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Diaries of a Lodge Owner
In 2009, sheet metal mechanic, Steve Niedzwiecki, turned his passions into reality using steadfast belief in himself and his vision by investing everything in a once-obscure run-down Canadian fishing lodge.
After ten years, the now-former lodge owner and co-host of The Fish'n Canada Show is here to share stories of inspiration, relationships and the many struggles that turned his monumental gamble into one of the most legendary lodges in the country.
From anglers to entrepreneurs, athletes to conservationists; you never know who is going to stop by the lodge.
Diaries of a Lodge Owner
Episode 98: Honeybee Homesteading - Starting Your Backyard Hive
The sweet golden nectar we call honey might be the most remarkable food on earth—the only substance that truly never expires. Egyptian tombs revealed 5,000-year-old honey still perfectly edible, a testament to nature's most extraordinary preservative.
Gary Tibbo returns to the podcast to reveal the secrets of beekeeping, from setting up your first hive to harvesting liquid gold. With 15 years of experience tending bees, Gary presents a comprehensive beginner's guide while sharing insights even experienced beekeepers might not know. We explore the fascinating social dynamics of the hive, where queen bees engage in mortal combat for supremacy while worker bees dedicate their short 90-day lives to the colony's survival.
Beyond delicious honey, we uncover the remarkable health benefits hidden within the hive. Did you know beeswax candles create vitamin D3 in your home atmosphere? Or that propolis, the resin bees use to seal their homes, contains the strongest natural antibiotics known? Gary explains how consuming honeycomb cleanses your teeth and intestinal tract, revealing why bees produce some of nature's most potent superfoods.
The conversation takes an unexpected turn as we discuss how beekeeping might diversify tourism experiences for lodge owners in northern Ontario. Imagine offering guests the unique opportunity to witness the intricate world of honeybees up close—an unforgettable addition to traditional outdoor experiences that connects visitors to the natural world in a profound new way.
Whether you're considering beekeeping as a hobby, seeking natural health alternatives, or simply fascinated by these remarkable insects, this episode delivers golden insights into the ancient practice that's more relevant today than ever. Ready to suit up and discover the buzz about beekeeping? This conversation is definitely worth the sting.
wax candles burning in your house create vitamin d3, like the sun, right in the atmosphere. So that's why a wax candle is so expensive. But most people don't realize the the benefits, the health benefits, of you burning a wax candle in your house. And then we have honey, we have pollen, you know all of those things are superfoods to our body.
Speaker 3:This week on the Outdoor Journal Radio podcast Networks, diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North. I'm really excited to talk with this gentleman, and no stranger to the show, about something that has interested me for years, to the point I wanted to incorporate this idea into my lodge business. It's sweet, totally cool and lasts forever. And now it is our pleasure to have back on the show Gary Tebow to talk honey. On this show, gary and I talk everything you need to know to produce your own honey and care for a hive as well. We tell some stories and have some laughs. So, folks, if you've ever been interested in how to produce honey and the mystery of bees, then zip those bee suits up tight, because this one's for you. Here's my conversation with Gary Thibault with Gary Thibault. Gary, welcome back to Diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North. It's a pleasure to have you.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to be back. I mean, we're going to get into it, right now?
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely, and I'm really excited about this one, and, folks, I alluded to this on the last episode of Diaries and we are going to talk about bees Absolutely, love to help you. We're going to talk about health and we're going to talk about a lot of different things that we've been working on in the last couple of well months really.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the last time I came here I helped you downstairs and there's a YouTube short on my platform showing what we're doing cleaning up the hives, the boxes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's start from the beginning. What kind of bees make honey? Or should I say do all bees make honey?
Speaker 1:Well, basically, honeybees make honey, or should I say do all bees make honey? Well, basically, honeybees make honey. And then if you look at the wild killer bees, like from Africa or South America, they make honey too and they store it like honeybees. But the deal with them is kind of very nasty. They call killer bees for a reason, because they will kill you.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and they're much larger. They're like super large, they're like an inch long.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, they're really serious bees. I don't need to be working with killer bees, that's for sure, but honeybees basically have been bred through generations.
Speaker 1:Basically a lot of the honeybees came out of Italy and France and you know before that they basically came out of the Middle East, around the Middle East.
Speaker 3:Are there any native honeybees to Canada?
Speaker 1:Basically to North America and South America. The honeybees were really not native. Bumblebees and killer bees from South America were native to here, but mostly we had bumblebees and we had all kinds of other little pollination bees that are native to here, but we didn't really have honeybees Honeybees the honeybees that we know, that we know and love today.
Speaker 1:Yes, and most of them have been bred in North America. Either are coming from Italy or California Gotcha, and I found that from my own experience being a beekeeper for a little while and I do not know everything, I'm continuously learning all the time. When you find somebody that's raising the queens and the nukes locally and that's been doing it for a while, breeding their own strains seem to work better up here in Canada and even in the United States.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so listen, why don't we start from the beginning? And for all those people out there listening and everybody in the Diaries family who may be interested in taking on a hobby like this, where would somebody start?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, you might want to join a group of local beekeepers there's always some around or find someone who's going to be a mentor of yours, like that's an actual beekeeper and has actually been doing it for a while and, you know, is going to teach you and help you to do it, because you know you can Google YouTube videos and look at other people doing stuff. But you need somebody to kind of guide you, because it's getting harder and harder to keep bees and the weather is not always cooperating with you and there's all kinds of diseases that have been introduced into North America with bees that never used to be here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Varroa is one of them.
Speaker 1:You're right. And then there's other kinds of diseases too that you really got to kind of be fussy cleaning your equipment, and you know.
Speaker 3:So we'll cover that coming up here shortly. But for the structure of what you need, like actually, gary today brought over to my house a I'm going to call it a bee trap, because we're looking for local bees and hopefully they're going to populate this bee trap, which really it's probably not the right terminology. But let's talk about what you did with that and how it would be the same for when you're building up your hive.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, second and third year hives that may be from other beekeepers. Once the bees have been established in a place, what happens is when the queen, the older queen, starts to get a little tired or whatever she's experienced, she will lay a bunch of eggs in a box and she will allow new queens to come out, and then she'll take 50% of the bees and fly around with her scout bees and find a new home. And that's how the bee population will expand, naturally. And so what?
Speaker 3:happens, so the queen actually leaves the hive.
Speaker 1:She will leave the hive and her family will follow her and they'll take a good portion of the honey out of the, store it in the bees' bodies and they'll go in and start building new wax and foundation and build a hive.
Speaker 3:So does she leave the new queen behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, she lays eggs and the strongest queen coming out of the capsule will kill all the other ones. Yep, and now? So there's a queen brawl. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. That's kind of crazy. And the witches fight to death. Yeah, they don't take prisoners.
Speaker 3:No way. So then the queen? Oh sorry about the cheaping in the background folks, we still got the incubators in the back doing their magic thing and we're hatching out a bunch of chicks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you want to buy some chicks, you should get in touch with this man.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you certainly can. They're wonderful little chicks, great breeds, giant Brahmas and ISA Red Cross and Langshans. So I know all of you folks have heard me talking about them before. But yes, you can get in touch with me and if you're interested in starting a beautiful flock for meat or eggs, just let me know. And you know how to get a hold of me at steven, at fishincandidacom, no problem. But where was my train of thought? Oh yes, the queens. So the older queen lays the queen eggs and she leaves before they hatch, so she's not involved in the queen brawl at her old house. They hatch, so she's not involved in the queen brawl at her old house. She'll take a faction of her own family which are scouts and then they'll head out and look for a new home.
Speaker 1:They'll look for a new home and when they find a new home they kind of advise her they found a good place to live and basically then there'll be a percentage of the worker bees that are going to stay in the old hive and rebuild it with a new queen and basically she will go with an experienced part of the hive and rebuild another place. And this will keep getting repeated. If you were just to leave your hives wild, they would just keep doing that and spreading.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very interesting, that's cool. So when you're starting out and you want to build a hive or buy a hive, what are the parts inside that hive and how do they kind of work?
Speaker 1:Well, what I tell people. If you want to become a beekeeper, you got to realize that per hive it's going to cost you approximately a thousand dollars. So you know people will say, well, that's overpriced this and that, but it's not really true. It is approximately a thousand dollars because by the time you buy a proper good bee suit, a smoker, all the tools and you'll need other tools that you don't count on, depending on how involved you want to get, and so you've got to buy your boxes and you've got to buy the wax frames if you want to do. You know, if you want to do like commercial style, where you're using plastic in there, which I don't like to use at all, you end up, you know, having to scrape more and do more work. But basically you need foundation, you need frames, you need boxes, you need a roof and you need a bottom floor and per box just that's, without buying any bees you're usually around $400 or $500 easily.
Speaker 3:And then in. So they call. Just so you folks know, the boxes we're talking about are the ones that you see when you see like beehives, right, everybody's seen them on the side of the road or in a farmer's field and they're just a square box and they're about you can buy a half. Well, they call them supers, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the half boxes are supers and then you have the deep supers. So the deep ones are basically where you're going to have your colony live in and then you can have a double of those so they'll have enough food throughout the winter. And then you'd put your supers on top of that. And some people just use deep supers all the way, and you know then they're using a spinner to spin out the frames and cut off the wax, and you know it gets more and more involved all the time. And I recommend that if somebody's going to get involved with it, they need approximately three hives. You could start with one, but if something goes wrong or sideways basically you got an expense and you don't have any bees, yeah, and then You're not going to start out with your own bees. You're going to have to buy them, and the average cost is around $250 and up, depending on how many frames your nuc is going to be.
Speaker 3:And that's a nuc and I think that that's derived by the word nucleus.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3:Because basically, inside your box you have these frames that we're calling them, and they're just wooden frames that hang inside the box or inside the super and that are deep super, and all a deep super is is a box. That's about 12 inches, would they be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's about 12 inches high and they're approximately about 2 feet square.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's about 12 inches high and approximately about two inches or two feet square.
Speaker 1:Yeah, somewhere around there, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Speaker 3:And then a super is just half as high but the same size, so you can stack them all Right. So inside a deep super, which is what you start with, you've got these frames that hang vertically from top to bottom, and there's a beeswax film inside that frame, or the industrial plastic and this is what, and you stack them all side by side, by side by side, so they're fairly tight, but there's enough space in there that the bees can travel up and down and around and everything else and then on these vertical frames they build the wax.
Speaker 3:Everybody's seen the wax honeycomb and they build that honeycomb and some of those honeycombs are for the queen to lay eggs in and to make I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, we'll see if I've been learning, but we've got the only male bees in the hive are drones, absolutely, and their job basically is to mate with the queen?
Speaker 4:Nothing else.
Speaker 3:And then you've got worker bees, and they're all female, all female. And some of those worker bees are workers that actually go out and fly and gather pollen and everything else, but some of them, their sole job in life is to feed and look after the queen.
Speaker 1:Well, every bee starts out that way. Their first job, when they're tinier, is to feed the queen and create royal jelly to feed the queen, because she only eats royal jelly. That's why the queen will live an average of seven years. Yeah, all of the worker bees that feed her and take care of her approximately from spring to mid-September, say. From March to September. These bees only live approximately 90 days, yeah, and then she's continuously laying an average of 2,000 eggs, plus a day. The queen.
Speaker 3:And that 2,000,. So inside your nuc and inside these frames, they've decided that the center part of the box and a box will hold what? Nine frames, ten frames, ten frames, ten frames. Ten frames, ten frames. So in the center of this box they make the wax honeycomb and inside that honeycomb she lays one egg in every one of these and she just drives around on top of the honeycomb laying eggs in every one.
Speaker 1:Yes, but she doesn't really start laying eggs till. Flowers come out and there's pollen being produced.
Speaker 3:Well, that's when she wants to build the workforce.
Speaker 1:That's right To make honey. So as soon as pollen, as soon as the worker bees start bringing in some pollen just not nectar then she really gets the busy, because the bees live. That's their superfood. It's a superfood for us as well, is the pollen and also all the worker bees. They have glands underneath their wings so that when they consume honey and pollen they produce the wax that comes out of their glands and then they take that wax and they build a frame to store the honey inside of.
Speaker 3:That's right. So the same wax honeycomb that's growing the worker bees, depending on where the rack is located inside the hive, the frame out and they fill it up with honey they leave it exposed to air for 30 days so that the honey actually ferments inside those little capsules.
Speaker 1:And once it's fermented after 30 days, then they put a layer of wax over top and seal it and because it's a fermented food, it's alive all the time. It never dies and it will never spoil, never, never. It has an eternity of life.
Speaker 3:I've heard that it's the only food that never, ever spoils. They used to bury pharaohs with well. They would coat their bodies in honey because they believed that it would help preserve their body into the next life.
Speaker 1:But um uh, if you had a vial of honey that was 5 000 years old well, they've found honey in egyptian tombs, that's right that were 5 000 years old and completely edible everything yeah, yeah, which is unbelievable to me to think about, but that's very that's. Well, what happens is if you store honeycomb in a container after a period of time, even the wax will crystallize and taste like sugar. Really, it'll completely go solid.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, very cool. So you've you've got this, the, the nuke, and you install that nuke inside your, your deep super, which is your first um, your first box in the stack, and then, when you start out, do you just simply start with one box?
Speaker 1:well, if you wanted to start with one box of bees like that, you could but, like I said, work the racks out, make sure they fill those racks.
Speaker 1:Well, no, what would happen is when you'd get your bees in the center. So you got 10 frames in there. Yeah, so most people get a four-frame nuc. Okay, I prefer to buy ones that have five. Pay a little bit more money because you have more bees to start out with, makes your colony work faster. So you take and leave three frames on each side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you'd maybe take a little bit of honey, if you had some, and paint it on the frames so that you got a little bit of a food supply in the beginning. And when you take your bees out of the box, you would actually stick them right inside and then Out of the nuke box, out of the nuke box of the nuke box, and you'd set them up. And then you'd put a separator frame in and you'd put a frame with a regular super on top so that as they started filling up all the bottom where they got their food supply, then they're going to start filling up honeycomb for you on the top, which you could extract some honey from. But most people will put a second deep box on top. Yeah, but if you put it too fast, they only finish the center.
Speaker 1:They don't really fill out the bottom box. So you want them to fill out the bottom box first, and then you would put an empty box on top. Yeah, and then you let them build that, and then you'd start putting on stuff for yourself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, because they naturally want to build up like in a tree or yeah, well, they, they actually.
Speaker 1:they don't want empty space. Yeah, so they want to fill the box full. Yeah, so and and so, once they fill their bottom box full, then you'd give them an extra space. You always got to keep them busy and working. Yeah, if you don't keep, if you don't keep them busy and working, what happens is the queen says we're running out of room, we have to find a new home.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have to find a bigger house. Right, and she will Believe me. Yeah, yeah, now I know some people in that bottom box will manipulate the order of the frames. So not so much the nuke, not not in the in the center, but on those two or three outside frames. If they've got one frame full, that's closest to the, because, from what I understand, bees really like having their their shit in order, like they don't like having racks mixed up once they've built the nucleus of the hive. But I know some people will take a full frame that's next to the nuke and then one of the frames that's on the outside wall, because they never start on the outside wall and work their way in.
Speaker 1:They always start from the center and move back.
Speaker 3:They'll take an empty frame on the outside, move a frame and put an empty frame closer to the nuke so that they'll fill them up and then, once they kind of start getting close to being full that way, then they'll build up. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yes, but I never. Once I put my nuke in the bottom box, I just leave them. I don't move the frames around enough. I let them do their own thing. Yeah, they know what they need to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some guys try to do all that stuff and manipulating them. I don't like to do that and I like to keep my bottom slide drawer clean. I like to keep my bottom slide drawer clean so I like to take it out and scrape off any fluff or dead stuff and burn the bottom box, kill any bacteria. And I also like to take personally cedar, the ends of the branches and I dry it and I grind it up like powder and I throw some cedar in there on a sheet of newspaper and the newspaper ink prevents the wax moth from going into your hives and the cedar. You know you have a cedar closet. I mean you don't have any type of things eating your clothes. 99% of insects will not live around cedar. So when you put some cedar shavings or the ends of the green inside dry, the bees don't mind it. They like the smell. You have the essential oils in there that keep your hive extra clean and I've noticed from experience, you know my bees live healthier and produce more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, that's a great tip, a natural way of dealing with the disease, because that is a big, big issue, and we'll just finish out the mechanics of the hive so that people understand what the inside of a hive looks like, and I think we've done a pretty good job. So you've got your bottom plate with your tray and that tray you can pull it out and that's where the bees kind of go in, where the door is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it'll be screened. So they go in on top of the screen and all the junk and dirt falls on that tray, so you can clean it every once in a while.
Speaker 3:Yep, and you can also look for parasites on top of that tray because you know they'll do a test for varroa mites and you can actually count these mites that die, because they're very, very difficult to actually see Because they hide underneath on the bees themselves.
Speaker 3:Right themselves Right, and the mite was a very difficult diagnosis, I guess, to try and figure out why hives were dying. But they finally found out that this Varroa mite is like a vampire and bees don't have blood per se, but the plasma that they have in their bodies. The varroa mite feeds on that and it weakens the bees. So you know they were seeing.
Speaker 1:Well, I've also found from experience that I take essential oils like peppermint or, you know, oregano or lemongrass or you know different essential oils, and what I've done is I put them in, drop them in water with a spray bottle and every once in a while, when I open the box, I spray inside the top of the box, on top of the frames, and I've actually watched. You'll see your bees going on that and that smell in that water and actually kind of rolling themselves because they know it gets rid of the mites. So I I do little things like that every once in a while. It helps strengthen your hive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very, very interesting stuff, because I know that, um, um, they tell you now, if you're going to be a beekeeper, you will have a row of mites. I'm not disagreeing with that. You have to. You have to treat for them, and there's different ways of treating for them. There's these little bombs that you can put in every three months.
Speaker 1:That it's like a fumigation deal, which I don't feel very good about that because, well, I I found from talking to a lot of people that when you're treating for the varroa mites and people put stuff in they usually kill off that. That that stuff, that toxic material, kills off sometimes as much as 50 of your bees.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's pretty hard on the bee colony see I, I don't know anything like that, I don't have the experience well, that's what I've seen from other people dealing with them, but they say you've got to do it, you've got to do it Now. I have never done it and I've lost a fair percentage of hives, probably because of it. I'm not sure, but I also it's got to do with. I think the biggest problem with bees dying today is the fact we have geoengineering and people are spraying these chemicals in the air, causing it to rain when we don't need the rain. It's just getting out of hand and you know I don't understand why not enough people are either writing a letter to their politicians or getting on the bandwagon and saying look, you know, you can say it's jet fuel fumes, like it's rain falling or this and that, which is all crap, because there's scientists around the world have been complaining about it for 25 years. And why do we have to spray strontium-90, which is leftover nuclear waste, nanoparticle barium, which is a deadly poison, and nanoparticle aluminum? They're saying it's global warming deflecting the heat from the Earth. You know it's something. I think that's a load of crap.
Speaker 1:And we're going on to a situation where people are saying well, you know, it's a population, we're creating too much carbon in the atmosphere. Nobody is even talking about. When a volcano erupts anywhere on the earth, how much carbon does it put into the air? And if you think carbon is not important, your body is made from it. Every plant on earth grows from it. And if you look at a forest fire in the bush, after it's burned like the charcoal, it turns green within a matter of days. Why? It's because of the quality of the carbon.
Speaker 3:I firmly believe that carbon is not our issue at all. No, it's not. I mean, our planet is 20% greener today than it was 30 years ago, when they were saying that we were going to turn into a desert, and it's those semi-arid areas that are greening up, but that's for another story. When you're in the wilds of northwestern Ontario, you need gear you can trust and a team that's got your back. That's Lakeside Marine in Red Lake, ontario Family owned since 1988. They're your go-to pro camp dealer, built for the North, from Yamaha boats and motors to everything in between. We don't just sell you gear.
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Speaker 2:Hi everybody. I'm Angelo Viola and I'm Pete Bowman. Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's favorite fishing show, but now we're hosting a podcast. That's right Every Thursday, ang and I will be right here in your ears bringing you a brand new episode of Outdoor Journal Radio. Now, what are we going to talk about for two hours every week? Well, you know, there's going to be a lot of fishing.
Speaker 5:I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and how to catch them, and they were easy to catch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show. We're going to be talking to people from all facets of the outdoors, from athletes, All the other guys would go golfing Me and Garton Turk and all the Russians would go fishing To scientists.
Speaker 5:Now that we're reforesting and letting things breathe, it's the perfect transmission environment for life.
Speaker 6:To chefs If any game isn't cooked properly, marinated, you will taste it.
Speaker 2:And whoever else will pick up the phone Wherever you are. Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions and tell the stories of all those who enjoy being outside. Find us on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1:Well, anybody who knows me or heard about me, gary Thiebaud, you'll know that 15 years ago I was filmed at my farm and at my house in Etobicoke. I was filmed by Marcus Roskrantz. He made the DVD series Free Living 101, where I was talking about plants and living basically very naturally off the land, and I explained back then that most people today, because of lack of knowledge and education, would be sitting on their front lawn starving to death because they didn't know what was around them to eat right out of their own front lawn. So everybody wants manicured grass, but if you look at any environmental situation outside and in a field, it's not manicured grass. There's all kinds of plants that will grow to hold the water and balance, and most of these plants that grow to hold water and sustainability are food. And you know people's brains have been demonized by globalists who want to control you and they control you through the banking system, your food supply, medication and it's all BS. You know we're talking originally about bees, but if the majority of people don't wake up to the situation and start doing stuff for yourself, even in small increments, you'd be surprised what you can accomplish.
Speaker 1:I mean, I advertised on the Internet for years that when my two daughters were at my house and you know they ate, believe me, the best, and you know they ate, believe me, the best Our food supply was costing us at the grocery store. What we had to buy other outside of what we were producing was only $30 a week. That's all we were spending for a family of four. And now my wife and I, I don't think we can spend $15 between the two of us a week. It's because we're very self-sufficient. And you know you don't need a lot of ground. And see, I look at what builders are doing around the world. They're making these houses the massive thing on a lot and there's no place to even grow a vegetable.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous, because if you're putting yourself in that kind of position and something happens to your economy, you're in charge of it. You lose your job, you can't make your payments. Well, what are you going to eat? The bricks. You know the mortar tastes good, I guess with spaghetti sauce, I don't know. But you know, it's just common sense. You know an army on the earth cannot outrun its food supply. If the man's stomach is empty, he can't fight, right? Yeah, the only reason North American military in the Second World War beat the European armies under. Hitler was a man from that lived to finally his days in Nova Scotia. He was big on wolves and everything. He told the Canadian government go up to the Northwest Territories and harvest the reindeer, you know, harvest the deer and they killed 60% of those deer and that's what fed the Canadian and United States military so they could fight because they had meat.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:That's actual fact, you can look it up. His name was Farley Mowat. Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:He wrote Call of the wild Right he was.
Speaker 1:uh, he was a scientist that knew a lot about wolves and he worked for the federal government and he did all these research on wolves up in the North and stuff like that. And he said, look, you know, we got all kinds of reindeer on the, on the things, uh, let's, let's, uh call the most of the herd and, uh, they'll rebuild. They never really have rebuilt to their size they used to be, but some places pretty close, wow, I guess winning the war was a pretty important Right otherwise today you'd all be speaking German.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, no, that's well, that's quite a tangent, but a good one, but a good one. People need information, yes. So let's go back to the bees, and we now understand how to build a bee box, what a bee box looks like. Now to go in and open up a hive of bees and folks these beehives. They'll start with about 15,000, 20,000 bees in the spring and they'll balloon to over 50,000 to maybe 60,000.
Speaker 1:Easily. So the average nuc when you get them, even with a five-frame nuc, would probably be about 5,000 to 6,000 bees when you get them and then they will increase to about fifty thousand depending on how much room they have, like that you give them and how much their food supply is. And you know, if you look at most bee yards, uh, some of these bee yards will have, you know, two, three hundred, uh, bee for colonies and nobody will know these people have these big yards like that. Don't worry about how much food supply is. It seems like all the hives do well, because your bees will fly from your box easily two miles in a radius to harvest whatever they need to fill up that box and like, for example, with my bees from last year that I have that survived and lived through the winter and we've had warm days where they're out.
Speaker 1:I couldn't believe how much they were on my red and black currents. They were just like in the currents, like you'd never think about that. They would really be on currents that involved. And the other thing I noticed too certain crops that you could plant chives, garlic, onions. Everybody will think that you know bees don't go to that, but for some reason when, if you let some of your crop flower, honeybees will be in them like it is no tomorrow, they will stop doing everything else to go to that, because so they know there's certain things in there that's very essential for their health, which is passing it on to you, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So how do you open up a box and not get stung you?
Speaker 1:need a bee suit and a smoker. And even then you know, sometimes you get a hive that's very aggressive and you know your screen face covering. You know the bees come and they try to sting you right where your pineal gland is. That's the first place they go around your eyes. They'll come and they'll bang on that thing in front of you and you'll spray a little bit of smoke on your face so they'll stay away from it. But mostly if you, if you work with your bees kind of easy going and relaxed, not in a hurry and banging the boxes too much, you take your time and you use your smoker, when you put some smoke the bees will go down to the bottom and you can kind of work. What does the smoke do? It kind of just calms them down.
Speaker 3:So it probably they don't like fire. I've heard that the smoke also there's. People talk about a hive mind and the queen puts out a pheromone when they get real excited and that the smoke makes that smell go away to calm them down.
Speaker 1:I would agree with that to an extent. But you know, everything in nature doesn't really want to be, uh, doesn't want to be, around fire a fire. You know nature knows fire is dangerous. So but the smoke, uh, you know they they just it calms them down. They'll go to the bottom of the box more or less. And, and you know, I found, when I'm making I love to use birch bark and dead grass and you can buy stuff that'll keep smoke in there. Also, when you take your old boxes apart, some of the old dark colored wax, like that fibrous material, is good to keep around because once it burns it burns kind of slow and it creates a smoke that the bees seem to like but they're calm around it. But I found grass and birch bark white birch bark seems to. For me I like it the best, gotcha.
Speaker 3:And does the weather make any difference on the temperament of the hive?
Speaker 1:Well, the best time for me to go into a hive is on a hot, sunny day in the afternoon, because most of your bees are out foraging. Yep, they're out working. Yeah, that makes sense, and then you're not going to have so much trouble. But if you know, going in first thing in the morning or at the end of the day, you're asking for trouble. You know, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:And you know, if you've got a big hive that's kind of aggressive and you start to take honey out, you've got to have a plan that you're going to put that those frames with honey into a box and cover it right away.
Speaker 1:And you know, like I like to put it in my tractor bucket on a platform and I leave the tractor running. The sound of the tractor running kind of leaves that they, they don't like that so much, so they kind of stay away. But even then your bees have such an incredible nose. You know, I also have a little box that I used to put a trailer on the back of my ATV and I actually think that's the best one because I would cover it up and then I would go for a drive around the property before I went to the shop where I was going to go Because the bees will believe me, they will hunt you. Oh, they know they can smell that there's honey over there and it came from my box and they want it back. Work hard for that honey, yeah, yeah and, and they want it back.
Speaker 3:Work hard for that, honey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and they're going to work hard at stinging you and taking it back too.
Speaker 3:Gotcha.
Speaker 1:So now that we've talked about harvesting it a little bit, you mentioned a filter of sorts that you would separate out your oh, no, I'm talking about not a filter. Well, you can buy filters to screen your liquid honey.
Speaker 3:No, no, I'm not talking about that.
Speaker 1:I'm talking about within the box to keep the queen down. Oh yeah, you have a separating screen.
Speaker 3:A separating screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you put a separator in between your boxes. That's right, Because otherwise, if you didn't put a separator in between certain boxes, the queen will lay eggs everywhere inside your honey. Yeah Right, which is? You know, you don't want to be eating larvae and you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So basically, you want you've got a queen separator. So once you get a really nice hive going, which typically could be two deep supers, right, right, then on top of two deep supers You'd put a queen separator. You'd put a queen separator.
Speaker 1:So I actually cheat a little bit and underneath the main box I put a queen separator, then I put a deep super and then I put another queen separator and so in case my hive doesn't work out and they die off or something, I've got that super above with a lot of honeycomb and if they worked hard and they filled me up and something happens to the hive, it flies away or whatever. I've got a deep super and a super filled with honeycomb that I'm at least going to recuperate most of my costs, so that you know, I spend 300 bucks for a nuke. I've got my money already made in advance if it works out, and so that's what I do. Otherwise, you know, I don't have a tree in my backyard printing money. I just don't. I wish I did, I don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt, and it's getting harder and harder. So you financially got to think of, you know, the maintenance and everything else. And so, like you know, I run into different beekeepers. Sometimes you talk to them in the springtime, like last year in the spring. I talked to a guy that is up here with, you know, a thousand hives and he lost 500, 500 hives died. So that means he lost half a million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot of money, you know like. I mean, I don't know how he stayed in business. Yeah, you know so we talked to.
Speaker 3:We touched on disease a little bit varroa mites and that. What are there? What else are we fighting against?
Speaker 1:Well, there's a? And what are the solutions? There's a hornet now that's kind of coming up to North America. In southern states they've had quite a bit of problems with it, but I think I've actually had a hive get attacked with it. But cold winters will kill this hornet off and like last winter that just went by it was a pretty cold winter, so that was good.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that but it's a big black hornet and if it gets into your hive, the bees here don't know how to deal with it. But in Africa, what to do? The bees swarm this hornet and they keep flying around it so much that basically they take the oxygen away from the hornet and it dies Really. Yeah, you can actually watch this on the internet they talk about, but in North America the bees have never had to deal with this hornet, so they don't have a mechanism. So there's guys all over through the States now that are going out at night with suits on and they're looking in trees where this hornet bores a hole in and they're getting it out and killing it, and they're going around because it's basically you know, a family of these hornets could devastate hundreds of hives in a night.
Speaker 1:Wow, like I mean it's just unbelievable, huh. So you know there's more and more problems coming along and it's just like you know. You know I'm going to go off a little a little subject here. You know like people like to import cheap goods from China and different countries and stuff like that around the world, which I I basically I'm totally against it. I think you know we should be building our own economy and produce our own products in our own country, service our own people and if we have extra, okay, we can sell it somewhere else. But what's happening is, for example, we had that ash borer beetle that's killed basically all of the elm trees, ash trees.
Speaker 3:Elm trees too. Well, the Dutch elm disease did a good number on that.
Speaker 1:Well, that boring beetle also attacks these elm trees as well.
Speaker 1:I didn't know it was attacking elm trees too, and so you got so many of these trees. For example, we have flowering ash trees, so you got so many of these trees. For example, we have flowering ash trees and that's one of a major source of honeybees in the springtime, especially up here in Canada, like mountain ash yeah, the mountain ash and the flowering ash trees and those flowering ash trees if you look right now all around Mulmer Township, you'll see these trees. They're all like kind of white color and they're full of flowers, and so you have honeybees that are actually feeding on this, bringing a lot of nectar and pollen in, and so this you know. I look at my farm. I've had about 15 trees and I some that seem to have been immune to it. They're not dead, but all these dead trees are dying because this beetle goes in and kills it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, all of the ash trees, like that emerald ash borer, it's like standing dead, like I mean, it's been an epidemic.
Speaker 1:And you know that's a terrible thing. You know people are looking at the bottom line. You want cheap underwear and you know, cheap this, cheap that. But you know there's a consequence to that it's coming from other areas. And now you're wondering why your taxes are high. Well, we're spending money to fight other things that we wouldn't really have to fight if we were doing more production locally based.
Speaker 3:And so when you know so you think the Emerald ash borer come over.
Speaker 1:It came on skids. It came in wooden skids. Yeah, that's a fact, yeah.
Speaker 3:Came in skids. Yeah, I never would have thought of that.
Speaker 1:You know, that's what happened. It came from the wood over there they make skids and the border was beetle and the larvae was in the skids and brought over here and that started multiplying and flying around. Yeah, and you know. So we have all these consequences. You know that side hustle consequences that are causing us a lot of problems and we could solve that problem pretty easy. You know, yeah, we used to manufacture everything yeah, well, manufacturing in this country is uh.
Speaker 3:I saw it dying when I was starting in that business. Well, you know getting off subject.
Speaker 1:You know, being an automotive machinist and a master mechanic, I complained to the to Ontario government when they stopped having the automotive machinist program out of Centennial College 30 some years ago and we've seen the entire automotive industry go downhill because you know, metallurgy and machining are a key to a company and everything around you I mean the farmer on the field needs a tractor built. There's engineering, metallurgy, making parts, machining, building. That all starts from that root thing. Yeah, yeah. And you know, just like beekeeping, if you don't start with a good foundation and good product to start with and good boxes and like, for example, I'm starting to think that for next season, all my bottom supers are going to be made out of cedar. I'm going to start making them myself because now your queen are going to be made out of cedar. I'm going to start making them myself Because now your queen is going to be living in a cedar box. I'll put the cedar shavings in the bottom and she's going to be healthier and less diseased. The mites won't want to live in there.
Speaker 1:That would be very interesting to see the difference. And there's some people starting to do that in the United States and some of the Mennonites are starting to do that in the United States and some of the Mennonites are starting to do that as well. And I thought about it 15 years ago. I said, well, why don't we make the boxes out of cedar? And nobody's jumped on that bandwagon. Everybody's making them out of pine. But I got my sawmill and I got a few tools and I'm thinking you know, I'm going to start Might as well. Give it a shot, I'm going to give it a shot. What have I got to lose?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely Right, 100%. Well, this has been very interesting, and the only thing that we really haven't talked beehive and the health benefits that some of them carry with them.
Speaker 1:Well, most people don't realize eating honey actually heals your teeth. Okay, sugars, you know from other things, actually eat holes in your teeth, but honey does not. Honey actually helps your teeth. Secondly, you have propolis, which is the strongest form of antibacterial on earth, of anything. The bees make it and eating a little bit of propolis on a regular basis or making a tincture from it, which I do both of them.
Speaker 3:And that's just the glue that they use to stick the boxes together and fill the holes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the bees go to olive trees, poplar trees and tamarack, spruce and basically sumac, because all of those trees have resins in them, because all of those trees have resins in them. So, for example, if you go to the biblical text, the poplar tree is called the balm of Gilad and it's a sacred tree according to the Bible. So, and poplar trees, the largest population of them in the world in one group, is basically in the Carolina forests below the Great Lakes and then basically north of the Great Lakes, all around northern Ontario, and that we have a lot of poplar trees. And poplar trees grow from seed and root and basically they feed a lot of things. In native culture we eat the inner bark as survival food. You can't die from it, it doesn't taste good, but you will live, you won't starve. So poplar trees, the bees go to it and they take that resin. It doesn't taste good but you will live, you won't starve. So poplar trees, the bees go to it and they take that resin. And most people don't even know we have olive trees growing in Canada all over the place, called Russian olives, and some of them produce a little yellow olive. That's kind of sweet and you could eat and the bees will go to that and collect the resin again. They'll also go to all the types of spruce trees and, like I said, the sumac as well. They collect the resin and they mix it with their body fluids and it's called a bee spit. It's like a gummy brown glue to black.
Speaker 1:The red stuff, if you can find it in a box, is the highest quality. That's kind of pink and red color. It has very high medicinal properties and so putting it in good quality alcohol food grade alcohol I like to use good quality vodka and you let it ferment in there and then you have a little one way dropper and having a little bit of that on a piece of bread or just putting it in your mouth is really good. An example my youngest daughter.
Speaker 1:When she was a little kid she had a lot of cavities and my wife used to take this liquid propolis and put it in the cavities. They never got worse. All of those teeth fell out naturally and my youngest daughter has movie star teeth I'm not kidding, she has the nicest teeth, they're picture perfect, and so I learned a lot of stuff about propolis and stuff like that from the hive. Second thing is you get wax Wax candles burning in your house create vitamin D3, like the sun, right in the atmosphere. So that's why a wax candle is so expensive. But most people don't realize the benefits, the health benefits, of you burning a wax candle in your house. And then we have honey, we have pollen, you know all of those things are superfoods to our body.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell you, you gave me a honeycomb, so the whole the wax and the honey and everything. It was just like a capped comb and you said, eat the wax you got to eat the wax.
Speaker 1:Well, most people don't realize that when bees make wax they have to eat two pounds of honey to make one pound of wax. So just think about it. How much nutrition is in the honey. That means there's got to be double the amount in the wax, because they had to produce that.
Speaker 3:Well, and I'd never really eaten beeswax before and to take a teaspoon of honeycomb which is the wax, the honey itself and everything else in it, and to throw that in and eat it. The wax is almost like gum and I like it. It gets a little bit at the end when you keep chewing it and chewing it, and chewing it, it goes a little sandy almost.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it also cleans and sucks all the grains and all the junk off your teeth. Yeah well, I don't doubt it.
Speaker 3:That's where my mind went.
Speaker 1:And then what the wax also does when it gets into your intestinal tract. It's like a sponge for absorbing all of the bad things that you don't want in your intestinal tract.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's good. I've been eating beeswax.
Speaker 1:It's a great product. I've been doing it for 35 years.
Speaker 3:Nice, it's. Uh, it's a, it's a. I I've been doing it for 35 years. Nice, right on. Wow, listen folks. Uh, do you have anything else that? Uh do you feel I missed when it comes to uh, beekeeping and bees?
Speaker 1:well, you know, don't think of it as a summertime job, because when the fall comes you got to clean up equipment, put stuff away. You're extracting honey, you're cutting cone, you're doing all this stuff. Then you've got to take and make sure your bees got enough food. You know you got to make sure the bottom boxes are clean. You got to wrap them. You know if you're in a really cold place you got to wrap them. You know if you're in a really cold place, make sure that you have ventilation so that, see, bees don't really die from cold, they die from water dampness.
Speaker 1:So if your boxes are a flat box and most of these beekeepers, commercially-wise, like the flat roof box because they stack the boxes and they ship them all over the place, which is not the greatest thing for bees. They don't like that, they like to be stationary. So if you're stationary you want a roof that's kind of angled. You know I've designed a roof for my own self that's more almost a 45 degree like a house roof, and I found that from using that style that I developed your bees don't have to work very hard in the summertime to keep it cool and they don't work so hard in the wintertime to keep it warm because it naturally deflects both ways. And you know, have yourself a nice organized little area where you can extract your honey out and your stuff. You'll have to buy some kind of extractor if you want liquid honey. Other than that, you need some hand tools, scrapers, some trays, jars, you know containers to put if you want to sell cut cone or wax honey in in the separator that I buy.
Speaker 1:The solar power that you put out in a sunny day for leftover wax with some honey in it. It melts it out, the honey goes to the bottom, the wax comes on top. You can take the piece of wax out, pass a little hot water over it, rinse it off and you've got clean wax. And so there's lots of things to go on. I mean I could talk about beekeeping, so there's lots of things to go on. I mean I could talk about beekeeping and I think I'm an amateur. I've only been doing it for about 15 years. I still don 416-709-3535. Send me a text, I'll be glad to help you. And if you look at my YouTube channel, I'm putting up videos and trying to teach people, to educate them.
Speaker 3:It's a great hobby. That is work. I'm going to find that out, oh yes, he is.
Speaker 1:He's already finding that out.
Speaker 3:Oh for he is, yeah, but he's already finding that out. Oh, for sure, for sure. But you know what? It's one of those things that I at least for me, it's very gratifying to be in nature, to go out. It's therapeutic looking after these hives, looking after these hives. And if you've never pulled a rack out of a beehive and looked at it and I have a fellow showed me I actually did a course, a one-day course, with um apiary, uh and I and, and you know what I'll, I'll figure, I'll figure out who, uh, the the information for this guy.
Speaker 3:But it's an apiary in calling wood and uh, to pull out a rack and hold on to a rack that's just alive with movement and bees and there's shit going on, and you're holding onto this rack and you don't even the bees don't even care that you're holding this whole rack full of honey and wax and larvae and everything else. They're just doing their work and it is something amazing to see. Everybody is busy and there are hundreds of thousands of these little dudes and they know what they're doing. They work in harmony. There's no issues.
Speaker 3:Everybody does their own stuff and to be able to watch it, to see it and to work in harmony with it. It just really does something for your soul and it's a great hobby, and you know from what I'm learning. You can make a lot of money doing it if you know how to. You can make a lot of money doing it if you know how to, and that's something that is one of my goals and endeavors, and Gary too, I think. So listen, thank you for coming on the show today. It was my pleasure and mine too.
Speaker 1:We're going to have to do this more often, Absolutely absolutely. And folks out there, even though you know this is a fishing thing and we're going to talk about a lot of different subjects. You know our environment's very important, and so it's just like if you don't take care of the bees, it's the same thing as you don't take care of a lake and put fish into it you don't got fish to eat.
Speaker 3:You know it's all connected. I'm glad that you mentioned that because the environment is so important and for me, being a lodge owner, I always, like I said before, I always wanted to have a beehive. I just, you know, when you're a lodge owner, you're really, really busy doing a lot of other stuff, but I'll tell you, if I could have been organized enough and had a mentor or a base knowledge of beekeeping, that is something that I would have totally integrated into the lodge and coming up in the next up and coming weeks. It's funny I had a conversation with one of my good friends and former guests, val Gayna, and this was when I was up at the cottage for opener this year, when I was up at the cottage for opener this year, and our conversation was based around the sustainability of the lodging industry today and his point of view is that our demographic is rapidly changing, is rapidly changing, and that's culturally, that's socially, everything is changing. And he was one of the guys that was constantly on me about not having internet at the lodge.
Speaker 3:And I'm not pretending to have any of the answers, but we're going to start asking the questions about how sustainable is the lodging industry today the way that it is, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't, and maybe what are some of the things that can be incorporated into a northern tourism operation that could widen the interest, and I believe that beekeeping and honeybees could be part of that. Like, I mean, I think that if I had the lodge and I had half a dozen bee suits and half a dozen hives out in the back and suggested to guests that, hey, have you ever seen a bee colony at work, you know it would be an amazing experience for somebody to see the inside of a hive and that could be something that that you incorporate into your business. So, you know, as as far away as as beekeeping could be construed construed as something that has nothing to do with lodges and fishing, but I believe that it does and it could be and it could have an impact and help you know lodge owners out there who could be struggling with a fishery that's not doing well and looking for an experience. I grew, I started in a fishery that was not doing all that well the French River in 2010,.
Speaker 3:The walleye population was suffering and I was forced to figure it out and folks. It wasn't about fishing, it was about experience and it was about knowing people, and it was about knowing your guests and what they were looking for and being able to listen and build an experience that they never forgot. And a lot of it happened, and happened not even on the water, so I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1:Well, I will agree with you because you know, since I became a beekeeper I've run into people that their father was a beekeeper and they want to get back into it and they regret they didn't spend time learning from their parent and they're coming to me for suggestions how to become a beekeeper. Or they get a hive and they don't know how to take care of it, and you know they or they've got a bunch of hives with somebody else and they all died on them and you know they're wondering what are they going to do now with these empty boxes? And so you know I got people who approach me all the time just for that reason, and I agree with you. You know I owned a fish hatchery in Parry Sound area and I was raising on my property all the pickerel for the Great Lakes and it was a native guy in the reserve, in the Schwanager Reserve, that got with a private owner on the property I own and I can. My property is still licensed to raise fish but I just don't have the capital to do it anymore.
Speaker 1:But I want to get back into it and see, the thing is, you know people don't understand the importance of stocking programs and actually doing stuff to educate not only the locals but the people in the industry, and it helps everybody have a great experience. You know, I have a pond on my property which is filled with smallmouth bass and I've really managed it and took care of it. You know, not many people can say that I've had a guy come and catch 55 fish in an hour and release. You know, I mean it's an unbelievable experience. He couldn't believe it without, no, just the rusty hook throwing in the water. They were biting that good. So you know. But it's management of things and I look at it the same way that we don't manage the bee population, we don't manage our waters, we don't manage our forests, we don't manage stuff. You know it's going to be a sad world for our grandchildren and even our children.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think we're doing. I think that we as a population are doing a pretty good job at the grassroots level to do that and I enjoy being part of that. And on that note, folks, thank you so much for listening to this point. I really appreciate everything you guys do out there. And thanks to producer Anthony Mancini you are the man. Love you, brother. You work really hard every week to make it possible for everybody to be listening to us. And folks head on over to FishinCanadacom where you can get in on those giveaways. I tell you every episode Get on over there, um, you get on over there.
Speaker 3:I love hearing about people that listen to the diaries of a lodge owner podcast winning the things over at fish and canadacom. Thank you to our, our supporters, um, um, it's, it's wonderful to have that support. You're the reason that we're here, um, you know lakeside marine, uh, and, and all of you folks out there, I really really appreciate it. Thank you again, gary, and we'll do this again sometime soon. And thus brings us to the conclusion of another episode of Diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North. I'm a good old boy, never meaning no harm. I'll be all you ever saw, been reeling in the hog since the day I was born.
Speaker 4:Bending my rock, stretching my line.
Speaker 1:Someday I might own a lodge, and that'd be fine. I'll be making my way.
Speaker 4:The only way I know how.
Speaker 1:Working hard and sharing the North with all of my pals. Well, I'm a good old boy.
Speaker 2:I bought a lodge and live my dream.
Speaker 3:And now I'm here talking about how life can be as good as it seems. Yeah.
Speaker 4:As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons of our natural world become harder and harder to hear, but they are still available to those who know where to listen. I'm Gerry Ouellette and I was honoured to serve as Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources. However, my journey into the woods didn't come from politics. Rather, it came from my time in the bush and a mushroom. In 2015, I was introduced to the birch-hungry fungus known as chaga, a tree conch with centuries of medicinal use by Indigenous peoples all over the globe.
Speaker 4:After nearly a decade of harvest use, testimonials and research, my skepticism has faded to obsession and I now spend my life dedicated to improving the lives of others through natural means. But that's not what the show's about. My pursuit of the strange mushroom and my passion for the outdoors has brought me to the places and around the people that are shaped by our natural world. On Outdoor Journal Radio's, under the Canopy podcast, I'm going to take you along with me to see the places, meet the people. That will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature. And under the canopy Find Under the Canopy now on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts.
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