Buzzing
I had a hive that um that had a real mean
mother and I decided I was going to
change the genetics
because this hive was always stinging.
It took me about an hour to find the queen because they were actually protecting the queen,
keeping her um, they had a ball around her.
I got about a hundred stings
that day.
I found the queen.
I axed her head off.
They made a new queen. But the next year
they survived the winter and they made me a lot of honey the next year
And they weren't stinging anymore.
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We're taking out queen cells. They're just starting to think about swarming.
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I've been working for
about five or six years, or seven or eight I think, selecting
and also bringing in select genetics from um
places like Vermont and Washington.
I'm looking for a bee that can endure our length of winter,
which takes a conservative bee.
The main reason why bees don't survive Alaska is the duration
plus starvation. Some beekeepers in Alaska
choose to kill their bees. To me their too precious to kill.
It's going to be a long a road to make beekeeping sustainable in Alaska.
A lot of people need to work on it.
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Being an owner of a supplement and natural food store,
wintering the bees rather than killing them and
not using chemicals and using natural cell size just
fit in with what I'm about.
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Keith used to come in and buy
essential oils and calendula and stuff like that.
and I had heard about him a little bit
and didn't quite know who he was.
He was uh, you know he's a
little bit of an outlaw I guess you could say in the beekeeping community up here
because he's into wintering his bees.
We started exchanging information
about beekeeping. It's good to talk with Nathan about bees because he picks it up good.
At first it was just basically he was just my mentor in beekeeping
but we do a lot together now business-wise as well.
We're like peas and carrots, beans and rice, mustard and ketchup,
cowboys and cowboy hats.
Laughter
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So anyways, what I do is
I don't remember seeing that.
There still there I'll show them...
I'm not sure.
Anyways...
I'd remember that.
I'm talking to the camera man.
Why don't you talk with the camera.
Most people have heard by now
that there's a huge loss every year of honeybees down in the lower 48
especially. You know, 25 percent, 40 percent, I mean it's huge
every year. It didn't make any sense to me personally to
do what they're doing. They're failing really.
They're theorizing that it's between
that it's between antibiotics, chemicals, herbicides.
Anything and everything. What I think it is is beekeepers trying to hard
and they need to simplify
their beekeeping and get them on a natural system.
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Other than zero treatments,
and treatments could be anything from
essential oils, giving them fake pollen, you know mite-away, mite-icides
fungicides, those are all unnatural obviously.
And what it's done over the years is it's created an environment
where you end up with weak bees and strong
mites and bugs and stuff.
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There's a lot of beekeepers that are frustrated with the system
that's currently in place. A lot of beekeepers don't want to put stuff in a hive
that the bees wouldn't bring in on their own.
They're being propped up by chemicals.
People don't like change and if that's what they've been taught
And the honeybee association tells you to do that and Monsanto
buys a bee genetics company and comes up with a bogus reason
of why that's a good thing, people do it so
Is that too political?
Let's introduce these bees to the box.
Or in my face. One of the two.
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mmhmm.
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Now that's an overwintered hive right?
Nope.
Oh.
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