Bee Love Beekeeping... presented by Mann Lake

What happens when your bee colonies get so big people think you’re using AI in their photos?

And what happens when the honey sold as “local” turns out to be anything but?

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It's Time For Winter Bee Prep!

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This episode dives into both, with Debbie Klughers of Long Island sharing her secrets for building powerhouse colonies, avoiding swarms, and keeping bees happy through winter.

Her feeding strategy might make her the Italian grandmother of beekeeping!

Then things get sticky as Deb exposes honey fraud, using DNA and pollen testing to challenge sellers passing off questionable honey as their own.

Add a little beekeeper drama, a fairground confrontation, and a poker-playing hobby, and you’ve got an episode packed with big bees, bigger personalities, and plenty of beekeeping surprises.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Deb: https://bonacbees.com/index.html https://www.instagram.com/bonacbees/

What do NASA astronauts and backyard beekeepers have in common? They both know that honey bees don’t always follow the rules!

This episode of Bee Love Beekeeping starts with a wild trip into space before welcoming Ben Cooper, a Pennsylvania beekeeper with more than 50 years of experience.

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It's Time For Winter Bee Prep!

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Ben shares practical tips for reading frames, spotting queen and brood issues, identifying pests like small hive beetles, and figuring out what your colony really needs as winter approaches. Spoiler alert: sometimes your queen isn’t broken—she’s just following the calendar!

Then it’s time for some creative beekeeping hacks that could save your wallet from getting stung. From catching free swarms with bait hives to recycling old wax and discovering the surprising flavors of seasonal honey, Ben proves that a resourceful beekeeper doesn’t need every shiny gadget on the market.

Whether you’re new to beekeeping or a seasoned beekeeper, you’ll pick up useful insights into caring for honey bees, managing your frames, and learning to expect the unexpected. Because after 50 years, even Ben knows who’s really running the hive—and it isn’t us!

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Ben: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AlleganyMountainBeekeepers

Honey harvesting without the sticky mess? Yes, please! 🐝

On this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, Eric Bennett chats with Simon Mildred of Hivekeepers, an Australian innovator making honey extraction easier with clever reusable cassettes and a compact honey harvester. Less cleanup, less fuss, and more time enjoying the bees and their sweet stuff!

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It's Time For Winter Bee Prep!

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First, Eric gets into the honey bee’s sneaky stinger, which can keep pumping venom even after detaching.

Then Simon shares how his invention could make beekeeping less intimidating for beginners, help every beekeeper sample different honey flavors throughout the season, and give those busy honey bees a little less wax-building work.

Sweet science and sticky innovation—what’s not to buzz about?

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https://hivekeepers.com/

What do you get when you combine a French beekeeper, illegal rooftop beehives in Manhattan, a legendary bee venom pioneer, and a healthy dose of curiosity? One seriously sweet episode of Bee Love Beekeeping!

Host & beekeeper Eric Bennett, chats with Jean-François La Rivière, a beekeeper and apitherapy expert living in southwestern France, who shares the wild story of sneaking honey bees onto a New York City rooftop—black garbage bags and elevator rides included.

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From Manhattan’s urban apiaries to the rolling pastures of France, Jean-François has spent years exploring the fascinating world of bees and their remarkable products.

Then it’s time to get sticky with apitherapy—the traditional use of bee products like honey, propolis, royal jelly, bee pollen, beeswax, and even bee venom for health and medicinal care.

Whether you’re a seasoned beekeeper or just curious about what your honey bees are making besides honey, this conversation is packed with history, unusual adventures, and enough bee-related rabbit holes to keep you buzzing!

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https://beehealthyfarms.com/

https://www.chezlesabeilles.com/en/

What happens when a surfer, a swarm of honey bees, and a wildfire-prone corner of Southern California collide? You get one heck of a beekeeping story!

Eric Bennett sits down with Eli Lichter-Mark, a small commercial beekeeper managing hundreds of hives around Topanga and Malibu. Eli shares how he went from catching swarms and repeatedly killing off his colonies to building a real bee business—complete with forklifts, flatbeds, almond pollination, a honey kitchen, and plenty of opportunities to get stung.

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It's Time For Winter Bee Prep!

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Oh, and there’s Buckwheat, the bee-yard dog who apparently considers anything that buzzes—including motorcycles—a personal emergency.

But this episode gets seriously interesting when the conversation turns to keeping honey bees in a place where the weather can swing wildly and wildfires can turn an apiary into a pile of staples.

It’s a story about risk, resilience, sticky equipment, epic failures, and why anyone would voluntarily spend their days surrounded by thousands of flying insects. In other words… classic beekeeping.

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Eli: https://www.elisbees.com/

It’s episode 100!! And we’re celebrating with a whole lot of beekeeping, a whole lot of bees, and a guest who knows that being a beekeeper is basically a full-time workout—with honey supers instead of dumbbells!

Ryan Griffeth returns to the show to talk winter bee prep, managing hives across Connecticut’s wildly different microclimates, and what it really takes to keep colonies healthy when the temperatures drop.

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Ryan also gets into the business side of beekeeping, including hive management, working with clients, and turning a passion for bees into a sustainable business.

Add some laughs, a little humility, and the occasional “oh crap, I forgot to check my mites” moment, and episode 100 is a fun—and seriously useful—celebration of beekeeping, and the people crazy enough to do it. It's all about the love!

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Ryan: https://www.neckersfarm.com/

How To: Best way to find lost hive tools (she has 30 and they're all missing)!

What do you do when you love beekeeping, make your living with bees, and your body has decided it would really rather you not get stung? You apparently keep going!

This week we head to Scotland to meet full-time beekeeper Gael Wilkinson, who manages hives across the Kingdom of Fife while navigating unpredictable weather, Scottish seasons, and the occasional bee that apparently has a personal grudge.

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Gail pulls back the curtain on the business side of beekeeping—selling honey directly to loyal customers, managing and sponsoring hives, rescuing swarms, and turning leftover beeswax into candles, balms, soap, and other goodies.

We also get a wild bee sting story (that includes projectile vomiting and pee), some questionable decisions involving hive tools, and a reminder that working with honey bees is never quite as calm and peaceful as the pictures make it look.

It’s Scotland, it’s bees, it’s business—and yes, there’s an EpiPen involved.

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Gael: https://kinbees.com/

What happens when a teenager thinks Beekeeping is going to be an easy way to make some money?

In this episode, Jeremy Jensen shares the hilarious—and ultimately inspiring—story of how a fascination with bees turned into a full-blown career.

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From free hive removals and stashing colonies in the bushes to working for an experienced beekeeper and eventually buying the business, Jeremy’s journey proves that sometimes the best plans are the ones you never planned!

Jeremy also takes us behind the scenes of commercial Beekeeping in Southern California, where honey bees can keep you busy every day of the year. We talk pollination, farmers markets, honey production, queens, Varroa, and the unique challenges of keeping honey bees in a climate without much of a brood break.

Add a little ancient honey history and a warning about yellowjackets, and you've got an episode packed with bees, business, and plenty of bee-worthy laughs. Remember, it's all about the love of the bees!

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Jeremy: https://www.billsbees.com/

Grab your bee suit and get ready to meet royalty! In this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, we sit down with Delanie Craighead, the American Honey Queen, to find out what it’s really like to wear the crown, travel the country, and talk nonstop about honey bees.

Delanie shares how she became Queen, what goes into the competition, and some of the fun adventures that come with representing Beekeeping and Beekeepers across America.

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But this isn’t just about crowns and honey jars! We get into the serious side of Beekeeping, from Varroa mites and pesticides to the threat of fake honey—and why honey bees are so important to agriculture.

Delanie brings plenty of enthusiasm (and maybe a little honey-powered energy) to the conversation, showing why educating people about honey bees can be both important AND a whole lot of fun.

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Delanie:

American Honey Queen

https://www.instagram.com/americanhoneyqueenprogram/

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanHoneyQueenProgram/

What do Picasso paintings, bee dance-offs, and a swarm living on a greasy crane have in common? They’re all part of the wonderfully weird world of honey bees and beekeeping!

In this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, we head to San Diego to meet Hilary Kearney of Girl Next Door Honey, who has turned 16 years of beekeeping experience into a creative, full-time business.

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We also explore the unique challenges of keeping bees in San Diego, where year-round brood means year-round Varroa and some colonies can have seriously spicy personalities.

Add in bee news from Texas and Virginia, and you’ve got an episode packed with fascinating facts, laughs, business inspiration, and plenty of reasons to appreciate the incredible little creatures at the heart of beekeeping.

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Hillary Kearney: https://girlnextdoorhoney.com/

Get ready to meet your match for Africanized bee expertise: third-generation beekeeper Monica King joins Bee Love Beekeeping host, Eric Bennett, to talk about wrangling "killer bees" in the 110-degree heat of southern Arizona.

Monica shares her beekeeping secrets for night-time hive removals under red lanterns (bees hate white light and love drama). She explains why "hangry" honey bees get meaner during droughts, and reveals her go-to trick for spotting varroa mite infestations by popping open drone brood cells.

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Bonus points for the chicken-and-bee symbiosis system she's engineered on her 14-acre off-grid homestead.

Things get truly wild when Monica breaks out her craziest beekeeping stories — including the time she pulled 18 virgin queens out of a single swarm, and a bizarre cutout where four mated queens were living together in one melted, catacomb-like hive... until the bees ruthlessly picked a winner overnight.

Between water-hauling homestead hacks and gutsy mite-testing tips, this episode is equal parts survival guide and beekeeping soap opera.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Monica King: https://www.monicamking.com/#/

Forget everything you thought you knew about swarm removal!

This episode is a full-on myth-busting session with SoCal's own Bee Man Dan, a rescuer who's handled over 21,000 colonies and trained in Beekeeping the unconventional way: through his Kung Fu school, under Daoist and Buddhist monks.

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The internet gospel says "find the queen, box her, and the rest will follow." Dan says nope. After years of hands-on Swarm Removal, he discovered bees actually chase the brood ("the babies"), not the queen — she just wanders in eventually, sometimes last.

No bee vacuums, no frantic queen-hunting, just capped brood, patience, and a little pheromone magic doing the real work.

The conversation rolls into Africanized bee hybrids, sketchy 50-foot ladder rescues, and the messy legal reality of bee ordinances across SoCal cities.

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Bee Man Dan: https://wesavebees.com/

What is "RNA Interference" and why are beekeepers calling it birth control for Varroa?

In this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, we're buzzing into two topics that every beekeeper should know about. First, we tackle the sticky subject of glyphosate (Roundup®) and what the latest research says about its surprising effects on honey bees—from disrupting their gut health to changing the way they forage.

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Then we welcome Adam Pachl of GreenLight Biosciences to talk all things Varroa mites and introduce Narroa, an innovative treatment that doesn't kill mites—it simply stops them from starting the next generation. Think of it as birth control for Varroa!

Along the way, we dive into when (and when not) to use Narroa, how it fits into a smart mite management plan, and why testing your colonies always beats guessing.

Adam also shares hilarious stories from his days as a state bee inspector, including the heart-stopping moment he found a queen bee taking a stroll across his beekeeping suit.

Whether you're a first-year beekeeper or you've been keeping bees for decades, you'll come away with practical tips, a few laughs, and maybe even a new favorite tool for keeping your colonies healthy.

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https://norroa.com/

This week's beekeeping adventure takes us to Byron Bay, Australia, where Flow Hive co-inventor Cedar Anderson gives us the buzz on life after Varroa mites invaded the continent.

After a failed containment effort that saw thousands of hives burned, Australian beekeepers battled a brutal one-two punch of Varroa weakening colonies and small hive beetles finishing the job — sound familiar, fellow beekeepers?

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The good news: things are stabilizing. But Australian beekeeping comes with its own wild twist: bee-eating cane toads that camp out at hive entrances all night, gobbling up bees like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We also get into rainbow bee-eater birds, Africanized bees creeping into the southern U.S., and a hilarious near-miss where Cedar got chased by angry bees while a New York Times reporter had his back turned — talk about a close call.

Toss in some jaw-dropping bee-communication stories (turns out their waggle dance is way more precise than science gives them credit for) and a peek at Cedar's new book, and this episode is a must-listen for anyone who loves bees, beekeeping, and the delightfully chaotic world of managing them.

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Cedar Anderson: https://www.honeyflow.com/

This week we're heading to Oregon to hang out with Joy and Eric McEwen, husband-and-wife beekeepers who've been at it together for 26 seasons and now tend around 650 colonies.

They coined the term "natural nest beekeeping" to describe their whole philosophy: foundationless, paint-free, plastic-free hives, protected with a homemade beeswax-linseed-pine rosin sealant, queens raised in-house by their own sister bees instead of grafted or shipped in cages, and a Warré-inspired vertical hive design that lets the bees' own body heat pre-warm their winter honey stores.

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Then we take a step sideways when Joy dives into apitherapy — she's been doing bee venom therapy for 15+ years, treating everything from arthritis and Lyme disease to Parkinson's and chronic fatigue, and now co-teaches a full certification course with Eric through their business, Diggin' Living.

Moral of the episode: it's not about the honey or the money, it's about the love (and maybe a little bit about ditching plastic hive equipment).

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Joy & Eric: https://digginlivin.com/

2 Million Americans are allergic to bee stings. Do you know what to do for yourself, or someone else, when they have a severe reaction?

We kick things off with eight bee sting facts that'll make you the most insufferable know-it-all at your next beekeeping club meeting. Did you know only lady bees can sting, that a detached stinger keeps pumping venom like a tiny horror-movie villain, or that bee venom is basically one superstar protein wearing a trench coat? You're welcome.

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Then Eric sits down with Chicago allergist Dr. Juanita Mora — who, plot twist, once got absolutely obliterated by roughly 100 stings as a six-year-old sitting on her grandfather's hive (yes, sitting on it) and grew up to become the exact doctor who now teaches people how not to die from that.

Highlights:

• The "two or more systems" rule that tells you in five seconds whether you need epinephrine or just a good sulk and a cold pack
• Why "eh, I'll just pop a Benadryl" might be the worst sentence a beekeeper can say mid-emergency
• A real live demo of EpiPen vs. Neffy (the no-needle option), including a hilarious confession about parents who've stabbed their own fingers instead of their thigh
• The plot twist that you can become allergic to bees after years of stings — so "I've never reacted before" means nothing
• Why your grandkids, neighbors, and even your laundry hamper might be quietly at risk
• The honey myths, the botulism truth, and Eric's own homemade (informal, definitely-not-science) experiment eating local raw honey to fight his allergies

Bottom line from Dr. Mora: Every beekeeper, and anyone regularly around hives, should keep both adult and pediatric epinephrine on hand, know how to use it, and never hesitate to act during a severe reaction.

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Dr. Juanita Mora: https://www.instagram.com/dr.juanitamora/?hl=en

Neffy: https://www.neffy.com/

• Most commercially insured patients can pay as little as $25 per prescription for two single-use neffy devices through the company's co-pay savings program.
• For eligible patients whose insurance does not yet cover neffy or who face high out-of-pocket costs, ARS Pharma offers a cash price of $199 for two doses of neffy.
• For eligible uninsured or underinsured patients who meet program requirements and have exhausted other options, the Patient Assistance Program may provide neffy at no cost.

Buzzing with intrigue, this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping kicks off with spider venom playing mite assassin.

Then the real fun begins: UC Riverside's Genesis Chong and Owen Wagner dish on their scrappy "Californian" hybrid bees, tough, hybridized survivors that shrug off Varroa infestations that would tank a typical commercial colony.

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For beekeepers tired of chemical treatments, this is the kind of hopeful buzz worth tuning in for.

Turns out the secret isn't new chemical treatments — it's happening deep in the brood chamber, where mites mysteriously struggle to reproduce on these bees' larvae.

Scent? Bad nutrition? Chemical trickery? The scientists are still chasing the answer, framing it as an evolutionary tug-of-war between bees and mites.

Toss in a hilarious military-runway bee rescue story, some reflections on falling in love with bees, and you've got a genuinely entertaining, hope-filled episode for anyone invested in the future of beekeeping.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Genesis & Owen: https://ciber.ucr.edu/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ciber_ucr/

Facebook: Center for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER)

Yappy: "This will get me excommunicated from the bee community!"

Firefighter by day, bee-whisperer by everything else — Yappy BeeMan joins the show fresh off a job (complete with a couple of fresh stings) to spill 15 years of beekeeping wisdom, chaos, and comedy.

Yappy tells the wild story of how one shaky cell-phone video — where he caught a queen bare-handed, mid-recording, with nowhere to put her — rocketed his channel from 5,000 subscribers to a million views practically overnight.

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From there, things get delightfully spicy: he makes the case for treating bees "like ladies" (suit optional), roasts the beekeepers who bust up cinder block basements to "save" $150 worth of bees, and explains why lazy trap-outs are basically bee purgatory.

The grand finale? Two jaw-dropping removals from a 150-year-old farmhouse — one wall hiding a 75-year-old colony, the other a 45-year-old honey vault with a jaw-dropping 100 gallons inside.

Oh, and before all that — the host crunches this year's colony loss numbers. The bees are doing a little better, but as one industry leader puts it, that's still less "victory lap" and more "crisis in slow motion."

Buckle up, beekeepers — it's a big one.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Yappy Beeman: https://swarmremover.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@YappyBeeman

Before getting into the honey of it all, host Eric riffs on a string of bizarre highway mishaps — rolled-over bee trucks, a tofu spill, flaming ribeyes — proving that 2026 is just a weird year for cargo.

Then the real magic begins: mechanical-engineer-turned-beekeeper Bill Hesbach drops some serious hive-mind wisdom on condensing hives, the practice of letting bees manage their own internal climate instead of beekeepers cranking up the ventilation.

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Turns out our buzzy friends are basically tiny thermodynamics geniuses — using CO2 to chill their metabolism, recycling latent heat from condensation, and even running their own swamp coolers in summer. Who knew beekeeping came with a side of physics class?

The conversation gets delightfully nerdy (volcano-buried hives! snow as insulation! queens partying in CO2 chambers!) before Bill explains how to DIY your own insulated hive sleeve — and why a "quilt box" might be sabotaging your bees without you knowing it.

Things wrap up with two classic wild & crazy beekeeper tales: a swarm-catching fiasco involving mistaken identity (turns out bees are sneaky little ninjas) and a jungle honey-hunt in Thailand that ends with giant Apis dorsata bees chasing panicked undergrads through snake-infested streams. Equal parts science lecture and adventure story — this one's a hive worth diving into.

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Bill: https://www.wingdancehoney.com/

Host Eric Bennett, travels across the pond to Cornwall, England, for a fascinating conversation with Molly Earl, full-time beekeeper and founder of Bees Off and The Rescued Bee.

Molly specializes in live bee removals — rescuing honeybee colonies from chimneys, walls, flat roofs, and other structures — and has grown what started as a two-hive hobby into an operation managing roughly 300 beehives across mid-Cornwall.

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The conversation covers her techniques, tools, the Cornwall beekeeping season, and pest management. Plus, Molly shares a couple of wild & crazy, memorable beekeeping stories that you won't want to miss... including how the pant leg of her beekeeping suit caught on fire!

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