Beekeeping Hot Topics and Trends in 2025 (315)

315 - Beekeeping Hot Topics and Trends in 2025

Tom Groom: Hello, BTP podcast listeners. It's time for New Mexico to be put on the Beekeeping TodayPodcast map. Becky and Jeff take a look. Is New Mexico filled in? I don't think so, but it is time. My name is Tom Groom. I am a beekeeper in the Pecos River Valley just east of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Take it away Jeff.

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 Betterbee and all of our sponsors who 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 300 past episodes. Read episodes, transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. If you can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com.

Jeff: Hey, everybody, Happy New Year. This is our first episode of 2025. Happy New Year, Becky.

Becky: Thank you so much, Jeff. I feel like I just saw you, but Happy New Year to you too.

Jeff: That's right. We've already exchanged our Happy New Year's at north American Honey Bee Expo. It's our first episode.

Becky: Right at the start of the year.

Jeff: Yes, it is. I even celebrated a birthday there at NAHBE.

Becky: Yes, you did. There's so much going on in this new year. You're really packing it in, right?

Jeff: Becky, I was so excited about the New Year. I forgot to thank Tom Groom for that wonderful opening from New Mexico. He's absolutely correct. We didn't have New Mexico marked off. It's a great way to start off the new year. Another great thing about the New Year, we're filling in another state on our map of listener openers.

Becky: That is very exciting and thank you so much, Tom. I get from your energy that you understand our energy about this listener opener map. I think that the year 2025, we are just going to see that map get filled in or die trying. Oh, wait, no. That's a little dramatic. Anyway, it's going to be very exciting to see how that map gets filled in.

Jeff: It is.

Becky: Thank you, Tom.

Jeff: Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it a lot. Becky, we're going to kick off the season coming up with our guest, Dr. David Peck, from Betterbee. He's joining us to talk about hot trends and topics in 2025. I'm looking forward to this episode.

Becky: I am too. I have caught a couple of David's presentations that he did throughout the last year. Wow. Does he have a lot of good stuff to tell beekeepers? I'm really looking forward to us having him on for the full time and getting to do a lot of Q&A.

Jeff: That's right. He has a unique position on his stand there at Betterbee. He has an idea of what new products are coming out and all the research he's aware of. Just how all that comes together to better serve beekeepers. It's exciting. I'm looking forward to having them on. We'll have them up right after these messages from our sponsors.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the great big beekeeping podcast table, this very first episode of 2025, sitting in upstate New York, is Dr. David Peck. David, welcome back to the show.

Dr. David Peck: Thank you so much for having me again,

Becky: David, we are just thrilled to have you and all that information in your head on the podcast. Thank you. Not just the information, but you too.

David: You're right. I'm the fun wrapping paper around the information. I've often said I'm a wealth of information, some of it true. I'll do my best to stick to the real stuff for this interview.

[laughter]

Becky: I have faith in you. I don't think you'd lead beekeepers wrong. Your whole goal in life is to lead beekeepers down a path and give them great education and let them make great informed choices.

David: That's right.

Becky: Wait, isn't that a goal in life? Am I right?

David: That is. It really genuinely is. The beauty of my job here is that I don't even have to worry about tenure clocks or filing for grants. Betterbee just pays me to teach beekeepers how to be better beekeepers. That's what I do.

Jeff: For our listeners who don't know who you are and your role at Betterbee, who is our key sponsor and we truly appreciate, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background with bees? Then we'll get into our hot topics and trends of 2025.

David: Sure. I'm coming to you currently as Betterbee's Director of Research and Education. I'm basically the staff scientist here. As far as I know, we are the only all-purpose beekeeping supply company in the country that has a staff scientist. My role here is to teach classes, write articles, help to work with folks like you who make great podcasts and build these relationships with scientists and successful beekeepers. Getting all of the best information I can and then getting that into the hands of beekeepers who want to use it to succeed with their own bees.

I came here directly from Cornell. At Cornell, I got my PhD studying with a few mentors early in the process. Then I transferred into Tom Seeley's lab, so had the great privilege of having him as my scientific mentor and also my beekeeping mentor, which is a real treat. Tom taught me how to keep bees, how to understand bees, how to be a bee scientist. Then after I graduated, I did some more work at Cornell. I did some postdoctoral work focusing on teaching. I did some work in Madagascar with a development project there and then took this job at Betterbee. It's been really a great opportunity for me to get into beekeeping in grad school and in the context of science and studying varroa mites and bees and parasites and hosts and things like that. Then grow into all of the different angles and alleyways of beekeeping as I've expanded my role.

Jeff: The work that you did at Cornell and working with Seeley was, you were his last graduate student?

David: I broke him, I think so.

[laughter]

David: I was going to say that I am the final mentored PhD out of Tom Seeley's lab after a very long line of much better scientists than myself. It was really great to work with him and to see him at-- scientists don't really have a pinnacle and then a decline. They just reach their apex at their retirement because they just keep doing more science the longer they do it. I really feel like I had the privilege of working with the best and most experienced Tom Seeley than anyone ever got to work with.

Becky: David, did you just find the Betterbee ad or was that a conversation or were they looking for a staff scientist? Because that is such a novel position.

David: That's really interesting. I guess I'll take a step back in the story. Which was that I was asked to give a lecture on varroa mites to the Massachusetts beekeepers during COVID. It was a Zoom lecture and so I joined. Betterbee was a sponsor. One of the owners attended and listened to my lecture. He was like, "Oh, who's this guy? I might as well stay for it because we've paid sponsorship fee." Listened to it and I guess liked it. When they put up an ad a few months later for, I think an education coordinator, they were looking for someone with maybe an undergraduate degree in entomology, maybe they had kept bees before. If not, they were going to teach them how. I saw it and I said, "That's not exactly what I wanted," but I so enjoy teaching beekeepers about beekeeping that I applied for it. That, very quickly, led to us renegotiating the title and the scope of the job.

They were thrilled. They didn't think they could get a scientist. That's why they didn't advertise for one. When I came waltzing through the door, I think they were delighted to be able to subsidize the stuff that I do to help the bee community and to pay me to do some of it for Betterbee like developing classes and things like that.

Jeff: Not to stroke you too much, but you do a fabulous job in the work that you're doing. We talked a week or so ago about the fantastic resource the Betterbee catalog is. In the center section, all the educational material. I could see your hands in it all over the place. Not only your picture, but you were there. You guided that along and it's a wealth of information.

David: I take great pride whenever anybody comes up and says, "Hey, we've got a bee class coming up for our local club. Can we get a few copies of the Betterbee magazine?" It's a catalog as far as the marketing team is concerned, but it's a magazine as far as I'm concerned. It's me just writing some cool articles, some exciting stuff that I think will help beekeepers improve. It's nice that we get to mix those two things together into that one sheaf of papers.

Jeff: It's more than a catalog. I encourage everybody to not only get the catalog for the great products, but also for the information that you share. The reason we invited you, David, is to talk about hot topics and trends of 2025. I think that's a great way to start out this year. Everyone is either, at this point, hungover from the New Year's or hungover from the North American Honey Bee Expo. They just don't want to think too much, but they want to keep discussing bees. I think this is a good topic for this week.

David: Yes, I think it'll be fun. One of the neat things about my role is that I get to have my finger on the pulse of beekeeping across the board. You guys are in a similar position because being at the center of the podcast or being where I am, I'm talking to all sorts of different kinds of beekeeper or bee scientist or bee professional and so it's really interesting to get to see some of these trends rearing their heads months before the average beekeeper might encounter them. I think that'll be a lot of fun.

Jeff: Let's start down this road. I'll just come right out and ask you, when someone says, "What do beekeepers have to look forward to in 2025?" what's the first thing that comes to mind?

David: Well, do you want the good news or the bad news? [laughs]

Jeff: Hey, it's all going to come, so might as well just start with whatever comes to your mind first.

David: I think the thing that's blooming largest in my mind is that we have a major unresolved issue in the southeast US for beekeeping and we need to see how things play out. Things could go very well or very poorly. That is that we are in the midst of a very well-developed incursion by yellow-legged hornets into North America. A few years ago-- actually, I love this story. It was a brand new beekeeper. It was a first-year beekeeper was sitting at his hive just staring at the bees, enjoying watching them in Savannah, Georgia, and he saw this weird wasp flying around, grabbing bees out of the air, and eating them. He said, "That's strange." He got a specimen of it. He knocked it out of the air and he sent off photos or he sent it off to the university and said, "What the heck is this?"

They said, "Oh, yes, new beekeeper has found a brand new wasp. Sure thing. Let's take a look at it." Lo and behold, it is this horrifying invasive social wasp, these hornets that build these massive nests and specialize in some ways on feeding upon honeybees. They hover in front of the entrances, they pull bees out of the air, they chew them up and take the resources back to feed to the larvae and the nest, and they come right back to the hive and they grab another bee.

They have established themselves in Savannah and they've gotten over the river into South Carolina as well. If they are able to contain, eradicate, eliminate these things, then we are going to owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the professionals in the Georgia Department of Agriculture, the university scientists, everybody who's been contributing to this process. If they fail, we're all going to be dealing with these hornets.

We don't have to look too far to see what our future might look like, what trouble looks like when these things get established because they got themselves established as well something like 20 years ago in Bordeaux, France and they've spread all throughout western Europe. There was a paper that came out in 2023. An analysis suggested that about 10% of the colony losses in France were the result of predation by these hornets. We are looking at something that might very well come in and just add an extra 10% colony losses onto our issues that we're already dealing with. That's the bad news. [laughs]

Jeff: They're pretty temperate. They go across all the climates in United States, right?

David: One of the scientists working on this is Lewis Bartlett at the University of Georgia. I saw him give a talk where he showed off some work that had been done basically looking at Europe, mapping out all the climate zones, looking at these wasps, and trying to figure out, all right, if they could go everywhere in this whole continent, where do we think they would do well based on the climate? They made a little map and they look at where they've gotten established over 20 years and it overlaps pretty darn well. Basically, if there's susceptible suitable habitat, these wasps are going to set themselves up and do well there.

You can do the exact same analysis on climate zones in North America and it's pretty scary. There are not a lot of places that aren't going to have to think about this hornet. If they're able to get established and spread, spread, spread across all of that suitable territory, there's going to be an awful lot of beekeepers who are spending time thinking about and stressing about hornets.

Jeff: Well, folks, Happy New Year.

[laughter]

Becky: Wrap it right up there. I think--

David: Well, that's all right. We better wrap up. There we go.

Becky: I have a quick question. I don't know if you know the answer to this. What's the range of a nest? I know with some wasps it's not great.

David: The foraging range around one of these nests is not enormous. Especially if there's a bee colony nearby, they can just sit and hit the forages from that colony day after day after day. Why go anywhere else if you've got free meals on wheels or wings as it were? We do know that the queen wasps will disperse a pretty wide distance away from-- they can go miles away from the parent nest that they grew up in.

Like a lot of these wasps, they start in a nest in the fall, they produce a bunch of females and a bunch of males, they mate, those queens then go and they establish themselves over winter through whatever that winter looks like, and then they build these tiny little embryo nests which then build them a little cluster of workers and then they'll migrate to another nest site way, way up in a tree or something like that. They've got a few different points in the hopscotch that will allow them to move further away from where the queen grew up, which is unfortunately helping them spread faster than we might like.

Becky: It's so hard to see a hornet's nest in the middle of summer up in a tree. The leaves fall and you're like, "Oh, look at that."

David: Unfortunately, in Savannah, they've got a lot of pine trees, so the leaves never fall.

Becky: Oh, gosh.

David: They've just got a pier up there. A lot of it is through trap lining. They're putting out cage traps with catfish filets in them because it's protein. These things are hunting bees for protein. They'll also take fish for protein. They're putting out these fish filets and then coming back to them in the Savannah heat and seeing if there are wasps foraging on them. Then if they do, that helps them go and try to track and locate where that nest might be, try to triangulate it.

Jeff: They've been around for a couple seasons. What are the realistic odds that they will be eradicated? That's the hope.

David: Each season that passes, you become more pessimistic. If they killed that very first wasp that showed up or the very first batch of queens that she produced after the first season, we'd have a much better shot, but unfortunately, each year that passes they say, "Oh, looks like there were some successful nests that we missed in this neighborhood or in that region or over on that side of that piece of property." That means that they've now created potentially 100 new nests that you need to catch and eradicate.

My understanding is that whoever the head of the Georgia Department of Agriculture is, the commissioner or whatever title they've got, basically declared that this was a major threat and they were going to defeat it and so they were going to allocate resources to defeat it, which is great. That's exactly what should have happened. My understanding is that South Carolina did not mobilize the same resources, and even worse, even if they had both been really focused on trying to get this under control, the federal government, USDA, didn't really meaningfully step in.

You would think that when it's an interstate problem that would affect all beekeepers or all US agriculture, you might imagine that you would have some kind of federal organized response that tackles it. Unfortunately, my understanding is that there hasn't been as much of that as you might hope for. I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic that they're going to be able to keep these hornets from spreading. I'm hopeful. I remain hopeful. Every time they get another nest, I cheer for them and I'm thrilled to hear it, but it worryingly seems like it's not just a matter of rounding up the seven or eight nests in the city suburbs and then calling it a day and saying, "Good work. We're done. We've defeated this problem."

Jeff: I would think that the queen breeders in the plains or the Piedmont area of eastern Georgia would be really concerned about Asian yellow-legged.

David: Right. It used to be called the Asian hornet and then they changed the name because you don't want to associate an insect with a place or people. Now more helpfully it's called the yellow-legged hornet, which it does in fact have yellow legs.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to hear from one of our sponsors and then we're going to change subjects when we get right back here.

David: Something more fun.

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Becky: Welcome back everybody. David, how about something that we can look forward to that maybe might make a beekeepers day?

David: Sure, something that'll make you smile instead of break out into a cold sweat. I think that we are at a very exciting spot for varroa mite control. I think this year is going to be a really exciting time. We're going to learn a lot. There are new products that are coming out. There are products that aren't even new yet, they're just a twinkle in someone's eye, but that they're moving down that pipeline, and I have reason to believe we're going to be seeing more new strategies and chemicals and tools available to us.

Jeff: Are you talking about actual chemical controls, or are we talking about management controls or tools?

David: I think it's all of the above, and that's what makes me so excited about this. In terms of chemicals, we've got VarroxSan, which has just been released by Vita Bee Health and which is a really exciting extended release oxalic acid and glycerin strip that many beekeepers have already bought, although a lot of them got them in the fall and have been waiting until spring to put them in. A lot of us are still sitting on our packages, waiting to open them up and put them into hives.

It seems like all of the research that has been done on these extended release oxalic acid treatments tells us that they're poor to middling at knocking down a really high mite population, but they seem to be pretty darn good at, if you've got a low mite population, let's say in the spring. If you put these treatments into your colony, you can keep that mite treatment low all the way through a lot of your main honey production season. That, I think, has a great deal of potential to allow beekeepers to get mites low in the spring, make all of our honey in the spring and the summer, and then, as we're getting into winter preparation, maybe go in and do another mite cleanup, but not have the horrible treadmill that we're always on where we have hopefully low mites in the spring.

We've got to put our supers on. There's very few products that a lot of beekeepers can use depending upon climate or weather or suitability with supers or not, and then we pull our honey in August and we look at our mite levels and go, "Geez, this is catastrophically high. We better get the sledgehammer and try to beat them back." That's surely not any good for the health of our bees. Something like this that will help to hold mite levels down, I think is really exciting. So VarroxSan is one product that does that.

Another product in the same vein is called NORROA, which is being released by GreenLight Biosciences. It's in the approval pipeline. I think that's expected to come out. Some people may have heard this discussed or seen research on this under the previous name of vadescana, but it's an RNAi technology. It's using these advanced genetics techniques to create a molecule that basically goes into the varroa mite's body and makes it so that it can't lay eggs properly. It turns out that if varroa mites can't lay eggs, they don't have too many babies.

They're cheekily marketing it as birth control for varroa mites, but it's achieving the same thing. It doesn't take a disastrous mite level and knock it down to square one in a day, but what it does is if you've got your mites sort of under control, it's going to keep them in a pretty good stable position for a good long while. I'm expecting that that will probably be available at some point next year. If it isn't, I expect that come next fall and winter season, they're going to have gotten enough of the approvals that we'll be learning about it, so that we're getting ready to use it the following year.

Jeff: Is that being tested at a university or an association within university?

David: Yes, it's been tested in a number of different places. They've got private trials that they're doing in-house, but there's published data under the name vadescana out of New Zealand and they're working with a lot of other folks now to try to build up that data set, so that when they launch the product and people scratch their heads and say, "Yes, but does it really work? Will it really work in my area?" I think they want to be able to answer yes. Here's the data to support it.

Becky: Are they testing both of those on tropilaelaps too?

David: The RNAi is targeted to varroa. I don't think it'd be suitable for tropilaelaps. The principle of that technology should work as well on a tropilaelaps mite as it does on a varroa mite. Those are two really exciting products that I think are starting to open a door for beekeepers that otherwise we've been left with a handful of chemicals and some of them, if your weather is right, if your bees are in the right condition, then great, go ahead and use them. There's times and places where some of the current products, the past generation of products, just weren't as helpful as you would have hoped. It's great to have these new tools entering the toolkit.

Jeff: That sounds great.

Becky: VarroxSan in the spring, it's just-- That may be better than Paris in the spring, I think, this year.

[laughter]

David: The other thing, you mentioned management separately from the chemicals, and for that, we are learning more and more, and more and more people are getting practice with what is sometimes called biotechnical varroa control, using cages and brood breaks to try to create these broodless periods mid-summer that allow you to knock the mite population down. I've got an article I wrote for the Betterbee newsletter that goes into this in some detail and talks you through the math. The basic idea is, you take a queen, you put her in a cage with a frame to lay on or two frames to lay on, and she's caged up for a couple of weeks, then you let her out, and she starts laying eggs in the rest of the brood nest.

Before any of the outside eggs get capped, you have an opportunity to take out all of the capped brood inside of that cage, that she was stuck on for a while, and throw that into a freezer or melt it down, kill all of the mites that were vacuumed up into the very limited brood, and then you've got a colony that's completely without capped brood. I can go in there and I can provide an oxalic acid vapor treatment or something like that and potentially knock my mite levels way, way, way down, whereas it would be difficult to do that with a whole bunch of capped brood in the colony, because so many of the mites are sheltered.

The fun about that becoming a more popular and better understood varroa control tool is that, not to go back to my doom and gloom soapbox, but if tropilaelaps mites get established in North America, this other invasive parasitic mite that folks are worried about, if tropilaelaps mites came here, they depend upon brood to reproduce. If beekeepers get really good at creating these brood breaks, creating these periods where there's no brood available in the hive, sure, the colony's growth is going to be tamped down a little bit, but it gives you this opportunity to starve out all of these parasites, which is fantastic. What could be better than that?

Jeff: At what point would you do that? You wouldn't do that during your honey flow, your nectar flow.

David: Yes, the trick of it is you're basically getting all of these mite control benefits in exchange for sacrificing some colony growth. When do you, Jeff, most want to suppress growth in your colonies? In my case, it's going to be in mid to late summer when I know that I've got a July or an early August dearth coming on, and I could go back a couple of weeks before that and say, "Hey, look, beautiful Italian bees, I'm glad that you're just growing and growing and growing, but as it turns out, I'm pretty confident that there's going to be not much food for you in July. I'm going to just turn the volume down a little bit on your reproduction, just for a couple of weeks at a time, so I can do this mite control."

In the meantime, we're going to be in the middle of that dearth, and instead of having to feed my bees a gallon of sugar syrup just to keep them alive through the dearth, maybe I'm only feeding them a half gallon, because the colony's gotten a little smaller. By doing that, I help them to grow up to get ready for the fall flow. That's the stuff that we don't have really clear data on. A lot of the work that's been done on this has been done in Europe, it's been done in Germany and the Netherlands and a few other countries around Europe, none of which are exactly the same as all of these great US climates that we live in.

By introducing these cages and these tools and these techniques and getting folks to try it out, we're moving closer to having a sense of which parts of the country this works really well in, which parts of the country it works poorly in. If you talk to a beekeeper in parts of Maryland, they'll tell you that they get a beautiful spring maple tree honey flow, and then the rest of the year is just feeding their bee syrup to wait for the next spring. There's just not that much forage around for them, and that's fine. They can make a honey crop and succeed under those circumstances. In that case, they've got all summer to do this because they don't have a big fall flow that they're waiting for.

It depends upon your bees and your beekeeping management strategy. I think that there's going to be a lot of regions and styles of beekeeping that will appreciate these cages and these brood break strategies as yet another tool in the mite control arsenal. That's what I preach from start to finish when I talk about varroa control, is the more tools we have, the better it is to reach for exactly the correct tool for the job for your bees in a given moment. I'm always happy when there's new tools coming out.

Jeff: This is using the two-frame cage I think that we talked about last time you were on, where you put two frames inside the queen excluder kind of cage. You're not talking about keeping the queen in a two-by-two cage?

David: There's very different ways to do this and all of them have strengths and weaknesses. Yes, I was alluding to the frame isolation cages that better be cells that-- I think other folks have probably picked them up by now, but that are exactly what I described. It's a cage that holds one or more frames and the queen is marching around on those combs.

There are other studies, there's been some great research published out of Italy, I think, and some work in Spain that has actually taken queens put them into basically three-hole cages, and then locks them up for a month at a time and just turned off egg laying for that period. In those strategies, there's always that concern that if you turn the queen's egg laying off for a month, she might have a hard time turning it back on. I do think there's some issues with those queens at the ends of those studies, but the ones that do successfully kick back into gear, that seems to work perfectly well too.

There's different strategies available, but all of them are opportunities for beekeepers to manipulate their bees in a new way and then potentially not have to be buying as many chemicals to kill varroa mites. Not having as many colonies that die because they just never got the mites under good control.

Becky: You could just take all your queens, cage them up, and make one big queen bank.

David: Right. Just bank everybody for a month.

Becky: Bank everybody.

David: It could very well become a style of beekeeping. You never know with these mites coming in or with varroa being as difficult as they are, it's a strategy. If somebody did a big trial and proved that it could work-- If they could keep these profitably doing that, an awful lot of commercial beekeepers would be lining up to learn how to do it.

Jeff: Everybody goes to the bank. You go to the bank, you go to the bank, we all go to the bank. Speaking of queens in 2023 and '24, the topic of queens and queen quality has occasionally come to the news and come to the forefront. As we are looking at the spring of 2025, is there any new updates in developments on queen shipping, queen breeding, queen longevity?

David: There are always new lines of queens being developed and being offered for sale, and that's always exciting. I think we're seeing more and more that are claiming and maybe have some evidence to support the idea that they have got at least partial varroa mite resistance, which is always great. I'm always a fan of more resistant population developing across the US. You're right, though, that there has been this ongoing conversation about why it is that 40 years ago you could buy a queen and keep her in a hive for five years and still have her laying eggs when you decide that her wings are looking a little ragged, so you're going to replace her.

Now, there are beekeepers who find that they struggle to get a queen through an entire season, and there are open questions. I don't think we've got answers yet. Is it that queen breeders are doing something unscrupulous, they're taking some shortcut that's making queens that just aren't as good? Is it that there's some environmental contamination, some pesticide that is making queens shorter-lived and weaker, and we haven't detected it yet? We don't know what to lobby to have banned from farms around our queen breeding operations? Is it the drones?

We know that a queen that runs out of sperm is a queen who's not very functional in her colony anymore. We know that those drones they're Prima Donnas in life and their sperm might be Prima Donnas after the drone is long gone. They don't clean themselves. They don't feed themselves. They need to be taken care of. Maybe there's something in the pollen or some temperature control that's getting screwed up that's causing the queens to just not have as good sperm or as much sperm. Dave Tarpy's lab in North Carolina has done marvelous work on queen quality and looked at drones quite extensively, and has found that a lot of the, quote-unquote, "bad queens" that you find, it's at least partially attributable to issues with the drones that makes those queens crummy.

Jeff: Would that also trace back to the queen that produced the original drone?

David: It certainly could, right, or the queen that produced the egg that turned into the queen. Any of these things could impact quality. Unfortunately, I can't tell you that I've read some preprint of a scientific paper that is going to blow the lid off this whole thing, that we figured it out and we're going to fix everything. The other thing too is there's always crummy queens in a batch, there's always great queens in a batch. When we say queens aren't living as long as they used to, that doesn't mean that you're not going to get a queen who lives for three or four productive seasons. It's just that it does seem like the preponderance of the evidence is telling us that there are more queens with more issues now than there had been previously.

We don't know why, but at least people are paying attention to it. We're talking about it. We're being honest about it, and so we can try to dive in and figure out what to do. The last person who wants to sell a crummy queen is a professional queen producer. If we figure out that they're doing something wrong or their neighbors are spraying something bad, they're going to be the ones on the front lines fixing that because they want to make sure they've got the very best queens that they can.

Jeff: What else is on your list of hot topics and trends of 2025?

David: One that's near and dear to my heart is beekeepers who are getting excited about becoming bee educators. In my role here, I'm the educator for beekeepers, but one of the things that I teach and the things I enjoy teaching the most is teaching beekeepers how to be good teachers so that they can teach more beekeepers so that they can teach members of the public about bees. I'm seeing more and more interest in and excitement about that.

Something that's very personal to me is that I just accepted and was anointed the position as the academic advisor for the Eastern Apicultural Society's Master Beekeeper Program. That is a program which is at its heart all about testing, very rigorously testing, and evaluating beekeepers and then certifying the ones that are approved and passed that threshold to go out and teach other beekeepers about bees. There's an oral exam that proves that you could give an interview to the press or give a presentation to an elementary school class, or to a bee club. There's written exam, lab exam, a field exam that shows that you know which end of the hive tool goes in between the boxes to pry it open.

It's really exciting for me to be part of that program and helping to cultivate these new crops of very accomplished, very successful, very well-educated beekeepers to then go out and teach even more people. I'm seeing more and more educational products and classes that folks are offering. As someone who sells classes, I would never say only take my classes. Take my class, but then go take somebody else's because I'm sure he'll teach you or she'll teach you something that I'm not teaching. If you take my class and then our head beekeeper, Anne Frey, teaches that same class the next month, come take hers, because I'm sure that even though we've talked about the curriculum, she'll teach you something that I never would have brought up, and vice versa.

I think that being open to the fact that being a good beekeeper is a lifelong learning process, is a really healthy mindset that I'm seeing more beekeepers accepting. Some of the crusty old gray beards at the meetings who used to sit there and say, "Everything I learned about beekeeping I read in A, B, C, X, Y, Z in 1924 and I don't have to learn anything else because I know it all." That's not an attitude that's fun to interact with or healthy for a bee club or a bee community. I think more and more people are open to continuing to learn, talking to more people, and that's always exciting for me as a teacher.

Beck: It's also a great way to disseminate new information as far as emerging threats, even just initiatives that could support the beekeeping industry. That's such a great group of smart beekeepers in every Master Beekeeper Club I've encountered. They're truly-

David: There's many programs, but they all share that.

Jeff: -a little daunting. Yes, they're very, very smart and very invested, which is a great way to, I think, help the industry along.

David: Right. If you send an email to every master beekeeper of any stripe, of any certification, you're not going to send an email to every beekeeper in the country, but you're going to send an email to the person in every club in the country who's probably the one that people turn to for information first. When you educate that group of teachers, they can very quickly disseminate the information and make sure it's coming out in an accurate way. Something like the yellow-legged hornets are scary. They're threatening, they're confusing. We need to understand them if they're going to spread and if they might be something we have to deal with, and they can be dealt with. It's not like people have given up keeping bees in Western Europe since they've showed up. It's not like people can't keep bees in Asia where these wasps are from originally. When you have a good, healthy pipeline for new information to get funneled down and fed out into people in an accessible way, it means that you can deal with any of these challenges much more easily. You just have one great podcast that teaches people what they need to know, then the whole beekeeping community knows something new. What could be better?

Becky: There you go. [chuckles]

Jeff: I think you've summed up the podcast really well, David. Thank you.

Becky: Wait. Is this our only podcast episode for the whole year then, Jeff?

Jeff: Oh, no, no.

Becky: Okay. I'm just checking.

David: No, because there's going to be more new information for you to disseminate.

Becky: Oh, okay.

Jeff: That's right. It's ongoing. It's a journey. I can't believe this hour is going so quickly. From your perspective and your unique perspective there at Betterbee, are there any exciting products for beekeepers coming out in 2025 that you're aware of? You don't necessarily need to mention names, but maybe--

Becky: I'll mention names. Go for it.

Jeff: Oh, yes.

[laughter]

Jeff: Perfect.

David: I wish I could say yes, but so many of the products that are out there are-- It's the old standards. Beekeeping is still beekeeping. Bees are still bees, even as things change around us. I don't know if too many radical, earth-shattering revolutionary products. I do know that the Hogg Halfcomb system has gotten an upgrade. They've got a frame that just holds eight little pre-waxed cassettes that will let you make eight cassettes of comb honey right in the middle of a regular, super full of frames that you're going to extract. That's exciting. It makes comb honey easier and more accessible for the average beekeeper.

Jeff: Oh, that's Interesting.

Becky: Wait, I've got to ask.

David: Oh, yes.

Becky: Do you have to push the bees as far as on the brink of swarming, or is this such a good--

David: No, the beauty of this is that you just put it into a regular old super during a regular old spring flow, and it should be able to produce about eight combs of honey. You can't make 45 without, as you say, manipulating the bees and putting them to the brink of swarming. This is cool because it avoids that. The management is a heck of a lot easier.

Jeff: You read some of the old Richard Taylor stuff about comb honey, and it'd be hard to replicate what he does.

Becky: It's Intense. You really just have to be such a good beekeeper which, I'm not against, but--

David: In this world of honey fraud and what Apimondia just announced, they're not going to have any honey competition because they can't rule out fraud. There's no way to test for it. They're giving up on that aspect of the competition for the meeting. The beauty of something like comb honey is like, "Sure, I guess while my bees are filling the comb, I could be feeding them syrup," It's a lot harder to adulterate a product or to falsify whether or not your honey is honey if the bees are the ones that packaged it behind the [crosstalk].

Becky: Oh my God.

Jeff: That they're the ones stealing it.

David: Yes, exactly.

Becky: That's excellent.

David: Who's a better judge, and sort of, certificate of authenticity than a bunch of bees saying, "Yes, this is honey and we're going to cap it over"?

Jeff: That's a fun process.

Becky: That's super fun. Good for them.

David: There's always new stuff. The beauty of that one is that product came to exist because Herman Danenhower, who makes the Hogg Halfcomb system he bought from John Hogg, he's made it for years. He was talking to another beekeeper, and they were digging through an old barn and they found some comb honey sections with these special rinky-dink little frames made out of wood or metal. He said, "I bet I could make that out of a plastic."

This whole new product is a brand new, thrilling, exciting thing for beekeepers to get to use, and it's based on something that's probably 70, 80, 100 years old. There's not a lot that's new under the sun in beekeeping. We keep reinventing the wheel and finding slightly new and better ways to do things, but we're still going to have these living in boxes. We're going to cut the caps off and spin the honey out. That's fine. It's nice to have something that's the same in a world that does have so many changes.

Jeff: True to that. That's funny. No developments in beekeeping since 1853 except what was once basswood is now plastic.

David: There's changes, but it's more tweaks than it is radical earth-shattering reinventions.

Jeff: David, before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to say that we haven't gotten to yet in the last few seconds here of the episode?

David: No. I feel bad. You did invite me in for a nice, fun, casual chat, and I started talking doom and gloom right away. That maybe is my background as a parasitologist before I became a beekeeper. Tom Seeley spent his whole career admiring the cooperation and collaboration of honeybees. I came in to study the varroa mites, first and foremost. Whenever he looks at bees teaming up and working together, I'm more interested in questions like, how is this parasite going to exploit them? Or, when the bees start robbing each other and stealing their honey, how many guards will die in the war?

I do feel a little bad that I started on a downer note. The point I've got here is that as I look forward for a year of beekeeping, there are going to be challenges, just like there have always been challenges, and just like beekeepers have always overcome them. There are going to be new, exciting products on the horizon that we might want to play with and test with. Although a lot of what we're relying on is going to be the old mainstays. I think there's going to be new things that are offered that people are going to say, "This is the silver bullet. This is going to kill all of your varroa mites. This is going to solve your problems." I think some of them probably won't, and I think some of them probably will really help.

We, as beekeepers, need to be open and flexible and excited about testing and trying new stuff. As a scientist, Becky, you're a scientist. As scientists, we do our best to generate data and then provide that data to someone to interpret and decide whether or not something's good or bad but even if I did a, 10-year-long study on one of these products or one of these techniques, I couldn't give that to you and say this is going to work for you in the Pacific Northwest because I don't live in the Pacific Northwest. Each beekeeper really does need to test these products out and make sure it works for them. All of this stuff is exciting. It gives us the opportunity to keep growing and learning as beekeepers. That's what I'm excited about in 2025, just like I was in '24 and '23, and every year I've been a beekeeper.

[music]

Jeff: David, it's been a delight to have you on the show to help us kick off the new year, and look forward to having you back more often.

David: Sure thing. Thanks for having me.

Becky: Thank you so much, David.

Jeff: This is starting off to be a great new year.

Becky: I'm going to get comb honey this year. I don't know about you.

Jeff: I tried in Colorado. I tried in Ohio to produce comb honey. I found it very difficult, at least for a time-crunched beekeeper like myself. This sounds more along my lines of being able to get some comb money.

Becky: It's like a passive investment. It's instead of an active investment where you have to go in and do the management. I'm kind of talking real estate here too, but it's like a passive investment. You put the frame in there and then the bees take care of it and you haven't had to do anything extra.

David: Yes. You're not sitting there monitoring and worried about over--

Becky: Them swarming.

David: Them swarming, yes. Oh, my gosh. Right when you don't want them to swarm. What a great way to kick off 2025. This month we have Fred Dunn, we have Randy Oliver. Next month we're going to kick off our series on upscaling your beekeeping operation. That's going to be a fun series.

Becky: I think so many beekeepers out there are trying to figure out how to build their beekeeping business. I am thrilled we're going to be talking about it. Building operations, building businesses, things like that.

Jeff: Folks, thanks for tuning in. Happy New Year. Continue listening. We have great shows lined up, great guests, and we'll be talking to you next week. 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 or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage. We want to thank Betterbee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, 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 on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:49:45] [END OF AUDIO]