About Bees, Culture & Curiosity

Bees of all sorts are the engines of agriculture and the glue of ecology. Join us as we explore everything About Bees, Culture, and Curiosity. Watch the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@ABCCPodcast

Waxing with Jessie 01/13/2025

Season 3: Trailer 01/06/2025

Starting the New Year Right! 01/02/2025

Bye bye '24 01/01/2025

The Christmas Gift 12/25/2024

The Shortest Day 12/23/2024

Granulated Honey 12/17/2024

About Bees Mailbox 12/09/2024

What would Plato do with Drones? 12/03/2024

HiveIQ: A Smart Hive from Australia 11/25/2024

Saskatchewan Honey Crops & Westcoast Canadian Queen Rearing with Steve Clifford 11/24/2024

Bee Cube: An Apiary in a Box 11/14/2024

Bumble Bees 101 with Mathias Fenton 11/05/2024

Chief Crowchild and the Bees 10/28/2024

Season 2: Trailer 10/21/2024

Bees by the Number 10/14/2024

Moving Bees, part 2 10/07/2024

Moving Bees, part 1 09/30/2024

Honey Harvest Time 09/23/2024

Dogs That Smell Bees 09/16/2024

Cameroon to Canada - Patrick's Bee Journey 09/09/2024

Cameroon to Canada - Patrick's Bee Journey 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 (). 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 (). 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: [email protected] /episode/index/show/2359aaf8-9c48-4b40-862a-b1db77050911/id/32966807

Sweet Clover: America's other weed 09/02/2024

Some Bee Buzz 08/26/2024

Some Bee Buzz 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: [email protected] /episode/index/show/2359aaf8-9c48-4b40-862a-b1db77050911/id/32677037

The Bees' Ears 08/13/2024

Do Bees Feel Pain? 07/31/2024

Tolstoy and the Robber Bees 07/30/2024

Myths and Legends 07/29/2024

About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Introduction 07/29/2024

About Bees, Culture & Curiosity

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