Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott. Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman. Global Patties: Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion, Global Patties crafts protein-packed patties that'll turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture this: strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees, and they love it.
Check out their buffet of patties, tailor-made for your bees in your specific area. Head over to www.globalpatties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve. Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up
on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping. Search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes. Read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Becky? Becky: Yes, Jeff? Jeff: Did you notice that opening? Becky: Jeff, was it really fast or really quiet? Jeff: Yes, it was really quiet. We need a listener opener. Becky:
I think that we're not asking a lot, right? Jeff: I mean, we've put openers up there that are 10 seconds long. Becky: Yes. Just, who are you? Where are you from? Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast. Jeff: Pretty easy. Becky: You know it makes my day when we get those openers in. I'm guessing you too. Jeff: Oh, it does. I love coloring in that map. I get out my orange crayon, and it doesn't matter their state. I like coloring
in it. If it's a country, I like coloring it in. Last time we looked at the stats, we have listeners in 191 countries. I think we can get more listeners openers in our episodes. Becky: If you are tired of us talking about wanting listener openers, one way to solve that is to record an opening for us. Jeff: You'll make Becky and me very happy. Becky: Very, very happy. Jeff: Becky, you know what else we have going on? Becky:
Oh, this is a good one. We're rewarding listeners with a mighty hive tool. A mighty HiveIQ hive tool. Jeff: Mighty HiveIQ. That's pretty cool. Yes. We are asking our listeners to send in questions to us to read on the air or play on the air. It's really for you to record them from our website. Ask us questions about beekeeping. Becky: I am just excited as we've seen one, maybe two or more roll in. I think that our listeners
are taking us seriously. We want some good questions. I think they're going to make us work for it a little bit. Jeff: They want to hear us beg. Becky: I know, but this is such an exciting HiveIQ promotion that Jeff, you're going to be at the post office sending these out on a regular basis, aren't you? Jeff: That's right. As we get questions in, we will select a question and read it on the podcast, the opening during this
section here. Then, the persons whose question we read, we will send them. I'll take it to the post office myself, send off this beautiful HiveIQ tool that has the HiveIQ logo on it, of course. On the other side, it has the wonderful Beekeeping Today Podcast logo and name. It's a really nice co-branding effort brought to us and our listeners by HiveIQ. Becky: Almost too pretty to get propolis on it, but it is a sturdy hive tool that it's
just perfect for propolis. Jeff: Yes, it is a very nice tool. You almost want to just leave it on your desk in that beautiful box it's in and look at it all day like I do. No, no, I use mine religiously. Thank you, HiveIQ, for this promotion. Becky, today's guest is an East Coast beekeeper, someone I know you will want to listen to. Becky: This is a big deal, but I am so excited about this guest. I am
so excited because you know, when you have a beloved product that you use and you get to actually meet the person who created the product and is beekeeping, it's pretty exciting. I'm going to meet the Fischer of Fischer Bee-Quick. Thanks for making this happen. Jeff: I'm excited to have Jim on the show. In the process of reaching out to him, I found out that he doesn't do too many appearances. I'm pretty honored that he chose to be with
you and me on the show and talk to us about beekeeping in the East Coast, in New York City, and the development of your favorite product. Becky: It's another story about a beekeeper who found a need for something and then invented a product. I just have a feeling we are going to learn a lot from Jim, not just about taking honey off the colonies, but also about his beekeeping and history with the industry. Jeff: Great. We'll be talking
to Jim Fischer right after these quick words from our sponsors. Betterbee: Winter is coming. Prepare your bees for the cold months with Betterbee's insulating hive wraps, outer covers, mouse guards, hive straps, and more. Visit betterbee.com/slash winter prep for tips and tricks to help your hive withstand the harsh weather. HiveAlive: HiveAlive has always been backed by science, and now US beekeepers are proving it in the field. Last winter, average colony losses hit around 60%, but for HiveAlive users, losses
were closer to 23%. That means nearly twice as many colonies survived. HiveAlive's unique blend of natural extracts boosts gut health, builds resilience, and helps your bees survive the toughest season. Beekeepers trust HiveAlive to keep the colony stronger, healthier, and more productive. Get your hives ready for winter at usa.hivealivebees.com. HiveAlive, proven by science, trusted by beekeepers. Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table. Sitting out in New York City, we have Jim
Fischer. In St. Paul, Minnesota, we have Becky Masterman, and I am sitting in Olympia, Washington. We have a show coming to you coast to coast. Becky: This is exciting. Jeff: Hey, Jim, welcome to the show. Jim Fischer: Thank you. Becky: Jim, I am beyond excited for this next 40 minutes or so. I cannot wait to learn from you. Honestly, can we start talking about Bee-Quick now, or do we have to let Jim talk about how we got into
beekeeping? Jeff: Let's ask Jim a little bit about himself first, and then we'll get into your favorite topic. Becky: I love Bee-Quick so much. Okay, anyway. Jim: Jeez, no advertising. Becky: It's not if there is no money being exchanged. Jim: Not yet, anyway. Becky: No free product. This is not advertising. Okay, I'm going to try to settle down and let Jim introduce himself. Jeff: Jim, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your interest in bees
and how that got sparked? Jim: Like most things in my life, it was a joke. I was leaving a company and "retiring" at the age of 35. People were interested in what I was going to do next, and they thought, oh, I was going to start up another computer company or do something like that. I said, "No, no, I'm going to do what Sherlock Holmes did." They all ran around, read Sherlock Holmes for a while, and realized that
he threatened several times to quit being a detective and take up beekeeping. At my retirement party, they called my bluff. They rolled out this beehive- Becky: Oh my gosh. Jim: -which they had assembled and painted on company time. That thing was beautiful. It had 37 coats of lacquer. You could see yourself from the finish of that beehive. It was gorgeous. You needed sunglasses to look at that thing, and a certificate for a package of bees. I had bought
a farm up in Virginia. The Dundon branch in Virginia was very close to where my farm was. I figured, "Hey, what the heck, I've got this farm. I've got these beehives, so I'll go put some bees in it." I met George Kelly, who ran the branch then, and he said, "Oh, no, no, Jim, you can't have just one hive. You have to have two." I said, "Hey, wow, that makes a whole lot of sense. That's very sensible." I
got two hives. As it happened, my dad was really retiring at the same time. I had bought a place for him about 20 minutes south of me. As an aside, if you are ever trying to find a place for your parents, you want to find it just far enough so that they have to call before they come over. I found a place for him, a little 10-acre place down. I thought, hey, father-son project. He can have a hive,
I can have a hive, we can work both the hives and compare notes, and so on. After decades of Christmas and Thanksgiving, suddenly, we were going to be doing stuff again. At the time in Virginia, there wasn't a whole lot of varroa. Our big operation was making splits to avoid swarms to keep the bees out of the trees because it would annoy the neighbors, things like that. That was basically our whole operation. We just started making splits and
started making splits and started making splits. Then I had to figure out what to do with all these beehives. The local apple grower said, "Hey, you want to pollinate my apples?" I said, "Sure." It got worse from there. It just got completely out of control and ended up being in a situation where I was hiring teenagers and we were pollinating apples from North Carolina up to the Maryland border along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Becky: Oh my gosh. Jim:
I was making comb honey for the Elks National Home, a retirement home for retired members of the Elks Lodge. Of course, they all wanted comb honey just like my dad, so I was making lots of comb honey. Then I had to figure out what to do with my extracted honey. The price that people got for honey was not very good. I went to the Germans and got myself biodynamic certified. Back then, nobody really knew what biodynamics was, but
health food store people did. Getting biodynamic certified and following those practices meant that I could charge three or four times for my honey, what other people were getting. I had a chain of health food stores that I was sending honey to, and I was selling honey along the Blue Ridge Parkway. That all worked. Fast forward to today, and I sold that operation to a guy that was going to make a million dollars in the almonds and moved up
to the big city. Now I make splits in fall to keep ahead of the Varroa. Really, the only thing I know how to do is make splits. That's it. Thank you very much for having me on your show. Oh, no. Becky: Don't leave now, Jim. Jeff: Yes, but wait, wait. Becky: We have a lot of notes. We've got questions. Jim: Yes. I thought I was jocking. Becky: I know. Now I get to ask about fall splits, right, Jeff?
Jeff: Yes. Becky: We can't go any more without me learning about these fall splits, because making a divide in your colony in the fall takes a little bit of finesse. Could you elaborate and share your secrets? Jim: I didn't know it took finesse. I would order queens about August or so. I never grew my own queens. I've always bought queens. I've never thought of people that grow their own queens as getting anything other than a mandrel out of
a deal. I want a pedigree queen. Thank you very much. I have to say parenthetically that one of the reasons why I make money was I looked at various queens. I tried Buckfast. After the Buckfast, I said, "I don't think so. These are too mean." I have heard of Sue Cobey's NWCs. I'm very fond of Sue Cobey's NWCs. Becky: It's New World Carniolans for anybody who's trying to do the letters. Jim: They are just a great bee for
apples because they get going early, they build up quickly, they overwinter on very minimal feed, and they are very responsive to environmental conditions. When a dearth comes, they stop raising brood. When winter comes, they stop raising brood. When the first nectar comes in, or if you put a feeder on and throw a pollen patty on top, you get to jump back quickly. Otherwise, the expanding colony will break your nose. They're that quick to expand. That's really great for
apples because most of the work in apples, you do that in the snow, or at least you used to back when we had snow in the winter in Virginia. We don't have it anymore. That's part of the problem. Making splits in fall feed them a little bit because you're probably feeding in August. There isn't a whole lot. There's some lake blooming roses, things like that, zinnias, that they're foraging on. I would just split colonies two ways and make
them into nucs and overwinter those nucs on top of full-sized colonies. These days, 50% splits. If I have 12 colonies, I want 6 nucs. That covers my losses. That really is where I'm done right there. I've already made my splits for fall, so I'm basically done beekeeping except for putting candy boards on them. Becky: Is there anything special you do to introduce queens to those nucs? Jim: I guess the only trick I have is that I've found that
about 10% of colonies are two queen colonies, mother-daughter. You think you've pulled out the queen. No, you haven't. There's another queen. You want to take the queen out, or better yet, cage her and wait for the bees to have no brood at all. Wait for the brood to emerge. Then pull out the queen out of the cage and carefully put your new queen on the top bar for a bit, and see if the bees are acting receptive to
the queen. If they're not acting receptive, you probably have another queen. If they are acting receptive, that's okay. Release the queen or let them release her. Now, I like taking out the candy in a queen cage and replacing it with a mini marshmallow so they have a quicker time of it. A lot of people will take a wood screw and make a small hole in the candy, something to speed up the release. You don't need to make them
chew through all that candy. Making sure that the bees are well and truly queenless is probably a good thing. More importantly, making sure that they're well and truly broodless, because then you can go through and look for brood and say, "Do I see any eggs? If I have more eggs, there must be another queen here. The queen is in this cage." The push-in queen cages I'm talking about, I make them out of the screen from a package. A
while ago, they used to put metal screen on packages. Now it's plastic. There used to be metal screen on packages, and you could take that screen and solder at the edges, and make a nice push-in queen cage about four inches square. Push that in and keep her in that limited area. Then if there's any eggs or brood anywhere else, that's a dead giveaway. There's another queen. That requires having the patience to actually find the queen, which is, for
many, at least novice beekeepers, really hard. Jeff: Especially in August. Jim: Yes. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Jeff: True. Jim: It's like the number of complex things that beekeepers try amazes me. The beekeeping classes or the beekeeping experts. How many different kinds of splits are there? They're all named after dead guys. I maybe know two of them. I was lucky enough to have Richard Taylor show me how to do a split once. He did a
split and it was not much talking. I said, "What kind of split is that?" He said, "I don't know. It's a split." He was about the same way I am. I do not know that there's much advantage to a lot of the complexity that people have packed around beekeeping. I think that a lot of the simplicity that I've found is because the more complex operations are desperation or they are moves of desperation. You are doing these desperate measures
to take care of something you should have taken care of a month ago. If I am not taking desperate measures, I do very simple things, and I do very few things, and I use very simple equipment. I don't have to go to extreme measures because I don't let my bees get into extreme conditions. That brings up another layer, which is beekeepers, they want to fight to keep every colony, especially when they've only got two. That's the problem. I've
got two colonies, and one of them is dying. I'm going to do everything I can. I read queen more quickly than other people do because I'm intolerant of queens that don't perform well. Queens are a weird product. I buy 100 queens, and 10 of them are duds right out of the box. I'm supposed to put up with that. That's just the way things are. Then 20 of them, 20 of the 100, turn out to be crappy performers. I
paid for 100 queens to get 70 that were decent queens. Nobody's ever really improved on that. That's probably the best queen producers can do. If you've only got two hives, what if both your queens are one of those, part of that 10, the 10 that were duds right out of the box? You've got this queen, and she's warming around, she's not laying eggs, and you're a new beekeeper, and you're not really sure what eggs look like. You waste
two months to find out, "Oh, I've got a hive that's decreasing population with a dud queen." It's not fair. Gardeners somehow they don't mourn the loss of every tomato plant, but beekeepers do mourn the loss of every hive. I felt it myself. I feel like I failed. "Oh my gosh, I had a hive die." If we are more able to be like gardeners and treat our beehives like plants, we have more of a chance of transcending a lot
of this desperation in beekeeping now. It's really, really hard to be that-- people would call it callous. Oh, I don't care if my bees die. Of course, I care if my bees die, I'm just not going to show it. Becky: Are you thinking of calling in at the queen level or the entire colony level? Because it's hard to call a colony. We don't have a great safe technique to say, "This animal isn't healthy, and it's not producing, it's
not growing. I'm going to take my loss and move on." Culling at the queen level is a little bit easier. It's a squish and replacing her with new stock. Jim: Yes, I actually don't squish them. Now that I'm in hobbyist mode, I actually take them in Ziploc bags and put them in the freezer so they have less violent death. Becky: They go to a chill coma first and then-- Jim: Yes. That may sound stupid, but I bring a
little cooler and I get some liquid nitrogen. Becky: Oh, so it actually happens pretty quickly. Jim: Yes, I get them very cold and very quickly cold. I don't put them in liquid nitrogen. Obviously, that'd be cool. Either some CO2 or some liquid nitrogen. Let me just back up and say, all right, so varroa have been around for more than 20 years. The beekeeper is certainly not going to solve the problem of varroa in his own backyard. We're waiting
on science, and science has not come up with a good solution. Every single one of the so-called varroa solutions we have are partial solutions. We've spent 25 years learning techniques to kill varroa. If you would have told me when I first started beekeeping that I was going to put an insecticide into my beehive, I would have gone, "What? How does that work? No, no, wait a minute. I got bees in the box. I'm not putting anything in the
box, but wood and wax and maybe some stainless steel wire. That's it." Now we're putting insecticides in. I don't really think that the beekeeping community has caught onto the fact that neurotoxins are a bad idea, in general, all of it. We have the organic acids. We have formic. We have oxalic. They work perfectly well, and they work just as well as the neurotoxins. Nobody's seen any physiological change in the mites that would make them less susceptible to the
combination of formic and oxalic, because it's a physiological attack on the mite. It's not a neurotoxin that some of them can learn to resist, but they're able to digest in larger quantity of the neurotoxin without dying. They're able to metabolize it, pass it through their system, and their offspring are able to metabolize it and pass it through their system, and that's a resistant mite. With oxalic acid, it doesn't work that way. The industry is selling products that the
beekeeper has been told, "Oh, this will work, this will work." I remember Apistan. Apistan had this ad back when it first came out. It says, "In your hives and off your mind." It's going to show this very bucolic beekeeper with his smoker out in his peaceful little 12-5 apiary. My wife, Joanne, she immediately took that, ripped that page out, and scribbled the "off" and wrote "out" in place of it, so it's "in your hives, out of your mind."
She put it up on the fridge, and it was like, "Yes, yes." My wife also keeps bees. Becky: I love it. Jeff: Let's switch gears here. When you were talking about how you got started, you mentioned making comb honey, and you mentioned Richard Taylor, too, which is a fun fact. Were you making comb honey as sectionals? Were you doing rounds? What were you doing? Jim: Lloyd Spears sold me a whole bunch of Ross Rounds, and I was very
happy. I was making rounds and doing my comb honey. I had one third of the colonies doing Ross rounds and the others doing extract. Becky: Do you want to share your favorite tip for getting those bees to make comb honey? Jim: Yes, compress the heck out of them. Now, people don't understand compressing because they buy these deeps, and hobbyists should just stop buying deeps. I like mediums for everything. I would overwinter a colony in three mediums, which is
roughly the same comb size as two deeps. When spring came, that bottom medium would be empty anyway. I would pull that bottom medium out and compress the bees down into two mediums. Then I could put Ross rounds on. Becky: Wow, you made that sound very simple. Jim: Oh, yes. When you compress, you are taking a chance of swarming, but if you re-queen 100% of your colonies every fall, your odds of swarming are greatly reduced. You can compress the
heck out of them, and they will move up into those comb seepers, and they will draw that comb up. You have to get those comb seepers on very, very early. Jeff: In New York or Virginia, where you were doing this very early, means when? What time of year was that? Jim: Early April with the latest. Early April. I was feeding about Valentine's Day, both places. The two climates are basically the same because, since I moved up to New
York, the planet has warmed to the point where New York now has Virginia's climate, which is very convenient, at least for my notebooks. Jeff: I was going to say, as a beekeeper. Jim: It is very convenient. They have declared New York City to be subtropical, so I live on a small subtropical island off the eastern seaboard of the United States. Becky: Oh, goodness. Jeff: You sound like a real estate agent now. Jim: Yes. Jeff: Let's take this opportunity
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fondant today. Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Jim, you opened such a lovely door to lead us into Fischer's Bee-Quick because you were talking about Varroa treatments and how the organic treatments were effective. Again, this is not paid. I do not get free product. I just love this stuff, and I've been using it for over a decade, I think. When I think of Fischer's Bee-Quick, I love it because it feels safer for me to smell and just easier on the
bees. Can you tell us the Bee-Quick story? Jim: First year when we were keeping bees, we had to harvest some honey. We were lucky enough to have strong enough colonies that we could harvest a little bit of honey. We went back to Dave, and we said, "How do we get the honey out of the boxes here?" We were a little confused and sold us a fume board with some butyric anhydride. I don't know if you've ever smelled butyric
anhydride, but if you haven't, don't. It's like my dad literally bought himself a Chevy Silverado pickup truck because we were now living in Virginia, so we had to fit in with the other guys and have a pickup truck. He stopped the pickup truck, and he took the butyric out of the back of the crew cab and put it in the bed of the truck because even before we opened the bottle, it was exuding this odor. We were like,
"Oh, boy, this is going to be fun." We harvested the honey, and we came inside, and my mom said, "Don't come in here smelling like that. Go outside." We said, "What do you mean?" She said, "You smell horrible. Go outside, hose yourself off with hose, whatever." She went and she got clothes. She handed us clothes. She said, "Change clothes. Leave your clothes outside." We hosed off with the shower, and we changed clothes outside. We came in and said,
"Oh, boy, what are we going to do?" I said, "You're going to burn those clothes. That's what you're going to do. I'm not putting those clothes in my washing machine." My mom was not to be argued with, which is pretty much it. Dad turned to me and he said, "Jim, you went to college. I expect you to solve this problem." Becky: Oh, goodness. Jim: I've always done what my dad-- I still do what my dad said. He was
91. I still follow orders. It is not that hard when we go through all of the aromatics, all of the volatile organic compounds. It's pretty easy to find one that has a high volatility because it doesn't really matter what you are overloading the bees. Little smell receptors on their antenna, they smell what their antenna is. As long as there is something that overloads their smell sensor, they'll go, "Oh my gosh, let's get out of here. Oh, let's go
check the brood or whatever." They get slightly alarmed. Now, butyric doesn't work that way. Butyric actually suppresses their ability to utilize oxygen. It basically chokes them a little bit. They say, "I can't breathe, they're choking," so they go away from the butyric. That's what butyric does if you get a whiff of it too, which is why butyric used to have a warning label that would say, "Use only under a fume hood." I don't think beekeepers have ever seen
a fume hood. You've seen a fume hood in a chem lab, right, Becky? Becky: I have, yes. Jim: Most beekeepers do not have a fume hood in their bee yard. I just started going through all of the families of chemicals that make either nice or nasty smells. You start with the alkenes and the alcohols and the aldehydes and the ketones and the carbolic acids and the thiols and the amines. You've got all these families. Each family, you've got
somewhere between 1 and 16 carbons. You can make yourself a little spreadsheet where you've got family of chemical going across the top and how many carbons flowing down the side. Some of them are well known. There's a coconut smell. The chemical that is the operative chemical in a bee sting pheromone that gets the bees all excited smells like those artificial banana candies from the 1970s. We have some of that. We've got that on people's back occasionally. That's some
fun. Eventually, I came up with something I could buy cheap enough to distill to get Bee-Quick out of, and make Bee-Quick cost-effective because it had to be something cheap, because you have to use a great deal of plant material to be able to distill and get a gallon of liquid. It had to be something that I could distill that was available. That was Bee-Quick. Started making it. Started distilling it. Becky: We always used to say at the university
that honey harvesting season, our vehicles would smell a little bit like marzipan. Jim: Yes. It's got a cherry scent to it. Yes. Marzipan or cookies or whatever. Jeff: I have to believe that most of our listeners know how to use a fume board. For those listeners who do not know how to use a fume board, how would one use Bee-Quick on a fume board to drive the bees out of their honey supers? Jim: First of all, I should
preface by saying there are many ways to take off honey. Bee-Quick is just one of them. I don't promote. I don't push. Fume board is a piece of metal on a wooden frame that is about the same size as your beehive with a piece of felt in contact with that metal. The metal heats up with the sun. The heat transfers to the felt, and that helps the liquid to evaporate better. The liquid evaporates all the time. That's why
you can smell it. You want it to evaporate more to make lots of fumes so that the bees go down quicker, so you don't have to wait 10 minutes. You want to do it in 5 minutes for a hive, not 10. The fume board is best put out in the sun. Some people will paint the metal black to speed it up. The fumes will then cause the bees to go down in the supers, down to the blue chamber.
You can start pulling the supers off. You put a fume board on. Some people run multiple fume boards, three or four, and they'll put one, two, three, and they'll pull one super off and put the fume board down on the next super step and keep moving along. If you have three or four fume boards, you can keep two men or people-- Sorry, two beekeepers. Sorry, Becky. Becky: That's okay. It's all good. Jim: Two beekeepers, steadily pulling at a
pretty good rate. I haven't seen people run more than four fume boards at a time. That's for big operations. For hobbyist levels, it's like put it on, wait about 5 minutes, that's probably done. If they're not all out, you probably need to put some more. It's pretty simple. The good news about it, it's a better hobbyist tool because you don't make a fuss for the neighbors. Most people are keeping their bees in close proximity to someone who may
not enjoy bees at all and may not understand that 1,000 bees flying around is not a big deal. They may see bees flying around as the end of the world, and so using a bee blower is probably not a good neighborly habit. There's other ways to keep your bees, bee escapes, or if they warp too, but the problem with bee escapes is you have to do a lot of heavy lifting to put them in place, and then you
have to wait. Jeff: Hope you don't get a drone stuck in one. Jim: Yes. I'm actually probably one of the last men on the planet that knows how to adjust those little metal fingers on the Porter Bee Escapes. It's like being a watchmaker. I have to get out my iLuke and get out my little tiny pliers and adjust them, but they do work. There's the maze-type bee escapes, too, with the triangle and so on. My bees always seem
to be smarter than the maze, though. They could figure out that maze and get back up into the sequence. I don't know. Maybe I just had smart bees. They were spelling bees. Jeff: Jim, one of the things that you are recognized for is the work that you did with the New York City beekeepers. I can't imagine keeping bees on a rooftop in Manhattan. Can you just describe that real briefly? Jim: It's really funny. I have to say my
bees have a better view than I do. My apartment overlooks the East River. My bees overlook Central Park. The good thing about New York is that Fifth Avenue borders the East Side of Central Park. There's a lot of very rich people that live on Fifth Avenue, and they feel guilty about that. To assuage that guilt, they want to do something for the environment. Keeping bees on the roof is like, hey, that's an easy thing to do. That probably
offsets their guilt for driving around a big SUV or all kinds of things. It's not hard to find an extremely rich person who wants some bees on their roof. Most of the buildings are co-ops, so they have a co-op board. These co-op boards are dominated by some dowager whose husband was in the oil business and died 20 years ago. It comes down to making one little old lady happy. You just make sure nobody runs out of honey. Some
of my little old ladies have a lawn chair up on the roof to sit by the bees and watch them come and go. You make sure that that's there. They are happy to have the bees, and they don't charge rent. I pay in honey as they need it. It's really just a common thing these days. When I first started out, I was looking at people that had green roofs and were looking to pollinate and help spread the sedum
that they were planting to be the rain absorber on the green roof. Those were good. My wife, she worked as a personal trainer. She specialized in the extremely minor elements of the unimaginably wealthy, which is a very good market segment. She knew a lot of these people already. She was also keeping bees. Actually, we met at EAS. Becky: Oh, the keeping? Jim: That's how the two of us met. Yes, I know. You thought Richard Taylor was bad with
his ad and bee culture, seeking a wife. We literally bumped into each other at EAS 2004 in Pennsylvania. Becky: Oh, that's Jeff: Very cool. Jim: She was giving a talk, and I was giving a talk. They had Xeroxed her handouts, and they had not collated them. She was almost in tears. I helped her collate her handouts. That's how we met. I was giving a talk in the next little classroom down the hall. Becky: I love that. Jeff: Nice
EAS story. Jim: Yes, but keeping bees on roof, it's really no different from keeping bees anywhere else. It's just you have to remember you're on the roof. If the bees start to get ornery, you can't exactly run away from them. You can't run very far. Jim: It's a long way down. Jeff: It has to be a lot different. You're a little bit further from any vehicle you might have. You have to use an elevator or a freight elevator.
That has to make for some interesting conversations. Jim: It's getting 24-hour access. That's one of the things that I've always focused on is you need 24-hour access to the bees. It's all electronic. You're punching in codes and so on. There's no physical keys anymore. Yes, it's nice to have an elevator that goes straight to the roof, so you don't have to go up a flight of stairs. Some people get stuck with roofs where the elevator only goes up
to the top floor, and then there's a stairway to the roof. There are many people that have the standard Brooklyn brownstone, where access is through a hatchway and a ladder. The top floor has a ladder which goes up to the roof. Actually, funny story, my wife, while she was in one of those when she first started keeping bees, she realized that after building her equipment up on the roof of this friend of hers that when it was time
to move her hives because she had gotten a letter from a lawyer saying that everyone on the block was allergic to bees and they were going to sue the owner of the building-- Becky: Of course. Jim: Oh, yes, they were all allergic, every one of them. Becky: It's amazing, those statistics. Jim: This was one of our dates. I was a geographically undesirable boyfriend because I was living in the mountains of Virginia, eight hours south. She called me because
she had this problem. She had to move her bees out to Long Island, and she realized that her bees were not going to go through that hatchway. I introduced her to cardboard nucs, which were a good tool to use. She was very happy with cardboard nucs. We took them out to Long Island because at that time, of course, beekeeping was illegal in New York City. Becky: Are you using ratchet straps in all your colonies on those rooftops? Jim:
Oh, of course, yes. We've talked a couple of things. Number one, some of the nucs are soft. It gets hot because they tar or they've got a coating or they've got some sort of fancy polymer, laminate, or whatever. First thing you have to do is have some sort of spread out the weight, a piece of plywood, or something that's underneath the bottom. Second thing you need is something to get the colony, the bottom board, up off the roof
because the heat can be very intense, very intense, the reflector. You really want a parapet. You don't want to have just a roof that pops off. The parapet is nice. It blocks the wind so the bees can get in and out of the entrance, or blocks the entrance area from winds in the winter and so on and so forth. Roof selection is important. Jeff: I can't imagine. Jim, it's been wonderful having you on the show this afternoon. We
look forward to having you back to continue the discussion because I think there's a lot more there that you could share that we haven't been able to get to yet. Thanks a lot for joining us today. Jim: Thank you. Becky: Thank you so much, Jim. We really appreciate it. Jeff: Becky, are you excited about finally talking to Jim Fischer, who developed your favorite product, Bee-Quick? Becky: Jeff, I feel like we might be friends eventually. I really do. I
really do. Honestly, I love learning more about his operation, his history. It actually surprised me because, holy cow, to go from two colonies to a pollination operation was super impressive. I've got more questions. I just love his philosophy and how Bee-Quick started. Honestly, it's been such a great tool for me that it was just-- I don't know. I'm happy. He did not disappoint. Jeff: That's great. I will be honest with you, I had used it years ago, did
not perform well for me, so I've gone to other products. Because you so much enjoy the product-- Becky: Enthusiastically. Jeff: Enthusiastically. Becky: Let's just use that word. Jeff: That's a good word for your position on it. I tried it this year and it worked well. Again, this is not a commercial, but this is just a reflection to what your experience, and it's fun with our guests to meet them and put a name to a face to a name.
Becky: I look forward to talking to Jim more in the future because I love when you expect to hear one thing and then, beekeepers do this: they just surprise you. They've got this great extensive experience in managing bees, keeping bees, bee businesses. Jim's had multiple bee businesses, and he still has Bee-Quick, so pretty neat. Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today. Before we go, be sure to follow us and leave us a five-star
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