Erika Thompson, a first-time podcast guest who brought bees to her Joe Rogan Experience debut, reveals how honeybees—non-native to the U.S.—communicate via pheromones and waggle dances while facing threats like Varroa mites and habitat loss. She debunks myths about "killer bees" and "murder hornets," instead highlighting industrial agriculture’s role in their decline, with 75% of flowering plants dependent on bee pollination. Thompson’s viral TikTok removals (24M+ views) showcase ethical beekeeping, rejecting exploitative media offers to preserve colony well-being. Rogan shares wild animal anecdotes, while she emphasizes supporting local beekeepers over adulterated commercial honey, underscoring nature’s delicate balance and the need for sustainable practices. [Automatically generated summary]
We don't know everything there is to know about bees.
Bees have been around for 120 million years.
We've been keeping bees for maybe 10,000.
If I were to think I knew more than the bees, that would be so foolish of me.
But we do know some of the ways that bees communicate.
They communicate through scents, through pheromones a lot, through these chemical signals that they're sending out to the entire colony to let this colony that's a superorganism know what's going on.
And so in your case, you had one colony of bees.
A colony is the collective noun for a group of bees, whereas a hive is the box they live in.
So you had these two colonies, you know, who met and were trying to make sure they all stayed together and they all stayed with their queen and went to the right place.
And, you know, it sounds like you had a bunch of bees in one area and bees are social creatures.
So they were attracted to the sense of these other bees and were there to see what's going on.
And, you know, they eventually figured it out and everybody went back to their respective places and...
Yes, they will have a different scent and that's how they'll stay with their colony.
And it comes from the queen.
The queen has a queen mandibular pheromone.
She is sending out scent signals, pheromones to the colony and they're always communicating with each other and the queen and the worker bees have this wonderful system of checks and balances to make sure that everything gets done within the hive and that the colony is doing what it needs to.
So a worker bee, and we're talking about honeybees, western honeybees, the ones you see me keep, the lifespan of a female worker bee varies throughout the year.
So in the spring and summer, when the bees are working their hardest, the female worker bees will only live about six weeks.
In the winter, when they're not doing quite as much and when we need more bees to make it through the winter, they'll live a little bit longer and they'll live about six months and their bodies actually change in the winter.
The bees that are born later in the year and need to make it through the winter will have more fat bodies on them so that they can make it through the dearth when there's nothing in bloom and when bees are living off the honey that they collected or stored in their hive earlier in the year.
A honeybee colony is about 95% female, and the amount of male bees can actually fluctuate throughout the year.
So when we need male bees around to mate with a queen, and they'll mate with a queen, not their queen, but when we need more male bees around, the colony will produce more male bees.
In the winter, when there aren't as many resources available to the bees, The female bees will kick all the male bees out of the hive and they'll either starve or freeze to death.
So right now there are no male bees in most hives.
In these bees that came along with me today, there's not a single male honeybee there.
So most people have never seen a male honeybee before, and that's just because male honeybees are out in the world doing the work of bees.
They stay in the hive or they leave and they go to drone congregation areas to mate with a queen, but they're not going to be on a flower or in your wine glass or whatnot.
So here's what happens within the colony when it's time for the queen bee to mate.
So once a queen bee is born, when she reaches the ripe age of about seven days old, she'll go on a mating flight.
And she may go on only one, possibly two mating flights in her entire life.
And she'll fly out of the hive and she'll go to a drone congregation area, which is exactly what it sounds like.
It's an area where there's a bunch of drone male honeybees flying around just waiting for a queen bee to fly by.
And these drone congregation areas exist about 100 feet in the sky, which is another reason you would never see a male honeybee.
If a queen bee flies by, the fastest, strongest drones win, and they will successfully mate with a queen, and the queen will mate with only about 15 to 20 drone bees, and she'll have enough sperm to last the rest of her life.
And what happens to the male bees is once they mate with a queen, their endophallus rips out of their abdominal cavity and they fall to the ground, and that's the end of their little bee life.
So if they're present, that's what they're trying to do.
And that's why the colony controls how many drones there are.
So right now, in the hive, there aren't that many drone bees.
They're trying to conserve the resources they have.
So the honey that we eat from bees is their food source in the winter when nothing is in bloom and there's no flowers out there for them to forage from.
Some research will show that they're contributing to the heating of the hive, but they're really not doing a lot of work, even when you see them in the colony.
Not only can you distinguish them because they look different from the female worker bees, they're larger than the female worker bees, but they're not doing anything.
They're walking around different.
They're kind of fumbling and bumbling around, so they really don't have a lot of purpose, which is why there aren't that many of them.
We have to keep in mind they only make up about 5% of the population, maybe 10, sometimes zero.
There aren't that many male honeybees, and I always love sharing with people that they probably have never seen one.
So if you're ever near an observation hive or have the opportunity to go into a hive with a beekeeper, you know, I encourage folks to do that and make sure you ask to see a male honeybee.
Well, the comb building is a really interesting process because we see it as hexagonal comb, right?
We see little hexagons within the hive, but they actually start off building it as circles.
So the weight of the hive will bring it down.
The way that they build the comb is actually up at an angle so that the honey doesn't seep out.
It's remarkable what they have figured out how to do as a species, how to engineer this perfect building and do it out of beeswax, out of something that their body produces naturally.
I mean, I can think of no better example that nature has given us for a sustainable creature that can build its home out of, you know, something that comes off of its body and just...
Live with what's around them and then always leave the world better than they found it.
So as a beekeeper, you can introduce a new queen to the colony and likely they'll accept her.
You can also give the colony eggs from another colony that are female eggs, so female bee eggs.
Any female bee egg can be made into a queen bee.
So if you give a colony that's queenless the opportunity to make their own queen, that's sometimes even better than introducing a new queen to them.
And the way that a queen bee is made is when the queen bee lays an egg and if it's a female worker bee egg, which most of them are because again 95% of the colony's population is female, Every bee in the first three days of their life, they're fed royal jelly.
And then they're switched to a diet of pollen and a little bit of nectar.
But if a baby bee is fed royal jelly through the duration of its development, it turns into a queen bee.
Well, it's not always the queen that knows, and it's more the colony that's making the decision.
So we often think of, you know, a colony of bees being a monarchy where the queen is in charge and making all of the decisions, but that's not the case at all.
It's the colony making the decisions.
So it's all the worker bees.
It's the collective of female worker bees making that decision.
And they can take any female egg and turn it into a queen bee, not only by that diet of royal jelly, but they will also make the cell that the bee is born into a little bit bigger to accommodate the queen bee's larger body size.
So it's actually the group of female worker bees that's making that decision.
And the queen bee doesn't always know when she's In her final days, it's the colony that would know.
Her pheromones would get weaker and they would prepare for having a new queen and sometimes even have a new queen develop while their old queen is still alive.
And in the case that you have a colony with an older queen who is failing and a new queen who just emerged from a cell, The queens will fight to the death.
And the best queen wins.
And that's what needs to happen for the life of the bee colony.
But, you know, swarming is a dangerous endeavor and sometimes the queens don't always make it.
So swarming is when the bees will decide to leave their hive and make another, either, you know, they're trying to make another bee colony or they're trying to find a new place to live.
And that's a dangerous trip for the queen.
That's why, you know, the queen doesn't really leave the hive that often.
When I'm going to remove bees, I'll find a healthy colony either without a queen or sometimes I'll find a deceased queen and I'll have to, you know, do what I need to, either introduce a new queen or give them eggs or something.
So I've seen videos of you where you've moved colonies of bees and one of the things you do is you isolate the queen and then you move the queen to a new place and all the bees go with the queen.
So, you know, I just start working my way through the hive and I'm always looking for the queen.
Finding the queen in a bee removal is the key to a successful bee removal because obviously we've talked about the importance of the queen, but the colony really wants to be with their queen and so they will naturally follow her.
And once you find the queen and have control of the queen, you can control the colony.
And so that's why it's so important for me as a beekeeper during these removals to always find the queen.
You know, if it's a really, really large hive, I mean, if it's five, eight feet of comb in the walls of someone's shed or in Someone's, you know, backyard compost bin or whatnot.
I mean, it can take a long time.
Some of these bee removals will take hours.
Sometimes I have to go back the next day.
But then sometimes you get lucky and she's on, you know, one of the first few combs you pull up and she looks different.
She's bigger than all the other bees.
She has a different job, right?
She's the only bee laying eggs in the colony, so that naturally looks a little different.
She also has this kind of retinue that follows her around this circle of bees that is guiding her and giving her these signals on what to do.
So there's clues that the bees will give you on her location.
And, you know, if I'm moving bees from point A to point B and I don't know where the queen is, typically where most of the bees congregate.
Well, if they don't have all the resources they need, if they're in a bad spot, if they don't have a queen, a large colony tends to be more defensive than a smaller one because they have more resources to defend.
So, sometimes you'll see me do this, and it's a small swarm, so it's a swarm where there's no comb, there's no beeswax, there's no nectar, pollen, or honey, there's no baby bees, so they don't have anything to defend.
They're much gentler, you know, in those cases most of the time.
But every colony is different.
Every colony has a different, you know, behavior and is in a different set of circumstances.
Tools that I'm using and this is the first I have no idea what to expect if how defensive they'll be so So this is your first exposure to these particular bees you're cutting through we're what for the folks who are just listening she's at shed and she's Sawing through the side of the shed where the bees were using my saw There's your voice very calm and soothing and are you getting stung here?
I almost wish someone could monitor my brain and watch it light up as I do this work because there's so many points that are just so exciting throughout the process.
I don't really know what to expect beforehand, so I get there and I see the high for the first time and I go, It might fill the whole wall.
And sure enough, you know, then once I saw through the side and get through it, it does.
And there's definitely another dopamine hit when I first see that beehive.
It was a pretty small colony, so I just kind of scooped them into the box I was putting them in, and then, yes, I had a queen clip that I put the queen into, so I'll capture the queen and I'll put her in a queen clip, and it has these little slots where she's the largest bee, so she can't escape, but the other bees, the worker bees, because they're smaller, they can go in and out through the clip and take care of the queen.
So when you are removing bees like you did from that shed, there comes a point where you realize that, you know, you can manage this without your equipment.
Is that when you're the most happy, when you can take the gloves off and take the headgear off and all that jazz?
I sort of came out of the box, a bug lover and an animal lover.
And I was really lucky to have parents that encouraged and supported that as well.
And I spent a lot of nights and weekends and time in my backyard as a kid collecting bugs and Putting them in jars and trying to keep them as pets or trying to study and observe them.
My childhood idols growing up were Dr. Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, and I wanted to be just like them.
But, you know, as a seven or eight-year-old, I couldn't exactly go to the jungles of Africa to study primates.
So I went in my backyard and I collected bugs.
They were everywhere.
They were easy to find and easy to pick up.
And...
My love of bugs just continued my entire life.
So over 10 years ago I took a beekeeping class and I started keeping a hive in my backyard in central Austin and really just fell in love with honeybees and became fascinated by their world and being able to step inside of it.
So I started my beekeeping business when I still had a full-time job and I was doing bee work on nights, weekends, lunch breaks, but it was really all I wanted to do with my time.
I mean, really the best way to learn something like this is experience, and that's how I've learned the most, is just doing as much bee work as I can.
When I started my business, I didn't really know what my business was.
I just wanted to be a beekeeper.
It really started as organically as it could.
You know, people would ask me for beekeeping services.
So folks would say, can you keep bees on our property?
We want bees, but we don't want to be beekeepers ourselves.
Or can you give us a private lesson?
You know, you've been doing this far longer than we have.
We're first-year beekeepers.
I got asked to teach beekeeping classes, and eventually I got asked to do live bee removals and For me, that was just what I fell in love with as a beekeeper was being able to go into a hive and see how bees live and work naturally without a human making decisions for them.
You know, it allowed me to learn more about bees and I could see so much that I would never experience in the little boxes that we as beekeepers have.
Keep bees in.
So, you know, really just a lot of experience and doing a lot of bee removals and, you know, of course, books as well.
But this is one of the things you can't really learn from a book.
You just sort of have to get out there and do and see bees and see how they work together.
And I started small.
I started not with, you know, hives that had eight feet of comb and removing them from a backyard shed.
I started with water meter boxes.
So water meter boxes are those things everybody has in their front yard.
You know, it's a box about a foot deep, and it has that plastic lid with a small opening, and it's one of bees' favorite places to build.
It's one of the most common calls I get as a beekeeper is to remove bees from these boxes.
And starting out, I thought, you know, it was the most controlled environment.
I could start with doing the removal process because you just never know what you're getting into.
But at least I knew this is always going to be the size, right?
The hive is never going to be much larger.
I won't get surprises like...
Taking paneling off a wall and finding eight feet of comb, right?
And they were relatively small which was easy for me and easy for me to handle but you know I just did as much of those as I could for as long as I could and then eventually started to do more and more removals and larger ones and just a lot of experience.
So all the information that you know about in terms of like pheromones and how they construct the hive and how they create a queen and all that stuff, that's all stuff you've gotten from books?
I always like to say I'm an expert on my own experiences.
I'm not a bee biologist or I'm not an entomologist studying bees.
I just really love bees and have been so fortunate that I get to live a life where I get to work alongside them every day and I learn so much from them.
I mean, when I do these bee removals, I meet a lot of people who are so happy to see me and they were just terrified of the bees, you know?
And that's an element that doesn't always come through, like, in the videos that you see me do with the bees and working with the bees is there's this other side that you're really helping people.
I mean...
When I go and remove bees from a place, it's like you're giving these people back a sense of security in their own space.
You know, I will say that I'm really lucky most of the people I meet naturally they're on the side of bees because they called a beekeeper to remove the bees versus an exterminator or doing something else.
But a lot of times I show up and there was a fear of the bees and then, you know...
The folks will watch me work, you know, through the glass of their back door.
I've had people in their cars before watch me from the safety of their car.
And, you know, by the end of it, they're out there asking if they can open the door and come out and take a photo or whatnot.
And, you know, and I'm showing them the queen or whatnot in the clip.
And it was interesting doing this work through the pandemic when, you know, a lot of the times I would do bee removals and I wouldn't see people that often because I would show up and they weren't there.
Us beekeepers were kind of like the original social distancers.
We show up and nobody wants to be around us.
We're used to being alone.
I don't think it's an uncommon trait of beekeepers to be more introverted and just want to spend their time around these insects who may or may not be so happy to see them.
But I would show up and I would have people during the height of quarantine, you know, I would have people peering through their windows with their whole family and parents would tell me this is the most exciting thing the kids have seen in months, you know, is have someone come here and watch the bee removal process.
Why is it so enjoyable when it's just you alone with the bees and you're removing this hive from a shed or wherever it is and putting it into one of these things?
There is something incredibly meditative about being inside of a beehive and with a colony.
Whatever you're thinking about beforehand, whatever was on your to-do list or whatever has been on your mind all day, the second you open that hive, it all melts away.
And you have to be so focused on every movement you make when you're working alongside bees, not only for your safety but for theirs as well.
And that really just makes you, it forces you to be in the present.
And it's hard to explain that to people who have a fear of bees and assume that It's chaotic inside of a hive and it's so disorganized and why would you want to be around these tens of thousands of stinging insects?
But it's not like that at all most of the time.
It's incredibly calm and orderly.
All the bees have a job.
And there's also a great sense of humility that comes with it and just watching these creatures work and do all of this work.
All of this amazing work within the beehive and, you know, knowing that these tens of thousands of creatures are all working together for the good of the colony.
It's just a wonderful experience for me anyhow, but I can understand how people, it would terrify people.
I think the communication goes back and forth and I hope that they can pick up on my behavior as well, that I'm not there to harm them.
I'm not ripping open their hive as quickly and as forcefully as possible and I'm not, you know, I'm doing everything with a lot of care and precision or as much as I can and I hope that they pick up on that too.
I mean, they seem to not mind, you know, when I pick up their queen and move her into a new box, which you would think, you know, that maybe would anger them.
But, you know, the colony all works together and it's that super organism.
So they all want to be together and they're all doing what's best for the good of the colony.
And so I sometimes think that if I'm doing that as well, then, you know, it's a lot easier to do my job for sure.
I have met some wonderful beekeepers and have some wonderful beekeeping friends, and everybody has their own way of keeping bees.
It's very much a craft.
It takes a lot of skill, of course.
I think it's an art form, especially the bee removal process.
It takes a lot of creativity, and everybody will do it in a different way, and everybody has their own opinions about their bees or what's best for their bees.
The beekeeping community can be, you know, divisive.
How so?
Just because everybody has a different opinion on what the best way is to keep bees.
And that probably stems from a lack of understanding that we all don't know all the answers to all the questions.
Just different techniques for keeping bees, you know.
Have different control methods for different pests and diseases.
Some folks like to do it more naturally.
There's a lot of different ways people keep bees all around the world, and I think everyone's doing it the best they can.
But everybody has a different idea on how to keep bees, but also everybody has a different reason for keeping bees, and so they might have different management techniques for that.
So the smoke, it will mask their alarm pheromones.
So one of the pheromones, the chemical sense that they communicate with, is an alarm pheromone that, you know, lets the other bees know that there might be trouble in the hive.
So maybe me, maybe a beekeeper coming in, and that will make it harder for the bees to communicate.
But also what it does and what I use it more for is You know, I'll always use it at the beginning of a removal or when you go into any beehive, but it's the best tool for moving the bees around.
So if I need to move the bees around, I'm going to have my smoker because if you and I were sitting around a campfire right now and the smoke wafted in your direction, what would you do?
There's a certain point where you know that the bees are not going to be that defensive, and you might still use your smoker a lot if you're just trying to move them around because they're always going to move away from it.
So it's one of the best tools we have in beekeepers.
We don't really use a lot of tools.
It's pretty simple.
There's simple tools and simple equipment, but the smoker is the most important tool.
You know it's different for every colony but you know it's just a little bit of smoke will go a long ways and you don't want to do too much but you know once they start kind of reacting to it and you can see them settle down or move away from it and so it's it's just different every time.
I mean, I've been sharing stuff about bees for a long time on Instagram, but I started to share more of the bee removal process in, I guess it was 2020. Well, that's probably when I found out about you.
You know, I was just sharing the work that bees and beekeepers do every day and could have never expected so many people to see it or be interested in it.
But, you know, as soon as I started to kind of put the bee removal process together in like the one minute edited down format that these platforms, you know, would allow and kind of play to, People just really seem to be interested in it, which is great because it's a fascinating process.
And, I mean, no one sitting here today is more shocked than me, you know, to put out a video and get, you know, 24 million views in 24 hours.
Is that the most satisfying thing to you, the fact that you're spreading your love and your appreciation for these things and giving people an education and understanding of these incredible creatures?
I mean, at first it just terrified me, you know, but now I'm really embracing it and hope that, yeah, I love showing people that you can work alongside these creatures and that they can be very peaceful and it can be a wonderful experience.
You know, I think that Bees have been misbranded for so long.
I mean, most people think that bees are aggressive and they're not.
You know, they can be defensive, but I love showing people a better side of bees and that, you know, it's possible to work alongside these colonies without wearing gear.
But then there's another side of I get to show people something they've never seen before.
So, you know, hopefully it's entertaining to watch someone do this work and, you know, be covered in bees or whatnot.
But they've probably never seen people remove bees before or maybe not like I have.
And so I love showing people that, you know, something that they've never seen before.
And hopefully I can educate them and there's something they learn from watching a video.
A lot of people will say, now I can find the queen in a colony.
You know, and that's great to hear, too, and just that people can see something that they wouldn't have experienced otherwise if I wasn't doing this and, you know, having my iPhone out.
One of the problems with becoming successful or becoming viral is that you may get offers now to do things that you might not necessarily want to do, like some sort of a reality television show, I'm Erica the Beekeeper, and then they fake things.
You know, I just try to sort through the offers as carefully as possible and in the beginning it was really figuring out I mean, what I wanted to do with this opportunity and also just how I want to live my life.
You know, I live a pretty quiet life that I love.
I'm so happy and I get to do what I love every day and it's on my own time.
And I don't have a boss and I don't have someone that may want to show, you know, a different side of the bees.
And that's why they're there and they are just waiting for me to, you know...
The bees get really defensive one day and, you know, I just...
Just try to, you know, do what seems like is best for me and the bees and my family.
If I can help you in that regard, don't get involved with anybody else.
Don't let anybody come along, executives and production companies.
They're going to mess it up.
You already have this immense audience and incredible amount of success getting that message out.
All you have to do is figure out what anybody would want to do with you is do some sort of reality show.
Just sort of ramp up what you're doing.
And just figure out a way to monetize it.
And you'll be far more successful, completely independent, far more financially successful, because you want to have a bunch of parasites sucking off of what you've done.
Because all they're trying to do is capitalize on it.
And I guarantee, one of the things they'll do, because I've I've done some reality stuff before.
One of the things I like to do is they fake scenarios.
They'll create a scenario.
I mean, they might even want to place a queen somewhere.
And then you have to, like, there's a dilemma.
You know, there's a sorority house.
You have to help these girls and they're shrieking.
You know, and that's how I felt, too, is that if my goal is really to reach the most amount of people, I mean, just looking at the numbers of what a video that I, you know, just set up a couple iPhones and do the best I can editing it and putting it together.
It was just, it was some bees I got from the night before, and they escaped.
The queen escaped the clip, so sometimes if she's not older or well-mated, she might be a little bit smaller, and she escaped the clip, and it was a large colony of bees, and I showed my mom, and she said, oh, you have to post that, and my husband said, oh, no, you got to post that one, so I just put it together and posted it, and Yeah, listen to your husband.
An interesting thing that's been part of my story is that this all happened to me during the pandemic.
At the height of quarantine is when those videos were getting the 50 million views a day.
I didn't get recognized for a while because nobody was going anywhere and then woke up and went out of my house one day, you know, so my life really changed in a weird way.
I was in a weird time where I was doing all these interviews and stuff, but it was from the study at my house.
I didn't actually go anywhere.
It was all very interesting to go through the process of receiving offers for doing things and working with people because, like you said, I never met these people.
It felt like, you know, after that one video I posted and it was 24 million views in 24 hours, I mean, it felt like if you had a production company, you emailed me.
You know, it just felt like that was what happens to people.
And I met some great people and it wasn't the people.
It was just, I mean, you know, I didn't know them.
If you hired an editor and had someone that you trust, a friend or someone like that, a family member, to come film with you, that's it.
That's all you need.
And then you talk to the camera, you talk to that person, you have some fun.
And you don't have to deal with anybody.
And then someone edits it, they put it up, and there's companies that you can get, like, very similar to what podcast companies do, where they find you advertisers.
When you get 133 million downloads, it's not difficult to find advertisers, especially something that's...
So interesting, so non-controversial, educational, wholesome.
Everything's cool about it.
It's really interesting.
It's great for the environment.
And I think it's very important that people understand, like, how important bees are to the ecosystem.
If all bees died, all people die.
We have to really understand that.
Like, there is a gigantic system that's in place.
And I'd like to hear you talk about that.
Because there is a crazy system in place with, like, how our food is made.
And one of the things about sharing my work with the world is that I've realized that people don't know a lot about bees or how important they are.
Bees pollinate one out of every three bites of food we eat.
And it's not just the apple or the almond that you've had today or your cup of coffee.
It's the beef that you're eating that grazed on alfalfa.
Bees are responsible for that and you know when our bee populations are healthy that's a good sign for our planet because bees are pollinating over 75% of plants need bees for pollination and our world would look so different without honeybees and the over 20,000 species of bees that do So much work for our planet and you know there's a lot of other beekeepers out there like me trying to
help bees and doing wonderful work for bees but I do feel like you know beekeeping is a really noble profession because you're helping these creatures that do so much work for us and you know if we want our grocery shelves to look like they do now and to have a diverse diet we need to treat our bees better and make sure our bee populations are healthy.
It's, you know, we're putting these large monocrops.
We're putting acres and acres of the same thing that need bees to pollinate.
For example, almonds.
Almonds are almost entirely dependent on bees for pollination.
And so we would have no almonds if we didn't have bees.
And we're shipping our bees across the country, you know, to pollinate the almond crops in California and then maybe up to the apples and In New York, and we're putting them in these areas where they only have one food source, which isn't healthy for them or for anybody.
They only have it for a short period of time.
So, you know, they can only collect food there for a little while, and they may or may not have pesticides sprayed on this food that the bees are collecting.
But at the end of the day, bees weren't made to be shipped on, or bees shouldn't be shipped on semi-trucks across the country to pollinate these places where there's just one thing living, and we're forcing the bees to pollinate this one crop.
From, you know, commercial beekeepers who keep them, most often in the south, they will overwinter the bees in the south where, you know, like right now our bees can still go out and forage, but in colder climates it's, you know, the bees will stay in the hive.
So I have beekeeping friends in Colorado who don't see their bees for months on end because if it's about 55 degrees Fahrenheit or below, the bees won't leave the hive and they're just clustering inside.
So, you know, we'll have beekeepers from all around the country ship their bees and do this pollination circuit.
And, you know, they'll come from all different areas, Texas, California.
So is it like human beings, where if you give them this artificial stuff, you see a decline in lifespan and a decline in overall longevity and robustness of health?
But, you know, we certainly want to keep the bees as healthy as possible.
And these sugar water diets are not what's healthiest for the bees.
And they know best, you know.
And so let's let them forage naturally.
But they need to have things available to forage.
So everybody that has a lawn of grass in their front yard with no wildflowers, no native plants, there's, you know, a lack of food for native pollinators.
There's a lack of places for them to find food.
Yeah, there's little things everybody can do to make a difference in the lives of bees.
And the biggest one is everybody can plant food for bees.
Anytime you're planting something in your yard or your garden or on your balcony, wherever you live, make sure it's something bees can forage from.
So whatever is local and native to your area is best.
And when you go to your nursery, you know, you can ask someone for help.
Or what I like to do is I just look for the plants where the bees are on.
So if I see a plant covered in bees, you know, I make sure it's native.
But then, you know, I know it's probably a plant the bees will forage from and get food from.
Everybody can plant food for bees and, you know, we just need a greater awareness about it too on a larger scale, an urban scale when we're planting our cities and building our roadways, thinking about the natural forage and food that we're taking away from the creatures that have lived here longer than us.
One of the things that I've read about bees and honey is that local honey can protect some people from allergies that they may have from the very plants that these bees are getting their pollen from.
Eat honey, enjoy honey for all the different wonderful properties that it has and all the wonderful things it can do for you, but not because you think it will help with your local seasonal allergies.
Yeah, they used to preserve psychedelic mushrooms in honey because it keeps them from rotting.
Yeah.
And then they went on to create mead with honey.
This is like in psychedelic lore when they're trying to figure out why certain cultures moved from a psychedelic culture to an alcohol-based culture for intoxicants.
And they think that it stemmed from, initially, that they started to preserve mushrooms, in particular, in honey.
My friend Maynard is the lead singer of Tool, and he owns Caduceus Vineyards and...
He's a real weirdo because he does a lot of different things really well and one of the things that he does really well is he makes wine and he makes mead.
And he makes different, you know, kind of sparkling wines and stuff.
But they make, you know, it's alcohol based out of honey.
In the 2011 one, I'll put it up on the screen, this guy put two cell phones in a beehive and then studied them with what they were doing after a couple minutes.
But most of what I got to the abstract and the conclusion of all these studies is they just need to do more research to find out exactly what it's doing.
They got to that it could be affecting electromagnetic waves and systems around the bees, and that could be what they're using to communicate, but it didn't...
The thing about that, it says, in his experience, Favre placed two cell phones inside a beehive and set up equipment to record the sounds of the bees when the phones were off in standby mode and active in a phone call.
After the phones had been on for about 20 to 40 minutes, the bees began to make a high-pitched squeaking sound known as piping.
This sound is usually a signal made by the bees to announce swarming or that the hive is in danger.
However, even after the cell phone signals running for 20 hours and the piping sounds continuing, the bees did not swarm.
Within only two minutes of the cell phones being turned off, the bees calmed down to their original state.
But that seems like you're introducing a lot of other things other than just a cell phone signal.
You're introducing electronics, heat.
There's a lot of stuff going on, sound, vibration, right?
And when we talk about honeybee population decline, to begin with, we need to know that, you know, why we lose colonies every year and the populations aren't healthy.
Beekeepers are replacing those colonies.
So the populations are stable, even though hive loss rates...
Go back to that, Jamie, what I was just going to point to, what you just had.
Right here it says, 2009, Dr. Sanyuddin had found that EMR from mobile towers was responsible for the killing of bees, which is substantiated by a Swiss scientist, Daniel Favre, in 2011. Rock bees are the major pollinating agents on their migratory routes and And are sensitive to EMR, which would affect their navigational skills, physiology, changes in their antennal sencilla?
The orientation of honeybees is connected to the Earth's magnetic field, and for this they possess localized particles called magnetites.
If EMR frequency from towers increases, the magnetite particles won't be able to detect the Earth's magnetic fields and disrupt their navigational skills, according to Dr. Sanuddin.
Well, one of the ways they communicate in addition to the pheromones and through touching each other or piping, vocalizing is Through dancing, through movement.
So we call it the waggle dance and every morning some scout bees will fly out of the hive and find the best places for the bees to forage from or in some cases if they need a new place to live they'll find a new nest site so maybe a new you know backyard shed or compost bin or whatever And the scout bees will come back to the hive and announce what they've found to the colony through a waggle dance.
It's a series of movements.
It kind of looks like a figure-eight pattern.
And it's the bee waggling her abdomen up in the air and doing this dance and telling the other bees...
Yes, so you'll see the other bees around her and they are obviously, you know, getting her messages, reading the dance and If she is announcing a place to live or a place for the colonies to move, then what will happen is other bees will go and investigate that nest site and come back to the colony.
And the more bees that choose the nest site, the more popular it is.
And essentially, you know, the bees are all voting together on where to move to.
So when, you know, most of the colony with the queen leaves the hive and looks for a new place to live, that's a swarm.
And that's, you know, a popular reason that they would do the waggle dance is to announce a new nest site for the other bees to go and investigate and come back to the hive and announce what they found the colony.
Well, what happens is most of the bees will take the queen and look for a new place to live and hopefully they will find a new place and be successful and go on and create more baby bees and have a great healthy colony in their new nest site.
Meanwhile, back in the old hive, they have left behind food, they have left behind baby bees, they have left behind bee eggs, and enough nurse bees to care for these baby bees and bee eggs so that they can create another queen.
So if they have the female, you know, a female bee egg, they can turn that into a queen bee.
And so the swarming process is the natural reproduction process for the colony.
You know, when you see me remove bees from somewhere, that's just, in many cases, the natural way we get more bee colonies into the world.
So, you know, if we have one bee colony and we need two, that's how it happens in nature.
They certainly make sure they have enough resources, you know, in the area.
And they want to find a nesting site, a hive location that has resources around for them to build.
But there are things that they look for.
They actually have, you know, pretty more stringent requirements than we thought for building these sites, or for choosing a site to build a new hive.
Which is why I do bee removals from the same places over and over again, compost bins, water meter boxes, things like that.
The bees will look for an area that's climate controlled and the right amount of space.
They need a certain amount of space to fit all the bees in there, of course, but they need space to expand and build the comb and grow.
They like a small entrance that they can easily defend.
Learn that it's about an inch, inch and a half big, I think, is their preferred entrance size.
There's a wonderful professor of biology, Dr. Thomas Seeley, who's done An immense and incredible amount of work regarding how bees choose their nest sites.
And so there are things that are better for the colony as a whole and, you know, they'll all decide on that together and choose and select the new nest site as a whole unit versus the individual bees.
They react to carbon dioxide, so earlier I was trying to show the gentleman, the queen, and I blew in the hole a little bit so that they could kind of move around in it.
Just rep some a little bit.
And we saw her down here where there's brood.
This is where the baby bees are.
So it's more likely that she would be down here.
But I also selected this piece of comb to bring out of this hive because...
It's not quite fully built all the way across and if you notice this side the bees are just hanging on the comb and they're on top of each other and they're kind of making this little living chain of bees.
Their little legs are all linked together and that's how they build comb.
So you're seeing them build more of this beeswax comb.
I don't know if you can see that group of bees there.
I mean if you shake the hive you can see it moved.
That's actually how the bees will or can kill a queen.
In beekeeping, we refer to it as a cuddle death because it sort of looks like, you know, a bunch of bees, just a ball of bees bawling all over the hornet or in some cases the queen.
And in that case, that's what they're doing is they're overheating it to death.
And that's their way of taking care of these, you know, northern giant hornets that made the news last year a lot.
They are probably, you know, they're a predator of the bees.
They will eat the bees or go after the honey or the pollen.
And, you know, we have to keep in mind these hornets are native to an area of the world where people keep bees and beekeepers have learned to live alongside these hornets and have their own management techniques.
But as we can see, the bees have their own management techniques.
I mean, that was also media-induced fear, you know, as we saw the progression of these bees and saw them Get established in South America and Central America and you can track their progression.
We knew that they would eventually make their way into the U.S. And so I think, you know, during that time the media just amplified the fear, you know, the fear factor.
But, you know, the Africanized bee, that is a hybrid bee of our Western honeybee that we have here.
And a bee from Africa that a biologist brought to Brazil to breed a better bee.
So a biologist in the 1950s brought over this subspecies of bee To breed with the European honeybees, the Western honeybees that they had in Brazil, which were not native to Brazil.
Bees are not native to the United States, you know.
This happened well before we were here, about 100, 120 million years ago, I think.
And that's one of the things I love most about beekeeping is when I go into this hive, I'm part of this collective consciousness that knows so much more than I do.
So a lot of them, and a lot of them are even better pollinators than honeybees for some plants because they're specialty bees.
So they'll specialize in one plant and so it creates this relationship where we have some plants that rely on some of these bees where as honeybees are more I would say, and do, you know, a lot of plants.
So, you know, that's why when we talk about the bee populations, it's, you know, we have the honeybees that are managed by humans, and then we have these other bee populations, which are not closely managed by humans, and humans are not replenishing or really even thinking about.
They do so much work for our world and are this amazing kind of underground network of creatures that we never see that's contributing to our food system too.
I mean, it's just a great byproduct of bees doing the work that bees do.
When bees go out into the world every day and do the work that they need to do to survive for their colony, they're also offering our planet one of the most amazing services of pollination, of making sure other plants can reproduce and survive.
And they don't even know they're doing this.
So when they go and collect pollen and nectar from a plant, you know, they're Bringing that pollen to another plant so plants have the problem when it comes to reproduction that they can't move.
So they need help to reproduce and that is what bees are doing.
So as wasps evolved into bees and as these bees figured out that pollen and nectar were great sources of food, the plants figured out it was beneficial for them to be able to attract these bees to the plant.
And so they became more showy and vibrant and colorful.
And they have a mutual relationship.
It's so incredible.
I mean, it's so interesting that we know so little about bees and that people don't think about them often, but they're around us all the time.
I mean, you know, they're outside and they put food on our table and they mean so much to our world, but people rarely think about them until maybe they show up in your backyard, you know, and you need someone like me to come and remove them.
One of the things that we covered really recently is the large amount of wasps that will inject their larvae into other creatures and use these parasitic relationships with caterpillars.
Go to that caterpillar that we showed the other day where it implants all the larvae into the caterpillar and then the caterpillar will die and these larvae exude from its skin.
There's something called the Varroa mite, and it's an exoparasite that lives on the bee and feeds off the fat bodies of bees, which we didn't actually know.
You know, we've known about this pest in the beehive for a long time, since the early 1900s, but it wasn't until...
In 2018, the Dr. Sammy Ramsey found out what the biggest, or arguably the biggest threat facing bees is feeding from.
We thought it was feeding from kind of its blood forever, but it's not.
It's feeding from the fat bodies of bees, but it lives on the bee or on the baby bees, and it will, I mean, if it was on us, it would be like the size of a rabbit.
It really is interesting how many, like, that shape of what a wasp and a bee looks like, but how much variety there is in the way they live and what they do.
It goes all the way deep into the log and then it drops off its larvae in there and the larvae survive eating the tissue or eating the wood.
This is crazy.
These relationships that these things have is so bizarre.
There's so many bizarre parasitic relationships.
And then there's relationships that fungus have.
Parasitic relationships that fungus have with insects.
Which is like the cordyceps mushroom that infects ants and causes these ants to explode.
And these ants release these spores that will then infect all the ants around them.
So when ants find that one of their ants has been killed and infected by this mushroom, by this fungus, they will drag this ant far away from the colony.
But with some, they get to a certain point where the heads of these things will explode.
It looks like a head, like a ball.
And it'll explode and release millions of spore into the air.
And when it does that, then everyone's doomed because they'll all get infected by it.
This cordyceps mushroom, in fact, is used as a supplement.
It actually increases oxygen utilization in humans.
So there's a thing that my supplement company Onnit sells called Shroomtech.
That's what it looks like when it pops out and then that thing will explode.
Shroomtech is a supplement that's based on the cordyceps mushroom that the Chinese Olympic team started using in track and field events because it optimized your access to oxygen in some way.
And the way they found it is high-altitude herding populations would notice that these cattle were grazing on these particular mushrooms and they found them to be more active.
And so then they started eating them.
And the way they farm them, it's wild, they farm them on caterpillars.
I think your friend Paul Stamets has done some great work with mushrooms and bees and figuring out there's a fungi that may be helpful to bees with the varroa mite, with killing that mite.
I mean, I think about that all the time with my dog.
Because, you know, I have one dog, and he doesn't have access to other dogs until, like, my daughter brings her dog over or my friends bring a dog over.
But he knows all this dog stuff.
No one's telling him that he has to pee on these certain trees.
He has this thing where he rolls in fox poop.
It's so disgusting.
But we have this fox that comes and visits our yard, and the fox is really cool.
But in the documentary Grizzly Man, when that guy lives in the woods long enough, the fox decide that he's their friend and they just hang out with him.
Like right next to him.
Remember one of them stole his hat and they were playful with him?
But they're small wolves, and they're wolves that have been persecuted by gray wolves.
And so because of the adaptation, there's a great book called Coyote America by Dan Flores.
And he details how coyotes...
Because of the persecution with gray wolves, coyotes are related to—they're a type of wolf.
You think of them as coyotes, but they're actually a small wolf.
And they're related to red wolves, but they don't breed with gray wolves.
So when you hear about coy wolves, That's an eastern wolf is breeding with a coyote, not gray wolves.
Gray wolves kill coyotes.
So because they've had this relationship with gray wolves where they were persecuted by gray wolves, coyotes have figured out how to let the other coyotes know when one of them is missing.
They think they do that to communicate when they've killed something.
And they also think they've done that to do a roll call.
And when one of them is missing, it causes the female to have more pups.
And then they spread their boundaries.
So they move into new neighborhoods.
So because we eradicated gray wolves from North America up until, you know, like, what is the 90s when they reintroduced them from, not North America, but America, United States.
Well, they reintroduced them from Canada to Yellowstone.
But during that time period when they were killing the wolves, coyotes started spreading.
And coyotes were spreading a little bit because they were persecuted by the gray wolves.
And then people started killing coyotes.
And as people killed coyotes, they spread even wider.
It had the exact opposite effect they wanted.
By people killing coyotes, now coyotes are in every single city in North America.
Every city.
A hundred years ago, they weren't.
A hundred years ago, they were confined to the southwest.
And I guess the northwest as well.
I guess they were mostly in the western coast of the United States.
So we had this one chicken that was brooding, and when the hen was brooding, we put her in a separate, smaller pen where she has to stand.
And she can't sit in the nest.
There's a post.
And because she's in this stand, this smaller pen, rather, with her feet on this post, After a while, she gets over the idea that she's got this unfertilized egg that she thinks she's going to raise into a chicken.
That's what the brooding is.
And they'll sit on this egg.
They just decide that this is going to be the egg that gives them a chick.
It's kind of sad because there's no rooster, so they never get fertilized.
Well, when the coyote recognized that this was a smaller pen, they had been trying to get in the big one.
It was too fortified.
But the smaller one, they're like, you know, I can get this big, dumb motherfucker to break into this.
So this coyote tricked my dog into destroying that pen.
He had never done that before.
I was in my house with my family, and we were playing some board game.
And I look out the window, and I see a coyote running across my backyard with a chicken in his mouth.
And then, you know, we had a fire, and then the chicken coop burnt to the ground, then we had to take the chickens and put them in another coop, and then the coyotes broke into that and they killed them all.
And we had, I have one really great, I have four really great dogs, but my first dog Shelby is just like quintessential great dog, you know, and so just got to add to the starter and we're up to four, but you know, space them apart age wise and let them teach the next generation how to be in your house and around you and what you like and, you know, and it's, yeah, it's just the sourdough.
And something, it changes you when you move out and can live more alongside nature, or at least it did for me.
I mean, I am from Texas, have lived in an urban area my whole life.
I've lived in Austin for 15 years and then just moved out to a little piece of dirt, you know, on the Colorado River and just living...
In sync with the seasons and noticing everything and living in the rhythm of nature has really changed my life and, you know, kind of slows down the pace of life.
Yeah, I think everybody should have a little piece of dirt and grow some food.
I tell people it's sort of like akin to keeping a garden where it's more labor intensive at different points throughout the year.
And of course, once you first get started and get going, you know, there's a big learning curve and, you know, you just have to learn a lot and you do that through spending a lot of time with bees, with your bees.
Depending on how many colonies you keep, you know, it can be not that labor intensive and a wonderfully fulfilling hobby or profession as far as you want to take it.
I do and so that's why I don't harvest a lot or sell any honey because it's just not where I find my joy in keeping bees.
This is a little bit of honey that I harvested in the summer and this is the last of our summer harvest.
That the bees had.
And, you know, I take a very, very small amount for my personal use and then to share with friends and family or people who have helped me in the bees.
And, you know, that's as much as I personally want to take.
I was lucky early on in my beekeeping journey to figure out that harvesting and selling the honey just wasn't what I loved about keeping bees.
And, you know, at the end of the day, it didn't make me feel that good.
So this is their food source.
It's their food source during the winter.
I can't predict the weather, of course, and don't know how long the winter will last and when the spring will come.
A perfect example is here in Texas last year when we had the major snowpocalypse.
Everything that was about to bloom, those early blooming plants that the bees really rely on to get them to spring, snapped back.
None of it bloomed.
Everything died.
It was a horrible year for bees and beekeeping and I was thankful to have not really harvested a lot of honey because it was something we could have never predicted and the bees couldn't predict you know but in the winter when there's nothing in bloom there's not an opportunity for the bees to get more food naturally unless the beekeeper provides it so they're only collecting food during a short time of the year when the nectar is flowing and when the plants are blooming and so In the winter,
when they're not doing that, they're living off what they collected earlier in the year and all the work they did earlier in the year.
And so when we harvest honey in the summer or fall, you know, it's before the time the bees really need it.
So we just need to be careful and mindful about how much we take.
And, you know, you can certainly harvest honey responsibly, and most dog beekeepers do, of course.
And, you know, there's no reason you can't happily harvest honey from your backyard hive if that's your choice.
It's higher than it's ever been, probably because people, you know, like that it's like a natural sweetener and it's, you know, part of a healthier lifestyle.
But, you know, the world's demand for honey is so high and the supply sometimes can't meet it.
And there was a situation where beekeepers, or there still is, but people from What?
keeper who is not selling that adult adulterated honey or just buy it in the comb like this and you'll know that what's going on honey is the world's third most fake food according sometimes Chinese honey is cut with much cheaper corn syrup and fructose syrup to enhance profit margins and sometimes Chinese producers even feed corn syrup to the bees to get it into the honey more
The importation of Chinese honey was specifically banned because it is so often adulterated.
So you can figure out what the bees were feeding from.
And every piece of honey is going to be different.
Every bite of honey is going to be different.
Every frame of honey you take from a hive is going to have different, you know, food sources that the bees were foraging from.
So it's going to taste different and maybe have a different color.
And, you know, it's all very unique and there's tests that you can do to figure out where the source of the honey, you know, depending on the pollen and the nectar and the source of the plants.
Well, no, please always support your local beekeeper who is pulling this honey, you know, with the bees in mind.
My motto is hives before honey, and I'm always going to put the health and wellness of the colony and what's going on in the hive before honey.
Harvesting honey and, you know, someone selling, a local beekeeper selling honey at a farmer's market, or if you find local honey that is truly local and from local bees, not just packaged locally, then that's a great way to support beekeepers and the bee population.
So please don't...
You know, not buy honey from the store shelves, but look for honey that is labeled locally and maybe not the name of the big brand store on it or, you know, a big company.
Or just go to your farmer's market and buy honey from your local beekeeper or your friend who is a beekeeper.
I don't think there's one for honey, like a database where you can just find local beekeepers just to buy honey from, but most beekeepers will offer honey for sale.
Just ask your local beekeeper.
I mean, you know, if you see a beekeeper at a farmer's market or if you find a beekeeper and you really like buying their honey, please support them year after year.
Most, you know, beekeeping is so not only local, but really hyper-local.
I mean, bees forage for up to two miles.
So beekeepers have a great sort of local community built in a lot of Cities and counties will have a beekeeping association and so that could be a great place for people to ask, you know, email the beekeeping association and say, hey, I'm looking to buy honey and buy honey for the year from one beekeeper.
Buy it for gifts for your friends and family.
Support, you know, a beekeeper that way.
If you Google your local beekeeping association, you can find someone very local because, again, beekeeping itself is just something that the bees work in such a small area that I can have hives 10 miles away and they can be completely different with what they're bringing in and what's happening with them.
Even here in Austin, hives on one side of 35 versus the other, it's different soil.
It's just a completely different environment for the bees.
I often see dark red honey in a lot of hives that I'm removing from people's backyards that are in really like suburban areas where people have a lot of hummingbird feeders.
You know, the way that the bees collect the pollen is they go into the flower, they'll forage for pollen, and they store it on the sides of their legs.
They have these little divots, and they'll pack it in these little balls.
So if you are buying pollen to eat for your protein shakes or whatever, it's going to come in these little tiny balls of pollen.
That's just exactly how it came off the bee.
Because the way that beekeepers will collect the pollen is the bees will go through an entrance device on the front of the hive and the pollen will scrape off the bee's body and into a container below.
You're getting pollen that was from the plant on the bee's legs right into your protein shake or whatever.
And so it'll be little balls like that because that's how the bees store it and carry it and bring it back to the hive.
And they can carry an insane amount of weight.
They can carry over half their body weight in pollen and for up to two miles.
Royal jelly is a special secretion that comes from the gland of every worker bee.
And it's a food that's fed to the baby bees in the first stage of their development.
And then again, if you feed it to a queen bee or if you feed it to a young female egg larvae for the duration of its development, That larva will turn into a queen bee, but it's a special secretion that worker bees make, and you can kind of think of it like milk, like mother's milk, because it's a food that the younger bees are eating, and it's from a gland that all the female bees produce.
So it's just the food source for younger bees, or bees that I haven't developed yet, but a lot of Some folks will harvest royal jelly.
You can harvest royal jelly, kind of scrape it out of the cell and harvest royal jelly for cosmetic purposes and whatnot.
Well, listen, Erica, I really appreciate you coming in here.
It's been very, very educational.
It's really cool.
I love that you're doing what you're doing.
It's really fun to watch your videos, and I think it's really illuminated the art and science and the love of beekeeping and just bees in general for a lot of people, me included.