Regional Beekeepers Fall Roundtable 2025 (355)

355 - Regional Beekeepers Fall Roundtable

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. This is a special one. Twice a year, we invite regional beekeepers to the table, to the great big virtual Beekeeping Today table, to talk about their prior season. Becky, this is an exciting show. Our listeners enjoy it. We enjoy it. I'm looking forward to it.

Becky: I always love regional beekeepers because you all teach me something, because we are spread across the United States, and I'm just really excited to get going. Should we have everybody tell us who they are, Jeff?

Jeff: Yes, let's go alphabetical.

Becky: Oh, Ang, you win.

Ang Roell: All right. Hey everybody, I'm Ang from They Keep Bees. We run about 200 to 300 colonies in the northeastern part of the United States.

Jeff: Then we have Bonnie.

Bonnie Morse: I am Bonnie Morse with Bonnie Bee and Company. We're in California, north of San Francisco, and help manage about 350 hives.

Jeff: You are where right at this moment?

Bonnie: I am in Copenhagen, just finishing up on the Apimondia Conference.

Jeff: Hold that thought. We'll come right back to you. Sitting in Arizona, Duane.

Duane Combs: Yes. Duane Combs, Arizona Beekeepers LLC. I sell 200 nucs a year and some honey, and play with trying to keep bees cool in the hot summer.

Jeff: [laughs] Sitting down in Tennessee, Jay.

Jay Williams: Hey, everybody, my name is Jay, and I run two different lives. I run Williams Honey Farm some days of the week, and then other days of the week I work at a farm-based resort called South Hall Farms, where I manage collectively about 200 hives.

Jeff: Sitting not too far from me in Olympia, Washington, Paul.

Paul Longwell: Hi, everybody. My name is Paul Longwell, and I run about 10 hives in the Pacific Northwest, and it's a great hobby to do.

Jeff: Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. It's always enlightening to have you here. Becky, we were talking earlier. We are running a promotion right now with a new sponsor, HiveIQ, where we have asked listeners to provide us questions, and we answer their question. For those listeners whose question we answer on the podcast, we provide them a HiveIQ tool branded with the Beekeeping Today podcast logo. Today, we have a listener question. We are going to play and have the entire regional beekeepers provide their answers.

The lucky listener will get more than just our two cents worth; they'll get the combined five cents' worth of our beekeeping experts here around the table. Today's question is from Brian Schmitz of Orcas Island here in Washington State, out on Puget Sound. Let's listen to Brian's question, and we'll be right back.

Brian Schmitz: Hi, Becky and Jeff. This is Brian on Orcas Island in Washington State. Hey, I have a question for you. What does your overwintering hive look like? Thanks.

Jeff: All right. That's an interesting question, sitting here in the middle of October as you get ready for the winter.

Becky: I bet a lot of people's winter hives look different from each other's. I'm hoping that my winter hives don't look like Bonnie's winter hives, but I could be wrong.

Duane: In Arizona, I'm in an unusual situation. My winter starts December 15th and is over by January 15th. What I'm doing this year to make life easier is I'm consolidating my hives into three boxes per hive. I will manage them as triples until January 15th. Then, I'm going to split them into eight-frame deep boxes where I will put a feeder and five frames of bees and at least one frame of brood, and go from there.

Becky: Duane, do you need to feed those winter bees during that long, long winter month?

Duane: It all depends on the rain in Arizona. If we get rain, we have flowers. If we get no rain, we have no flowers. One of the honeys that I produce is creosote bush, and I've got 186 acres available of creosote bush. This year I didn't get any flowers because I didn't get any rain. You tell me what the rain is going to be like, and I'll tell you how much money I'll spend on sugar this year.

Becky: I will look that up for you.

Jeff: When do your rains usually come?

Duane: We've just finished the summer rains, and December, January, we'll start the winter rains.

Becky: Let's go to Bonnie so we can keep her awake because she's in a different time zone than usual.

Bonnie: Yes. No, I was about to follow Duane anyways. Our winter colonies for a full-size colony, we need to leave them about 30 pounds of honey. If they're smaller, we can overwinter two-frame nucs, three-frame nucs. It just needs to be about 50-50 brood to food ratio on those. That'll really get them through most of the winter. The big question is when we get into January, February, we have things blooming, but if it rains a lot, they can't get out to get to it. These bees start building up because it can get pretty warm. This year, we just had monster colonies, but then they'd get stuck inside with the rains and basically be on the verge of starvation. They'd go through everything, and that's when we need to feed. That's usually late January, February, but it really depends on the weather.

Becky: Then are you feeding a light syrup at that time or a medium syrup?

Bonnie: I don't usually feed syrup at all. We used to use just dry birch sugar because it was so easy to feed and just throw in the inner cover. Now, for the last three years, we're pretty exclusively just using fondant, the HiveAlive fondant specifically, because it's just so easy to apply. The bags don't go bad. You tear them open. You put them on when you're ready, and it's just really easy for us. That's what we tend to feed. Of course, if we have extra honey from another hive, at that time of the year, we clearly can't extract it because it's probably-- In the fall, we get coyote bush if we're lucky. We haven't really had coyote bush for three years, but it crystallizes very quickly in the frames. If we do have dead outs or have extra coyote bush, we generally will just feed that back because we can't do anything with it.

Becky: I think we've got a trend. Thanks, Bonnie. Should we go to Jay? Because Jay's a little bit warmer for a winter, maybe, than our next one, but cooler than Bonnie, right?

Jay: I am not cooler than Bonnie, but the area around you--

Becky: You're not cooler? Oh, you're right.

Jay: Bonnie could have pneumonia right now.

Becky: Bonnie's pretty cool. You're right.

Jay: She also has the best internet connection that we've ever-

Jeff: That is cool.

Jay: -had. Bonnie, I'm proud of you. It's a big day. Okay, I'll go next. We run many, many different varieties. I think the easiest way to explain or describe our system is by a 3:2 ratio. We run all eight-frame medium hives. In general, an adult overwintering colony is going to have three supers of brood or three something down below, and then a two super of honey up above. Those two supers of honey typically are about one and a half full. Those two supers fill about, let's say, 12 to 13 frames. If we have a really good year and the goldenrod is blooming, which it is right now, we get a little bit extra bump, we will go into the winter with two supers of honey on top of three supers of brood. We will also add a one package pretty much of HiveAlive, just like Bonnie.

We've had really good experience with the HiveAlive. I am now more at the phase in my life or career where I throw an insurance patty on there, a fondant, and if they don't want it, it's all good. It has proved very, very good for us. We also wrap our hives here. I'm like a helicopter parent. I wrap my hives with a bee cozy, I put the cortex board in down below, a mouse guard on front, make sure the ventilation is very, very good. That's something that I would stress to all listeners out there that are getting their hives ready.

I'm in a very, not volatile environment, but there's highs and lows all the time with our temps. You can have a day of 70 degrees in December and January, and you're like, "What the heck is going on?" The important thing is to maintain some sort of semblance of neutral in the hives. I find that wrapping and doing all these things protects them if we follow the 3:2 ratio. We also overwinter more nucs than eight-frame mediums. In the nucs, we try and apply that same sort of algorithm. We have three five-frame medium nucs with about two five-frame medium nucs of honey on top of that.

Becky: Jay, I just want to clarify. The way you're describing it, three, two, you don't have a queen excluder in there, do you?

Jay: No, definitely.

Becky: You let the brood nest go up into the two?

Jay: Absolutely. Yes. We don't use any queen excluders at all.

Becky: I just was a little curious. Are we going to Paul next? Paul is going to be warmer than Ang's wintering, I think.

Paul: What I'm doing this year is a little different since I only have a minimum amount of hives since I'm changing all my wooden wear over to HiveIQs for winter. I'll be running two deeps on them and a medium with a, what we call, a insulated bunker, which adds about an R22 extra installation on them. Then, I'm using HiveAlive fondant on them.

Becky: [laughs] Sorry.

Paul: Then on my AZ hives, they're typically three chambers. I'll knock them down to two, and then I'll put my feet up on the third chamber to get them through the winter.

Becky: Tell us about your winter bees, Ang. [laughs]

Ang: My winter bees, I keep these in two different systems. I have Langstroth 10-frame equipment. I generally run deeps and then mediums of super. Then I have box hive, Warre hive equipment. In the box hives, we generally do a 2:1 ratio, so two brood boxes and one super on top. We have a feeder box above that, and then we insulate with a 3-inch foam insulation board above that. In the Langstroth hives, we do double-deeps with a feeding rim, and then again a very thick 3-inch insulation board above that.

We have wrapped in the past, but we are in a very narrow valley next to a very big river, and so we find that moisture is more of an issue. We seem to lose more hives from wrapping than if we just insulate them really well above and make sure that they have a nice, serious honey cap on the very top. We have better success with just that insulation and the ventilation. All of our hives have mouse guards because if you don't have mouse guards, even if you just have wooden mouse guards, the mice will try to pull them out all winter. All of our hives have mouse guards. We use a half-inch chicken wire for that, and the Langs have just a bottom board with an open bottom, and the comforts have several entrances. There's usually one in the bottom and one in one of the top boxes that have a mouse guard over them.

The way I think about our hives is that our comforts are generally similar to what it would be like to overwinter nucs. What's really important for us is density of bees. Getting a scraggly hive through winter is not our priority. Our priority is to create a density of bees before the fall flow so that the bees can really pack it in to the point where they only have one or two blanks, and then we liquid feed them until early November, when we really start to get consistent frosts that are freezing, and then we switch to either fondant or a mountain camp method.

Becky: Could you explain mountain camping to people? I think people understand fondant.

Ang: We take granulated sugar like you would use to make a liquid feed, and we mix it with just a tiny bit of vinegar and some essential oils. We blend that so that it's like play sand. If anyone has a toddler, they know what I'm talking about. [laughs] It's got a moisture to it that it sticks together a little bit, but not too much. We pack that into the feeder rim of the hives. That's really, as Jay was saying, an emergency or insurance policy for us that acts as something the bees can draw on if they do get through all of their food.

For us we have two experiences of winter. We have a long winter, and it's quite cold. If you're losing bees to mite pressure, you're going to lose them before December 1st, in my experience, in the northeast. That means that either you didn't manage your mites well in the late summer or you didn't manage your mites well in the fall. We rarely lose bees then now that we've got our mite management system locked in. Where we tend to lose bees in the late part of the winter because we have these huge temp spikes, where it'll be 70 degrees for two weeks and then negative 20 for a week. [laughs] It's completely bananas. We'll tend to lose more of those.

We run Carniolan hives. They tend to run a smaller breed nest. We tend to lose bees to starvation right around then. The mountain camp we found is a security system or an insurance system for before we can start to feed liquid, that will keep those nucleus colonies alive until we're getting into a little bit more flow and getting into a space where we can start to feed liquid feed.

It's been a good insurance policy. I don't think it can be the only thing. That is why during the fall flow, we're lightly feeding a one-to-one syrup. They take it if they want it. They take it if it's too cold to forage. They take it if it's rainy. Whatever the case may be. They don't take it if they don't need it. Then, we're continuing to feed that 1:1 until about October, and then we switch to a 2:1 or close to it, and then we switch to the fondant once we really start to have those hard freezes.

Becky: Does that consistent feeding help with robbing at all, do you think?

Ang: A little bit. I think that it's always tough in October. Right around now and through the end of October, it used to be quite cold, and so they would be clustered. Now, with the shifts in temp, what we are seeing is that it is warm. It's going to be 80 degrees today. It was 80 degrees yesterday. It's going up to that temperature and then back down into the 40s. I think it helps with the amount of food that bees will eat overnight, to not be eating everything that they forage. I think it nominally helps with the robbing. It keeps it down. I do find if a hive is weak or if it has some points where it might be leaking a syrup or not quite shored up in the way that it needs to be, that they'll still continue to pick on those less resilient hives.

Jeff: I think our listener has many options to choose from. I hope that they heard an answer that they can use. It's about the time we needed to hear from a couple of our sponsors, and we'll be right back, and we'll talk to our regional beekeepers right after this.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Thank you so much for sharing your winter hives, but now let's talk about the bad stuff. How about we share what did not go well this year, or just some regional problems that you're seeing? If we'd say that, then we can end with maybe a more positive question. That's my goal. I don't want to end this episode on a downer, so this is your window to talk about whatever went poorly this year.

Duane: Heat is always our problem. We didn't have rain this year. A very dry year, so food was a problem. In terms of heat, I did three things that I can talk about. One is I moved bees up north. That worked really well in terms of solving my heat problems, but there was no feed up there, and so I was running 90 minutes up the road once a week to drop food off. They still didn't get enough that they really grew fast.

Second thing that we did was I got curious about how hot does an empty hive get. In my backyard, I put a model of a Shelley Hive, which is a concrete hive. I buried a motherload plastic box and put a Bee Smart lid on it, and then I took a foam box and put the Bee Smart intercover cover and bottom board, and took the temperature every day. The conclusion I reached is we had a relatively mild heat year this year. We only had about one week where the temperature was above 110, and yet the hives were still regularly hitting 113, 115. That's a problem.

What I'm doing next year is I've got some hilly land I own, and I'm going to build bee basements for my bees. I'm going to dig a hole, put a roof over it, put 3 feet, 4 feet of dirt on top, and keep my bees there so that they're in a constant environment, because one of the boxes I did was I put it in the ground, and it worked very well until the ground heated up and ground held the heat, and then it didn't perform well. Then, the second thing I'm going to do is put bees on a trailer, and I'll put them where food is. This year, I put bees on gourds and produced gourd honey, which is pretty tasty. When we hit a hot patch, I'm just going to move them up north for a week or whatever the short period is to get them out of the heat. That's how I'm solving heat in the great desert of Arizona.

Jeff: How about Jay?

Jay: This year was very challenging for us in the Southeast or in Tennessee, mostly because when we typically are treating our bees or testing for our bees, it's right after we take honey off. In my area, where our system is, we don't harvest until essentially July 5th, the end of the season, so we can get all the flavor profiles packed into that one honey. Generally, we take off the honey, and then right away, as we take off the honey, we try and use Apiguard. This is, by the way, in hives where we have a increased Varroa load, so about 1.5% or more we will treat. We don't just treat everybody.

When we have a Varroa load that's above 1.5%, we put the Apiguard on, we come back in 14 days, and we always retest to make sure we effectively got rid of that Varroa count or did we drop it. We found that we didn't after 14 days, so we had to put another cycle in there of another 14 days. This cycle of 30 days now, that we've just gone by, during that time, at least in Tennessee, our heat indexes were essentially 110 almost every single day. As soon as we put that Apiguard on there, basically, it was gone in a very, very short amount of time. We did not get our full 14-day dose because it vaporized or off-gassed right away, and we were behind the 8-ball the entire time.

Then, cut to a month into it, basically, August 5th, August 10th or so. Now we're like, "Now, what do we do? We got to switch to something else." The way things were going, it was just complicated in how we were going to treat. I never thought I would be treating with oxalic acid in August or September, ever. Never done it. It's something that I do in January or so when we're completely broodless. We had brood on the hive, and yet I don't use synthetics. I've never used synthetics in my entire life. I was going to try and do something along the same lines. What it made for is multiple cycles of OA every five to seven days.

We also were going off of old dosage readings, and I think now the dosages have changed. I'm not sure what we're actually allowed to talk about in public, but I was doing a lot more or I did a lot more this year than I ever have before because of the stuff coming out of the University of Florida that, in my opinion, backs up a larger dose than I've ever done. This is really different.

Jeff: Jay, I was going to ask you if you're doing OAV or are you doing OA dribble?

Jay: I'm vaporizing. I've found that I like vaporizing. It's not as hard on the bees, but that's just me. We're vaporizing. It's still really challenging. We had numbers that were insane. We're talking like 20% infestation level. That, to me, means this hive is not going to last. It's very, very alarming. The point of bringing all this up is that we are very much in tune with our bees. We are easy-checking every single time we do something to find out if what we did actually worked.

I'm very concerned about the newer beekeepers out there that think, "I put in a gel of Apiguard there, and we're good to go." I'm very concerned with what's going to happen this winter and going into next spring if all those new beekeepers that I helped and I trained, or whatever, that said, "Yes, I'm good to go." Are they truly good to go? Because in the end, a lot of this maybe isn't their fault. The weather was really challenging this year and really threw us a bunch of curveballs that I feel like we are still fixing, and we're getting to that point of no return. Kind of like what Ang is saying, if you don't fix this right now, you don't come out of this, you're going to lose that hive.

This time of year, at least, when we are operating in the yards, it's a little bit more cutthroat. You got to rip that band-aid off. If this hive is too small, you got to combine it, you got to get rid of it, you got to clean, whatever. You got to make hard decisions because I am much better off if I combine a bunch of colonies together and then split them out in the spring, then if I'm like, "All right, let's see what happens." Again, similar to Ang, I run pretty much all Carnis, and Carnis overwinter a lot smaller. They're a lot easier in my opinion because the clusters are smaller. I still have challenges. That's a long way of saying, every single year I do this, it's a learning experience. This one was no different in challenges, in every single way.

Jeff: Thank you, Jay. How about Bonnie?

Bonnie: As I mentioned in our spring session, we had record overwintering success, and we were actually concerned about what we were going to do with all these bees. They need to be split, and where are they going to go? The record overwintering success was followed by record lack of queens returning from mating flights. We usually get at least about 80% and we were lucky to get 40%. Early in the season, it made sense because we had some cold, rainy weather, so maybe it was more difficult for the drones to smell the queens, find them. Maybe it was harder for the queens getting out on mating flights. It made no sense to me once we got into summer and the temperatures were little warmer. We didn't have those cool temperatures.

I'm still struggling to find an answer to this. Are birds getting smarter? Are they teaching their young where these drone congregation areas are? I really don't know, but it's shocking to me that successful returns were just so small. Varroa doesn't seem to be as much of a problem because we had some very long broodless periods, and if you weren't checking these colonies, especially for newer beekeepers, if they didn't time it right to check them and make sure the queens had returned, and if they didn't have the resources or to find the resources to give them to try again. So many colonies just turned into either laying workers or the queens just didn't go on mating flights and were drone-laying queens. That was a real challenge this season for us.

Jeff: Paul, how about you?

Paul: This year was a little different. Basically, my problem was weather. The bees would turn around and put a lot of weight on the hive, but then we'd have a rain cycle go through, and you'd see all your honey come right back out of the hive. It was off and on, and then everything was being delayed. Flowers in the garden or plants in the garden were just sitting there, so we had a lot of resources that we had to deal with. We had to put actually some feed on in the spring to turn around and get the hives going because they're building a lot of brood, but they're not bringing anything in, so that was my main thing.

My other big problem was my friend, who lives just a couple miles away from me, got rid of the honey house. That was my big problem is "What equipment do I take out of the bee hut to turn around and build a new honey house so I could turn around and harvest anything that comes out of them?" That was my big issue this year.

Jeff: Funny, I had the same issue. We'll have to compare notes sometime. Ang, how about you? How was your season?

Ang: I would describe my season as a little bit chaotic. We came out of last fall. We had a number of hives in western North Carolina; they all got washed away. Then we had some hives in Florida that were impacted by hurricanes as well. We started out the season rebuilding from what we had. We have many delays in recovery funding because of reasons. We started out the season really recovering from what we had, because of the level of uncertainty with what was going to come through when, and not wanting to put our horse before our cart, essentially.

That meant that we were making a lot more splits and rearing a lot more queens than what we usually do because we were trying to double what we reared so that we could make up our losses and still sell our queens to our customers throughout the season. That went pretty well, except we hit a threshold sometime in mid-June when we have the black locust nectar flow here in the Northeast. It doesn't hit every year, so when it does hit, it tends to hit very robustly. This year, it was a really robust black locust here, which means we go from blackberry and raspberry blooms into black locust, and it was just this explosive nectar flow. It only lasts a week or so.

We had hives that were-- Speaking of queens not coming back, queens were coming back from their mating flights, laying like five eggs, and then immediately getting pushed out to swarm-

Becky: Oh, no.

Ang: -[crosstalk] new place colonies, because they were just backfilling everything with nectar before we could get there and give them space. Because we had so many more hives trying to make this recovery push in nucleus form, rather than in production form, we very much spent the spring and early summer just chasing our tails, trying to catch up with ourselves, pulling swarms out of trees.

In the place that's our home apiary, we just planted 100 chestnuts. They're about three years old. They're probably like as tall as me. I'm like 5'4. Every morning in June, we'd go down to the mating yard and walk around, and they'll be at least one swarm on a baby chestnut, so you just get some boxes, shake it out, put it over here. That just was like part of the morning coffee routine, at least for the black locust flow. At some point, it just became comical, like the point where you're trying to catch up with yourself, and then you're like, "This is ridiculous. I'm never catching up with myself." That's when it finally started to slow down a little bit.

Just like Bonnie, because of those many broodless periods, we had low mites go all through the summer. I did see an uptick, not just with our bees with mites, but I do a lot of mentoring and talking to beginning beekeepers who weren't seeing mites all summer or were seeing low mites all summer, and then quite a spike in late August and early September, which I don't think of as abnormal anymore. That just kind of is. There's a moment here where there's a little bit of a dearth before the fall flow. When you're going to see stress and high mite load, it's like those two weeks.

We have a really locked-in system for how we deal with that. That includes genetic selection, mite management, the earlier season brood breaks, and how we manage for density of bees. Several of my mentees, I think, similar to what Jay was saying, it's like they thought they could just put on an oxalic extended release or do one treatment in the summer. They check that off their list. They don't have to do anything else, and then they're emailing me or messaging me like, "There are tons of phoretic mites all over the adult bees." I'm like, "Have you tested the bees again after you did the mite treatment?" They're like, "No." I'm like, "Okay, but you got to manage them."

It's just tough because there's such a learning curve of you can't-- it's not just a checklist that everything has to be done on a certain date. It's a relationship of care, and you really need to be tending to and observing them and managing them. It takes several years to really get a system locked in where you're responsive to the season enough that you can understand, "Okay, these signifiers, this heat or this drop in temp or this flow flowing or this drought, making this flow not flow means I have to be responsive in a different way."

I think part of having a chaotic season is really embracing that responsiveness and actually learning, like, "I actually have it locked in pretty good. I know what the signals are that I need to respond to at this point in my career, and that feels good. Even if things are chaotic, I still have that capacity to hold down being a responsive beekeeper and providing that care."

Jeff: Is there anyone there using oxalic acid?

Ang: Some of our folks is like they've started using those oxalic extended release, but they would open a package and then they would leave it open. I think they were technically applying something that was like it's not shelf stable once it's opened, so the efficacy of that treatment is just tanking. They're like, "But I just used the one I used in June." I'm like, "That's not really how chemicals work." I really think there's still a bit of a learning curve with how we're using and applying oxalic and what the methods and the methodology are, and how we're teaching people how to use that as part of their mite intervention. It's just like, it's taking some time, is what I'm noticing.

Becky: Also, that Varroxsan is supposed to last; it could last over 50 days, but if your bees chew it all up and get it all out of the colony within the first week, it's not going to work. Sometimes they chew the tops off, and so it falls to the bottom board. Sometimes it looks like they didn't even touch it. You really do have to go into your bees and ask them, "What'd you think of it?" Because sometimes they are getting that Varroxsan out of the colony faster than you would like.

Jeff: Also, understand that it's a maintenance dose rather than you're not going to knock down 20% to 1%.

Ang: No, totally. It works for us because we also have a pretty significant period of broodlessness in most of our hives. It is a maintenance dose, but it's not formic. People are trying to apply it unilaterally, like it's these other chemicals that they've relied on for many years, and it's not working in the same way, because obviously, because it's a different chemical. I think we will see a couple of years of real learning curve about these newer treatments as they get introduced, and trying to figure out how people are using them, how people are using them well, and what our bumpers and guides for beginners are, so that they can use them well.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take our final break, and we'll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff: All right, everybody. It's been a challenging summer for everybody, and I think that's just beekeeping in general. It'd be rare to find a beekeeper who said, "No, I had a perfect summer." It'd be like anybody in agriculture saying, "Yes, it was a perfect season." There's always challenges that we face, and that's part of, I think, in some ways, beekeepers have been at it long enough, come to expect those challenges each season. Part of the enjoyment of beekeeping is overcoming those challenges and looking forward to the next season.

As we're sitting here in the fall of 2025, and we're expecting the winter here and looking forward to 2026, let's go around the table real quick and let's hear what you all are looking forward to in the coming season.

Duane: I had the beekeeper's miracle. I had a lady a mile from my house that has 45 acres of trees and horses, call me up and ask me how much I would charge her to move bees on her property. I told her I wouldn't charge her anything as long as I could leave bees there year-round. Now, what I'm excited about is we're going in a totally new direction. I've started importing honeys from Mexico, rare honeys, coconut, lychee, all kinds of stuff. What I'm working on right now is we're in the process of relocating our bees to their winter locations. As soon as we get that done by the end of next week, then I'm going to focus totally on selling honey and selling rare honeys. I've got a group that's invited me to share rare honeys with them, and that's on October 20th. We'll see how selling rare honeys goes.

Jeff: Paul, what are you looking forward to in the coming year?

Paul: Well, I'm hoping the Varroa treatment I did this year, and getting off my butt and doing the treatments when I should instead of letting life get in the way, I am hoping to have a greater success of overwintering my hives, so I'm not spending all my money at the bee supplier for new hives.

Jeff: Bonnie.

Bonnie: I really just want to see queens coming back from mating flights again. That's what I want to see. That would make everyone's life a whole lot easier, and it would be nice to see these, what are now empty hives, get filled again without a whole lot of work on our part.

Ang: Bonnie, have you had Julia Mahood come out and map your DCAs?

Bonnie: No, we have not.

Ang: He's there in Copenhagen, so maybe you guys can connect. She's a pal. Anyway, and if you want to connect [crosstalk].

Bonnie: Oh, sure, Ang. You should have told me that before. We're flying home tomorrow morning.

[laughter]

Ang: Well, shoot me an email. I'm happy to connect you, and I know she's been working on a project where she's getting funding to map people's DCAs, and it sounds like you could get a lot out of that.

Bonnie: I think it would be awesome. We've talked about that. I'm pretty sure there's actually one above our home apiary because it's not uncommon for us to find drones that have been through, obviously, some recent trauma.

Ang: Well, speaking of drone trauma--

Bonnie: Or ecstasy, whichever way you want to put it, but they've been through something recently.

Ang: Speaking of drone trauma, I'm looking forward to 2026, where we do a lot of germplasm collections. For the last two years, I've been studying instrumental insemination with Megan Mahoney. I've gone out to North Dakota. She's been here, and we've been practicing, practicing, practicing germplasm extraction and instrumental insemination here at They Keep Bees. And so, really looking forward to a broader implementation of that in our own system so that we can hone in on some of the Varroa Sensitive Hygienics traits that we've selected for and start closing our breeding pool a little bit. We're also hopefully going to be able to do some germplasm sampling in different parts of the US so that we can bank germplasm at the USDA's cryo preservation lab. Those are two things that we've got on the horizon that I'm really excited about, and I'm just excited to be a new and very fast learning beginner at something and beekeeping again.

Becky: Ang, that sounds like another good SARE Grant. Are you going to get some funding?

Ang: We have some SARE Grant funding, and it would be great if the government could stay open long enough so that we could get our disbursements, so that we can start the project, but still far.

Becky: Maybe by 2026, not kidding.

Ang: That is not proven. [unintelligible 00:40:52] the case. I think it will come together for next season, and we'll start in California. Another reason for us to connect Bonnie, and then we'll branch out to some other spots.

Jeff: Jay.

Jay: I'm excited about two things. Number one, when I got into this 18 years ago, everybody's bees were perfect. Nobody talked about Varroa, and everybody said everything is perfect in their hives, and one thing that I'm noticing these days is we're all very open about when we have problems and what our numbers are. We don't hide it and pretend that we're perfect, and I think it's very healthy, and I'm really excited about that. I'm excited to see more of that in 2026, especially with new beekeepers that we're trying to train to be open, honest, and stay humble. I really like that trend, and I'm noticing that at least in my networks, constantly. It's very refreshing.

The other thing is that I work very heavily in agritourism. That's pretty much the basis of most of my revenue, and the outpouring of support and interest in bees has never been stronger. It has not actually waned at all. People are dying to know more and come visit the bees. Our bookings on a weekly basis are just the highest they've ever been since I started doing this. In 2026, we'll probably start doing even more. You're going to think I'm a little woo here, but even more bee meditation. We are doing constant bee meditation, so people will come out and we'll meditate in the yards with the bees flying overheads, and it is very popular, and it's very rewarding. I'm loving every single minute of it. I'm excited for 2026. We call it Bee Still. It's really fun.

Becky: Wonderful.

Jeff: I love it. That's great.

Becky: I love that.

Jeff: Do you make them wear suits?

Jay: They start with suits, and in the end, most of the time, it's done when we're done. They take them all off.

Jeff: I want to thank everyone for joining us this afternoon. It's always a learning experience to hear from each and every one of you and everybody, even though we have common themes, everyone approaches a problem differently based on where they're located, and that is fun to hear. We'll be talking to you again, I'm sure.

Becky: Thank you, everybody.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today. Before we go, be sure to follow us and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcast or wherever you stream the show. Even better, write a quick review to help other beekeepers discover what you enjoy. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab on the top of any page. We want to thank Betterbee, our presenting sponsor, for their ongoing support of the podcast. We also appreciate our longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, Bee Smart Designs, and Northern Bee Books for their support in bringing you each week's episode, and, most importantly, thank you for listening and spending time with us. If you have any questions or feedback, just head over to our website and drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again, everybody.

[00:43:49] [END OF AUDIO]