight up I lasted the tree and I was still like 15, 20 feet away from the actual box. And so I took a bunch of two by fours and I started drilling those into the tree with lag screws. They weren't even lag screws. I didn't know anything at the time.

31:51 So there were literally like three screws. That was what I was depending my life on. So I just screwed those into the tree and then started climbing this to the nearest upper branch. And finally got to the top of it and strapped it to, it would, these luckily were super chill. The best part is there was a photo of me from the side profile from the guy, Trent. And I was so high up in the tree. Sent to my mom. You know, her only comment was the neighbors have a really cool backyard. So my, my classic hashtag is don't tell mom when I do something really sketchy. But that was, that's probably the dumbest one I've ever done in my life. Don't you ever need one of those scissor lifts or whatever they call those things to get way up high safely? Safely nowadays with you know being more experienced I can demand that but when you're first starting out back in the day you can't demand someone to get a crane or a lift or whatever it is and unfortunately this one was in the far backyard I don't think cranes exist this high or long but we just had to mainly do it but nowadays we typically if it's questionable I'm like, I think we'll do some smart things today and get a lift versus climbing and doing dumb stuff.

33:07 But they're still fun. What are some of the laws like in Southern California? Do different cities have different laws? Is it okay to exterminate a hive? So as a blanket for Southern California, they restricted the use. So when we first heard it, we thought it was no extermination whatsoever. but they can exterminate with four different chemicals that just don't last as long. So I remember I was working at Poway School District and this was before we had the count. I've had the count for eight years and they had a swarm move into this little pillar and all the kids, all the teachers started freaking out because the bees started dying in the walkway and they're crawling 15, 20, 50 feet away. And just, you know, you've seen the videos of how they're dying, like thousands of them all over the ground. So they call us in panic, we head over. But mind you, they hadn't exterminated in at least eight years. So whatever chemical they had inside, the bees swarmed into it. Once we opened it up, there was old honeycomb where they sprayed and that stuff was still viable, is still active.

34:16 And so it killed on contact and the bees were just getting slaughtered out over. So now as a compromise, they're only allowed to use chemicals that will degrade in like one month or three months. And that's typically how their warranty is. But they're still legal. It's still legal to kill them. Do some of the cities have ordinances that make it OK to keep bees and some not? You mentioned one where it's not legal. Yeah, the Orange County Beekeeping Association, Liz Savage, she's a really she's a beast. So. She goes to all the advocate meetings and really spearheads making it legal to have bees. So she made Fullerton legal, Costa Mesa, I think legal. A couple others, but she's, she's made it a point to make sure that people can have them in the cities. Instead of saying, yo, there's a blanket one, uh, just the restrictions were changed. At one point it was 50 feet away from your neighboring property.

35:12 And now I think it's down like 15 or 25, but it's a much more reasonable that. People in the backyard can have it at least in the middle of the yard and that's that's pretty good by my book And most of the ones that I've seen in these suburban areas limited to one or two hives You know, I mean who would want to move 20 hives in anyway in their backyard, but somebody might if it's Somebody might if it's not illegal if you don't have neighbors 10 feet away. Anyway, I'm gonna let you go. I have one last question And I wish I had a better way of asking this. Dan, I just feel like you have so much knowledge and wisdom in all of this that I haven't even asked all the right questions. So my last question for you is just drop a little wisdom bomb on us here before we go. I always say to help the planet, help the bees is just to go play with them. And if not, grow a garden. And if we can grow gardens, grow veggies, grow trees. be connected with nature again. Most of our problems kind of go away because we've outsourced our food to commercial ag, and we want almonds, we want avocados, we want oranges cheaply all year round, and so this is the price we have to pay for it.

36:28 But if we can get connected back to nature, the way I see it is out of sight and out of mind. So people turn a blind eye to all the horse poop that happens in our agricultural system. because they're not the ones out there doing it. Like, we raise our own meat rabbits, our own chickens, and stuff like that, and I will dispatch them and go through the process of it. So there's a very intimate connection with nature when you're going through the whole life cycle, making sure they had a good life, making sure that they were peaceful during the process. And that really opens the mind to really appreciating all the things that happens behind the scenes. And so, but as simple as when people don't have their own gardens, they're not out there. They don't care about people spraying. It's just words, right? It's just, they just heard that this is bad for them versus I'm not going to want to touch that tomato because I just sprayed a bunch of crap on there. And that becomes now a real thing versus a distance thing. And that's probably my only takeaway from all this growing on food.

37:33 Perfect. B -Man Dan, thanks a lot for being on the show. Thanks, Eric. Appreciate you, sir. Thanks again for joining us on B -Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acids Trips. Hey thanks a lot guys. And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeKeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion or topic you'd like discussed on the show, shoot me an And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.