So complete this saying: Bibbity Bobbity…..? Not Boo!…

BEE!

Bibbity Bobbity BEE! Yeah! The reason I’m saying ! Bibbity Bobbity BEE is this week is pollinator week. And to celebrate pollinator week, I am interviewing a beekeeper. Sam is from Best Bees. I mentioned in my last episode that I have a couple of honeybee hives in my yard and I love them. And my neighbors love them because different houses around the neighborhood have all these types of fruit trees and they’re getting more fruit. Plus my blueberry bushes are booming.

Listen to how local businesses and developers are incorporating honeybees into their plans!

Honey Bee Swarm Links:

• Best Bees
• Norfolk County Beekeepers Association – Swarm Removal

From the city of presidents, it’s the all about Quincy podcast. This is your host, John Melley. Join me as we explore the history, hidden gems and highlight the businesses with great stories that I’ll tell the tale why Quincy, Massachusetts is a great place to live. Hey, there it’s Jon. Thanks for joining me today. I do appreciate it. Welcome to episode three of the All About Quincy podcast. First thing I want to do is thank folks for their kind comments about my interview with Tim K hill from

Speaker 2: Last week. Alicia, Janet, thanks for reaching out on Facebook and giving me a thumbs up or a nice comment about that episode. I really do appreciate it.

Speaker 1: A lot of people don’t know a lot about the honeybee.

Speaker 2: So I thought that it would be a good thing to do, to have a beekeeper on and talk about it. So I mentioned a couple of things in my interview with Sam from best bees. And I want to direct you to the show notes for this episode. It’s episode three at all, about Quincy podcast.com. And when you go there for this episode, you can see a couple of videos. One video is of the beekeeper, literally putting her bare hand into a cluster of honeybees that have swarmed and landed in one of the bushes in my yard. The second video is that beekeeper capturing the queen and putting it in a temporary hive. And I’m literally standing in my yard in jeans and a t-shirt with my iPad, recording the swarm, flying around me and I was perfectly safe and it was so cool to see. So if you want to see those videos go to all about Quincy podcast.com, episode three and click on the show notes and you’ll be able to see it. We also have some other links there for anybody who’s interested in learning more about bees. This is a little longer

Speaker 1: Than the other episode. So let’s just head on over to millions. You were saying, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, my guest today is Sam Jennings, who is the sales

Speaker 2: Manager and beekeeper at the best bees company in Boston, buh, buh, buh, buh. How are you, Sam?

Speaker 4: I’m good, John. Thanks for having me. And you deal with honeybees, not bumblebees,

Speaker 2: Cause that way we wouldn’t say the best bees company of the bumblebees in Boston. No,

Speaker 4: We, we primarily work with honeybees. but we all do. We do it for all bees too. So, you know, honeybees are an indicator species that we’re able to use for research purposes to measure the health of the native pollinator species around our beehives.

Speaker 2: Now, folks listening to the show may be wondering, why am I talking about bees Well, I have to tell everybody that I have a couple of honeybee hives that Sam’s company, the best bees company helps manage. And they tend to every month. And, we get honey from, and Sam is involved with some beekeeping in Quincy. We’re going to talk about all kinds of things, but we’re going to be talking about the importance of honey bees and pollinators because this is pollinator week in June. we celebrate pollinator week and I have had an interest in honeybees that goes back to my childhood. I think my parents or an aunt gave me a national geographic subscription for kids. And along with that subscription came like two or three hardcover books. And one of those books, Sam was on honeybees and from very good. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And from an early age have always been fascinated by honeybees. And then when I was a kid, my parents had their house painted by a guy by the name of Mr. Thomas. And Mr. Thomas also kept bees. And one day he came to finish up painting and he brought this gigantic jar of honey and it was a really nice gift and it was delicious. And I was just fascinated about honey bees and beekeeping. And I don’t keep these cause I got enough on my plate. And I think my wife would be like, you’re going to

Speaker 5: Do what now. But she, she

Speaker 2: Read an article in Boston magazine, I think a number of years ago. And she said, oh, you might be interested in this. And I said, oh, this is kind of cool. And it was one of those things where I said to myself, Sam, I said, if I’m still thinking about this a year from now, I’ll look into it some more. And so I did, and I’ve been a client of yours ever since. I know I’m talking a lot, but I love the honey bees. They’re very relaxing. And, and your son done

Speaker 4: Quite well, haven’t they in Quincy You’ve had it. You’ve had a hive go three years and you’ve got one hive now that’s on year two, right

Speaker 2: Yep. That’s correct. Yep. We had a it’s server. That’s a question that I get asked all the time and is when the winter comes, people say, where do the honeybees go And I say, they are right there in that box. So incredible. And people are amazed by the explain to people why honeybees stay in their hive over the winter and that whole process.

Speaker 4: I know it’s crazy to imagine them, you know, finding a way to stay warm on these cold, new England winter nights. But, you know, with best bees, we don’t move the hives down south. Some beekeeping operations may be, you know, moving the bees down to Florida. There’s Snopes snowbirds that go down there and, you know, collect the forage and, produce more bees down there to extend the season. But, you know, at best bees, we were about establishing the hives on site to survive the winters year round, making sure they have enough resources and essentially what they do in the hive over winter is they cluster together around their queen. There’s one queen and then a bunch of worker bees and every beehive. And they, they use their wings, they beat their wings, creating friction, creating warmth and heat for the hive, in this ball of bees, basically that’s just in the center of the beehive.

Speaker 4: You know, they’re not really fully hibernated. They do have a reduced metabolic rate at that point. But, you know, if it warms up on a warm day, about 50, 55 degrees, you’ll see them come out the door and, you know, use the bathroom, do a cleansing flight as we like to say. but you know, they go right back in at nighttime and, and, and cluster together. And they, they move through the hive is a ball actually to access their honey stores over winter. And, early March, sometimes late February, the queen begins to start laying her eggs again, you know, preparing a new batch of worker bees for the spring season. And from there, the colony will grow in time with the early nectar flows here in new England. It’s really

Speaker 2: Always fascinating when that starts to happen in late winter, early spring, as you were saying that there might be some snow still on the ground and you do you see these bees flying out and then you’ll say like these little orange droplets in the snow and a bee poop. Yeah. And I’ll have it on my car. And sometimes I’ll see it on my car as I’m going to go drive somewhere. And I may not have noticed that there they’ve been out, but I’ll see that and I’ll go, oh, they made it through the winter or they leased. They’ve made it this far. One of the questions that I, yeah, I get that question all the time. Where do they go in the winter time And their honeybees are different from a lot of other bees species in that they collect extra honey so that they do make it over the winter. Am I correct

Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s right. There’s over 20,000 different species of bees. Some of them are solitary bees, bumblebees Mason bees. And they don’t always, you know, live the same type of life as a honeybee would in the sense of, they don’t have a large colony and hive where their instinct is to collect, a surplus of resources. So they just operate a little bit differently. Overwintering in different types of social environments. Sometimes all of the Queens will, you know, return to the same location to cluster together for winter and then disperse back and start new small little nests. But there are so many different bees and, it’s always great to see different types of bees species because it does indicate, you know, that your area is, healthy enough to sustain different types of pollinator populations. Essentially. They’ve also, you know, all these different bees have evolved over time in step with plants. And so each of them has a different length tongue. So certain bees have really long length, length, tongues, or medium lengths, shorter length tongues. And this allows them to forage from different flowers. So not every bee species will like even forage from the same set of flowers. And they, you know, they use different methods to get that nectar, get that pollen from flower. Oh, that’s

Speaker 2: Interesting. I didn’t know that one comment. I get a lot when I’ll be out. I, I think we talked before we started recording this program. I have a couple of dogs. You have a dog and when I’ll be out walking the dog, somebody else will say, oh, how are the bees Or if they don’t know that I have bees, I’ll talk about the bees to somebody. And a comment I get a lot is, oh, you know how you can get rid of those. And yeah. And I’m saying, no, I don’t want to get rid of the honeybees because they, this is on purpose. They’re there in my yard on purpose.

Speaker 5: The honeybee

Speaker 2: Really isn’t interested in people. It’s, they’re interested in, they’re interested in flowers and water. that’s also cool. I have a little bird bath and sometimes they’ll cluster around the edge of a bird bath on a hot data and you can see them drinking and flying back to the high with it. It’s cool. but you know, the bees don’t sit there and are flying around and go, oh, look, there’s a person. Let’s go get it. unless you’re like diving into their hive and really disturbing them, or you’re SWAT nap them while they’re trying to do their thing, they don’t care about us. Right Yeah, that’s right.

Speaker 4: Yeah. They’re, they’re completely, non-aggressive, you know, honeybees, especially, but even all of the other native bee species, including like yellow jackets and wasps, for the most part, when you encounter them in the wild they’re foraging, they’re searching for food, whatever that may be, you know, honeybees are looking for flowers. they typically know exactly where they’re going in the hive. They communicate to each other where the nearest nectar and pollen sources are. So those worker bees are following these predetermined flight paths, right to the source. So they’re busy, you know, they’re making trips back and forth and they’re not concerned about you. If they bump into you, they keep it moving. A lot of gardeners will know this, you know, as they’re gardening, there’s going to be bees on the flowers, bees in your plants. And, you can move them, brush them aside, pick the flowers, shake them off the bees.

Speaker 4: Aren’t going to get disturbed by even that type of activity. It really comes down to defending the hive itself, defending their, their nest and their queen. So when those nests and those hives get disturbed, that’s when bees do exhibit their defensiveness and they don’t do so independently, collectively they start to release their defense pheromones, which really trigger that defensive response. And it’s limited to the hive itself. So, you know, the best thing to do when you see a nest is to take a minute to reconsider, you know, disturbing it, it’s not going to be something that, you know, would be done quickly and even consider whether or not the bees are any nuisance to you. or if they’ve just found a great home because, you know, the native bees especially are dying and anywhere they can find a home is just a great success story. We want to keep those bees, you know, where they are and help to repopulate their populations in areas all across the country. So

Speaker 2: You bring up a couple of interesting points that I wanted to talk about since they are dying. And let’s say, somebody says, oh, I’ve got bees in a crack in my wall. What should they do You know, should they call somebody to have it removed Should they buy some poison and, and squirt it into the wall I mean, what’s a good ecological thing for people to do when they find something like that, where, you know, B doesn’t care. If it’s a house or a tree, it just says, Hey, this looks like a good spot.

Speaker 4: Right Yeah. Well, I would definitely advise not to use any sort of like pesticides it’s, you know, it’s bad for the bees, of course, but it’s, it’s gonna, it’s, you’re, you’re not taking care of the situation, you know, bees and in walls. it’s pretty rare, but it can happen, especially with like old sheds and things like that. And depending on your situation, it can be pretty tricky to access them. So there’s always, you know, the local beekeeping association, there’s one for every county, you know, there’s a statewide directory. Anyone in the country can look them up and contact their local beekeepers if they have some honeybees to relocate. But when they’re in the walls, you know, it can involve needing, you know, to like open up the walls and things like that. And, you know, you want to remove everything. You don’t want a bunch of dead bees running in your walls, even if you do want them removed at all costs. And you’re, you’re willing to do pesticides, it’s still probably not a good solution. So we would always advise to relocate them and, do so in a way that involves a professional beekeeper or local beekeeper so that you or your contractors and, you know, getting to knee deep in a beehive inside of your house,

Speaker 5: cause

Speaker 4: There’s ways to safely do so. And then it’s kind of a fascinating experience. Maybe, you know, your local beekeeper can help you get it set up in your backyard and in an actual beehive, giving them a proper home. but you know, there’s also other types of bees out there that tend to gravitate towards wooden structures. If you’re familiar with like the, the Mason bees or the, carpenter bees. Yeah. Any, yeah. Especially coastal homes, untreated wood, they really love stuff. And, one thing you can do is obviously plug up the old holes, but you know, also spray them with some just natural peppermint oil and soapy water to keep the bees out. You can do that during the day and they’ll go find a new home or, you know, plug up the holes. But you know, untreated wood is what they like. So if you keep that painted or you keep it sealed, they’re not going to be as likely to take up shop in your house or in your shingles, peppermint oil and soapy water. Yeah. There really

Speaker 2: Is. You know, you don’t have to go and get the stuff that I want to talk about weed killers and all that kind of stuff in a moment. But the other thing I wanted to talk about, which kind of has to do with the safety of honeybees and all of that one point, I take my lawnmower and go right up in front of the two beehives. I have two of them. And you know, if I stood there and held the lawnmower in front of the hives, they’d probably get aggravated, but they don’t care. I’ll just walk right through them as they’re flying in and out of the hive, Hey, don’t bother me. I’m not bothering them. And it’s people think I’m nuts, but like you said, here, they’re on a mission.

Speaker 4: Exactly. That’s how bees work. You know, you, you going by with the lawn mower, you know, some guard bees might take notice, but they’re not going to have that response. Cause like I said, they have to release their pheromones. So you really have to like disturb the hive itself, open it up. And then they start to release their firearm owns and exhibit that defensiveness. But, it typically takes some time and you know, you coming by with the lawnmowers, they’re probably familiar. They probably know you and are familiar with that sound. And they know it’s not a threat at this point. Right.

Speaker 2: That is, that’s very true. The other thing is, is now we’re in prime swarm season, correct

Speaker 4: Yes we are. Yeah. And

Speaker 2: I remember I’ve had the swarm a number of times the first time it ever happened.

Speaker 5: I didn’t know what was going

Speaker 2: On. I was like, oh my God, what have I done Because it was like this clone of bees in the yard and it was, they were just, they filled the yard at any rate. We had another swarm where we have two colonies and that’s why we have two. We had, the beekeeper come cause I called and I said, Hey, look, they’ve swarmed. And they’ve clustered on this Bush. That’s really low. We can capture them. And she came and with her bare hand, stuck her hand in the cluster of bees and just pulled out a handful of the bees and nothing happened. And I thought, oh my gosh, look at this. And then she, captured the queen and shook a bunch of them into this, portable hive and trimmed these little branches off and shook them all in. And as the queen was moving from the Bush into the portable hive, the whole yard just filled up again with the swarm. And I was standing there in a t-shirt and jeans and my iPad recording this, we’re making a video of it and I’m standing there in just in this swarm and you know, nothing happened

Speaker 3: And it, people look at it and

Speaker 2: They go, weren’t you scared And I said, no, because, and you explain why swarms aren’t anything to be afraid of.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So for the listeners, a swarm is actually a normal thing that these do. It’s a, it’s how we refer to a specific behavior. When, you know, the bees produce such a large population that the queen no longer has an ability to lay eggs. You know, it’s kind of their natural instinct to swarm. So at some point in the season, typically, you know, may and June, the queen decides it’s time for her to leave the hive and go find a new home. So she’ll release a specific pheromone that communicates to the bees that this is happening. Half of the population will eat as much honey as they can to prepare for the journey. And half of that population of worker bees will leave with the old queen. And, when they leave the hive, it’s a lot of activity. You know, it’s like a big amount of bees kind of flying through the sky altogether.

Speaker 4: they don’t go very far, typically stay within the property and, perch up on a tree branch like you described and like a cluster of bees. so they kind of stopped flying as much and they become this big clump of bees that is just dangling from your tree. And they’re there at this time. They’re completely docile. So once they’ve decided to swarm, they’ve left the hive, they no longer have a home to defend and they don’t exhibit any defensiveness. They don’t release defense pheromones. And like you saw with the beekeeper, we just walk right up to the hive or the swarm cluster. And we just grab those bees and put them into a container that we, you know, established into a new beehive. And essentially if you can grab the queen and the first clump and get her into the box, if you can’t access the remain, the remainder of the swarm, they’ll actually follow the center of their queen right into the box. And so you’ll see them actually walking in like a line going right inside of where we’ve, we’ve moved to the new queen. It’s

Speaker 2: Fascinating to watch because she got the queen into the box. There was this big cloud of bees. And then she said, okay, I’m just gonna leave this box here and go look at the hive that the group that was left behind and within 10, 15 minutes, all of them just coalesced into that travel hive, if you will. And it was fascinating. It was like, they all suck themselves into this box.

Speaker 5: Yeah. They were so happy

Speaker 4: To find a new home. Yeah, it was great. It was a good spot for them because typically they don’t find a great home. They’ll typically die or get eaten by some birds or, you know, they’ll maybe find a tree, but it’s not great for overwintering. So it’s always good to find a new home. And, you know, back in the hive that the queen left behind, she’s got half of the worker bees are, and they’re developing new Queens, which will then hatch in the next few dates. And those Queens that hatch actually will, will battle for control of the hive. And the surviving queen, you know, will then take over by, you know, going on a mating flight and then returning to the hive to, you know, start a new, you know, lineage, so to speak. So as beekeepers, we try to mitigate this behavior by taking what we call like artificial swarms or splits from the hive and removing some of the brood frames and kept queen cells to prevent the queen from thinking that she needs to leave, you know, making sure that she feels like she can stick, stick around. And so, you know, inevitably over the years, you know, it’s, it’s possible that your hive will swarm, but it’s actually a really good sign. And, you know, it’s a good thing in healthy behavior for the bees, but of course, you know, urban beekeeping being our specialty, we want to, you know, prevent swarms from, you know, happening as much as possible just to cut down on the new sense of just, you know, bees ending up in places where bees were not expected. Yeah. You see

Speaker 2: Him like people just cars in a parking lot, somewhere they’re land on the door handle or something. And it’s like, oh my gosh. But yeah, it’s really, they’re really, really, I can attest they’re harmless at that. Definitely.

Speaker 4: And they’re fascinating too. So if anyone ever sees them check out those beekeeping associations, I mentioned local beekeepers are always looking to catch swarms in their area. bees are limited resource. We don’t always have, you know, bees for everyone every season. So anytime we can access new colonies, like swarm beekeepers are, are looking for that. So, so contact the local beekeeping association, if you do come across a swarm, send them a picture and let them know where it is and they’ll be right out to collect it.

Speaker 5: And best bees does that too. And you know, I’m going

Speaker 2: To put the contact information for you folks in the show notes. And also I’ll go find some links to those beekeeping association, actually the local one here, because this is the Alabama Quincy podcast. So that actually leads to an, a nice segue about Quincy. And you’ve been involved with a number of installations in Quincy. Talk to us about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4: As you know, Quincy is really going through quite a revitalization. You could say these years as it’s been a cool to see, it seems like more and more people are really excited about the future of Quincy and, and, I’ve seen a lot and of course, environmental impact, and we have to think about habitat. and so with bees and pollinators in general, habitat loss is the number one reason for their decline in health. And we’ve partnered with a local real estate company called Foxrock properties. And they have, office buildings in north Quincy, Quincy center, south Quincy. And they’ve been a big part of the, you know, development there in downtown Quincy. And, what we’re doing is installing beehives on the rooftop, maintaining them and engaging their tenants and really fun educational programs. People get honey from the properties. and we’re also doing research.

Speaker 4: So we collect data from all of the beehives we maintain, including yours strong. Yep. So that visit data helps us to manage the hives, but it also helps us to look at and quantify pollinator health in certain areas. Basically, like I said, they’re indicator species, the native pollinators are difficult to study. They don’t have hives. We can look at their solitary and it’s hard to really keep up with them. So the honeybee health is a really good indicator of the native species health. And we’re looking at a colonies health over the years, as well as diving deep into the data of their nutrition through honey DNA, actually take a small sample of honey from the hives, send it to our lab for genomic analysis. And then we get back a full list of the different plants that the bees forge from to produce that honey.

Speaker 4: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. It’s like the 23 and me of, of honey, you know, we learned, learned a lot about their tie it and, of course, you know, it’s similar to people. A diverse diet does correlate with better bee health and there’s gaps in forage. You know, some places don’t have enough plants maybe in early spring or late fall to sustain healthy colonies of honeybees, which is a good indication that there is also not enough habitat for the native species. So, you know, we’re doing this in Quincy where we’re monitoring, you know, bee health and Quincy and, you know, through our partnerships with companies like Fox rock properties, we can advise on plantings and habitat restoration that will impact all pollinator species. And, you know, being able to measure that over time is really important. So we can actually see the difference in habitat and diet changing in the bees over the, over the years. And, you know, it’s a fun thing. It’s fun thing when you have bees at work, you know, so it’s a cool thing to do and get to have fun, fun bee related events, you know, beehive tours and honey tastings. you know, the honey can be used to create honey ice cream or honey beer. And there’s a lot of fun, fun things that these, properties will do with, with the different companies that have offices

Speaker 2: There. That sounds like fun. I just have to let people know that I have this dog in the background who is snoring. So if you hear little snores, that’s Zoe the wonder dog sleeping in the back of the studio here. It’s a good job. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, you’re talking about, gaps in forage it’s pollinator week. What are some of the things that people listening if they’re interested can do to create a more pollinator friendly environment in general,

Speaker 4: Number one, obviously plantings, anything we can plant to create forage for the bees is great. A really great resource is these are CS for invertebrate conservation. it’s a long name, but the website is xerxes.org. Yeah. There’s just, they’ve really great local guides, for pollinator habitat establishment. you know, you can plant things, that bloom in early spring and late fall, those are really good for bees because that’s typically where we notice the gaps in forage. and then there’s also great guides for things like establishing pollinator Meadows, you know, Meadows of native wildflowers to new England that are blooming year round and providing that food for them year round. So, you know, number one is plantings. Number two, you know, cut back on all of the pesticides. It’s just, it’s tough to see people spraying so much that they may be not needing to check in with your landscapers, if you don’t do it yourself and really check in to see what they’re using and if it’s necessary, or if there are natural alternatives, it really affects the native bees even more than the honeybees where they just don’t have, you know, a whole population to rely on or a queen who can just lay even more eggs and create more bees.

Speaker 4: It’s just, you know, pesticides can wipe out populations.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And I also have to think

Speaker 2: On some level it’s, it’s hurting us. I mean, eventually it gets into the food supply and it makes its way into us and it kind of have to wonder. So do you know, I mentioned, I think it may have been before we were recording, but I’ve actually taken a mixture of vinegar and water or mostly vinegar and just squirted it on, some weeds popping up in the middle of, you know, like crab grass coming up in between some bricks in my walkway or something like that. Or are there some natural things that people can do that are totally benign to pollinators and people and really inexpensive, but very effective. Yeah.

Speaker 4: I mean, what you did is a great option. I think that that, that works really well. You can also put down like a tarp and cover up the area from any sunlight to kill all the plants or weed them yourselves. And, you know, the biggest thing is like when things are in bloom, maybe consider leaving them it’s pollinator week. If you’ve got, you know, weeds that are blooming, you know, they may not look as great to you or you might not want them, but they’re, they’re essential food for bees. So I always say, if you can leave them, that’s great. But if not, you know, try something natural, like you said, or, you know, weed them yourselves and just never, ever spray any sort of pesticide or chemical treatment on flowers in bloom because that’s, you know, that’s a stop for a bee somewhere to, you know, grab a bite to eat. And, you know, you just don’t want to have that, you know, be exposed to the whole colony or, you know, kill the native bee. It’s just, best to leave the weeds or do something like a little more natural. Okay. A lot of people might be thinking, well,

Speaker 2: What’s the big deal on a site Well, we get a lot of our food from these, these pollinators. So it does impact us.

Speaker 4: That’s an entire ecosystem, you know, not only are a hundred over a hundred fruits and vegetables that we eat pollinated by honeybees and other bee species, but know that the thousands of different plants, you know, that, that require pollination, to survive. And, and, you know, these native bees are a part of a big ecosystem and they’re dying. They’re disappearing due to habitat loss from development from people, you know, having just green lawns and removing all the weeds. And it’s just so important that we don’t lose these species and the biodiversity that we have already here in Quincy or in new England, it’s, it’s under threat and we have to really be considerate to why we are landscaping and the ways that we are. And, you know, what are some simple ways that we can have beautiful flowers, but also contribute to the health of our local ecology.

Speaker 2: Sounds great. So I would be remiss if I didn’t let you talk a little bit about what the best bees company does. Why don’t you tell everybody what the best bees company does So the services you provide and if people want to learn more, how they can get in touch with you. Yeah,

Speaker 4: Of course. It’s, you know, the best bees company is a national group of beekeepers. We have beekeepers in 14 cities across the country now, and we provide beekeeping services. It’s really the hands-off approach to having your own beehives, supporting pollinator research and even producing your own honey. So, you know, we’ve designed things to be just all inclusive of everything needed for happy, healthy honeybee colonies, including the beekeepers. So you wouldn’t have to do the work yourself, but you, you know, have your own bees and learn a lot about the process. and like we were saying, we take a real data-driven approach to it. And, you know, view all of the bees as indicator species. We’ve got a sister non-profit research organization called the urban bee lab that actually takes the data that we collect, and analyzes it alongside other data sets with our research partners, helping to advance our mission, to improve the health through research and expand populations.

Speaker 4: But, you know, it’s a cool thing to, and your beehives not only are producing delicious backyard, honey, they’re also, you know, NASA data points helping with, you know, studying the native pollinator species around your area. And, you know, spring is here. We are still installing beehives and areas around the country. So if you are interested, you know, especially in Quincy, we have beehives and, and are doing that all this month. You can get in touch with us at dot com, book an assessment, or give us a call at (617) 445-2322. We are local we’re Boston area based. And, now we would love to have, you know, some more beehives this season, you know, in your, in your backyard or on your rooftop.

Speaker 2: And I have to say, I mean, I’ve had, I don’t even know how long I’ve been a client of yours now, but it’s been at least seven years, I think. And it’s, it’s one of those things that it’s been a lot of fun. And what Sam says is true. If you’re, if you’re looking to do something, to help the environment and also have some fun, but not have to really do a lot yourself, you just kind of give them a spot in your yard and they do it all. And another question I get all the time is how much honey do you get And I said, well, it depends, depends on the weather, depends on a whole bunch of factors. One year I didn’t get any, but you folks provide some anyway, because sometimes that happens, colony can be just a little slow and not really kind of get, established and, and you need to make sure that they have enough food to make it through the winter. Cause that’s the goal. I think you have a program where you’re guaranteed at least a minimum amount of honey. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah. We, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got other hives too, that we maintain in our reserve AP areas. So we provide, you know, every client with five pounds or more of local honey at the end of the year, if they’re calling these don’t produce, you know, it does happen when establishing a new colony because we want to make sure that they have enough resources to get through winter, especially here in new England. but, it’s those subsequent seasons when they make it through winter and then go into spring healthy and a strong population, they really can capitalize on that early nectar flow and produce, you know, quite a bit of honey as you know, I mean,

Speaker 2: Somebody said, how much honey did you get Well, I said, one year I got like 49 pounds on him. And

Speaker 5: He’s like, really I said, yup. Yup.

Speaker 2: So, you know, if you’re looking to do something and it really helps. Oh, and my neighbors love it by the way, Sam, because, well, they love it because not just for the honey, but they have apple trees and pear trees and peach trees and berries and nuts and all around the neighborhood. There’s people with pear trees and apple trees and the guy, I was just talking to my neighbor. He said, my apple tree is absolutely loaded this year. And, and, and so he’s all excited. And so, I mean, it, it, it has effects just beyond your yard. It does good things for the neighborhood. And, if you’re looking for a hands-off thing to do, give Sam a call. What’s the phone number again saying,

Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s the phone number for best bees is 6 1 7 4 4 5 2 3 2 2. And you can also check us [email protected] Sam. I want to thank you for

Speaker 2: Your time today. You’ve been very generous with your time and, thank you so much for sharing some information. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners that you make sure gets out before we end the show Yeah,

Speaker 4: I, I would say, you know, make sure that you’re doing something this pollinator week for the bees, you know, sprinkle some wildflower seeds at least, and, you know, get in touch with best bees, even if it’s just to, you know, keep up with the pollinator research that we’re doing. John, thanks so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to talk about bees on your podcast. I talk about bees all day long as you can imagine, but it’s always great to, to share with a larger audience. And I’d love to give a shout out to, you know, all of the, best bees Quincy clients, who I hope are listening. Thank you guys so much for the support and, John, thank you. Welcome

Speaker 2: Sam. Thank you. And, and good luck with what are all the stuff you have going on for pollinator week

Speaker 4: Yeah. Thank you. It’s a, it’s a busy time of the year Springs. A great time to be beekeeping, but we are busy. So thank you, John. Yeah. And good luck with everything else this spring you’ve got. Yeah. Thank you. Maybe they bothered AB that was really

Speaker 1: Cool. That’s it for this episode next week I think we’re going to have some folks on it from the Quincy historical society, leading up to July 4th independence day, make sure you tune in for that. And if you have an idea for someone who should be a guest on the all about Quincy podcast, go to all about Quincy podcast.com, click on the contact button in the upper right-hand corner and tell us who they are and why you think they should be a guest on the all about Quincy podcast. We want to interview business leaders is storylines, unsung heroes. If you think they should be on this show, we want to hear about it. So go to all about Quincy podcast.com, click on the contact button in the upper right hand corner and send us the email until next week. Thanks for listening. 

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