Hello and welcome to episode 153 of beekeeping at 5 Apple. This is Lee. I'm so glad you've joined me today. Today is a special episode. I'm going to be sharing an interview with James Lee, a very interesting beekeeper. Before I tell you more about James, I want to say hello from the heartbreaking point of North Carolina Mountain Winter. We're in mid-March and after a couple of weeks of spring-like weather, we are looking at snow and a few nights of 15 degrees Fahrenheit at night. That's going to be hard on bees that already have a lot of brood. I just hope everybody's bees do okay. I was speaking to a wonderful group of beekeepers from the Burke County beekeeping association and where they are, they said that their apple trees are already blooming. Here in the higher mountains, there are peach trees blooming and all of that is going to get hit. So very sad. The land is just covered with daffodils right now at my home and I'll be collecting bouquets tomorrow because after that they're gone at 15 degrees. But anyway, that is the way weather works and we just hope that everything will hang in there. In the meantime, a good way to take your mind off all that is to tune in to this interview. Again, James Lee, I came across his work because I kept seeing these wonderful education offerings from the sustainable beekeepers guild of Michigan. And they were virtual offerings. So I could tune into them, listen to some of the most fascinating beekeepers and some of the most forward researchers for a very reasonable price. The classes were so inexpensive and they were held on zoom. And the part I loved was even if you couldn't attend that particular zoom day, you got the recording to listen to later. So I just really love this and I found that the that the president of the sustainable beekeepers guild of Michigan or SBGMI is James Lee. In addition to doing that, he's also the founder of the Northern Queen Initiative, which is another cool project where a network of beekeepers up in Michigan are getting together to breed and develop and distribute locally adapted might resistant queens that are cut out for Michigan. That's a very cool project. In the show notes, I have all the links to all of James Lee's cool things. So check those out as you listen. And he's also the owner of James Lee's bees, which is his personal apiary, which has a YouTube channel as well as does SBGMI. What caught my eye was a video that James Lee did that was titled something like monitoring to breed, not just to treat. And because of what I'm going through in my backyard this year as I adjust and also look at having to adapt a new kind of hybrid management approach, the video struck me as so reasonable. And that is one of the things that is really wonderful about the organization. They are very open to treatment-free breeding regimens, but are also not dogmatic. James Lee in particular, when I've heard him teach, is very open to whatever you want to do with your bees. That's cool, but here's some cool ideas. It seems to be his approach to teaching, which is such a welcome departure from a lot of the more dogmatic teaching that we run into online. So I interviewed him about some things that were of interest and mainly I want to bring him to you so you can check out these links and check out the offerings of the SBGMI. I think you will be delighted at the amount of education and the speakers that you can get without having to leave your home, because you can leave their home when they have all these bees to take care of. I hope you enjoy. James Lee, welcome. I am so glad to have you today. Thanks. Thank you for having me. It's good to see you. I have been a fan of yours. Not only watching videos from the beekeepers guild YouTube channel. I've attended the the winter conferences, if which have been wonderful and lately have even started watching your YouTube channel. Now I want to hear about you. Well, that's great. Thank you so much. So I am James Lee and I am a beekeeper in Southeast Michigan. The Detroit area and that is where I reside to a city called Romulus near Detroit Metro Airport. I currently serve, if you will, as the president of the Sustainable Beekeepers Guild of Michigan, which can be found at SBGMI.org. I also am a president and founder of the Northern Queen Initiative, which is a 501 C3 nonprofit operating a Queen breeding operation as well as this. In the state of Michigan. Then obviously you discussed my own private or personal YouTube channel. I feel like I can be a little less PC, maybe be a little more point in that and that would be James Lee's bees. SBGMI has a YouTube channel presence as well as James Lee's bees. Did you start Beekeepers Guild of Michigan or did you join lighter? So the Sustainable Beekeepers Guild of Michigan was founded in wow. So 2022 I think is when we kicked it off. Our first speaker was actually an in-person speaker. We invited Sam Compert and very impromptu organized a space at the local library and put out notification to maybe keepers as possible. And maybe 50 folks showed up and he gave a nice talk about his beekeeping practice. And that was also one of the first YouTube channels that are, sorry, one of the first YouTube videos that we recorded and put on the YouTube channel for SBGMI. And that's at SBGMI media. So what SBGMI started out as was a discussion between two beekeepers, one treatment-free beekeeper and the other a conventional treatment style beekeeper. And we were friends and we often would discuss issues that were happening in the treatment-free versus treatment and so on and so forth dialogue. And we came up with at least the base idea of why can't we just have some group or a group in which these kinds of conversations can happen without hostility. And so that was really the birth of it. And by and large was, you know, within the mission of the SBGMI to have a rational dialogue concerning better bread bees, but with treatment-free being a discussion that's not looked at with the stain. But it's considered a viable practice as well as treatment or in the middle reduced treatment all across the spectrum. So it's not this binary construct that typically happen at least in my experience and many other people's experiences and beekeeping club meetings. So that's where it all began. A website went up who we started discussing amongst a group of individuals that had interest in the SBGMI. What that would look like, what membership was shaped like, how much should membership be. But you know, all that to be said fast forward to where we are here in 2026. It's now a 600 member organization. It vacillates between 6 and 700 depending on the time of year. But, you know, we have an international presence. We have members all across the globe. It's more of a virtual educational organization than it is a local bee club. So it started out with the aspiration to be a local bee club and became a virtual educational organization. I think that is so wonderful and I so appreciate being able to attend the educational things online because I don't like to travel. If I can help it. And so it's just wonderful to be able to get the and the speakers you get are phenomenal. You get really good speakers. Yeah, in 2022, I think when a lot of this was being discussed and everything was still largely, well, 2021-22, things were still largely, largely virtual. And clubs were having a hard time making a transition between, you know, in person and virtual meetings because of COVID restrictions. People's hesitancy to meet in public spaces. Regardless of what people's viewpoints were on those practices. Lots of people still had hesitation with meeting in person. So the virtual transition was kind of a natural thing for us. Because it was something we were familiar with doing already based on the median age demographic of the folks involved. But also because it was a necessity. So it was meeting a need. And people were able to access some of the speakers that we decided to start bringing on. The other, you know, the other thing about the SPGMI is that generally off season, sometimes during B season, there's a monthly speaker. And we try to bring in individuals who are doing some sort of research or sharing something new with the B keeping world that would be not just like revealing data or scientific based principles, but practical application for the B keepers who are participating, listening. And those are always free. Like you don't have to be a member of the organization to participate in those. We give individuals the option to sign up for free or make a contribution to the SPGMI, which further helps us bring in those speakers. That also kind of meets the need to like one, you don't have to travel to a conference to see some of these speakers. But two, you don't necessarily have to bankrupt your clubs treasury in order to lie one of these speakers in just for a monthly meeting. It's really wonderful the quality of the speakers has been great and tell me about your involvement in the northern queen initiative. The northern queen initiative came along around the end of 2022 when we were discussing.
how we were going to bring in this queen-rearing component where we saw the transition into better breadbees, like finding an access for beekeepers, particularly in the state of Michigan, and then identifying how we would source those bees. And the Northern Queen Initiative was kind of an answer to what we saw as a dilemma for the state of Michigan because there is no current or at the time with no current organized breeding initiatives. There are beekeepers that meet together, there are groups that rear queens and share genetics, and it's not to say that those things don't exist, but there was no focused and concentrated effort on breeding for might resistance. And so we wanted to kind of bring that to the fore because the general response when treatment free beekeeping or better breadbees that can resist veroa, come up is that you have to start with good stock. And I was left with the question, where do I find that stock? Where can I get it? And there weren't a lot of viable resources. There were some, but there were not a lot of viable resources that didn't cost several thousand dollars for a breeder queen from someone who may or may not actually be testing the stock, but just raising off their survivor stock and that sort of thing. So we were like, let's make it so that we can bring queens to more people. There's better and broader access. And there's a reasonable price attached to those queens as well. That's the very beginning of the Northern Queen Initiative. And now here we are three years later still going pretty strong. They're looking to continue to expand and continue to get these genetics out to other beekeepers, but also to train and educate beekeepers on queen-rearing techniques as well as instrumental and dissemination so that they can capture those genetics when they do have a successful program that produces some might resistance to Acro because that kind of answers the problem of delusion that beekeepers often raise. You know, what do I do if there's other beekeepers around? Or I, you know, there's a migratory operation nearby. Sometimes you may be able to find that one diamond in the rough and you can't really keep it or hold onto it for several years because of the delusion in genetics or maybe the perceived delusion in genetics. And the training in instrumental and dissemination is kind of to help bolster that. Not necessarily replace open mating because we emphasize open mating, right? We want all beekeepers to be able to do this and open mating is something that doesn't require specialized technique. Tell me about how the structure works. Like if I were in Michigan, how would it work? How could I get bees from your group? So the Northern Queen Initiative through a North Central Sair grant, which is a organization that provides funding to sustainable agricultural projects in the North Central region of the United States. There's other regions, but ours, Michigan and the centralized Midwest area are North Central Sair. We were able to write a grant and receive grant funding for a two-year period in which we spend up to $50,000 between those two years. So 25,000 each year to kind of build the program to make Queen's accessible, but also the trained beekeepers and techniques that will provide these tested and embedded stocks. But we also built the Queen portal, which is its home is with the SBGMI. And part of the grant was to provide that market for beekeepers who are lesser known. Like, I mean, who knows who James Lee is, right? Like, or who knows who Matt Coby was or Richard Anderson or some of the other individuals that are participating in the project. And on a broader scale, these are not associated with might resistance breeding. So the purpose was to demonstrate that local beekeeping associations or clubs can kind of harness the same visibility that an organization like the SBGMI has. And then give that access to the broader network through that platform so that they can make it a viable and I guess sustainable practice to sell Queen's so they are incentivized to continue to produce those Queen's. Because let's face it, if you're making Queen's, there's labor and time involved. And then there's also financial involvement in raising Queen's. So we created the Queen portal so beekeepers could go log in. They can find out which one of the producers had Queen's available. What kind of Queen's they had? What were the testing procedures? You know, for lack of a better word, what kind of pedigree are we talking about when it comes to purchasing those Queen's? And so if one didn't have Queen's and another did, there was always some sort of availability. So beekeepers could just go to the website. They could log in. They could find out who's got stock or they could get an email reminder. They could make their purchase and they can reasonably plan their operational Queen needs. I think that is so wonderful. And in our local club, we have noticed such an increase in survival once we've had a big increase in people getting their Queen's just from each other, not necessarily even highly selected, but just getting them from our area has really increased our club's survival rates. And we try to actively discourage, you know, if they can, bringing in package bees from just random places to try to improve that. On your YouTube channel, you talk about your own work. And if you would give me a quick overview of, you know, where did you start out? Did you start out as fully treatment-free and where you've ended up and what your thoughts on are of those two things? Because you're right that there's such a polarization. There seems to be a lot of folks who are just like, it's this date. So therefore, you treat, you know, and then there's a lot of folks who are, I want to keep my bees naturally. I don't want to touch them. I know on this podcast, I really try to go down the middle with really your message about monitor and make smart choices and then bring in good genetics and you may have a very low treatment need. And that's what I encourage. But I want to hear about your personal beekeeping journey. Well, I guess because I'm associating with the Northern Queen Initiative and the Sustainable Beekeepers Guild, like a lot of that message kind of bleeds into that, you know, a lot of my practice and principle kind of bleeds into that. I mean, I'm not the only one who shares these beliefs by any means, you know, with the individuals that are involved. But James Lee's bees, the channel itself. And if you scrolled all the way back to the very first video, I think I can remember was like no member was on a hunking trip and I was sitting in a deer blind and I saw a, what is it called? A murmur of starlings land in front of me. And I had not seen a single deer, not a squirrel, not a chipmunk all day. It was one of the worst sits possible. And so I started recording that video and I put it on the YouTube, right? That was how that channel started was that. And then I don't, I don't know where I got the hunk, but I just started recording things that I was doing with bees. Primarily catching swarms. And so that had really developed into me, dialogging and recording what it was that I was doing in the B yard. Recording my practice and survival because I was keeping these treatment free. I did not have altruistic intention, right? Like my, my intent was to demonstrate that people who said it wasn't possible are, are not necessarily fully informed on what is possible when it comes to treatment free beekeeping. And so I was recording my progress, not just the triumphs, but the trials and survival and demonstrating that these colonies were still alive in the spring and not just swarms that moved in. So all of that to say is, you know, my channel kind of progressed over the years. I still record myself doing things, but also discussing what I'm learning, what I'm applying. As you'd mentioned, like I've come to a point where I'm still demonstrating some of these things, but I've taken a reduced treatment approach versus the fully treatment free approach. And that is out of principle more so than it is desire. So the point is this C and show that you can take this middle road and still be successful without a full compromise of the economics in your own a theory. I can have a system that allows for me to deal with those that, you know, maybe exceed a specific threshold that I have set and then those that who are showing their ability to resist Varroa, identifying that I can monitor for success and I can monitor for might resistance and make that monitoring method, whichever one I'm using, a selection tool instead of a treatment tool. So it allows me to make decisions about who to keep around and who I should continue to breed from, whether it be a split or a graft or, you know, instrumental insemination, whatever those tactics are, I can make better informed assistance because I have these consistent monitoring techniques in place. That is something that I want to draw attention to because that is one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on the podcast because you have a video in YouTube that I believe that titles something like monitoring to breed, not just to treat and it grabbed me because it was that wonderful middle road where you are all about getting the data of what is going on in the bees, but also leaving what you do about it open because you are looking for the the colonies that can manage their own mites. But then if they're not managing, If you are monitoring, you have options at that point of what to do.
And that is the juncture I find myself in my B yard. As listeners know, my situation has really changed. I've gone from a completely isolated B yard to a quite populated in B's neighborhood. And that has really affected my ABRY, which in since 2010 has been able to be completely treatment free. And I am looking at in order to keep my B's in the best shape that I can and to not have losses like I had this winter, I believe I'm going to have to adapt that hybrid very low treatment where I am looking for the lines that are managing the mites in order to breed from, but to salvage many of the colonies that are not able to do it of using the organic treatments and then re-queaning with the genetics from my good breeders. So when I saw that video, you really put it into words the thing I was looking for. It came at the right time, so I'm very appreciative. Yeah, well, I'm glad that it was helpful to you. I mean, what you're describing is kind of one of the circumstances that, you know, all these efforts to the B Guild and the Queen Initiative and my own personal efforts really is trying to get at the general treatment free, live and let die message is that the treatment free colony can survive and resist borough on its own because the B has the capacity to do this. So you don't know, I wouldn't argue against that. No, I don't know a whole lot of B keepers that would argue against that, at least within the initiatives and the B Guild. But the fact is that under the circumstances in which you may present yourself as in an isolated area, your colonies may not have sufficient might pressure to fully demonstrate resistance. So the treatment free B keep very well may not have to replace colonies in those circumstances and they may very well be selecting certain stocks that could resist borough up into a point. But you don't know until the pressure arrives and you also don't know until you're actually monitoring again, whichever capacity you're choosing for monitoring, you don't know what your colonies are capable of until you're actually applying that. Survival of the fitness is going to win out the quickest from point A to point B every time. So if you do these colonies and you're going to gain colonies, but if I can step in there and assist in the selection process, I can maybe stave off loss, which is what treatment aims to do or I can increase survival, which is what treatments seeks to do. So in either of these spectrums, we're taking an active participation in the matter. That's why I say not lazy, just better B's, right? So I did let my colonies live and let die for several years and I think that that might have helped a lot of my circumstances with my own stock because I'm not completely isolated. I'm not completely crowded, but I would say there's pressure from other B keepers in the area, but having had a few years where the colonies were self-selecting has helped centralize some of those genetics. That might put you in a good position as well with your survivors, stock those colonies that did make it without the treatments are going to be a good building block for that approach you want to adapt to. I had hoped that my B's were just doing so great on their resistance. Now I realize a lot of them, they just had not been under enough pressure to decide. So this was a super selection event, this winter and my survivors, I am thrilled with because they went up against high odds and they're doing great. So those will be the backbone, though I will be adding in genetics from Cory and Troy Hall and this to try to bring in some fresh into my yard. So for the listeners, there's many ways to count mites. You can do the alcohol wash, some people do sticky board on it and then there's the harboh assay, which is very in depth and takes a lot of time. And then you mentioned one that I don't know much about the pin killed brood assay. So talk about that. So this last season, I brought in some pin killed brood assay kits for the sustainable beekeepers guild of Michigan and for individuals who are interested in using the tool after a presentation that we shared with Luke Suggard from Germany who also be presenting at the virtual winter conference this year. And he has been kind of using this test kit for a good number of years to select is breeding population. And there's a good body of research that demonstrates that the pin killed brood assay is a good tool to help individuals select for resistant colonies, higher hygienic colonies with just a simple test in the spring and in the fall. The dilemma is that it's not a replacement for some of the more scientific assays, if you will, because it is not as reliable or statistically significant as a brood assay would be. But that's the problem, right? These brood assays and these more complex evaluation tools involve a lot of time and labor that not many people are going to really engage in. So the purpose of the pin killed brood assay is to kind of provide it like a pre-screen or use as a screen as to what colonies you're going to maybe spend a little more time or attention on in the selection process. And it doesn't matter if you had previously treated that colony or not when you perform this test, it's really just focusing on the honey bee workers themselves and their response to dead brood, right, or damaged brood. And all colonies, all honey bees have a hygienic response to some extent. But the ones with the highest degree of hygienic response are what we're looking for with this pin killed brood assay. Talk about what the process is for using this. How are you using it or will use it in your IPA? Also, you know, like I had showed in the video, the demonstration that I used it for what I was looking for was how well does it correlate with might washes as well as with the harbo assay. And if you're not familiar with the harbo assay, if you look up harbo assay on YouTube or do a Google search, there's a lot of material that will come up and even some videos from the sustainable beekeepers guild on how to do that. We have an online course on the SBGMI under the eLearning tab that you can enroll in for free. Watch a video, learn all about the process, answer some questions, get yourself a handy bandy certificate that you've completed the course. And this assay is typically used by a five row of sensitive hygiene in honey bee populations. This made possible by Dr. John Harbo, who's the preeminent researcher who discovered that honey bees could resist borough mites way back when borough first got here to the US. So I wanted to find a way to reduce my dependence on this assay, but also show how they correlate. And if they do correlate, if they compare very well to each other, I can reduce the amount of assays that I have to do by screening out colonies that may or may not correlate. So I used it last season with colonies and it survived the last two years without treatments and that had previously been tested whether they'd be tested by a might wash or Harbo assay for both. And just record where those correlations were occurring. And just from that initial preliminary evaluation and demonstrated that the pink hill brewed assay, like some of the research shows, does correlate highly with the might resistance based on my scoring techniques. So the might wash is in the Harbo assay, where there was a low Harbo assay score, which is bad. High might wash, the pink hill brewed also was low. And then for colonies that demonstrated a high Harbo score, which is good and low might wash, which also is good. The pink hill brewed assay also was high, which is good. And so there was this really interesting correlation. So do I have the might problem for the honey bee industry saw? No. But do I think that we have maybe some insight into how we can make tests more readily available to, you know, Joe Bob, Tumbleweed beekeepers? Yeah, most definitely. And I think that at small scale, you know, I don't have 1000 colonies at small scale. I think I'm demonstrating that these tools, when used in tandem with the other breeding techniques we've learned from all the other greats that have gone before us. It's more approachable for everybody. I'm very aspirational to get a routine of these tests and to try these out and to see which works for me to get the data that I didn't have because I was a lazy beekeeper last year. So in your personal apiary and your personal practice, what is your process of picking out your best breeders? How do you do that? And then once you have them, what do you do from there? How do you reproduce them and redo your ones that don't score well on the test? Complete pandemonium. I wish you could show a picture of what my B yard looks like when I have to do all of these kinds of decision making because I'm always up against it. Yeah. I work a full-time job. I have a fairly large or sizable family. I also have my own private practice as a social worker in a clinic.
So I'm kind of wearing many hats. I do reduce my private practice or the clients that I see during the B season because, you know, I'm just busy here in winter with those clients. People get the seasonal affective disorder, you know. Yeah. And Michigan, you're looking at just a perpetual great cloud for four, five solid months. And I almost just dropped a cuss word thinking about it. And the selection process is that I typically have relied on the harbour assay and survival. So the best way to describe it as simply as I can is that I take the best stock that I have that season and I make queens from it. And then I produce nucleus colonies from that stock. Those colonies go into five frame nucleus, I guess stacks. We call them nuke stacks. I call them nuke stacks. And it essentially is 15 frames, which is almost the same as I'd say maybe a deep and a half worth of bees going into winter. And so I take all of those daughters from that best selected stock from previous tasks. And I let them base winter without treatment. I'd see 90% of the time I have not run any monitoring on those colonies because winter survival is the first selection process for me. So those nucleus colonies have to face winter without any intervention. And then in the spring, they are moved into full size colonies and into a production setting where they're making bees brewed and honey. And I allow them to run under the same style that most beekeepers are going to run their bees and monitor them throughout the course of the summer. And then using these tests decide who's going to be selected for further or final testing to go to that breeder track, if you will. And so there's a lot of nuance involved here because if I don't have any breeder stock, then I have to make decisions based on the stock I do have available. But if I already have existing breeder stock, it gives me a lot more wiggle room with those nuke stacks and what I'm going to do with them. Now we're going to just say, let's imagine I have the breeder stock selected already. Those colonies are also running under production style. And they get retested. And so the reason I'm retesting and I'm not suggesting that everybody retests, but the reason that I'm retesting is because I'm trying to validate resistance and longevity of queens and not just these single snapshots or single year examples that we see somebody say my colony survives. So therefore they're resistant. Well, we talked about that a little bit ago. Like your experience is, you know, like if the Mike pressure went up, that it may not have been resistant mechanisms that could have just been resistant. So how do we eliminate that variable? And so that's what I'm doing with those production colonies. And so I identify which ones are the best and then I take those colonies and I move them into a mating yard. It's a single, a single yard where I put the best stock, which is also the same yard where I would bring in virgin queens that are in mating nukes and I would get those colonies made within the same yard because my philosophy is the drone comets are going to be at their best within the yard with the best colonies that I don't have to worry about this. Some flying 10 miles to find this random drone congregation area. Some queens might do that. Obviously, I'm not 100% effective. It might resistant queens in this style. But I'm moderately effective maybe to the tune of 80% are coming back and demonstrating these resistant characteristics. So my theory is that they're breeding within the same yard as these drone mother colonies because I'm concentrating all the genetics in the same yard. And so it's a constant rotation. It helps if you have more than one yard. But if you only have one yard, it's still a similar principle. You're going to continue to concentrate the best genetics in that yard and negatively select the ones that don't have the good genetics. And whether you remove those or you sell them to an unwitting newcomer, they might just kill them anyways and just kind of how it goes sometimes in your first year. Maybe they don't care about might resistant genetics and they just want to get bees. That's okay. Or you re-queen those colonies that are in that yard with better selected stock and you try to remove the negative selected stock as best as possible. So it's this constant cycle of rotation of good and bad and removing what's bad and adding what's good. And now to the side of welfare or rescue treatment. And an apiary that has colonies that have reached a certain threshold, let's say of my count, I have started using treatments in those colonies where it's too late to do anything mechanistically or mechanically. So that would be integrated pest management. So if I can't do a brood break because it's August or I can't re-queen because it's August and you're not really going to have a successful mating in time to make winter bees here in Michigan, I may very well have to issue a rescue treatment in that colony. But monitoring each month, May, June and July will give me a better idea of what that colony's trend line is, were they're headed or were I may need to intervene. And if I've got a 4% count in June, I can reasonably predict that it's going to go up 5, 6% in July or it could go down because when honeybees engage in hygienic behavior or might resistant behavior, that typically is off low. So at the end of July, I might have a better picture, right? The bees may bring that count down and they would do that on their own or they won't. But I won't know until I monitor. So right again, you have to be monitoring consistently across each month and establishing the baseline, doing it at similar times each month, similar brood frames each month, and then having this consistent pattern to make these decisions. So for me, 5% by August, at the end of August, at their infestation levels at 5%, I'm generally okay with that. That's not too high because we have less brood and more bees at that time and we're going to have less broa in the brood. They're going to be more out on the bees so your counts are going to be a little bit inflated. But if I have a 5% count in May and June is usually a red flag so that colony needs to be requeened or it needs to be split or treated. It makes sense and really what you're doing is the new plan for my apiary. Well let me ask you this, are you trying to do any type of drone saturation around your mating yard? So it would be cool if I could put like a little slide up here, right? So the city of Rhymenilus is shaped like a square. I call it a square donut because again, if you've ever been to Michigan and Detroit in particular, you fly into Detroit Metro Airport and when you land in Detroit Metro Airport, you are not in Detroit. The only reason you are in Detroit is because they actually have a Detroit zip code. So fun fact for the listeners. It has a Detroit zip code because of the tax arrangement that happened when they built the airport, so on and so forth. But I'll spare you the rest of the trivia. Rhymenilus is the city surrounding the airport. So that's the donut. And on each corner of the city, so you imagine the square, on each corner of the city I have had colonies and apiaries established for the last five, six years. In those apiaries, I have saturated my best stocks as best as possible with a centralized mating yard. It's completely anecdotal, so don't develop doctrine around this. But what I discovered was that again, the concentration of the resistance genetics were in the yard that I focused mating and drone mother stock in. The colonies that were on the periphery, like in other apiaries, did not necessarily demonstrate a higher degree of resistance or low michouse. They actually trended upward, which was telling me that the majority of the mating was not occurring in this drone saturation ideology. But again, we're not talking to 1000 colonies, but I am the largest beekeeper in the city. So I do know that I have a little bit more control over the drones that my neighbors would. So you would think you would see this, you would see this saturation impact those outmiring apiaries. It didn't. And that's what's kind of led into what I just was discussing, like centralizing everything in that central mating yard, concentrate all the best genetics there and bring your mating nukes to that apiary. And there's data and there's research that actually supports this. Again, I don't have any original ideas. I say this all the time. I'm not humble enough for original ideas. God won't give them to me. I have to give credit to researchers and other programs that have shown this. And I just kind of have gone along and pulled these bits and pieces. And lots of conversations with my friend Matt Covey, who's a biologist, an educator and sometimes my argument is that I'm not a big fan of the way I'm doing it.
because he makes me think harder, think better. And it's always good to have that kind of contrast when you're thinking through things. So that saturation model would work. Like if you look at page late law, they've demonstrated this and they've discussed this. And far greater scientific detail than I could ever fathom. But for beekeepers who don't have the capacity to run a thousand highs with drone mother colonies, it's just not feasible for us. And that's what's made breeding for resistance or selecting for might resistance is such a difficult topic in bee clubs in small scale situations. It's just not possible. You don't have enough bees. Well, you know, the data says otherwise. And I feel like what I've done has demonstrated that and some of the education that we've been putting out through the big yield and the NQI has demonstrated that. And guard Otis, Dr. Otis from the University of Guelph, will also be at the virtual winter conference. He'll be presenting and discussing drone congregation areas and some of these ideas that we're discussing from his studies on African ice honey bees over the last 30, 40 years. So really good stuff. I won't give away too much of it. But yeah, this talk that we're having will come out after the conference. The drone saturation has been of interest to me because that's one thing I have wondered, you know, being this is my second year in my current situation. Did the change in the drones have an effect on my bees as well? So my coping mechanism for this coming year is in the Appalachians here around where in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we have these high mountains and a lot of skinny valleys. And so I've read some of the European material about queen mating and found an isolated area that is near the outlet of where a friend of mine who's very actively working on my resistant genetics as well. And so I have found a farm that's going to let me put my mating yard there in hopes to catch her drones and go from there. So yeah. Yeah, drones definitely play a big role in the equation because they're carrying their mother's genetics. So, you know, I did bring in stock that was previously might resistant at the very beginning. And I was like 2022 when I first started bringing in stock from outside that wasn't mine. And reluctantly, you know, I was pressured by a friend and maybe not super pressured, but, you know, he just kept saying you should do this. You should do this. So we brought in some of Corey Stevens queens. And those queens said, you know, they were, they were gentle and they were very, very gentle. They were gentle and calm as could be. And they were very resistant. I think I started with like seven versions that were made into local stock. And then I allowed those colonies to follow the model that I've been discussing and I just let them run for production. And for three years, they scored the same on these tests. They continue to demonstrate might resistance. And they were putting out drones. And I was making sure that they had drone frames and that I was increasing the drones in the area. So I benefited quite a bit from those genetics as well. But it further emphasized that having those colonies in the same yard that I was mating meant that those queens from my stock didn't have to go very far to mate with those drones that have been contributing to the local pool. As we wrap this up, are there anything that you learned in particular in the last couple of years of beekeeping that you're going to, you're like, this, I'm going to add this to my repertoire this year in 2026. I'd say outside of the pink killed brood assay, I may very well increase the amount of production colonies that I'm going to run as far as honey and nuke production is concerned. So I can put more of these queens that I'm making into those. But the pink killed brood is the biggest one. And the reason is is because I'm, if I have more colonies and I've got queens that are, you know, older breeders that are aging and reaching this point where they may trans, you know, year three and year four detrimental because just on average, queens are not typically living much longer than that. I have had some that have lived longer, but those are anomalies in comparison. So it means that I need to start thinking about next year's breeders well in advance. And so I would, I need to be producing daughter stock off of those tested stocks. Well, I'm also adding instrumental insemination, at least in the part that trying to get competent with it and practice with it and improve my abilities with that through routine practice. So that way, again, can concentrate those genetics when I do find them and produce breeders that can be shared with others to emphasize local stock. You want to be breeding for within your own and not having to bring in other bees and other genetics and that's the goal. I don't want to be a hypocrite and say it and not do it. So I want to be able to remain consistent with that message. Well, I am going to be looking very forward to what I see in your upcoming YouTube's and everything. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to introduce yourself to the listeners of beekeeping at Five Apple and they can look you up. I'll put all your your links in the show notes and I thank you so much for coming on tonight. Yeah, YouTube. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we were able to finally catch up. So I hope you enjoyed that talk with James Lee and check out all the educational offerings you will find on SGBMI. The links for that organization as well as James Lee's YouTube channel and the Northern Queen Initiative are all in the show notes. In particular, when you, if you join the organization, it's very inexpensive and anyone can join anywhere. You get access to their back archives of videos and virtual winter conferences. The winter conference just happened last weekend. I haven't even gone through the whole video, but the speakers were great and the bits that I did get to tune into were wonderful. I'll talk more about that later. I'm wishing you all a great week. I hope it's going well. As always, I love to hear from you guys.
[email protected] and this whole podcast is brought to you by the sustaining patrons over at patreon.com/fiveapple. And I would sure appreciate your support. It really makes a difference. Thank you and have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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