Podcast

Transcript

Josh (00:00)

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Five and Twenty podcast by Remarkable Academic Foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller, where we have at least another five questions in 20 something minutes. Today, we are going to go into the land of honey. That's why we're talking about bees. We're going to give you something to buzz about. And eventually I'll stop with the dad jokes here and then all the references. But very, very exciting things that we're going to talk about. It's not just about building these beehives, all right? We have so much to talk about in terms of what bees contribute to the food supply, culinary uses, gardens, engagement opportunities, education opportunities for students. So, so much more, so many sweet things we're going to throw your way.

And our guest is David Peck. He is the director of research and education at Betterbee. That is Betterbee -ee -ee, just as it sounds with the pollinator.

And they are a leading supplier of beekeeping equipment, education, resources, supplies, all that, and so much more from beginner to expert level knowledge. So a lot of things that can get thrown your way. Make sure you stick around for all the value we're going to drop

David, thank you for taking the time to join in this episode and talk to us about bees and honey and all those great things. But first, to kick things off, I'm going to ask you an icebreaker question, which is, what is your favorite type of honey?

David (01:31)

Okay?

Ooh, so my great passion is teaching people about how diverse honey is, right? Bees are making their honey by going out and foraging on the flowers that are all around them. And so if you've got bees in different places all over the world, then you're gonna have different flowers and therefore different honeys. you know, no two honeys are the same. Even if I say I like upstate New York, late fall, middle of a cow pasture, you know, full of goldenrod honey.

Josh (01:43)

Yeah.

David (02:04)

There's going be different amounts of goldenrod and different species and different trees and different bushes on the edges. And so the bees are going to wind up making slightly different honeys from that. you know, I'd be hard pressed. Some of the best honey I've ever had, I got from the remnant rainforests in Madagascar. I did some work there on bee conservation and they have this absolutely magnificent bouquet of flowers that the bees are visiting and the honey that it produces is really, really noticeably starkly different from any of the honey that I've ever had from the US.

Josh (02:35)

Wow, sounds like honey is like wine in some cases, right? Like there's just so many different types and varieties. That's awesome. And that was a very intentional question because I want the audience to learn things as I do, which is there's so many different types of honey and it's so unique learning about those different aspects of it. So David, again, thank you for taking the time to be here. So let's give the audience a little bit of a bite size of who is David.

David (02:39)

Absolutely.

So I'm the, as you said, I'm the director of research and education at this company called Better Be. I'm basically the staff scientist here. And I got hired straight out of Cornell. got my PhD in honeybee and honeybee parasite behavior. Then I was in the entomology department teaching classes and working there. And they sniped me right out of academia and brought me over here into industry. And my job is sort of to be like an academic in residence. I am a scientist who

has all of my scientific connections, I do research, I collaborate with other people, but I also help me know develop products or I teach classes here at BetterBee that if folks want to learn how to keep bees, I want to make sure that they're starting with the absolute best possible and most accurate possible information. And so that's that's sort of the mindset behind hiring a PhD scientist to come, you know, sit here and help folks pick out the best beehive for them.

Josh (03:54)

Wow, that is awesome. And in terms of bees, obviously the honey is the thing that most of our audience is going to be most familiar with. however, I'm not sure if they understand the importance that bees play in the production of honey. So how important are bees when it comes to that?

David (04:01)

Right.

So bees are critical. Obviously, if you want to get honey, you've got to get it from a honeybee. That's the only place it can come from. And you can go out, there's some folks who have gotten ideas of getting pipettes and going out and slurping nectar out of different flowers and then dehydrating some of the moisture and selling that as a bee free honey. the whole project is sort of ridiculous. Bees are amazing because they are collecting this honey, they're making the honey from the nectar that they collect.

Josh (04:18)

Yeah.

my goodness.

David (04:39)

And they're making it because they need to have a shelf stable food that they can consume in the fall and in the winter and in the early spring when there's no flowers for them to visit. Most insects die in the winter. know, they might leave some eggs behind and the eggs hatch and then they restart again in the spring. But honeybees are going and making this, know, hundreds of pounds of honey are stored in their nests so that they can eat that and keep themselves warm, buzz their wings and generate heat so they're not going to freeze to death during the winter.

Josh (04:55)

Mm -hmm.

David (05:07)

So just like you need to have heating fuel for you to get through to the spring during a cold winter, the bees are gonna need the same thing and their fuel is honey. And so it is a shelf stable antimicrobial food that we can go cut right out of the beeswax cells that they store them in and put it into a jar with no more than filtering. And it's perfectly safe and shelf stable for humans to use and eat and consume as well. So it's a really...

Josh (05:11)

Yeah, yeah, I do.

David (05:32)

sophisticated process that these insects have worked out to take this this plant nectar that might have fermented if they just sort of slurped it up and then spat it into a beeswax cup. And they've turned it into this the stable food product, which is also conveniently delicious. But they're also critical for food, much more generally than that, you know, we wouldn't have a lot of the crops and foods that we depend upon if we didn't have honeybees and also other pollinating, you know, insect species visiting.

Some things like tomatoes, a bumblebee is going to do a much better job of pollinating than a honeybee. But most things, know, your raspberries, apples, almonds, avocados, all of those things are effectively dependent upon managed honeybee colonies coming in there to the farms, pollinating those crops, and then getting the, you know, the bees go off to the next job, and the plants have now been able to set their fruits and they're going to grow them and they'll be harvested by the farmers at the appropriate time.

Josh (06:27)

Wow, that is a lot of information packed into that and I want to dive further into some of that information because like you mentioned, naturally shelf stable, I mean it lasts like forever, right? Like is there even expiration on honey?

David (06:32)

Sure.

Yeah, they've found honey in ancient Egyptian tombs and they found honey in some of these ancient burial sites. And as far as they can tell, it never spoils, right? It just sits there in a clay jar and you can take it out and you can taste it and it'll taste like honey and it's safe. It's not going to kill you. What it is, is all of these plant sugars with as much moisture removed and evaporated out as possible.

And the bees add enzymes that do things like invert the sugars, turn sucrose into fructose and glucose and things like that. And they also, some of those enzymes do things like create hydrogen peroxide, small amounts of hydrogen peroxide. And that is part of honey's antimicrobial properties. It kills off any yeast or bacteria that might try to get in and spoil it. And so it just sits there being stable. It might not be quite as aromatic as it was in ancient Egypt 8 ,000 years ago, for you to go take a taste out of it out of a tomb today, but it's not going to kill you and it's going to taste sweet.

Josh (07:36)

That is crazy. so we're talking a lot about the bees, the honey, and the whole process so far in continuing this episode. However, we also know that we're dealing with schools, we're dealing with students that are young, students that are old, and there's opportunities that we have in the industry, the school food service industry, to make it educational in talking about honey. What are some of those opportunities that we have?

David (08:06)

So I think one option, if I wanted to teach people about bees, which I do, that's what they pay me to do all day, but I also control the cafeteria, one thing that I might do is just do a celebration of the pollinator -dependent or the honeybee -dependent foods that those kids are eating and enjoying every day.

I can make sure that my raspberries and my avocados and my almonds are featured prominently. And that might be a way for me to make a display or for me to even offer a menu that's going to get kids excited about pollinators. Another thing that is maybe a little bit more avant -garde, but could be more fun, is to go in and say, look, today we're gonna have a pollinator -free lunch. We don't need bees to pollinate wheat. We don't need bees to pollinate corn. They're grasses and they're pollinated by the wind.

So it's not that we would all starve to death without bees, but if you wanted a cake, you know, I can get milk and I can get wheat and I can make you, you know, I can get sugar, I can make you a cake, but if you want to have raspberries on top of it, nah, you're not getting that without the bees. So, you know, maybe, and maybe that's not a disappointing lackluster meal one day and then a pollinator bounty the next, but maybe it's, just, put out a plate and you say, look, here's a plate of what you'd be eating today if we had no honeybees. You'd get corn, you'd get wheat, you'd get milk, you'd get cheese.

Here's what you get from all of the great resources these bees are producing. I think that'd be a fun way to show it off.

Josh (09:27)

Yeah, yeah, and I couldn't agree more. if I read correctly, I obviously try to do some research on some topics here. So apples, pumpkins, squash, strawberries, onions, cucumbers, all those things that pollinators are helping with producing in our food supply.

David (09:44)

Yeah, absolutely. The onions are obviously a root vegetable, so you can plant a small onion and grow a big onion and harvest it. But if you want that onion to make seeds so that you can plant more to get more small onions for the next year's crop, then you're gonna need to have bees pollinate those flowers. So even things that we don't think of as being bee pollinated, like an onion, actually wind up being, bees are a really important part of the production of those crops.

Josh (09:52)

Mm -hmm.

Awesome.

David (10:11)

Yeah, so there's a huge number of foods. It'd be very easy to say, look, I can give you polenta and oatmeal and nothing on it and you'll survive, but you won't be happy. If we add in all the stuff that the bees are contributing to, suddenly it's a much more fun and balanced meal.

Josh (10:23)

Yeah.

So, so true. And we are getting into the fall season. So apples, pumpkins should definitely be on my list if I was any.

David (10:34)

Right. Right. A harvest season display at its heart needs to be a celebration of pollinators, because the things we're harvesting, for the most part, are dependent upon the work that these pollinators are doing.

Josh (10:46)

Yeah. And what a lot of schools do, both K -12 and colleges, is they tend to highlight a food item, which is usually a produce item every month. And that's the highlight for the month. And any time it's on the menu, they bring special attention to it. And there's an opportunity to do that with honey in some of the stuff that we're talking about here today, where you're just educating the students on nutritional benefits, educating them on the benefits that they bring to our food supply, and just having posters, it's something different. It's different than a fruit and vegetable that we always, always, always do. So something cool to think about their audience.

David (11:16)

Right. Right.

Absolutely. the fun thing about bees is that even though they're insects, and even though they're tiny, they're very charismatic, right? Even though they can sting, that adds a little bit of danger and romance to the idea of being a beekeeper. But other than that, they're little, they're fuzzy, they're cute, and they're generally friendly if you don't go and bother their hive. And so, you know, a big fuzzy bee is something that is going to get people's attention, and it makes it an appealing display.

You know, if we had something that was pollinated exclusively by spiders, I don't know that we'd want to have a big spider hanging up, maybe for Halloween, but but not for most of the year. The other thing if honey was a featured product, if you really wanted to emphasize the honey as the crop or honey as the piece of produce, the thing that I would recommend is educating students and and this begins with educating the folks who are setting up the the education themselves.

Understand that honey as we said before is not just one crop. It's not just one thing The thing the thing I hate hearing people say is I don't really like the taste of honey because when you understand how diverse it is when you understand that these bees are flying for miles around their hive and Concentrating all of the local seasonally blooming crops or or flowers in the area and then and then filling up their honey crops and bringing that back to make honey.

When you understand that it becomes very very intuitive when I tell you that Honey from over here is going to taste different from honey over there honey from the spring will taste different than honey from the fall So if you want to do a honey display You can't just buy one kind of honey because people taste it and they'll go. Yeah, it's sweet. No big deal

Josh (13:00)

Hahaha

David (13:01)

If you get two or three kinds of honey, if you get some buckwheat honey and some clover honey and some orange blossom honey, suddenly people are gonna taste it and go, wow, I can really taste the differences between this flower and that flower. I understand the way that these bees are visiting these crops and that's where this sugar is being extracted from. So I think it winds up being a more enjoyable experience. It's also something that in food preparation, for those that have meaningful control over their menus and recipes,

Josh (13:04)

Yes.

David (13:30)

If you think you've got a recipe and you throw honey in it like it says you should and you don't like the taste, maybe you used the wrong honey, right? Maybe you used honey that couldn't stand up to the heat of cooking or you used honey that had too strong a flavor and it was overpowering something else. recipe books generally don't say use the very best buckwheat honey you can get or the very best goldenrod honey you can get or the very best clover honey you can get, but they had something in mind when they wrote it down. And so you can...tweak that and play with that. You you make a, find a honey cake recipe and use three different honeys on it. And suddenly people get a little piece of dessert that's going to teach them a heck of a lot about, about biology and ecology and insects behavior and where their food comes from.

Josh (14:14)

Absolutely. supporting, we're always talking about farm to schools and supporting local. And this is one great way to do that. Honey is, although it's not the cheapest, a little goes a long way. And there's so many different things you can do with it. Throw some, some vegetables with some honey and oil. You can drizzle it on oatmeal, on yogurts, on all those kinds of of things. And in desserts, like you mentioned, honey cake, things like that. If you just even baking in some products. It little goes a long way. So there's lots of opportunities to incorporate that and highlight that in a farm to school program.

David (14:51)

And if you're working with a local beekeeper, number one, make sure that you ask them, do you have two different varieties of honey? And they might not be able to say, well, this is orange blossom and this is this blossom and this is that blossom, because they're probably not moving their hives down to an orange grove and then trucking them back home. But they probably have spring honey and summer honey and fall honey. They've probably got some different options available. And so they can even talk to another beekeeper and say, hey, let me get a couple pounds of honey from you. I'll take a couple pounds from me. I'll bring this to the school because they want to do a display and let kids taste the difference. And I think there's opportunity to be found there. The other thing to remember is that beekeepers, by their nature, these are people who are passionate about honeybees, right? These are people who are willing to put on heavy protective gear and go stand out in the middle of the sun, in the middle of the summer, run the risk of getting stung by bees, picking up boxes full of honey and honeycomb that might weigh up to 80 pounds. These are folks who are really committed to bees. And so if you ask them if they've got educational ideas or educational materials, if they're willing to stand and answer some questions about bees for a lunch session, I'm sure you wouldn't have a hard time finding someone willing to do it. Beekeepers love teaching other people about honeybees.

Josh (15:45)

Mm.

That is a very big hint, audience. Engagement, opportunity written all over it. Bring in a beekeeper. We bring in so many other types of farmers and manufacturers and producers. It would be really cool to highlight that in your program.

David (16:05)

Yeah. And if you've got somebody local, you can find a local beekeeper who is going to be a lot more local than your local, you know, potato farmer, right? You can find somebody from a hundred miles away who will come in and talk about their potatoes, but you can get a beekeeper, even if you're an urban school, you can get a beekeeper who's keeping bees on the roof of your school or on the roof of the apartment building, you know, two blocks down.

And those bees are probably the ones that are foraging on the clover in your playing fields. And so when these kids are tasting honey from a really local beekeeper, they could wind up tasting honey from flowers that they've seen from bees that they actually saw visiting and foraging on them, you know, a few weeks or a few months earlier.

Josh (16:57)

Wow, I never thought of it that way, that they could literally be everywhere, be hives.

David (17:01)

Yep. I work with a bunch of folks who keep bees on rooftops in Manhattan. and, know, one of the things they're always asking us is, can you get us a jacket that folds down really small? Or can you find a way for us to seal up our smoker? Because when we're up on the roof using smoke, we got to calm the bees down. But when we get on the elevator, we have to really quick pretend we're not beekeepers because otherwise people ask too many questions. So there's, there's a lot of clandestine beekeeping around, but you can find somebody doing it on the up and up who I'm sure would be happy to come to a lot of schools and talk to folks about bees.

Josh (17:21)

my goodness.

Awesome. And in terms of bee hives, so me and Rachel got to enjoy coming to the Better Bees field day a couple months ago, which was really awesome, really cool. I took away some things that I never thought a million years would just really get at my interest as much as it did, which is really cool. However, bee hives, obviously it was a big topic that day. There was a lot of beekeepers there.

Let's talk about schools and beehives. Is there a success in that area? Is there more potential for more schools to adopt that? Is there concerns that they should have? What can we think about?

David (18:02)

There's absolutely, I have seen and coached people through successes and through failures. So there are programs where a staff member or a faculty member or an interested member of the community is happy to be a knowledgeable beekeeper and to keep the bees on the school and then to involve the students and the staff to the extent that the school and the students are interested and able to do that, involve them in the beekeeping.

I have also seen folks write a grant, buy a couple of hives, slap them up on the roof of the school or off on the side of one of the fields, and they only cause trouble because it is a skill to manage bees. It is more complicated to keep bees than it is to keep something like chickens, right? Chickens, keep them safe from foxes, you give them some food, you give them some water, you collect the eggs, they more or less sort themselves out.

Bees, you do need to be knowledgeable about what they're up to. You need to inspect them regularly to make sure that things are going right, that there's no sign of disease, that you need to intervene and treat. So it does require some knowledge and some specialty skill. And that works best when you've got either an established beekeeper or someone who really wants to become the specialist beekeeper who's going to be maintaining those hives. And that can work if the school wants to acquire their own bees, especially if it's a staff member who wants to be the beekeeper.

But it can also work really well to find and partner with that local beekeeper and have them bring their hives to the school. The nice thing about somebody who's got maybe 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 hives in the area is if they move a hive to the school because you want to do a pollinator education display and then it turns out that the bees in that hive are a little bit touchy, they're a little bit mean. Well, if that was the only hive that your school owned, suddenly you're stuck with mean bees.

That beekeeper can go move that hive away and bring in one of their nicer ones partway through the season. And you've still got the display, you've still got all your educational goals met, but they had more flexibility because they were able to move hives and swap things in and out.

And that's going to give you a benefit of harvesting honey, it gives you a better I'll tell you, if there's one thing principals love, it's being given five pounds of honey in a whole bunch of teeny little jars that they can pass out at at any schmoozing event that they go to any fundraising superintendent comes here, would you like a jar of honey that our school just made, you're gonna have you're gonna have a lot of friends one very quickly that way.

Josh (20:26)

That is awesome.

Wow. And so much load will be taken off by partnering instead of trying to take it all on because there is a lot. mean,

All right, so you mentioned the beekeepers and going out and finding them. Is there like a, I'm not sure if there's like a webpage, a group or something like that, Facebook group or something like that where people might be able to just start doing some searches. So they just go on Google. Like how is the best way to go and find local beekeepers?

David (20:55)

Probably your best bet is going to be looking for your local beekeeping association or your local bee club. And no matter where you are in the country, there is probably a bee club or two or three that claims jurisdiction over your county or your town or your region. And so you can find your state beekeeping association. You can also probably find one more locally. So like in our area right here, right? Better Bees in Greenwich, New York, we've got the Southern Adirondack Beekeepers Association, SABA, and they cover the southern Adirondacks, sort of the whole Hudson Valley, the upper Hudson Valley where we live. This region is served by that club. And a lot of the beekeepers are going to those meetings. If you contact them, instead of just contacting somebody who you know has bees, you're more likely to get recommended the ideal candidate for the needs that you are presenting. If you go to the farmer's market or you go to somebody who's got a honey stand at the end of the road and say, hey, can you bring some hives over and bring some honey and do a demo for the kids?

You may not get the best candidate for that, right? They may be willing, but they may not be the most able. So asking at an organization level is probably gonna get you the best candidate identified. wherever you are, I would say just Google your name of your town or your county or your state and bee club or bee association. And you're likely to find a few links and just send an email. You can probably email, know, president at whatever the bee club's name is or whatever their website is and you'll get connected with someone who can say, yeah, you know what, think I know somebody who'd be really keen to set up some hives on school grounds. they've worked with the lawyers and the rigmarole of whether or not it's okay to bring the bees onto the campus and all of that. So there are a lot of folks that you can find just by Googling your area, your municipality and bee club or bee association.

Josh (22:37)

Great, great tip. And talking a little bit outside of just the beehives, because some schools might not be convinced that, do we want to have beehives on campus? There are pollinator -friendly gardens. And I just started learning about this. And there's a website that even breaks it down by your zip code and what color flower and what kind of soil you have and all these different parameters. could literally go on its pollinator .org where I could just plug in all these information of what I have to work with and what I want as a result. And it's going to give me flowers that I can plant. Is that another option if they don't want to have bee hives on campus?

David (23:17)

Yeah, it's a it's a great idea and a great resource because the the flowers that you plant in a pollinator garden are going to help you teach about pollination, you're going to be able to to if you've got any local beehives in the area, even if those bees aren't living on on your property, suddenly they're visiting and they're collecting connector that's going to go turn into honey that that was grown right on the school grounds. And it's not just going to be honeybees either there are a lot of species of pollinator.

Honeybees are not native to North America, or rather the species of honeybee that we keep isn't native to North America. They were introduced when European colonists came over to North America. But there was a species of honeybee native to North and South America that was here for eons and then went extinct. But we found fossil evidence of these bees. So they were here, then they were gone, then a slightly different species came back.

So it's not that there are some horrible invasive species, but they aren't, they aren't, you know, one of the native species of pollinators around here. There are a lot of other native pollinator species that, that you will find visiting your pollinator garden. They are probably not going to be quite as efficient at pollinating crops. There's a few rock stars in the, in the world of native pollinators for certain crops that they're real specialists on, but a honeybee colony, you know, I can move 80 ,000 bees you know, 60 to 80 ,000 bees and one really big hive right out into an apple orchard. And those bees, even if they're slightly less efficient than the the apple orchard specialist bees, they're gonna pollinate a heck of a lot of flowers, because there's just so many of them flying around from flower to flower to flower. The native bees are really cool, really sophisticated, really beautiful, a lot of them are not going to be terribly likely to sting you unless you actually go and harass and bother them. And so they're, you know, it's a safe insect to welcome onto your campus and helping them by providing them food is going to is going to allow them to continue to thrive and provide pollination not just to the food crops that humans eat but to all of the other you know plants that are in your area those plants need to set seeds as well and so if they need to be pollinated by a bee and if a honeybee isn't the best one for it more power to you if you can plant a pollinator garden that will help both honeybees and all of these various native bee species find something to eat.

Josh (25:36)

Nice. And not to mention, I'm kind of obsessed with the bee hotels that you can put in these pollinator gardens. Everyone, please check that out. Google it, bee hotels. And you'll see all kinds of things pop up. So your garden, is typically just flowers and plants and trees and shrubs and all that, can have some little bit of wood architecture in there as well that's very appealing to look at and part of the education.

David (25:42)

Mmm. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, they look cool. And the bees love, you know, moving into the tubes or the the slits in the wood and building their nests there. One thing to keep in mind, though, is some of those are designed to look really cool and that the bees will move in. But the problem is they don't offer any protection from woodpeckers. So you can get one woodpecker that comes through and now they're eating up all the baby bees.

So just make sure you're looking for a design that recommends, that says that it offers some kind of bird protection. That's often gonna have some kind of like a wire mesh covering on the front that the bees can get through, but the woodpeckers can't stick their faces right up against the wood. And that's gonna allow you to keep those baby bees safe between the generations.

Josh (26:41)

Very good tip again. Wow. Thank you, David. So much great value here. And you've turned a topic that I feel like most people will be like, this is going to be boring into a very, very exciting one. Value -packed, tons of information. And so how can people connect if they want to learn more about anything you have to offer or Betterbee? Where's the place to go?

David (26:47)

Yeah, so betterbee.com is our website. We've also got a YouTube channel, you can find us on all kinds of social media too. And we put out educational videos, we put out, you know, educational articles, there's a newsletter that I write for every month that is teaching folks how to be better beekeepers or how to get into beekeeping or talking about the related topics. But betterbee.com you can sign up for classes, you can, if you want to buy any of this beekeeping equipment, if you decide you want to be a beekeeper and you want to start a beekeeping program, then you know, we're a one stop shop, you can get anything that you need for anything from from bees to beekeeping equipment, tools to educational materials. So, you know, swing by better bee .com check us out on YouTube. There's some videos from me our head beekeeper Anne Frey Hey, she hates when I say this, but she's been keeping bees for as long as I've been alive. So she is a wealth of knowledge. And so she does a lot of our YouTube videos, and they're really, really great.

You know, she wants to teach people about how cool bees are and she wants to teach beekeepers how to be better beekeepers So, you know, we've got a lot of resources and it is always our pleasure to educate if you happen to be in our neck of the woods Greenwich, New York, you can always swing swing up by the store and We're always happy to show folks We have an observation hive with glass walls with live bees running around in it right inside the store You can sit there right next to them and take a look at

Josh (28:19)

Yes, I saw that. Very, very cool. Definitely take them up on that opportunity, everyone. And hopefully you got great value and you're going to take something from this and bring it into the new school year. Thank you, David, for everything you're doing and everyone at Betterbee to help support schools and food service in general. You are all remarkable academic food ambassadors. So thank you again. And until next time, everyone, I'm your host, signing off.