Bee Smart Designs with CEO Cliff Struhl (295)

295 - Bee Smart Designs with CEO Cliff Struhl

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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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors.

You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey everybody, thanks for joining today. You might have noticed it was a little quiet at the opening of this episode. What do you think, Becky?

Becky: I think this is a theme that we have to really address.

Jeff: Yes, this is an issue. I don't want it to become a theme.

Becky: Okay, it's starting to be a theme. That's really because we have an issue. We need your openers, everybody. You can do it. Just go ahead. You can be in the bee yard. You can be in your bee truck. We don't care where you are, just open the show for us.

Jeff: That'd be fantastic. Yes, out in the bee yard with the sounds of bees and smokers. Be creative. It'd be a lot of fun.

Becky: No pressure.

Jeff: No pressure. Just send it to questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com and listen for your opening in a future episode. Becky, you do a great job on the newsletter. I give you full credit on the newsletter. All I do is receive it.

Becky: I know how to copy and paste your lovely summaries of the episodes. When you write the summaries of Honey Bee Obscura and Beekeeping Today Podcast and Two Million Blossoms, I'm just bringing it all together for those listeners who may be might miss an episode or maybe even just want to access the episodes via that newsletter.

Jeff: You do a great job. Not only is it just a straight copy and paste, we also include special discount offers from our sponsors. I hope our listeners look at the newsletter, check your spam filter if you're not receiving the newsletter.

Becky: I always worry about that because I've seen people sign up more than once. I'll add them to the list again, and it'll tell me that they're already on the list. I'm like, "Oh no, are we not getting through to them? Are we being misdirected into spam or trash or junk?" Hopefully, if you've signed up for the newsletter, look for us in maybe a place that's not your inbox.

Jeff: Newsletter comes out weekly along with the episode, usually in the afternoon of Monday afternoons, maybe Tuesday mornings. If you're not receiving it and you signed up, check your spam filter. Becky, I know you're excited. You've been excited since mid-summer, actually.

Becky: Early summer.

Jeff: Early summer. Okay, rub it in. Rub it in. How's the honey production there in Minnesota, Becky?

Becky: We weren't number five last year for nothing. It turns out that this is just such an amazing year because we had such a warm winter. We had lots of bees going into spring and we've had tons of rain, which it's worked in our region. I'm in the Twin Cities and I'm so out of equipment. This will just be a testament. Nobody's sending me, and I'm not asking for them, but I'm not getting sent free supers from our sponsors because I literally have to go pull supers, extract a couple hundred pounds of honey, and then go put them on another bee yard, pull those supers. I'm playing the pull, extract, replace game, but it's so much fun, Jeff.

Jeff: Bees like those wet supers too, so you're just making friends everywhere.

Becky: Right. No, they're like, "Okay, you can have our honey because this is just tasty and it smells good."

Jeff: That's fun. I hope that everybody's getting to experience a good flow. Not experiencing it here in the Pacific Northwest, but that's all right. That's all right. You were mentioning equipment before. Beekeeping equipment really hasn't changed too much since, what is it? 1850s, 1840s, Langstroth box. We have the square box frame and the top and the bottom. There's been a little tweaks here and there, maybe a little dimension differences here and there, but for the most part, everyone's making the same design. Today's guest is a sponsor, which we truly appreciate. He is an innovator with over seven or eight beekeeping patents. I'm looking forward to talking to Cliff.

Becky: He's been a guest before. he recently became a sponsor, correct? I think we have more and more of these little stories of people who came from a very successful career, fell in love with bees, and then took their energy and efforts to trying to make beekeeping better, which I think we need that. I'm really excited to talk to Cliff about that.

Jeff: As you pointed out, Cliff has been on the show before with Kim and I, and then I talked to him briefly at NAHBE last January. This will be a good discussion for everybody to learn about innovating beekeeping equipment. We'll talk to Cliff right after this message.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbials site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the virtual Beekeeping Today podcast table is Cliff Struhl, the boss, CEO, chief cook, and bottle washer of BeeSmart Designs and sponsor of Beekeeping Today podcast. Cliff, welcome to the show. It's good to talk to you again.

Cliff Struhl: Yes, thank you very much, Jeff. Always a pleasure to be here.

Becky: Nice to see you again, Cliff.

Cliff: Same.

Jeff: Yes, it was fun talking with you at Knobby in January. You were going a mile a minute. I think you were more energized at that show than a ferret on a double espresso. You were just zooming.

Cliff: That's my normal mode.

Jeff: I believe it. I believe it. Cliff, you run a very successful company, BeeSmart Designs. Let's talk about how you got to that position. Let's talk about your beginning of starting with bees and what led you to this point where you are now.

Cliff: My beekeeping started very interesting. A friend of mine bought a new house, thought he had bees, said, "Do you want the bees? We don't want it." I went online, found a local club, found a local beekeeper, called them up. I said, "Do you do bees?" He said, "Yes." I said, "I'm interested in doing bees." He goes, "Come on out." I got in my car with my daughter. We went out to visit this fellow named Ernie and he showed us around for two hours. He said, "f you're going to do bees, you're going to have to take a sting. Where do you have an injury?"

Yes, he stung me in the hamstring, near the attachment point. It hurt like a dickens. He said, "It will be good for you, and you need to know that you can take a spin."

Jeff: I don't know.

Cliff: Went home, this is the way it was done. This is old school. I went home, I called my friend, I said, "I think I'm going to do the bees." He said, "Bad news, our exterminator said, it's not honeybees, it's yellow jackets in the tree." I go, "Damn." Then I spoke to my wife, and I said, "I still think I want to do the bees." She goes, "Do whatever you want." I called this guy Ernie back up, I said, "What do I do?" He said, "Come out, I'll tell you what to buy. I'll sell you bees. I'll help you, and then I'll tell you where you have to take classes so you can learn beekeeping." That was my start.

Then I just ordered the equipment. He gave me bees. That was the beginning of it. As a little side, my main business is in the sign business for outdoor sidewalk signs for businesses. We make all types of outdoor stands. When I got the beehives, my then-wife said, "You're not putting cinder blocks and two-by-fours in my garden." She was a certified master gardener from Cornell, and they take it very seriously. I called up my molder, and I said, "Can we modify one of my products to hold beehives?" He said, "Sure, we can cobble something together." I put two cobbled-together stands in my yard. That was the beginning.

Jeff: Do you still have that original stand?

Cliff: No, I have the original wood models, but not the original cobbled-together one. It was not all that sturdy, but it proved a point. Then we designed the first Bee Smart hive stand, which was the first product.

Jeff: That is fun.

Becky: I was going to ask, how long did it take you to start innovating? It turns out, it was--

Cliff: Day one.

Becky: It was day zero, or?

Cliff: It was very early in the going. We do a lot of molding, so to make the tooling was pretty easy. I was using an existing pattern we had for part of it and part of our existing technology, so it was easy to get going. The tough part was finding dealers. I was brand new, knew nothing about the beekeeping industry, and I went to EAS in Rhode Island, which was about 12, 13 years ago. I just showed the product, and I opened up. At that time, Man Lake took it on, Dayton took it on, and Brushy Mountain took it on. Then from there, everything's history.

Jeff: We were talking before you joined us about innovators in beekeeping, and beekeepers are by nature, tinkerers. That's great in the backyard, but you've taken it to the next step, where you've taken your knowledge and your professional background in moldy plastics, and your wife's drive to have something nicer in the garden than cinder blocks and two-by-fours, and made it into a business that is, it's a leading-edge beekeeping products company.

Cliff: One of the things I think is interesting for what we've done is, I don't have any history for wood or metal, which is traditional in beekeeping. My background is strictly in plastics, and all types of molding, extrusion. I was able to use that to come up with designs that were similar, but next-generation compared to woodenware. I could get many of the features. I could add more features without additional cost, get longer life, and have a stronger product that was less costly.

Becky: We are constantly fighting the elements when it comes to, well, especially wood in beekeeping. How do the plastics fare in weather? Somebody told me that more about plastic than almost anybody out there, but it fares well, correct?

Cliff: Yes, almost all the plastics we use have UV stabilizers and absorbers in them. All the white we use has a lot of titanium dioxide as a coloring for white. It's also a natural filter. It blocks the light from coming in. If we can prevent the UV degradation, we don't have the breakdown of the plastic. Our plastics are all designed for long life. Some of my original covers are out there now, 10 or 12 years.

Becky: You've got hive covers, inner covers, and you also have bottom boards.

Cliff: Bottom boards, robbing screens, feeders, and a whole pile of little nifty tools.

Becky: All of those traditionally have been made with wood or metal, so.

Jeff: I want to talk about the elephant on the table in 2024. Plastic has a bad name. Talk to us a little bit about plastic and the use of plastic in the world today and recyclability of the Bee Smart Design product.

Cliff: Sure. This is a path we went down many years ago when Kim was on the program. Kim was very adamant about that. He asked me the same set of questions.

Jeff: Yes, I'm sure he did.

Cliff: He liked my answer, so I'll give you a very similar set of answers. Most of our products are made with recycled materials. They can be recycled. Most of them are in the polyethylene family, which is like a milk jug. When you look at the plastics, yes, they are plastic. They don't decay. They do last much longer. You have to look at the carbon footprint of wood also. The growing of the trees, the harvesting, the lumber, the cutting, the waste, paint, everything else.

I'm not saying I know the answer, but it's not a simple equation. We try to use all recycled materials wherever possible. Everything is post-industrial, which means it comes out of industry from our own processing or from scrap from the processing. One way or another, if we're preventing it from going to the landfill, we're recycling. All of our products are made here in America using American-sourced material, recycled or virgin when we need it for certain products.

Jeff: The important thing is at the end of the life or the use of the product, the beekeeper can take it to their recycling center where it can be repurposed.

Cliff: Yes, most of the products can be, they're labeled with either polypropylene or polyethylene or polycarbonate. We usually put the recycling symbol on where we can.

Becky: We try to sell it first, right?

Cliff: Yes.

Becky: Try to get another beekeeper.

Cliff: Hopefully people will keep it for a long time.

Becky: I'm wondering, Cliff, is there any benefit? Have you looked at any benefit as far as sanitation? We don't talk about biosecurity a lot, but if you've got a bottom board that's made of plastic, is that easier to disinfect than one may be made of wood?

Cliff: Oh, for sure. For multiple reasons. I'll start with one product we came up about four years ago, which is our magnetic hive tool holder, which is a plastic holder with magnets to hold the hive tool. Hive tools, of course, are probably the biggest transmission tool of disease in the beekeeping industry. It's easy to sterilize a hive tool. You can flame it. Hit it with a torch and it's clean. The plastic hive tool holder can be lightly torched or cleaned with alcohol or any other material that's out there that you can use for sanitizing.

If you have a leather or a nylon version, it's virtually impossible to get clean and sterilized. The same would go for the other products that you can lightly flame it. You don't have to burn it. It doesn't take much to kill bacteria on the surface of a product.

Jeff: Just don't stand there for five minutes.

Cliff: No, you can just burn a somatic torch and basically just pass it over lightly.

Becky: Just pass it over.

Cliff: You don't have to scorch the surface. If you've ever worked with cultures on a petri dish, you basically just run your little wand over the Bunsen burner and you're ready to go. Same type of thing.

Jeff: You mentioned the hive tool holder. I really liked that. I've not lost a tool since. Otherwise, I'm fine in the springtime with a lawnmower and I prefer having it on the hive tool belt.

Cliff: We're talking about biosecurity. It appears from all the people I speak to in the US that no one takes it very seriously. I read magazines from all over the world and in England, they are paranoid about this. In the US, not so much.

Becky: I think we should be.

Cliff: I agree with you, but this is American beekeeping. I get to do it my way, how I want.

Jeff: That wordiness or that communication is changing, I believe, because last week we talked to Tracy Ferron, who's a DVN. She writes for Bee Culture and she's recently released a book over the summer about veterinary medicine and beekeepers. She did talk quite a bit about biosecurity. There's a group trying to bring that message home to the US beekeepers. Hopefully, they're successful because it is important.

Cliff: I think it's incredibly important, not within your own apiary, but if you have multiple to keep each apiary separated in some manner.

Jeff: When you design these products, you are not just winging it. You really have a design or a philosophy to your beekeeping that you're following, that you're building these products to, aren't you?

Cliff: Yes, but I have to factor in that not everybody practices beekeeping the way I do. We had a prior episode where I talked about my pragmatic beekeeping theory and practice and how I go about that. There's four horsemen to the bee apocalypse. They've got pests, pathogens, and pesticides that everybody knows about. The worst one is practices. We try to design the products to work with anybody's management practice, but we try to promote the concept of condensing hives, things that Tom Seeley talks about, Marla Spivak talks about, the wood boxes, the propolis envelope, the sealed hive with no top ventilation.

Insulation where you need it, things that will help in the management of the bees and putting the bees in a natural environment. With that said, unfortunately, I think, not all people believe in that. There are lots of articles out there about other ways of keeping bees. Part of being pragmatic is okay, I know how I would like to do it, but I got to go make a product that fits everybody's needs. We do have options. We have an insulated inner cover that's sealed. If you want some ventilation, we have an option you can pull a plug out. If you want a top entrance, we have a top entrance option for people that want that.

You will get the insulation either way. We try to work around all of those different things to give people as many options as possible. Maybe they'll come back and think about the way we promote it. Maybe they won't. I tell people, you may not understand the condensing hive theory, which is fine, but why don't you just try a side-by-side comparison test? Do a couple of hives with our system and a couple with yours and see which one works better. The biggest benefit of our cover is it prevents heat gain, which is tough on hives because it requires more water, more cooling.

It has passive ventilation if you need it. The insulated inner cover does a good job of mimicking what a tree does. I'm a big believer in an IPM bottom board, but if you don't like that, leave the inspection board in all the time. As I tell people, learn to read the bottom board and now you got two products for one. You got a solid bottom board, but you can do an inspection by looking at the inspection board. You're going to get the same seal, but now you have an option to inspect your hives year-round without disturbing the bees.

Jeff: I like the flexibility that one piece of equipment can go one way or the other. It really doesn't matter. You get the benefits and you can use it in an approach that suits your management style.

Cliff: Exactly. Plus we have the ability that all of our products are designed to be 8-frame, 10-frame compatible. You can start at 10, go to 8. You can start at 8, you can go to 10. They work for either. You're not buying new equipment. For dealers, they don't have to stock two types of equipment. One does it all.

Jeff: Speaking of equipment and dealers, let's take this quick break and we'll be right back and we'll learn a little bit more about BeeSmart Designs.

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Jeff: Welcome back, everybody. Cliff, you designed a complete set of products, but you haven't designed or you don't sell a complete hive. Is that correct?

Cliff: We sell everything but boxes and frames. There are enough people making wood boxes that in my estimation, it's a race to the bottom when it comes to pricing. Frames is pretty much the same way. I can't beat the people that are making plastic frames. It's a very competitive business. I want to stay in the area that I know, which is more unique products, offering different benefits for the beekeeper and let the high volume people bang it out and figure out how they're going to make their pennies.

Jeff: You mentioned early on what or who inspired you for your hive stand. Walk us through the idea to design, to testing, to product rollout.

Cliff: I can give you two examples. One was the cover, which was the second product we came up with. A friend of mine harangued me about why don't you make a better cover. Why don't you make a better cover? One that's lighter, one that doesn't absorb heat, one that doesn't get hot. I started playing around with a double wall cover, like a thermos, but without the vacuum. Just two walls, dead airspace would give you a way of preventing the heat gain in the hive. It just evolved into a number of unique features that went into it. A traditional wood cover, you can turn upside down and put your boxes on. I needed to factor in that.

If you look at our cover on the inside edges, it's crenelated. It looks like it's a corrugation to give it a lot of structural strength. We had to worry about water. The inside is domed. The water drips to the outer edge. In a traditional cover, wood rolls around the bottom edge and then down the side of the hive. We were able to incorporate a drip edge so the water comes to the edge and drips straight down, not along the bottom of the hive. Took about six months of back and forth, playing with different designs. I didn't want a flat cover. I wanted something that would drain the water. A modified mansard roof just looked nice. I went with that.

Jeff: Are you using software like a CAD design or are you actually modeling it out and building it from a model?

Cliff: The cover was actually done on a 2D program that was used for sign design. That was in my early days. I had a traditional model maker actually make the model for me. That was the last time we went down that road. That was a long road. Then the next one was something like our direct feeder. Everybody has open feeder-type designs with the feeders in an open tray and the bees have to go up and somehow you have syrup slopping around. Then they talk about like a bucket feeder, which can cave in and not drip on the bees. I thought we could come up with a better nipple-type feeder that would be a structural tank that you could put on and over your inner cover.

You could use it above it, if you thought it was okay for the bees to go into a cold box. You can do what we now talk about a lot is the nipple or the feeding section sitting in the hole on the inner cover so the bees get direct access to the syrup, never have to go into a cold box. You can maintain the temperature, humidity in the brood nest. The brood nest stays where it's most optimal temperature, humidity, but the bees have access to the food 24/7. If you put that on top of the insulated inner cover, now you have a complete optimal situation for the bees.

Jeff: Are you the one coming up with this innovation or do you have a team of people, of beekeepers?

Cliff: No, I'm guilty. I kind of do it all. I'm a closet engineer. I like to dabble. I like to play. I have a really talented designer engineer who I work with, who does all my CAD work. Fortunately for me, he has an understanding of beekeeping. We can bounce things off. We can play around. He can send me 3D models. I can play with them. I can print samples. I can test it. I have pretty good resources. In the case of the feeder, when we redesigned our tank a couple of years ago, I wanted to get some structural testing done. I got lucky. My friend's daughter was a Yale engineering student and used it as her class project.

Jeff: Nice.

Becky: Have beekeepers figured out that they can find you at a conference and start pitching ideas of things that they want to get done with their equipment?

Cliff: Yes. Some have come to me and asked me and generally, unfortunately, their ideas are good ideas, but they're not large enough market to make it worth the investment. When you work in wood, it's very cheap to get started, to get going, and to make stuff. When you're working in plastic and you have to buy tooling and molds and you have minimum runs and expensive machines, you need to make sure there's enough volume and margin to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

Becky: How do you determine what's going to make it and what's not? Has anything not made it yet?

Cliff: Has anything not made it? Yes.

Becky: It's good that you had to think about that.

Cliff: I have two companies and each company has had its failures or issues, I should say, not necessarily direct failures. In the beekeeping, my first feeder was a two-piece feeder with a valve. We had a variety of different issues with it, with dead bees getting in, drowning. We made about four or five versions of it. At the end, it was pretty much a bulletproof product. The biggest problem we had was our tank was we thought a good design, but it wasn't structural. There's a Japanese term, kaizan, continual improvement. We followed that.

I said, "That tank is a problem. We're getting rid of it. We're going to make a new tank." We made a new tank. It's been working very well. Just recently we said, "Okay, the feeders are doing extremely well, but again, they're costly. People are complaining about the price." We invested into new tooling that instead of making the tank one at a time, makes them two at a time. We've been able to cut the cost and starting in September, the cost of our direct feeder will be dropping.

Jeff: Oh, that's nice.

Cliff: I don't mind investing in the products, in the tooling to get better products, to bring the cost down, to continually make them better.

Jeff: You told me, I think when we're setting up this call about a new product that you're about ready to launch that you thought of as you're driving home from Manatee, which we referred to earlier, the North American Honeybee Expo. You mind talking about that? The innovation process I think is interesting.

Cliff: I'm not even quite sure where that one came from. I was at the show. I'm looking at all the people selling boxes, all the different type of boxes. I read all the magazines. I speak to customers. When I first started, this was about 12, 13 years ago, if you remember Shane Gebauer from Brushy Mountain. I'm dating myself, of course. He said he was a little upset that people wanted the boxes assembled and painted because it was just, he called them just add bees hives. He said people aren't learning. They're not understanding what they're doing.

They can just go out and buy everything, dump bees in, and become a beekeeper, which he thought was wrong. The world has changed. Twelve years later now, if you're not selling pre-assembled, pre-painted boxes, you're going to lose out on a huge part of the hobbyist market. People aren't making the boxes anymore. They're not assembling the frames anymore. Those days are long gone. Maybe, I don't know, when was the last time you made a frame?

Becky: Oh, gosh, my husband just made 100 for me last weekend. Okay. I didn't actually make it, Cliff, but I'm related to the person.

Cliff: He said, when was the last time you made a frame?

Becky: Have I ever made a frame? I know people who do.

Cliff: Okay, when was the last time you built your own boxes together yourself?

Becky: Again, my husband, let's call it a team. My husband puts my boxes together, too.

Cliff: No, that doesn't count, I'm sorry.

Becky: I think it does. I think it's assembly. We're buying them unassembled.

Jeff: My first frames were old root frames, and I can remember taking those little tiny skinny nails and pounding them into the end bars, into the top bars.

Cliff: I went to a staple gun quickly.

Jeff: I didn't do that until many, many years later. Yes, you're right.

Cliff: With that said, one of the problems for pre-assembled boxes is they're very expensive to ship. Back in the day, you paid for the weight of the box, and that's how UPS and FedEx worked. Now they charge you the greater of weight, or what they call dimensionalized weight, which is length times width times height, divide by a factor, gives you a theoretical weight, which is way more. With three pounds of wood for a box, unassembled is three pounds. Assembled is 17 pounds to ship. Very expensive, $3 to $5 more per box to ship.

My thing was, why can't we do a box that you can pre-paint and ship knockdown or flat pack? Think IKEA. That got me thinking, how do you make a corner? A number of years ago, there was a fellow making a metal corner that was very unsuccessful. I don't know if it was him, the product, the whole concept, but it didn't lend itself because you needed to have a flat spot above and below the frames, and you'd have to notch the frames. I said, wonder if I can make a corner assembly that you can use to put the boxes together that could be molded easily without any moving parts in the mold and affordably.

Driving back from the Bee conference, I did it in three days, and each day I was in the car with my friend, and she doesn't want to talk to me. She's already had enough of me after three days at the conference and three days driving out. My brain just went into neutral, like when I'm riding a bike sometimes, I relax and all the answers come to me. I came up with this concept. We got to the hotel that evening, and before we went out to dinner, I said, "I got to sketch this out."

I sketched it out and went out to dinner. Next morning, I said, "Oh, I thought about this all night." Sketch it out, sketch it out. We're driving home with last day. We're in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania in a rainstorm. I call my designer and go, "Ray, I have an idea." He said, "Okay, describe it to me." For 45 minutes, I described him the design. The next day when I got home, there was an initial sketch on my desk or on my computer.

Jeff: That turned into, what do you call those?

Cliff: We went to 3D prints. I went to visit Betterbee, who helps us a lot with some of the development. They have really sharp people there. Showed it to them. They liked the concept. I said, "Well, 3D prints are not strong. I invested in a single cavity injection mold to mold these. I molded 1,000 pieces. I shipped out over 200 sets to different people all over the country to test." We've been getting pretty positive feedback. People like the concept.

Jeff: The whole process of how you came up with that and how it works, I'm surprised no one's thought of it before and produced it before. The fascination for me with you on that is that taking that from a seed of an idea on a car trip and making it into a viable product.

Cliff: I'm fortunate that I have a good team behind me. At my office, I have a team that runs the day-to-day so I don't have to worry about it. My designer engineer is really sharp guy. My mold builder is really sharp person. This required, took my idea and a lot of feedback from these other people as our team to come up with adding structural elements, deciding what material we're going to use, and how to build the tooling inexpensively without moving parts. It's easy to design this if you do it with moving parts but just very costly to make the tooling. We've made it very simple, but very strong.

Becky: Cliff, is this going to market soon?

Cliff: It's in final testing now. We're probably going to start building the production tooling in the next two or three months. By October, November, it will be live and full introduction at NAHBE 2025. Hopefully, Kamon will give me a good spot because I think this is going to be the game-changer product.

Jeff: We talked to Kamon a couple of weeks ago and he is planning out the floor space even now. Hopefully, he gives you a good place. Not to speak for Kamon...

Cliff: Right. Also tied into what we call the box builder corner is a new handle for the hives. We originally came up with a handle a few years ago, a modular handle that would click on and off the hives. You were asking me about failures. It was not a big success. It worked great, but it's a little cumbersome to use. I said, if we're going to do it, we got to come up with a permanent handle that's on all the time, ready to use, can take the torque of manipulating boxes with honey and bees, be strong and be affordable. We're about 95% of the way there now.

Jeff: That'll work with deeps as well? 10 frame deeps?

Cliff: It'll work with any box, 8-frame, 10-frame, new, shallow, medium, deep.

Becky: I was just unloading a bunch of honey supers into the house for extraction. My husband helped me because I was in a rush. He's like, "Why are these handles so small?" I'm like, "This is the one thing in beekeeping that fits me." It is harder.

Cliff: It fits you, but it doesn't fit a lot of other female beekeepers because if you have fingernails, you're done.

Becky: Oh, of course. Yes.

Cliff: If you're wearing gloves, not the most comfortable. If you don't have strong fingers, it's difficult.

Becky: I think it's why I have strong fingers.

Cliff: We're trying to get around that for an ergonomic handle, an easy way to lift because along that line, a few years ago, we introduced a product called Prypoint, which was how to separate boxes without damaging the woodenware. That's done pretty well. People haven't exactly figured it out. We actually incorporated that same design into the box builder corner. That corner has that same feature built into it. That feature was already built into our insulated inner cover. You can get your hive tool between and just pop it off. I try to use many of these designs, many ways.

Becky: You're taking out all the hard work, Cliff. We have to work to get those boxes separated. What are you doing?

Cliff: I'm taking out the scut work.

Becky: Are you making it easy?

Cliff: Yes. There's an expression a friend of mine used to use, laziness is next to godliness.

Becky: You've got the robbing screens, which are super valuable this time of year. We're just in robbing season in August. It's so nice to have those, but they're also good for moving bees, right? If you're moving bees because you can just put on that screen, close it up.

Cliff: Close the two doors, and now you have a moving screen with a lot of ventilation, which is critical when you're moving bees.

Becky: Right. It's one of those things that beekeepers, they never plan to have to move a colony. When that actually happens, obviously you can't close them up, and you might not have a screen available. It's just a two-in-one product that's super. I feel like I'm doing a commercial, but--

Cliff: The robbing screen is our number one product.

Becky: Is it? I believe it.

Cliff: It's our number one seller because it's 8-frame, 10-frame. It has two different doors. The ventilation is at the bottom near the entrance. There's no openings near where the doors are. You're trying to concentrate the hive odor down low, away from the doors, and you have the two doors. Plus, it's very affordable. I think they sell for $11.

Jeff: It works a lot better than making a wedge out of window screen and putting it inside the opening and hoping it stays.

Becky: Which they always get out. They always get out that one corner.

Cliff: That is a headache. One thing, with our system, I always tell you, we try to design a lot of things in. If you are doing a condensing hard using our insulated inner cupboard, you can pop the cap out in the middle, put our cover on, now you can get passive ventilation if excess heat comes out through the roof and fresh air comes in the bottom. You can always pull out the inspection board if you're using an IP or bottom. Your bees won't overheat because evidently Jim, too, likes to talk about overheated bees, moving bees. I think we have about six stories like that.

Jeff: Jim has a lot of experience moving bees. That's all I can say. He's a wonderful man. Let's talk about your product lineup. You want to start at the top or you want to start at the bottom? Because you don't sell the complete hive. We've already established that. You don't sell the sides of the box.

Cliff: Everything but the box and the frames and the bees, of course.

Jeff: The bottom board, you have an IPM-bottom board?

Cliff: We have an IPM-bottom board.

Becky: Let's tell everybody what that is. We've got some new beekeepers listening, you two. Integrated pest management.

Cliff: Bottom board, which means it's a screen bottom board with an inspection board below so the detritus, the dead mites, things fall down onto that inspection board. If you've been well-trained, which it would be nice if people could train people on how to read the bottom board to get more effective management techniques and understand what's happening in their hive.

Jeff: That is a very valuable skill.

Cliff: Yes, it is. With that, up until last week, our IPM bottom board had a wire mesh like many of the wooden ones. Starting in the next month, we're transitioning to a complete one-piece molded bottom board with a molded grid on the bottom that has larger openings for the detritus to fall through, but still small enough that bees can't get through. Now, there's more room for things to fall through. It's flatter, it's more uniform, and it's immune to any of the acids that you're using, being it OA vapor, you're dripping oxalic acid on it, you're using formic acid in your hive. Whatever you're using, it's now impervious to everything. It's about $5 less expensive because we got rid of the wire mesh.

Jeff: Interesting. The wire mesh on the bottom board I had tend to sag a little bit.

Cliff: They tend to get very wavy.

Jeff: Yes. Interesting.

Cliff: That's the main reason we got rid of it. We couldn't get quality mesh anymore. It was always wavy, hard to manage, and we used to embed it in the plastic. It's a good process, but the people that do it were not thrilled about getting burnt by the machine. Now, it's all molded as one piece. They're very happy. It's simpler, it's easier. I think it's a better quality product and it's priced more affordably. I believe the new price is going to be $29.50.

Jeff: After the bottom board, you have the handles, and then?

Cliff: After that, the major other product would be the insulated inner cover, which is a full R10, which is anywhere from 25 to 55% more insulation than any other product on the market. None of the poly hives, none of the European hives, none of the foam hives offer even close to R10. We're the only people with R10.

Jeff: That's nice, year-round.

Cliff: Yes, perfect year-round, because it really lets the bees maintain their optimal conditions in the hive. They can ventilate through the front entrance as much as they want. With our bottom board, we have entrance reducers and mouse guards so you can control the entrance size as much as you want. You can break it down into thirds or even less. You can control your entrance year-round. Then we have our cover on top, which is a double wall cover. It's bright white, it reflects the heat. You're in Washington, so it doesn't get too hot. If you have a traditional metal cover, you can cook an egg on it in the summer if you're in South Carolina.

Jeff: Depending on what part of Washington state, we've been up over 100 for many days, which is quite unusual, but it's becoming more usual.

Cliff: You understand how hot that metal cover is?

Jeff: Oh yes, I'm very aware of that, that's for sure.

Cliff: Where do you think most of the heat from that metal cover is going?

Jeff: My hand, when I put my hand on the top.

Cliff: It's also moving into the hive and heating the hive up, which means the bees need to spend a lot of time cooling and you're stressing the brood and everything else. With the insulation, you avoid that. With the double wall, you get very little heat gain. Any heat gain between the cover and the inner cover vents out because we have a passive ventilation system. We've tried to cover all these different things. I have a science background, so I'm used to thinking in the way of science, biology, earth science, physics, and a lot of that goes into the thought process on how the products are designed so we can do more with the same product without any detriment to the bees.

Jeff: You have any other innovative designs that you want to tell our listeners about coming out this fall or they should think about for Christmas?

Cliff: We're actually rebranding our system as a complete system, and we're calling it the Universal Hive System. It's a complete system of the inner cover, bottom board, direct feeder, and robbing screen. Everything you need to manage your bees throughout the year. With the flexibility to manage in a manner that you're comfortable with. If you don't believe in the condensing hive and you want ventilation, pull the plug. If you need upper entrance, you can turn the piece of foam around in the inner cover to create an upper entrance.

A lot of people use it during the winter. Not good idea, spring, fall when there's robbing going on. The robbing screen, of course, is the robbing screen that Becky talked about. By the way, that robbing screen comes very handy in the spring when your bees are building up and you may have a weak hive that has a varroa issue still, and you don't want the other bees robbing it out and getting the transmission of the mites from one hive to another. I like to use them in the spring also.

Jeff: Are European foulbrood or any of the other diseases, you want to shut it down a little bit?

Cliff: Then, of course, the stand is very popular. It's pretty much the nicest-looking stand on the market. It's strong. It can hold six, seven boxes full of honey. It gets the hive at a nice working height. It raises it about 12 inches off the ground, which means you have less problem with animals getting in or poking at the front entrance. It integrates right in with our bottom boards designed to screw right into it. It's designed to hold the bottom board secure on the stand. Plus most of our products also have alignment pins now. When you put the box on the bottom board, there's four pins that keep it from sliding.

You put the inner cover on, there's four pins that keep it from sliding. The only product I missed, which you saw at NAHBE, was that we introduced our product called the Trivet, which is the pollen patty holder, which is limited market, unfortunately, but if you have small hive beetles, which is basically for the most part south of the Mason-Dixon line, and you're feeding pollen patties, this will keep the beetles under control because the bees can now patrol the entire patty and there's no place for the beetles to lay eggs in the patty, which is their preferable place to lay eggs.

Jeff: It holds it up.

Cliff: It holds it up on a very open grid. A friend of mine, a bee scientist, likes to say, "No worms, no worries."

Jeff: There you go. No worms, no worries. I'm going to have a T-shirt made with that. No worms, no worries.

Becky: Oh, that's going to make the people who use worms for composting mad.

Jeff: Oh, oh.

Cliff: There's probably plenty of beekeepers that do that.

Jeff: Yes, probably. Cliff, is there anything we haven't discussed that you want to tell our listeners about this afternoon?

Cliff: I think I pretty much covered everything. I'd like to stress to our dealers and our customers that we're an American company making in the US. We don't import. We're believing in making everything here with American-sourced materials. It also means we have full inventory all the time for our dealers. We support our products. We support all of our dealers. If you go to our website, it's very easy to place an order with a dealer with just a few clicks. We don't sell direct. We only sell through our dealer network. We're probably one of the few manufacturers that does not compete with their dealers.

Jeff: Cliff, it's been really fun having you on this afternoon. Thanks a lot. We look forward to having you back and looking forward to seeing you at the North American Honeybee Expo in January.

Cliff: I look forward to being invited back. I got lots of topics I'd love to talk about. We're working on new products and we're going to continue to innovate. Thank you very much for having me.

Becky: Thanks, Cliff.

Jeff: Becky, are you going to go out there and design some new bee equipment?

Becky: You know what? I think we've already established that I can't build equipment. I think that--

Cliff: I don't know if that part made it to the podcast.

Becky: Oh, I don't know if it did or not. Regardless, it's not a secret. My husband builds all my equipment. I always buy it knocked down, but I do have somebody to make it for me. I'll tell you what else. I'm really good at bees and I'm really good at biology and I'm good at management. I'm not innovative. I don't have ideas for inventions while I'm out there. I know how to make more bees and honey, but I'm glad that there are people like Cliff out there who can actually design things that help beekeepers. How about you? I bet you're a little innovative.

Jeff: Oh, heck no.

Becky: Oh, no? Okay.

Jeff: There was a time in my life when I had a table saw and router and dabbled in making my own equipment. Ultimately, I had a young family, took much less time to go down to AI Root and buy equipment and build it than it did to go select the right lumber, make sure it's the correct length and the correct dimensions, and then cut it to size and then do blah, blah, blah. I didn't have that enjoyment of woodworking. I know there's many beekeepers who like woodworking and they like being innovative. More power to them. I like it.

Becky: Yes, I like the fact that I probably wouldn't have been a beekeeper years ago if I had to make my own equipment. I like the fact that we have great bee suppliers, great innovators, and great people out there who are helping keep my bees housed.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any web page. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patty, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the "leave a comment" section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:51:53] [END OF AUDIO]