Best Beekeeping Invention of 2026

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 bee's 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 Be Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends and partners in beekeeping, Man Lake. Today's interview is taking

1:32 us all the way to Australia to meet with a beekeeper who's invented a really interesting new way to extract honey from hives in smaller apiaries. But first, how much do you know about honeybees' stingers? If you've been stung, you've probably seen not only the stinger, but also the attached venom sac. Unlike other poisonous animals, bees use a set of pistons to pump the toxin even after detachment from the bee. It's known as a two -stroke stinger and it's very rare in nature. Most venomous creatures like snakes, spiders, scorpions, even wasps, squeeze poison from a storage sack and out of their fangs or stingers.

2:17 On the other hand, the business end of a honeybee stinger consists of two tiny lances inside a rigid sheath extending from a venom sack. When a bee lands to sting, the barbed tips of the lances pierce the target's flesh, causing the lances, sheath, and venom sac to rip away from the bee's body as it flies away. This move dooms the bee to die and leaves behind an apparatus that can keep pumping venom into the victim. The new up close and personal video from researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney and Macquarie University shows that while one lance in the stinger moves down, its bottom end dives deeper into the victim's flesh. At the same time the piston on the lance's upper end extends across the bulb and forms a seal like the rubber ring on a plunger in a syringe. This allows the lance to push venom out of the stinger as it moves downward, while also drawing more venom from the sack in the bulb. On the lance's way back up, however, the flap collapses, allowing the other lance's flap to form a seal in the bulb and keep pushing venom out as the other lance moves downward. My explanation I realize may sound a little bit confusing, but the bottom line is that this back and forth allows the venom

3:47 to flow out non -stop. That's why if we want to reduce the amount of venom in a sting, we need to scrape the stinger and venom sac off of our skin as soon as possible. Lastly, kind of interesting, researchers note that honeybee stingers have inspired the design of tiny needles, such as for attaching drug patches to skin. And in the future, they hope the piston pumps might inspire the invention of tiny pumps for biomedical devices. Alright, now that our creepy biology lesson is out of the way. Let's go down under for our discussion of the new Hivekeeper. And just a reminder that this podcast has both audio and video formats with video versions found on Be Love, Be Keeping's YouTube channel and now also on Apple podcasts. Of course, the audio only versions, as always, are on all the major audio podcasting apps, including Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Amazon. Take a breath audible pod bean and a whole bunch more. Thank you so much for listening We've got a great guest from down under today Simon Mildred. Yeah way of it everybody Simon So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

5:09 You are so welcome I love talking about new inventions. My mother was a gadget Fanatic and you should have seen the kind of kitchen that we had. Oh, we had the Spaghetti forks. Do you know what that is? Spaghetti forks, those special spaghetti forks? Yes, it's a fork that you stick in the spaghetti and then it has a crank handle like this. No. That's the kind of inventions that we had around our house. That's next level. So when I see new things for beekeeping, and I don't mean to belittle what you have in any way by using the term gadget, because it's a cool invention. I love to learn about new stuff. So we're going to be talking all about that. But first, why don't you tell us who Simon, where do you do beekeeping? Yeah. Thank you so much again, Eric.

5:59 So my name, as you've already said, is Simon Mildred. I'm down here in Melbourne, Australia, on the beautiful Mornington Peninsula. We've got a nice, fairly mild area down here, I guess, Eric, with the coast nearby. So it means we don't get snow on the ground. We don't get snow even falling here where we are. We have nice hot summers and nice cool winters. We have really, we see all the four seasons here, but a beautiful part of Australia to be. And as for beekeeping, I just have a few beehives here, not too many. I enjoy looking after them. I don't move them around a whole lot. They're just here on my property, my five acre property with me. So why don't we do this to get into it? Would you give us just a one or two minute, what is Hivekeepers? And then after that, I want to talk about how you came up with this whole idea to start with. So give us the 30 ,000 foot view here. Yeah, Hivekeepers is a business down here in Australia. We've been looking at innovating in beekeeping for over 10 years now. We've done a lot of different things when it comes to technology and bees. And where we are now is helping this small beekeeper with harvesting honey easier and bringing about a more unique experience where the beekeeper can focus on looking after their bees less fuss when it comes to taking some honey from them. And what we aim for there, Eric, at that high level

7:30 is being able to make beekeeping more sustainable and enjoyable for those that are already into beekeeping. They might find it a challenge, but also those that are working their way into becoming a new beekeeper who often don't understand all of the learning that's about to happen for them and all of the challenges that are coming their way. To us, it was really important to find a way to give them every chance of having amazing success and a really enjoyable experience with looking after bees. And that's where we knew one of the real frustrations was around honey harvesting. And we wanted to go through, look at that whole process and see if we can find a better way for them to be able to take some honey from their bees. So let me set the stage just a little bit. If somebody has maybe 50 hives.

8:26 500 hives, 5 ,000 hives even. So they're up in that commercial beekeeping sphere. This really is not designed for them. This is designed for the smaller hobby beekeepers who are saying, oh wait a minute, to get the honey out of my hive, I need to set up a room. I need to do all the decapping. I need to have something to spin out all this honey or do some other way, a crush and strain or a something. to get the honey that my bees have worked so hard on. Let's say you wanna use your garage. Well, you have to have that thing so clean and so empty first. And you have to keep the door shut or the bees are gonna join you while you're doing this. And if you're doing it inside your house, the next thing you know is every door handle in the whole house is sticky and every light switch and everything else. So Simon's come up with something to...

9:24 Really take that process down a notch and make it a lot more reasonable For someone that is doing this on a small scale and wants to have some honey in their tea this afternoon I know the majority of our viewers can't see what you're gonna show us those watching the video can But show us what is different here. What are your honey frames like? Quite simply, when we started to work through our innovation, Eric, we knew we wanted to keep beekeeping, the actual beekeeping side of this, relatively the same as what people already do. We didn't want to introduce new processes and steps in how to look after their bees, a beekeeper to look after their bees. So we knew it was important to us to keep... to an ordinary size frame. You can see me here. You can see I'm holding up at a Langstroth deep frame. We also have a Langstroth shallow frame, which actually is useful in a medium box. But we didn't want to change that configuration of how a beehive gets put together. We wanted it to be easy to inspect a beehive and not change that. And let me just interject. So if I'm using your system, I don't have to buy new boxes. I don't have to go to a whole different kind of setup. I already have the boxes that I need. You have something that fits in them. Okay, go. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the biggest point of difference is looking here at this full depth Langstroth frame.

10:56 We have eight sections across here, and we call these sections cassettes. And that might have been a term that people have heard in beekeeping before, but our cassettes are definitely the new and the innovative bit of what our invention is. And these cassettes, quite simply, come out of the frame. They just pop out. They're about four inches by four inches. So they're quite small. And it's what happens here in the cassette that is the most important part. And when I open one of these cassettes, I'm going to hold it up so that those that are watching can have a look now. Each cassette half has a portion of the bottom of the cell open. When they were together, a cassette has a full three dimensional structure.

11:42 which forms the honeycomb shape or the cells that the bees will use to put honey in. So when together, sealed, full cell, when apart, we actually access the honey from the back of the cells. And that means we don't have to interrupt the bees' wax cappings that were on there. And that was a really important part for us, Eric, in sort of the journey is how do we try to remove some of the steps, especially some of the awkward steps that exist in the honey harvesting process. And one thing I learned from speaking to thousands of beekeepers over many, many years is uncapping was actually quite a challenge for a lot of people.

12:23 Now, if you've got a big, a large industrial machine that does it for you, because you're a commercial producer, like you wouldn't blink at that. It's just what you do. It's simple and easy. But a lot of that big industrial equipment doesn't size down well for the small beekeeper. It's not that you can't use it. It just doesn't... never was designed with that in mind. So we thought, can we remove, can we actually take out of the picture capping altogether? And with this we can, because as I said, we're going to access the honey from the back of the cells, not the front. So we leave the cappings completely in place. And that, I guess, proposes the next question, Eric, that people would have in their mind is, well, what happens with the cappings once the honey's been harvested? Well, bees being such clever creatures. Once this goes back in the frame and back in the hive, within 24 hours, those cappings will be removed, and the bees will be going in there cleaning up any leftover honey, and it will just be happening all very quickly. But the bees sort it out for us. And a lot of that, because the wax is still in, right?

13:30 The bees can reuse that. So they're having to go through a lot less labor and resources to get reset up to fill these up again. It's true, yes. And cassette is an interesting term. It's almost like they're a small square frame, really. And so we're harvesting a bunch of much smaller things instead of a big full -size frame. Do you know, Eric, with that, we get, in one of these cassettes, we get maybe five or six ounces of honey, or about 160, 170 grams, if you prefer that unit of measure. And that is, it is a smaller amount. And across one whole frame, Oh, what's my conversion here, but I'm getting about one and a half kilograms of honey. I'm going to say that that is my, it slips my mind right now, but one and a half kilos of honey, which is probably only about two thirds of what a frame would normally hold. And that's quite obvious because you do lose a little bit of the real estate on the frame in the fact that we have these cassettes, the way they are configured. But what you get in return for that, Eric, is they actually do fill them up quite quickly. As a result, there's less space. You get a cassette filled up quicker.

14:41 And we actually have the unique ability that as the bees are starting to fill out a frame, if they've only filled out part of that so far, because it's maybe early in the nectar flow, you might still be able to take one or two cassettes, rather than having to wait all that time for a full frame to be ready. You could just take a few cassettes that are capped and ready to go. and be able to enjoy small amounts of honey quickly. And we did this once, Eric, and harvested just a few cassettes. And even then, you can change the position of these other cassettes and bring them towards the center. And that was actually encouraging the bees onto those other cassettes faster. Because once they've been on a cassette once and they've filled that one time, the bees really have no difference with regard to the fact that these are made from plastic, which is one of those points which people like to ask us is how do the bees accept these frames and these cassettes and they actually use them quite fine but with one caveat the first time they go in they really benefit from a hot wax roll treatment across the face so that that speeds up just that first time that they adopt these cassettes but after that you won't notice any difference and to your point Eric Once they've they're using this they don't have to go and rebuild the structure every time it's there ready for them to use and They are saving a lot of wax production as a result So yeah, that's just something we like about that one more point and

16:13 then I'll throw back to you But when you take just a small section or a small cassettes worth of honey, we've actually harvested on the one frame found many different colours of honey and that's because there's many different seasons and floral resources represented on that one frame. Now that would be obvious to any beekeeper that of course the bees are putting their nectar in different locations as the season rolls on but we've just not been able to access that and take advantage of and enjoy the different honeys that the one beehive puts into just one frame and now you can actually do that with this system. Alright, let's talk about how we actually extract the honey out of those cassettes Because in looking at those those are not gonna fit in my extractor that I already have. Yeah, you're out there also Because this is on the top of my mind right now.

17:07 I want to talk about cleanup Oh, yeah, because around here we did a honey extraction a couple of days ago And I have a big old extractor out on my front lawn right now as we're speaking that the bees are out there cleaning up, but then I'm still going to get out there with hot water and soap and everything to really get it clean. Let's talk about your extractor that goes with this system. You just explained a bit of the cleanup process for the traditional way of extracting honey. This is an absolute delight, the way that this works. I'm going to hold up the harvester for you now. that's going to help us frame that conversation. What you see here, and anyone who can't see it, I've got a small benchtop harvesting device. It's about the size of a bucket or a pail and it has a handle on the top. So it's easy just to carry around and walk with, and it doesn't weigh too much at all.

18:03 So this is our small benchtop honey harvester. The cassette will slide in the top of this. I'll show that in just a moment. And it spins. for 30 seconds when you push the button here on the front. And most of that honey would come out in the first sort of 10 seconds we'd usually see, Eric, unless it's really thick or cold. But then the cleanup for that is an absolute dream. What I might do just for the sake of showing the process, I'll go through that now, Eric, of how we would harvest with this. I don't have a cassette to show your viewers, but we can link to a video that does. So I've just taken the lid off the harvester. And I'll just do one side at a time and hold it up for you. But if you can imagine that the front of the cassette has cappings on it, and I'm just sliding this in.

18:52 So you're going to do both sides of one cassette at a time. You do. So you do one full cassette. Each half is taking up one side of the harvester. And I just need to put it down to put the lid over. And that's in position now. And I'll just, you can see. Just trying to manage that. You can see through there is the cassette, and the side facing out is the inside of that cassette. Now, when I press this button now, for two seconds, it's going to spin. And I will... Yeah, it looks good, doesn't it? You're not cranking it by hand, by the way. And I can turn it off quickly just because it's a bit easier to talk without that noise just right in my ear, given I'm holding up to the camera. but that'll spin and turn off after 30 seconds. As I said, most of that will come out really quickly. When you harvest with a proper cassette, it looks incredible. You can imagine that the honey would spin out on the side here, then it drains down and it looks really great. On this podcast, you often hear a lot of talk about winter preparation, and there are many different philosophies, mostly involving hive insulation. But what you haven't heard until now is a solution where insulation is built right into a traditional wooden hive body. That's what Man Lake just did. Created an insulated wooden hive and really guys, this is a big deal. I hope you'll take a look at it. Beekeepers have been

20:22 trusting Man Lake for over 40 years. So if your winter prep involves feeding, mite treatments, new insulated hives, or even hive hugger insulation for your current hives, you can find it all in one place. 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. We were in Texas, Eric. It must be a month ago now, a bit over a month ago. and we went to a farmers market and we worked with a local honey producer and we said can we come down we'll bring our honey we'll bring the harvester we want to harvest in front of your store and you can imagine there there's not really beekeepers as such in the audience of all the customer base or the farmers market there might be a few but this was sitting on the counter in front of this honey store and people were coming from far and wide when they could see in the distance that there was something happening And they were watching and absolutely loving seeing this. And I've seen beekeepers, actually a 97 year old beekeeper from Louisiana, who's been beekeeping since he was a teenager, had to have one of these, even though he's a commercial producer, because he just loved the visual effect of how the honey came out here and what that would be for his great grandkids.

21:46 But the effect of that farmer's market is they couldn't stop selling honey that day. And we had to tell the people who were like, where's this honey? Where do we buy this honey? Because they were tasting it from in here. fresh honey, and they'd say the same thing every time, Eric, is, this is the best honey I've ever tasted. They'd be looking over our shoulders to try to find where the honey was, and we'd have to say, well, this is a different honey to what they're selling behind us. But if you like this one, then you'll really enjoy these different flavors. And it was just amazing to see that experience, that they were going through that, that just such a wonderful visual experience. But now back to the beekeeper. you've harvested some honey maybe you've harvested a frames worth of cassettes or whatever it might be and you need to take the honey out of here now so we're just going to take the lid off you'll see there's a base at the bottom here which is where the motor is that just simply disconnects and that's usb -c rechargeable so that's easy to recharge and lasts a very long time we take out the center spindle and now you're just left with a bowl and that bowl of honey For one, you just take the honey out with a spatula, and then you just wash this like a regular bowl. Eric, my cleanup after this process, after harvesting honey, takes me less than one minute. Less than one minute. We're often enjoying the honey and not thinking about all of that hours long cleanup effort and filtering.

23:15 And because we don't take the cappings off, there literally is nothing to filter. So the honey's ready to go from the moment you've pushed that button and let it stop. You've got honey there that's clean and ready to eat. Don't you ever miss the sticky door handles though? No, not for a second have I ever missed that process. I've never missed giving up my whole weekend. I've never missed the technical challenge of doing a good job of uncapping frames. over a season maybe we collect less honey using this method but we enjoy fresh honey from right across the season at all different times and it gives us access to so many different types of honey and one thing that we really strongly believe in and I guess can I prove this yet not really but new beekeepers those that have only had a small number of beehives for a few years then They drop out of beekeeping when things get challenging and difficult. And a lot of them do. And we believe that the honey extraction process and the whole setup and system that they need using the traditional ways is one of the key reasons why a beekeeper stops having bees and moves on from that hobby because it's just a real challenge. It's a real ordeal. So we would like to think, Eric, that in a few years from now we have helped beekeepers look after their bees better. but still enjoy some beautiful fresh honey from across the season.

24:40 All right. Give us your big news. You just got news today. What is it? It's phenomenal, Eric. And it was, you're the second person I shared it with after my life this morning. We had an email in the inbox from the Time Magazine and they have announced that we are one of the best inventions of 2026. I've got chills going running up my arm right now, Eric. That is... Unbelievable news and exciting to tell your viewers. Congratulations on that. I have a feeling it's going to help you sell a whole bunch more of these things. So anyway, congratulations on that. Thank you. We've worked so hard and it's taken a long time. How did you come up with this in the first place?

25:22 Were you a large scale beekeeper or a hobbyist just going, hey, here's a problem. I know how to fix it. I've been a beekeeper for about 15 years. Always small scale hobbyist. go down this pathway too much, but my normal employment has been a firefighter here in Melbourne. Having bees was really important for my mental wellbeing. I didn't know that when I first started, but it's been a really important part of my journey there. About 10 years ago, I started a business in this space because not only was I enjoying the bees, I started to have all this exposure to a lot of the problems in the industry. And as a firefighter, we're good at problem solving. Whether we're good at it or not, we like to solve problems. That's our job. And for me, I could see many issues in this industry. A lot of the commercial industry problem solving just didn't match the recreational hobbyist space, but it wasn't honey harvesting where we started, Eric.

26:17 We started with, I wonder if any of your viewers would remember this, but Hivekeepers when it first came out in 2016 was a software app. for record keeping management. And after three or four years, we moved on from that because that was a tough space to work in, by the way. We moved on from that and we started to use what we'd learnt in making smart enabled beehives. And here we were down in Melbourne in Australia, creating image recognition beehives that were there to find Varroa on bees. And we were scanning every bee as they went in and out of a beehive, looking for Varroa mites. and we were funded by the government as part of that project to have early detection systems here in Australia to avoid Varroa. But then back in 2022, ahead of our trials being fully supported and having rolled out across the nation, the Varroa mite was found in Australia. I'll cut that story short too, but we didn't get to be able to control it. we didn't get the opportunity to be able to eradicate it completely. And we now live with Feroa as of only 2022. But that stopped our business in its tracks, Eric, of what we were working on. And that's where I decided to look at what next. And honey harvesting had been a drama for such a long time for me, and for many people I'd met along the journey, that I decided to tackle that problem. And here we are four years later, getting emails from Time Magazine. telling us that we're one of the best inventions of the

27:49 year. So that's a wild journey, wild ride. I'm sure you can imagine there's lots that's happened in all of that. Hey, tell me real quick about Varroa in Australia. Where did it first appear? I saw articles about, you know, where it appeared and the government tried their very best. Some people even told me they went overboard. They burned over a hundred thousand beehives and stuff. Give us just a little bit of an idea of really what was the story here and is it all the way down to where you are now? Do you know what? I'm not sure I'll ever know the full real story, but how I understand it at the moment, Eric, is we know it came in near the port of Newcastle, which is just north about an hour's drive north of Sydney. For those that know where Sydney is on our East Coast, it was expected that it would have come in on a shipping container from wherever its origin was. There's a bit of argument as to whether that is genuinely the real story.

28:45 And there's probably people watching this from Australia right now saying, Simon, tell the real story. There is a little bit there about whether it was deliberately brought in. I don't know the facts, so I can't really be certain on that. But if it was brought in deliberately, that'd be horrifying, as I'm sure you could imagine. But it then was a huge effort to try to stop the spread. a huge eradication program to try to remove any beehives within a certain region, and it was a very large region, were all destroyed. No beehives were allowed to move for a long time as a result of that as well. And it really was very destructive, Eric, as you said, to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of beehives were burnt, destroyed, but to no avail.

29:29 It's then been spreading across the eastern side of Australia. The centre of Australia. Australia is huge for anyone who doesn't have a concept of its size. We are as big as your mainland states there, 48 states. We are covered just as much area. The central area from north to south is a very wide desert. Bees would not survive in there. Bees do not travel across there. So on the eastern side of our state, it has travelled north and south really well, going all the way. Not all the way to the top in the north, but it certainly traveled all the way down south to where I am. Interestingly, Eric, I only did an alcohol wash this last week of my beehives.

30:09 I have no Varroa mites yet. It's found all around me, but there are still little pockets where we don't see it yet. And I would be one of those few remaining little pockets here where I am. Right now it is October. It is our springtime. I'm sure you with experience with Varroa and those listening, will know that I'm probably weeks or months away at springtime from finding Varroa in my own beehives. We're going to keep our fingers crossed for you. Thank you. And wish you all the best on that. If there's any good news, hopefully it is that we've dealt with it long enough that even though we don't have all the answers here, we have some answers and you can use all of the research that we've done and the things that we've tried and the things that have worked and haven't worked. and how some things do work and then they don't work, and learn from all of our mistakes to speed up your process of dealing with them. As far as we know, there's no such thing as eradicating them, but dealing with them. Hey, lastly, do you have any kind of wild and crazy beekeeping story you'd like to share with us? Oh, wild and crazy beekeeping stories. There's been so many over the years.

31:24 But I guess one that... It comes back to my mind usually, Eric, and I'll try to keep it tight, but there was a friend of mine who had a beautiful property up in the Yarra Valley where I used to live. He had a beehive that wasn't his when he first moved there. And when he told me about this was 10 years after he'd moved there. So the beehive had been there for at least 10 years, probably longer. And he said, oh, I really want to get him to beekeeping. Maybe we can do something with that beehive down under the tree down the back of our property. And I thought, yeah, I'm up for the challenge of seeing what we can do about that. And what it meant was we had to go back and forth over the season, Eric, just to see what they were like. Anyway, as soon as you get within about 60 feet of these bees, they would be up and coming to visit you and not in any sort of friendly way. They were ready to go. It was awful. Anyway, I said, yeah, we'll try to figure this out. And the first time we went down there in a suit, I realized that almost all of the components, the base, the lid, the...

32:23 actual boxes all needed replacing. They were all falling apart. We would never have just been able to lift anything up. It would have just collapsed. So I said we're going to need to replace all of that. I guess all the frames are going to need replacing and I really want to be able to sort out the Queen Bee that's in there because I think we might be able to replace her with one that's a bit friendlier and a bit easier to be able to manage going forward. So with that in mind, we spent weeks or quite a few months just changing over the components and getting used to it. Then when it came to requeening one day, we knew what that meant. We had all the gear on, we taped up our sleeves, taped up our ankles, went to a huge effort to protect ourselves more than ever before. I'd never done it quite like this, but I was like, if we're going to find this queen and requeen the colony, we'd better be ready for it. It's going to be tough.

33:12 And not a word of a lie, Eric. That day we went down and did this. the bees hardly showed interest in us. We went down there, we had to go through two boxes full of frames and I'm sitting there sweating before I'd even lit the smoker, sweating, anxious, knew what this was going to be like. No, completely the opposite experience. We'd spent months being in a war zone and on this day they had some sort of, they decided that we had a truce and that they were going to comply and work with me. It still took us a long time to sort out where that queen was in that hive so we could do a successful requeening. But we could not believe ourselves when we got the reprieve that day from all of this aggressive activity we'd had over the previous months. That was a wild experience, but I'm glad it ended that way.

34:06 What a happy ending. Yeah, that's fantastic. You know, I don't care what people say. Bees have moods, okay? And some days they're in a good mood and some days they are not. And usually the bad moods come from, what, bad weather, no food. There's things around them that cause them to be in a bad mood. It's not that often that you see the switch flip the other direction. That's right. Because we don't make a big deal out of it when they're in a good mood. Actually, I do. I thank them when they're in a good mood on days. That they are and our bees often are and I appreciate it. And it's so much more enjoyable when you don't feel like they just want to kill you. When you tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, right?

34:52 And knowing they just want to get you. But instead they're just, you feel like you're in harmony with them and hey, that's all about the love right there. Yeah, that's right. Can I ask you a question there, Eric? I don't know if you have this over in the US. We have a... You wouldn't have this tree, but we have a particular type of eucalyptus tree, the mesmate stringybark. When that's producing lots of nectar and the bees are collecting from that, and we could fill a box in a week like it's that sort of great sort of nectar flow, but that particular nectar, it's well known that that makes the bees more aggressive and defensive. Would you know if that's the case with any type of flora over there in the US, that it's known that there's aggressive behaviour comes off when that nectar is flowing?

35:39 I personally don't, so I want to put it out there to all the beekeepers listening. If you know of something, reach out to me, because that'd be interesting to hear about. I do know where I live, eucalyptus doesn't grow. In the south, where it's warm, it does. In Hawaii, it does. Places like that. And I know there's different kinds of eucalyptus. And I've tried eucalyptus honey. It's very good. And that's something, I was on the big island of Hawaii not long ago. And during a certain time of the year, beekeepers will take their bees into these eucalyptus forests. to make eucalyptus honey, but nobody has mentioned to me the temperament. So I'm going to have to ask about that. Are there other plants or trees that also set them off? I don't know of any around me, but I'll bet there are some. Will I be seeing you at the North American Honey Bee Expo this January in Kentucky by chance? I was just going to ask when you're coming back to the States.

36:38 I will definitely be there. I'm there every year. So I will see you there. You can have a booth. We've definitely got a booth there, but the reason I wanted just to bring that up with you, Eric, I like to bring some honey from Australia over whenever I'm traveling and make sure you come and see me and say, Simon, you told me there'd be honey because I'll be bringing some incredible honey from Australia for people to try. There won't necessarily be a lot of it, but I'd love for you to experience some of our honey from down here in our part of Australia. I can't wait to try it. If I check luggage, I will bring you some from here. Amazing. Because it's better than yours. We'll do a blind taste test, shall we? I tell everybody, look, my honey is the best in the world. Yours is the best in the world.

37:25 And if you're a beekeeper, you should think yours is the best in the world and stand by it. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. I think that's completely fair. But I have also learned that if it's more than three ounces of honey, it doesn't go in a carry -on or our lovely TSA people here will take it and keep it. So we'll see if I'm checking a bag. For us, it's, yeah, it's got to be kept quite small, but that didn't prevent me last time being able to bring over some amazing different honeys, some Jarrah honey, some Manuka, and just some yellow box eucalyptus honey, which is just fairly easy to find here. But great to watch people's behavior when they try honey that they've never had before. And there was one that I brought over this last trip, because I've only just got back from being in the US. Leatherwood honey. And that's from an island off the bottom of Australia called Tasmania, big island. And it's a very unique flavor. And you watch people's faces. It's a love or a hate.

38:22 And the expression on the face tells it all in the first one second. And it's a real thrill just to share. We have plants and obviously people are more probably more familiar with our animals that are just not from anywhere else in the world. You cannot see what we have anywhere else in the world is not the same. But because of the difference in plants, we really do have very different flavors of honey. Very different. It's really fun bringing that up and sharing that and seeing seeing the delight or concern on people's faces when they try something so different. I'll have one of my friends from the East Coast bring you a taste of some lantern fly honey. Oh, wow.

39:03 I cannot imagine what I'm about to experience, but let's do that. That'd be amazing. I'm not going to explain. I'm just going to let you try it. Anyway, Simon, it is great talking. I'll see you in January. And Louisville, have you learned how to say it yet? No, I don't think I've got the ability to make my face say that word. I'm still not very good at it. The people in Kentucky are always correcting me, but it's a fun show and it'll be fun to see you there. Take care. Can't wait. Thank you so much. It's been great to talk with you today. Thanks again for joining us on the number one Be Love Beekeeping podcast presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes out to Vita Bee Health for their support.

39:50 Vita's Varroa control range of products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan. Extended release oxalic acid strips. If you haven't yet, hey please subscribe to and follow the show. Tell your friends about it. and click on over to be love beekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion or a topic you'd like discussed on the show shoot me an email 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.