"Condensing" Beehives - Why & How

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 Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our great friends and partners in beekeeping. Mann Lake. Today we're going to have a super informative conversation

1:31 about condensing hives with one of the leading authorities on the topic but first fresh from the beekeeping news we had another couple of big trucks carrying beehives rollover one in Yellowstone National Park and another in Texas. What really cracked me up was this headline from the Texas Accident quote Two million bees escape after truck carrying hives overturns. The reporter made it sound like they were hauling federal prisoners who escaped the accident. Call the federal marshals. Of course, we know that the last thing the bees wanted to do was leave their homes. But when their homes are broken open and scattered across the highway, they don't really know what to do. Orange County Emergency Services warned residents, quote, Everyone that lives in the affected area please remain indoors. An 18 -wheeler carrying beehives has turned over and there's heavy presence of bees in the area.

2:33 The good news is that local beekeepers quickly came to the rescue both of the bees and of the residents. This got me thinking because we hear about this quite often. Is there something with bees in these truck rollovers? And I'm going to say no because here are some other unusual mishaps in the last few months on US highways. A truck in Tennessee hauling fireworks caught fire and its load triggered a spectacular impromptu display. Back in March, 40 ,000 pounds of extra firm tofu was spilled in Missouri, and previous to that, firefighters responded to a crash in which a truck carrying a huge load of ribeye steaks burst into flames. All right, enough of that silliness, let's get back to talking about honey bees. Welcome, welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping, everybody, and I'd like to welcome especially We have a great guest today, Bill Hesbach. How are you, Bill? I'm very good. Thank you so much.

3:42 It's a pleasure to be here. I am super excited to have you today because we're going to be talking all about condensing hives, which is something that I still have a lot to learn about, but it's come up a lot lately. We had Lauren on the show recently and she mentioned it and you and I had another guest on that has built his own long laying hive. and is talking about a condensing system with that. So if you don't mind, I want to jump right in. Would you start with just the 30 ,000 foot view of in general, what are we talking about when we talk about condensing hives? Yeah, it's actually quite simple. So when we're talking about condensing hives, we're assuming that we allow the bees to control the the internal environment in hives. We don't get involved with ventilation at all. And it's based on the principle that bees have lived for millions of years. The pollinators have lived for millions of years.

4:45 The current Western bee that we keep here in the United States has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and they've lived in cavities where they controlled all the hive gases. So a condensing colony brings them a step backward. toward their more natural environment. So it's, in a word, bees get to control all the hive gases. We don't interfere. In order to do that, by the way, you have to have a box that allows for a complete envelope that they can then manage themselves. So does that mean in times of winter, for example, you have no ventilation in the hive at all? No ventilation at all in the hive, except for the entrance. the bottom entrance here, just like it would be in a tree cavity, a box that would be surrounded by a lot of insulation on the top and the sides, a closed box, and the only ventilated part of it would be the entrance, which we keep at about a three inch long space. Okay. And a lot of people reduce that entrance in winter anyway. But it's hard for some of us to understand how we don't need ventilation because we need to talk about condensation. We need to talk about CO2. We need to talk about gases that build up.

6:02 And I want to preface this with something that just came to my mind. Bill, what is the name of the volcano that blew up over in Italy a few years ago? Yeah, it buried beehives in volcanic ash. And they were buried for, if I remember right, about 50 days. Yeah. And they were dug out and the bees were still alive and just fine. Yeah. Well, that and you could also extend that into some of the colder climates where bees are covered with copious amounts of snow in sort of an igloo configuration that occurs naturally. And they survive under all of that snow without any added ventilation at all. So In the winter where I am, we get a lot of snow. And a couple of years ago, we had so much snow that even though some of my hives that are on stands, they were still buried. Like you just sort of saw a lump.

7:02 And I thought it was my duty to take a brush or a broom or whatever and get the snow away from the entrances so that they had ventilation. Was I making a mistake? Well, you weren't making a mistake, but you were just surviving through a lot of cold work. Unnecessary snow ice is different than snow. So if you had ice over that front entrance and you have to remove it, snow has an incredible amount of porosity. When I do this talk and I've been doing it since about 2016, I show snowflakes and up under microscopy and it's just a veritable porous space. So bees. And all other insects, by the way, that live underground all winter long with dense snow packs survive perfectly okay with the exchange of gases through snow. So you can exchange gases through snow, is my point. They don't get bogged down.

8:00 As a matter of fact, if a colony gets a lot of snow on top of it, it adds to the insulation. Okay. I want to let you get back to giving this whole 30 ,000 foot view. Tell us... a little bit more about detail now. Okay. How does this work? Why should we use it? Well, I can tell you how it works. And for you to sort of embrace the concept, it's a challenge to Belor. And to give you an idea, I think where we started with ventilation, I think ventilation is a useful practice when you don't insulate a colony, especially in a cold climate, and you allow the gases that come off of the core To meet a lot of cold air on the say a cold inner cover It'll condense there into liquid moisture and drip back down on the cluster So early on when bees were taken out of their natural habitat kept in Langstroth boxes Early beekeepers noticed right away that they could they had to do something To keep that condensation from accumulating around the top of the cluster with a cold surface. So those are just basic thermodynamics. Those are physics laws. You can't change that, right? If you have warm, moist air that has a fairly dense moisture content and hits a cold surface, it's going to condense into liquid moisture. Now, if you insulate that and you maintain a surface above a cluster,

9:31 It's above the dew point. There can't be any condensation that occurs there. So what ends up happening then is the moisture vapor that's coming off of the cluster will come up, warm the surface that's insulated, and then it spreads out and seeks colder parts of the colony. So again, just basic physics, basic thermodynamics and basic bee biology. So bees take advantage of this, especially when they're in trees and there's plenty of insulation above them. As moisture then finds its way out toward cooler spaces, it condenses inside the colony. So therefore, it's a condensing colony. So you're allowing the moisture to condense. So then is that good is a question to let moisture condense inside the colony. Yeah, because people would say, hey, we don't want the bees to get wet. Yeah, they absolutely will never get wet as long as the surface above them is above the dew point. or you can't get liquid moisture to develop and drip down on bees if that surface can't reach the dew point. What happens is then that moisture, that vapor, goes out toward color surfaces and it condenses there. Now this is the number one factor why bees are, by their instincts, are biologically superior to our beekeeping. So the first thing that happens is when that condenses on the outside, it gives off latent heat. There's a built -in latent heat recovery system when moisture is allowed to condense inside the colony.

11:02 That can account for more than a double -digit savings in energy expenditure if you allow that to condense inside the colony. Again, this is just physics. So that's one thing. And then, of course, if there's excess moisture, then it'll run down the frames or inside the box and then accumulate in the bottom or or go out of the bottom board or whatever, whatever happens. But that doesn't normally occur when bees are allowed to condense in the colonies. Not a lot of excess moisture, not where I live. Yeah, so that's the first thing. There's a latent heat recovery that bees take advantage of when they allow to condense. Now that water is in the colony. It has liquid moisture in areas where bees have access to it.

11:47 So that's the other positive part about allowing some condensation to occur inside the colony, not in the cluster, but around it. on surfaces around it, is they have it access to thin honey when they want to eat it during the winter. I don't think a lot of beekeepers realize that honey is cured honey inside cells. It's easy for bees to uncap that, but they can't lap it up. They got to thin it. It's too thick to go through their proboscis. I've often wondered why bees use water to thin honey. and then eat it. And that's the reason why it's just, it has too much viscosity for bees to just swallow, right? So that then means that they don't have to go out to search waters. When they break cluster, they can find water right near them or move a cluster over a little bit. They can find more.

12:35 So those are two really important parts of why condensation is a positive thing to occur inside of a colony during the late heat recovery and moisture available to thin honey so they could eat it. Now there's more to this, right? So now you asked earlier about the gases. So the gases are where it really gets interesting. Because with the gases, two things happen in a cluster, especially a type cluster. The CO2 builds up and the oxygen levels driven down. So now you have an environment that is higher in CO2 than you would expect, right? So it could get up to 22 % of the somewhere between 14 and let's say 20 percent, somewhere between 14 and 20 percent of the colony's atmosphere, the cluster's atmosphere, is now CO2. So what's the bee's response to that?

13:27 Bees respond to that in a completely different way. If you were human in that environment and you would last about five minutes before you would go into hypoxia, you would die at 10 percent CO2 in minutes. These survive and lots of other insects survive in these real high CO2 high environments by lowering their metabolic rate. So they have another biological adaptation. They go into a low metabolic stabilized rate. So they, instead of dying or going to hypoxia, they manage the amount of energy they use using that gas. Now, if it gets too high, of course, they ventilate a little bit of it out. If it's really cold and they're in a tighter cluster, they're going to use that CO2 to lower their metabolic weight.

14:16 And therefore they use less honey to generate the amount of energy they need for that size cluster. That's the hard part for people to understand because you would think the first you'll hear in B meetings, first of all, you got to get the condensation out. Then you got to get the CO2 out because it'll kill. CO2 does not kill insects. You can put anybody who has bred queens. will know that if they're going to do some artificial insemination, they will put a queen bee inside of a tube backward, and a nesticizer would see a CO2 for as long as they have to to inseminate that queen. Then she wakes up and is fine. And we didn't be able to put the bees in 100 % CO2.

14:59 Of course, that wouldn't work. So the extreme side wouldn't work. That is fascinating stuff. Is this something that people should be doing if they're in a warm environment, Hawaii or Southern California or something? Yeah, since I wrote the first article on condensing colonies, I wrote in 2016 for Be Culture magazine and it got some circulation early on. And I coined that term condensing colony, which now has a life of its own, which is kind of interesting for me and rewarding in some ways. But I got feedback from people all over, up in the Northwest of the United States, in Germany, Turkey. So I got response from that article, with the same kind of question, should I try it here? What should I do? And my answer was always the same for everyone who made an inquiry, was try it, see what happens. And so then the second generation... of folks that have tried it in the meantime, some have found incredible success with it. Now, if you're going to use it in Florida, you're using it for a completely different reason. The interesting part about the way this whole thermoregulation biology ties into both cold and warm climates is something we don't normally think about. So in a warm climate, what does a condensing colony do? In a warm climate, it acts as a way for bees to regulate the amount

16:29 of heat that's in a comb. There's a bunch of behaviors that occur where bees will dump heat outside the colony with their little bodies. They press it against comb. They absorb heat. They can get about a calorie. of heat absorption per a bee's abdomen then they bring that outside on the outside of the box disperse that heat then come back in so there's a heat shielding effect. Now if you start pumping in really hot humid air into a cluster that's already managing the way that they regulate heat it works really well if you will allow them to do it themselves. you know, then they set up little swamp coolers in there, right? They'll collect water hanging off the rim of a cell and evaporate it with wings, with their wing movement, right? So in cold climates where we think of thermoregulation as saving bees from freezing to death, in hot climates, the same thing, bees are adapted to thermoregulate on their own. And a condensing box, so the condensing colony is just a box that has insulation on top and the sides, works fine. I really don't have to take my word for it. The industry has responded really well to this. And they make a bunch of insulated condensing colonies right out of the box these days. When I first started to popularize this idea, you had to make it. 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

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19:03 And, of course, seal off the bottom and all that with a single entrance on the bottom. You had to make it all. Now you don't have to make anything. There's everybody out there. There's a number of brands. Man Lake carries a few, and Better B carries a few. There's lots of... you know, bee supply houses that are now carrying them. And out in Australia and in all of Europe, the Germans have been keeping polly boxes for decades with no topping. As a matter of fact, if you look at German beekeeping practices, their box, their polly box, which is a condensing colony by nature, has a piece of plastic like a ... six mil plastic that they put over the top of the frames, they're thick polytopon. And through all of those scenarios, there's been tests of colonies in really hot climates, like the Gibson Desert and other places in Australia where they had uninsulated boxes side by side with insulated boxes. And notice that the behavior of bees is that they did a lot more bearding on the outside of the uninsulated boxes than they did in the insulated stuff. And I've seen that for years in my own apiaries, where bees in hot weather will beard like crazy. In my insulated boxes, there's always some hives in a colony that in my yards that aren't insulated. I will see them beard differently. So I think this is a great reminder for people that insulation is important in hot climates as well as cold ones. That's

20:34 part of what you're getting at here, right? It's exactly right. I mean, you know, you don't take the insulation out of your walls in the summertime, or you don't uninsulate your attic in the summertime. So insulation works both ways. I mean, if these are keeping a brood area at 95 degrees Fahrenheit, say for instance, they don't need 102 degree moist air coming into the bottom of the box, or for that matter, they don't need 95 degree air or 87 degree air with high humidity being pumped inside the box. The homeostasis is a bee's absolute biological adaptation. They want a box that they can stabilize in all environments and control the air envelope inside. There's lots of high -powered physics behind thermoregulation, and I got into all of it. And if you can do the formulas that are associated with figuring out all these thermodynamic, you have to be an engineer.

21:40 The real key to understanding it is to put yourself back in time a little bit and think about how bees evolved. There's very little natural evidence that a beekeeper can't rationalize themselves. They can say, well, listen to what... Bees came from trees, say for instance, or other cavities. And all of those other cavities that bees have evolved to live in provided them with a lot of insulation. Take an old tree here in the northeast where I live. You'll see a hole in a bee tree that's been there for maybe 75 years. Colonies occasionally occupy it and then they go away, but they come back to that. And the reason they select that over and over again is because it has the characteristics that they need to survive.

22:31 And one of them, of course, in a tree, is a bunch of insulation above the cavity that they pick, a bunch below it, and then usually five or six inches of wood all around the outside, which would make for a complete insulated envelope with a single entrance. So let's say we have a beekeeper that wants to try this concept and they don't have a polyhive. So they want to buy some insulation and just try this. You mentioned a sleeve that goes over the whole thing. Yes. Give us some kind of step by step. Like how much insulation? Do we want that hard foam insulation? Do we want an inch of it? Do we want two inches of it? What's a what's a just a basic recommendation?

23:17 Yeah, so there's like about a 75 25 split on loss So about 75 percent of the loss heat loss in a colony goes out of the top Let's just say it's an uninsulated box just goes out of the top and then maybe 25 percent around the sides so if you were gonna make a sleeve that went over a Langstroth box say for instance, you could buy poly sheets, there's ones called R -Max, there's pink sheets of foam, EPS foam and expanded, some special expanded foams that you get about R -5 or R -6 or R -7 per inch. And you could put one inch of that around the outside. And I'm going to explain some peculiarities about how insulation works. So we'll just generally flesh out how you could make this yourself. So you would make a box that fits over the Colony right right over a length with box same dimensions as the outside now. You've got an extra inch Around the entire circumference of that box, which so your normal telescoping covers won't fit over that anymore So in order to get a complete Insulated envelope you have to make Or if you were going to make this you have to make a telescoping cover that would fit over that insulation. It would accommodate that one inch around the entire colony and then also have two inches of that foam on the top. So one inch around the side,

24:50 two on the top, but it has to be a continuous, no break in the insulation. So does the heat just leave through those breaks too much? Yes, the heat leaves through those breaks. So let me explain how insulation works. When I worked as a mechanical engineer in a company that I owned, I was a consultant for building envelopes. So I would be called in as a specialist to figure out how they could improve the design to accommodate for more insulation. Now it's well known. But back in the day, there was very little known about it. So we did some tests on how insulation works. So if you were to take a regular building bay cavity and fill it 90 % with insulation, that 10 % that you left out at the top would compromise the entire insulation quality of that bay. So if you have a box that has open edges and all kinds of the insulation doesn't touch each other or on the top you don't make it a continuous so it touches all four sides. You just lose insulation heat and you're defeating the purpose of the insulation. A lot of beekeepers will say to me well I did what I thought but I put a quilt box up there and then I put the insulation on top of the quilt box. So the quilt box ends up with a lot of ventilation and we don't ventilate below insulation. It just doesn't

26:20 work that way. You know, you know, you know, put your insulation has to be in contact and in a continuous area or else it just doesn't work. So no quilt box. My point is you can't put ventilation below your insulation. That would be like opening up the windows in your second floor in your house all winter long. Totally makes sense. Okay. So yeah, so that's how you might make one. The article that I wrote in B Culture in March of 2016 is still available online. Anybody that wants to look that up, just look up, you know, just you can search my name. They have a good library there. You can look up old articles. Yeah. And you just go ahead and do that and you can. search that article and give step -by -step instructions on how to build them.

27:07 Just be reminded that this is when they weren't offering an insulated box yet. There weren't any poly boxes on the market at that point. So that's why you had to make one. And now there are all kinds. Yes. There's also insulation blankets that wrap all the way around and have like plastic on the outside so they're waterproof and they look like, I haven't used one yet, they look like they're three or four inches thick. Like you'd get a lot of R value, but it sounds like it's important to make sure you have higher R value on top than on the sides. Yes. So there's really some innovative products out there that have come out and one I consulted with is the Hive Hugger. And if people want to take a look at that as an example of how you put together your own sleeve, they're already made for you.

27:52 So the sleeves are being made if you wanted to try it. and see what the results are. So I did a lot of work on figuring out if I was okay with talking about the way condensation works in economy. My early efforts at trying to understand the thermodynamics were then reinforced by some interesting physicists, one in England, that did a bunch of work on the thermodynamics and explained that what's possibly happening with boxes in cold climates that are ventilated is that the bees are in a constant state of trying to survive. So it puts them in a really rugged state, and they have to try to survive that, and they can for the most part. But we have to be aware that since the bee lore of ventilation was initiated back in the day when beekeepers first learned that liquid moisture would kill their bees, there weren't a lot of viral stresses that we know of. The form -wing virus wasn't discussed. We didn't have varroa. No one talked about black queen cell virus. I mean, the viral landscape back in the day, there may have been there, and I'm almost guaranteed it was there. My studies in virology would indicate that... We didn't invent anything. There were viruses even back then. They just weren't deadly. What we were working with back in the day was American Foulbrood, European Foulbrood, Sackbrood, Chalkbrood, all of that stuff, the bacterial infections and the

29:23 viral infections that went back a ways. But now we know for certain that bees, that Varroa, are vectoring a bunch of viral load into bees. And you're hearing a lot about beekeepers saying, the first cold snap in my colony died. I think that there's different pressures on bees in terms of their cellular mechanisms to try to combat viral infections. It leaves them a little bit more vulnerable. So my logic in all of that is, yes, maybe your bees will survive without a bunch of insulation and outside of a condensing colony, but why not? If you're a hobby beekeeper or advance your animal husbandry into a place where you're providing the bees with a more natural habitat, give them a chance. I'm going to add something to that. And that's a great line of thinking and a great explanation. And another thing that a lot of us deal with is pesticides use around us that the bees just can't seem to stay away from. And so anything we can do to make their life easier, is going to counteract some of those other things that you were just talking about and the pesticide load, the viruses, the varroa, the everything else. So let's give them a break any place we can. And you mentioned these things about we learned about moisture and it's all terrible and that kind of thing. It seems like

30:54 one of the problems that us beekeepers have is the first thing that we learned on a topic, whether it was from a mentor 20 years ago or whatever. like that sticks and we have a hard time being open -minded that maybe that wasn't right. I need to be open -minded here about thermodynamics and condensation and all these other things because bees are struggling and we've got to figure out any other way to help them than we can. And it's not just about throwing chemicals in to fight varroa. Right, you can, yeah, so you're fortifying the natural biology of bees. The way I look at it is on this sort of like a continuum between a fully condensing colony where bees are allowed to divide management controls over the hive gases, using CO2 to regulate their metabolism in the wintertime, using that internal atmosphere to cool colony and heat. Under those circumstances, you have a biological unit that's working in concert with the evolution of their own biology.

32:03 As you move away from that model and move them toward a more of a ventilating model to a full ventilating model, you're moving from a natural environment to an artificial one. And the artificial one has pretty much been reinforced by our industrial beekeeping complex in that I don't have anything, I have nothing against pollinating or beekeepers using pollinators and their services, but they view bees as an industrial product. We don't have to. If we're going to care for bees in a more sort of natural way, it makes sense to provide them with a habitat that's more natural. Yeah.

32:47 All right, Bill. I really appreciate all the wisdom that you're sharing with us today. Let's leave with something fun. You've been a beekeeper long enough that I'm sure you've had some wild and crazy beekeeping stories. You want to leave us with one or two? I was thinking about that when you first asked the question, and there's so many of them that are just a whole lot of fun that happened. So I was in the yard one day and I witnessed a swarm. I always spend a lot of time around bee yards. And especially in swarm season, I'm always there doing something. So I'll always, or on occasion, I'll see swarms. In this particular time, I saw a swarm coming out of a hive. I saw it emerging. Then I went to a tree and hung there about four feet high.

33:35 Nice big swarm. So I thought this is going to be easy to catch. Let me just go over there and I'll shake it into a bucket. So I set up some hive equipment and I shook the branch. Now I'm working blind. So I'm holding the bucket and the branch, so I shake it down and all the bees fly away. I mean, I get a couple thousand in the bucket, but the bees all fly. Now what happened is they flew with the queen to another location, which I didn't notice. I'm in the middle of hiving these couple of thousand bees that I put up a box in the apiary and dumped those bees in. And then I then I said, wow, wait a minute, there's another swarm up there. Well, actually, it was the same swarm. It's just that they I didn't notice that they formed in a different location.

34:24 So I'm over there collecting that swarm. So I hide them in a different box. So now I got I got one swarm in one and one swarm in the other. But that but. You know, and then I got the original colony that swarmed. Should we guess what the colony without the queen did? Yeah, go ahead. What do you think the colony without the queen did? Well, I assume they realized their queen's in that other box and they all headed over there. So they took off out of that box, but there was more bees in that to say, you know, because they took off with that and they went into the, and they went into the box. So now I've got a swarm coming out of a box that I just hives and I'm thinking, well, that does happen. Sometimes they'll benefit, but that colony swarmed and went into the other box. Now there was a lot of action in the first box that I dumped in, right? The colony that I dumped the box in with the queen.

35:22 the queen managed to get out of that and fly, because she was ready to fly. But I didn't see that. So when she returned to the colony, which she did, she went underneath. And there's a screen bottom on those boxes. So now both colonies in my inspection, like the next day I usually go back when I get a swarm and I'm thinking, okay, let me make sure that this colony is queen right. There's no queen. And I knew there's no queen anywhere except she's on the bottom with about 10 ,000 bees. So yeah, so that has happened more times than I can imagine. We never totally figure them out. That's part of the fun. So we just keep learning and learning. I haven't run over my smoker in the yard with the truck and caught the yard on fire and I haven't bent hive tools or got flats from running them over. I haven't done anything that crazy. Where's the most painful place to get stung? I've gotten stung everywhere.

36:28 I think the most painful place to get stung for me is my nose. If you got a minute. Let me tell you this other story about Thailand. I've been fortunate to go on a couple of B excursions in other countries, Africa, Thailand, especially Italy. We went with a bunch of university students to Thailand and we were out in the middle of. We went to the University of Burpa and we were hosted by entomologists there and we were going out into the jungles and looking for Apis dorsata. the biggest bee in the world, the biggest apis bee in the world, huge bee, three times the size of a regular Western honeybee, or at least two size. I thought I was going with grad students and entomologists, but I went with undergrads.

37:21 A lot of them weren't really that interested in keeping bees. They were just looking for a trip to Thailand, but they went anyway. We arranged to go out with honey hunters. to find these nests in them, in the forest. So we find one. The unfortunate part about this nest, it was down a trail. The trail went past a tree and ended not very far. It couldn't go very far in Thailand. There was water in ditches all over the place. There's seven species of poisonous snakes. It's thick jungle -like conditions. Now the students all went past a tree. and gathered in a location where to get back out, they got to go back under the tree and back to the bus. So the beekeeper is trying to explain to us in a way that we couldn't understand it because he's speaking Thai, that the colony hasn't been acting. That colony he harvested honey from and hadn't been acting that calm. So he wanted to warn us ahead of time might be a little bit dicey. What happens is they climb the tree with a smoker in their hand that they make on the way there. They have no protection at all. He climbs up about 10 meters high and he smokes the colony. And what happens with dorsata, which is different than western honeybee, is they leave the colony when you smoke them. They don't stay on, they don't hang around trying

38:52 to gather up whatever nectar, nectar they have themselves. They blew up off the colony and who do they find for I was standing under the tree filming the beekeeper, the honey hunter. The bees find the students. And did they have all their gear on, their protective gear? Yeah, they had like some gear and some not. And so they started to sting. So they panic. This is a big bee and it's kind of intimidating. So they ran out of the from underneath it. They ran past me. The beekeeper had dropped his smokers. I had the smoker, but I was filming. So I stayed with the beekeeper and I was filming them up the tree. They ran through, but when they panicked and they didn't run out the trail, they decided they were going to run through the little streams and horrible conditions where there's a bunch of little... predator snakes and things ready to get you. And it was just, it was just horrific.

39:59 I mean, it was just, it turned out to be the biggest nightmare beekeeping experience I think that there ever have. They're not, they didn't go home and become beekeepers, I'm sure of that. But yeah, so we got, we got a lot of people stung with it. Everybody was fine. Nothing happened. No serious injuries. No serious injuries, but a couple of students went back to the United States the next day. Hey Bill, I've got to let you go, but it's been really fun and really informative. Thank you so very much. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to V2B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. 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 email eric at BeLoveBekeeping .com and remember if you're not just in it for the honey or the money you're in it for the love.

41:09 See you next week.