Mann Lake CEO Opens Up About The Company and Industry

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 Man Lake with today's special guest We'll be discussing the overall condition of the beekeeping industry, new trends in technologies,

1:33 and a whole bunch more. First I want to mention the new report just released, North American Honey Bee Strategy. I know that's not the most exciting title in the world, but the contents are really important. It's a collaborative effort with the American Beekeeping Federation, American Honey Producers Association, Canadian Beekeepers Federation, and the Canadian Honey Council. Other sources noted are the Honey Bee Health Coalition, Honey Bee Pests, and Project APIS -M. The purpose of the report is quote, to unify the beekeeping industry and provide a path toward industry sustainability.

2:16 Beekeepers need to have a stronger unified voice in the face of increasing obstacles to maintain a sustainable beekeeping industry. Commercial beekeepers across North America face similar challenges and share similar interests. We can work toward these interests more effectively together. The strategy outlined focuses on external threats and internal mechanisms for success. We will have someone involved in the report as a guest on the show soon but in the meantime there's a link to it down in the show notes and in our weekly newsletter you can sign up for it for free at BeeloveBeekeeping .com. This report isn't just for commercial beekeepers it's for all of us with a love of honey bees and their management. We've got such a special guest with us today Rob Wright who's the CEO the Big Cheese of Man Lake Hey Rob, good morning. How are you?

3:18 Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm great. Have you been called cheese recently? No, that's the first time in a long time. My kids might call me that Anyway, it's good to see you and it's gonna be great to have you on the show today We have a ton to talk about I want to let our listeners know right up front Just because Rob's with Man Lake doesn't mean this is gonna be an infomercial. It is not We're gonna talk about the whole beekeeping business and everything that's going on with beekeeping and new products and all kinds of fun stuff So I don't know where you want to jump in. I I have an idea I was told by a little bird that you did your first swarm removal recently That's correct. Yeah, how did it go? Well, you know, I actually did two of them, and it's sort of an outgrowth of... I've been catching swarms. There are a lot of feral bees in my area here in Santa Barbara, and I think I caught five swarms in the same swarm trap this spring in the course of about two or three weeks. You know how it is as a beekeeper.

4:29 Everybody always gets so excited when you tell them you're involved with bees, and often people say, oh, I want to get bees, so... I've taken to capturing swarms and giving them to my friends and neighbors who say they're interested in bees. In a man -like box, of course. So anyway, my wife's friend, who has a big farm north of here, had an old dairy cow building with hollow walls, and she had a pretty big colony of bees in there, and she's looking to repurpose that building. and asked if I could come and remove some of those bees. And then I had another neighbor in town just shortly after that say that he'd had a swarm of bees land in his garden and they had established a hive actually on the outside of a little small date palm just kind of hanging from the palm fronds. So I removed that one as well. That one I added to a colony of mine that was weak and needed a new queen. So we're one of those unusual. Why did this come up? Well, I think Jenna maybe mentioned it because we did some film of it just for honestly, just for marketing purposes, but it was a really large colony and it took me several hours to remove it. Erica Thompson, who you probably know her name, gave me a little bit of advice on how to handle my first B removal and it was super helpful. So yeah, removed this wall had a sheet metal panel

6:00 on the outside. outside of it. And the hardest part was getting that panel off. And Erica had told me, you know, the whole key to it is to be really gentle in removing the wall and not to get the bees all agitated right from the start. But that was really hard because the sheet metal was, you know, trying to bend sheet metal away from the wall as you're removing nails. And it was this whole probably eight, four by eight panel of old sheet metal. So yeah, we were able to get that down with some effort and the bees weren't really super agitated, didn't really even need gloves or a suit. Started putting the bees into a box and I very carefully measured the comb and cut it to fit, to maximize the amount of comb I could fit in the frames and it filled up two 10 frame boxes. I've just taken all the comb out. I think we'd refer to that more as a cutout, wouldn't we, if you're actually removing part of a structure to get to them? Yeah, I guess that's right. It took me a very long time to find the queen. There were a lot of bees there, and she was shy. I was afraid that I was going to have to leave without. Knowing if I had gotten the Queen and eventually I saw that she was already in the box So I must have missed her when I was when I was kind of a coma Sometime off microphone remind me to tell you about my first swarm Yeah Because it was a hilarious disaster that unfortunately we weren't filming and I ended up with a great swarm but oh man was it a mess we won't get into

7:32 that today because it's not embarrassed the host day today but I often get embarrassed anyway so what kind of swarm trap were you using that you caught all those swarms with you know somebody had given me a colony in an old nuke box I'll bet it was 2020 five years old and I decided well this thing's probably run its useful course so I cut the bottom out of it and extended it into a double deep nuke box and put a little open enclosure thing on the on the entrance and just hung that in a tree, in a palm tree in my front yard. Yeah, I just get so many swarms there. We have a lot of California live oaks in my area and a lot of them have cavities with little holes that are just perfect for the bees. The bees love them. So, you know, as I go for my morning run around my neighborhood, I'm always seeing bees in oak trees. I guess spring conditions were good and there were just a lot of swarms.

8:28 That is really fun, isn't it? And being able to share them. is great yeah and you know i i have some swarms in my coli i only have six colonies but i think four of them are swarms that i've caught and they they seem to do better than packages i think maybe just they're adapted to the local environment better or something okay now you're truly not doing an infomercial those men like packages are so much better than swarms and Yeah, don't worry. We sell swarm traps and swarm lure as well. All right. So you go to a lot of different bee shows. I think you were recently at the California Beekeepers Association. I saw you at Appamondia in Copenhagen. Can you give me a feel for just being out there in the industry. How does everybody feel? Is there a really good positive attitude right now? Are people a little nervous after the die off last year? What's the general makeup of how people are feeling? Well, it varies, as you might imagine, pretty starkly between hobbyists and commercial beekeepers. That speaks to a dichotomy in our business that we're constantly managing because the reasons people keep bees and how they think about beekeeping. is so fundamentally different in those two worlds. So speaking about Appamondia, which was more geared towards the hobbyist from my perspective, I just found it fascinating speaking with all the, it had a pretty heavy European bias, as you know, and I really wanted to learn about what's happening in Europe

9:59 that might be helpful for our customers in the United States. And I saw lots of products and different ideas coming out of Europe that Hopefully, we'll have some success in introducing to the US. I can't talk about anything in particular right now, but for me it was very interesting. I went to the CSBA show, the California State Beekeepers Association, which is down in Temecula, California last week. Yeah, I spoke to a lot of our commercial beekeeping customers. It's interesting because I've only been in this industry now coming up on four years. and I found that this time of year the beekeepers are pretty nervous and tense generally because you know they're coming up on next year's almond pollination and they're starting to find out how their colonies are doing depending on whether they're putting them away in storage or moving them to the south or whatever they're doing they're starting to get early reads on how the the colony survival is going to be but they don't really know yet and so Yeah, I'd say a handful of people I spoke to said it's going to be as bad or worse as last year. But then I kind of got the sense they were just kind of bracing themselves for whatever's going to come. And then I had probably an equal number of people say, oh, it looks better. I think it's going to be better. But I would definitely say the preponderance of people I spoke to were not optimistic about this coming year, unfortunately.

11:21 So one of the things that we're really trying to do is to play as positive a role in helping our customers succeed in beekeeping as we can. And the way that we have decided to focus in on that is to try to help in the introduction of new nutrition -based products. I mean, everybody knows that Varroa and its surrounding issues are the biggest challenge in keeping your bees alive year to year. We're not going to be a drug development company or a miticide development company for a variety of reasons, but we feel that helping beekeepers bring the best possible nutrition to their bees is something that we actually can do to help beekeepers succeed. I've felt in my time in the industry that there's not strong enough bridges between the latest understanding of bee nutrition in academia and in the industry. So we felt like that's a positive role that we can play. And we're trying to get smarter about bee nutrition and bring to market products that we think will actually help your bees be healthier and stronger. I like it. Speaking of Appamondia, we did a second ago. sure there was uh as you remember this great big area i forget what they called it the world honey tasting or something like that yeah yeah that was so fun i don't know if you spent much time there i did i tasted a lot of honeys yeah for people that weren't there what they did is they had this huge area of this expo center with banquet

12:53 tables with samples of honey from all over the world and it had marked next to it what country it was and then there were these little teeny wooden spoons and you would take a dip and just have this little bit of honey and then throw your wooden spoon away. I found after I don't know. I don't know maybe 20 samples. I just couldn't handle anymore and I'd have to go back a few hours later the next day or something like that. Right. I found that really fun. The only honey that really surprised me a lot and there were different colors and none of these were infused. These were just the straight honey. Do you remember the honey from the stingless bees? I do remember that. It was so different, wasn't it? It was very runny. It has a much higher moisture content and just a very strong flavor. I don't know how else to explain it. Yeah, I'm trying to remember.

13:49 There are several honeys that I was just surprised that it was even honey. The taste is so different. It was really inspiring. I mean, just the different, I guess all the different floral sources the bees are relying on ends up creating such a Thanksgiving or cornucopia flavors. I mean, it's kind of shocking. Then yesterday we had fun as a family We had a big get -together and it was kind of fun because I had brought back a jar of honey from Lars and Zofus I don't know if you met them they helped put on the conference and They live in Denmark and I had them on the show a month or two before the conference They had a few years ago won an award for the world's best honey Okay, so I'm like I've got to try this and they were so nice to bring me a jar of this and it's a creamed honey That's what they're famous for. Yeah, but as you know, most cream honey gets really hard and The crystals can be kind of almost crunchy.

14:51 They can get a little too big Yeah, their honey as we were all tasting it yesterday. This was really A fun family activity. Their honey is so smooth and buttery for a creamed or crystallized honey, whatever you want to call it. It was just amazing. I mean everybody just sat there with it just kind of like rubbing it on their tongue going, whoa, this is so cool. So I just want to encourage everybody when you travel, when you go to different places, try honey from all over the place, all over the world, or all over the country, or all over your state, wherever you are. It is a really fun thing to do. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I've even noticed my colonies.

15:35 So we're lucky out here that we've got a pretty long season when the bees can be out foraging and collecting nectar. Depending on when you harvest the honey in this area, it can look very different. It may seem early, but right now is a great time to order your live bees for 2026 because they do sell out and because Man Lake is offering a discount for Be Love podcast listeners. Wait, what? I know you're saying live bees, they never go on sale. Well, they are now. Click on over to Man Lake. Order your bees any variety. nukes or packages and anything in the beginner essentials category and when you check out use the code get started in bees it's down in the show notes so you don't have to remember for a discount on everything so get your orders in early and save my bees are are pretty heavy into the avocado trees at certain times of the year but then there's sage at other times of the year and and then just a lot of various flowers as well. So we get a pretty wide variety even just in the same location. I wanted to get back to bee health for just a minute because I think the nutrition is fabulous and I personally believe the bottom line to getting your bees through winter, insulation helps. air circulation helps, all these things. But the thing that is probably the most important is just be health. If your

17:06 bees are healthy, if your Varroa levels are low, they have a much, much, much, much better chance of getting through winter. When all the harsh things come, whether it's cold or wet or whatever, if they're strong and healthy, they're much more likely to get through it. The same with they're much more likely to survive other kinds of pests. Do you want to speak to that topic? Yeah. So, so the thing that inspired me about getting more involved with bee nutrition is exactly what you said, I found that in the industry there's so many bee nutrition products, but very few of them have any real scientific data associated with them. It's almost like the human nutraceutical world, where you can buy a dozen different remedies for the same affliction, and honestly, 10 of them probably don't do anything. And some of them might actually make it worse. And it's the same in the bee world where I feel like there's so much science going on with respect to bees and what keeps them healthy and strong, and not all that information is making its way into products.

18:13 So from my perspective, if you think about getting, I don't know, the flu, if you get the flu and then you get something on top of the flu, it can kill you. Whereas if you get the flu and you're fit and you eat well, you've got a good diet, you're well -nourished, It's really not that big a deal. And I think the bees are facing so many stressors with habitat loss, exposure to pesticides. out in the world, exposure to pesticides that are accumulating in the wax. You know, in the case of commercial beekeepers, they're trucking their bees all over the place, which is not, you know, that's stressful for the bees as well. So anything we can do to boost their overall health level is going to help them survive, whether it's Varroa or the viruses that are vectored by Varroa. The bee nutrition is just going to help our overall success. For me, it's not just introducing new products, but also introducing new products with to scientific data, we're going to be doing controlled studies to test the products that we introduce so that we can actually show you that they... They make the bees healthier, they result in greater brood production, whatever the relevant factor is.

19:25 We don't want to just throw things out there and say, well, you know, the bees like it, so it must be good for them. I've heard so many people say, well, this must be good for the bees because they just gobble it up as soon as I put it in the colony. What I always say to them is, if I put a bag of Doritos in a bowl of carrots in front of my kids, which one do you think is going to get eaten first? It may or may not be an indicator of the healthiness of the snack, but it's not a reliable indicator. So we want to really do what we can to introduce products that are proven to work and to help you make your bees healthier. That is such a good analogy. The other one that I'm going to use is think about your bees. It seems like if I put beautiful, clear well water out for them to drink, they're not drinking it. They are next door in the neighbor's pool with chlorine or they're in a mud puddle or they're somewhere and I can't explain why.

20:23 Yeah. But you got me thinking about another thing when you were talking about the research which I love that idea and that is there's so many products out there. For example just miticides okay there's a whole bunch of different ones and there are people that try to do it without using any at all. and there are ways to kill mites with heat and all kinds of other things. How is a beekeeper supposed to decide what to use? What to do? Yeah, I think it's very dependent on your personal values and why you're in beekeeping and what's important to you. We're actually working on a couple of things there that I think will expand the hobbyist choices. I think commercial beekeepers struggle because if you've got 10 ,000 hives, you can't afford as a commercial beekeeper to go and do an alcohol wash on every one and see what your mite counts are. And so a lot of times they're taking more of a prophylactic approach. And in the end it can backfire because we end up creating resistance to some of these treatments. But as a hobbyist, you have more options because you really can gather more information about a single colony. and make a decision that's tailored to that specific colony. I think that one of the things I'm most excited about is seeing what a lot of the queen breeders are doing in terms of developing Varroa resistant traits, good hygienic behaviors. They're choosing queens

21:54 that have good hygienic behaviors and then breeding those queens and producing a stock that is just naturally more resistant to Varroa. I think that's the winning path in the long run. But in the meantime, we have to deal with the situation at hand and as a hobbyist beekeeper, again, you just have to choose what you're comfortable with. The natural acids, the miticides, whatever works for you. One other thing that we're... looking at, Eric, is what we might be able to do to help beekeepers. I'm very aware of the fact that the wax is sort of a repository for all these pesticides, not only the ones that we're using to treat mites, but pesticides that the bees are bringing out from the outside world into the hive. Wax is a perfect place for those things to live forever.

22:41 There have been some studies that have shown that some of the pesticides that show up in beeswax have been out of use for 30 years but they're still showing up in the wax because we're just recycling the same old wax time after time after time. We're looking to see if there's something that we could do to make that better as well. Well also because some of those pesticides don't go away. They don't just become inert after a few months. They can hang around for a long long time. Just because of the chemical makeup of wax, it's a very good repository for those molecules, and that's part of the reason they don't go away as well. So reminder to change those out from time to time. Most people I talk to say at least once every three years. Make sure you're changing those out. And you don't have to do... a whole box at the same time. You can do every other frame and then the next year do the frames in between, things like that. If you would come up with a little test strip that I could stick in my wax and it would say overabundance of this and this pesticide, that'd be awesome. Yeah, so we're looking at what we can do to help people with that. I don't have anything specific to talk about at this point but I think there will be a couple things we can do to make that better.

23:53 I was being a little facetious because I didn't think that was possible but you sound serious like you're figuring that out. We have a couple ideas that we're working on that might be useful, yeah. So Rob, I know I've bought so many things from Man Lake and just had great experiences and I wish I lived where you have a store, but I have found that the shipping on stuff is fast and easy and usually free. You only have to spend, what, 150 bucks or something and shipping's free. So to me, it's just, it's easy from wherever you are. But give me an idea of what's going on with the company. What overall, you know, you're the big cheese. Take a look down and tell us what's up. You know, I actually spoke about that last week at the CSBA conference with all the commercial beekeepers in California. One of the things I've discovered from my sales team is that they get asked a lot of questions about what's going on at Man Lake and isn't it owned by a financial institution or did it change control or what's happening with Man Lake. Personal view of the world is that transparency is important in business and in life generally, so I just kind of laid it all out and I'll give you a quick version of that. Man Lake was purchased by a private equity firm in 2018. I'm one of the co -founders of that private equity firm. At the time, the founders of Man Lake, Jack and Betty, sold the business. Sadly, Jack passed away before

25:26 the transaction closed and Betty moved on to other things. And then in the years after 2018, the sales of the company really boomed because of COVID. And then on the commercial side, we weren't dealing with these high levels of colony loss that we've seen in the last few years. So times were better. Sales of the company boomed. Unfortunately, the profits of the company went way down. And the debt of the company was going up because the company was losing money every year. So by 2022, the debt had doubled, the profits were near zero, and the company was in financial distress. And that's actually how I got introduced to the business. I had retired from investing during that period of time and was no longer working. My wife told me that I was not meant for retirement and I needed to get out and have a purpose in the world. And she was right about that. So I was always a big believer in beekeeping and the importance of pollinators in the world.

26:25 So I decided, you know what, I'm going to A, become a beekeeper and B, I'm going to take over Man Lake as the CEO and get it turned around. I felt a pretty strong obligation to the employees and also the customers of Man Lake to not let Man Lake basically go down the tube. I stepped in as CEO in May of 2022. I went to visit the company's lender in Boston, who informed me that I had three weeks to come up with a plan. And if they didn't like it, they were going to take over the business. For those of you who are not familiar with what that means, it usually means the company gets liquidated. I was just not willing to let that happen. So I got with the team. We came up with a plan. Three weeks became three months, became a year. And we were able to make some big impacts in the company in a short period of time. We paid off over half the debt in the first two years. And then I knew this was going to happen eventually. Eric, I kind of dreaded the day. But I got the phone call from the lender who said, hey, you've paid off half the debt.

27:28 And now if we just sell the company, we can get the rest of our money back. They essentially forced a sale of the company. I was not in a position to stop that so I did my best to try to find a buyer for the company that would be a good long -term home for the business. But ultimately the lender decided to sell the company to another financial firm. I met with this financial firm more than once with my team. The whole team agreed that this was not going to be a good future for Man Lake and that we really didn't did not support selling to this firm, but we could not get our lender to back off from that deal. So I decided to step out of Man Lake and put together my own buying group. I got five family friends who are all big believers in pollination, the importance of pollination, beekeeping generally.

28:21 And we bought the company in less than a week. We outbid this financial firm and bought the company in... March of this year. For me, that was a really huge and important step for Man Lake because Man Lake is now back in the hands of family ownership. None of us bought the company to flip it and make a quick buck. We bought it because we believe in the mission of Man Lake and we want the company to thrive, you know, decades into the future. Man Lake today is debt free. It's owned by a group of families, all of whom are personal friends of mine and are just fantastic individuals who bring a lot to the company. Many of them have great business successes in their background and have advised me on ways to improve the performance of Man Lake. Gosh, I think some of the important things for our customers, Eric, are that we have gone back to the basic blocking and tackling that made Man Lake what it was in the first place.

29:17 So for example, our goal is to get to 24 -hour turnaround on all orders by the time we hit the busy season next year. We're currently at about 48 hours. And you know, that's down from probably 11 days or something like that when I joined the company a few years ago. When I first started in the company, just to give you an example, we were out of stock on 400 key items just in our California location alone. I had one of our customers call me up when I first joined and said, I don't understand how you can claim to no bees when it's May and you don't have any smokers. And I didn't really have an answer for that. So what we've done over the last few years, Eric, is that we've invested in the team. We've invested in information systems. And we're now using state of the art technology to manage our business, predict our inventory, trigger the right actions in terms of buying goods and building goods so that we're always going to be in stock on the right items at the right time. Those things make a difference to the customers. As you know, when you've got an issue in your hive, getting something 10 days later is just not good enough.

30:22 So it's important that we have the things you need when you need them. Anyway, that was sort of a long answer to your question, Eric, but hopefully that gives listeners a little bit of a sense of what's happening at Man Lake. I almost don't know what to say because when you say equity firms are buying it and stuff, I just think about, well, I can think of quite a few movies, one being Wall Street, which is one of my favorites. And the big, what's that one called? The big something, the big short is another one of those. And you guys are doing the exact opposite of those. And I think that's really cool. And I think it's cool that that you also jumped headfirst into beekeeping so that you really get it. Yeah, I just wish I had done it sooner. It's been really transformative for me. I just love the bees and everything to do with them and I feel like my experience of the last 30 years turning around basic industry companies that have just lost their way. turns out to be perfectly suited for what man like needs. So I'm still a newbie when it comes to bees. I'm only out at four years, but I just devour any information I can get about bees because I love them. And I think that the more informed we are as a supplier, the more we can support our customers who, if they share anything with us, it's the love of bees. Last thing before I let you go. And that is as we look forward to the future. And you've been to all these trade shows and things. So you've seen

31:56 all the newest gadgets and there are things using AI and robotic arms and beekeeping and trying to take people out of the mix, the beekeepers. What do you think about the whole future? Is that going to be part of it or what? Well, that's a really good question, Eric. I mean, you'll see we've introduced some technology like on our app where you can identify a plant and it will tell you if it's good for bees or not. We have our AI chat bot, Bella, who we educated about beekeeping and who actually is pretty effective at giving good advice. And so I think what I would say is that we're trying to be realistic about the way the world is developing. And I don't think we can shun these technologies. but at its heart beekeeping is it's something that we do to connect us with nature which in some ways is sort of anti -technology and don't get me wrong i'm not anti -technology but i i think the important part of beekeeping for me is cracking open that hive and smelling it and seeing what's happening with the bees and having that remind you that We are all part of this natural world.

33:05 And as much as we can get sucked into our screens and watching 10 second clips of people doing whatever, the most rewarding times that we have are when we feel that connection and we actually go with it. And that's what we're trying to promote as a business. I wish people spent more time with their bees and less on their smartphone. I think the world would be a better place. The world would be a better place. We have just solved the whole nature of humanity. Yes, that's right. Thanks to the bees. Hey, Rob and Man Lake. I appreciate you being on the show and really appreciate Man Lake being such a huge supporter of the show. It has really meant a lot and has really been, I hope, a good partnership because we've had so much growth over the last year or so since we got this thing going. So we just appreciate it very much. Take care, my friend. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake.

34:08 If you like this content, I hope you'll share it with a friend. Follow and subscribe to this podcast and even sign up for our newsletter at BeLoveBeekeeping .com. Also, just a shout out to Vita B Health for their support, we appreciate them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Veroxen, Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys, 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.