Season 2 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – HiveIQ: A Smart Hive from Australia

In this episode, we welcome Victor Croker of Australia’s HiveIQ. Victor is a third-generation beekeeper (his grandmother started the business), with 1500 colonies. The bees motivated him and his partners to design a better hive. They wanted something to help honey bees survive Australia’s heat as well as the cold on other continents. The result is a modular hive of a smart and attractive design.

HiveIQ Link

Worker and Hive Link

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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 2 Episode 4: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Saskatchewan Honey Crops & Westcoast Canadian Queen Rearing with Steve Clifford

Steve Clifford's lifetime among the bees has taken him from North Dakota bee inspector to managing 1800 colonies in Saskatchewan, at the edge of agriculture. He kept bees there for decades, producing two or three-hundred pound crop averages of beautiful white Canadian honey. He saw the transition away from package-beekeeping in Canada to nearly universal over-wintering in the far north.

Recently, Steve has moved to the mild Canadian westcoast and set up a queen and nuc business. In this episode, we walk, step-by-step, through Steve's queen cell production system. We get a great view of honey production and queen breeding from a real expert!

Steve's YouTube video: raising queen cells, start to finish

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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 2 Episode 3: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – BeeCube: An Apiary in a Box with Herman van Reekum

We discuss an unusual housing concept for honey bees. Our guest, Herman van Reekum, has designed a BeeCube, which can house about 32 colonies of honey bees in standard Langstroth frames. The unit somewhat resembles bee houses used in parts of the Alps but has technology and electronics similar to the BeeWise Technology units developed in Israel. We discuss these types of honey bee houses and look at applications relevant to Canada.

Herman's attractive BeeCube is almost entirely natural, recyclable wood and can be moved as a unit, making it possible to slide the cube, packed with over a million bees, on and off a 6-wheeled flatbed farmtruck or trailer. Electronic sensors add to the utility, allowing remote hive monitoring.

BeeCube website.

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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 2 Episode 2: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bumble Bees 101 with Mathias Fenton

We welcome biology instructor Mathias Fenton of Mount Royal University. He tells us about big bumbling bumble bees. Our chat touches on the relationship between wasps, ants, honey bees and bumble bees. Mathias mentions some of his interesting wild bee observations and we give a shoutout to iNaturalist, a great public resource that all naturalists, regardless their experience level, can appreciate and enjoy.

In this episode, we focus on the bumble bee lifecycle and best places to position empty nest boxes. In the spring, these cool-weather insects start a nest with just a single queen. She mated the previous fall, then waited under snowdrifts for the new season. Then she begins with a search for a suitable nesting site. Mathias explains how the Alberta Native Bee Council surveyed the nesting success of 400 empty wooden boxes placed in back yards by citizen-scientists. Success varied statistically depending on how far above ground the empty boxes were placed, direction of box entrances, colour of paint, and amount of sunlight hitting the bees' wooden homes. Anyone hoping to attract bumble bee pollinators by setting up backyard boxes will find Mathias Fenton's results interesting and helpful.

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Bumble bee box assembly instructions can be found on this page.

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 2 Episode 1: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Chief Crowchild and the Bees

Chief Lee Crowchild of Tsuut'ina Nation is a member of a family designated as the Keepers of the Bees. He tells us of childhood summers spent sleeping in a tent that carried the symbol of the bee. But it was not until later in life that he tasted honey from a hive behind his house when he realized how deeply bees were embedded in his life.

In this episode, we learn a bit about the culture of the Tsuut'ina people and the Chief's honey bee apiary that helped build respect for the bees and skills, knowledge, and self-esteem for people at Tsuut'ina. You will also hear about a bee-welcoming smudge ceremony that still fills Ron with wonder.

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Podcast website: https://sites.libsyn.com/540327/site
About Ron Miksha: https://about-bees.org/about-ron/
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Finally: email your questions, comments, and angst: ron@aboutbees.net

Season 2 Trailer: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Season 2

Season 2 of About Bees opens today! We look ahead at the next 12 episodes that has guests talking about 300-pound honey crops, helping bumble bees find a home, controlling granulation, beekeeping at Tsuu'tina Nation with Chief Crowchild, raising queen cells on Canada's westcoast, amazing BeeCube technology, and, of course Plato.

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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 12: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Bees by the Number

In this episode, we manage to jump around the bee world by using the numbers 1, 2, 2-3, 26, 500, 20,000, 45,000, and 50,000. That’s a wealthy range of handsome numbers!

One queen? Not always. What about zero queens plus laying workers? Or more than one queen? Did you know that some beekeepers quit running two-queen colonies because their hives made so much honey that they became impractical to add supers on top? We're talking 600 pounds per hive.

Two words. Please folks, it is honey bee, not honeybee. Two words. Beehive, one word. Bee yard, two words. We explore why it’s important to use words correctly, including ‘robbing’ the bees and all the baggage that the word ‘robbing’ carries. Then we naturally start talking about witches.

Why 2-3 and the numbers 26 and 500? And why those big numbers – 20,000, 45,000 and 50,000? You’ll have to listen to find out what those are about. Curious? 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 11: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Moving Bees 2

We begin this podcast with the capture of a swarm, with details described in real time. The subject of Hutterites, a Christian religious group, came up when similarities between Hutterite colonies and bee colonies 'splitting' was discussed.

Since we are again talking about moving hives of bees this episode, Ron has a neat trick to help you pick up a single-storey colony (such as a swarm) and move it inside the trunk of a car or back of a van. Simple, fast, cheap, and the bees don’t get out and get lost.

Later in the episode, Ron describes a couple of harrowing bee-moving incidents that involved truck malfunctions – brake failure on a steep mountain road and then an accelerator jamming on a busy toll road. Luckily, no one was hurt.

We talk about the Tesla truck, which probably wouldn’t be much good for hauling bees, then Elon Musk, Twitter, and the future of the planet.

We wrap up with an inside look at a large-scale commercial honey farm, Scandia Honey, and talk shop about the operation of 15,000 colonies of bees on the western Canadian prairies. So, 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