"Natural Nest Beekeeping" With Hippy Oregon Beekeepers

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 Beekeeping presented by our great friends and partners in beekeeping. man like. I'm gonna try to keep this intro today very brief short and sweet because

1:33 we have such a good interview coming to us today. We have beekeepers Joy and Eric McEwen from Oregon and we're going to be talking about natural nest beekeeping and a bunch of other really great things that they do to keep things as natural and as organic as possible on their beekeeping journey. And we'll be talking about apitherapy and their commercial beekeeping business in general. First, just one little thing, and that is, when was the last time that you spent some quality time with your bees? I did it this morning. I got up early, went for a hike in the mountains, came back, and just enjoyed some quality time with a handful of beehives that are right around my home. And you know, just instead of doing a regular inspection with a big checklist of things to get to, today was more like, hey girls how are you doing and we spent some time just watching their behavior in the entrance of the hive and then cracked the lid open pulled a couple frames oh you girls are doing so great hey i need to get you another honey super be right back and a couple others hey you new queen you're doing fantastic well you're maybe a little slow but uh no rush take your time things are going very well just go at your own pace I don't know

3:03 I probably sound a little crazy having this sort of conversation with the bees but it was a very pleasant morning and please get out there and do it yourself it's all about the love of the bees I would like to welcome our very special guest today we're going out to Oregon in the US And we have Joy and Eric McEwen here. How are you two this morning? Very good. Very great to be here with you. Yeah, give us a big wave. I like that. And if you don't mind, I'm going to say this is a compliment. These are hippie beekeepers, and I think that is so awesome. And most of Oregon is probably that way. Anyway, there's my tangent to get us started with. But we're going to jump in with. My gosh, we have so much to talk about everything from apitherapy to natural beekeeping and and that's where I want to start because One thing that interests me and you Eric was the term natural nest Beekeeping which I don't know that I had heard before explain what that means Well, it is a term that we coined as an attempt to encompass our style of beekeeping.

4:22 And so we really meant it to just sort of be an umbrella term that encompasses a whole suite of tenants of best management practices, if you will. We're the first to say that we're a work in progress. So we set the bar high and then we aim to attain it. And so many of the tenants of naturalness beekeeping are things that we're still still integrating into our operation. I guess it all starts with place. And it starts with the hive. So it's going to mean organic management practices. It's going to mean pristine locations. It's going to mean avoiding intensive agriculture. And then moving inward, it's going to mean a hive that is comprised of natural materials, no plastics, no paint. So, you know, wood, wax.

5:11 In our case, we use a natural sealant that we make for our beehives out of beeswax, raw. linseed oil and pine rosin. It's a concern for the conditions that the bees are living in, in order to ensure an utmost purity of the bee products. And that overlaps into, you know, some of our discussion of medicinal, of the production of medicinal quality hive products. And so setting the stage for producing products like that. And then it's going to move into how we manage the bees, the ways in which we interact with the bees and, and some of the internal architecture of the hive. So we're a proponent of foundationless brood nests and we use modified frames to give us the opportunity to. adhere to biodynamic standards in regard to the brood nest, having foundationless brood nests that are of a size and shape that allows the bees to have a natural organization to the brood nest that is uninterrupted by frame parts, for instance. And then it's going to involve our practices, including queen rearing. So avoiding of the grafting procedure and kind of a returning of authority to the bees with regards to the rearing of queens. And for us, that means In hive queen rearing, queens being reared by their sisters from eggs laid by their mothers. I'm hearing let bees be bees. Exactly. Let's quit trying to make bees be what humans want them to be. And then it would be the utilization of integrated pest management practices for mite

6:43 management. So a minimal interventionist mindset. What are some of those that you use? Because you also used the term organic earlier. And a lot of people jump from there to the term that's very controversial. I don't mind bringing it up. Treatment free beekeeping. And just so everybody knows, that doesn't mean ignore the bees and don't do anything. Tell us about your IPM philosophy. Well, I'm glad you bothered to make a distinguishment between. Treatment free and what what joy and i like to call and other people called do nothing be keeping right with that's actually kind of a tenant of our natural nest be keeping is that we are not do nothing be keepers right we are we are hands on but we we seek to minimize the amount of intervention that we do so for instance.

7:31 Join i do not interrupt the procedure process when we find colony superseding we trust that the colony is aware of a problem. whether or not it's apparent to us and we leave the bees to do that. But backing up to your question about mite management and integrated pest management, one of the things that we do is we employ brood breaks. We'll employ those at multiple times a year in various ways. We also raise a lot of our new queens from eggs, from worker eggs, essentially as what we would call an emergency queen, a term that Joy and I don't really like. that in and of itself adds several days to the queen rearing process and results in a more significant brood break in the starter colony itself and we see that translate into much lower levels of viable mites in our new colonies each spring. We also utilize foundationless frames in our colonies and so because of that we get the production of whole frames of drone brood. And then we will transfer drone brood out of queen right over wintered colonies in the springtime as a means of mitigating mite levels. And it's fairly effective.

8:44 And we'll move those frames of drone brood into queenless nucleus colonies, mating nukes, if you will, and thereby get the drones to, to where we want them. And also our room are transferring big proportions of mites out of our queen, right over wintered colonies. And by utilizing. Those techniques by making divides and so we'll remove brood from our colonies two times in the spring We'll target drone brood in that process and we'll remove capped brood from our colonies and that enables us to avoid mite treatments typically from From about October until like late May or mid May Sometimes it doesn't work as well and we'll do a mite treatment in the spring earlier in the spring March or April but a lot of times we can go about six months without any use of any acaricides. And then we will utilize brood breaks. If we see a colony that's having mite stress, we will do queen -right divides where we'll pull the queen into a cavity of her own and we keep her overhead so we can keep track of her. We'll move the queen along with as little open brood as possible into a box of its own and move her overhead of the parent colony. leaving the colony queenless. Occasionally, of course, you're going to get the rearing of new queens in that process, but you're also going to get a brood break. By the way, if we have some brand new beekeepers listening or people just thinking about getting into it, I know we're speaking

10:16 a bit of a foreign language today. Bear with us, it's worth it. Even if it's helping plant a seed of things that you're going to learn more about later on in your beekeeping journey. One of the things that you mentioned was the term the size and shape of the brood chamber. Give us an example of what that is in your apiary. Well, yeah, when we look at the natural organization of a colony, when we study like temperate colonies that are dormant in a non -reproductive state, you know, they're going to occupy a space inside the cavity. That's probably roughly a basketball size, 10 and a half inches, 11 inches somewhere in there. And then, you know, they're going to expand from that shape outward in the springtime.

11:01 Joy and I like to talk about the thermodynamic nature of honeybees and how they really utilize the heat that they're producing as a super organism to do a lot of work for them. First and foremost, to incubate their brood. And second of all, to, to warm their food supply. So we're very much advocates of a temperate organization of a hive in a vertical orientation, which allows the nest heat to warm the the winter stores that are overhead of the colony. We are in agreement with Warray that the Layen's hive is a beautiful hive, but that they got it wrong in the overall configuration of the hive by encouraging the honeybees to put their winter stores to the side of the cluster.

11:49 You are reducing the ability of the bees to use their nest heat to warm their winter stores. So war a was one of the most eloquent people to advocate for a vertically oriented colony that then allows the nest heat to pre warm the honey that that the bees are going to move on in a vertical direction as the winter and spring goes on. So we're very much advocates of that. So while we use a Langstroth format, we are eight frame and we're trying to keep our colonies narrow and tall. And so backing up to your question about brood nest. If we utilize a frame that is not only foundationless, but also missing its bottom bar, you can grow out brood frames that then you can come along with another super or a hive body, as we say, and you can nadir or you can take that hive body and stick it underneath the existing brood nest. And then that encourages the bees to draw their brood combs in a downward direction. And you can end up with a brood frame that in our work, our research, we've come to the size of about 13 and a half inches as an ideal brood frame. And what that enables is the bees to have their brood nest in entirety on a frame that is uninterrupted and can encompass the entirety of the brood organization, the natural organization of brood, where the queen is laying her eggs in concentric spirals. in an uninterrupted way, and that even allows a little bit of space

13:21 for the peripheral storage of pollen, bee bread on the comb, and even a little bit of nectar. We emphasize a little bit of nectar. Our original iteration of a hive like that, we used to run 16 inch frames, and that allowed the bees to put a pretty nice two to three inch layer of capped honey across the top of that frame. And that actually became a hindrance to our style of beekeeping, which involves supering for honey production. And with that two to three inch band of capped honey, sometimes that would actually create a hindrance and it deterred the upward movement for honey production. And we are commercial beekeepers associated with producing food. So we want to encourage the bees to produce honey in supers. And then, yeah, I just want to add to that by saying the other hindrance was just it was way too big for our family. Like we have three daughters and for me out in the hives, like these huge, huge brood nests are way too difficult for the beekeeper. And we feel like, you know, what's good for the bees is good for the beekeeper and vice versa. So I think that was one of the main hindrances was just. a workable size for all of us. And then the other one is just small colonies. Small colonies don't start off in that natural basketball size and they don't really appreciate all that extra space.

14:43 These are definitely different things that we learned along the way. So to be able to start them as more of it in a smaller, we use Western Shallows box, right? To start them in one box that's a Western Shallow. And then when they grow, we're actually knee -deering with an empty box. So that's how they're gaining some of their length. Wow. How long have you been doing this? This is our 26th season beekeeping and beekeeping together. Congratulations. And how many hives do you have on an average year? Well, that number does vary. I think at the moment we have about 650 colonies. I haven't met a beekeeper yet that can tell me exactly how many hives they have.

15:26 That's so normal. But when you get up into big numbers like that, that's even more so. I think we're about 665 if you pressed me. Well, and it's just a big range, you know? And it may be different tomorrow. That does lead into a tenant of natural nest beekeeping for us. as I mentioned, our natural queen rearing techniques means that we don't cage queens and we never separate queens from the family that they were reared in. So our practices for hive management are different than a typical commercial beekeeper. And because of that, our colony count goes up and down a lot more than an average commercial beekeeper, because we're not rectifying queen problems by just depositing a queen in a cage. We're actually either encouraging those bees to raise a new queen of their own by the transferring of brood in the case where they're hopelessly queenless and don't have what they need to raise a queen then we're going to fix them up with what they need to raise a new queen or in the case where the colony is already so demoralized and the population has plummeted we're going to actually introduce a whole starter colony so we're going to take a queen you know a nucleus colony where the queen is laying already surrounded with her her sisters and brood and everything. And we're going to introduce that. So, so we're utilizing a starter colony the same way someone else might use a queen in a cage. So because of that, our colony count certainly fluctuates, you know, midsummer. We go up through spring and then we hit midsummer and then we start going down. Sure.

16:54 All right. Let's shift gears. Oh, I'm sorry, Joy, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to share like one really nice thing about our range is we go from Crescent City which is on the coast with about 100 inches of rain a year all the way over to Ashland. So this is kind of the range of our 650 hives where Ashland gets about 17 inches of rain a year. And we have a lot of just really excellent beautiful bee yards. Some of our bee yards are like the certified organic regenerative farms, herb farm, Oshala farm, Pacific botanicals. Like those together are maybe even like 500 acres of certified organic regenerative medicinal herbs. So we work with some really wonderful farms, along with even Alexander Family Farm, which is on the coast. And they won National Organic Farmer of the Year. 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 you live in the world it's either here now or it will be in the near future and man lake is making it so easy to plan for click on over to man lake's website for an amazing selection of extractors filters bottling supplies uncapping knives supplies for comb honey everything and i mean everything you'll need. But if you aren't there quite yet and the honey flows right around the corner,

18:25 make sure you have extra supers on hand. You never can have too many or be too prepared. And right now Man Lake is offering podcast listeners $10 off your next order. Just enter code MLBLove10 at checkout. That's manlakeltd .com. Discount code MLBLove10. And that climb, if you will, from east to west also goes from roughly sea level to like 2 ,200 feet in elevation. So it's nice being mom and pop beekeepers. It's just us taking care of this business. And so you can't be in two places at once. And we're, we're able to sort of manage our job list, our task list with regarding to. making honey or tending bees or applying my treatments or whatever we're often able to prioritize all of our activities on these elevational longitudinal climbs so that we can always sort of be in the right spot at the right time. We can follow the bloom. As long as we're on that topic let's talk about your business a little bit if you don't mind. Not at all. You don't have to give me any specific numbers or anything like that that is uncomfortable but the majority of the profit from your business is it Honey, is it selling bees? Is it? What is it? Because I assume you're not going out and doing pollination all over the place. Actually, to clarify, we still do one pollination event in California for the almonds, and that has been a big part of financing our creative endeavors.

19:59 As you know, beekeeping, like all forms of farming, is Intensive it's equipment intensive. It's it's capital intensive and we are not multi -generational beekeepers We started we started from nothing Yeah, we're first gen and so all of these lofty ideas of how we wanted to create a bee business We really had to figure out how to capitalize them And so we are happy to report that almond pollination is well under 50 % of our income and currently honey is competing with pollination for for taking first place as our primary source of income. And that is our goal is to create a diversified business that is primarily concerned with B products. And so I'm happy to report B products collectively as a category is the majority of our income. And those include a candle -making business, a whole line of hive medicines that we make that involve propolis and honey as a solvent for herbal extracts. We make a beverage called jun, which is a honey -based kombucha.

21:03 We sell a lot of that, especially at farmers markets and events. Yeah, it's a really easy way to get people into the booth is giving them samples of this jun. They just love it. Does it taste better than regular kombucha? which I have a hard time with. We convert kombucha beverage drinkers on the daily. I'm not kidding. I hand out samples at Farmer's Market and I say, when they're not familiar with June, I say, are you familiar with kombucha? And then they make this face. They're like, oh, not for me. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Just try a little tip. Then they are lifetime customers. There's something about the taste too, like it's really alive. A lot of times it's because we're using all these herbs that we even polemate for from around here. But just the fact that we are adding raw honey to it, they're really, really this just like aliveness to it, this activating part of it. It tastes great. And really a low carbon footprint too. Like when you really think about, you know, kombucha and where it's coming from, the ingredients are mostly sugar. and glass packaging compared to live honey and probiotics with prebiotics because it has honey right out of a keg. We pour it as a dispenser and sometimes people bring their own cups. Love it. I want to shift gears before we run out of time. Oh yeah. We have talked about apitherapy a lot on this show I'm sure a lot more than other beekeeping podcasts and YouTube shows and stuff like that

22:33 But no, that's probably just because it's something that I'm super interested in and so we're gonna do a little bit of that but I want to start with the integration with that and your beekeeping because as you talked about doing your beekeeping as organic as possible I assume that when you talk about medicinal qualities of hive products, if it were me and I'm putting something in my body or on my body, I want it to be as organic as possible. Tell us how you have a good balance of those two things or how they work together, I should say. Well, I guess first I just want to point out what you were saying is just the integration and One of our big proponents in all of this is sharing with folks that in teaching natural beekeeping and apotherapy, I like to teach them together because I want people to really know and understand that apotherapy is a part of beekeeping. and that beekeeping is a part of apotherapy itself. Getting to even like normalize this a little bit in the beekeeping community, I really appreciate that you're bringing all this to your podcast because I want more and more beekeepers to know that we go back like this is 4 ,000 year, 5 ,000 year history of beekeepers really integrating that these hive medicines are part of our our livelihood, our passions, what we're doing on the day to day. Our lifestyle.

24:01 Yeah. And for them to really get to understand that this is part of what I think the bees are even asking of you. So for us, what are some of the ways that we want to be a beekeeper and then both be making these medicinal products? That would then kind of go right into like natural beekeeping. One little example we could I could start off by sharing is how we harvest propolis So like we would use stainless steel tools. We don't use any paint whatsoever in any of our boxes That would be something that would be very important for any scope of organics And furthermore, we don't use we don't use plastic pollen traps because we think of propolis as a very strong substance We don't want it in contact with plastic before it's being made into medicine. So or paint.

24:52 I mean, if it's going to go in your body, sure. Yeah, exactly. And just really quick, just so that everyone doesn't think that we're purists, as I said at the outset, we set the bar high and then we attain it over time. And so every one of these goals takes time. Right. So out of our we have about 2500 boxes in the operation. And I'm pretty sure we still have about 100 painted boxes. And so We're not perfect. We're working towards it. And so what do we do to mitigate those imperfections? Of course, for starters, we don't harvest propolis from anywhere. in contact with a painted box. We're working towards that. We also have a plastic free operation. And yet I'm pretty sure out of the 20 ,000 frames in our operation that we have a few hundred plastic frames in there still. And I could tell the story of why, but more importantly, we're, we're trying to take those frames out of our hives. We're trying to get rid of them, but we're also pragmatic.

25:50 If a frame is covered in a frame of brood, I'm not going to. I'm not going to dispose of the brood in order to get rid of the plastic. So we're moving that plastic to the periphery of the boxes. We're moving them up into our supers. And when they end up in the honey house, they're out of here. We're not perfect. We don't have lawyers listening in. You don't need the disclaimers. But I like that you mentioned it because a lot of us are trying to work towards that. Exactly. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing. We can work in that direction. And that's exactly how do you harvest your propolis? Is it through some kind of a trap? Are you scraping it off boxes? What are you doing? Stainless tools by hand and targeting really only the highest quality propolis in the hive. So colonies bring in one to 200 grams of propolis a year, typically. And when we're doing an average inspection, We might get a few grams of propolis out of a colony.

26:43 Sometimes we'll have colonies that are propolis hoarders that will get as much as an ounce out of them, but that's not common to two to five, maybe 10 grams of propolis as much as we might harvest. And we're really looking for high resin content. So, you know, as, as your listeners probably are aware, bees blend propolis with wax at varying levels based on their different. uses of that propolis and we're really working hard to find these high resin propolis's resin contents of you know 70 plus percent so fairly pure propolis as as you might see it on the corbicula of a propolis harvester. Just hand harvesting with stainless tools storing it in stainless containers and then extracting it in organic ethanol. And for those that don't know, when we talk apotherapy, we're not just talking about bee venom therapy. We're talking about all the medicinal things from the hive. That's why propolis comes in and pollen and royal jelly and honey itself. And I'm sure I'm leaving some things out. But I want to ask you real quick, what are you doing with propolis? Are you making tinctures out of it or stabs or what? All the above. We've had a really popular propolis tincture. for quite some time and then just this past year we developed Problis plus a little bit of honey of a throat spray and we have that just kind of original and then also with some eucalyptus as well. and

28:13 they are going really just like showstoppers at the farmers market. With that, just the spray, it makes it just last a really long time. It has a cute label. And then we're doing more propolis salves as well. Even a propolis enriched honey. So for those of you who are making propolis medicine with your propolis, I'll just say propolis is it not an easy substance to handle and it's not a very easy substance to extract so if you look at the marketplace there's actually a lot of i don't want to be too negative but there's a lot of mediocre. Propolis products on the market out there or even poor quality propolis products that are really sort of riding on the word propolis But if you look at the other ingredients you look at the methodologies used to make them They're not really resulting in a very high concentrated level of propolis constituents in the final product and that is giving a bad name to propolis because then these products don't have the medical effectiveness that people might hope or they're not going to get the tonic qualities that they want out of them. And so I encourage anyone who's making propolis to look into the finer chemistry of propolis and understand some of the constraints of working with it so that you can make a really high quality medicine. Or if somebody's just buying it, how do they know they're getting a good one? For starters, propolis is a very insoluble substance, and really most solvents like honey, vinegar, water, are really not going to make a good propolis extract. I could give a few exceptions

29:46 to that, but basically really the best solvent for propolis resin is ethanol, and really it even varies quite a lot. by strength of ethanol most research would say that you are wasting your time at anything under 140 proof or 70 % and I would suggest that that's Still probably a little low if you look at products out there. You're gonna find a lot of them are not made at that concentration So what do you make yours out of? 80 % organic ethanol minimum and put how much propolis per how much of the alcohol? Somewhere between a one to ten and a one to five weight weight tincture And then let it sit for what two to four weeks Yeah, three three weeks is what we usually aim for you can make a pretty good medicine in two weeks But we like to be thorough. I want to just interject something to sort of answer my own question I think it's also like buying honey Get to know your beekeeper If you're at a farmer's market and somebody has a propolis tincture or something else with propolis, great, talk to them. Find out how are the bees kept. Ask lots of questions. You're going to learn a lot more that way than just reading somebody's label online. I also think like the nose knows, you know, like if you're able to try it, ours, it's, it's actually really obvious. If you try ours compared to one of these other ones. you're gonna get it, that you're like, ah, this one is way better, this is more potent, this is more

31:18 pure. It becomes obvious too, so. All right, before we run out of time, Joy, let's talk for a minute about B -venom therapy. Wonderful. Because it's something that you do and you have clients that you help with this. Yeah. Give us an idea, what are they coming to you for? So I've had a practice, it's been about... 15, 16 years really kind of just got started with farm animals, farm workers, our family, our kids, through some work with them, going to some conferences at the American Apotherapies Society and hearing from other apotherapists of like how to really just get started of wanting to really with just this simple question of just wanting to help people. and knowing about the products or about BeeVenom and how well it works for so many different types of people, I think that just kind of compelled me to just start trying, right? So, started small of like helping people. I mean, arthritis is a really easy one to help people with. And then I think through all these years, it's just kind of building stories.

32:29 like building people's actual stories of like, okay, does this work? Does this not work? Does it work for some people? It doesn't work for other people. And for me to just be able to share like the I statements of like, this is what I've seen. This is the story I've helped somebody with. It's hard to dispute someone else's story. as true or false or why this helps them in such significant ways. It really differs for so many different people. It's a panacea. I can't even, I mean, I really help people in so many different ways. I would say arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. Chronic pain is a real big one. I've helped a lot of people with Lyme's disease, Parkinson's, even preventative Parkinson's. Those would probably be some of the big ones, but I also end up working with people once I get to know them more and they get to know B -venom more, their body becomes more adaptive to it. Then we start also working on things like chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.

33:33 And sometimes we even work with various like meridian or acupuncture points specifically for those ailments. Generally in apotherapy or B -venom therapy, we're working with either like kind of trigger points. or kind of a typical like a pain center where you're either like attacking the dragon or surrounding the dragon but sometimes we kind of also go to some of the like the farther reaching points as well cancer yeah cancer as well yeah if somebody just wants some general information on Hey, I either want to just learn more about it or maybe they're a beekeeper and they want to get some full training into it. Where should they go? I'm not sure if you're aware. We actually started this whole apotherapy certification course. We just finished the first full cohort. We did it in four months and we graduated about 65 students. Eric and I do that course together. It's on KJabi, so most of all the lessons are all pre -recorded. And it's a very extensive, thorough course. So each week the students are getting so much information.

34:46 And kind of also what you were sharing about like that apotherapy isn't just B -venom therapy. We actually do it on purpose that the first half of the course is going into all the other products of the high -vis medicine because that truly is apotherapy. And being an apotherapist is to be able to talk. to the clients about integrating all these other medicines, not just bee venom therapy. So as an apotherapist, I actually take that very seriously. And as we get started together, it really is about like integrating honey. The more you integrate honey, your body's more even getting microdoses of the bee venom, but you're getting to know bees, you're getting to know beekeepers and all of that starts to become part of like your healing process. And by the way, you guys are at digginliving .com. I'll stick that down in the show notes. You had also mentioned earlier the American Apotherapy. Is it association or society? Society. Society. There's a global organization as well. I'm on the International Federation of Apotherapists, which is that international board where Dr. Steffen is the head president of that board and I enjoy working with him and all the other. It's a wonderful board. And then I am the chair, the coordinator of the Medicinal Beekeeping Commission on the International Federation of Apotherapy. And then I authored the guidelines in that way as well. Fantastic. All right. We've

36:16 got a couple of minutes left. I want to hear a fun, wild and crazy beekeeping story or two from you guys. This just goes way back, but it does seem to be kind of wild and crazy in that when we first came from mid -state Corvallis area and we moved down to southern Oregon, our beekeeping business was growing. We were already like organic eaters, organic farmers, and so we wanted to become organic beekeepers. And so we showed up at that local meeting and we told these guys which was like a bunch of really, really a lot older gentlemen. And it was like a dark room. I don't know. It should have been full of smoke. It was just. Yeah. And I was like, had my little baby. I was like nursing my my oldest daughter is now 22. I remember just telling them that we're we're organic beekeepers. And there was like arms flying. They're like, that's not possible. That's not possible. You can't do that. And so I guess that is just my wild and crazy story to just tell you it is possible.

37:17 You can do it. I love people that stir the pot. That's awesome. All right, Eric. OK, I was thinking about it. I'll just go with the one that popped into my head. There was this time that we were. Just just had just moved to southern oregon. Maybe had been there a couple years And so we were still hungry enough for bee colonies that losing swarms just really bothered me So I saw a swarm had gone up into this young alder tree about 35 40 feet up and And I had a witness for this I walked out there and the alder was only about this big and it was kind of Getting shaded out by these bigger cottonwoods. And so I decided you know what? I'm gonna cut it down And so I took a Rubbermaid tote and I walked out to the base of the tree and I looked up at how far it was, guessed how high it was. And then I just paced out into this meadow, set the Rubbermaid down, walked over with my chainsaw and dropped the Alder and it got perfect direct hit. It landed the cluster. The swarm went right into the Rubbermaid.

38:21 We're gonna watch this happen. We're actually hillbilly hippies and I got I Got the swarm to land perfectly in the Rubbermaid ran over put a lid on it and that that is where the good news ends because I did take the high I was very Imagine I was very proud of myself and I caught the swarm and I deposited them in a hive and Then came and checked on them the following morning and they had absconded. They were done with me. They were not gonna put up with being dropped 40 feet out of a hive. But I will say, I think that's probably one out of only maybe a couple hives that's ever absconded on us in 26 years. So that is incredible that you can look at it, guess the height, step it out and have it hit. And I'm going to tease you with one last thing. And that is far as I know, those rubber made containers are made out of plastic. Nice. It's true. You know what? We have a couple other pieces of plastic in the operation and I will not rest until we get rid of them. All right. Hey, it's been fun, you guys. We are going to do it again sometime in the not too distant future. That's Joy and Eric McHugh. And thanks for being with me today.

39:34 Yeah, great to be here. Thank you. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to Vita B 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 be love beekeeping dot 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.