Varroa Mites In Australia - Flow Hive's Cedar Anderson

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

1:26 Today we're headed to the land down under to get an update on Varroa in Australia plus some other crazy things about beekeeping there. In fact have you ever heard of the bee eating cane toad? Well we're going to learn about that but first let's catch up on some beekeeping news from around the globe. According to a study led by researchers at Penn State, diets rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids may help protect honey bees against the toxic effect of pesticides. The study, published in the Journal of Insect Physiology, described the effects of diets rich in various fats, saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated fatty acids.

2:12 on bee survival after exposure to a popular pesticide. The team found that bees fed a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids had a 90 percent survival rate after exposure to the pesticide, whereas fewer than 50 percent of bees fed diets high in saturated or monounsaturated fats survived. So get your bees eating the right kinds of fats. Next, dieticians have been studying what is the healthiest kind of honey. Here's what they've come up with so far. Dark, unfiltered honey, which gets its color from the type of nectar used to make it, may have more health benefits than other types. The differences though are likely modest, the experts say. Dark honey varieties tend to contain higher levels of antioxidants. These include honeys like buckwheat and manuka, among others. And when honey is not filtered, it also means it's going to have more pollen, enzymes, and antioxidants.

3:21 Lastly, from Japan, they have just found a fossil that fills the two million year gap in honeybee history. Archaeologists recently found a fossil dating back between 2 .8 and 2 .2 million years ago. Preserved in siltstone the specimen shows a worker bee roughly 10 millimeters long with wings hind legs and body segments clear enough to allow detailed comparison with living honeybee species. Based on wing vein patterns and leg structure, researchers argue that the fossil bears a strong resemblance to a honeybee species found today only in the Philippines and Indonesia.

4:07 So there you go, you're caught up on a little bit of honeybee news from around the world. Now let's go down to Australia. I'd like to welcome back to the show Cedar Anderson coming to us down from Australia. How are you today Cedar? Great thank you and thanks for having me again. Tell us exactly where you live because we're going to be talking a little bit about beekeeping in Australia today among many other things. So we're in a small town called Byron Bay, which is on the east coast of Australia. In fact, it's the most easterly point and it's a very green wet area usually, although we can get severe drought as well. But normally we have a lot of rain, a lot of things flowering actually all through the winter time. So it's a subtropical region. We never have to feed the bees here because their flowers tend to go quite well actually even through the winter. Sounds a little bit like paradise. Look it certainly is and I think that the bees think so too at least they did till Varroa came to the shores a couple of years ago. We're going to be talking about all kinds of things today but as long as you brought it up let's talk about Varroa in Australia because for those that aren't familiar there was no Varroa on your whole continent until what, three years

5:37 ago? So that's it. Yeah, it came into a place called Newcastle, which is in New South Wales, the state that we are in, and it's slowly been spreading out. I mean, having said that, it travels as fast as a truckload of bees do, but there was a big effort to actually contain it. But unfortunately the detection was far too late and it was already off and racing and it was too hard to control the movement of hives. So there was a big effort by primary industry and they burnt 10 ,000 hives, then decided that it was a loss. So Varroa is now part of this continent, just like it is for yours. And it's slowly spreading out. We had that come to our region a year and a half ago, specifically to where we are. The buildup phase was quite a thing. I don't know if you were beekeeping when Varroa hit your area, but basically what happens is a whole lot of hives start getting weak and dying out from Varroa.

6:50 And then your hives, even though you're trying to manage them well, go. and collect the remaining resources, the honey, and bring back the mites. Then we have those small hive beetles in our area which then decimate those wheat colonies and you get thousands and thousands of hive beetle larvae crawling out into the ground and then you get a hive beetle boom. So what was happening for us is it was the hive beetles that were taking out the hives, not the varroa, even though the varroa was the catalyst and is what weakened the hives. It sounds a lot, obviously, like what happens here. We often say, oh, winter killed my bees. But it probably wasn't winter. It was probably the fact that they were very weak from a varroa load in the fall. And that weakness meant that they weren't as resilient against the winter weather as they normally are. That all just sounds too familiar. You mentioned about 10 ,000 hives were burned. I read some things that made it sound even worse than that, like 100 ,000 plus hives. Was that just hyperbole by our journalists or something? right, you could be right, there was big effort actually to contain it and unfortunately it didn't work out. There is a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel for us and we're seeing that now where all of

8:20 a sudden the hives are looking good again, the Varroa numbers are stable, there's hives we haven't done anything to for three, four months now. And they're getting a wash count of like two or four mites, you know, and that is really different to a year ago when you turn your back and there's a count of 200 mites in the hive. So the buildup phase, hopefully, is mostly over for our particular area. But if we travel just further north, even just three hours drive, they're right in the thick of it now because of the way Varroa has been spreading out. Eventually, and I hope it's this coming season, we join the rest of the world with more normal beekeeping, with Varroa being a part of it, but not necessarily the big scary monster that has been in the build -up phase here. It'd be interesting to know what it's like for you where you are in terms of is it something you're managing often or is it something you need to manage Varroa twice a year or what's kind of normal? Not just here. I'm in the state of Utah, but over most of North America The idea is you have to be on top of it all the time And that doesn't mean that you're treating all the time But it means you've got to do your might counts and you've got to know what's going on So when our bees come out of winter, we need to know where they're at in the middle of summer We need to know where they're at. I'm a believer in treat if they need to be treated and don't

9:54 treat if they don't need to be treated. Now there's people on every end of the spectrum that never treat or that have some kind of an IPM that they have in place that just doesn't include any kinds of chemicals. There are other beekeepers bless their hearts that feel like hey there are always mites so I'm just always going to treat. So there's every end of the spectrum here but there isn't a particular like hey we have to deal with it once or twice a year. If you're in a cold climate especially and you wait till fall and you do a mite test and it's high it's probably too late.

10:36 It's time you can okay let's let's get those honey supers off let's get some treatment on and let's see if we can knock this stuff down but it may be too late. So make sure by mid -summer the varroa load is in a good place and just keep it that way going into fall. That's kind of where we're at. Tell me what kinds of treatments that you're using there in Australia. So for me personally, I want to keep things organic, so I was using the organic acids, formic acid and oxalic acid and really experimenting and learning and finding that the formic acid really does knock the mites down extremely well. Even under the caffeine, we were digging out the pupa and counting how many mites died and so on and getting scientific about it. We're really finding the formic acid does a great job. of knocking down the mite load from potentially, you know, it could be at 30, it could be 100 in a wash, and it'll be right down to two or none after a couple of weeks.

11:44 That said, there's seemed to be like a 10 % chance of losing your queen in that process. So that's the complication with formic acid. Another thing we've found with formic is a lot of flow hive customers would just put it in the tray in the bottom, which means they don't even have to open the hive to apply it. They put the formic pad or two down in the tray and the next day it's literally raining mites into the tray. So it works very well from that area, which means it's just quite a user -friendly way to apply that treatment. And other people were experimenting with, well, okay, if it rains down just overnight, how about we just use it overnight? And that seemed to be an effective way. Even though this is all off -label treatments, it's quite interesting to see how people are using that formic acid.

12:43 With the idea being perhaps if there was less exposure, there's less likelihood of losing the queen, but it did a good job of knocking down the mite load. And then there's oxalic acid, which in the form of strips, which seems to be good for just holding the mite load low once it is low. And then the fogging seemed to be useful as well. If you're prepared to buy one of those fogging machines, you've got to get the gas mask and all of that. But once you invest in that, then it's really quite quick. You can just go along and it's 30 seconds or so each hive. So if you've got a number of hives, that seemed to be a useful way. Of course, you're only getting the phoretic mites, the ones on the bees, you're not touching them under the capping. So you've got to come back in a week and do it again and perhaps in another week.

13:26 And that seemed to work well. There's also a drizzle available which I didn't really use. I'm glad that you guys have been able to learn a lot from us, just the things that we've learned over time. And I will tell you watch out for resistance, whether it's formic or something else. The mites can develop a resistance. There's a lot of people that have been like, hey, for the last five years, I've used the same treatment. It worked every year. I know it works. So I'm going to keep using it. And then all of a sudden, one year, it doesn't. So keep an open mind to all of that and keep experimenting because we do not have it 100 % figured out. That's for sure. Or it wouldn't be a problem. Absolutely, yes. We're experimenting around the clock here, trying to work out the best ways to approach it and trying to work out the best information to put forward to those that are just getting the varroa now. It's been quite an interesting journey. Of course, we wish it hadn't come to the shores, but we've certainly learnt a lot more about beekeeping. having to really get intimate with pulling out larvae, pulling out pupa, checking it all out, seeing what's going on and actually having to do a lot more intervention in the hives.

14:49 Hopefully that will subside now that we're over that buildup phase and yes, forever we join you guys managing those mites, but hopefully it's not too onerous. in terms of the season and what we need to do. Of course, we've got a different season here where there's not much of a winter, so there's not that brood break that you guys get, which changes the dynamics a bit. In terms of resistance, well, we're already seeing resistance to the synthetics, bave roll, and amatras, where commercial beekeepers are already concerned about the next... next season, our spring coming, because they've already seen resistance to those. So that's, you know, only in a season or two that that resistance has built up. All right. Let's talk about some other fun things that you've been involved with. Last time we had you on, we talked a little bit about the Superlifter and I'll put a link in the show notes if people want to go back and see that because it is just the coolest thing, especially for those of us that are getting a little bit older and the back gets a little sore lifting those heavy frames.

16:07 The super lifter is just a really cool thing. But you've got a new book out and I've got a copy of it. I have to tell you, it's pretty cool. When I first jumped into it, I thought, oh, this is just a beginner book. And so I kind of was going through it kind of fast. Tell us about the book in general. You and your dad wrote it. What was the purpose? Who is it for? Okay, for many years there's been pressure to write a book and I guess we've been busy. We've been amazingly busy with the launch and the success of the flow hives and delivering all of those crowdfunding hives and then keeping it going. So each year actually the publisher would come and say, hey, we need to write this book. And then no, no thanks, no thanks. A decade in, and we finally went, yeah, okay, okay, let's write the book. It would be appreciated for our customers, for those that really like to read. an overwhelming amount of video training content, both on the beekeeper .org and on our channels and all of that. And that's been amazing. But for those that like to read, that's what this book is for. The aim of it is it's an inspiring read wherever you open up to. There's amazing things about bees that have that curiosity angle and that inspiration.

17:35 And we want people that after reading it. almost have more questions than answers and that curiosity to just keep learning about bees, which is what it's all about, right? Not only that, we also want it to be a very useful manual, practical manual on how to look after your hives and specifically flow hives. which there hasn't really been in the world. There are some differences, of course, it's a beehive, there's bees, the brood nest is the same, but we've got a whole lot of information specifically to do with the way the flow hives set up and all the things were built into that.

18:17 We've also got the story. of the Flow Hive upfront, explaining the whole crowdfunding boom and how we raised $12 million in eight weeks of pre -orders of our Flow Hive and started with that crazy boom where we had to deliver 25 ,000 hives before Christmas and that story that you probably already know. It's one that you have to just take a great big breath. So many people are absolutely jealous. I mean, millions that have tried crowdfunding. and not had that kind of success. And then on the other side, it's like, here's a great problem to have. How do we deliver all of this merchandise this fast? And then it is a fun story and a good read. By the way, we haven't even mentioned the name. It's called Flow Hive's book of bees and beekeeping. And I'm just going to say it's not just for Flow Hive users. there's lots of good information about beekeeping in here. And one of the things that I liked besides pretty pictures is the fact that in the back there's an index and so you can look up Varroa, you can look up feeding, you can look up whatever and it'll take you to something. So that sounds a little bit like a college textbook but it's much more of an enjoyable read than that. So off the Varroa topic. Are there any other kinds of pests that are unique to Australia that I don't have to worry about here in North America or in England

19:51 or Scotland or wherever that you have to deal with that we don't? Yeah, absolutely. We've got all sorts of bee eating pests around and one of them is an introduced species called a cane toad. 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 a comb honey everything and I mean everything you'll need. But if you aren't there quite yet and the honey flow is right around the corner, 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 one of them is an introduced species called a cane toad, which has been spreading out from Queensland.

21:12 They are quite a large toad and they love eating bees. In fact, if your hives are just set up on the ground like bee hives often are, the toads will knock on the hive in the night. The bees will come out to see what's going on and they'll gobble them up and they'll do that all night. And I was around here two months ago and I happened to be at the hives at night and I took photos of there'll be 20 cane toads piled up at the entrance of the hive. I don't know how they don't get stung in their mouths or maybe they do and don't care, but they love eating bees. In fact, one hive wasn't doing so well. This is going back 20 years and I wondered why it wasn't. I lifted the box up. And inside was a cane toad that had gotten in the entrance when it was small.

22:03 It was living inside the hive, like this big scary monster. The bees had got to come through the entrance and they get gobbled up as they go. Normally the toads stay on the outside, right? And that's why we've built our hive stand basically sort of into the form of the hive. So we came along and went, hang on. rather than just a base that goes on a stand, let's build the stand into the hive. So that's what you see in our flow hives now and each corner has an adjustable leg and we've got levels in the side just to set it up nicely for honey harvesting and if you're drawing naturally drawn comb then having it level side to side is useful as well. But more importantly the hive is off the ground so those toads can't directly gobble those bees at the entrance. So what they do is they sit underneath and it's only when the bees are really building up and hanging down at night. So when they're bearding they'll actually come and start gobbling up that beard? Yeah, absolutely. So it's a little bit of annoying and it's useful as a beekeeper to go around and collect up those toads from time to time and lessen them. So that means walking around with a garbage bag and at night If they've got a torch shining on them, then they don't actually move. They stay still. So you can simply just pick them up by the back legs. You've got to avoid the poison glands, which are just behind their eyes. They do have a toxin. And you pick up their legs and you chuck them in the garbage

23:35 bag. And I've been walking around and my arms sore from the weight of the bag. That's how many totes you're getting. And then typically, I mean, there's all different ways. People say put them in the fridge to sedate them, then put them in the freezer is the most humane way, and then they die, right? Up in Queensland, there's certainly a lot of people who prefer to run around with golf clubs and things like that. This introduced species that does have quite an impact on local species that eat them. certain types of snakes, there's goannas, there's all sorts of animals that suffer from trying to eat those toads. So you find that they're decimating a lot of native species because they have that toxin and that poison. However, some are starting to work it out. And just yesterday I found one of these toads flipped upside down, their heart pecked out. So something And I think it's a native type of rat is actually working out how to flip the toad over, make an incision and eat the organs that it wants to. So over time balance will form again. We also have the rainbow bee eaters, which I'm actually looking at about 20 of them in a tree. They're beautiful rainbow bird and they like to catch the bees on the wing. Now, they come and go. They're seasonal. I don't usually worry about them. It's not something you need

25:07 to do anything about. I figure fair's fair. We've brought in Apis mellifera, the European honeybee. And if some of the native species want to eat some, then, you know, you're doing a little bit of a service there for those rainbow bee eaters. Wow. You mentioned snakes a minute ago. I see so many documentaries about poisonous snakes in Australia. It's like, you should be afraid to get off the plane or something when you get there because it's just, it's just crazy how many poisonous things there are. I had not heard about those toads. Do you have skunks there? No skunks. So I've heard they can eat a few bees.

25:49 They do a similar thing. They come at night. They scratch on the entrance. They don't knock like you were mentioning with the toads, but they scratch. Bees come out and somehow they can eat them up. And we do not grab them by the back legs and throw them in a bag. That'd be a horribly bad idea. You can imagine that with the skunks. Anyway. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, there's going to be predators. There's going to be mites or some other thing infesting. Gee, we hear about these tropy mites all the time now. We're keeping them at bay as long as we possibly can. There's the Asian hornets or also known as yellow -legged hornets, which we now have in the states, a couple of the southern states, and they're trying to keep them from spreading. The Asian giant hornets, also known as murder hornets, have hit our doorstep and have been kept at bay and hopefully that will keep there for a long time. But we do have something that I'm sure that you don't and that we have to deal with in most of the southern states here, and that is Africanized bees. You don't have those in Australia, do you? We don't. Give us a little rundown on the Africanized bees. So these were developed in a lab. I believe it was in Brazil many many years ago like 50 60 years ago and the idea was You had a beekeeper slash

27:20 scientist that was trying to do a hybrid with some bees from Africa mixed with Apis mellifera and Hey, we're gonna have something better that creates more honey and is still friendly problem was they weren't friendly They were really mean they escaped the lab and they have gradually made their way through Central America Mexico and now up here in some of our southern states, California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and they're pretty good bees as far as honeymakers and as far as reproducing and even have some good Varroa resistance to their genes, but they're mean buggers.

28:05 And that's the problem. And they've been known to, in some areas, actually, you know, do great harm to people and kill some people because they get really upset. And instead of five guard bees coming out and knocking you in the head or something, you'll have hundreds of them pour out of a hive and chase you quite a long ways. I'm glad I've not had that experience yet, but I've talked to people that have. The good news about that, we're going to have here in the next couple of weeks, some scientists on the show from University of California, Riverside, who are studying the genetics of some bees have hybridized on their own. So they're Apis mellifera with some of these, what are known as Africanized bees. And they've gone down many, many generations and they're finding that the temperament is getting better.

29:02 And the Varroa resistance is really, really good. Now what becomes of that over the long term? I don't know. If some longer term studies find this really is a thing and it's really worth it, are they going to start breeding them widely? And then we can buy these just like we can buy Russian bees or we can buy Buckfast bees or something else. So we'll see where all that goes. The genetics side is quite an interesting space and it's something we're interested in here. We've actually put funding a couple of years ago towards helping that space kick off here in Australia. And we actually have been purchasing in some queens that have been specifically bred for the Varroa resistant traits and now we're going through observations on those hives to see whether they're doing the uncapping behavior and recapping and so on in order to disrupt the breeding cycle of the mite. Australia is quite an interesting test case in genetics as well because the percentage of wild hives is so much higher. than a lot of other countries because we've got so much wild space. So we're going to get this natural genetic selection as well happening out there in the wild, which will then feed into the managed colonies as well. So there is high hopes in Australia that the genetics side of things will play a

30:34 good role in getting Baroa to a naturally resistant strain of bees, I guess. We're finding it can come from a couple of different ways. One is they can have hygienic traits. Another one is they can just be bees where Varroa doesn't bother them that much. I'm not using any scientific terms here forgive me people, but there are different ways that bees are dealing on their own with Varroa. All right, hey Cedar. Co -inventor of Flow Hive and all kinds of other things, Hive Lifter, Fun Book, any other inventions that you have coming out? Yeah, absolutely. Watch this space where we're working hard. We're working around the clock on non -chemical Varroa treatments.

31:25 So hopefully you'll see in this next year something very useful and easy for people to use. I've met with a couple of people that also have some. I'm not going to name names right now. When we're done talking here you and I'll chat a little bit about that because I'm curious where you're going and maybe a year from now we'll be able to talk about that. Before I let you go, we get to have a little bit of fun. Tell us about some kind of a wild and crazy beekeeping story that you've had. We want to remind everybody it is all about the love of bees and it's okay to have fun beekeeping. My memory fails me, but I think last time I was on your podcast, I might've talked about using the Superlifter, but I'll tell you about another story and that in the middle of the crowdfunding, because we had that insane success, we had attracted the media of the world.

32:18 We had like something like 10 new US publications every day were featuring us. And that meant from dawn to dusk. We were fielding media. Inquiries and only taking the good ones. You can't just be in the media all day. There's a company to run the staff issues. We've got to set up a supply chain to deliver 25 ,000 hives that we've never made before Christmas and all of that. Right. One of the ones we said, yeah, come on down was, was, uh, New York times. We said, yeah, yeah, you can come to our place and, and, and do an article. So they're all setting up. And I'm going to get one of the big honey jars, which is resting on a hive just down the way. And we don't have the Africanized bees here, but certainly the hives I used to keep were quiet, aggressive.

33:12 So I went to get this jar that was just sitting on top of another hive. What happened is I went to get the jar, bees got aggressive and started stinging me. And at that point, and I know these hives well, that the only way to get away from those hives is you've actually got to run through some foliage, right, and you lose the bees that are after you. Quite different to the lovely hives we keep now where you can almost be in that bee suit, right, and do your inspections. These were wild hives. straight away I dropped this jar, it was a big jar like this and it's smashed and I took off into the bushes and I'm running around trying to lose these bees and I get back up to where New York Times is setting up and they were looking the other way, they didn't see any of it. They could have made a great story about Cedar, this floe -hiving bender runs from his wild bees, but that was just kind of... illustrating what a crazy time it was where it was just one media thing after the other and that's one little memory that's stuck squarely in my head. And how did they not catch it? That's crazy. And it may have been embarrassing. You should be grateful for that, I guess. All right, a couple more questions here before we finish up. And one is, and you and I talked about this a little bit last time. One of the things that fascinates me about the Flow Hive is the fact

34:44 that I'm not just waiting till the end of the season, or at least I don't need to, to do one great big harvest, which is going to be a very multi -floral kind of thing. But when there is a flow on that is just one particular thing near me, as soon as that's over, I can drain those frames, right? And so it makes it easier to say, let's say from April 15th until April 30th, I've got this blooming. And then in June, I have something else blooming. Doesn't it make it easier for me to have, okay, let's get some of this honey and then let's get some of that honey? Absolutely.

35:27 And it's not something we set out to invent in a way. It happened by accident. The way you can use the Flow Hive, and a lot of people do, is you can harvest single frames to either a single big jar or to multiple little ones. But in doing so, you tend to isolate the flavors. And that's become an amazing bonus and a real joy with Flow Hives. You know, once upon a time, I used to mix the honey from 40 hives all together. I had a nine -frame radial extractor. I'd go through the hives, I'd spin them all out, and you'd get good honey. But to me, it's much more interesting. It has become an amazing thing to be able to isolate not only the honey from a single hive, but from a single frame. One will have these beautiful dark licorice tones. The one next to it, because the bees have been foraging on something different, might be a bright, light, very floral, blow your taste buds off honey. And to me, That is a real joy because you can bring all of those flavors back to the table and it tells a story of what's been flowering directly in your area.

36:40 And in traditional beekeeping, for most of us, that's just not practical. I'm not going to pull a couple of frames here and a couple there and spin them down and do all that. There's too much cleanup involved for me to do that. So I thought that was pretty fun. To me bees are incredibly fascinating and one of the really interesting things that I think we've still got a lot to learn about is the way bees are able to navigate so precisely and we all know about the waggle dance and the way they do their figure of eight and that axis to the Sun is the angle and that's all incredible, right? But what I've witnessed in my life being around bees so much is the level of accuracy of their information they can transmit to each other is a lot more accurate than what we understand. They do their waggle and a second of waggle is about 750 meters of distance. So we've got distance and now we've got direction.

37:47 But what I've noticed and through lots of examples, but One is, let's say you're in the shed, you're making a sticky mess, working with honey and a bee comes. A bee flies back to the hive, does a dance, tells the other hives, hey, there's easy honey to get in the shed. And they come and then you close the door and open the window, which might be just a couple of meters around the corner. What happens is you get a cloud of bees coming to exactly where they were coming in the door. And going, hang on a second, there's no honey here. So a bee goes back to the hive, does another dance and says, there's no honey.

38:30 Or more accurately, the bees find the bee in there that's giving the directions. They jump on it, hold it down so it can no longer tell the hive where to go. Another bee has in the meantime, a few hours later, found that just around the corner, there's a window. And that's the way in. Goes back to the hive, tells some more information. That tells me that the accuracy of information isn't only distance and direction. It's exactly where the window is in the building to fly in. To me, there's a lot going on that we haven't studied yet. And that is throughout.

39:13 bees in general. We've got a lot to learn about their brain, their capacity, their landmarks. There's new studies really showing how they are able to take in visual landmarks in a way that we didn't believe their brains were capable of. So to me, that's fascinating. They're so cool. And that communication, if we talk about swarm behavior, great. book on that is The Honey Bee Democracy, if you haven't read it. And it sounds like they're coming back from the scout bees or coming back from someplace they have found as a potential new home. And not just saying where it is, but saying either what's good about it or it's really good or something. We don't know exactly what they're saying through their dance, but they're explaining more than just where it is. Absolutely. Cedar, it's always fun talking. We'll check back in a while and thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me.

40:20 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 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 e - email erikatbelovebekeeping .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.