Winter Bee Prep & How to Make $$ Managing Beehives

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 the 100th episode of Be Love, Be Keeping presented by our good friends over at Man Lake. That's right, we are

1:31 celebrating our 100th episode in just under two years. We're so filled with gratitude for all of our guests. They are really who make this show great. But it's you our listeners who deserve a great big hand for making us the number one beekeeping podcast. We have listeners now in over a hundred countries, all 50 states of the U .S. as far away as places like Japan, Argentina, Israel, Singapore, even Antarctica. And I can't imagine there are very many bees there. By listening, you have joined a community of people who share a love of honeybees, other beekeepers and the natural world we live in. The goal of this show has always been to educate through interesting and fun conversation. When we started we were immediately available on all of the audio podcasting apps plus Man Lake's YouTube channel and over time with a lot of coaxing we added video which you can see on Apple Podcasts, Man Lake's Facebook community and our own Be Love Beekeeping YouTube channel. So Whether you want to see our guests or just listen while you're on the go, we are here for you. And a final thank you goes to Rob, Jenna, Rose, and all of our other great friends over at Man Lake who support the show. They truly are great partners in beekeeping. Today's guest comes to us from Connecticut and among other things we'll be learning all about how to turn your beekeeping passion into a business doing

3:03 hive management for clients. Thanks again for taking the time to join us and celebrating our 100th episode. I'd like to welcome our very special guest today coming to us from Connecticut on the East Coast of the US, Ryan Griffith. How are you, Ryan? I'm doing very well. How are you? fantastic and Ryan has been with us before and was one of my very favorite guests full of knowledge and fun and just somebody that you're gonna love for those that don't remember him from last time and we're gonna be talking quite a bit about winter bee prep but believe me a whole bunch of other things too today so Ryan I hope you've got your your podcast hat on because we're gonna hit a lot of stuff real fast today We'll get through it and we'll have fun doing it. But before we do, I can see up over your right shoulder, my left, you've got one of those pull -up bar things. Do you want to go do some showing off for us and do a few pull -ups first? I have a lot of honey to harvest today, so I'm gonna have a workout regardless. And we still do it with an uncapping fork, so I'm doing it. It's a full arm workout. I think I have to go through about 40 supers today, so that'll be enough workout for me. Yeah, we were talking earlier, beekeepers do not need to go to the gym. They're doing that all day long. Yeah, that arm bar is mostly for

4:34 my daughter. Old man strength kind of stuff. Exactly. Let's jump into the winter bee prep first. OK. And then I want to talk about hive management, which has come up a lot on the show lately, by the way. But you're in Connecticut. So for those that don't know your climate, give us a little bit of an idea of what fall and winter are like where you are. So this is a very loaded question in Connecticut, and most people don't realize that Connecticut actually has three distinct growing zones where northwestern Connecticut is actually zone five, southwestern Connecticut is actually zone seven. I could be literally in three growing zones in one day where I'm traveling, you know, all the way to the north part of Connecticut.

5:18 It's a very small state. It's just the way the wind comes off the Appalachian Mountains that affects the weather and also Long Island Sound. that affects the weather. So my prep has to be very unique and then you have the very micro climates that are throughout the state of Connecticut. I usually start my winter more in the northern part of Connecticut, let's say Goshen, Connecticut. That's generally when I pull the goldenrod honey in another week or so and that's the final harvest and I immediately go and feed two to one sugar and make sure they're stacked. A lot of those hives in the northern part of the state are a lot easier because they shut off very quickly. It's the hives that are near the water that linger because it's the warm water. The water in Long Islands Down can stay around 70 degrees, you know, into October. where it's a warm water and that's creating anything near the land and our farm is right on the water to stay warm. Even if you're on the water and you go four miles north of where we are, you're gonna see a temperature change, especially in the winter. You have to be very open -minded on what to do and you have to study every... in a case by case situational awareness. We manage, now we're up to 70 apiaries that we're managing. I say we, I have one person that does part -time help and my daughter's help a little bit. So it's mostly me. I first have to study the health of the bees. My hive management starts for overwintering in July. I have to make

6:50 sure that the mite population is down to near zero in July because in my climate, we start getting winter bees, the eggs are starting to get laid right around August. So if you're not getting plump bees in the beginning of August because you have too many mites or too many viruses, you're not going to have a healthy colony going into winter. So mites are usually addressed... in July. This has been a very odd summer for us in Connecticut. We usually have a very dry August. This August was very wet where we had rain maybe 15 days out of the month and we're used to having a dearth. The dearth would make it so there's not much in bloom and there's not much for the bees to forage. It's been quite the opposite where we are still seeing wet supers on a lot of our colonies. And we never actually had a pause, you know, throughout July, throughout August, there was still white comb on a lot of the colonies, particularly towards the shore.

7:50 And this created a great obstacle because that that little span where they shut down that honey production is great to really focus on knocking off the mites, putting on winter stores and getting them in the right direction to overwinter. This winter is going to be unique and this fall is going to be unique where they were just constantly producing. a lot of times in the middle of July we'll actually have to feed because the dearth is so bad we'll have 90 degrees for 20 days straight and it turns from flowers being you know very abundant with nectar to having nothing at all so this is going to be a very unique you know fall as i say that's first step control the mites worry about the food stores. And then we have the other obstacles like hive beetles. This is something that we never had a problem with. The hive beetles have really only taken hold since I think I saw a first contact in 2019 in Westport, Connecticut, where I saw a hive getting completely inundated. And I had a lot of old timers in our state. dismiss it, saying that will never be a problem. You're doing something wrong. This wasn't even a hive that I was managing. It was somebody that, a hive that I got brought in, help, we need to figure this out ASAP. I don't know what to do. And when I got to there, you know, there was three, 400 hive beetles in that hive and it was already almost a goner. There was not much you can do. we're starting to see them over winter in large numbers. They can travel large distances. It's not like the middle of the country where you set up 20 or 30 hives and then you might not set them up for another 10

9:21 miles or 15 miles. This is very much you might have four hives and a half mile away from there. There might be four hives and there's so many residential beekeepers in the area where I bee keep that A lot of the beekeepers don't have the same practices or are not on top of managing the hives. They're just, they throw the hives in the middle of their yard and they say, all right, hopefully we'll get honey. And they don't maintain them throughout the entire season. Or their idea of maintaining is... popping the lid and taking a peek and not actually looking at the brood and not actually looking at the, you know, the larva. I think most of disease management is from the larva. You can see anything wrong with a hive by looking at the larva. You're not going to necessarily see anything wrong with the hive just by popping the lid. One thing that You know, I was taught at a very, very young age is you may be able to tell something's wrong with the hive, but you won't know what it is by popping that lid. You can hear the sound when they're, when they're frustrated, when they're, they're upset, when they're angry, they kind of let you know that they're not happy. I know when I pop in a hive, something's wrong, but that doesn't mean I know what is wrong. You have to get in there and you have to look at the larva.

10:30 The larva is going to tell you the disease. The larva is going to tell you if they have mite issues. You can just see the mite frass if you have good enough eyes. You don't need to always do that 300 bee kill, you know, mite wash. You can see the issues right when you go to an area where the bees are hatching out and you see the mite frass in those cells and you're like, okay, we have a problem. Or you take the drone comb and you start plucking them out and you start seeing we have a problem. One of the issues we have where I am is not only do we have beekeepers that are not beekeeping and that could create mite bombs and obviously hive beetle issues. Have you ever seen a hive that was slimed out where thousands of larvae are just pouring out? I have only seen pictures luckily because where I am we don't have hive beetles yet. Cross our fingers you didn't used to either and hopefully we never will but I know it could happen even though we have cold winters here. but it just looks disgusting. I mean, the term slime out, it sounds bad enough. I think people know what it means. It's terrible. You can't even save the honey out of that colony. So the larva will actually get, and we've actually, I've made the mistake, because this was a learning curve. I didn't know any better. I had honey supers that I had set aside that I was going to harvest.

11:45 And I think I had them set aside for three or four days. In that time, it was only a few beetles got into that comb, started laying eggs and created a larva and it ruined every single one of those supers. And it's not something you can harvest because the larva is so tiny. It will get into the honey. It will destroy everything. So it is a very new issue that we're dealing with the Northeast. I know the South has dealt with it for a while, but they were prepared for it. And I don't think we studied enough because we thought the winners, there's no way they can overwinter. There's no problem. We don't have to worry about it. they are now overwintering in the hives. I will find them in February if I'm popping that lid open and I'm seeing one or two that are still alive. And I've even heard stories of them living through a Minnesota winter. They're gonna be capable of basically living anywhere in the Northeast eventually. So our friends up North, learn from us. So you don't put the supers to the side in a room temperature room or even hotter room because they can survive in the heat. You realize you're gonna have to harvest fast because if you don't harvest fast the entire harvest is gonna be ruined Which I hope what I'm saying right now might save somebody down the road and it's not something I ever anticipated So I want to summarize a couple of things that I'm getting from you as far as winter prep be on top of aroha If they need to be fed feed them in the colder areas that you're dealing with your zone fives Do you do any kind of hive insulation or anything like that? I do.

13:15 So I usually use a one inch board, foam board right on top of the hive. They do have a lot of expensive covers that do work really, really well. But when you're managing the amount of hives that I am, and you're as small of an operation that I am, I try to go the cheapest way possible. So the three things that I do is I do the foam board on top. And then you know the insulation bubble wrap that's reflective that duck workers use? that's in every Home Depot, Lowe's or hardware store. I use this one layer around the hive and that's going to basically seal up any of the wind flow of the cracks between the double deeps. We overwinter with double deeps or a deep medium. Closer to the shore, it's a deep medium. Up north, it's a double deep. We do one wrap with the bubble wrap, reflective bubble wrap, and that seems to do the trick. It's cheap, it's reusable, and it doesn't seem to bother the bees at all. And then we also use mouse guards. What I use for mouse guards is a little different. I'll use five sixteenths chicken wire. you know, the coated green plastic chicken wire, you can find that at a tractor supplier somewhere else. And I just cut it up into strips and then just cut it up with your tin snips and you put it right on, staple it on. I actually leave that on year round.

14:25 So I like to have my mouse guards on year round. It is a smaller entrance. I just use a wood block, not the typical notched out issue, but I use a wood block that gives a two inch entrance and then have the mouse guard that goes in front of that. That same seems to give them a big enough entrance to come and go where I don't have to worry about it. Sometimes there's roadblocks, but I keep that on year round and that is actually technically part of winter prep, but it's it's a year round thing. Let's say that colony dies out. I don't have to worry about a rodent moving in. and being an issue. And it will also keep out the bigger wasps. You know, we have European wasps where I live and that they are not able to enter the hive because of that chicken wire. And the drones are still able to get out pretty easily without a problem. But those are the three things that I basically have to manage and make sure of. I would like a hive to weigh at least 120 pounds. I generally lift each hive, you know, and I'm able to tell how much it weighs and how much stores it has. I do not try to break the wax seal between the top box and the second box after October. I try to avoid that at all costs.

15:30 One, if you kill the queen later in the season. And again, I think there might be a lot of beginners that might be listening to your podcast when you're doing your inspections, particularly now. you have to realize that the queen can be anywhere. She can be at the top, she can be in the top honey super. We do a lot of our end of the season harvests and we'll have half a brood frame up at the top. You don't know where she is. So when you're pulling supers, you have to make sure you shake all those bees into that colony and not in front of that colony, into that colony. Because if you miss that queen, that colony is almost surely a goner. They're not going to have enough time to make an emergency cell. and have enough drones out there in another three weeks, at least where I live, it's going to be cold.

16:12 It's going to start getting cold very, you know, the nights are going to be in the forties and the days are going to be in the sixties. We're not going to be able to create any more mated queens in probably two weeks from now. That harvest is very important that that you look at what you're pulling. And I see a lot of people that will say, well, there's brood up there. I have to let them hatch. And I'm like. consider that mite management. You're pulling brood out and you're managing mites because most of the mites are in the brood anyways. I feel particularly lucky if I see a frame of drones that's at the top and I'm pulling it out from a honey super. And I feel like that's great management to pull any of the extra mites out of there. And I also get to, when I bring it home, I get to go through those cells and see what the mite counts are in that hive. So it's dual active. I think for a beginner, mites are definitely number one.

17:00 but close number two is make sure you don't shake off that queen when you're harvesting or make sure you don't lose that queen or you're going in there too invasively because it'll look like that colony is alive well into November and that queen has been dead since the end of August early September and you wouldn't know any better especially if you're a beginner and you're not going through there so be very very careful on what you're doing when you're you're going through the hives. It's good to do a lot of your winter analyzation in August. Do your full checks some point in August, maybe early September. You look at the larva. you study to see if there's any disease. You're usually not going to have any issues with like sac brood or if you had EFB or God forbid AFB, you'll see the early signs usually around June or July from what I've noticed. And if, if there are any signs of that, you can deal with it, you know, usually in June and July by if it's August or September, if you have a bad issue with EFB, you're not going to save that colony. It's just not going to happen. Let me throw out some questions that I get asked often from less experienced beekeepers and there's a few here. One is we're recording this the middle of September and you've been telling people all these things they need to do in July and August.

18:15 So let's say they're listening at the end of September and they're going oh shoot I didn't do that or I didn't do that. Is there any way to catch up? I mean, you can still do some Varroa management, even if it's that late. You may be too late, but it's worth trying anyway. So if they can have a little bit of OCD, I don't have it. I'm very chaotic. That's why I plan ahead. If they can be very OCD with feeding, they have to make sure that there is enough food in that colony. That is a no -brainer. If they starve, they're going to die. I'd be very careful about putting any miticide treatments that are going to potentially kill the bees. So use something that's less invasive. I might use formic acid this time of year, but I know how risky it is.

19:00 A lot of times I'll use formic acid this time of year if I'm trying to change the behavior of a hive. It will knock bees down on purpose and it will basically wipe out any of the disease or the mites that are in that hive last minute. I also know it might kill the queen. So I'm very aware that I'm doing that. So if you're going to take the riskier approach, you have to be on top of it. You have to be in there maybe more than once a week and really seeing the progress. If you're in an area where you don't have high beetles, you can feed protein. I feed protein sparingly, but I'm only going to feed protein this time of year in areas where I can be back within a week. 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.

19:52 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. Man Lake, trusted by beekeepers since 1983. If I can't be back within a week, I'm going to come back to a whole bunch of hive beetle larva. that are basically all throughout the hive. So you have to be very, very, very careful in this time of year. I do love oxalic acid pads. It's something that I've been using for a while. I did a lot of research on Dr. Randy Oliver's site. And if you're on top of it and you do it properly, it does work.

21:15 You're not going to have a magic bullet. If you have a high mite population this time of year, you're going to have less of a chance to make that colony go over winter. And that's the reality of it. It also depends on where your climate is. If you're in North Carolina, you have a lot more time than I do. If you're in a southern area, you have more time. But if you're in a northern area, you might even have less time. If you're in Maine right now, obviously things are going a lot faster. Beekeeping has a lot of humility in it. You're going to have to learn loss. And it also has a lot of patience in there. So if you didn't get it this season, you know. maybe you plan it out better next season. And I have a lot of clients that go on vacation for a month in July and thank God I'm their beekeeper because I had other people that I took over that used to do that all the time and they were they were the beekeeper and they just let these colonies go for a month in July and you're still swarm season. It's not peak swarm season, but you could still get a swarm in July. This isn't something where you can just let it live. This is very, you know, manageable animal that needs help.

22:18 If you're behind the clock, you're going to have to get in there. You're going to have to really take pictures, send it to the master beekeeper in your area or somebody that knows how to teach you. There's a lot of us that are for hire that will go through your hives on a special day, you know, where we'll go through it once and we're not, you know, hired full time. It may cost a little bit of money, but it can get you in the right direction and save you that colony and the overwinter colony is so much more valuable than buying a package or a nuke or whatnot in the spring. because you have a head start. An overwintered colony in the northeast, you can turn into three colonies and potentially 200 pounds of honey. And you know they're strong. You know you've got a queen that knows how to do it for winter in your area. Yes. And that is a big, big deal. OK, I want to shift gears to that hive management that you just mentioned a minute ago. But first, in case anybody missed it, about two minutes ago, the quote of the day.

23:14 Beekeeping comes with humility, I believe is exactly how you said it. And that is so true. You can be a pro and have done this for 20 years and you've got a colony that dies over winter and you have no idea why. What did I do wrong? You may not have done anything wrong. They may have had some other kind of issue that's beyond your control, but a lot of things are in our control. And if we're the managers of the hives, we call ourselves beekeepers, but we're really managers. We're trying to be helpers, not trying to fix what they're doing. They already know what they're doing. We're trying not to screw it up on them, right? And we're not being good beekeepers or managers if we're letting things go. And we're all guilty of this. If we're saying, oh, crap. It's September 10th, and I don't know what my mite levels are right now. I better find out today. We can all be better. Yeah, I'm not OCD either. I'm all over the place, too. But thanks for the humbling, because beekeeping will do it to you. Let's talk about hive management.

24:21 A lot of beekeepers are, especially sideliners, are looking for a way... How can I make a little more income from beekeeping? I'm not quite there yet. And I've talked to a lot of people lately that are doing hive management. Somebody I talked to just last week, they're in Southern California. They're doing hive management in Beverly Hills. Okay, these are people with money that want to have the cool factor of a couple of beehives in the backyard. But they're not there all the time. They don't want to take the time to learn everything there is to learn. And they may not even enjoy cracking open a lid. So tell us a little bit about your hive management business and how you've grown it. And so on the East Coast, I guess the mirror area would be Greenwich, Connecticut.

25:13 I have a lot of clients in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a lot of clients in lower Fairfield County. One thing that I made a decision this season was that I was going to step back from a lot of the rescues I did. We did a lot of cutouts. I think we ended up doing around 200, a little over 200, between bumblebees and honeybee rescues between swarms and cutouts last year, which... Was a lot and it took a lot out of my body. A lot of times I'm setting up a staging, you know, scaffolding all by myself. This is a full -size scaffolding and it'd be five sections up and nothing I was doing was safe. And you can only imagine going roughly 25 feet up on a, on a staging covered in honey. And you're trying to extract a colony while you're using power tools and nothing is safe there. Was it lucrative? Yes. You know, if you you know, have a right customer, they're going to pay. And if you have somebody that says, well, I'm just going to spray them, don't be so quick and say, no, no, no, I'll take care of it. Stick to your guns. Because I've noticed a lot of people that say they're going to spray them. They don't end up doing it. And it doesn't take care of the problem. And if you can have the right air filter on and maybe a hazmat suit, you can still go in there and clean up the mess that they just made when the bees die. And it's it's the rotten honey is seeping through their ceiling. And now they have to spend $3 ,000 to get it all fixed. And what I say is you triple your price. The second they spray, you triple your price, whatever that price might be in your

26:44 area. That sets a precedence. And you make sure everybody knows that you're going to triple your price the second they spray. That's also going to get people to use less pesticides. A lot of these people are spraying from the inside of the house. Let's say a Yellow Jacket colony comes in from the ceiling, and it chews through the sheetrock wall. And they unload a can of Raid inside their bedroom. And I just baffled that. Do you even know what this stuff does to us? Did you read the instructions on there? And they clearly don't. I wouldn't sleep in your room. You just sprayed pesticides inside your bedroom. And they said, well, we didn't know what to do. I'm like, well, don't do that. I have different customers when it comes to maintenance. One type of customer is, you know, we have solar yards, but they have to have their agricultural certificate where they're doing some form of ag on those areas. and it'd be a solar yard where I manage a certain number of bees. I take care of the bees, generally I sell them the hive stand, I put the electric fence up, I sell them the beehives, and then I manage them for the entire, you know, however long they're going to be on that property, and they get to keep the honey. That would be, you know, just a typical... a lower rate than some other areas because I can just go into a locked fence. I take care of it and I don't have to deal with a customer. It's 100 % autonomous, basically. And I could actually send a worker there, you know, somebody that works for me to actually feed those bees or take care of them in the future. And then I have the other customers that maybe are celebrity status or, you know, hedge fund or they have a lot of expendable money

28:17 and they just want to keep their, the bees on the property and they want fresh honey off their property. And they also want to help create pollen. A selfish reason for honey bees is honey. A non -selfish reason is we've been talking for decades now that the native pollinators are gone. Whether we like it or not, there needs to be a replacement to those pollinators, and honey bees can step into that role. I think a lot of organizations try to villainize the honey bee, but in reality, those honey bees are still pollinating a lot of trees that... aren't actually getting pollinated anymore because there's no pollinators left. And that's where they can kind of be a, you know, a secret hero. They're not replacing bumblebees.

28:58 There's, there's not a high. And I started with bumblebees when I was maybe six, they've been dual saturated for years. And one thing I always try to tell the younger generation is, and I'll ask you this question, do you remember something in front of the gas stations in the summertime, maybe 20, 30 years ago? Every gas station had stacks of this in front of the gas station. No, I don't remember what you're talking about. the windshield wiper fluid because you had to replace the windshield wiper fluid because we would always get the insects hitting our windshields. And some people are like, well, the aerodynamics of the vehicles have changed. I drive a 2001 truck. I mean, that doesn't have a different windshield from 20 years ago. We've quietly watched insects population dramatically decrease where they're not hitting our windshields to the point where we don't need to change the windshield wiper fluid. And what's actually ironic is with synthetic oil, we're getting our... will change every 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 miles as opposed to 3 ,000 miles. So then it really hits home how little we're using that windshield wiper fluid in the middle of the night. A lot of times you would have to use the windshield wipers every minute because the insects were so bad. We don't see that anymore. There are some groups that try to villainize the honeybee and I think that they need to re -examine what they're trying to actually look at where honeybees are not the villain.

30:18 They are a great insect that provides great pollination. And this is what I'm selling to you is exactly what you would sell to your customers. If you want to make outside money, they are great pollinators. You want to have pollinators on your yard? We can do it. Guess what? They can also produce this medicine that you can eat that can keep you healthy. And it'll come right off your yard. And we'll produce it right off your yard. You don't have to do anything. We'll put them on your yard for a fee. We'll manage them. We'll make sure they're healthy. And we're going to extract the honey. We're going to jar the honey for you. And you get to keep it all. Working my bees, my genetics on somebody else's property is a great lucrative business model. We make a lot more than some of the companies that are racing around trying to produce honey and fill the stores with that honey. And that's their number one monetary source. we're doing really well doing this. I don't know how many openings there are, but I know there's a lot more openings than are filled right now for that particular job. People that are new at this, how do they figure out how to charge for it? And you don't have to tell us any secrets or anything, but people are wondering, what the heck do I charge?

31:32 How do I figure that out? Examine your job. Are you lifting heavy stuff? Yes. Are you putting yourself in a dangerous situation? Yes, you know, you're gonna get stung multiple times on somebody else's property. What is your time worth? If you're gonna be a good beekeeper, you have to be well -educated. Maybe put yourself at a rate that's comparable to, you know, your local nurse. Not quite a doctor, but, you know, darn close. My rate is a lot higher than anybody would imagine. I have different rates depending on what I'm doing and depending on where the area is. If somebody has me traveling... two to three hours to go to take care of something. Let's say I'm like Martha's Vineyard. Obviously, I'm going to charge a lot more. What I'm charging extra on travel time is how much I'm missing out doing with customers that are closer to home. This season, I kind of opened up the wait list where I said, all right, we're going to we're going to stop doing the rescues as much. And we're going to do this pretty much full time. As long as the rain is not. too bad. You're going to put in seven days a week, 12 hour days, maybe even 14 hour days. You're going to be exhausted.

32:40 There's a lot of times where I'm going to need a drink at the end of the day and also to flush out the venom. Days I'm still getting stung 60 times a day and it wears on you when it's every day. but it's extremely lucrative. What are you gonna charge? I thought I was too high when I started charging $40 as a side gig. Then I realized that it's not even close. I had a customer the other day that, and I'll just be honest, I said $125 an hour. And I felt like the way they looked at me, they would have paid me $250 an hour. In that particular customer, I guess I sold myself short, but I like to keep my rates at the same for all my customers in a certain area. I don't like to take advantage of anybody, and that makes it so most of my clients are through word of mouth. And they're talking to each other. So if you're charging somebody double, they're going to hear about it. They're going to resent you for that. Right. And you mentioned a wait list.

33:33 You only get a wait list when you've got a lot of good word of mouth. Was there anything else you wanted to finish up on hive management? No. I mean, I think we basically covered it. You really have to start in July. I would definitely. Spend the money to have each a master beekeeper and you're talking about how to make it lucrative that master beekeeper the person that's looking to make that extra money That's the person that you hire that can potentially make extra money in beekeeping something somebody That's a professional beekeeper that does this to make you know, at least a significant portion of their income Those are the people that you would hire if you're a brand new beekeeper. So that basically answers both questions at once. And make sure you're paying him well, because if that's his time, it's his travel time. And they're going to give you a lot of knowledge that could actually save your colony. If you care about these bees, it's worth the investment. Other things that I wanted to talk about, one of the obstacles that has to winterizing colonies is what I mentioned, the lanternfly. We're now starting to get their honeydew into the honey, which has an off -putting taste. It's another new thing for management.

34:31 issues. We better back up. It's been a while since I've mentioned lantern fly honey on here. But for those of us that know what it is, most people don't. So go ahead and tell them where does it come from? What exactly is it? And then they'll get an idea of why it tastes different. There's an insect from, I believe, Asia that is called the spot on lantern fly. And it started showing up in Pennsylvania and now it's just spreading across our country. It's moving about 10 to 20 miles per season where it really just, you know, takes over an entire area. Two years ago, you could track me on a map. It was heavily in Bronx, New York. And then last year it was heavily in Larchmont, New York. And then this past... it's really starting to show presence all the way up to Westport, Connecticut. It feeds on trees and it basically eats the dap from the tree and it shoots off a honeydew and the bees will actually eat that honeydew. So it's actually the excrement from the spotted lanternfly. Now there's a lot of signs that the excrement that turns into honeydew has a lot of health benefits.

35:37 It is apparently very healthy for us what it produces and the honey, funny honey that it produces. but it does not taste good. As you had mentioned earlier, it has a medicine -y taste. I think when you mix it with goldenrod nectar that already smells like dirty socks, and Japanese knotweed nectar that has a very strong, as I call it, a dessert flavor, you're going to have a very off -putting taste. And now we have to learn to harvest in between those different nectars that are coming in. And it's just one more obstacle that... It's just, we're just getting into the managing with hive beetles and now we have another obstacle that we have to basically pay attention to. And it's, it's all manmade. So a lot of the problems we have with honeybees is manmade. You know, the, the mites were introduced by humans.

36:22 The hive beetles were introduced by humans. The lanternfly is introduced by humans. Granted, we've introduced the honeybees into North America's, but they've had 200 years without any of those issues. So. It's kind of our job to help manage those issues because it's our fault. But the second thing that I wanted to put on the radar is we have a particular type of honey that is getting analyzed by the University of Texas. I have a doctor friend that is doing a lot of research. I've already did research on it and I had it tested and we're trying to have three different companies that test it. Japanese knotweed might have some really exciting news going forward that potentially we can raise the price for that particular type of honey. Hopefully it shows that it can have some great health benefits for us that were not seen before. But the AAS is basically studying the sample right now. And I'm very hopeful that I can have some great news coming forward. This is big. We'll get you back on the show like next spring or something whenever you have some news and want to talk about it.

37:24 Japanese knotweed, I don't understand scientifically. what it does or how it works. All I know is my wife has some chronic illness issues and she takes a lot of supplement and Japanese knotweed is one she takes every single day and really believes that it's helpful. So we'll learn more down the road. It's gonna be fun. There is a compound in there that does a lot of good. There's another product that has it. in there. I'm just not going to say too much yet. I'm not allowed to say too much yet. But Japanese knotweed is one of the biggest villains for invasive plants. And it does, the selfish reason would be it produces this great honey. That's good for us. The non selfish reason, you know, across at least the Northeast, we've made all these green lawns that are a void of clover and there's not much blooming when Japanese knotweed is blooming. And if you ever go actually look at Japanese knotweed blooming, there's so many different species of wasps, hornets, and bees that are going there because it's literally the only source of nectar in the area. These colonies are starving and this is where they're producing a lot of their queens. So everybody talks about not having enough bees and we talked about how the insect population is going down.

38:38 This is one of those plants that actually is helping the insect population create those queens, because we all know it's towards early fall, late summer when a lot of these colonies, bumblebees, are creating a lot of their queens and they have to go out and mate. So if they're not well fed, they're not going to produce proper queens for the next season. There's not much else blooming, at least in our area, other than that. Now, does it destroy riverbeds? Does it basically affect foundations? Yes. All those things are true. Is it an invasive? Yes. Is it non -natural? Yes. Technically, we're not natural in the Americas. So, you know, we could go technicalities all day long, but I do know what helps. other insects. I do know it is a prime nectar source for a lot of insects. And if what I think I know about this particular honey is true, that means that that particular nectar is helping those insects as well, if that compound has the same relation to how it affects us. Does that make sense? You know, where if the compound in that nectar is helping us, it might be helping the insects as well, making stronger insects. Because we don't really do a lot of studies on acute environmental factors, whether it be pesticides, or anything else that we're doing, how it affects insects, this might be something that counteracts a lot of those effects, which would be tremendous.

39:54 Absolutely. And to get back to that and something that you mentioned a little bit earlier about pollinators in general. And right now, honeybees are getting a little bit of a bad rap from some articles that I've seen here and there saying that they're pushing out these native bee species and these other pollinators and There may be some truth to that. I don't know. Here's what I do know. When I look at my own yard, for example, very early in the spring, we've planted pussy willows here on purpose because they are the first things that bloom around here. And I not only see honeybees, I see, I don't know how many different species of native bees, bumblebees, butterflies. I see all kinds of things and they're They're not chasing each other off. They're all out there at the same time. And the same with the mint that we have right now and other things like that. I just personally, I don't see it.

40:55 But some science says there's a problem. I've got to be careful because this is strong opinions. And I try not to say strong opinions on anything that's going to be published. But there's something that changed about our growing practices after World War II. The honeybees and the bumblebees coexisted fine. during World War II, and that's since Jamestown. So if you factor in the fact that there was more honeybee colonies alive in North America, particularly America, during World War II, and there's less colonies alive today, and now we're seeing that sudden shift, you can see that maybe... The honeybees are not the problem. And maybe it's a lot of other factors that we're not paying attention to. I would think that that argument would be a silver bullet because that's just the eye test. But a lot of people want to ignore a lot of the research that's right in front of you. A lot of the easy answers that are right in front of you. Well, you get more clicks if there's a good guy and a bad guy and a villain and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, the truth is there's about half as many managed honeybee colonies now as there were that many years ago. And bumblebees had no issue back then.

42:05 Yeah. And in the meantime, monocropping has grown huge. Herbicides, pesticides have grown huge, which goes back to your thing about the bugs hitting the windshield. It used to be in the summertime, I just remember every time I got gas, I'd pull out that, you know, that washer thing and scrub it on the windshield and squeegee it off. I almost never do that anymore. And the younger generation will have no idea because it was an inconvenience. It was one of those inconveniences that we would never think about to teach the next generation. I mean, we have a supercharged, very outspoken, energetic youth amongst us nowadays. And I feel like this is something that they can really latch onto and notice because if you have a generation that wants to protest all the evil or the bad things that they feel are in the world. What's worse than losing the tiniest creatures? If you can't protect the tiniest creatures, how strong are we as a species? If you can't protect... the weakest amongst us, how great are we with our morals? A lot of times when I say I care more about a certain animal, or I care how much an animal likes me, or I care more about the animals around me more than I do how the people like me. And it doesn't matter to me as much as that dog coming up to me or that, you know, that will be an insult. If a dog doesn't like me, I'll be insulted or a cat doesn't like me. I'll feel more about, I'll feel terrible about that versus if it's a human. But you got to take care of

43:36 the tiniest creatures to be better as a species. That's the way I look at it anyways. Hey, I know how busy you are this time of year. Well, all the year, but especially right now. And so I really appreciate your time. This, again, is Ryan Griffith from Necker's Farm in Connecticut. Thank you so much for being with me today. We'll do it again in the future. All right. Have a great day. I'm going to be spinning honey all day. Thanks again for joining us on the number one Be Love Beekeeping podcast presented by Man Lake. Another big thank you goes out to Vita Bee Health for their support. Vita's Varroa control range of products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan, Extended Release, Oxalic Acids Trips. If you haven't yet, hey please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion or a topic you'd like discussed on the show shoot me an email eric at be love beekeeping .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.