Raising Package Bees & Queens with Ray Olivarez (324)

324 - Raising Package Bees & Queens with Ray Olivarez

HR Cook: Hey, Becky and Jeff. This is HR Cook coming to you from the limestone bluffs of the mighty Mississippi River in Dubuque, Iowa. Home to the Swiss Valley Bee Club. Our bees are put to bed for the winter. The fire is lit. Hot chocolate poured, a dog at my feet, and we are ready to listen to another great episode of Beekeeping Today podcast.

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 or download, and listen to over 300 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.beekeepingtoday.com.

HR, that was a great opening. Man, I just want to show up on your doorstep and sit there with your dog and drink some hot chocolate. What a great opening.

Becky: It was lovely. Just the picture he painted and his bees set for winter. This is nice. Hopefully, they're coming out of winter into the spring healthy and happy and big.

Jeff: Yes. Exactly. Thanks, HR. It is the beginning of spring in many parts of the country. We're right in the middle of March, and it's a good time to start-- If you haven't been thinking about your packages in queen situation, you better get on it because you might be behind the ball a little bit.

Becky: It's such a dance because I think the official survival date for wintering is April 1st, but a lot of times you need to know what you need before that date and so your bees might not be out of danger and you might have to predict whether or not you need to buy some more or decide if you're going to expand.

Jeff: A lot of beekeepers just solve that problem by just ordering a couple packages or a couple nucs or whatever they need and just, "Hey, if I have to expand, I have to expand. Oh, well." [laughs]

Becky: I love that. You win either way, right?

Jeff: That's right.

Becky: You've got bees either way. You just might have more bees.

Jeff: That's right. As you go into the springtime, how do you judge whether you are going to go with more bees? Because you can go packages or nucs or splits, but let's just considering today.

Becky: I always just do the math and see what they look like. This time of year and actually a month earlier, I was even peaking in January so that there are no real big surprises. You do the math as far as what the colonies look like, and then how much equipment do you have or how much equipment can you sneak into the house and have your husband build without noticing how much equipment is coming into the house? Anyway. That actually is a calculus. It's not a simple algebraic equation. That's a calculus problem.

Jeff: There's been a couple of springs where I say, "I have enough bottom boards." I go based on a number of bottom boards figuring, if I have a bottom board in a deep somewhere, even a medium, I can make it work and give me four or six weeks, then there's enough time to get another box on top.

Becky: Then at what point do you realize you need more covers?

Jeff: That happens. That does happen, but for a while.

Becky: Plywood will work in a pinch. Right?

[laughter]

Jeff: That's right.

Becky: And a really good rock. Plywood and a really good rock.

Jeff: That's how migratory tops started. [laughs]

Becky: Exactly.

Jeff: Springtime is a great time to get started, starting with packages or newbies or nucs or splits, or later in the spring here, we can think about swarms. How did you get your first bees? Did you get packages-

Becky: Oh boy.

Jeff: -or a nuc, or did you just get a whole hive?

Becky: That's a tricky question. I started beekeeping with the university and so as a graduate student. The university has always when getting new bees gotten packages, so that's how I learned. Actually, I don't think I've ever gotten a nuc before. I've always just gotten packages for my own bees. I didn't have that experience of the first package because I was already elbows into it. I still love a package. Oh my gosh, I love packages so much. Watching them grow is one of, I think, the most fun beekeeping experiences that I have. I haven't ordered packages for a while, but I'd like some.

Jeff: My first was a couple of hives that I got into June or beginning of July sometime, or complete hives, full-size busting with bees. They were bearded out front the night we went to go get them.

Becky: Whoa.

Jeff: Hey, that's another story altogether.

Becky: That's one way to learn. I think we need to hear that someday. [laughs].

Jeff: Some of these days. It was a story there for sure. I do like packages as well. There's something special about packages. No matter how you start them, watching them grow and expand, it's very comforting for me. I just enjoy it.

Becky: It's like you grow into catching a swarm. A package is like the magic of a swarm where you just have a bunch of bees and then they're going to make their own nest with the equipment you give them. It is pretty magical to put in 7,000 or 10,000 bees and a queen and see what they can do.

Jeff: It's like HR talking about the dog curled up at his feet. A package to me is like a puppy.

Becky: A puppy.

[laughter]

Jeff: Bringing home a puppy and getting it going and just watching it grow and anyways.

Becky: Yes, you have to feed it and care for it and watch it closely, right?

Jeff: You do. Many beekeepers have a fond attachment to the packages as they go out. The reason we're talking about packages today, and I encourage beekeepers everywhere to, if you haven't had the experience of a package, please go ahead and do that. Nucs are fine, and splits are great, everything. Packages are special. Today we have as our guest, Ray Olivarez from Olivarez's Honey Bees. They're going to talk to us about the Queen and package business.

Becky: It is very exciting. I think I've been a customer of Olivarez's Honeybees through our local natures nectar, for ever since the bee lab can remember. It's really going to be fun to actually have this conversation.

Jeff: I'm looking forward to it. Every spring they have a big bee festival and package pickup day in their place in California. I've never been. I've always wanted to just take a while, drive down there and just spend the day and just watch. There's something magical about people picking up their bees and just sharing that experience.

Becky: It's a happy day.

Jeff: It is a happy day. Hey, Becky. Ray is out in the green room. Let's invite him into the studio. Folks, we'll be right back with Ray Olivarez right after this message.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey everybody, welcome back. Thank you to our sponsors for supporting us on this podcast. Hey everybody, sitting across this great big virtual Beekeeping Today podcast interview table is Ray Olivarez. Ray, thank you for joining us on Beekeeping Today podcast.

Ray Olivarez: Thank you for having me.

Becky: Ray, this is so exciting because, as I mentioned earlier, I've been one of your customers for years and years, and so this is very exciting to actually have a chance to talk with you.

Ray: Thank you.

Jeff: Ray, for our listeners who don't know you, can you give us just a thumbnail sketch of your background and your family's history with bees, and where you are right now?

Ray: Bear with me. I might jump around a little bit. If I go back to my dad, so I'm a second-generation beekeeper. Our kids, we have three of them, two boys and a girl, are the third generation, and they're probably seven years into the business full-time. My dad started working for beekeepers about 1965 and then started his own business about 1967. He worked with some of the pioneers in the queen industry here in California; Wenners, Penners, Art Banta. These are names that nobody out there will know other than maybe locals around here.

Anyway, back in the day, back in the '60s and the '70s and the early '80s for my dad and myself, package bees to Canada were our primary source of revenue because they would gas their bees off every year and then restock them with two-pound package bees until 1987 when the border closed.

Jeff: Just real quick, for our listeners who may not understand the gassing of the bees, they would literally just euthanize the bees every fall so they didn't have to care for them through the winter.

Ray: They had six months to overwinter them and they didn't have the technology we had now. They could wrap them, but the success ratio wasn't very good. They'd use the bees as fertilizer because they're an incredible fertilizer, and they come down to springtime and pick up and start over. Those bees for the Canadians back then were called mortgage bees, because most of them are cattle farmers, grain farmers, and they had enough bees to make enough honey to pay the mortgage each year. That's going back then. I jumped into the business with my dad in about 1982, '83. I was going to be an AG teacher, and my dad lost all his bees in a flood, El Niño, right around 3000 hives in one night. Tried to help him rebuild. It was pretty tough that we're talking interest rates back then. The 20% interest rate. It was pretty tough.

My wife and I, Tammy, we started our own business in 1987. Started with about 100 hives and just grew it from there over time. We took on a business partner, Dan Cummings, might've been about 15 years ago. We split up about maybe seven years ago, mainly just because his plate was too full. He was the chairman of the board of Blue Diamonds for 10 years. He was on the Almond Board for 30 years, and he was managing 15,000 acres of Amazon Wallets, so we moved on when he moved on. He helped us grow the business, very smart businessman, and got us to where we're at today.

Becky: Where you are today is a very well recognized and a large supplier of both honeybee queens and packages. Your packages go all over United States, as do your queens.

Ray: When the border closed, then almonds they are not big yet. Then that's one of the reasons we got into business with Dan because he knew there was going to be a problem sourcing bees because it's still working with tracheal mite, the onset of Varroa mite, who knew where we were going to go with the Varroa mites? The early years of Varroa mites we didn't have the viruses, and then now we're dealing with viruses. You could have mites or no mites and still have viruses affecting you.

What we decided to do is, we used to shake packages for commercial beekeepers that were restocking their bees domestically here, not Canada, but domestically, but they might need them this year and not another four years from now. With all the inputs that go into the bees to have them strong so that we can do the queen and the packages, it's a lot of inputs. Way more than most beekeepers will put into their bees. We got to guarantee ourself a return. We built our own trailer, specialized truck in trailer, to haul these bees to Texas, to Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, you name it, we can go anywhere with 2,000 three-pound packages and get there with no loss of bees unless we get in a wreck. [laughs]

Becky: These trailers, they are decked out?

Ray: Yes. You got a live animal, and these bees generate a lot of heat. What we learned over time, we had all kinds of sensors. We had GPS, and using satellites, we could get temperature readings every five seconds or every five minutes, whatever we wanted. What we discovered is we made a trailer that the bees could be transported in, that there was constant airflow. That's what gets people on hauling bees is if air gets trapped and then they panic, get hot, and they regurgitate all over each other, and they drowned in the vomit because it's the way bees breathe. It gets all over them. They're wet. Over the years, we don't know everything. We're still learning, and we make improvements constantly.

Becky: I'm not being paid to say this, but it's interesting. The bee buses too, the packages show up, and you barely see a dead bee at the bottom. It's pretty impressive. You know that they're comfortable.

Ray: What we learned with the bee buses, and in fact, one time they had a bottom that was vented, and Charlie Linder makes the bee buses. I said, "We need a solid bottom in case they get warm in the syrup leak. I don't want it leaking down to the next package right on the bees because when they clean up that syrup, they generate heat." That's why it's so important to not get the bees to a point where they get too warm and get excited because just the heat from the bees, or sometimes it's just the altitude, will force the feed out of the cans. We try to keep them as cool as possible without getting it too cool. What's even bigger, it's just having a lot of air flow.

We feel like the bee buses, they don't absorb the heat either, like wood does, and stay warmer longer. It dissipates the heat a lot quicker. One of the things that we're doing this year, not only are we shipping to distributors, we're also this year-- Last year we shipped about 1,000 packages through the United States Postal Service. We quit doing that years ago because it was a pretty good chance that 50% of them would die. We only lost one last year. Now we're comfortable shipping these packages through, not UPS. UPS is unpredictable. We had some losses in the past with one of our distributors. It wasn't their fault, UPS was just-- People are afraid of bees that don't know bees. Some people that have bees they're afraid of bees. They were gassing bees off in containers and things because they just didn't understand. I don't completely blame them.

Jeff: What do you attribute the increase of survivability over the years through the postal service?

Ray: The postal service is now coming to us asking for our business. You have a group of people, generally they're coming from the military, a lot of them. They have a certain level of accountability that is above and beyond. The fact that they want to do business with us now instead of, "Oh, God, here comes the beekeepers," that makes a difference. It's attitude and care. A lot of people are shipping USPS, and so now, here on the West Coast, you can get them directly from OHB. On the East Coast, you can also, but you could also get them from our distributors.

Becky: What does that look like? If I go onto your website and I order a package on a Tuesday, say it's during the season, do I choose from a number of dates, and then are you shipping them out, and how long does that take?

Ray: Yes. Generally, it's two-day ground transportation, two to five, but it's all ground. UPS and USPS will not do error anymore. A lot of our distributors we ship them out on the trucks, and then they reship them again, and sometimes they get shipped again and again. A lot of people making money along the line, but how you shake these packages, on our end, I think dictates the quality at the other end and the amount of dead bees and stuff. Like you said, you don't see many dead bees in the bottom of the packages. It's all about we shake by hand. You're getting mostly baby bees. We shake by hand through an excluder, so most of the adult forages fly off when we're shaking and get no drones. We look for the queen--

The reason we shake by hand is because the next thing we do is go to Montana right after the package season. We're queen shaking at the same time to see the health of the bees. You're getting a lot of young baby bees in our packages, nurse bees, because we're shaking right off the brood frames. We usually can shake in one and a half days and have them on the road the second day. They're not sitting for three or four days till you get enough bees shook and then they're on the road. It makes a huge difference.

Another thing, I don't want to say it's a trade secret, I learned this from Kevin Ward and Leonard Pankratz. They're northern California bee breeders here, and it's you don't shake bees that are hungry. If you think about it, packages, actually, they were called swarms a long time ago. I just bought a swarm of bees. What did that mean? When a swarm leaves a hive, they gorge themselves with enough honey to make it for three or four days or five days without even foraging. If you shake on bees that are starving or light, there's nothing to gorge on. Those cans are just there to maintain.

We've had packages where we didn't punch the holes right. The feed wasn't actually coming out of the can. It was a mistake. It was making an indentation and didn't realize the hole wasn't there. The packages were fine for about four days and the guy installed them. He said, "Boy, these are the most gentle bees I've ever seen." I said, "That's nice." He says, "Yes, they just laid down real nice." I said, "They're okay?" He says, "Oh, they're beautiful. They're fine." I said, "Check the holes on the cans." He goes, "Oh, there's no syrup coming out." But they made it for four days without even having syrup.

That's my point, how you shake them. If you shake them when they're starving or light, you got to give them some smoke to calm them down they gorge. If they don't have that to gorge on, you'll see bees dying that night in the package because that can isn't really enough. It's not there for the only feed source. You need feed in their gut. That's a real key to getting healthy packages 2,000 miles on the other side of the country.

Becky: That's why those bees are ready to build wax too. They're young and they're well fed.

Ray: They'll build wax too with the syrup in the package.

Becky: Yes. I've seen that a number of times.

Jeff: What does it take to raise the number of bees to create and send out the number of packages you send out every year? When does your beekeeping year start?

Ray: It never ends. Our business model is to keep the bees in the healthiest environment that we can because we start shaking for cell builders, boosting breeders.

Becky: Oh, wait, let's tell everybody what cell builders are, Ray, without everybody's raised queens here.

Ray: Yes . We use queenless cell builders. It's a couple frames of brood and six pounds of young bees shook or shaken off of the brood frames.

Becky: For when you're grafting.

Ray: When we're grafting. Yes. We'll install them the night before and, say, eleven o'clock the next day, we graft into them. Then every time we graft a new graft, we add two pounds of young bees every time we graft.

Becky: I'm going to make you stop here too, because now a lot of people who don't know the grafting business are envisioning you grafting literally into the colony, but you're grafting into cups, correct?

Ray: Cell cups, yes.

Becky: Little queen cups and/or cell cups.

Ray: We have, I think it's 13 cell plastic JZBZ cell cups on a bar.

Becky: What are you grafting into those? What age larvae?

Ray: Certain age of larvae.

Becky: Very, very young.

Ray: Generally, is right around 11 hours old. Very young.

Becky: That's young.

Ray: It's a process. Jeff, you asked me about how do you do the volume that we do or what we do. We just each year graduated to what we could do, but we don't do it unless we can do it right. It's like breathing to us. It's just a natural thing. We have really, really good people. Most of our staff starting to age out a little bit. We're always looking.

Becky: Eyesight's pretty important too for grafting.

Ray: For the grafting, with the cell builders and then the caging crew, they don't need a lot of direction. They're self-sufficient. We've just got good people, and we've only increased as we can increase with the people. You're as good as the people that work for you. Period. They're the ones that make it happen.

Becky: You are moving 11-hour old plus or minus larvae into queen cups, and then you're moving them into cell builders so that the queens are started. Then what, Ray?

Ray: Those are queenless cell builders made up of primarily nurse bees. They feed them the royal jelly, what they need to make them into queens. Then, after so many days, we pull the cells at about 11 days, 10 days and stick on the 11th day. When I say stick, that means we're either reselling a nuc that we cage the queen out of or caught a queen out of, and put a new cell in to start the same process over, or it's when we're making up our nucs in the building, we make them up with a third of pound of bees. We use the Mann Lake mini mating nuc styro. There's a whole process to that. Then we regraft again into the same cell builder, but every time we graft, we add two pounds of baby bees so that they're fed correctly.

Jeff: Must be quite an assembly line of the recipient hives, the mating hives or the queen raising hives, and the donor hives, that you're pulling all these baby bees or the young nurse bees from. It's a constant flow, isn't it?

Ray: Yes. We have one crew that shakes maybe 1,200 pounds a week just for the cell builders to add. After we graft so many times into those cell builders, we'll take those out and put a queen cell in them and let them raise a queen and start them as a new hive, and we make up new cell builders. It's just an evolution, just constantly revolving all the time. A lot of bookkeeping and organization.

Becky: Calendars, right?

Ray: It doesn't seem hard, but we've been doing it for-- Like I said, it's almost muscle memory, but you just can't assume everybody's doing everything right all the time. We're checking on things all the time.

Becky: Ray, if you had one subspecies or line of bees that you could pick to produce your baby bees, what would it be?

Ray: Man, I don't know. We have our OHB Italians and Carniolans. Mainly, we have Carnolian breeder queens. We don't use Carnolian in our outfit. We have instrumentally inseminated breeder queens that we get from Valeri Strachan, which is the new world Carnolians, as our mothers. Our Carnolian are hybrid, which I like everything hybrid. It just goes back to my high school FFA, your best everything is hybrid. You got your pure bread, but that vigor of the hybrid is what we like supercharged. I guess if I wanted to manipulate something, I'd have to say maybe the Italians. We could get more bees out of the Italians because they'll hitch out a house at home in some instances-

Becky: They will.

Ray: -if you're not paying attention.

Becky: They won't stop.

Ray: I don't want to call it a fallacy at all because I'll probably get in trouble, but we used to send nothing but Italians to Canada for honey production. We get our best honey production from our Strachans. They're honey machines. Albert Robertson developed those for Canadians. 30 years of selecting for survivor stock. Number one thing they had to do, they had to be gentle, but they also had to produce a lot of honey because that's where they make all their money. Just by doing that by default through selection of certain traits, you got to be careful because if you super concentrate on one trait, you're going to lose two or three other traits.

Like the Saskatraz, they had to make honey. They had to be gentle and overwinter. Every time you select-- Beekeepers all around US are doing this already. They're selecting from the best every year, so you're getting, hopefully, a better bee all the time. I would say for both bees, the Italians they're going to produce a few more predictable. Sometimes they don't know when to shut down, though, but it depends. That's the truth.

Becky: Rain is not going to stop them. Cold is not going to stop them.

Ray: Yes.

Becky: I was curious. Thank you. Okay, Jeff. I'll let you take it away.

Jeff: This is a fascinating discussion, and, obviously, we can't get enough questions into Ray. Let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back right after this word from one of our sponsors.

[music]

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Ray, I have a serious question. How do you sleep at night knowing that we're all depending upon you to get us bees and queens? How do you get your bees to the point where you know you don't have to worry about being able to fill orders?

Ray: Jeff, you asked me a question earlier. I think I told you it's 365. It's 365 days of the year. There's no breaks like there used to be. We used to have three months where the bees could go dormant, California, and we didn't have to worry about them. We never quit working. We got to control the mites and got to have good nutrition. We take half of our bees to Montana for honey production. We take those bees out there because of the environment. We're in the prairies. We're in dry land, a lot of dry land areas where there's more flowers. There's bumblebees out there. There's no shortage of bumblebees. Go to Montana. [chuckles] They just have them in the prairie. It's a high pollen area.

A lot of the Midwest is that way. Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming. Of course, we need rain, but there's a lot of pollen out there. We keep the bees as healthy as we can. This year, we started feeding supplemental pollen about maybe, I'm going to say, the first week of August this year, and we never stopped. We're still feeding pollen right now. We feed maybe-- Let's see. Every two weeks during the fall. We would like to do it sooner, but we're spread out all over the place. We keep turning the bees over.

The key for me is to turn the bees over, going into winter to have the healthiest bees going through winter. Then we start feeding pollen as soon as everybody's back from Christmas, and we could get a crew together. We start feeding pollen again. We try to get two rounds in before the almonds bloom. Then, of course, the almonds, almonds, almonds, however you want to say it, we get a big buildup on that, and we just keep it going. Our inputs are off the charts, but we create a level of predictability, consistently predictable, that we can get the bees out.

Some years, we have to get a little help with the bulk bees for if our bees aren't as good as they were the year before. We'll buy some bulk bees to stock the baby nucs and let our hives build a little bit stronger so we could shake the packages the way we need to. This year, I think we're seeing some of the best bees we've seen in 10 years as a whole. I don't know why. You're going to hear pretty soon that we might not have enough bees for the almonds this year the way it's sitting right now. This is probably the highest losses I've seen yet going into the almonds. It's pretty bad right now nationwide.

Jeff: What comes first in your operation? Do you focus on the queens first and then the package bees, or is it package bees then the queens?

Ray: Yes. I think there's a flow to the season. I tell my boys all the time and everybody that works for us, "Everything will come if the bees are healthy." It's the health of the bees first because everything will fall into place after that. If you have healthy bees and productive bees, whether it's the queens or whatever, everything will come behind it. Even the honey. If the bees are not healthy, it's just a struggle. It's a constant struggle of survival.

What a season looks like for us, let's just start January 1st. We start feeding pollen and sucrose or carbohydrates to the bees to start and stimulate the queen to start laying. Winter solstice this is December 22nd. The days get longer. If we stay on the same track, the almonds are going to come about five to seven days early this year. We're extremely warm right now. We already have drones in our hives, which is way early. We have sealed drone brood. We have the Queensland. Now you count out so many days, and that's when you can technically start grafting when you have mature drones. Every two days, I look at three different blogs on YouTube to look at long-range weather. It's like the bible to me. It's all about the weather because we prep everything.

Like this year, we're prepping everything so that we might get a jump on the queens this year because the most demand is at the front end of the season. It's the summertime, everybody's got queens. We're thinking about getting a jump on it. We're prepping all of our nucs, all of our equipment to raise queens, have it done so that if the opportunity's there, we'll jump right on it. If we wait to prep everything when the time's there, we miss the window. I think that's where things are going to go. You got to have healthy bees, and everything will fall into place.

Jeff: In your operation, you mentioned Saskatraz, Italians, and Carniolans. We talked to Randy Oliver not too long ago on the show, and he said that you're raising some of his bees as well as queens.

Ray: Yes. We are. We got our OHP Italians, which we've had forever. That's been influenced over the years by other friends of ours, whether it's Kevin Ward or Leonard Pankratz or other breeders. We share stuff and do things like that. We got the Saskatraz with Albert Robertson out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Randy Oliver, Golden West, the Italians, Carniolans. We're not producing any queens yet, but we're hosting PAm now, Project Apis mellifera, with what was called the Hilo project. It had a little bit of an interruption and some problems. We picked it up because I know Danielle very well and Bob Danka. That's the VSH. We're retesting and working on that line, trying to help them move that along also. We don't have the North Queens available yet until we prove some certain criteria.

Randy Oliver, he's explained to you how he came about his selection process. Let's just put aside the mite levels and stuff like that. Are they a good bee in general? They're phenomenal. I think that's just by default, by selecting the best all the time to breed from, they're credible bees. I didn't know how hard it was going to be. He's got some strict protocols and we actually can't produce those as early as we would like to because we take those to our more traditional yards in the foothills where we have isolation for the most part, for mating purposes.

We have over 1,200 hives now that have the right drone stock in them. You can only raise so many queens and they're up in the foothills a little bit, so it's a little cooler. We're probably a week and a half behind on raising, maybe even two weeks because we're not just going to call something a Saskatraz or a Golden West queen unless we do it right. We're alcohol-washing every hive and it was amazing. The mite levels were very, very low. It's a lot of labor that goes into that. That's something I think even Randy realized how do we make something we can get out there because we're limited on the numbers, but following those protocols to get that stock is not easy. We're learning and we learn every day, but it's going really well. We're very happy with the queen so far.

Becky: When people order packages or queens, they have a choice for all the packages for different queens. Correct? They can also just order the queens individually. So the package comes with one of the specific breeds.

Ray: One thing that we want people to know, we have a pretty long relationship with Mann Lake and you guys know that, with the packages and everything, a lot of them. You'll notice now that the Italians and the Carniolans have been taken off. They're still purchasing the Randy Oliver or the Golden West and the Saskatraz because you can't get them anywhere else. You're not should be able to, unless it's authorized dealer because we're the only ones that produce them. They can still order the Italians and the Carniolans' postal service, just to let you know. We're getting a lot of calls, "Why aren't your Italians Mann Lake?" That's another story.

Becky: We're not going to talk about that today.

[laughter]

Ray: No, not today.

Jeff: I'll just say that just from our local bee company here, they go down and pick up our Saskatraz from you. Boy, I've really been happy with those the last couple of seasons with the Saskatraz. They've been a delight.

Ray: We got really good crosses. The S96 is a 113, 144 are really good. There is about maybe 25 different crosses. Albert is just an untapped resource I had. I wish more people knew him. He's incredible. I've learned so much from him.

Becky: Ray, you've mentioned it a couple of times, but I think that it deserves a little bit of special attention just how collaborative the honey bee industry is because I think you've named many queen producers and many suppliers in your conversations, but could you just give our listeners a heads up at how you work together more than you work against other?

Ray: There's two sides to that because there's still is a green-- well, beekeeping's very territorial. It's very nomadic, migratory. My dad's generation was a little different generation. Again, it hasn't changed. It's still very territorial. I don't think the collaboration was as great as it is now. We've chosen to work with as many people as we can because in our introduction on our website, I mentioned that my best information comes from the other beekeepers. We have a lot of good friends and there's a lot of really good beekeepers out there. Like I said in the last week, we've been on the phone more than ever because of this collapse.

Whatever's going on out there, it's a three-year cycle or if it was just the weather conditions, environmental, I don't know exactly what's going on there. We have some suspicions, but yes, working with all these beekeeper-- actually the funniest part of the job is working with other beekeepers. I don't think it happens enough in our industry. We have two meetings a year, industry meetings. They all got businesses and we leave there and it's hard to follow up. They're doing what they can do. I don't know how some of those guys do what they do. Besides running a bee business or going to Washington, they're trying to do all these different things and move the needle.

I believe that the knowledge of bees outside of owning bees and doing it for 20 or 30 years, we've got 2,000 or 3,000 people in the United States that really, really understand bees. I don't expect anybody else to understand, because I used to-- it was funny, we were talking about this yesterday. I used to get so mad at my dad because he had an answer for everything. It's like, "How can you have an answer for every bee question I ask? There's 10 variables to every question or 20."

You can have an answer, but you might see one thing this year and maybe not see it again for another 10 years, but who's going to recognize it? The only person that's going to recognize it is the one person that went through it, had to pay for it. I don't know if the world knows how fragile the bee industry is right now. It's very fragile and we have a lot of good people out there. Man, moving that needle is just painful. That's not doom and gloom. [laughs]

Jeff: I was going to say, let's leave on a different note, and you do one thing in the spring that I've wanted to come down. I'm up in the Olympia, Washington. I've wanted to come down and join the day. You have your bee days or your package day, and it looks like such a celebration of the honeybee for all beekeepers. Can you just take just last two minutes here of the show and talk to us about your bee days in the spring?

Ray: We do have a Bee day, but it's not what it used to be. Still, we do a few demonstrations. We have a restaurant, I'm not sure why, but we have a beautiful restaurant, of beekeeping, and it's doing great. We have a barn there right in the middle of town. Randy Oliver will be there this year, probably have a couple of other people. When COVID ended our hobby day, our big one, we had almost 4,000 people show up one year because we added Honeybee Festival to it. This was in April of 19. COVID shut the next one down. Kim used to come out and-- We had all these researchers, they just loved to come out and we had all kinds of demonstrations.

I used to get chastised a little bit about it for supplying bees to some commercial beekeepers because we don't need any more bees around. I said, "They're going to get bees no matter what, so why not help them? Be a part of their experience, and help them be successful because if they feel like they're being shunned, you're not going to know where they're at. You're not going to be able to help them." It's the same way over in Hawaii. We haven't mentioned that. We raise queens on the big island in Hawaii. The reason we went over to Hawaii was because when the small hive beetle was introduced in the US, we didn't know out in California how that was going to affect us. Turns out we don't have small hive beetles. Our humidity's too low. We'll see hive beetles come into the area with the almonds, and then they just disappear.

There's one other thing I want to let you guys know. We don't have small hive beetles. We don't have Africanized bees. We don't have hybridization. We ship about 50,000 queens to Canada every year, so we have to have our bees tested genetically every 45 or 60 days. I could be wrong on those numbers. It might even be 90. We're doing all kinds of things to have the healthiest bees available. Those are some things about Northern California that a lot of people don't realize. There's hive beetles in California, but they're on the coast for the most part. High humidity area. We have them in Hawaii and they're more of a nuisance than anything. People ask me all the time, "What's the hive beetles like on the island?" It's like, "Oh, nobody really talks about it anymore, but they're there."

Becky: We don't want to let you go, but before we let you go, Ray, is there anything else new you want to share that you're planning on doing this year?

Ray: Yes. We will be offering vaccinated queens with our packages and individual queen sales. This is Dalan Animal Vaccinations, and it's a product that's supposed to prevent American foulbrood, but they're seeing some other properties that might work against maybe some of the other viruses like deformed wing, but it's still in discovery mode, but it'll be available for those who choose to click the button and have a queen vaccinated.

Becky: It's nice because the vaccination is new to the industry and sometimes it's nice to just support the science that's helping to keep our bees healthy even in its infancy.

Jeff: You can check our show notes because last year we did talk with the representatives from Dalan about their vaccines. I'm glad to see it's coming to market and making available for beekeepers. Ray, like I said earlier, it's a pleasure having you on the show. Look forward to having you back.

Becky: I think I'm just going to encourage our listeners to follow you on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and your website, ohbees.com.

Ray: Thank you. Appreciate it and enjoyed this a lot. Kind of remember it's nice to try to recall things and bring them up and you forget some of the things you've done and some of the things you need to do still.

Becky: That's because you're working 365, Ray. I'm glad you took a little time out of your day to talk to us. Thank you.

Ray: You have to love bees to do bees. That's all there is to it.

Jeff: All right, well, thank you. I appreciate it. There is a lot that goes into producing packages of bees. There's a lot more there than just bees, that's for sure.

Becky: Right. They're well fed, they're the right young age, they're carefully transported. I've got pictures of this trailer. It's not even a trailer. It looks like this souped-up RV specialized for package transport. It's so impressive. I don't know. I think it makes me feel good about their investment into the industry.

Jeff: When they were talking about the care they taken in getting the young bees into the packages, that for me really meant a lot in terms of the longevity of the packages and how less stressed they are through the entire process. It's good.

Becky: Right. It's great information, and it's great to know that the industry is supporting the great treatment, good nutrition and making sure that when they're making bees or swarms or packages for beekeepers that they're as healthy as they can be.

Jeff: There's a lot of information there that we didn't talk about. A lot of information that would be really fun to hear. I look forward to having Ray back at a later date.

Becky: Jeff, it might be better if we just go there and see it firsthand. All those bees.

Jeff: You've got me thinking. You've got me thinking. Well, 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 Podcast 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 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.

[silence]

[00:54:46] [END OF AUDIO]