Scottish Beekeeper Allergic to Stings

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

1:29 Today we're going all the way to Scotland for a conversation with a full -time beekeeper who's actually allergic to bee stings. We'll learn a lot, share some fun laughs and even hear her most crazy beekeeping experience. First, How do you know when it's finally time to remove a colony of bees from a church built in 1857 and listed on national register of historic places? Well, this is kind of a fun story. It comes to us from Bluffton, South Carolina, where at a recent celebration, they ring the church's bell 250 times. And guess what? Honey started dripping down the walls. Everyone has known there were bees living under the church's exterior siding for years, but it wasn't really seen as a problem.

2:20 So they, the bees, and the churchgoers all lived together in harmony. But sticky walls weren't the only problem. You see, Beaufort County is South Carolina's epicenter for yellow -legged hornets. The hornets have been terrorizing the bees, which of course put the bees in a bad mood. See where I'm going with this? Local beekeeper Fred Peters was brought in and ultimately removed 10 different colonies from the church, totaling around 400 ,000 bees. The colonies were relocated with beekeepers further away from the hotbed of hornets. And as the final chapter in this, it's reported that Peters received 200 stings during the removal. Hey, Fred, you're a brave guy. One more quick note before we get to our desk. We want you to know that this podcast is available everywhere and any way you like it.

3:15 All of the podcasting apps plus Man Lake's YouTube channel. And if you want video to see our guests, you can find video versions on Man Lake's beekeeping community on Facebook. and on YouTube at B -Love Beekeeping's channel and video is now available for all new episodes on the Apple Podcast app. If you're already on that app just push the little video button and you're in business. I'd like to welcome to the show today from across the pond our very special guest coming to us all the way from Scotland, Gail Wilkinson. Did I pronounce that right, by the way? That's right.

3:59 No, that's perfect. Okay, I'm just not used to spelling Gael that way. Yeah, it's Gaelic, G -A -E -L. It's the Gaelic spelling. Also, a man's name, if you live in Spain. As I found out when I lived in Spain that it's quite a popular boy's name. People would look at me very funny when I said my name, when I had to write my name down and go, that's your name? Well, that's a problem. Yeah, it never quite got to the bottom of it. Yeah, it is a Spanish man's name, but quite a common name in Scotland. Well, stay away from Spain. I actually have a lot of ancestors that came here from Scotland. So maybe they were friends with yours back when. Well, I think we have the Clans here and everybody seemed to fight from what I know of my own Scottish history. But when I'm over in the States, people immediately think I'm Irish. But then when I say, oh, I'm Scottish, they always say, I am Scot. And I love that.

4:54 I love that Americans say that they are Scottish from where their heritage is from, or I am Irish. It's not, oh, I have my families from. They say they are. I've spoken to so many people and had such interesting conversations with both who trace their ancestry back to various places across Scotland. I'm going to have to figure out where ours were compared to yours. And if they were fighting then, oh, well, we can be friends now. Well, I'm in the kingdom of Fife. which is a lovely part of Scotland and kind of right in the middle. We're very close to Edinburgh and I have eight purées all around the west of the kingdom and into Stirlingshire and over near Edinburgh, near Edinburgh Airport, our sort of HQ is in a little village, quite a historical area, but in a little village that borders two big estates, the Loga estate, which I always find interesting that Buffalo Bill brought his show here. to the village in 1904, something like that. And then the other estate that borders us, where I've got bees, is at Broome Hall Estate, which is the Bruce family of Robert the Bruce.

6:01 And they are, that's Lord Elgin, and you might have heard of the Elgin Marbles, I don't know. which Greece really wants back and is a constant argument. But we're in just a really lovely part of Scotland. It's kind of a lowland. It's not mountainous like the Highlands. Yeah, it's sort of plonked. We're right in the middle in the busiest bit, the busiest part of Scotland because there's a lot of areas of Scotland where, although it's a small country, there's a lot of space. Give me an idea of what the weather is like in that area where your bees are. And because of the weather, what kinds of things are they foraging on? We've got really strong seasons here, although like everywhere with global warming, every year is so different. And here in central Scotland, we have quite a short season and it really goes from Easter weekend is usually the first time I open up hives after the winter. I've finished up now. I've done the last checks at the beginning of September. We're doing a bit of supplementary feeding and then that'll be it. It'll just be hive hefting. mite treatment, stuff like that, right through to next year. So it's a short season and as I've seen every year has been different.

7:12 Sometimes we get a very wet spring, sometimes it's lovely and sunny. This year's been brilliant. We've had a good spring and a good summer. We used to have very cold, very snowy winters. What's affecting the bees now is that we just seem to have these long, damp winters where it's not really cold enough for the bees to properly cluster. So they do go through the stores quite quickly. And that's something we all have to keep an eye on after New Year is store levels because they are active and moving about inside the hive and burning those calories. Right now, we've had a really nice summer, although I'm looking out the window and it's raining. Quite different even from England, like five, six hours drive away, they've had a very dry summer. They're begging for rain. I think their summer season kind of fell off a cliff with the dryness and everything stopped. So this year we had brilliant spring and most of that forage was things like sycamore, chestnut, apple, a lot of cherry trees in this area. Not so much on the ground, but in the trees. which a lot of my customer, honey customers, find really interesting because when people talk about bees visiting flowers, they don't really think about trees all the time.

8:33 And for us in spring, it's mostly, if you're not on oilseed rape, which I think we call, is it canola? If you're not on oilseed rape, it's trees. And then in the summer, it's just such a mix for us here. We have field margins of bacillia and lots of different brassicas. But our main, about 40 % of our summer honey is usually bramble, like blackberry. It's prolific here. So it's a real mix. We have a scheme in the UK called the Honey Monitoring Scheme, which we are part of and we send off samples every year. The project is actually to measure the health of the rural environment by DNA sequencing the pollen grains in the honey. But the benefit for us to send it in is we get a free DNA profile of our honey back. And we usually have about 27 different pollen grains in there, but every year is bramble.

9:30 So it's quite a varied forage. Now it's over. There's not much around. Our last forage for the bees is Flowering Ivy, which has become a bit of a cult honey down south because it's warm enough for the bees to do a small harvest out of that. It tastes very medicinal, kind of TCP -ish, and people are really going a bit crazy for it, but it's just not warm enough up here for us to harvest it. So we just leave it in the hives. Just let the bees collect it and leave it in the hives for them for winter store. So last year we had Gino Jabar on, who's from your neck of the woods. And if I remember right, one of the things that he talked about was taking their bees up into the hills for the heather.

10:16 To the heather, yeah. Yeah. And it was a two or three week really big bloom. He said, made great honey. Yeah. Is that not a thing in your area? It is. People do take them up for me. It's a bit of a weird one. I actually have an April 8 through in Stirlingshire where the bees hit the heather. And the heather seemed to bloom quite late this year. So I went back just this morning to just check their stores, see how they were doing. And they were absolutely stuffed with heather honey. I could barely heft the hives, which was great. So I didn't have to do any supplementary feeding. I just walked away. But what I did do, I don't know if you can see it in the background, just there of my video, I did snuffle a whole frame and brought it home for myself. And the whole house now smells of heather honey. It has been tested, Scottish heather honey, and the active ingredients that are in manuka honey, apparently the Scottish heather honey has the same or more. things like manganese. It's not something that I do. I prefer to just keep my bees in the one place. I don't really like moving them around too much. And the weird thing is I am not a huge fan of Heather, honey. I'm trying to get more into it, which is why I brought this frame back and sort of trained my palate. What's wrong with it? What don't you like about it?

11:40 It's really strong. It's not got that classic... floral flavor. Dino would probably describe it better because he's more trained in honey sommelier. But there's just something about, I am training myself to like it more. So this year, I thought I'm going to bring myself back a whole frame and try and munch my way through it over the winter. It's going to be my own sort of winter store, but it's very strong. And even when my husband came in the house, so I'm in the office here and he came in the other end of the house. I could smell something, and I was like, I brought some heather honey back, and he could smell it at the other end of the house. It does have a bit of a cult following. It's a premium honey here. It's lovely, and people go crazy for it, which is why I want to like it more. But I suppose we're all different. We all have different tastes.

12:33 I'm a big fan of just my own bog standard wildflower summer honey. I just love it. If you don't like it, you don't like it. I know. I just feel like I should like it more. And people ask me for it. They say, are you not taking your bees? And every year I get invited because it's quite a big thing. You've got to have your bees ready, just the right, you've got to be super strong and really, really ready to go. And what I've found weirdly this year is my hides that were on the oilseed rake were tired this summer. They just sort of stayed the same. They didn't sort of come back really strong. and those are ones if I'd thought about it I could have taken up to the heather but you have to get them in the back of a van or on a trolley take them up to the heather and then get them up the hillside up the mountain and you usually have to pay quite a bit of money and then you take your chances because some years it's great and some years you get nothing so every year I get asked do you want to come on the back of our trailer and I go yeah yeah I'm gonna do that and then when it comes round I go no I can't Be bothered, to be honest. Can't be bothered. By the time it's ready to take the heather, I'm tired. Being a one -woman band in my business, I'm tired by then. How many colonies are you working with?

13:49 I'm on about 100. For one person, that's plenty. Yeah, and I'm trying to stick to that. I don't want to go really any higher because I want to just keep it one person. And I'm trying also to have a little bit of a life through this time. and not be working seven days a week. You have a grandchild now. Yeah, I know I'm a granny now. So I wanted time to spend with him this summer and to be able to do some nice things and do some trips. And what was great is we did manage to have some trips to other parts of Scotland and Lee managed to catch the brilliant sunny weather. So, because I have to say there's nowhere better in the world than Scotland when the sun shines. It's just stunning. And we have the most beautiful... Caribbean white sand beaches here.

14:35 The water is freezing, but it looks beautiful. But the sand is white. I've been to Scotland. It is absolutely beautiful and the golfing is good. The sand comes from the Caribbean, but the water seems to come from the North Pole. I believe it. All right. I would love to hear a little bit more about your business. So you have 100 hives, but I can see on your website, you do some other things. Oh, and before I forget, you had a tip for how to find lost hive tools. Would you please tell everybody, two word answer, how do you find lost hive tools? Cut the grass. Lawnmower. Lawnmower or strimmer, but I would recommend a strimmer before a lawnmower because I think some of my hive tools could, luckily.

15:19 I ran out of hive tools, that's what happened. And I do have about 30 hive tools and I ended up with one and then I lost it. I was like, this is ridiculous. I just couldn't find them. So I went, you know, you put them down, you turn round and it's as if they've run off. I decided to trim back one of the sites and found three immediately. And I was like, hmm, maybe that I should cut the grass a bit more often. So a couple of weeks ago was back up to about 10, but I'm back down to one already. So. I just seem to put them down and then forget where I put them all the time. And I've been sent one of these magnetic belts and I still forget that the magnetic belt is there and I put it down. Don't tell them that, I've lost it. But I will find it again the next time I cut the grass, at whichever site I've sat it down. I love Hive tools with a J hook on them. Do you use that kind? Yeah. It's got a J hook, the Hive Alive ones have got a J hook and a bit that sticks up, which is just brilliant for cracking frames.

16:17 They're really good. That's my favorite one, I think. I've got lots of different ones, but that's my favorite. We need to do one of two things, because everybody loses hive tools, and I think they do have a mind of their own. I think they do get down and walk off, by the way. That's just my theory. It's a thing. It's a real thing, yeah. Yeah, we'll have somebody study that, but... We could do one of two things. One is we could coat them with something that is glow -in -the -dark, and then we could go back at night and find them. That's a good one. Or two, you and I could market a metal detector for beekeepers, where you can just go out and... And you find all these hive tools everywhere. I've tried the metal detector once at one of my sites where it's one of these things that happen. This is last year, I've nipped in... I've been out and I nipped in just to check a nook, and for some reason I still had my good earrings in. This is such a girly story, but I had my really good little diamond earrings in and a bee got inside my veil. So I ended up all over the place flapping about, getting out the veil and I just blew an earring out. So I got a metal detector thinking I'm going to find it in the grass. And it kept beeping. And then I realized that I was never going to find it in the grass because there was a buried cable running right through the apiary.

17:41 And it was just constantly beeping. And I've still, despite cutting the grass, I've never found the earring. But I did find a hive tool. You found a hive tool. I saw something else on your website that I have not seen before. And that was a venom extractor. Is that something you make or you just resell? And how does it work? I found someone recommended it to me. I have been slowly getting more and more allergic to bee stings to the point where it's got a little bit scary and I've had to be really super careful. Just this week, I was given EpiPens by my doctor. I'd had spad reaction and I've had a blood test and I can't. quite work out exactly what they're testing for, but apparently a normal person would have a reading of not 0 .3, and my reading was 23 .1. So she asked me to come straight back down to the surgery and pick up a couple of EpiPens.

18:41 I've lost the train of thought. What was the question? I'm talking about EpiPens. The venom extractor. I've never seen one of those. So I'd been speaking to another beekeeper, Mark at Dunny Bees, and he had said... He's the same, he's got an EpiPen, and he said that these little extractor things, I mean, pick them up on Amazon, that's the chemist, really cheap. But basically you plunge it, but it sucks instead of blowing, and it actually sucks the venom out. And I've got one through my sleeve onto my wrist, and when you used it, because the nozzle's clear, you could actually see the venom bubbling out. and I ended up having no reaction. And it was maybe, you know, an equivalent of about $15.

19:24 It was brilliant. So that was good. But to be fair, that only works if you can see the sting. You know, if it's on the back of your leg or something and you, you know, or the back of your arm and you can't see exactly where the sting's gone in, you're a bit scuppered. So I do try and be really careful. But I am terrible for rushing and I seem to always have a deadline and something else to do. So when I'm rushing sometimes mistakes are made and I end up with one in my suit or, you know, up my sleeve. I'm always looking. The search for the perfect bee suit goes on. It's time right now to prepare your bees for winter and Man Lake is the place to help you make it happen. When it comes to prep, the first thing to think about is Varroa.

20:08 If your mite levels are high, yeah, you'll be buying new bees come spring. Man Lake has the Varroa test kits and all the treatments that you may need. Next priority is food stores. If you're sure your bees have enough honey reserves to make it through winter, great. But if the hives are a little light, or you're just not sure, you can't go wrong with helping them top things off with continued feeding. In fact, fall is often a dearth period and even if things look good now, by November your colonies might be light. Like I say, when in doubt, put the food out. 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. Manlike. Trusted by beekeepers since 1983. So the one I've got at the moment, I love the suit, but I don't like the veil. But I'm going to have another look around all of the different vendors at the beekeeping show in February, which is down in England. And all the manufacturers are there. And I'm going to. choose another one when I'm there. See if we can find the perfect suit for me. It's quite hard because I'm only five foot two. Bee suits, they are made for guys and they're always really long and huge. But I will find the perfect bee suit eventually and I will definitely talk about it on my social media. Okay. I can't wait to see. And by the way, I like getting bee suits

21:38 that are too big for me. I find when they're baggy, it's a lot harder to get stung through them. Yeah, I like it baggy but I find that when they're really big, when they're really long, when the sleeves are long, it all bunches up and bees seem to get caught in the folds and often are too long in the legs. And that's the problem with the baggy is they might be baggy on your wrist or down on your ankles and then that can become a problem. Yeah, I've got about five different bee suits and if I could just take bits of all of them and put them together into one suit, which is not that bad an idea. I might just do, I might just make a DIY suit myself. I bespoke it for myself. All right, let's talk a little bit about your beekeeping philosophy.

22:20 Are you a much more of try to do everything naturally or which direction do you go on the spectrum? I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't like to just throw chemicals around all over the place, but I haven't quite got my head around not treating for Varroa and taking the hit. I can't quite get my head around that. So I do treat for Varroa. I read up on things that are coming. Obviously, we've had the Asian hornet marches north. And just this morning, there was one sighted, maybe about five hours from here, a nest. So as the climate changes and things are not as cold in the winter that usually kills these things off, we'll just see where that goes.

23:04 There's also the rumblings of truffle alaps. I don't know how we stop that. And nobody knows quite what to do about it when it arrives. yet, although I know people are working on it. So yes, I thought I'd sit somewhere in the middle, but I do treat borough. Now you had mentioned earlier how short your season is, basically Easter through August till the first of September. If my math is correct, that leaves about a seven month winter. And you said one of the things that you pay attention to is if they're running low on food stores in the middle of winter. Seven months is a long time for winter bees to survive. Do you find it's warm enough that you have a couple of generations of them? Or do you have a set of winter bees that make it through that whole length of time? Well, it's not freezing cold yet. It's just that we've harvested. So the bees are still foraging and the queens are still laying, there's still pollen coming in.

24:03 And that will probably go on through into October. So the bees are probably at the moment we've harvested, so they're back filling for winter. And I think the queens will now be laying the winter bees. And then they do start laying again in February. There's movement in the hives on warmer days. It's just never sustainably warm long enough for us to actually want to open up the hives. So the bees are sort of working. by the time we start opening hives at Easter, which is usually at the beginning of April. This year was a little bit early because we had this weird March heatwave. As I was saying, the weather's just all over the place with a really weird March heatwave, which gave us a great spring crop.

24:46 It got everything growing, everything flowering. So it was a very heavy harvest in May, which was great. But yeah, every year is just different. but it would be nicer to get a bit more snow and just calm everything down a little bit. Yeah, but that makes more sense. That's more like a regular four or five months kind of thing now, where those winter bees have to hang on. Now, I see that you do hive management, you sell honey and other products from the hive, you do hive tours. Talk about the business for a minute. What kinds of things, you don't have to use any numbers, but what kinds of things sustain you?

25:27 I sell all of my honey direct to the customer through the website and at local markets. I don't stock it in lots of different shops and delis. I prefer to sell it direct myself. Over the last few years, I've built up a really strong mailing list through the website and have lots of repeat customers. So that's brilliant. Sometimes if I sell out over the winter, everybody's just really waiting and people come into the door and saying, is the honey ready yet? When are you harvesting the honey? So I sell almost all of it myself. I do stock one little shop in town. That is a not -for -profit that looks after Dunfermline's oldest building. And then we do the beekeeping experiences. A big part of the business model is hive management and hive sponsorship. And we look after hives on people's property who perhaps are not there all the time. I have some lovely people that live in a big castle and they're international. They're all over the place with their different businesses. So they're not always here. So I look after their hides for them. Day to day management of the hides. Just treat them exactly like my own hives. But when I harvest the honey, they get the honey. It's their honey.

26:46 And I just jar it up and they get... big trays of of their own honey or sometimes frames of honey whatever it is they want so that's a big piece of the business model and also hive sponsorship so we work with a lot of local businesses sponsoring hives and we provide them with social media content video updates of what's going on in their hive they also get some honey um they get a sign on the front of the hive so they can talk about their beehive what the bees are doing it's really good because that revenue stream helps support us in rescuing bee swarms. And we do quite a bit of that throughout the summer. So lots of different bits, moving parts going on in the business. I also like to be as sustainable as I can with our packaging. We try and be really plastic free. We try and reuse all of the wax that we have from harvest, mostly from the uncapping.

27:38 We make candles, balms, soap. And I mostly do that through the winter when it's the darker months. And those are all really nice little products that we can put together into gift boxes. And our gift boxes and candles do brilliantly sort of starting from October right through to Christmas. That's a big seller for us. We do sell a lot. And what happens is when we've got the Hive sponsorship, a lot of these businesses are also in the ecosphere. So they will then buy larger batches of honey for me. What often happens is the companies that come to us with sponsorship, we then end up helping them with other things. We have a house building company that sponsored quite a few of our hives, and they're now going to be putting together little packages of honey and some of our candles for all the new people when they move in. So that becomes another revenue stream. One of my other clients, they are having a big wedding, so we're doing gift boxes at their castle. So we're doing gift boxes as favors for that. So... There's always something different going on and that's what I love about beekeeping. I love the business side, but my favourite bit is when I'm just working alone in the fields with the bees. That's my favourite time. And there's also a reason why I don't want to increase my hive numbers because I don't want to work with anyone else. I don't want staff. I really enjoy that time on my own because when I'm not there, everything's quite busy. We've got busy lives and I really enjoy just being out in the fields. I've found this new app. that you put on your phone, I can't

29:10 remember, I think it's called Merlin. I leave it sitting on the van and it listens to all the bird song and it tells me all the birds that are round about while I'm beekeeping. Becomes slightly obsessed with it and finding something new. Yeah, it's so good. It's just interesting. Because all of my hives are on pesticide free farmland, we have, it's quite, there's lots of bugs. And so now there's lots of birds. So it's great just seeing what I can hear, but I can't see. This brilliant little app tells you, you should get, you've got to get it on your phone. You become obsessed with it. Okay. I'm going to have you send me a link. I will. I love the fact that when people get into beekeeping, it also gets us more in touch with just all of our natural surroundings. We think a lot more about flowers. versus pesticides and about birds and all these other things. I also love how much you've diversified your business. Really smart.

30:06 I think I sort of had to so that it could become a business that paid a wage, you know, that had an income to have all these different sort of revenue streams because just doing the honey wasn't quite enough. Yeah. But we've definitely tapped out all my hive numbers and I feel like... There's always someone new. There's a new company just come in as a Hive sponsor. They are a Scottish heritage brand who do book binding, old school leather for books. And they send that leather all over the world for book binders. Things I never think of. We just meet the most interesting people. We've got another company who are local. called McLean and Bruce. And the McLean of McLean and Bruce is Charles McLean, who's one of the top whiskey noses in the world. So they're a whiskey tour company. And you just meet, through Beeve, it's crazy. You just meet so many interesting people. I've got companies who make swimwear from recycled sea plastic. It's just, there's just so many different people doing so many, an international DJ that I look after their hives for, just so many different things. And that's, I love that about beekeeping. But as I say, I also love the quiet time when it's just me going from site to site in the van and working my way down the road. I really enjoy that. I like it.

31:28 All right. In spite of all the quiet time, give me an idea of a really fun or crazy beekeeping story that you've had. Especially doing a lot of this alone, have you had any crazy or really fun or unusual beekeeping stories that you want to share with us? Well, I think one of them harks back to bee stings and having got this EpiPen. So back in lockdown, obviously in lockdown here... bees were classed as livestock so I could get out and still look after the bees and that was great and I was just finishing up at a site for some reason, oh I'd taken a call, that's what it was, I'd taken a call which I now never, since this moment I never do that, I'd taken a call and I bent down to pick up the hive tool back to the hive tools off the grass and a bee flew up out the grass and caught me right on the throat so I panicked and I was like oh my god I'm going to swell up. There's no one around, it's locked down, there's no one on the roads. So I jumped in the van. I wasn't far from our village that has a little chemist. And of course it was locked down, so everybody's in a queue outside the chemist with their masks on. And I pull up outside in the van, leave the van running, hood still with my B -suit on, panicking, brush past everybody in the queue, rush in, and I get to the counter and I say to the guy, I think I'm having a...

32:50 anaphylactic reaction. I've been stung by a bee and he looked at me and I just projectile vomited right down the guy's front. And he just stood there and then I fainted. And then it got even worse because I peed myself in front of half the village in my bee suit. And I was basically dragged by the ankles into the little room. And then I was recovered quite quickly in about 20 minutes. And then they had to let me out the back door. And even now, when I go into that chemist shop, Six years later, that guy won't serve me. He hides through the back when he sees me. Oh my gosh. I'm now the crazy bee lady in the village and everybody heard about it. Well, thank you for being brave enough to share that.

33:36 The village crazy bee lady, it's awesome. Yeah, the village crazy bee lady. It wasn't my finest beekeeping moment, I have to say. But we have laughed about it now. Myself and the other girls that work in there, they still laugh about it. And when any new member of staff comes in, they have to be warned about the crazy bee lady who might come in and be sick down your front. So, did they give you a shot from an EpiPen? No, they didn't want me to go to hospital because it was lockdown. And obviously, the hospitals were crazy. So I just... on the floor till I felt better. That's all that happened. And then they let me out. They let me just go home. My son came and got me and I came home and I was absolutely fine. But I think they did the right thing because it was the first draft of COVID and the hospitals. Once you went in, you know, you seem to get caught in a system and I was like, oh, I don't want to go in the hospital.

34:29 I'll end up catching COVID in hospital, which is a weird thing. Like many beekeepers, I've never had COVID, even though everyone in my house... caught it at some point. I never had it. Seems to be a thing. I heard there was some research being done into it that why beekeepers are not catching things like that. Possibly back to the bee venom that's all running around our system. It very well may be. That's interesting. By the way, a month or so ago, we had an allergist on the show. So an allergy doctor. And she talked all about EpiPens and a thing called Nephi. I'll need to listen to that. which is the same medicine but it's a nasal spray instead of a needle but it was really interesting one of the things that she said is if you're afraid someone is having a reaction go ahead and give them the shot or the nephi you're not going to hurt them in other words you're not going to make the mistake and kill somebody because they weren't having a reaction and you gave them the EpiPen. It's just better to be safe than sorry and do it because it's not going to harm somebody. This isn't my medical advice. This was hers and she's a regular allergy doctor and so I take her word on it. Here, you need to have them prescribed by a doctor. Obviously, we get them free on the NHS, but because I think they're quite expensive, they don't just give them out. You get them prescribed for yourself.

35:54 I have to say, I'm a little bit nervous about using one. I'd have no idea why, but I'm sure if I ever need one, I will use it. If I think I'm going to end up with a bad sting, I will use it and we'll just see what happens because I have no idea what to expect. Yeah. And don't wait till you're nearly dead and you can't breathe at all. No. Do it before then, because a lot of people wait too long. I don't know how it is there, but here in the States, if you're a beekeeper, even if you don't have an allergic reaction to bee stings, usually if you go to your doctor and say, hey, I'm a beekeeper. I have other people around. I never know if somebody is going to have a reaction. Most of them will write you a prescription to get one. And it's just a really good, smart thing to do, especially with the bee experiences that you're doing. You don't know, and you may need to save somebody's life. I do feel better having them. So I've got two, because she did say, use it and then give it 15 minutes. And if you think you need the other one, take the other one. That's exactly right. Some of the beekeeping, the bee suit manufacturers are now building in little pockets for them.

37:03 So that's interesting. We really should have them with us all the time. It's just a really smart thing to do. We always have a first aid kit, especially as well because I am working on my own and I'm in often quite rural places where no one would see me from a road or a path. So I do always have my phone with me, fire extinguisher, you know, all those things. But I do feel a bit better now having the EpiPen just in case because I'm on my own. And if I went down, no one would know where I was. or how to come and get me. I suppose we should tell people where we're going, but often I get in the van and then I change my mind. I do feel better having the epic end. Hopefully that's it for this year and we'll just see what happens next year. These bee venom allergies are not to be messed around with. We have to take them seriously, so. Yeah, and I do feel it's getting worse. Hey, Gail, I've had fun.

37:54 It's been a fun chat. If anybody wants to find out more about your operation, it's kinbees .com with a K. We'll stick it down in the show notes so everybody can find it. Thanks for being with me today. I appreciate it. That's OK. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. I hope I haven't spoken too fast, because as Scottish people, we like to speak really fast. Especially when we're talking about a subject that we love, we can become quite fast. So hopefully everybody understands my accent. They will. And I talk slow, so the two of us will balance each other out. That's great. All right. Take care. Brilliant. Thanks so much. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes to V2B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acids Trips. 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.