Beekeeping in British Columbia, Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping Fun

0:00 May I have your attention please? The following is not the real Jeff Vox really. If the veil at your wedding, your wedding, kept you from being stunned, you might be a beekeeper. If you collect antique smokers, you might be a beekeeper. If you know what time of year your grocery store puts sugar on sale, you might be a beekeeper.

0:50 Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping Podcast, presented by our good friends over at Man Lake. At Bee Love, we're all about the honeybees and of course the beekeepers. Before jumping into our interview today with Christine MacDonald, a full-time beekeeper in British Columbia, Canada, we're bringing back our fun facts about honeybees segment. And a special shout out to my friend Jack, who listens to this podcast while driving a truck. Today, let's see how much you know about bee biology. Did you know that honeybees have five eyes, two large compound eyes, and three smaller eyes in the center of its head?

1:31 The compound eyes are sensitive more to the blue end of the light spectrum and into ultraviolet. Flowers reflect large amounts of ultraviolet light and will appear very bright to a bee. And speaking of bees eyes, did you know that honeybees are totally blind to the color red? So next time you're thinking of painting a high box red, you might want to think again. Did you know that honeybees have four wings? The front and rear wings hook together to form one big pair of wings and unhook for easy folding when not flying. Did you know that honeybees have six legs? Of course you did, they're insects.

2:13 But did you also know that the rear pair is specially designed with stiff hairs to store pollen when flying from flower to flower? This is why a heavily laden worker bee is seen to have two golden pouches or pollen baskets. The bees front legs have special slots to enable the bee to clean its antenna. And did you know that honeybees sleep? Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I have been taught that they don't sleep. But back in 1983, Walter Kaiser, a researcher, observed bees in his hive which had stopped moving.

2:53 He discovered that honeybees sleep. As he watched, Kaiser noted how a bee's legs would first start to flex, bringing its head to the floor. Its antenna would stop moving and in some cases a bee would actually fall over sideways as if intoxicated by tiredness. And even more strange, many bees hold another bee's legs as they sleep. Alrighty, let's get on with the interview. I'd like to welcome to the show today our very special guest, Christine McDonald. How are you, Christine?

3:33 I'm doing great. How are you? I'm great. It is a fantastic day today. And this is going to be fun because we're going to talk about beekeeping in a different part of the world that we haven't been to yet. And that is up in Canada. And when I hear Canada, I assume that you're up like in the Arctic Circle and it's tundra and it's dark and it's 100 million degrees below zero. But tell us where you are and what the climate's like. Yeah, so I'm not that far north, but I think your assumption is further north than most people. Kind of imagine that like Vancouver, Toronto, the very bottom edge along the US border. So I'm about halfway between there and your assumption.

4:14 I'm in Terrace, British Columbia, which is a small town, geographically about halfway up BC. So if I were to drive to Vancouver, it would take me about 18 hours. But it would also take me 18 hours to hit the Arctic Circle. So I'm right in the middle there and fairly close to the coast. So Prince Rupert is our port town on the Pacific Ocean and I'm about an hour inland from that. Yeah, I'm going to really impress you and I didn't have to look at a map. Just kidding. You're actually fairly close to Ketchikan, Alaska. Yeah, we're pretty close to the panhandle in latitude.

4:55 So we've been talking with beekeepers from all over the world, Scotland, Arizona, Hawaii and some cold climates like Newfoundland. Just tell us what it's like there because even if we don't live in a place like where you do, hopefully we can learn something from your experiences up there. So seasonally, like right now we're recording this middle of January. Do you have snow? What's it like? I wish we had snow. This was my first green Christmas ever, but that's an anomaly and in part because we live so close to the coast. Our climate is very seasonal and most of it has to do with the length of day.

5:41 We don't get the brutally cold temperatures that some inland parts of Canada get, but we still get those. It's dark this time of year. We only see the sun from nine until four each day. But the other side of that is that in the summer we have extremely long days and it's not unusual during the summer months for my bees to start foraging at five in the morning and not stop until 11 o'clock at night when it kind of hits twilight and it almost doesn't get truly dark here through the summer. So we have very long foraging days and even though our season might be a little bit shorter, they're using that daylight time to make up for it.

6:26 So we get really big intense honey flows where they can pile away an impressive amount of honey in a short time. Give me an example. What time of the summer is that and how much honey are they racking up? Our main flow happens in June and into the first part of July. I'll talk about one flower that we pursue is the fireweed flower and we can really isolate the flow of that one crop. So we take our bees way up into the mountains where that blooms for exactly six weeks in the summer and in those six weeks in a good year we'll get about 200 pounds off a hive.

7:07 Whoa, whoa. Say that again in case somebody missed it. It's amazing. Fireweed is where it's at. When we have a good fireweed season, it's about 200 pounds per colony that we can pull off those and fireweed is a highly coveted honey. So it sells for a higher price point than our wildflower honey and the honey that we make in kind of the valley bottom where the rest of the bees stay. Wow, that is really cool. So you're just basically putting a new box on almost every day. Yeah, we do. We take them up there and then we stack them up and go on a family vacation for a couple of weeks. That's so fun.

7:47 Well, tell me about the business because you do this full time, right? I do. I do this full time and have for about five years now. My husband also does it full time but on top of his other full time job. But it is just the two of us and we've decided that that's our sweet spot. We want to kind of, we have about 200 colonies right now. That's as many as we can take care of the two of us. And so we don't want any more. We're not interested in managing people. We just want to play with bees. So we produce honey, particularly our fireweed honey, which is kind of our higher market value product. But then we also do a bunch of beeswax candles. We make hot sauces that feature our honey in different ways. I think if my husband could do life over again, he would have been a chef.

8:34 So the hot sauces are his little pet project. We do honey vinegars. We've really diversified so that when we show up to a market, we have a table full of hive products and every customer who loves us and wants to support us has more than one thing to buy. And it has turned into quite a successful business locally. And is that how you sell most of things? Is that some kind of farmers markets? Yeah, we're about 80% direct to consumer. So at farmers markets and Christmas fairs or through our website, but people are picking up or we're delivering directly. We are in some local stores, but even our wholesale and consignment, we keep kind of within our region.

9:22 It's one of the things that we believe about, you know, honey and hive products is that they're meant to be local. And so we want to make the most of our local market and kind of extended a bit, but we're not interested in going, you know, across the country or global. So I was just at the North American Honey Bee Expo recently in freezing cold Louisville, Kentucky. For you there, you're nodding your head. I'm jealous. I'm so jealous next year, baby. That's okay. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. A lot of really awesome people there. And in the honey show, I became a little bit super interested in all these infused honeys.

10:02 They had a whole category for that. And it sounds like you're doing some of that. So tell me about some of those that you do and that you really like. We're doing hot sauces. We're not doing honey infusions yet. It's on the, it's kind of on the to do list. We can only do so many things at once. So right now our hot sauces have been huge. We can't keep up with production. I think if the novelty of those starts to wear off, then infusions will be the next thing that we experiment with. But I, I love part of what I love about being on social media. We were chatting earlier about being on Instagram is just seeing all the different creative things people are doing with honey as kind of the base product.

10:46 So I look forward to getting into that some more. Speaking of Instagram, 51,000 followers. Yeah. Nice job. Well, thank you. It's more people than live in my little town here. Now, have you found that that helps your business? Is this a marketing thing or just a fun thing for you? It has gone through a lot of different kind of iterations or focuses for me since I started. At first, I think like most people, I just, I found something that I loved. I wanted to talk about bees. And, you know, my family could only listen to it for so long. So I turned to social media.

11:26 The more that I shared and the more feedback I got, I started to kind of, you know, what's my purpose here? My husband's looking at me like you're spending a lot of time on this. Like what's the return? I tried kind of advertising our products, but then I was finding a disconnect between wanting to keep our products local and most of our audience for like the physical things we're selling being local. But then my audience on Instagram being in the US and like I'm not even allowed to export honey. So there was a disconnect when I was just trying to sell our products. So then I started to look at it a different way and say, well, maybe I have something else that can be a value on social media and that would be education.

12:06 And so I started doing some virtual mentorship with folks and who are all over North America. And that was quite successful. But never quite where I'm at right now is actually now moving back away from that and trying to just find enjoyment in the connecting with people in the community that I have on social media. So I think in the end, after seven or eight years of playing around on Instagram and, you know, slowly building up this following what it's come down to is I just I want to do it on my own terms.

12:46 I want to show up when I want to show up, share what I want to share. And our business is successful even without having to monetize that. It's been a journey. But when it comes down to it, it's been a very fun one. You don't have to monetize social media. It can just be a fun thing. I mean, that's really to me what it was meant for in the first place anyway. And somehow we feel like because we're spending some time there, we have to make money on it or something. That's okay. Don't feel bad about that whatsoever. But give some advice to other people that may be either in your shoes or looking at that and saying, Wow, I've got 20 or 50 hives now and I want to work up to 200.

13:29 What kind of advice do you have for people like that? And how do they make money? I think the first piece of advice that I have is to learn, learn good beekeeping, learn how to get your bees through winter. Because in the spring, a hive that is alive is immediately making you money and a hive that died over the winter is costing you money. So it really comes down as like a financial foundation for your business to learning how to get your bees to survive one year to the next. Once you've done that and that takes some learning. It's hard for people who have, you know, they just started this hobby last year and they're really excited about it and want to go into business.

14:12 There will come some harder learning pieces down the road. And then after that, I think it's important to diversify. I, we had a year, it was 2020, I believe we had a year of no honey. It literally rained from the start of the season to the end of the season. We didn't even harvest at the time we had 75 hives. We didn't even harvest enough honey for our family. We were buying honey all winter with 75 hives. But that was also the year that I decided to quit my job and go full time. And we just looked and we said, we've been collecting all this wax for the past like six or seven years. Let's do something with it. And we started making candles that forced us to diversify and looking back. That was still a rough year, but looking back, that diversification is what has made our business very resilient now year to year.

15:05 Because with honey, there will always be good and bad years. Just a quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. Hey, if your weather is anything like mine, it is freezing out. So let's put our creative brains together and visualize spring. Birds chirping, flowers blooming and bees buzzing. Now let's visualize you enjoying beekeeping so much more with some new gear. Or if you're new to beekeeping and not sure what you need, give Man Lake a call and their experienced beekeepers will help every step of the way. Protective gear, hives and tools, even packaged bees, nukes and queens. Man Lake has it all. And don't forget your discount code MLBLOV10. It's in the show notes for $10 off your first $100 purchase. I'm feeling better already. Now back to the guest.

16:00 And then another thing is to consider selling bees. Once you get good at overwintering them for yourself, you will eventually hit a point where you have too many. And then you get to sell nukes. And I think that's really when you start getting into some good money making potential. How many nukes do you sell a year on a decent year? Last year we sold about 250 and also increased our own hive numbers by about 50, including our nukes that we put through winter. Well congratulations, you're doing great. How about any secrets or things that have worked for you well at these farmers markets? Is it diversity? Is that the key or what else is it?

16:45 Yeah, that idea of you want people to buy into you and support your business and then if they're going to support your business, they only need so much honey. So have more than one thing there that people can buy. I also think for us, our family just has this reputation of being wholesome when people ask for a donation for a fundraiser. We've always given something. I think the more that you give to your community, the more you're going to get back out of it. It's never even a question for me of whether we can give because it just seems to come back tenfold every time. So make yourself visible in your community in a positive way.

17:32 I put a lot of focus on aesthetics at the market too. We splurged on tablecloths that have our logo on them. Our market style just looks very polished because we've spent a little bit more money on a canopy with our name and tablecloths with our name. And I think that pays off too. People see you and recognize you and it's like, that's the place I get my honey. So it's easier for them to come back. Yeah, that professional look. Back to what you said a minute ago. I think it's even more than just giving away donations, money when people ask for it. But education is the same way. Being free with being a mentor or just answering beekeeping questions or anything like that, I think is a great thing too.

18:18 Absolutely. We take an observation hive to market every weekend with us. And when I tell you that sometimes the last thing I want to do at 6am on a Saturday is go pack up a cranky nuke of bees. But it's worth it. It brings all the kids over and they ask questions and they have to find the queen and get a sticker and just providing that connection to what people are consuming. The parents who are saying those are the bees that make the honey that's sitting right there beside it. I think that's huge. That makes sense. What is your winter survival rate? You said you figured it out. Yeah, we have about 90% survival every year. So if we're looking at just our production colonies, our losses stay below 10%.

19:05 But then we also overwinter nukes so that really our number of colonies doesn't fluctuate because a colony that dies over winter, we have a nuke to pop in it the first sunny day in the spring so it can build right back up into a productive colony. So I think both learning how to have strong healthy colonies going into winter is going to get you decent survival rates. If you can learn to overwinter nukes and have those backup hives in the spring to just fill in your gaps, then you're really staying consistent.

19:47 I think that's when we kind of felt like we've got it figured out. Yeah, tell me about overwintering nukes for those who haven't done it. Yeah, so we overwinter. A nuke is just a smaller colony, five or six frames with a queen. All of our nukes are queens that we raised that past summer so we put the nuke together. I graft a round of queens and then those queens go in. So they're all nice fresh queens and we let them build up from mid July until the end of the year. We overwinter them in Lysin poly nukes so they're like the kind of styrofoam nuke boxes because the insulation of them is just amazing.

20:29 We used to overwinter in wood. We got a grant to try out some poly boxes and the difference was incredible. So now we've gone to all poly for overwintering. We push them up close together so they're sharing kind of one wall of heat between all of them and add a little insulation to the lid. But overall they overwinter very well. People often think that there just can't be enough food in there, but the space that they have to heat is smaller. The cluster itself is smaller just because they're going into winter with a smaller number of bees and they almost always have frames of honey left at the end of the season.

21:09 So they don't need to be fed then? We usually feed in the fall but it's less about stocking them up for winter and more about just preventing robbing and all the disease transfer and mic transfer that can come with that. So we just keep them fed for those days in the fall when they're still flying but there's no longer flowers left. But we don't need to bulk feed them or feed them any fondant or anything through the winter. Besides fireweed, what other kind of forage do they have in your area? Yeah, another thing that's really unique about us in this little corner of British Columbia is that we don't have any agriculture at all. There's a few kind of backyard gardeners but no widespread agriculture.

21:54 So we have mostly wild forage. There's wild rose, there's fetch, there's way too much tansy. We do have quite a few fruit trees that they're on in the spring. It's really a crazy mix. Our wildflower honey is very dark and very complex and it's all about that diversity. You're not going to find a field of clover or a field of alfalfa anywhere nearby. So it also keeps us out of a lot of the heavy pesticide use which is cool up here. And I, you know, as much as I can pat myself on the back for awesome overwintering rates that probably has something to do with it as well, that we don't have those agricultural stressors on our bees around here.

22:41 I agree with you. That is a big deal. I know it's rough where I am. We have a lot of that stress. Tell me about pests and predators. Let's start with pests. How bad is Varroa where you are? It's bad. We, I think like everywhere there are beekeepers in town who take it very seriously and test and treat. And then there are others who just have them and leave them bees and they don't really know what's going on in their colonies. They don't know why they keep dying every winter. We know because we see the mite bomb show up in September when their bees have died and ours have gone robbing.

23:21 That's probably the biggest reason that we feed through the fall is to try and keep our bees from robbing out those dead colonies that neighbors might have. So what's your IPM philosophy? Very frequent testing. So I'm all about knowing what's going on. I use Randy Oliver's Varroa mite calculator, which if you have not heard of it is the best gift you could give your bees this year is to sit down and spend an hour trying to learn it. So you can input your treatments at different times of year and then see at the end of the year how many mites you're coming out with. And so our goal is not just to get to the end of the year with our bees alive, but to go into the next year with low to no mite counts.

24:09 So we have changed our minds over the years. Where we're at right now is that we only use the two organic acids for treatment. So we'll use Formic Pro. If we have a high mite load that we need to knock down really quickly, we use oxalic acid during broodless periods and those two things for us have been working well so far, but we're not opposed to changing it up based on our tests. We always keep our finger on the pulse. Back to my terrible stereotypes about Canada. I picture bears walking around. What kind of predators do you have around bears? You do have bears. Okay.

24:49 Lots of bears. We have black bears and grizzly bears. All of our beards have electric fences like five foot high, five wire high voltage electric fences around them, especially up in the fireweed. So when we take them up in the mountains and leave them for six weeks, even up there, we're building fences. They all run on solar powered chargers. So they'll run even without electricity nearby. Hurts when you touch them. And we have had bears go through them in the past. They're a deterrent. But if one shorts out, if somehow a bear gets a taste of what's on the other side, it doesn't stop them kind of blasting through to get in there.

25:37 So we've, in the past, we've lost two yards to bears. How does that feel when you show up and see that? Oh, it's devastating. Yeah, one, two years ago was early in the spring and it was actually a mother grizzly and two cubs. And three bears can do a lot of damage in a short time. So it was not just the loss of bees, but the destruction to the equipment was incredible. The poly hives that we overwent, they actually got into one of our new yards and they were just shattered into a hundred pieces.

26:18 Like they jump on them to get them open and they chew up the plastic foundation. All I could think was that I hope it hurts coming out the other side. Okay, we'll go test and find out. I assume you don't have any pollination services up there, do you? No, we don't. We have like one man who runs a small orchard, but it's less than an acre and we put two hives on their forum. But yeah, there just is no agriculture around here to need it. You get some free apples out of that deal or something.

26:58 All right, any advice for anybody else that may be in a similar climate to yours? Well, my biggest piece of advice would be to look into that Varroa calculator. I think no matter where you are in the world, you know, this time of year you start to hear about colonies dying and people going out to check their bees and they're gone. And we want to blame moisture and we want to blame cold and we want to blame anything but Varroa mites. I'm surprised by the reluctance to say that it was mites, but to really take a harder look at your IPM and your mite treatment strategy because when a hive dies, that's my first question.

27:40 If someone wants me to help them figure out what happened is the first thing we're going to talk about is Varroa control. It's always my first answer. Do you even need to ask the question? I mean, yes you do, but yeah, but that's always, it seems like the issue. Around here, everyone blames the cold weather, but they have no chance getting through the cold weather with a big mite load. Without it, they do have a pretty good chance. So that's always the best place to start. What is it, Christine, that you love about bees? Oh, I love all of it. So before this is going to turn into a life story, before I was a teacher, I was a wildland firefighter for 15 years right out of high school into my 30s.

28:29 And I loved it. It was outdoors. It was physical. There was camaraderie. It was problem solving. It was seasonal. No two days were the same. When I went from that to teaching, I was depressed for a number of years where it just was not fulfilling in the same way that wildland firefighting had been. Then when I got into beekeeping, it's like it ticked all of the same boxes. I was outdoors. It was physically hard work. It was mental and problem solving and complex and no two days were the same. It was like everything that I loved and missed about firefighting, but in something that I could do even now that I had a family.

29:16 And that's why I stopped firefighting was because of the travel. Now I could have the same fulfillment in something I could do at home in my own backyard or nearby. So for me, you know, I can say I just, I just love the bees. I do. I love opening up a hive and that feeling of kind of Zen and nothing else in the world matters. But on a bigger, why do I love doing this as a career scale? It's about ticking all the boxes of what I need to feel fulfilled in my life. Love that. We talked another time earlier about a wild and crazy beekeeping story that you had.

29:57 And if anybody hasn't heard that, I'm trying to think what episode it was. I'll go back and post that in the show notes, but it was an awesome has to do with a high school classroom. I'll leave it at that. Can you think of any others? Have you had another one since I had a good one. I did the Master Beekeeper program through Cornell University and I had to do the exam series. So you do a written exam, you do a presentation, and then you do a hive inspection that you have to record in one take. So you, you can't stop it and start it and, you know, find your queen and then turn the camera back on.

30:38 It has to be from start to end one video. And I was doing this in July and you have to narrate. There's like a hundred talking points that you have to hit. So it's very long. It's about 45 minutes long. I had it all set up. I went in one hive. I got halfway through something happened. I had to stop. So I'm on take two now. So you starting again from the very beginning. Second one, something happened, didn't work. Third time, like I got to go pick my kids up from school. This has to be yet. So I set it up and I'm about halfway through. And everything is going great. And then I hear Christine ignore it. Keep going, keep going. Christine. And I finally look over and there's some guys standing off in the parking lot.

31:20 And they're like, your bees are swarming. And the swarm had taken off from the box right beside or I was working. So it became part of my video because I couldn't, I didn't have the time to stop and keep going. Reable to catch it later. I did not catch them. No, had to finish the video. All right. If somebody wants to get ahold of you, how can they reach out to you? You can find me on Instagram. I am at rushing river apiaries on there. Same handle on Facebook, same fit handle on YouTube and anywhere else. I'm easy to find if you're on social media. I love the name rushing river apiaries.

32:00 We have two kids and our kids are river as my daughter and rushing river. And rushing river is our river as my daughter and rush is my son. So rushing river is a nod to them and our business name. What happens if you have more kids? Not going to happen. Hey, Christine. Thanks so much for being on with me today. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us here on be love beekeeping presented by man like. Please right now before you forget, hit that follow or subscribe button, rate and comment on the show.

32:41 Then be sure to share it with a friend. We're building a community here and we want to hear from you. Send your crazy stories, guest recommendations, new gadgets or anything else that you'd like to hear about on the show to Eric at be love beekeeping.com. 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.