What do Picasso paintings, bee dance-offs, and a swarm living on a greasy crane have in common? They’re all part of the wonderfully weird world of honey bees and beekeeping!

In this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, we head to San Diego to meet Hilary Kearney of Girl Next Door Honey, who has turned 16 years of beekeeping experience into a creative, full-time business.

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We also explore the unique challenges of keeping bees in San Diego, where year-round brood means year-round Varroa and some colonies can have seriously spicy personalities.

Add in bee news from Texas and Virginia, and you’ve got an episode packed with fascinating facts, laughs, business inspiration, and plenty of reasons to appreciate the incredible little creatures at the heart of beekeeping.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Hillary Kearney: https://girlnextdoorhoney.com/

Get ready to meet your match for Africanized bee expertise: third-generation beekeeper Monica King joins Bee Love Beekeeping host, Eric Bennett, to talk about wrangling "killer bees" in the 110-degree heat of southern Arizona.

Monica shares her beekeeping secrets for night-time hive removals under red lanterns (bees hate white light and love drama). She explains why "hangry" honey bees get meaner during droughts, and reveals her go-to trick for spotting varroa mite infestations by popping open drone brood cells.

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Bonus points for the chicken-and-bee symbiosis system she's engineered on her 14-acre off-grid homestead.

Things get truly wild when Monica breaks out her craziest beekeeping stories — including the time she pulled 18 virgin queens out of a single swarm, and a bizarre cutout where four mated queens were living together in one melted, catacomb-like hive... until the bees ruthlessly picked a winner overnight.

Between water-hauling homestead hacks and gutsy mite-testing tips, this episode is equal parts survival guide and beekeeping soap opera.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Monica King: https://www.monicamking.com/#/

Forget everything you thought you knew about swarm removal!

This episode is a full-on myth-busting session with SoCal's own Bee Man Dan, a rescuer who's handled over 21,000 colonies and trained in Beekeeping the unconventional way: through his Kung Fu school, under Daoist and Buddhist monks.

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The internet gospel says "find the queen, box her, and the rest will follow." Dan says nope. After years of hands-on Swarm Removal, he discovered bees actually chase the brood ("the babies"), not the queen — she just wanders in eventually, sometimes last.

No bee vacuums, no frantic queen-hunting, just capped brood, patience, and a little pheromone magic doing the real work.

The conversation rolls into Africanized bee hybrids, sketchy 50-foot ladder rescues, and the messy legal reality of bee ordinances across SoCal cities.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Bee Man Dan: https://wesavebees.com/

What is "RNA Interference" and why are beekeepers calling it birth control for Varroa?

In this episode of Bee Love Beekeeping, we're buzzing into two topics that every beekeeper should know about. First, we tackle the sticky subject of glyphosate (Roundup®) and what the latest research says about its surprising effects on honey bees—from disrupting their gut health to changing the way they forage.

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Then we welcome Adam Pachl of GreenLight Biosciences to talk all things Varroa mites and introduce Narroa, an innovative treatment that doesn't kill mites—it simply stops them from starting the next generation. Think of it as birth control for Varroa!

Along the way, we dive into when (and when not) to use Narroa, how it fits into a smart mite management plan, and why testing your colonies always beats guessing.

Adam also shares hilarious stories from his days as a state bee inspector, including the heart-stopping moment he found a queen bee taking a stroll across his beekeeping suit.

Whether you're a first-year beekeeper or you've been keeping bees for decades, you'll come away with practical tips, a few laughs, and maybe even a new favorite tool for keeping your colonies healthy.

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https://norroa.com/

This week's beekeeping adventure takes us to Byron Bay, Australia, where Flow Hive co-inventor Cedar Anderson gives us the buzz on life after Varroa mites invaded the continent.

After a failed containment effort that saw thousands of hives burned, Australian beekeepers battled a brutal one-two punch of Varroa weakening colonies and small hive beetles finishing the job — sound familiar, fellow beekeepers?

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The good news: things are stabilizing. But Australian beekeeping comes with its own wild twist: bee-eating cane toads that camp out at hive entrances all night, gobbling up bees like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We also get into rainbow bee-eater birds, Africanized bees creeping into the southern U.S., and a hilarious near-miss where Cedar got chased by angry bees while a New York Times reporter had his back turned — talk about a close call.

Toss in some jaw-dropping bee-communication stories (turns out their waggle dance is way more precise than science gives them credit for) and a peek at Cedar's new book, and this episode is a must-listen for anyone who loves bees, beekeeping, and the delightfully chaotic world of managing them.

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Cedar Anderson: https://www.honeyflow.com/

This week we're heading to Oregon to hang out with Joy and Eric McEwen, husband-and-wife beekeepers who've been at it together for 26 seasons and now tend around 650 colonies.

They coined the term "natural nest beekeeping" to describe their whole philosophy: foundationless, paint-free, plastic-free hives, protected with a homemade beeswax-linseed-pine rosin sealant, queens raised in-house by their own sister bees instead of grafted or shipped in cages, and a Warré-inspired vertical hive design that lets the bees' own body heat pre-warm their winter honey stores.

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Then we take a step sideways when Joy dives into apitherapy — she's been doing bee venom therapy for 15+ years, treating everything from arthritis and Lyme disease to Parkinson's and chronic fatigue, and now co-teaches a full certification course with Eric through their business, Diggin' Living.

Moral of the episode: it's not about the honey or the money, it's about the love (and maybe a little bit about ditching plastic hive equipment).

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2 Million Americans are allergic to bee stings. Do you know what to do for yourself, or someone else, when they have a severe reaction?

We kick things off with eight bee sting facts that'll make you the most insufferable know-it-all at your next beekeeping club meeting. Did you know only lady bees can sting, that a detached stinger keeps pumping venom like a tiny horror-movie villain, or that bee venom is basically one superstar protein wearing a trench coat? You're welcome.

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Then Eric sits down with Chicago allergist Dr. Juanita Mora — who, plot twist, once got absolutely obliterated by roughly 100 stings as a six-year-old sitting on her grandfather's hive (yes, sitting on it) and grew up to become the exact doctor who now teaches people how not to die from that.

Highlights:

• The "two or more systems" rule that tells you in five seconds whether you need epinephrine or just a good sulk and a cold pack
• Why "eh, I'll just pop a Benadryl" might be the worst sentence a beekeeper can say mid-emergency
• A real live demo of EpiPen vs. Neffy (the no-needle option), including a hilarious confession about parents who've stabbed their own fingers instead of their thigh
• The plot twist that you can become allergic to bees after years of stings — so "I've never reacted before" means nothing
• Why your grandkids, neighbors, and even your laundry hamper might be quietly at risk
• The honey myths, the botulism truth, and Eric's own homemade (informal, definitely-not-science) experiment eating local raw honey to fight his allergies

Bottom line from Dr. Mora: Every beekeeper, and anyone regularly around hives, should keep both adult and pediatric epinephrine on hand, know how to use it, and never hesitate to act during a severe reaction.

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Eric@BeeLoveBeekeeping.com

Dr. Juanita Mora: https://www.instagram.com/dr.juanitamora/?hl=en

Neffy: https://www.neffy.com/

• Most commercially insured patients can pay as little as $25 per prescription for two single-use neffy devices through the company's co-pay savings program.
• For eligible patients whose insurance does not yet cover neffy or who face high out-of-pocket costs, ARS Pharma offers a cash price of $199 for two doses of neffy.
• For eligible uninsured or underinsured patients who meet program requirements and have exhausted other options, the Patient Assistance Program may provide neffy at no cost.

Before getting into the honey of it all, host Eric riffs on a string of bizarre highway mishaps — rolled-over bee trucks, a tofu spill, flaming ribeyes — proving that 2026 is just a weird year for cargo.

Then the real magic begins: mechanical-engineer-turned-beekeeper Bill Hesbach drops some serious hive-mind wisdom on condensing hives, the practice of letting bees manage their own internal climate instead of beekeepers cranking up the ventilation.

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Turns out our buzzy friends are basically tiny thermodynamics geniuses — using CO2 to chill their metabolism, recycling latent heat from condensation, and even running their own swamp coolers in summer. Who knew beekeeping came with a side of physics class?

The conversation gets delightfully nerdy (volcano-buried hives! snow as insulation! queens partying in CO2 chambers!) before Bill explains how to DIY your own insulated hive sleeve — and why a "quilt box" might be sabotaging your bees without you knowing it.

Things wrap up with two classic wild & crazy beekeeper tales: a swarm-catching fiasco involving mistaken identity (turns out bees are sneaky little ninjas) and a jungle honey-hunt in Thailand that ends with giant Apis dorsata bees chasing panicked undergrads through snake-infested streams. Equal parts science lecture and adventure story — this one's a hive worth diving into.

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Special thanks to our presenting sponsor, Mann Lake! https://www.mannlakeltd.com/

Mann Lake discount code: MLBEELOVE10 for $10 off your next order.

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Bill: https://www.wingdancehoney.com/