Beekeeping Podcast Hyve Time™: Bee expert interviews and beekeeping news, tips, & discussions.

On today's episode, I sit down with Brian Spiesman, a community and landscape ecologist at the University of Kansas, who is broadly interested in how environmental change affects the diversity and function of ecological communities. He has a focus on understanding how land cover change affects communities of plants and their pollinators. The goal of his research is to wrangle knowledge of complex systems for the effective conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Brian also helped create the Bee Machine™, an application for identifying bumble bee species using machine learning. We discuss the Bee Machine and what it does, how it was developed, how it works, and the future of the application. We also discuss the relationship between habitat and the web of species that rely on each other for survival.

Links to Brian's work and SM accounts-

I sit down with Emily Pedzinski, a YouTube™ beekeeper blazing her path in her beekeeping business. Emily joins to discuss her YouTube™ channel and how she is using Discord to help reach her audience and grow her beekeeping business as it evolves into different beekeeping strategies as well as how she hopes to grow her business.  

Emily's Links- 

Hyve Time™ Podcast Episode #17  We are back at it with this episode as I sit down with Dr. Heather Grab, an Entomologist from Cornell University in NY. We discuss many different topics, such as, habitat on farms and their interactions with local native bee populations and how honey bees may be competing for resources in limited habitat areas, as well as how honey bees as well as native bees interact with the hemp/ cannabis plant.   

For more information on Dr. Heather Grab- 

I sat down and interviewed Emily Bondor, owner and operator of Santa Cruz Bee Company where we discuss social media and growing your following as well as beekeeping education and mentoring. We touch on how Emily got started with beekeeping and why she has chosen to manage treatment-free. You can reach out to Emily and Santa Cruz Bee Company by following her and the company on:

I sit down with Dr. Kaira Wagoner who has discovered a new, simpler, and more effective way to detect honey bee colonies that express varroa hygienic behavior through the detection of unhealthy brood via odors produced by the brood. This discovery will help the industry with her new business detect and identify much more easily and with higher precision, which colonies may manage diseases and pests like the varroa mite extremely effectively.   Her process involves spraying compounds that have been synthetically processed to mimic the scents injured brood emit when attacked by mites and other pests and diseases. The hygienic colonies then open each cell up by chewing the capping off and within 2 hours you as a beekeeper will have an identifiable score for each colony.  

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Links: 

Stay up to date on the beekeeping world, and today we discuss the latest beekeeping news and talk about a new testing essay called UBO.

Today's news is brought to you by the Hyve Time™ host "Mike James" who discusses some of the top stories from the last week on honey bees, beekeeping, and a weekly tip. Today's tip covers hummingbird feeders.

We sit down with Peter Berthelsen again to talk about the Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund which is helping people give gifts of pollination projects and free seeds for anyone looking to start a prairie to help benefit butterflies, honey bees, and other native pollinators. If you have a project in mind of over 2 acres this fund will send you FREE seeds. This is a must-listen-to find out how the program works and Peter discusses the benefits of the program as well as some of the other things the fund helps with as it pertains to pollinators.   

Links: 

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Mike James covers some of the news in the beekeeping world over the past week and if you haven't heard, Australia has its first detection of the Varroa Mite. Also covered is a new discovery on a microbe in the colony that is protecting the honey bee larvae. 

Links on some of the news- 

Today we discuss beehive diseases, swarming, and honey supers-

Disease Management- EFB, AFB, Sacbrood, and Varroa. How to test for varroa before adding supers.

Swarming- Why do bees swarm and what is the difference between a supersede cell and a swarm cell.

Honey Supers- No more feeding the bees, top or bottom supering, and troubles associated with new supers and the queen excluders.

Today I have Peter Berthelsen a Wildlife Biologist and expert in prairie restoration and pollinators' habitat transformations on all sizes of plots of land as well as large utility-grade solar fields. We discuss many aspects of how the mixes used in new and managed prairie for pollinators matter not only on how the plot is used as well as the expectations of the client and limitations on blends of prairie seed.   

For more information on the show you can check out these links:  

Today we interview Cory Stevens, owner of Stevens Bee Co., out of Bloomfield, MO. Cory started beekeeping the traditional way and quickly discovered the benefits and needs of breeding VSH queen honey bees. His side hustle has him rearing 2,000 VSH queens that he ships out all over the country. We discuss how genetics will replace the need for most chemical treatments and the future of bee genetics role in commercial and backyard beekeeping.  

 Notes or Treatment efficacy: 

Episode 003: Springtime apiary setup and cleanup

I am a week behind on getting this episode out, but for good reason. In this episode, we talk through the steps and best practices for your spring apiary setup or maintenance of it. 

What we discuss:

1. Assess your hives
2. Inspecting your hives
3. Clean out your hives that did not survive
4. Feed your surviving hives
5. Setup your new hives
6. Remove winter gear
7. Installing your new bees
8. Put a plan together for managing future swarming

Resources- 

Our very first interview podcast episode with Dr. Erica Shelley at Best for Bees™. Dr. Shelley is the inventor of ProtectaBee™, which is a hive entrance for honey bees on a standard 10 frame langstroth hive. We discuss her experience in beekeeping and the research projects that led her to inventing the ProtectaBee™ which is now available on Indiegogo™.  

Resources- 

This is the launch episode of Hyve Time, I discuss the podcast's strategy as well as what influenced me to start a beekeeping/ business podcast in the first place. Especially after having no interviewing skills, but after being an entrepreneur since 2006 (Almost 26 years now), if you never try something new, you'll continue to be your old self.

The launch is in tandem with my new business Hyper Hyve, hence the funny spelling of the show, and we will be doing a bit of a build in the public throughout these shows, and talking to other business people within and outside of the beekeeping business. So take a listen (this one's only 5 min long) and hit that subscribe button for weekly show's.

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