About Bees, Culture & Curiosity – Details, episodes & analysis

Season 1 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Some Bee Buzz

In this episode, we jump from moving bees from Alberta to British Columbia to examining a recent paper about the ecology of disappearing bee species. Then, of course, we chat about Beyonce and Hex Art.

Bidzina describes conditions in British Columbia and why he avoided going farther into the mountains to make fireweed honey but instead split his colonies, doubling their number. He tells us a little about moving his bees back to Alberta, driving through the night with a trailer through the Rocky Mountains. In Alberta, he loses most of those hives over the next winter. But two survivor colonies are resilient and develop into strong colonies.

We discuss removing honey by letting the supers stay in the apiary, separated from the hives, allowing the bees to drift out of the honey supers and back to their homes, abandoning the honey. Bidzina also mentions nuisance bees at a wedding held where he was extracting.

Then, Ron talks about his two backyard hives. Both were replacements for colonies that died over winter. One was a package, the other a nuc. It was surprising to see that there was very little difference in strength between them by mid-July.

We drift to talking about trains and the enormous size of Canada. It's a 7,500-kilometre road trip from Pacific to Atlantic. Maybe it should be tackled by train, not car or plane. Trains are good.

We explore a recent paper about land use changes (farming, urbanization) that are related to declining populations of native and imported bees. Across a huge temperate area, scientists broadly divided landscapes into forested, herbaceous, agricultural, and urban. One of those areas were better for bee health and survival. The results surprised me a little. See: “Land use changes associated with declining honey bee health across temperate North America”   https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd867

Other news bits include the collapse of insect species diversity, which leads us to wonder about the 2024 reversal of a ban on neonicotinoids in England and the implications for bee survival. Then we lighten up with a visit to Beyonce (the Queen Bey) and a glance at a paper on the prevalence of bees throughout the history of art - have you noticed that hexagons seem to be everywhere we look these day? Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 4: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – The Bees’ Ears

In this episode, we discover that insects, including bees, can hear. They have three ways of picking up sound – through their antennae, their feet, and through their armour (exoskeleton). Since bees can hear, does music calm the bees and reduce stings? And since bees can hear, does the old tradition of “Telling the Bees” make sense? Is that why, upon Queen Elizabeth’s death, the royal bees were told about her passing by the royal beekeeper? Why?

How do  bees buzz? Do they hear their own buzzing? Is the tone of a happy hive (261 Hz, middle C on a piano) the basis for all western music? If bees aren’t dancing at a party, do they feel left out and get sad? Is it wrong for us to attribute human thoughts and emotions to bees? Should there be bee insect sanctuaries? Where? How would that work? When Asian honey bees do their flash dance, is it noisy?

Finally, why don’t honey bees pollinate tomatoes? They can’t, but bumble bees can. It’s got everything to do with insect size, weight, and something called buzz pollination. Listen to this episode as we compare their buzzing skills. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 3: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Do Bees Feel Pain?

We often expect to be on the receiving end of pain - whether from a broken elbow or from the tail-end of a bee. But what about bees? Do small creatures feel pain? Is it just a matter of defining pain in a way that we can claim bees feel no pain - or that they do, indeed feel pain? Or is the sensation of feeling pain so complicated that it defies a definition? Do bees simply react without actually 'feeling' anything? Or are they as anguished as humans when they suffer injuries?

We explore this question with McGill neuroscience student Daniel Miksha so we can better understand this issue and so we can begin to recognize our potential responsibilities respecting the ethical treatment of bees. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 2: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Tolstoy and the Robber Bees

Leo Tolstoy was a beekeeping fanatic. He even managed to work his bees into Anna Karenina, as well as War and Peace. In this episode of About Bees, Culture & Curiosity, we take a shallow dive into deep Russian literature, and look at the conflicted life and death of Tolstoy.  Our main focus is the passage from War And Peace after Napoleon enters Moscow and finds, according to Tolstoy, a city defeated and empty. Defeated and empty in the way that a robbed colony of bees is defeated and empty.

We also take a look at what goes on in a typical modern apiary when robbing between hives gets out of hand. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 1: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Myths and Legends

What we think we know might not be true.

Did you know that Einstein once warned us that without bees, humans would go extinct in four years? Did you know that honey bees are going extinct? That archeologists found 3000-year-old honey that was as good as new? That you can survive on a diet of nothing but honey? That when bees smell smoke, they get ready to fly away from their hive? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again. In this episode, we look at myths and legends about honey bees.

The beekeeping world is flooded with misinformation. It's almost impossible to turn back that tide. But let's try. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

The About Bees, Culture & Curiosity podcast explores the world of bees (and their entomological cousins) with ample attention to culture and the curiosities of the entire insect world. 

Bidzina Mosiashvili is a young beekeeper facing the challenges of managing a few colonies and growing a business of bees. He brings fresh, thoughtful insights and questions to our podcast while Ron Miksha is phasing out of bees and life. Ron learned beekeeping during the 1960s. As a boomer, he is stuck with some old ideas, but has had a lot of years on the road.

This episode introduces your hosts with details of their murky past and fuzzy future. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Thanks - and keep on beeing in whatever way gives you meaning.

Season 1 Episode 6: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Sweet Clover: America’s other weed

Legal. Illegal. Legal. Illegal again. Sweet clover has quite a history. Introduced into North America from Europe about 300 years ago, farmers were once fined for having it in their fields. It can be used to feed cattle, but improperly stored, it can become a blood thinner and kill cows. On the other hand, the state of Kentucky was saved from bankruptcy by sweet clover. And so were some beekeepers.

Every acre of sweet clover yields as much as one-thousand pounds of honey from its nectar. Along with alfalfa and a few other choice nectar-producers, it’s a winner in the nectar sweepstakes. But this podcast also looks at an Australian beekeeper who found an even better plant. But we circle back to sweet clover and Bidzina reads a list of “Ten surprising facts about sweet clover.” Number eight is amazing.

Mostly we discuss sweet clover, but bees, horned toads and tobacco are mentioned. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 angst:  ron@aboutbees.net

Season 1 Episode 7: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Cameroon to Canada - Patrick's Bee Journey

In this episode of About Bees, we are joined by Patrick Tefouet Tonlio, who was an agriculture community organizer and teacher in the African nation of Cameroon. Patrick now lives in Calgary where he keeps honey bees and has been working on farm and bee projects with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s Land of Dreams (https://ccisab.ca/land-of-dreams/).
 
During his last year of high school, Patrick learned to work with bees from his grandfather when Patrick moved from the capital city to live in his grandfather’s village. Honey bees in Cameroon are extremely defensive, so most traditional beekeeping consists of making small bamboo hives, coating the boxes with propolis and wax as a lure, then putting the empty hives in trees about 3 metres (ten feet) above ground level. After wild bees occupy the boxes and after the nectar season, honey is harvested. 

Cameroon has commercial beekeepers, including the Fabasso family, friends of Patrick, who operate 15,000 hives. Mr. Fabasso has designed a hive, also made of bamboo, similar to Langstroth hives. The Fabasso honey crop is squeezed by a press invented by the Fabasso family (https://teca.apps.fao.org/en/technologies/10140/). Pressing the honey yields a high-quality honey that doesn’t need to be extracted and is never heated during processing. 

Beekeepers may harvest about 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of honey each year from traditional hives. But the ethnic group sometimes known as Pygmy people (Baka) harvest directly from wild hives. To reduce stings, they use a special secret herb, rubbed on their skin. The herb? It’s a secret. Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 8: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast - Dogs That Smell

 We talk with Rose-Anne Bouffard, a bee enthusiast who trains dogs to find and rescue wayward bumblebee nests and to locate colonies with American Foulbrood (AFB). 

Dog breeds and their amazing scent sensitivity are discussed. Bloodhounds are best for sniffing out bumblebee nests and honeybee diseases, but that's not what Rose uses. Humans have million scent receptors and can smell AFB, but dogs have thirty million receptors. Dogs also use their floppy ears to stir up scents. The bee-rescuing dogs were trained through find-reward-repeat sessions. We discuss training a tracking dog to find AFB and the huge economic value that brings.

Talking about stings, Rose finds that controlling her breath and going into a meditative state when working around bees is essential. Without the proper mindset, apparently Preparation H helps with the bee stings you will get.

The questions of bee consciousness and a bees' ability to sense pain come up. We agree that bees probably feel pain.

Finally, there is a big shout out to Alberta Native Bee Council, the Suzuki Butterflyway Project, iNaturalist, and the urgency for action. Rose's bee and dog projects are looking for collaborators so check out her website to learn how to get involved!

Rose's website address for Dogs Find Bees is https://dogsfindbees.com/   Let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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 9: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Honey Harvest Time

After a few minutes pondering how some carpenter ants in Florida choose the profession of surgeon (sawing off sick comrades wounded legs), Bidzina and Ron settle into a honey harvest discussion.

This episode is packed with ideas and suggestions that describe four legal ways to harvest honey and one illegal way.  Then it wraps up with talk about amazingly big crops and the three disastrous ones that helped persuade Ron to move on to a new life. It's a wild ride, so let's go!

Please subscribe, like, love, and follow. We live or die by your adulation.

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