Season 1 Episode 8: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Dogs That Smell

We talk with Rose-Anne Bouffard, a bee enthusiast who trains dogs to find and rescue wayward bumblebee nests and to locate colonies with American Foulbrood (AFB).

Dog breeds and their amazing scent sensitivity are discussed. Bloodhounds are best for sniffing out bumblebee nests and honeybee diseases, but that's not what Rose uses. Humans have million scent receptors and can smell AFB, but dogs have thirty million receptors. Dogs also use their floppy ears to stir up scents. The bee-rescuing dogs were trained through find-reward-repeat sessions. We discuss training a tracking dog to find AFB and the huge economic value that brings.

Talking about stings, Rose finds that controlling her breath and going into a meditative state when working around bees is essential. Without the proper mindset, apparently Preparation H helps with the bee stings you will get.

The questions of bee consciousness and a bees' ability to sense pain come up. We agree that bees probably feel pain.

Finally, there is a big shout out to Alberta Native Bee Council, the Suzuki Butterflyway Project, iNaturalist, and the urgency for action. Rose's bee and dog projects are looking for collaborators so check out her website to learn how to get involved!

Rose's website address for Dogs Find Bees is https://dogsfindbees.com/ Let's go!

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Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst: ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 7: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Cameroon to Canada - Patrick's Bee Journey

In this episode of About Bees, we are joined by Patrick Tefouet Tonlio, who was an agriculture community organizer and teacher in the African nation of Cameroon. Patrick now lives in Calgary where he keeps honey bees and has been working on farm and bee projects with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s Land of Dreams (https://ccisab.ca/land-of-dreams/).

During his last year of high school, Patrick learned to work with bees from his grandfather when Patrick moved from the capital city to live in his grandfather’s village. Honey bees in Cameroon are extremely defensive, so most traditional beekeeping consists of making small bamboo hives, coating the boxes with propolis and wax as a lure, then putting the empty hives in trees about 3 metres (ten feet) above ground level. After wild bees occupy the boxes and after the nectar season, honey is harvested.

Cameroon has commercial beekeepers, including the Fabasso family, friends of Patrick, who operate 15,000 hives. Mr. Fabasso has designed a hive, also made of bamboo, similar to Langstroth hives. The Fabasso honey crop is squeezed by a press invented by the Fabasso family (https://teca.apps.fao.org/en/technologies/10140/). Pressing the honey yields a high-quality honey that doesn’t need to be extracted and is never heated during processing.

Beekeepers may harvest about 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of honey each year from traditional hives. But the ethnic group sometimes known as Pygmy people (Baka) harvest directly from wild hives. To reduce stings, they use a special secret herb, rubbed on their skin. The herb? It’s a secret. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst: ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 6: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Sweet Clover: America’s other weed

Legal. Illegal. Legal. Illegal again. Sweet clover has quite a history. Introduced into North America from Europe about 300 years ago, farmers were once fined for having it in their fields. It can be used to feed cattle, but improperly stored, it can become a blood thinner and kill cows. On the other hand, the state of Kentucky was saved from bankruptcy by sweet clover. And so were some beekeepers.

Every acre of sweet clover yields as much as one-thousand pounds of honey from its nectar. Along with alfalfa and a few other choice nectar-producers, it’s a winner in the nectar sweepstakes. But this podcast also looks at an Australian beekeeper who found an even better plant. But we circle back to sweet clover and Bidzina reads a list of “Ten surprising facts about sweet clover.” Number eight is amazing.

Mostly we discuss sweet clover, but bees, horned toads and tobacco are mentioned. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
Watch the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Finally: email your angst: ron@aboutbees.net