Pat Roe: 00:00:00.000
If you’re really interested, find your local organization. So here in Henderson County, North Carolina, we’re in the mountains of North Carolina. We have a club. We have meetings every month. We have a bee school in the winter. We have our own apiary, which means if you don’t know if you want to keep bees or not, you can go work in a bee yard and never own a bee. And you may benefit from that either by being– if you’re there constantly or there a lot, you may get honey from them or you may get bees from them or something like that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:34.834
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am really excited today to have this conversation with somebody I know really well. I’ve invited my husband, Pat Roe, to have a conversation with us about beekeeping. Now, we’re going to talk about honeybees, but we’re also going to talk about native pollinators. And I think you’ll find this to be a fascinating conversation. The hardest part of this conversation is taking 20 pounds of stuff and putting it in a 10-pound sack in a half an hour for you all. So let me welcome my husband, Pat. Pat, how about you introduce yourself and tell us how you got started into the journey of beekeeping?

Pat Roe: 00:01:19.753
Okay. Obviously, my name is Pat Roe. Gretchen and I have been married for 40, almost 43 years now. And I’m retired from all kind of different things, mainly in sales. I was in the Army for five years. Anyway, so, but we retired back to my hometown in Hendersonville, North Carolina. And I got started beekeeping here in high school. This is the town where if you do anything with homesteading or back-to-nature kind of stuff, Hendersonville is the home of Mother Earth News. And that when I– back in the ’70s, they had just started and I was kind of an early adopter and subscribed to the magazine. So one thing I could do was to keep bees. We were in a typical suburban household. We’re in the mountains of North Carolina. I was going to plant a farm and my parents were going to have that. So I thought I could keep bees. So I read a little bit, bought a book, read a third of it. I’m a little ADD. So I got through, went to the Sears catalog store here in town. This is before Sears was– we weren’t a big enough town to have an actual Sears store so we had a catalog store. So I went there and got their farm and country catalog and ordered a box of bees and all the equipment I need to keep bees. So that’s how we got my– that’s how I got my first set of bees. And that’s kind of where my beekeeping started. And then at some point in there– I got a call from a– my mom’s had a friend who had bees in a birdhouse and I called my then fiancée and said, “We got bees at a birdhouse and we’re going to go get them one night.” So she agreed to go with me and we went and got them and plugged up the thing. I put the whole birdhouse in a trash can. I put my fiancée and the trash can in the back of my Subaru station wagon and told her to hold on tight, keep the lid on because that’s really important, and drove two miles back to the house and we took that apart. And after all that, she still agreed to marry me. So that was some years later. And every time I say now– whenever I say, “Hey, let’s go get some bees. We got a swarm,” or something, she’s in the truck faster than I am. So that’s kind of how I got started. I really didn’t know what I was doing. And I did it on my own. I’m unfortunately not the type of person to ask a lot of questions or ask for help. So I kind of figured it out on my own, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:57.956
And so then you took a 30 Year hiatus [crosstalk]–

Pat Roe: 00:04:01.843
Oh yeah, we [crosstalk] the Army.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:03.155
–moved all over the country.

Pat Roe: 00:04:04.726
Yeah, we did the Army, and then we moved into communities that had no farm animals.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:11.281
HOAs, yeah.

Pat Roe: 00:04:12.284
HOAs that had restrictions against farm animals. So as soon as we moved back here to Hendersonville, the first thing I did was sign up for a beekeeping class and to get involved, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:23.296
And I should tell everybody that we have a wealth of resources for you all this week. The show notes are going to be vital to you. We promised you how to build a native pollinator house, and you’ll find those directions in the show notes. And we promised you that we were going to talk a little bit about how to get started with beekeeping. So Pat is the president emeritus of the Henderson County Beekeepers Association. So he’s shared some documents from them with us so that we can share them with you. So you’ve got lots of homework and avenues and things to pursue. But today, we’re going to talk about a lot of things. And we have tried very carefully to curate this content for you so that we can keep it kind of high level but make it interesting as well. So, Pat, I’m going to start the PowerPoint so that you can explain to folks the difference between different kinds of honeybees. And I think as I do that, could you explain to people– I’m shocked some people this past weekend when I said that honeybees were an invasive species. So can you explain that for us?

Pat Roe: 00:05:33.681
So honeybees came over. Some brave people put them on a boat back in the 1600s, I believe. I don’t know how they would do that because they don’t have the hives that we have to close them up, but they transported them from Europe. They’re native to Europe. And they brought them over here to the United States because we have lots of pollinators here in the United States, but they’re called native pollinators, and they’re not the type of bees that you can manage and produce honey. So that’s kind of the– yeah, this is an invasive species that we have brought here, and we manage them to our benefit. So we’re going to talk about the– it’s called the apis mellifera, and it’s the European honeybee that is now native is now– not native, but it is all over the United States, and we manage them. So these are the type of bees. If you see any of these three types of bees, these are honeybees. Anything else is something else. So the pictures you’re looking at are the three types of bees that are in our beehives. There’s a drone, and I don’t know if you can point, Gretchen, but–

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:46.318
Yeah.

Pat Roe: 00:06:47.000
Oh, there we go.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:47.928
It’s that nice big fat bee on the left.

Pat Roe: 00:06:50.890
So that’s a male bee, and the male bee has two jobs, is to mate with the queen and to eat, and that’s pretty much all they do. And the male bees live from spring until fall, and in the fall they are summarily escorted out of the hive, dragged out of the hive, prevented from coming in the hive, and they die out over the– they don’t get to live over winter. It’s not a great life, but it’s what they got, I guess. So in the center is a queen bee. We always say she’s got a torpedo butt. Her abdomen is longer than the rest of them. You can notice. It seems to be a lighter color and, it’s somebody– and we always laugh because when we go into a hive, we have 10 to 30 to 50 thousand bees, and we’re looking for one and probably three quarters of the time we find it. And then the next frame is just worker bees and the brown things that they’re walking on are capped larvae of worker bees that are probably a couple days from hatching out.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:02.716
I think this particular photograph that we took in the bee yard is kind of interesting because these little white things that you see are bee larva that has not yet grown to maturity. So they’re still feeding that larva and that will continue to grow.

Pat Roe: 00:08:20.966
And they’re feeding a mixture of nectar, honey, and pollen. We call it bee bread. So they feed that to the larva. So the egg– the queen lays an egg, egg hatches in three days. For six days, it’s in the larval stage and they feed it for the next six days and then they cap it over until day 21 and then they hatch out. The worker bees do. We always say we do bee math because the queens hatch out 14 days. All of them are eggs for three days. All of them are larva for nine days and they’re all capped for different periods of time. So the queen is capped for six days. The workers are 12 days. And then the drones, they hatch at 24 days, so they’re at 15.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:18.467
And I also find it interesting that not all honeycomb is the same size. If you have drone comb, it actually is– it sticks up higher. It almost looks like the top of a pencil lead. And a little bit further on, we’re going to show you the difference between a queen cell and a regular honeybee cell.

Pat Roe: 00:09:38.995
That’s really interesting as you look at the comb that’s on here.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:41.709
Uh-huh.

Pat Roe: 00:09:42.342
The cells are actually– the cells are not six-sided. The cells are actually round. They’re completely round. You know, we always put the honeycomb as this hexagonal unit, but it’s actually round. And then the way they’re connected in between makes them look like a hexagon. So those are queen cells. That’s a capped queen cell. And the next one is a queen cell that’s open. And everybody thinks that the queen is in charge of the hive. You know, that the queen runs the hive and tells everybody what to do. Actually, that’s not the case. We call the hive a superorganism because it takes all of it, all of the bees to make it work. And the reality is the queen is directed by the worker bees on what to do. She’s fed by the workers and she is pretty much told what to do. She lays up to 1500 eggs a day, which is a lot. And then that’s during the peak of the summer when it’s nice and warm and she’ll slow down in the fall and she’ll stop at about December and start up again in January. But the queen is not actually in charge of the hive. She’s a vital portion of the hive, but no part of the hive can live on its own without each other. I guess it’s the easiest way to put it. So we call that a superorganism. So we call it a hive mind. When the hive decides it’s time to swarm, which these have decided to replace their queen, the queen didn’t get a choice in that. And she would be– these are what we call supersedure cells. They decided that the queen was not doing a great job. They made a replacement and they’re going to push her out eventually.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:22.932
I think one of the things that I found to be most fascinating is, and if you would talk about, the first queen that emerges and then what happens to the other queen cells./

Pat Roe: 00:11:34.332
I don’t know if y’all have ever seen a swarm of bees. It’s a big clump of bees somewhere out. We get calls for them all the time around here. But it’s a big clump of bees out, usually in a tree or a bush. And people get all excited about them because they think they’re going to kill them. But they’re actually– they’re fairly calm because bees are– they defend their hive, but they don’t– when they’re swarming, they really don’t defend that well. So before they swarm, they make a bunch of queen cells. I think we found these two in the same hive; is that right? Gretchen?

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:08.996
We did.

Pat Roe: 00:12:10.165
Yeah, so we found them in the same hive. So they make multiple queen cells. And at some point, after the queen cells are capped, they decide it’s time to swarm. And the old queen takes a portion of all the workers and they leave the hive and they leave these queen cells. And then the queens hatch. And the first one to hatch like the one on your right that’s sawed open from the bottom, she came out. She emerged. And then she comes out and she makes a noise. I know you can hear it. I can’t hear it because…

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:48.218
I can actually hear it. I’ve heard it a couple of times over the last couple of years.

Pat Roe: 00:12:53.033
It’s called piping.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:53.762
Despite the fact that a beehive is very, very noisy, it’s a different sound and it almost sounds like a trilling and–

Pat Roe: 00:13:03.187
They call it piping. And so the queen comes out and she starts piping. And the other queens that are ready to hatch answer back. And then she goes over to the cell to answer back. And she drills a hole in the side of it and kills the queen that’s waiting in there. And we always know when it happens because the sides of the cells have been chewed open. But she kills her competition is the easiest way to put it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:31.875
So, Kevin, how do you know that these cells are supersedure cells in supersedure cells instead of swarm cells?

Pat Roe: 00:13:40.627
We’re not really sure why this happens, but the swarms – we always call them swarm cells – are always on the bottom of a frame. So this piece of wood here is a frame. I don’t know if we got a good picture of a whole wood, but it’s a frame. There’s plastic foundation in there, and we know that when they put them on the sides like this or up at the top, those are supersedures. That means the queen was not performing effectively. The workers noticed that and they have replaced her and they’re replacing her. And then there are swarm cells. So we’ve had a couple of these this year where we got behind and did not give them enough space. While they were building up, they were putting away honey. And they get crowded. They decided if they got too many bees, they need to leave. So when it’s time to leave, they put what we call swarm cells on the bottom of the frames, and it’s usually a bunch of them. And that’s indicated that the beekeeper was not doing their job. Or did not keep up with them because they were spring, they build up fast and they make a lot of bees and then they leave if you don’t take– if you don’t give them the space.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:55.988
So how many hives do you have this year?

Pat Roe: 00:14:59.112
So this year we have 30 hives, which sounds like a lot. We didn’t plan on having that many, except– I’m what’s called a sideline beekeeper. So I’m not a backyard or a hobby beekeeper. They say those are up to four hives as a hobbyist. I’m not really sure why they picked that number, but. And I’m not a commercial beekeeper, which is a lot of hives. We do sell a lot of honey, and I pollinate for one apple grower. What I mean is I take– in the spring, I take bees out to his apple orchard and spread them out throughout the orchard to pollinate his apples so he has a better crop. He calls it insurance. That’s his insurance to make sure that everything’s pollinated. He says he doesn’t– some of their apples are wind-pollinated, but he says, just in case, it’s worth paying to have the bees put on there. So right now, we have 30 hives, and we’ll probably keep it there. We’ll go into winter with as many as possible because we’ll be doing the same thing next year.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:02.095
And since Demme Learning is a bee company, can you explain a little bit about what is bee math? When we practice bee math in the early spring, what does that mean?

Pat Roe: 00:16:13.479
When we divide the hives, we know certain things are going to happen. And it’s really why I like bees so much, is they’re unbelievably interesting and they’re very– I say they’re pliable. We can do all kinds of things to them and no matter what we do to them, they still survive our best efforts to mess them up, so. Because I can go in and pull a queen out, and they’ll make a new queen within two weeks. I can divide the hive in half– half with a queen, half without a queen. As long as they have eggs, they can make a queen. So for a worker, we know that when they lay an egg, it’s 3 days for an egg to hatch, 6 days in a larval stage. So here’s 9. And then it’s either going to be 6, 12, or 15 more days for the next hatch out. So we can count them out and know if we see the brood– so if you look on your screen, you can see beside the queen on the left, she’s got a couple days before she’s going to hatch out because they come really quickly. The larva that’s by there is probably– they could have up to a week before they’re hatching out. So as a math, we kind of go, “Okay, what is this going to do when we pull these out?” And at the same time, when we know that they did swarm, we can count. We have to know the queen is going to– when she is hatched, she has to go onto a mating flight. She gets mated, comes back and starts laying eggs, it doesn’t start right away. So we have to count the weeks. We know that from the time that we have queen cells, we have a week or so before she hatches. We’ve got two weeks before she finishes her mating flight, so we got another week or two before she starts laying eggs. And I’m not really good at that counting because I get really impatient and want to see action quickly because we want to see– we want to see more bees. So anyway. So that’s what we call bee math.

Pat Roe: 00:18:23.553
The other side is we do what’s called single deep. I don’t want to get too far in the weeds, but we only use one brew chamber, and that has 10 frames, and there’s about 4,500 cells on each frame, and a queen lays 1,500 eggs a day. So we have to manage a little closer knowing how far she’s going to get across those frames before everybody’s hatching out from one end to the other. And we want to make sure she always has somewhere to lay. Otherwise, if she doesn’t have somewhere to lay, she leaves. And we’ve experienced that this year.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:03.318
So this one has a little bit of everything on it, and I wonder if you could– we’ve already talked about capped brood, but I wonder if you could explain the difference between the cells that have nectar in them and the cells that have pollen in them, and then–

Pat Roe: 00:19:18.411
So this is kind of a–

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:19.252
–how we get from nectar to honey.

Pat Roe: 00:19:20.701
So this is kind of a– this is kind of a typical frame where you see what we call brood, which are eggs, larva, or capped brood in the center with a ring of pollen around the outside of that and then a ring of honey around that. So that way, they’ve got breakfast, lunch and dinner standing by for the babies. Now, you see the yellow different cells. That’s all pollen. They pack that– they have their– we call them pollen baskets – they’re called corbicula – on their back legs. When they go to their flowers, they start picking up all this pollen, and then they shove that back into the cells when they get here. If you look, you can see the wet shiny cells. That’s nectar. I don’t know if you can point some of that. There’s usually at the bottom of the frame–

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:13.354
Do you mean here?

Pat Roe: 00:20:14.715
And then just above that, there’s– if you’ll notice, it’s different from the cap root. That’s capped honey. So that’s a tough– the stuff that we try to– when we harvest honey, that’s what we’re looking for. What’s really interesting, though, is the nectar sits in those cells and dehydrates. So as the hive heats up, especially during the summer, there’s bees fanning that are blowing air across these frames, dehydrating the nectar. When the nectar gets to about 16 to 20 percent liquid, it’s capped. And that the bees know exactly when to cap– it’s absolutely fascinating. I mean, it’s just [laughter] how do they know? I don’t know, but they’re pretty consistent and they rarely miss.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:03.485
What does it take to make a teaspoon of honey?

Pat Roe: 00:21:06.940
This is the other math. I don’t even remember this one now. You may know this one. I always know that we always talk about wax–

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:18.783
1,500 to 2,000 flowers visited and one bee will create one teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

Pat Roe: 00:21:26.761
Absolutely amazing. I don’t think it’s a teaspoon. I think it’s an eighth of a teaspoon. Now I have to look. Yeah, it’s a very small amount. And when we–

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:34.158
And how much money did we harvest last year?

Pat Roe: 00:21:36.906
About 700 pounds [laughter]. And you think of how many bees that’s going to take to bring in that 700 pounds of honey. And I’m not one of the bigger producers. So that’s–

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:47.052
Maybe you could talk– two things that I want you to explain before we leave this. One, can you talk about the– how do bees know if a flower has already been visited?

Pat Roe: 00:22:01.461
This is this is absolutely fascinating [laughter]. So we’re talking about positive or negative ions. And so when a bee lands on a lands on a flower to collect nectar, it’s a– it’s an electromagnetic field. They cancel each other’s electromagnetic fields out. So when a next bee comes along, he realizes there’s no charge there, which means there’s no pollen or nectar for him to collect or her to collect, I should say. These are all bees– all worker bees are females. And so they just move on to the next one and it’s– this is not a guess. They could wire flowers and have a feedback of sound– of electromagnetic sound. And when a bee hits it, it changes completely. So when the next bee comes along, they know that there’s nothing in there for them to get and it’s just– this is the way nature works and makes it, I guess, makes it better, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:02.697
So we were trying over the weekend to get the opportunity to show what is called a waggle dance. I’ll do my best to put a video [laughter] of a waggle dance in the show notes. But can you explain what that is and where it happens, because this to me is one of the most fascinating things.

Pat Roe: 00:23:24.718
So bees orient off the sun. I mean, that’s it. If I were to take a hive that I have sitting and I move it two feet to the left or the right, it’s going to confuse the bees to the point where they’re going to be flying, hovering in front of the space that used to be their hive and not really know where to go because that’s their space. And it’s all due to the sun. So I can move– it’s better to move them several– over three miles than it is three feet because I take them out 20 miles to an apple orchard and they’re fine. They come out, they realize something changed. They do what they call orientation flights. They come up and down. They measure the sun and then they do it. But if they’re three feet away, that doesn’t make sense to them. So they get lost. So when they go to a nectar source, when they find a new nectar source, the bee will come back and do what’s called a waggle dance. And based on the way that she wags her abdomen and moves up and down the frame will give directions to other bees in the hive. What you need to realize is that when this hive is all the frame, this is what we call a frame, that piece of wood there. When it is inside the hive and the lids are on, it’s completely dark. So this bee is doing a waggle dance in there. If they were to remove that bee that was doing the waggle dance that the other bees saw, the other bees can actually make it within 100 yards or less of the honey source. So they’ll end up at the honey source eventually because they once they get close to it, they can smell. They have a sense of smell that they can that attraction. So it’s kind of mind boggling. So they’re in the dark and the other bees are out there with their antenna feeling which way this bee is moving. And from that they can fly directly to their their new food source.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:20.803
I also think it’s pretty amazing that somebody actually took the time to research that to figure it out.

Pat Roe: 00:25:27.069
Right. And they trap that one bee and keep a track of them. And it was just amazing. I don’t know how they do. Okay.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:34.058
It’s pretty amazing that God has created this.

Pat Roe: 00:25:37.150
I know. It’s just phenomenal.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:39.400
So I had to put this slide in here because this is my my favorite word in the bee yard is called festooning. This is when bees cling to each other. And this was actually a picture we took last summer of bees clinging across two frames of honey. But can you explain why they festoon? Because this was information that we researched so that we could share this today.

Pat Roe: 00:26:05.798
Yeah, it’s like, why did they do this? So this is one where we pulled the frames apart. So the two frames were right beside each other and then we kind of separated them and they kind of hooked each other. But they do this from top to bottom. If there was no wax foundation, if there’s nothing in there and they needed to build comb, they would hang like this because this is how they measure. So this is they’re measuring the space. The bees are very precise on how much space is between each piece of comb. And it’s about three eighths of an inch and they’re pretty much exact on every time. And if it comes down and it’s got a waggle, it’s got a little sway to it, it will actually be three eighths of an inch in a sway all the way down because that’s just they are that precise. And that’s the way God made them. So they know what they’re doing and they are– so that’s their measurement tool. Don’t know how it works, but apparently it’s really good.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:02.373
Now, Pat, this was helpful for us to be able to– folks to understand. And this is not just honeybees as pollinators. This is native pollinators. So talk a little bit about the words that folks are seeing here on this screen.

Pat Roe: 00:27:21.245
Okay, so everybody, we always say that about two thirds of the food you eat is thanks to a pollinator of some type. And it’s not always honeybees. We have blueberries in our front yard and the best pollinator for blueberries is bumblebees because of the size of the flower. Honeybees can’t quite get all the way down in there to do a great job. So they’re about a 20 to 30 percent pollinator for blueberries, but the bumblebees are closer to 90 to 100 percent because they’re larger. And the bumblebees, they vibrate to shake the pollen loose just so they can get into it better. Something that honeybees don’t do. But these are just some of the things that require a pollinator. And it’s a lot. They always say if you go into your produce section, two-thirds of it would be gone if we didn’t have pollinators. And we focused a lot on honeybees because the honeybees have issues. There’s more. When I first started keeping bees in the 70s, I literally had to do nothing to them. I put them out in the field, then I collected honey. I didn’t have to go in them. I always say I was a bee-haver. I just happened to have bees and I stole honey from them. Now they require a lot more work because there’s a lot more pests that have moved around the world. So they happen to have a bite that’s like a giant tick and it kills them or weakens them. It transmits virus, kind of like the ticks we have. So a lot of these are the benefit either of, depending on what it is, it could be a hummingbird. There are actually fruit bats that pollinate some things. The native pollinators – what do you call them? – there’s some that look like honeybees. They’re called minor bees because they dig in the dirt. There’s not something that we can– we can’t manage them like we do honey bees. Super interesting though. A lot of people have seen sweat bees. If you’re out working and there’s little– especially if you’ve seen the green metallic sweat bees. Absolutely beautiful. But these are all pollinators that are out there. These are just some of the plants that need pollination to get there. Everybody knows about honeybees, so that’s usually what we talk about, so. And it’s a lot and this is not complete. Just this is just [crosstalk]–

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:47.532
And actually in the show notes, these words are all included in a PDF in the show notes, but it’ll tell you how many different kinds of bees actually pollinate these things. Because to me, I thought it was really fascinating to see how many different kinds of bees are necessary to get effective pollination. Here’s an interesting statement for you, Pat. It says, “We have honey berries and serviceberries, also called Saskatoons and Currents. How do we know the best pollinator for them? We live in North Pole, Alaska.” What would your advice be here?

Pat Roe: 00:30:34.683
So in the show notes, there’s a website to go to because one of the things I always advocate, especially being the past president of the association, I always tell people, “Get involved with either your– find your local association and find your local cooperative extension office if there is one.” And they’re a great source of information. So our local office, because of where we are, we’re in apple country. We’re also in dairy country. There’s a lot of blueberries and blackberries here. So we have extension service agents who focus on just those plants so we can go talk to them and find out what’s best. In the show notes is a– Alaska has two beekeeping organizations, which I was really surprised because I don’t know how people keep bees there but apparently they do. So I would go contact the associations and find it out. They will know and they will know how to help that. And if they don’t know– I don’t know what kind of planting goes on in Alaska, if there’s even an extension service up there, but there could be. And if there is, I would find them or find your State Department of Ag if there’s such a thing there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:54.078
So we have this video that we wanted to show you all, and I think we’re going to play this now. This is about a minute long and it’s going to show you a wide variety of native bee diversity. And then what we’ll do is we’ll stop the PowerPoint and we’ll start answering questions. So let’s go with this first. [music] As you can see, we were pretty excited to be able to put this little PowerPoint together for you. There’s over 4,000 native species of pollinators. And so in the show notes, we promised you how to build a native pollinator house. And we want you to know that it’s not that hard to do.

Pat Roe: 00:34:13.410
It’s really not that hard to do. So I stumbled on this kind of by accident because I agreed that when I finished my term as president of the Association after five years, that I would teach a 4H class for beginning beekeeping. And it was not just beekeeping, but it also included data pollinators. So one of the things was to build a native pollinator house. And it’s just stupid, simple. And I’m going to show you how. So that’s it. And so this is literally scrap wood and we drill holes in them anywhere from three-eighths down to, I would say, yeah, we did a quarter inch, three-eighths, five-sixteenths, different sizes because the bees will go into different sizes. We’re building an awning on our back deck and I was on the ladder and there was an extra hole in there and I watched the leafcutter bee drag a chunk of leaf into the hole building her nest in there. So these are just chunks of wood literally. I just drill holes in them. This is a toilet paper tube that I just rolled up. They love this kind of stuff and they will build all kind of– and you put it about three feet off the ground. I didn’t fill this one all the way up, but it’s really that simple. And this scrap two by fours. So they’re about six and a half inches long. These are about an inch longer. So seven and a half inches. Do it like that, nail it together. And it’s really that– and you put them, like I said, put them over three feet off the ground and they will fill them up. And I know they’ll fill them up because in my shed, there’s plywood with little holes in it and the miner bees will pack that full of dirt and those are actually– and they always say don’t use plastic don’t whatever. They filled in the little holes on my chop saw handle. There were little grooves in there. They packed it full of dirt and the bees hatched out of that. So you don’t have to be real particular about it. But it’s one thing you can do to help the native pollinators because everybody says if you plant a garden, a bee will fly up to three miles to get to forage for food. A native pollinator will go a couple hundred yards, maybe. So if you plant flowers– if I plant flowers for my beehives, maybe, maybe not. But if I plant them for native pollinators, they’ll be here and they’ll be the ones that are working those flowers, which is kind of an interesting way to look at it. So my bees are taking care of my neighbors and the native pollinators are taking care of me, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:47.737
Absolutely. So we had a whole bunch of questions. A lot of people registered for this event. And so I want to ask you some of these questions. And the first one made me laugh because it says, “Do you get stung often?” [laughter]

Pat Roe: 00:37:03.432
I kind of laughed because I said, “Only when I’m in the bee yard,” but actually not really. I get stung off my deck too. So yeah, I’m a little– in most of my life, I’m pretty calm. I’m very laid back. I don’t get excited about a lot. When I get in the bee yard, I tend to move a lot faster. And Gretchen, who’s normally on fire and in the house, when she goes to the bee yard is very calm, very relaxed and telling me to slow down because– so yeah, we get stung often. When I was keeping bees in high school and college, I would swell up so bad that I had to take Benadryl, which knocked me out. It put me out for the rest of the afternoon. Now it really doesn’t seem to affect me. So yeah, I get stung often. Lots of times.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:50.663
You do get used to it. But somebody did ask, they said, “If I had an allergic reaction as a child, can I keep bees as an adult?” And I think we both felt like that’s a question for an allergist [laughter] or an internist, not for us.

Pat Roe: 00:38:05.837
Yeah, I wouldn’t test that one. I wouldn’t test that theory. The gear does keep you pretty well protected, but not 100%. So I wouldn’t bet on that working. Yeah, I wouldn’t take that risk. Let’s put it that way.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:24.287
So one of the questions we had, Pat, was, “Why do bees die when they sting?”

Pat Roe: 00:38:29.898
If you’ve ever been stung either by a wasp or a yellow jacket or a hornet, they have– and we call it– we call yellow jackets “yellow jerkets” because they’re actually– they have no use in my life. Let’s put it that way. They’re usually nest in the ground or under something and you’d find them way by accident because you put your hands where they shouldn’t have been. And their stinger is a straight string, straight like a needle, stinger. It goes in, comes out. So they can sting. They can sting multiple times. And I stepped on a yellow jacket’s nest last summer and they were all over me and they just, they would sting and sting and sting. A honey bee stinger is like a fish hook. It’s got a barb on the end of it. So when it goes into your skin, it hooks. And when she flies off, it pulls out the poison sac, which kind of is part of her guts. And that when you lose your guts, I guess that’s not good for you. So it means a certain death. They’re guaranteed to die. What she also leaves is a sack of venom that is now pumping. It’s wrapped by the muscles and that’s pumping venom into your hand even after she’s gone. So when you get stung, the first thing you do is you scrape that little thing out of there because it will keep injecting venom into you the whole time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:39:53.345
Here’s another question for you, Pat. It says mosquitoes are called our state bird. My 89-year-old mother came to live with us and enjoys being outside in the summer. This is in Alaska. Since the winters are so long and cold, we began to pay to have our property sprayed. We no longer have the option to have commercial essential oil sprays. We have about an acre and a half. Would this spraying actually hurt the pollinators of our buried bushes and apple trees? We have been told conflicting information. That’s a really good question.

Pat Roe: 00:40:26.973
I had to go back to your ag people or to your cooperative pension office. If it sprays during the day. Yeah, 100%. I don’t see how it can miss. These things are not– it doesn’t differentiate between. Good insects and bad insects. So whatever gets sprayed gets sprayed. We know that when our bees find a source of pollen that has been sprayed in the area because that hive will suffer a severe die-off. We’ll see piles of dead bees in the front and we know that they found somebody’s yard who had sprayed their flowers. To keep the bugs off the flowers. So yeah, any type of– which is unfortunate. I mean, it’s a lot of– especially in the South, the municipalities spray at night and that’s for mosquitoes. They always say they fog and they send mosquito trucks out to fog the areas. And that’s usually at night. That’s to protect the bees. So it doesn’t–

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:35.146
But we live in what’s called a bee city USA here in Hendersonville, North Carolina. And they have just outlawed mosquito spraying here because of the adverse impact on native pollinators.

Pat Roe: 00:41:49.345
Yeah, they’re not. They dump fogging because we are a bee city.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:54.662
Right. So the next question is how much room do beehives need? And I know you have a great answer for this one.

Pat Roe: 00:42:05.583
So one of my best friends here in town. I met him at the bee school. He started keeping bees the year before me. He used to live in town on an eighth of an acre. And he had at one point, 30 hives. Obviously, he’s single because nobody’s wife would let them do that to them because his house was just full of bee equipment. But Jim, I mean, he kept a lot of bees on that space and they were fine. Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it, but you really don’t need a lot of space. And especially if you have a bee-friendly city, if you’re in the city limits, even in the suburbs, as long as– and here in North Carolina, even the HOAs don’t have a lot of say in keeping in preventing you from keeping bees because the state is very friendly toward beekeeping and they have outlawed the ability to regulate beekeeping at HOAs. So it doesn’t mean you won’t get a fight, and ultimately people that get in the fight win if they’re keeping bees, but you really don’t need a whole lot of space. We always recommend that people keep two beehives because each hive is just like your kids are different. They act different. They have different temperaments. Everything they do is going to be different. So we always recommend to have two hives and you could keep two hives in a very small space. We know people that have them, they keep them on their balcony on their balconies because it’s easier to work with. I wouldn’t do it in a condo. But if you– you can do it in a whole lot of different ways and you really don’t need a whole lot of space. The bees are going to go out and for it. They’re going to fly for three miles. You’re not going to feed them on your property. They’re going to go somewhere else.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:00.298
That actually brings to mind another another question. So what’s the percentage of flowers that you would need on a piece of property in order to keep native pollinators and honeybees happy?

Pat Roe: 00:44:14.772
Native pollinators, as many as you can put out there. Bees, you don’t need a single flower because they’re going to go. It’s nice to have them here and they do work our blueberries and they work our– we have blackberries and blackberries are heavy this year. And so they work the blackberries really well. They work the strawberries that we have really well. But when those are done, they’re moving on. Those are going to don’t stop. I think the blackberries almost stop blooming now until fall and they’re moving out. The best thing we can do is to plant things that are bloomed late because come August, late August here, there’s nothing blooming. We call it the dearth. And it’s a lot warmer here than it used to be. When I was a teenager, September was flannel weather. I mean, you can only guarantee that it was October, you were wearing a jacket. It’s not that case anymore. Bees are still flying late into the season, almost until Thanksgiving. And they’re hungry and there’s nothing to eat. And we have to feed them because we don’t have a choice. So I would say plant any you could. Oh, you can find native pollinator plants anywhere. It’d be great to be specific for your area that you have natives in your own yard because that’s what the native pollinators are looking for. So in every area is going to be different. Everybody’s got different native pollinators and native flowers that the native pollinators need. So the best way to put that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:45:48.012
I think I was surprised to realize that most of the honey, particularly in our bee yard doesn’t come from flowers at all, but it comes from trees.

Pat Roe: 00:45:56.473
We have, yeah, most of our honey is tree honey. So this spring, we had tulip poplars and the tulip poplars, their bloom is about the size of my hand. And it’s so big that the bees go to that one flower, they fill their tanks, they fly back to the hive, they offload it usually to another bee that’s waiting there. Then they fly back to the same flower and fill up again. So we always pray that the wind don’t blow and the rains don’t come hard in May and June to keep the blooms up as long as possible. Because we the longer that we have tulip proper blooms, the more honey we get. And [crosstalk]–

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:37.139
This was an interesting question that we had, Pat. And I asked you about it and your response was not what I expected. Does keeping security lights on at night hinder pollinators?

Pat Roe: 00:46:50.873
So to give you an example, when we go out, we move our bees out into the apples at night because they don’t fly at night. But we got to see what we’re doing. So we have headlights on and usually they’re trapped in there. But when we’re done, when we get them in place, the first thing we have to do is open up the hives so that they’re ready to fly the next day. And the first guard bees that come out go right for the light. I mean, they go. And so that means if you’re wearing a headlight, you got a bee that’s coming right to your face, which I just hate. [laughter] I hate bees in my face. I really, really do. I could take a lot, but I don’t like bees in my face. So would it? There’s a possibility. I mean, if it’s shining directly on the bees, yeah, it might bother them. They might come out at night and fly towards that light. There’s a possibility. Can’t say it really well. But I know I’ve seen bees around the off our deck, on the lights that are on our deck. So, but those are bees that may got lost. They were parked and they saw those lights woke up kind of thing. So not really sure. But I I would rather have them shaded as opposed to not even at night, not during the day, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:48:09.794
So tell me a little bit more about honey. Why is there an advantage to purchasing honey from a local beekeeper as opposed to buying it off the store shelf in a grocery store?

Pat Roe: 00:48:24.792
So I have my honey posted on Facebook Marketplace. So it reaches a lot further than I realize. And I’ve got people in other states asking me about honey and if I could ship it. And the first thing I advise them is to get local honey for a lot of different reasons. And it’s funny because I like the taste of honey, but I’m not in love with it. It’s not something I just got to have. I know it sounds weird because I’m keeping bees and I got 30 beehives and I’ve ended up with close to 1,000 pounds of honey this year. That’s kind of nutty. But I like the bees. I think they’re super interesting. I mean, they just fascinate me with all the things that we do to them and they still live in spite of us. So the honey. They say this is not proven by science, but it is proven by people. So I get people that buy local honey, especially people around– our neighbors who use it for allergy reasons. They swear if they will take a teaspoon of honey a day, especially during allergy season, that it relieves their allergy symptoms. The reason why is because the honey that we make here has the pollen in there. Now there’s not chunks of pollen. The honey is not– when we process it, we spin it out of the comb, and then we put it through two super fine strainers. But it still leaves the– there’s granular pollen in that honey. And supposedly that can alleviate some of your allergies.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:03.177
Well, I know personally– I mean, we have three dogs and we had one dog who was having allergy symptoms last year to the point that the vet was ready to put that dog on something called Apoquel, which would have been a $75 injection. And an acquaintance suggested we put him on a tablespoon of honey a day. And his allergies are gone. And he looks forward to his honey in the morning when I put his honey on his food. If he doesn’t get it, he sits back down and looks at me. So I know he likes it.

Pat Roe: 00:50:38.924
Okay, so there you go. But it also supports your local beekeepers. I mean, we do enjoy keeping bees. It’s a lot of fun. It’s super interesting. I mean, we do math. We’re moving hives. A week ago, we opened up a hive and queens were hatching as we were opening. So their queens are popping out. We’re catching them and we’re putting them in hives that had queen issues. So to me, it’s just a lot of fun and like I said, they’re very pliable and resilient to all the things we do to them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:22.129
So what is the difference then between the grocery store honey–

Pat Roe: 00:51:28.208
Oh, God. Here we go.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:29.056
–and the bee honey that– I know. Now, be nice but I know you have an answer.

Pat Roe: 00:51:35.069
So the two most altered or adulterated foods on the market are olive oil– they say that if you’re not watching the stuff being pressed, you’re not getting extra virgin olive oil. And the second thing is honey. And what was happening is that we were getting honey from other countries, especially China, that was basically sugar water. I mean, it was sugar syrup mixed in with probably probably mixed in with honey or flavor. So we we banned the import of Chinese honey. So they figured out if they ship it to Argentina or Chile or somewhere like that, then the honey is moved back up here through a different process. And we’re still getting this adulterated honey. So if you look at the label and it says “honey from the United States, Argentina, Chile,” and it gives you a whole list of countries, where they get it from, chances are it’s probably not honey. It may be partially honey, maybe half honey, maybe mostly honey, but it ain’t all. Then it’s been cut one way or the other. If you go, my honey is just honey. I mean, it literally is just– and I mean, we store it. It’s kind of like gold dust because it ain’t cheap, and it ain’t cheap to make, and it’s not easy to make. So to extract. So we, but if you get it from a local beekeeper, especially like in North Carolina, we were talking– we didn’t realize that North Carolina has the most beekeepers per capita or just a raw number than any other state. Even though we don’t make the most honey, we don’t have the most hives, but we have the most beekeepers. And a lot of the, I would say 90-plus percent of them are backyard beekeepers. They have a hive. [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:22.440
Obviously, beekeepers who have less than four hives.

Pat Roe: 00:53:25.623
Yep, less than four hives. Probably have one or two hives, which I think is kind of cool.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:30.339
I always find it fascinating that honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil. They’ve actually eaten honey out of the Egyptian tombs, which I think is fascinating.

Pat Roe: 00:53:38.333
Yeah, they found that 4,000-year-old honey.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:41.035
Yes. One of the things that I ask you to talk about is how long have humans been keeping bees?

Pat Roe: 00:53:48.928
Well, yeah, we did talk about the history. So they say that their bee products have been noted like wax and all they’ve found over 10,000 years. But that doesn’t mean they were keeping bees. They were probably benefiting from bees, but maybe not keeping them. But about four to five thousand years ago, they found evidence of actual beekeeping, where they were managing beehives. So it’s a long time, and it’s a evolved process. And it’s really interesting because every country has their own way of housing their bees and different ways of doing it. So it’s really interesting. And somebody had brought something up about killer bees. And so there is a– they call them Africanized. They’re just hyper-aggressive. And I guess they could kill you. I mean, the people have died from them, but they’ve died from all kind of bees. It’s a lot of hype. They’re all over South America and they manage these beehives for– it’s a little more work, but they manage them fine. They’re not out there killing everybody who has them. So it’s something that is happening. They are hyper-aggressive. They’re not fun to be around. I mean, we have one hive that sits all by itself because– and I wrote on the top of it to know it’s just– I just put spicy on the top because when we open them up, we know that there’s going to be some guard bees that are kind of banging off our veils right in our face. Not a lot, not enough to kill us. But, you know, they’re there. The Africanized bees are kind of the same. They are manageable and we’d rather not have those traits here, but we can’t stop them. So they do the best they can. But they’re not–

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:30.602
I can’t believe that we’ve had this discussion and we’re almost at the top of the hour. So we’ve had a lot of people who have asked questions of us, a lot of people who have listened to what we’ve had to say. What would be your closing comments for them today?

Pat Roe: 00:55:46.295
If you’re really interested in beekeeping, we always say that– we put a document there. Beekeeping is not the cheapest thing in the world, but there are ways to work around it. And I mentioned a few ways. If you’re really interested, find your local organization. So here in Henderson County, North Carolina we’re in the mountains of North Carolina. We have a club. We have meetings every month. We have a bee school in the winter. We have our own apiary, which means if you don’t know if you want to keep bees or not, you can go work in a bee yard and never own a bee. And you may benefit from that either by being– if you’re there constantly or there a lot, you may get honey from them or you may get bees from them or something like that. But you can get an experience without having to invest a whole lot of money in it. So there are ways to work around it. Yeah. If you have any interest in it, find your local organization. Start with your state organization if you have to, but find somewhere local that you can meet up with other beekeepers and don’t do it alone. I did it alone my first time. It didn’t work so good. I could have done a lot better. So do it. Find somebody. We always say, find a bee buddy or a mentor and listen to them and let them help you. It’s a lot more fun when–

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:03.073
Yeah. But we had the opportunity to be a bee buddy and a mentor for someone who keeps bees in Rural Ohio and has been very successful. So I think it’s also–

Pat Roe: 00:57:14.515
Yes, you’re right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:14.971
–important to recognize that if you’re motivated to do this, you can make it happen.

Pat Roe: 00:57:21.636
Right. Yeah, we did. We consulted by phone. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:23.389
We don’t have a bee buddy who lives close.

Pat Roe: 00:57:25.082
Yeah. We did it all by phone. She would call us with– she bought bees and called us with questions, and we’d answer questions, and then she’d call them later. So you don’t have to have somebody in your back pocket the whole time. You can do it if you’re brave. You got to be a little brave. But yeah, you can do it without having somebody holding your hand.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:47.154
Absolutely.

Pat Roe: 00:57:47.796
Literally holding your hand, standing right beside you. You can do it from a distance, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:52.584
So one of the things, the reasons that I wanted to have you on here is because I think as homeschool families in particular, we don’t realize the depth and breadth of scientific knowledge, math, geography, biology, zoology that’s available in just the study of native pollinators. And if you wanted to dig into that deeper, we’ve got a wealth of resources in the show notes this time. And I think you’ll find it to be really interesting. I want to thank you for taking time out of the bee yard to spend this time with me. It’s been a whole lot of fun for me. And I just want to say thank you. It’s been great.

Pat Roe: 00:58:36.211
Oh, sure.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:38.741
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We’ve enjoyed very much coming into your living room and sharing about our hobby and our love. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank you for joining us. You can access the show notes and find a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. Have a great afternoon, everyone.

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