Raising Resilient Bees with Eric and Joy McEwen (S6, E13)

S6, E13 - Raising Resilient Bees with Eric and Joy McEwen

Erin Evans: Hi, this is Erin Evans from the Maine State Beekeeping Association. Thank you for listening to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

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Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining, and thank you, Erin, for that wonderful opening. We have two guests today, Joy and Eric McEwen, authors of the recently released book Raising Resilient Bees. Their book offers a natural sustainable model for hive health and production that prioritizes the bee over the beekeeper. The book is written for beekeepers of all experience levels and includes many wonderful photos to illustrate their approach, and that's coming up. Hey, I hope everybody's September is off to a good start.

I was in the bee yard all weekend. It's fun but hard work and that's for sure. I've mentioned a time or two that my biggest challenge with bees since moving to the Pacific Northwest is the mental shift needed to find a way to keep my bees through the cool wet winters. This year it's going to be different, I know it. Well I can tell you why too. I've treated for mites to help the bees by reducing the viral and mite load going into the winter. I'll also better insulate my hives. In fact, I even broke down and purchased two new expanded polystyrene hives to give them a try here and got two colonies transferred into them this weekend.

I'll throw a photo of them into the show notes on the website. I will also write about them in the blog page as the winter progresses. Yes, the importance of insulation and especially top insulation cannot be overstated. Proper insulation is pivotal from temperature regulation to moisture control. Firstly, top insulation serves to regulate the internal temperature of the hive. During the winter months, the bee cluster generates heat maintaining a consistent internal environment. Insulating the top of the hive, helps to retain this generated heat, thereby conserving the bee's energy and reducing the consumption of stored honey.

This is vital for the colony survival into the spring. Top insulation is not needed to absorb moisture, but plays an indirect role in moisture management. In an uninsulated hive, warm air from the bee cluster rises and can condense upon reaching the cold inner surface of the hive's top, creating water droplets that may drip back down onto the cluster below. This can lead to undesirable consequences, such as mold growth or chilling and killing the bees. By insulating the top of the hive, you can retain the warm air generated by the bee cluster, which in turn minimizes the condensation of moisture on the inner cover or the top.

For effective moisture control, it's essential to complement top insulation with proper ventilation. A properly ventilated hive allows moist air to escape and it helps the bees maintain a proper humidity level inside. Some beekeepers use small upper entrances or other specialized equipment to achieve this. Always remember that the keys to strike a balance. While insulation helps retain heat, adequate ventilation is crucial to prevent excess moisture buildup. Research supports the merits of insulation with studies showing that well-insulated hives often have higher survival rates during winter compared to those without insulation.

In terms of materials for top insulation, you have several options. Commercial hive insulation wraps are available, or if you prefer, you can do it yourself with a piece of rigid foam insulation cut to fit the inner cover. The material you choose should act as a good thermal barrier while still allowing for adequate ventilation. This is where being a member of a local bee club and/or having a mentor is invaluable. Talk to beekeepers who've overwintered in the area for multiple years. They'll have the experience to help you avoid costly mistakes.

Remember, what works for beekeepers in one part of the country may not work where you live. All in all, the use of top insulation in hive winter management is critical. It offers a dual benefit of helping to regulate internal temperature and indirectly aiding in moisture control when used in conjunction with proper ventilation. Understanding and implementing this practice could significantly improve your colonies' chances of successfully overwintering. Okay, let's get on with Kim's in my chat with Joy and Eric, but first, a quick word from our friends at Strong Microbials.

[music]

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial 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 this big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast interview table are two fantastic beekeepers from Southern Oregon, Eric and Joy McEwen. Joy, Eric, welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Eric McEwen: Thank you so much.

Joy McEwen: Thank you so much. We're so glad to be here with y'all.

Kim: It's been a while since I've read your book again, nice to meet you this time.

Eric: Nice to meet you at last.

Joy: Kim, thank you so much for reading and reviewing our book, really meant so much to us. Thank you so much.

Eric: Yes, it was quite an honor.

Jeff: We did invite you here to talk about your book. It's called Raising Resilient Bees and it has a great perspective on honeybee management that is in tune with the current philosophies and approaches that is popular today and resonates with so many people. Before we get talking about the book, why don't you introduce yourselves, better than I could ever do, and tell us about your background and how you came into keeping bees?

Eric: I'll start. My name's Eric McEwen. I am a beekeeper of 23 years. We've been running a commercial operation for about 19 or 20 of those years. My background is in botany. I got a degree from Oregon State University and worked as a nonvascular botanist in the woods of Western Oregon primarily. Then my passions lie in sustainable living practices, alternative off-grid DIY projects, and certainly it was drawn to organic farming.

Yes, I think that about the time I met Joy, we were both pretty passionate about organic farming and living in Corvallis and practicing all of our homesteading skills, living on different rural properties. That inevitably led us to bees, and through some friends at the Oregon State Honeybee Lab, we were gifted our first colony and got to learn a thing or two around there and that turned into a hobby and before long, a passion. We had the fortune of living down the road from another commercial beekeeper who made it pretty easy for us to learn more and have access to bees and equipment and grow our dreams.

Joy: Yes, and get started on seeing the big picture. That was Kenny Williams and Heka over in Blodgett, Oregon. My name is Joy McEwen and I've also been beekeeping for 23 years with Eric. We started beekeeping together in the Corvallis area. This goes back quite a while, but my background is more like in organic production farming. I did my master's degree in environmental science and my master professor was Gary Stevenson. We worked on local food production and bringing local foods into the school lunch system of Benton County.

I'm also a mother of three. We have three beautiful children, daughters that are almost 12, 15, and 19. We homeschooled them for quite a bit of time and just been living out here in the country with them, and so being a mom's been a full-time job as well.

Eric: You bet.

Jeff: [laughs] It definitely is.

Kim: Interestingly, on this show, we've talked to many people, have told us basically the same story of how they got started and where it went from there. People diverge and go different ways. It's good to hear that what you started with isn't what you're doing now, but in all likelihood, better with your bees and your beekeeping.

What I want to do is, I've got your book sitting here in front of me, the Resilient Honeybee. I'm going to look at some of the chapters and ask you to distill them to just two or three-minute answers. I know that's a lot, but you can go further if you have to. The first one I want to do is the tenets of the natural nest. 99.9999% of all beekeepers in the world go, "Oh, Langstroth." That's not what you do, right?

Eric: We essentially keep bees in a Langstroth hive. We run all Western shallows, so that's certainly an adaptation, but we also use a variety of frame styles. That would be maybe where you'd find the largest deviation from the way Langstroth kept bees. Essentially, we're running out operation similar to a standard Langstroth operation, in that we're supering with movable frame boxes. In many ways, our operation is compatible with other commercial beekeepers. I think there's a growing trend of people getting out of deeps, but that's probably more common with hobbyists than commercial people.

Kim: Old people like me, those things are heavy. [laughs]

Joy: Yes, exactly.

Eric: And smaller people. We have three daughters that we really encourage to join us in the trade and we don't want to be responsible for destroying their backs. I'm not very big either. When we first got into beekeeping, we were told by wise beekeepers that it would be a good idea to use a single comb size. Then we, of course, thought, "Then we'll run all deeps." We ran deeps for honey production and nearly killed ourselves.

We've gone through a couple equipment designs, and so we decided that the next time we changed equipment styles, it would be the last time. We put a lot of time into thinking about what we were going to do. That was, with a couple equipment styles in between, all deeps and where we are now, but anyway.

Kim: When you talk about the natural nest, I and Tom Seeley, interestingly, immediately think of a hollow tree. Where are you with what you do and the hollow tree?

Eric: That's a great question. I think what we're looking for is a hive that offers us functionality in terms of being able to manage the bees. For us, a movable frame hive is pretty important. We want to be able to move combs in and out of colonies, making divides, pulling honey, what have you. Other than that, trying to model our practices after a hollow tree I think is a great idea.

For us, that means combs that are made entirely by the bees. Now, of course, we entice them to make those combs on frames so that we can still move them around. The orientation of our natural nest colonies is similar in a way to a hollow tree, in that, we are nadir in the brood nest, so getting the bees to grow in a downward fashion as they expand their brood nest, but then still encouraging them to put the honey overhead in a place that we can access it, so still using supers.

I think everything that we've learned about bees and the thermodynamics of the species definitely relates to their natural habitat in a tree. Trying to emulate the R-value and the cubic footage and appropriate entrances and what have you of a natural cavity, I think, helps beekeepers be successful.

Joy: Then I could just add to that, is that one of the things that's just become really important to us and part of our passion is being that food producer. Really, being able to increase the functionality of the beehive so that we can not only serve ourselves a bunch of honey, but a lot of other people as well.

Eric: Really quickly, since it's a vogue topic right now, there is this movement to locate bees in excavated tree cavities. People are obtaining trees and hollowing them out and then placing them up in trees with cranes and what have you. While I find it a fascinating practice, I just don't think that it's a realistic use of resources. That I think our solutions for saving the bees have to be a little bit more practically oriented and grounded on the ground. Not needing hydraulic cranes to place them, and maybe not taking a whole trunk of a tree for one cavity. It's a world of scarcity and to some extent, I'm not sure that I think that there's enough cavity, enough trees to go around if we all decide we want to have tree hives in our backyard, but anyway.

Joy: Just little note is just Rudolf Steiner, father of biodynamic beekeeping or biodynamics. He really appreciates having bees close to the earth. Really, getting to just be in connection with the magnetic fields of the earth.

Kim: One of the other things I was looking at is I've never seen anybody talk about how you put a hive on a pallet; what's good and what's not. I know that that's a strange question, but you guys don't.

Eric: We do put them on pallets.

Kim: Not the way I do.

Eric: How do you mean? You use a four-way pallet and no bottom boards? Is that what you mean?

Kim: I use bottom boards, but I've got two facing one side and two more facing the other side, and I go home. Your equipment is designed to do different things, I think.

Eric: Yes and no. On the one hand, our operation looks like an eight-frame commercial operation, in that those pallets get stacked one on top of each other and loaded onto 450-some hives to a load. In many ways, they're a commercial shipping palette, but they serve the bees really well. I think that's what we wanted to take the time to explain in the book, is that a pallet is more than just something good for people to transport hives with. It's also a configuration that serves the bees pretty well in terms of their orientation and in terms of moderating the climate.

Jeff: You also have the entrances to the hives on a pallet all facing in different directions.

Eric: That is true. We use a bottom board that's two-way. There's an entrance on either of the long sides. That does create an interesting complexity to the bees' use of that space. It's true so that their entrances are not uniformly pointed out. All full-size colonies have an entrance that faces out, but they also have an entrance that faces in toward the rear.

That creates a pretty fascinating opportunity for the bees to vary their use of these different entrances at different times of day and different seasons of the year. You see that. You see them propolize the front entrance shut sometimes at the end of a year. As the inclement weather comes on and the breezes start getting colder, they'll close their front entrance almost entirely, but then in the summertime, they open it back up.

Joy: For more ventilation.

Eric: Likewise, during the day, they switch back and forth. We've come to really appreciate that space that's created by the four hives coming together. It creates this lane of shade in the middle of a hot sunny day. It is where all the action is in the middle of a summer day. These colonies, you can go look in at all of the bees. First of all, it's where the flight is all coming and going from is these rear entrances because they'll stuff out the front entrance with bodies in the middle of a hot day, and shut down the access of that hot dry air into the hives. Then they'll come and go through the shade entrance.

Then they'll also just fan out and cover all of the surfaces of the landing board and the backside of the hives that are in the shade, where all of the foragers of four different colonies are pretty much all intermingling. They look like they're talking on the porch because you'll never observe any quarreling. You never observe fighting. It's so interesting. That was one of our first concerns about running this equipment, was if there would be fighting in the back and we never saw it. We've never seen it.

Joy: Then also just getting back to the point about the log hives, a lot of times you see naturally in a log hive that there will be more than one entrance, and they are utilizing a front and a back sometimes or a side entrance for various reasons.

Kim: I have to admit, there's a saying that I have that I tell almost every beekeeping class that I teach, and that is, what's good for the beekeeper usually isn't good for the bees, and what's good for the bees usually isn't good for the beekeeper. I think you solved that.

[laughter]

Joy: Thanks, Kim.

Eric: Yes, thanks. That's quite a compliment.

Kim: The other thing that you've got going here, you talk a lot about, a lot more about than when I'm teaching a beginner's course and many of the ones that I've been to over the years. When you've got six hours and you've got to teach a person how to take care of that package he's taken home tonight, you've missed a lot of things, and you step back and one of the things that you did was you listed in detail the aspects of a bee yard to put your bees in. You've got a whole list of these things and every one of them make perfect sense. My question is, how hard is it to find that bee yard?

Eric: Whaa.

Joy: It really depends. We spend a lot of time finding the right bee yard, because I think part of it is [laughs] we've learned our lessons, right? Where one bee yard looks like it's absolutely perfect, and then in the winter it floods or has too much of cold air or not enough of a wind break. I feel like we've spent some time of making sure before we ever bring bees onto a location, we really want to say, why, why is this a good site, and then where is it in proximity to some of our other hives?

I guess another part of that too is growing more and more important is we really love having good relationships with the farmers we're working with. We love getting to learn what honeybee food is available on the farm or nearby. That's how we set up for success. We talk about that a lot. Even just as a philosophy, how do we set up for success? The first step is making sure that we're placing them in a good spot.

Eric: We've had a lot of bad bee yards, [laughs] and you learn these lessons a season at a time, and it's painful. It's painful to manage bees in a bad spot and then find them not building up well at the end of a summer and realize that they're probably not going to make it through the winter when you see how poor they're doing. Then that inherently is related to carrying capacity, and how many hives will do well in a given site, and how many hives do we need to place in a site before it becomes logistically inefficient to manage them?

If we had six hives in each location, imagine how many yards we would have to have in order to run our business. They need to be sites that are decent, and sometimes we've learned those lessons about carrying capacity the wrong way. By placing too many colonies and finding several, not thriving for a couple of years in a row, then you start to say, I don't think this place can support this many hives, [laughs]

Now, fortunately, having been in one region for 20 years, we have a pretty good handle on about what that number is and how it varies place to place based on the quality forage and what have you, and so we're conservative now. We place less colonies and then we find out that a place is good and can support more colonies. That's the way we come at it now and it works really well. Now we finished the year with bees strong.

Kim: That goes back to, again, what I just said. What's good for the bees is good for the beekeeper, and that goes right to the heart of that with how you're making choices. For the folks listening, I want to list some of the things that you point out that beekeepers should be aware of or know of, or go looking for to avoid problems, either because it's too much or not enough. I'm going to say the first one is sunshine. That makes perfect sense. Unless you live in Arizona,

Eric: We have a little bit of that and we get just hot enough in late summer that the heat can be a little bit of a detriment to the bees. We look for spots that have maybe a big oak tree to the west or something that can just break that direct sun at 4:00 or 5:00 PM when the bees are just-- and it's just sweltering. Generally speaking, we have more problem with cool places that lack enough sun. We're just in mountainous terrain. People with different kind of property offer you the years and they have an idea of where they'd like you to place them. Sometimes that's up against a tree line or something.

Kim: That makes sense. The other one, I don't know if I've always just taken it for granted that it was there. You talk about having clean air, clean water, and clean soil. How do you measure those things?

Eric: I worked as a naturalist, a botanist in, and so I actually think I have a pretty good sense of the pristine nature of plant communities. You could even go so far as to say that robust lichen, or sorry, robust [laughs] lichen communities would be considered a sign of good air. Generally speaking, I think we live in a place that has really good air, but occasionally you can go places and see the signs of pollution.

For instance, if you get into certain places near roadways, you can look and find the signs of nitrogen accumulation from car exhaust. You can also find the signs of pesticide and fertilizer residues on farms in places where they're using a lot of chemicals. There's normally some biological indicators. Then certainly the pristine nature of the plant community, how weedy it is, how healthy the plants look in general.

Jeff: What are some of those indicators for the chemical exposure, the carbon monoxide from cars? As a beekeeper, I'm looking around evaluating the yard. What are some of the one or two key signs?

Eric: One of the best ones really is looking at the lichen communities on treats. I know that sounds a little obscure, but it's really true that lichens are fairly sensitive to pollution, but then there's a whole suite of lichens that aren't sensitive to pollution. In fact, they're nitrophiles or something along those lines. They like high phosphate and they'll-- and so you can go into places, like I said, along roadsides or in farm fields that have a long history of use and you'll find these lichen species. Xanthoria is a common genre that thrives on nitrogen. You just can tell, can look around.

Jeff: Start becoming more aware.

Eric: Yes.

Joy: We just live in a really beautiful area. We are up against the Oregon caves, the national monument, and then right adjacent to even the redwoods. Then remind me, Eric, about John Roth at Oregon Caves, he was saying about our streams.

Eric: Oh, it's true. We live in what's called the Wild Rivers area, which stems from about the Mad River in Northern California up through the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. It has the highest concentration of wild and scenic rivers in the nation. According to the geologist John Roth, the freshwater in these rivers is cleaner than 99% of the freshwater on planet Earth. We do think we live in a pretty clean area, but back to what you were talking about, Kim. Citing your apiaries in clean sites, that's a little bit of a subtle matter.

You have to be paying attention to land use, you have to be looking around at the neighbors, looking at who's doing what in proximity. We like to avoid roadsides, for instance, because there's usually pretty good evidence of roadside spraying, things like that. We'd prefer our bees to not be foraging on big banks of blackberry that are getting sprayed every year, so we [crosstalk] try to get a little more off the beaten path.

Joy: I think it goes into the discussion of really getting to involved even your local state governments of how do we have healthy environments for honeybees? One of it is to have more clean air and more clean water areas that are under protection on a larger scale.

Jeff: This is a great place to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

[music]

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Kim: One of the tactics that you are using in selecting a bee yard you call Bee-ing. That's B, double E, dash, I-N-G. Could you explain that a little bit? I mostly understood it, but you guys must have a really good handle on it because you're telling me I need to do it.

Eric: Oh, I'm not sure about the context, but I think, are we referring to the hive bee-ing as an entity?

Kim: That's it. Yes, yes.

Eric: Basically, it's just kind of us having some fun with the concept of the colony as the super organism. That's the way we prefer to think about honeybees, and we prefer to try and relate to the colony as a whole, if you will, and that helps us with the whole cyclic nature of bees' lives and feeling like the moral imperative to care for our bees as best as we can but understanding that the hive being, the whole entity, the super organism is truly what's moving through time, what's being cared for and so, yes, like thinking about the wellbeing and of the whole organism. What were you going to say?

Joy: Oh, just that includes the beekeeper and the environment all around. At this point, we really have been co-evolving for about 100,000 years together and so, yes, I think the hive being is really just thinking about all of us together as a super organism evolving together.

Eric: Right. The super, super organism.

Joy: Yes.

Kim: Okay. You have a formula for taking care of your equipment and you started out like every one of us did using latex paint and you've come up with something to me, I looked at it immediately much better and you gave me the recipe for it. Do you want to talk about that just a little bit? How you got there and how well does it work?

Eric: We really like our natural finish. It is not as durable as latex paint. We still have latex painted boxes around here that are 30 years old and look like they did when they were painted. We can't keep up with that, but as organic beekeepers, it's important for us to keep free of paint, and the main reason for us is that we value the harvest of propolis resin, and so we want to be feeling comfortable harvesting the resins from the boxes and not having the fear of paint chips ending up in that propolis because we're taking that propolis and making an organic medicine from it and we just--

Long ago, we just decided we had to part ways with paint and what were we going to do about it. Well, the first thing we decided was, is we were going to build our equipment out of the best wood we could afford to use for the bees. Using wood from the cypress family, we feel like is rule number one for top quality care for beehives, and anybody using bald cypress or cedar boxes I think could attest to what we're talking about that this wood just handles the environment of a beehive really well, it doesn't dry rot, it doesn't absorb atmospheric moisture, and so because of that it doesn't really rot.

It keeps the bees dry even in rough environments like ours where we get 60, 70 inches of rain a year, our hives stay dry. Then on top of that, we're hot dipping it with the natural finish recipe that you mentioned, and that recipe just came to us out of woodworking magazines and what have you and then experimenting around with proportions that worked well for our processes.

We hot dip it onto our equipment and we feel like we get a little better penetration that way, but it does form like a veneer, it's almost like a varnish in that sense, and so it holds up pretty well, but our lids definitely take the brunt of it, our boxes, I actually was just pulling honey today and was prying a box and a little part of the frame rest, or not the frame rest, but the little part of the edge of the box tore away and I was like, "Oh, that's not handling as well as I would hope." Then I looked at the box and it had screws on it. I identified that it was one of the first 50 boxes we ever built. They're still out there in great shape and I think that makes it about 10 or 11 years old. That's not the same as a 25-year-old super but we're getting there and I think they're holding up pretty well.

Kim: I think you got your money's worth, that's for sure. 25 years?

Eric: Yes.

Joy: Yes, and then I just like to add to that a little bit, which is that part of beekeeping as a spiritual experience and really getting to be in close proximity with nature and working with nature is different walking up to a beehive that's painted with latex paint, which is like petroleum-based compared to a beehive that it looks like nature, it's wood, it's all wood. I think just like that immediate connection of like health, good health through beekeeping, just getting to relate to the hive and as nature.

Eric: We're also aesthetic people and we think they're pretty, and we don't really think white-- we don't think stacks of white painted boxes are all that prettier.

Kim: Well, I'll take it another step. I'm driving by, I look up the hill and at the top of the hill there's a bunch of old brown boxes and I wonder what those are, and then I'm gone. If I looked up that hill and there's a stack of 8 or 12 bright white boxes, I'd say, now I'm coming back tonight. It serves several purposes, I think, is a good camouflage and the quality of the wood is good and it seems to work out pretty well. I'm sorry I don't have Cyprus in my backyard.

Joy: Well, that's another part is that we're lucky that we do.

Eric: Yes. We're lucky to live down the road from a lot of redwood and we get the opportunity to use by-product of a pretty sustainable family business, so it's great for us.

Jeff: One of the areas you talk about in the book I want to discuss here, because it's a hot topic for beekeepers everywhere, even more so as we come into the end of summer. Talk a little bit about your philosophy and your approach as you relate in your book about varroa management because that is such a dominant management activity for all beekeepers at this time, for the last 20 plus years.

Eric: Talking about varroa management, certainly, as you just mentioned, we dedicated a pretty good, pretty big chapter of the book to that topic and it is one of the main factors that's determined our success or lack thereof in business for the last couple of decades has been varroa and we experimented with a lot of minimalistic management practices and trying really hard to promote survivor stock within our own operation and various mindsets like that. The reality was that we barely survived that line of thinking.

I think for many, many years our losses were so high that we were unable to grow and we spent about a decade stuck between 200 and 300 hives, never really able to grow the operation where we wanted it. I think that was because we were being too laissez-faire about our varroa management. We were trying to haul that row, but it wasn't really as feasible as we hoped. We kept thinking, "Oh, we need to try this line of bees or we need to do a bond test on more colonies and let more die and then we'll find the survivor stock that we need to run our operation from," and it never really panned out.

Then we started thinking about it from the other direction, like, okay, what is the amount of intervention varroa management that we need to do in order to keep the roof from caving in, and then what does that look like, and then what is too much, because what we are interested in, we have a long-term goal of facilitating the evolution of the parasite host relationship. We would like to be part of seeing the bees move on away from such a devastatingly dangerous relationship with varroa. We always wanted to keep our management to a minimum but make sure that we were able to feed our family. Then hope that we could set up a situation where we could still see the bees evolving survivor traits.

Organic was a must. That was something we were going to not waver from. Then we've experimented with different substances. While formic acid worked pretty well for us at times, we didn't really like how much we were losing queens periodically. We would have bad queen loss right in the middle of our buildup when we want to be making honey and making divides. All of a sudden a third of your hives or queen list from a too strong of a formic vaporization or something like that and we have tricky high temps around here.

Varroa or sorry-- using formic for varroa became challenging. We also didn't really enjoy that it often cost you a round of open brood, and so we wanted to come back to something more gentle and where we've settled is oxalic acid. Oxalic has a much more limited window of effectiveness, and so we really have to curtail and redesign our management practices around making varroa management with oxalic effective.

That's when we really started pursuing breaking up the brood cycle to try and eliminate or try and minimize the amount of mites that were beneath, capped, brewed at the times that we would use oxalic acid. That led to many years of experimenting with the way that we manage our bees. Then that paired with our desire to raise our own queens, and specifically with the development or with the perfecting of the process of graft-free queen raising.

By going to a method of walkaway splits where you're raising queens from your eggs, we could implement a full more or less a 30-day brood break. By implementing a 30-day brood break in concert with oxalic treatments, we were able to start getting a handle on our varroa problems. It's kind of all the while maintaining the opportunity for us to develop an inbred line of bees, which we're in our eighth season of working on that. We're over seven years in and we feel like it's starting to go pretty good.

Jeff: I want to follow up on that oxalic acid. Are you using dribble or are you using vaporization?

Eric: We're dribble or a glycerin recipe sometimes, but we like to use a dribble. We don't like vaporization for the same reason we don't really like formic. Beekeeping is already a pretty stressful job that wearing a respirator in a bee suit is just almost inhumane conditions. I couldn't ask anyone else to do it and I sure don't enjoy it myself.

Kim: I like inhumane. I think you nailed it on the head with that one.

Eric: It's already hard enough when it's 100% degrees and you're having your own personal sauna out in the full sun.

Jeff: Trying to keep glasses on at the same time.

Joy: [chuckles] Yes.

Jeff: We're coming up close to the end of our time and there's so much to your book that we haven't covered. Is there anything that you want to point out that we haven't asked you about?

Eric: There's certainly things, there's certainly of making a living. it's been, of course, a fun part our life, marketing all of our products and running a diversified business that vertically integrated business. It's pretty fun. Keeps our job buried.

Joy: One of the things, yes, I'm just always really excited about is just talking about regenerative agriculture and getting to see the bees on the landscape from 10 years ago where there's not much pasture or forage or any bee food or soil vitality or ecosystem, just structure. Then having bees on a landscape and just seeing the vigor come back.

Jeff: You mentioned the products that you produce, the beehive products. I would like to invite you back at a later date to talk about your approach and different products you produce and your marketing of them, because I think that's an area where a lot of beekeepers have an idea that they would like to go, but don't really have an idea how to go about it. You do point out some good things in your book about what products to produce and the approach there, beyond just honey and blocks of wax.

Joy: I think one of the main things we've learned from that is when you're at the farmer's market booth and you just have honey for sale, that's a showstopper in itself, of course, but if you also have some other products around as well, especially, I don't know, our Jun, which is just beverage, a fermented beverage, a lot like kombucha, but it's made with honey instead of sugar and green tea instead of black tea. To be able to give out samples. People love samples, that's for sure on [laughs] a hot day, so diversifying your market booth has helped us a whole lot.

Eric: I think I'd have a hard time narrowing it down. I'm a talker, so I could probably go on about many different aspects of our business that I'd like to share with y'all. I think we enjoy being commercial beekeepers. We enjoy being part of the agricultural landscape. We work with great farmers, love the places we keep bees. We just think we have the best beehives ever and we really enjoy the way we run our business. We're starting to see some positive results in our operation from a commitment to these practices. That's exciting when we set off on what felt like a hard road of keeping bees the way we do. I thought in the back of my head it would take 20 years to see any positive feedback in the operation from what we were doing.

We're seven years into a closed breeding program and we're really starting to feel like we're starting to see some increased performance from the bees in the operation. Things are feeling easier. The bees look uniformly more strong and fit and we've never used antibiotics and our incidence of brood disease is so low, it's such a pleasure. We're not having problems with much Chalkbrood. We really don't see hardly-- we see a little bit of European foulbrood hardly any this year at all. Probably less than 10 colonies that failed to thrive from Chalkbrood in all of the hundreds of new colonies we raised. Things are going great.

Joy: They're going great. Also one of the reasons why we wrote the book is that we could use another 20 more years, of course. There's only so much one can really-- we've accomplished a lot in these 20 years, but we really need to just pass on what we've done and really encourage more local or young beekeepers. Especially our kids, we're really trying to push to have them understand that we're first generation farmers right here and how a lot of farmers-- how this really gets that momentum is that we've laid the groundwork and we're ready for the second generation to really take it off to more, to greater levels.

Eric: Fingers crossed.

Jeff: I want to just remind our listeners that we've been talking to Eric and Joy McEwen. They've written a book Raising Resilient Bees. The book has just been released this summer, I believe, if not in the last week.

Joy: It's like a week ago.

Eric: It's like a week.

Jeff: Yes. At the end of July, go out search for the book. It is a great read, especially if you're looking into a more natural approach to beekeeping and way to raise your bees with minimal stress. If there is such a thing on the bees, there's always stress for a beekeeper.

Kim: I want to thank you guys for being here today. I enjoyed the book, talking to you opened up even more information that you had in there and I would look forward to seeing you again some more down the road when life is getting better.

Eric: I sure hope so. I look forward to getting to shake your hand and thank you so much for having us. Thanks for everything you've done for bees.

Joy: Thank you so much. It's wonderful being here, y'all.

Jeff: Thank you.

Kim: Thank you.

Eric: Y'all have a great day.

Kim: Well, Jeff, these were great guests. They've got a somewhat different approach to keeping bees that seems to be working for them and I hope it continues. We're going to have them back. You can find their book on, what did they say, on Amazon and Chelsea Green Publishing, and they will also have it on their web page if you want to get it. I suggest that you do.

Jeff: I think it's really good to explore the different approaches to keeping bees. Listeners know. I started just the old traditional way, white box, Langstroth, actually. it was a white Langstroth AI root box right from way back in the early '80s. The new approaches that are outside of that standard Langstroth deep size and that approach I have to think about. It doesn't come naturally to me when keeping bees. I like the concept. I'm not sure I'm totally sold on it, but I think it's important. I think it's important to know and incorporate what you can into any beekeeping practice.

Kim: Yes. Good advice.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to 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 along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and especially Betterbee for their longtime support of this podcast. Thanks to 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 or comments at leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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