Honey Lemonade, Honey Kettle Corn, Honey Straws • Sticky Bee Honey Farms

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

1:26 By the way, if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow this podcast, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. Today's guest comes to us from the Midwest and has a wealth of knowledge on everything from sideline beekeeping to farmers markets, winter beekeeping, 3D printing, even writing bee related children's books. That's right and we'll discuss all of this but first let's take just two minutes to go inside the hive, this feature presented by Primal Bee. The standard beehive design is about 170 years old. It was built for the beekeeper not the bee. Easy to inspect, easy to harvest, easy to stack and ship. What it wasn't designed for was thermal efficiency. You see in the wild Bees choose nest sites with thick walls, tree cavities, hollow logs, spaces inside buildings.

2:30 They're looking for insulation because maintaining brood temperature is one of the most energy expensive things a colony does. A thin -walled wooden box loses heat fast. The bees compensate by burning through more honey, clustering tighter, working harder. It is doable, but it drains resources that could go toward building population or fighting off mites. That's the thinking behind primal bee. Thick insulated walls designed around how bees actually regulate temperature instead of how beekeepers prefer to stack boxes. after 10 years of testing across six countries from Florida to Alaska to the Middle East. Primal Bee just passed their first million dollars in sales.

3:19 Beekeepers in the US, Europe, and Australia are running to these hives now. If you want to give Primal Bee hives a try, I've arranged a 10 % discount just for Bee Love listeners. Click on over to primalbee .com forward slash Bee Love and use discount code Bee Love at checkout. That's primalbee .com slash Bee Love and be sure to use discount code Bee Love at checkout. I'd like to welcome our very special guest today Bob Ford is coming to us from what the southern part of Minnesota Bob Yeah, well between Austin and Albert Lee we live on the country between Austin and Albert Lee and this is gonna be interesting today, I think because We just have so much to talk about we are gonna be running the gamut From the kind of beekeeping you do to how you've figured out how to make money selling hive products And also, you're now an author, and I think that's really cool and fun. And we're going to be talking about the books that you've written. But I want to start with this. Your place is called Sticky Bee Honey Farm. How'd you come up with the name?

4:33 That's really fun. I tried to figure out a way to have a mascot that would be something of a branding for Sticky Bee Honey Farms. I wanted a funny kind of catchy name. And I spent probably two, three weeks of going through dictionaries and looking at words and things like that. Once I heard Sticky Bee in my head, I just all of a sudden, boom, that was it. And that's what I chose. And I also wanted somehow to include it with a... mascot for the books to write some children's books to help children get more involved into beekeeping. And so I came up with characters, Sticky of course, and one of the first names I kept coming up with was Stinger Honey. But there's so many people have Stinger Honey that I've seen out there and it's kind of an obvious name. So. So I have Stinger as one of the characters and not in the books yet, but in the books to come. So Sticky, she goes on adventures and stuff.

5:32 And that's why I picked Sticky Bee Honey Farms. I just thought it was a cute name for a little honeybee. As long as we've jumped to that point already, we don't have to go through your topics in any particular order. Let's talk a little bit about the books. I'd like you to tell me why you decided to start writing some books, who they're aimed at, their children's books, but a little more specifically about that and where they're going from here. I started out, I started making presentations on the computer to teach children, especially the younger kids, about bees. and try to make them more comfortable with these, because every time you mention the word honeybee to kids, they love the honey, but they're afraid of the bee part. And so I figured that I would write these books and take a character sticky and let her go on adventures to help promote beekeeping to younger children. I made sure that every book had a lesson to be learned in each story, kind of like the traditional books that I used to have when I was a kid. and that there was always some lesson at the end that you learned, you know, learn to be nice or learn to help others, things like that. Just simple lessons learned at the end of the story. They're kind of cute, but short. And it's just a lot of fun to do it, too, as well. And I think you'd mentioned to me the other day that you were injured and kind of needed something that you could do without being outside hauling around beehives and stuff.

6:59 Is that kind of what prompted you? Correct. Yeah, I probably could have started a little earlier in the story, but I was a general contractor for many years. I did commercial construction, a lot of hospital and school work and stuff like that. And anyway, I had several back surgeries over the years and I took and had a major back surgery about three years ago. And I had to lay flat on my back for about nine months. I'd had a surgery the prior year before COVID hit. It didn't heal correctly. And that's the long story I won't get into it. I had a contractor back out on me on a project. So I ended up three weeks out of back surgery. I ended up having to do the project myself because there was a $5 ,000 a day penalty for every day that I didn't get, or that I went past the six weeks. So I ended up doing everything myself, even laying the carpet and painting and everything. So I tore everything that they did in my back all out. So that's why it was such a major surgery to tear it all out.

7:54 And then 10 days later, I went back and they put it all back in. So I vowed that I was not going to work. I was going to let it heal. And I did. And while it laid flat on my back, I thought, you know, what a better thing to do than to sit down and start writing some books. So I wrote 25, 30 children's books and started doing all the drawings and the poses for Sticky in the books so that it would be easier for each page. I could bring her in and just post different, you know, surprise looks and this and that. And it was just fun to do. I enjoyed doing it. So anyway. So now no more construction. Yeah, no, please. Yeah, so you're the illustrator as well. That's awesome. One of the things that I love about what you've done here is most of us realize we need to get more younger people involved in beekeeping. And what a way to start at a very young age. So thank you for that. I have now children involved and grandchildren involved.

8:47 And I don't know that there is an age that's too young to get. Kids involved in beekeeping. What do you think? I don't think so either. And, um, I've had a lot of people because I told them at the range for kids, age -wise, even when I published them on Amazon, they even sent me a thing back saying that the books were advanced, too advanced for that age. And that, that there was a few words that I used that were more advanced for the age. My thought was, and they agreed with me actually, was that parents mostly read children the books. That's part of the book experience. is having the parent read the book to the child and the child starting to see the words and hear the words as they're watching them go across the page. So that's kind of what I think that being the younger kids, they learn the bigger words and start, because they're going to ask questions while you're reading it. They're going to say, Oh, what was that word nuisance? You know, what was this word? And so I think it's a learning experience for younger kids. And I, I'm a firm believer in that kids. up to the age of probably eight, nine years old, most of their parents are reading them in their books at night before they go to bed or just during the day.

9:57 I know when I've gone to visit some of my sister's grandchildren and you read them a book, it's always that you read it, you read it, you read it, and not that they're reading it. And then you kind of transition into them reading a little bit of it. Some of the best part of parenting too. Sure. I love it. Those are some great memories. All right. I want to jump into some things that we can learn from your experience. They're in a pretty cold climate there. Now most of us, when this is going live, it's going to be in the spring of 2026. So for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we're coming out of winter. We're looking and seeing how many bee colonies made it, how many didn't make it. our friends in the southern hemisphere that are listening.

10:39 Of course they're the opposite. They're thinking about winter right now. What kinds of things have you done for your bees to help them get through winter and maybe preface with how many beehives did you run in the past before the injury and how many do you run now? Well I started out I just was gonna have two beehives. Of course within two months there was so much fun and so exciting. I started splitting hives and creating more and more. And of course, being in the construction, I had plenty of extra wood to build more hives. And so I got up to, I think the most I've had was 65 to 80, something like that. But I found that it was just too much work for my back being that bad. So I figured I'd have to back it down a little bit. But I had enough equipment for 400 hives. I still do. It was my goal of Being that I was in construction, I had a semi already, and I've already got a semi trailer to haul bees to do pollination. And that was my ultimate goal.

11:39 But of course, my back kind of held me back on that. Still to this day, I still kind of hope to be able to do that, to be able to haul, not so much to California, but, you know, to Wisconsin or Michigan, I think would be kind of fun to do it. Of course, I already had forklifts and skid loaders and all the equipment necessary to do it, but my back is what held me back. No pun intended. Currently, I have 40 to 45, something like that, hives. I treat my hives as best I can. Sometimes I miss the date because of pain issues or something like that, but I do try to treat them. And the worst part about being in Minnesota is that you get through the winter, you think, oh, geez, I only lost 25%. It was a good year. You'll go through three weeks of good weather and then all of a sudden, boom, you'll have another half die off. That's the weird part about Minnesota. But yeah, we always usually end up, I anyway, usually end up between 25 and almost 60 % loss every winter. So you got to get busy splitting and cleaning out nukes and getting everything back ready again. So hopefully I can do it on a bigger scale here soon. That's what I'm hoping anyway. And I know I'm kind of asking too many questions at one time. We're going to come back in just a second to what to do to prepare for winter. But you mentioned you have maybe 25 % loss. Three weeks later you find another bunch of loss. Why is that? What is the second round of loss from? I think it's what they call colony collapse disorder I think it's just because in in Minnesota our weather is kind of weird We get like a warm spell and then a

13:10 cold spell and you know, and you kind of misjudge when That collapse is going to be because we'll lose some over the winter I believe the disease just finally gets to them. And in the spring, just when they're starting to want to build up, they just don't build up and they just die out. But I honestly believe it's because we have a kind of a false spring. And so what we consider spring here, like right now it's been 70 degrees for the last two, three days, but it's going to turn into 50, 45 as highs later in the week. I think that these that are overwintered into that. with the disease and stuff they get from the mites, they just finally just, and it's weird because they all collapse at the same time. It's not that you just lose this one this day, another one this day. It's, you go down one week. I walk through and make sure they have enough food, you know, to keep them through the winter. And then you go back again a week later and you'll have 10, 15 hives that are, that are gone and that I have to clean out. Anyway, it's just amazing how quickly the mice move in afterwards as well.

14:15 Well, and my first question was going to be, did they need food? Did they have plenty of food? Because that's often a cause for a spring collapse. It's just running out of food. I make sure they have enough honey to make it through the winter. So I leave them with enough honey. But a lot of times they can't, they don't move from one side of the frames to the other, you know, that they stay centered and then they would starve, so to speak. But I always in the closer to spring, I will go and open up to make sure. And I dumped sugar on the just plain sugar on the frames. so that they have food if they need it and there's always plenty of moisture of course in the hive so they don't have to worry too much about moisture but usually they're not dead with their heads stuck into the cells they're usually just dead like in a cluster or just fanned out on the what's left of them fanned out on a frame because usually when they when they starve out there they got their heads all stuck in you know in the in the cells that as far as i'm aware anyway yeah that's kind of a good indication is heads in butts out they're probably hungry Right. Yeah. You might want to have it at the inspector or somebody take a look at some time at one of those dead outs and give you an idea. Was it deform wing virus was something else going on? Yeah. If I could catch it soon enough, like I say, because of the temperature swings, they get a lot of mold on real fast. And, uh, otherwise I would try to put them under a microscope and take a better look. Some of them that I've noticed didn't have queens. So the queen must've died sometime through the winter or something. There's all.

15:41 kinds of different things that I see. But the thing that is alarming is that you don't see too many mites on the bees themselves, but you do see them on the bottom board of the hive. I don't know if treating more or maybe a better treating, I would have better luck with that. A lot of that is a matter of where was the mite load in the fall? Correct. Did you test in the fall? Did you have a pretty good idea? Yes. But like I said, with the back injuries, I'm not timely. Cause I always set myself to seven day time to do the exoc acid or to do formic pro, you know, things like that. Most of the people in this area that I, and almost everybody in our bee club, they lose almost a hundred percent of their hives. I actually thought I was doing fairly well. Like my neighbors and people around me, they just, they buy just buy new hives every spring. They don't even treat, which is hard for me because then I get their mite load coming from their hives. And so it's just kind of a never ending struggle. I do believe that chemical free beekeeping. I do believe in that. I haven't done it because it's, you have to be really timely with that and make sure that you can get out and, uh, and do that at the correct time. I don't know. It's just been a struggle, especially in colder weather. I hate to sound, well, I don't mean this to sound rude in any way, shape or form, but it's like welcome to beekeeping. It is so much harder than people think it is. And so many people get into it thinking, you know,

17:12 that it's like chickens. I just feed them and water them and they're going to be fine. And beekeeping is not that easy, folks. Yeah, it's not. I do notice a lot of people, they make it easy and that's all they do is they just take all the honey in the fall and they just let the bees go and The next spring they right back buying packages again I mean, I think it's sad but that's what a lot of people do that I know of around here I admit a pet peeve of mine is that it seems all beehives are white. Yeah boring old white And just when I get a pet peeve, Man Lake comes to the rescue with their new color collection. The vibrant new line of colorful beekeeping hive kits designed to turn your backyard into a buzzing work of art. Each kit comes completely assembled, ready to add to your bee yard, but with a big splash of personality. We're talking dandelion yellow. garden green, coneflower blue, and even bold wild rose pink. Because who says a beehive has to be plain old boring white? Imagine stepping into your bee yard and seeing a rainbow of thriving hives, each one buzzing with life producing golden homegrown honey. And right now Man Lake is offering podcast listeners 10 % off color collection hive kits. Visit manlikeltd .com and use the code

18:43 show me the color at checkout. That's manlikeltd .com discount code show me the color. I try to do the best I can to keep them going. It's nice to have those hives that that do make it through the winter and they just burst in the spring and you can split and you can do all kinds of just exciting. to do instead of starting from a package and then sitting back and waiting for them to You know takes two months for them here to start building up to even to you know to move on Especially if you don't have wax. I have probably a hundred and some hives worth of wax that's drawn out so that that helps considerably because then they don't have to draw wax out but if yeah, if you're if you're new and And you're starting to try to build up, and you're just buying packages every spring. You're waiting first two months just to get wax built. And the other exciting thing about those that make it through winter is we can kind of assume they probably have good genetics. So we want to split those. We really want to make sure that we're nurturing and taking care of those colonies. Yeah, those are the ones you paint gold before you leave. Yeah, absolutely.

19:55 So a lot of people in cold climates will wrap their hives with tar paper, will put some kind of insulation around, even hay bales. What do you like to do there? I myself, I kind of do a, I like to get them out of the wind and you can put a windbreak up, but the wind usually comes from every different direction anyway. So you almost have to put a U -shaped windbreak around them. But I think that when you do the wind breaks, that you're still getting wind, you know, filling in and going up and over the wind breaks and stuff. So what I do is I actually wait till it's going to be consistently below 56 degrees. And I put them inside of a pole shed that's out of the wind so that I think that's 99 % of what helps to keep them warm is they don't have that. that wind when you put up a windbreak I believe that when you have wind blowing across the top you'll get a negative air pressure inside as well and I think that that helps to fluctuate and sucking air in and out of the hives and kind of like a sandblaster but where you're blowing air across the top of something and it sucks the sand out of the out of the bottle that you're you're sandblasting with so that's why I put mine in a building so they're out of the wind and then when the temperature gets looks like it's going to be 56 or above well actually lower than that, but because I've tried to be proactive, and then I'll set them back out again.

21:17 I find that there's less condensation in the hives with that, and I don't wrap my hives. I use pallets for all my hives. I put a wood fiber board on top. It helps to not let the water, because you want some condensation in the hive for them to have water, but it doesn't drip like other products that are out in the market, like wood would drip. it actually absorbs most of the moisture but it doesn't literally get drops on it like you would see when you lift off like your styrofoam of people that use foam on the top if you lift the foam up you'll see the water run you know down the face of the foam the moisture that's why i use wood fiber it just doesn't seem to drip on the bees that way they can just go to the hive especially the edges and get the water and moisture that they need to to keep on going and there are a lot of good products out there yes if you go to a place like manlakes website There are things that wrap all the way around the hive that block the wind and have insulation. There's things that go on top. There's a hive heater, which is a solar thing, which I've had really good luck with. We'll have to try that. We'll have to look into that one. Definitely insulating definitely helps. I don't personally insulate mine. I guess I don't know why, just probably because I have so many of them, but it would take quite a while to insulate and a lot of material to insulate them all. I do have concrete blankets. There are big, huge blankets.

22:36 They're like 40 foot by 60 foot. Uh, and they're insulated with plastic on the top and bottom, like a tarp, insulated tarp. And a lot of them are, you know, three, four inches thick. And I do it sometimes when it's going to get really cold, I'll literally roll that out over the top of all of them. And that I'm sure helps quite, quite a bit. So insulating does help. So if you have, or able to, you know, I would think that most folks with 30 highs, maybe at max would, I don't know, it must take a long time to wrap a hive. I would think. to do individual hives. That's why you don't see commercial beekeepers wrapping up 10 ,000 hives. It's easier to just put them someplace warmer. There are, yeah, lots of other products out there and I think it's great to just try them, see what works for use and the way that you bee keep and the way that your weather is. This last winter I also tried a Primal Beehive, and people have heard about this on this podcast, had super good luck with that, but it's really, really thick insulative kind of material that it's made out of, didn't need to be wrapped with anything. And by the way, I happen to know what a construction blanket is, but it's not, in case you don't know what it is, I mean a concrete blanket. It's not a blanket made out of concrete. Go ahead and mansplain that for us for just a second, Bob. Oh, it's a tarp that we use like when we pour concrete in the fall, when it's getting cold out and it helps to keep the concrete warm. So you roll out, we usually have plastic down after we spray our sealer on the concrete. Then we'll throw

24:09 the blankets on top to help keep the concrete to stay warm. So it cures longer. You want it to cure up to 26, 28 days. I'm getting old, I can't remember. But the longer you can get it to cure up to 26, 28 days, the better as well. So sometimes even. If it's in direct sunlight, we will put blankets on it for the first few days or several days so that the sun doesn't just dry out the top surface right away and it cracks. Sometimes we use it to keep the concrete cool. Sometimes we use it to keep it warm. But most of the time it's in the winter or in the fall to keep it warm. We usually don't pour concrete in the winter because then the ground is froze. And then when you get shifting and movement from thawing in the spring, it's not a good deal.

24:51 So usually it's mostly used in the fall. Yeah, it's just two pieces of tart with insulation in between and then they saw it like almost like a quilt bottom line It's a giant weatherproof blanket. Yep has no concrete inside of it when you and I were chatting the other day you were telling me about some of the things that you do at farmers markets and Other places and how you're growing that side of the business. I think this is great information because there's beekeepers, especially hobbyists and sideliners are always looking for, wow, I need to make a few bucks at this. It's a pretty expensive hobby. And if you're a sideliner, you want to do more than that. So fill us in on some of the things that you've done. Maybe it'll help spring some ideas and others. Well, what happened was is that we used to have honey. I'd have 900 jars of honey in my living room and we used to just give it away, believe it or not. So that's how much I enjoyed beekeeping. We just gave the honey away to every book. friends neighbors with a mailman the postman would stop by we just give them all honey anyway after a while you kind of look and go well I'm not gonna have a retirement if I keep just buying bees and giving the honey away so I thought you know I'll start going to some farmers markets so I made bound labels and branded it and with the sticky bee this is all before sticky the books but went to like a small town farmers markets the ones that we could get into a lot of them only allowed one honey person so they wouldn't allow two So I had to find other markets to go to. So I was traveling 30, 40 miles just to get to a farmer's market to where I could

26:22 actually sell the honey. That was probably the biggest issue to overcome. Then when I did do farmer's markets, I would sit there all day and you would sell like a hundred dollars worth of honey. Well, number one, it's sad that most people don't go to their farmer's markets to buy a lot of their food and things like that. But I thought, well, the mayor that I talked to. In a couple of the places, counties and cities that I went to and there are townships. The mayors would say, well, if you stay here longer, the longer you're here, they get to know that you're here. And then, you know, it will build up, which is true. It was true for the first two or three times I went. I did get more people, but then after that third or fourth farmer's market, those were the customers that I had. It was 80 to a hundred dollars worth of honey from then on all the way through the whole summer. And so I stayed the whole summer because I dedicate myself to a farmer's market. I'm going to stay. So I thought, you know, there's gotta be a better way to make money with the honey than sitting at the farmer's markets doing that. And I thought, you know, honey straws, the honey sticks, the flavored honey straws that people sell. I thought, you know, those, they must sell like crazy, but the only thing is you're selling them at 50 cents a piece or less to folks. And it takes a lot of honey sticks to even get to a hundred bucks.

27:35 But I thought it would draw more people in to buy the honey. So I started doing that. And of course, the people that have made them before know what a labor intensive thing that is to make honey straws. So I actually bought a 3D printer designed on the software. It could be in a construction. I knew how to do AutoCAD and Fusion 360. So I designed a straw machine and I bought a pottery wheel for doing pottery. with the variable speed pedal. And then I 3D printed this circle on a piece of plexiglass, because my printer wasn't big enough to do a two -foot circle at one time. So I did it in pie shapes, like a pizza shape, so that you could have a pot in the middle. And then when it spun, the honey would go out into the straws, and the air would come out through the ends. So I made it so I could clip in 40 straws. And then I think it's 40. Yeah, 40 straws. And then I pour the honey in the middle. and then when it spins the honey goes in and then when you're done you just pinch the straw to get that last half inch of honey out of the end so you can reseal them so then i 3d printed these little holders that would hold the straws so i could have 16 of them in and then seal 16 of them at a time to make it go faster without buying a 20 000 machine i don't know the way that you could go much faster i i tried using a pressure cooker and i tried using air pressure and put the jar on the inside with the hose coming out of the center of the jar and then I had electric solenoid with the brass

29:05 valve coming out of the end and I could stick that in the end of the straws and fill you know and just hit a pedal and it would squirt in to the straws so that works probably almost just as fast as the spinning one but it was messier so I took you had to clean straws and stuff when you were done but the only problem I had with this is a funny story with the spinner was that I had it set up in the middle of our kitchen. And when we moved into our house, I tore all the walls out in the whole main area here, so that we have open living room, dining room, kitchen area, which I'm sure you're probably knowing where this is going. But once one straw popped out of the hole. No, no, no. You had a line of honey all the way completely around the windows, the back of the chairs, all the way around the walls. So I actually took a hula hoop that kids use for playing. and I put it on at my stands.

29:56 I used to play in a band, so I have these light stands. And so I put it on the two light stands, and I put a shower curtain all the way around it. So then whenever anybody visited us, I always tell them, yeah, we're getting down to the point where we have to take a shower in the middle of our kitchen. But the shower curtain definitely helps when I have a failure on the straw spinner. So I thought, you know, try the straws. We did the straws. That helped with getting kids involved and the parents come and then see if like the kids want straws and the parents then would take a honey home. And that's probably doubled our sales, but it still was a lot of time that you were spending. And I drive a one ton dually. So I had a lot of money and fuel just going to some places and back. So I decided, you know, I'm going to start a little food thing inside a tent. And so I went and I got licensed for the, with a food license to sell honey lemonade.

30:45 And so we sold flavored honey lemonade. And of course that more than quadrupled our sales. People were just all excited and then they would actually buy honey and to make their own. And we'd always give them the recipe for, for the honey lemonade. So that worked out well till up to, I believe it was last year, the year before last year, we decided we'd get a food trailer and start doing that. So I built a food trailer to do the honey lemonade. And we also made honey kettle corn. So it's kettle corn, like they make at the fair. But we make it with honey instead of sugar. Boy, that was really good. And it took a while to get it so that, you know, things didn't burn or you didn't get, you know, there's a trick to it, to getting it right. But we started doing that honey kettle corn. And of course that just, you know, you're back to making a living now instead of just a side hustle. So that's kind of what I did to build it up. We've tried doing honey cotton candy. But that was really tricky.

31:42 If there's any moisture in here at all, that turned to sticky too quick. Sticky as in the bee back there. Yeah. I've got to say, I have to interject something here. Beekeepers are the smartest. Entrepreneurialist, if that's a word. Inventors, they can come up with anything. to make stuff happen. And you're such a good example of that. How about you sent me a picture of your 3D printed mason jar honey dippers. Oh, yeah. We sell our honey in jars, in mason jars. So when we sold it in the mason jars, a lot of people wanted to know what they could use. A lot of people asked me the question about the spoon, that putting a metal spoon in your honey would kill enzymes in the honey. There's some truth to that and some not truth to that because a lot of your honey It starts out in a steel pot and you've stored in steel containers things like that. Anyway, it's a long story I won't get into that but so I thought you know How could you make it so that you didn't have to keep dipping a spoon in all the time? So I 3d printed these little Honey dippers with a handle on the top so that people could take and dip your honey out and then turn it your sideways and drizzle it on your toast Anyway, they worked out really well. I got my logo printed on the top and we make them for all the different sized jars that we have, even quart jars. Anyway, I just thought it was kind of a way to solve a problem. So I designed that a little bit, I guess. Can you make some of those with my logo on top? Oh, sure.

33:10 OK, we'll talk after. Yeah, no, it's fun to do. I enjoy it. I actually have all four 3D printers, four of them now sitting here. I made them all so that they were the same so that I could actually make that. process easier instead of having different files and different things for each different one. If you're into 3D printing, you'll know why. But, but, uh, so now I have them all upgraded so that they're all exactly the same. So that'll help in the future as well. And hopefully I'll put them on Amazon handmade here soon. That's what I'm hoping for. Maybe Pinterest. Well, that's another one. Yes. Yeah. I got a, I'm not very computer savvy. I was just to be able to do construction work, but a lot of the social media and the stuff behind it, I just, I have a lot of, I struggle through it and I should just find somebody that knows all about it and hire somebody to do it.

33:59 But I'm kind of the person that I want to, if, even if I have somebody doing it, I want to know how they're doing, you know, I got to know what they're doing. You know, I got to know the information behind it anyway. So I just try to learn it myself. So find a 14 year old girl to handle your social media for you. There you go. That's what I need. Think the computer stuff you can handle if you can design and print things with 3d printers It's not like you're not smart computer wise a long time though to learn how to do some of that stuff and then a lot of it to me gets to be steps and then you go from like I 3d printed a CNC machine and Most of it's all 3d printed except for the electrical of course, and I printed that and designed it and built it blah blah blah but then that's a whole other set of different knowledge it's a whole different set of knowledge to try to figure out that whole thing and try to remember by the time you get done doing that to go back to 3d printing and then you're back to rewiring yourself to okay now I got to have this as what kind of file? anyway so it just and I'm getting older too my memory fails me so it gets to be kind of a struggle sometimes I have trouble just remembering all the passwords to all these different sites and stuff that you have to get on. Just do one, two, three, four like everybody else. Yeah, there you go. Okay.

35:20 We're not giving that kind of advice here on this show. Before I let you go. I would love to hear a wild and crazy beekeeping story that you've had. You already gave us a crazy story about putting honey in straws and the big mess that it made. Can you think of anything fun or unusual like that that you've had actually with bees? Oh my gosh, yes. It was actually this, well, this spring, last spring. I can't remember now, but anyway, I went to go. do mowing. I also have a bee farm down in Iowa. Anyway I went down there to go mow and when I went to go mow I was flying across the yard to go to the spot where I was going to start mowing and I actually hit a stump and it threw me off the lawnmower and I hit my head on another stump of course so now I have a pinched nerve in my neck so if I look funny that's kind of why. Anyways right after that happened of course I got the bees boxes ready for The new packages that were coming and I think I added 16. So so now I got like 45 But I added like 16 or 12 Hives and it must be 16 because it was four pallets So I had the boxes and I went to go take out all this stuff from winter, you know out of the boxes They were semi cleaned one night when they die I try to clean them out right away So you don't end up with a bunch of mold and stuff in there, but mice there was mice flying everywhere when I was pulling frames out And it's just amazing how they can get in that little tiny slither under and so

36:51 many of them get in. So anyway, after all the mice, I thought, you know, the bees are coming within two days. So I'm going to set the covers and instead of putting both covers on both on each, I didn't want the mice moving back in right away. And they will go back in right away. So I set the two covers halfway on each. So there was half of the hive showing on the left and half on the right on the pallet. So I did that. leaving them open so that the mice wouldn't move back in because the bees are only going to be another two days and then I'd have the hives to put or the packages to put in anyway so I went and I picked up the packages and I went to go put the packages in and not only did a mouse one moved in already and had a nest made with two little babies in it and anyway so I had to take the nest and set it by the tree where the mouse kind of went down a hole that hopefully could get the babies and move them or whatever the case may be. But a raccoon had evidently came and pulled every frame out and scratched the wax and chewed up some of the frames. So in beekeeping, you end up with a lot of grief.

37:53 I'm trying to remember the rest of the stories, but there's like four items that just all happened all in a row. Five items that you just stop and you just go, why do I keep doing this? And then when it comes time to open up and put those bees in, it just makes it all worth it, I guess, in the end. But yeah, it was quite an eventful spring. And you just led up right to where I wanted to finish up, which is you obviously love the bees because You're not, I mean, you mentioned that you had done it even when you were going backwards because you were giving honey away and stuff. So just what is it about the bees that Bob loves? Well, I like the stories behind it. I like talking to people about them. That was the biggest thing.

38:34 I think that that turned me was that so many people were interested that, oh, you have bees and the questions that they would ask when you go for coffee, even tables that were two tables away. Oh, you have, you know, local honey and, uh, you know, Oh, they say the bees do this. They say the bees do that. I listened to a lot of podcasts, especially yours as well. And Jamie's I tried to learn everything I can from professional folks. And that way that the wives tales that you hear about beekeeping, a lot of those I found after two years of beekeeping that they weren't a lot of things I learned weren't true and things like that. And, uh, you kind of learn on your own and it. It's constantly evolving and constantly moving to a direction and you're not bored with it. And it's always a challenge too, as well.

39:20 And that's what I think I like best about beekeeping is just the knowledge, the learning and the new things that come out and, uh, you know, adapting to issues. I can't adapt to falling off a lawnmower, but I could adapt to the raccoons, you know, tearing my frames out. I know next time I'm not going to do that. So. It's a learning curve. You never stop learning. That's one thing about beekeeping I found is that even I've been doing it for what, 10, 12 years now, and you just don't stop learning. You constantly are learning new things and new things happen as well. So, so true. All right. Appreciate your time, Bob. It's been fun. Let's meet up sometime. That sounds great. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping 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 Acids Trips.

40:18 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. See you next week