Bees Beyond Borders with Bo Sterk (S6, E41)

S6, E41 - Bees Beyond Borders with Bo Sterk

Cheryl: I'm Cheryl Burkhead, President of the Northeastern Kansas Beekeepers Association established in 1948. Welcome to Beekeeping Today  Podcast.

Jeff: Welcome to Beekeeping Today  Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky: And I'm Becky Masterman. 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.global patties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

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.global patties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to 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 guest, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 250 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.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com.

Thank you, Cheryl Burkhead from Kansas, for that great opening captured in Louisville, Kentucky at this year's North American Honeybee Expo.

Cheryl: I love it. Kansas. That is a good place to put a mark on our map.

Jeff: We'll fill in Kansas on the map right away. Thank you, Cheryl. It's nice to have the return of the listener openers. We've missed them through the  How to Get Started series along with Liz Frost's episode, so it's nice to have them return.

Becky: It is, and hopefully, now all those new beekeepers who are listening can tell us that, "Welcome to  Beekeeping Today  Podcast. I'm a brand-new beekeeper. I listen to your series, and I'm from, hopefully, Minnesota." Anyway--

Jeff: Yes. I can say probably no one from Minnesota, Becky. I've got a few of them here in the queue and I can tell you, no one from Minnesota.

Becky: Now we have new beekeepers. We have beekeepers who have listened to our series, they are ready to go. They're getting their bees in what, a few weeks probably, and so I think, before those bees come, they should probably record an opener because they're going to be very busy once those bees arrive.

Jeff: This is exciting times coming up. I always look forward to the March-April timeframe when the bees come in. Whether you're an old beekeeper, longtime beekeeper, or a new beekeeper, getting those packages is a fun day. I'm going to try to take the recorder out on package day and get some feedback from people as they are waiting for their bees. I did that a couple of years ago here locally and it's fun time, everyone's excited.

Becky: Oh, that sounds like fun. That's great.

Jeff: It's March. I think about March, most college students are in the South, Florida, Caribbean. Today's guest is from the Caribbean.

Becky: He's from Florida, but he does an awful lot of work in the Caribbean.

Jeff: Yes. I wonder how many of those spring break people are keeping bees or know about the bees in Florida like our guest Bo Sterk does.

Becky: I'm guessing that their minds are really not about honey production, pollination, social behavior of honeybees. I bet their minds are on the swimming, maybe the parties, the bands, the bars. I think we've got two different worlds going on down there.

Jeff: Oh, kids these days. I tell you.

Becky: Do you want to try to recruit those spring breakers to an apiary because I don't think drunk beekeeping is a good idea, Jeff?

Jeff: That's a podcast idea that I've had floating around and maybe I should go down the spring break and test it out. You've heard of  Drunk History on the History Channel, maybe Drunk Beekeeping podcast.

Becky: That is such a good idea, and I think any listener out there who wants to help you out with that podcast because it's not going to be me, any listener should send you, what is it, questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast?

Jeff: Questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com.

Becky: "Dear Jeff, heard about drunk beekeeping. I'm already doing it. How do we talk about it?"

Jeff: "I'm experienced."

Becky: "I'm experienced." We do not recommend all the beekeepers out there that you take a drink before you go out there and work your bees.

Jeff: No, no, we're just teasing.

Becky: Be good to your bees.

Jeff: We're just teasing. All right, so we do have Bo Sterk coming up. Bo is a beekeeper in Florida, and he runs the--

Becky: Bees Beyond Borders.

Jeff: Bees Beyond Borders. Thank you.

Becky: I love the alliteration, but I love what he's doing in the Caribbean even more.

Jeff: We'll hear more from Bo and Bees Beyond Borders right after this quick word from Strong Microbials.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to  The Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Sitting around this big virtual beekeeping today podcast table, I am excited to bring you Bo Sterk. He is founder of Bees Beyond Borders. You're sitting down in Florida right now, Bo. Welcome to the show.

Bo: I am. I am. I don't want to say sunny Florida today. We're a little overcast, but it's still warm enough out.

Becky: Thanks for joining us, Bo. We're so happy to have you here.

Jeff: Bo, as we were saying, you are the founder of Bees Beyond Borders. Can you give our listeners just a high-level review of your background, who you are, your background with bees, and then touch on who Bees Beyond Borders is, then we'll talk to you more about that.

Bo: I have been a beekeeper getting close to 30 years now, and in the early days as I was learning beekeeping in my mentors, one of them happened to say, "Hey, I'm doing a mission trip to Barbados. Would you want to go along? I'm not interested in doing the field work, but if you're interested in, I will go to the classrooms and you can do the field study with the students." I just jumped in and said, "Sure," not knowing what I was doing, but had enough knowledge of beekeeping that I could pull it off going in with a lot of newbies.

That was quite a few years ago, and it's been really an interesting journey. I basically got caught up in the whole thing of rural development and working with beekeeping as a tool for sustainable income for these I don't want to say third world economically challenged people in other countries around the world. For the most part, my thrust has been the Caribbean. They've been so hard hit over the years with hurricanes and earthquakes. It's driven me to help out as much as I can with development work down there.

It's always interesting because everybody does it in a little bit different style. My background is I kept studying and researching with the bees and I became a master beekeeper through the program that we have here, much like they do in a lot of the states now starting to adapt to bee colleges, and we actually had a bee college and gone through the master program. I took the next level of becoming a master craftsman beekeeper with my projects in the Caribbean across the board.

Saying that, I've been instrumental as far as University of Florida. I teach there at their bee college here twice a year and we were able to get an extension program to actually take the bee college faculty. We take about six of us. Six to eight of us go down and actually do Caribbean bee colleges every two years. We actually really try to preach and do what we talk about across the board and take to other countries.

Jeff: That would be with-- well, we know Jamie and Amy.

Bo: Amy, exactly. Sometimes Jamie goes along with us. He's done quite a few with us down in Barbados and in Grenada, a couple of the other islands, but not all the time. He doesn't participate since he's in such demand in traveling with his research projects.

Jeff: Well, you definitely have a good team working with you there.

Bo: Yes, it's great. One of the other main guys is-- my vice president of Bees Beyond Borders is Dave Westervelt. He used to be Chief of Apiary for the State of Florida, which is pretty big deal running. He ran over overseeing about 600,000 hives and 6,000 beekeepers at that time. We're over that now in Florida.

Becky: Dave is a great resource. I had the pleasure of having him tour us around the Caribbean a little bit and talk about beekeeping a few years ago.

Bo: He's just a wealth of knowledge. He scares me. It's still--

Becky: Flowers. He knows flowers.

Bo: Botany. Dr. Bill Kern's another one and they get in these arguments about botany, and termites, and all of a sudden, it's like, "Where did this come from?" "I don't know," and the scientific names of all these plants on top of it. It's just mindboggling.

Becky: It's impressive.

Bo: Yes. Dave shocks me all the time. He's been on over 27 research papers so he's just really well-versed in all aspects of beekeeping. He came from a commercial background of-- he ran over 3,000 hives personally at one time.

Jeff: Beekeeping in the Caribbean, people at first blush might think it's the same thing as beekeeping in-- I don't know. We had an opener from Kansas, or from Ohio, or from even where I'm in Washington state. What's the key difference? If beekeeping's all local, what's the main difference of beekeeping in the Caribbean?

Bo: They differ island to island. They were all brought into the different islands at different time periods. It's getting to be hard now with globalization, and swarms coming in on ship containers all the time is a problem. Certain islands are worse than others just due to the fact that they have large ports or not. The bigger the ship, the more problems that they incur. Like in St. Kitts and Nevis, they're always having an issue with swarms coming in on the ships.

Most of the stuff comes out of Venezuela or the Caribbean somewhere farther down the line, and so you get these ships coming out of South America bringing Africanized bees on it is always an issue. It's real interesting in the Caribbean across the board even listening to the problems that they have. They actually even find bees floating in mats across the ocean that attack the fishermen. They find these big mats of bees that have swarmed and gone off to sea and land on the water and then take off again. It's really wild to talk to different aspects of finding out where they find their bees or how they've accumulated them.

Jeff: It's not necessarily within flight distance of the mainland. It's whether they can basically do a--

Becky: Raft?

Bo: A raft.

Becky: A bee raft.

Bo: Yes, make themselves a bee raft and they fly three to five miles and just land, regroup and organize, or find some piece of objects floating out there and they just land on it till they find another container ship or something to fly onto.

Jeff: Wow.

Bo: It's really bizarre-

Becky: I just learned something. Wow.

Bo: -to talk to beekeeping. It really varies saying that they're getting a lot more Africanization into their colonies across the board. Their information is very limited on what they get. A lot of beekeeping throughout the Caribbean being British-controlled islands or have some influence on it, a lot of Brits end up going down and teaching beekeeping classes, which is not a bad thing, but at the same time, they're teaching beekeeping from a British perspective and not a tropical perspective. I run into this all the time. Even now we're starting to see some people coming out of Argentina teaching beekeeping in the Caribbean.

I don't have a problem with a lot of the basics, but then when you start getting into the nitty-gritty of, "Is this the same or not," it's usually not. They're teaching a little bit different techniques of double brood bodies, for instance.

Becky: Oh, wow.

Bo: We would never do that in the Caribbean. Bees in general down there, they're a little bit smaller. I don't want to say they're a lot tinier, but you start seeing cell size even being more that 4.9 cell size. Bees aren't living near as long. Maybe lifespan might be 25 days. Here in the States, we always say 40 days or 500 miles on a set of wings. It really varies on what they're doing seasonally. Down in the Caribbean, they're flying all the time. If it's a little bit night and it's 82 degrees, they're working all the time. They don't stop. Nectar and pollen sources are very different varietals from island to island. Some are great, some are just horrible. Techniques are just all over the place.

When I started in Haiti, the program started in the mountains of Haiti. I've really never done a whole lot along the coast. I've gone and visited some beekeepers along those areas, but where I've been working mainly in Haiti was in the mountain regions. When I walked in the first time, they'd never seen a smoker. They had no clue. I'm having to do drawings of smokers and veils. No idea. They didn't know what a hive was, what a Langstroth hive was, or a top bar hive. They were all log beekeepers. They were basically traditional beekeepers that had learned from their grandfathers in keeping logged hives.

I never tried to change that. I tried to add to it, never discourage it. It's a tradition that they have. Don't change it. That's what I think my problem was. What spurred me on was a lot of these British beekeepers would say, "No, you need to change the Langstroth equipment." It's like, "No, this is what they know," and keep what they know going. I'm learning from them, so it's really fascinating.

One of the best examples I have of that is one of the young kids that I met there. At that point, he was in his teens and he had six logs. In the next year or year and a half, we got him up to 25 logs. Then before you know, when he got 25 logs, he was able to afford a moped. When he got that, we got it up to 50 logs. Now he's able to afford to go to college. By the time he got to graduate, he had 75 logs. We got it into about 20 top bar hives, and he was just starting to do a few Langstroth to try to keep going. All of a sudden, he became a mentor for the entire region to teach beekeeping and how to get out of this poverty-stricken or problems scenario that they get caught up in just to move on.

Jeff: The log hives, were they using them horizontally or were they standing them vertically like you see a lot of the beekeepers in the north?

Bo: Most of the time, they're horizontal. I've only seen a couple in the south that were actually doing vertical gum tree type of a log. Most of them were just the sapwood, the stuff that's really too-- oh, well, the hardwood is burned for cooking fuel. You don't find anything under three inches in diameter that's a hardwood down there because they've just deforested everything. If it's a larger tree that's not burnable, that's what they'll actually hollow out, burn it, or gouge it out as much as they can, burn it out, put a palm frond on each end of it to keep the bees in for three or four days, and then they open it up or they leave the palm frond, pull a couple off, and off they go, and it's ready to go.

They usually harvest about every year, year and a half on those. They just let them inside the colony. They don't even let the bees out for the most part or mess with it. Then, at that point, the honey tastes pretty smoky. They're just using banana fronds or something, balling them up, and blowing into it, take a knife, and just cut out what honey they need and crush and strain technique for extraction.

Bottling is just unheard of. There is no glass. We always used rum bottles in the islands across it. They don't even see that. Most of the stuff is sold in Ziploc baggies on the side of the road. At least they had something to barter with, so it's just getting enough hives going that they have something to barter with across the board. Lumber's way too expensive for them to even build boxes for the most part.

Becky: Bo, can I back up with the bees getting into these hives? Are they collecting swarms and putting them in there or are the logs swarm traps themselves?

Bo: Kind of a combination of both, but most of them are swarms that they're picking up out in the woods in the forest, and then they'll actually just bring a swarm back in a basket and dump it into a hive and say, "Go for it." It's really pretty fascinating to watch.

Becky: And a lot of work.

Bo: A lot of work. Nothing goes to waste, of course. We were trying to get a little swarm out of a tree, little tiny sapling and there was a little crack in it. They were trying to get the bees out to try to grab the queen. The kids are all over there. The young kids are all so anemic that they're actually trying to grab the brood out of it. They want to eat the brood. They're not interested in the honey as much as they are the brood. If they find drone brood, they fry it up. It's part of the diet.

People are really gracious. Wages in those areas are around $2 a day. Anywhere from $1 to $2 a day is wages. Even in Port-au-Prince, prior to the big earthquake there in 2010, wages still are around $5 a day in sweatshops.

Jeff: What about the political strife there in Haiti?

Bo: The political strife in Haiti is really, really dangerous right now. Problem being is the gun laws in Florida and Texas. This have all changed in the last few years, and a lot of the guns are coming out of here. There's a lot of illegal weapons down there, and it's become a really big issue. It's so dangerous so my connections down there have been chased out of their homes. It's basically run by gangs.

It's been about two months ago now, I had a donation from a jacket bee suit supplier out of Kentucky and pro suits, and they donated 50 bee suits to me. We got them down to Haiti, got them into Port-au-Prince. My big fear was getting them through the airport, getting them offloaded that you can get them on the ground without having somebody steal them.

We were able to get them onto a bus on its way. It was about three hours away where I'd been working with a group and the bus was hijacked. They just robbed everybody on the bus and steal the bus and off they go, so I lost all these bee suits. My whole program that I was trying to support is lost. They got the bus back and that was it. It's really difficult with those kind of things, you're just always up against these huge obstacles all the time when you go down.

Jeff: It wouldn't be like you could go around looking for somebody in a new bee suit either. It'd be hard to ask for it back.

Bo: Right. That's all you can say. It's like they're on the ground there. What they're getting used for, I don't know. Hopefully, they're going to sell them off, I don't know. Not that they could use ventilated bee suits, but at least they're on the ground in the country and hopefully somebody sell them, and they've gotten into the right hands. Hopefully. You just don't know. It's so disheartening.

Becky: Are you able to visit still?

Bo: No, I haven't gone down. My contacts down there don't even really want me to come down. If I got down, it's not too bad, if I can get out of the city. Getting in and out of Port-au-Prince now has been really difficult. My contacts down there, they come back and forth to the States every six months or so to work and go back. They won't even drive into the Port-au-Prince airport. They fly into it now, try to get a commuter plane from somewhere else. It's just so difficult in the city. It got to be so dangerous.

Jeff: Do you do any work on the other side of that island?

Bo: I've done a little bit on the other end, in the western end, in Jérémie. I've gone over there. There's a few beekeepers over there and they seem to be fairly knowledgeable. They were doing a pretty good job, so I really haven't pushed the program over there. They've had another earthquake over there that was really devastating a few years ago too here, within the last five years, so they've got their own issues, but they had a few beekeepers there that were kind of old timers that were doing a pretty good job.

Each city is different in Haiti, across the board. Then going back even a couple of years ago, working, I was in St. Vincent here this past year. They had the big volcano go off there. It leveled. All the beekeepers on the north half of the island lost everything just due to volcanic ash fall, and it was blown all the way across into Barbados. I've done about 17, 18 different countries down throughout the Caribbean. It's kind of a misnomer too and you say, "Talk about the Caribbean," like you say. People think I'm going down on these vacations. I don't see the pristine beaches at all. Coming and going, I see the blue water from the plain and I'm basically working with farmers in the cane fields or in the mountains. I'm working with farmers for the most part. It's really development work that you're seeing.

Becky: How do you pick your projects? Do people reach out to you?

Bo: Yes, they reach out to me various ways and we try to pick and choose between which ones will work. Once in a while, we do get had in false advertising. You get down there and it sounds good, and then you get there and it's not what it was cracked up, or it wasn't what it was going to happen to be. I did a program last year with USAID in Jamaica for two weeks doing work with the equipment so they've reached back out to me again here now so I'm putting a program together for down there for basic beginner classes on their beekeeping programs.

Jeff: Let's take a quick break here and we'll be right back right after this word from Betterbee.

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Becky: Bo, how do you fund all of these different projects?

Bo: They get funded in different ways. You're always looking and scrambling around being a nonprofit looking for donations of some sort. Being such a small organization, we always try to double up and have somebody to have skin in the game by having something involved with it. We either have them supply us with either a driver all the time and a handler, somebody that can handle us in country that can get us around from A to B and knows their ways and customs. Even in Haiti, to be able to translate, we talk about Haiti and the transition there. We actually have to have two handlers and an interpreter in the mountains.

We end up with a lot of pigeon tongue, so normal Haitians in the mountains don't speak the same Haitian that they do in Port-au-Prince. You always have to rely on the locals for a lot of different aspects of what you need. We try to get them to either put up some funding for the airline ticket or for the on-grounds hotel or feed us some sort of skin in the game across the board. We try to always do a dual program so that you're not getting involved with-- when you start doing 100% of a program, it gets to be costly on my end, and at the same time, you get taken advantage of really easily.

We had one in Dominica a few years ago and it ended up-- we have 20 people that you're going to be training and it's the minimum. I try to emphasize that I don't really want under 20 for a program for a single individual to come down. If we get a larger group, we get 40 people, then Dave and I, we can get 2 or 3 people involved or we get the bee college involved when we start getting to be 30 or 40 people involved in a program. I can ask UF to team up and throw a little funds in the direction of helping out and having Amy and Jamie come down for the program.

We're always looking for funding. That's always an issue. I was just granted some money here recently so I'm going to be able to do a little bit more outreach programs and not worry about budget near as much, I guess. I'm not getting the hundreds of thousands of dollars or huge programs that you really would like to see endowment-wise to be able to pull it off, but that's beekeeping today.

Bees for Development is out of the UK. They do a lot of the same work that I'm doing but they're basically in Africa. Bees Abroad is another one out of the UK. They do a lot of work in Uganda. There's different groups out there doing it. Originally, I tried to work with Bees Without Borders. It was my whole initiative, was with Andrew Cote out of New York. Andrew just wasn't doing a lot of programs kind of back. His own business had taken off and he had a family, so he wasn't as interested in doing the outreach programs, extension work that I'm into. I started Bees Beyond Borders on my own and with Dave and a few other people in my board to get it going.

Becky: We did a trip when I was at the University of Minnesota and it was a combination of Minnesota Extension and the Bee Lab. We did get some funding from the Eva Crane Trust. They definitely support projects like what you're doing.

Bo: Yes. I haven't reached out to them yet. Jimmy Buffett also has a fund, the Seeds for Change with the Jimmy Buffett funding. There are some funds out there that you're writing grants and trying to-- I need a fundraiser. I need somebody to fill that seat for me of a grant writer.

Becky: You need to look at other bee labs across the country because this is such a great experience for extension experience, for graduate students to take part of. Bee labs are really good at writing grants.

Bo: I almost had Cameron Jack here in Florida. I had him convinced in doing a program in the Caribbean and then they had somebody come in from Thailand so they've been doing Thailand abroad trips these last couple of years from research over there. I was kind of, I don't want to say upset, but I'd really like to see Cameron take that leap. He has over 500 students now at the University of Florida in beekeeping classes. I'm pretty impressed with that, that out of a university of 50,000, he's got 1% of the students taking a class in beekeeping-

Becky: That's impressive.

Jeff: That is impressive.

Bo: -which says a lot. We are the breadbasket of beekeeping in the US, the nursery of beekeeping. I think it's 37 states bring their bees to Florida to overwinter them and get them up and running.

Jeff: When we were talking before we started recording, you were talking about you live in St. Augustine. What were you talking about bees in St. Augustine early on?

Bo: St. Augustine is the earliest settlement in North America. It was founded in 1565 and has been colonized ever since. We had the first Thanksgivings here really, so there's a lot of misnomer. We had the first free Black settlement in 1802, so we've had a lot of really interesting history here. My take on beekeeping was that the Spanish really brought bees in a lot earlier than-- the hard part is that Eva Crane wrote the book on the history of beekeeping in English. Being in a Spanish city, it's really hard to take all that British history. Whoever wrote the book is the winner and that information is jammed in Williamsburg, in Jonestown, 1492 kind of.

Wait a minute. Let me back up a minute. I started looking more into the history of what was going on and then circumnavigation in Bahamas being where Christopher Columbus settled first in San Salvador, one of the southern islands in the Bahamas, and then really went on. The first colony they really set up was Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, which is now Dominican Republic. The French settled a lot to northern edge of Hispaniola. Columbus on his third voyage brought in a lot of livestock and that's when they really established a lot of things in 1499 in Santo Domingo.

We found some books from Puerto Rico, the governor of Puerto Rico requesting beeswax from Santo Domingo. Being a Catholic-based culture, they needed beeswax for the religious ceremony, having that virgin wax. We don't really know which came first, the chicken or the egg. Were the Spanish actually bringing over the beeswax or were they bringing over bees? I like to think they were bringing over bees at that time, 1499. It just happened to be that the pope at that time was Spanish, so did he go back to Rome and bring those nice Italian bees and send them over to the coast to ship over on the boats? We don't know. I like to think that they brought them into Santo Domingo in 1499.

Baracoa, Cuba is the oldest city in Cuba on the coast, and that was founded-- I believe it was 1507 that the bees most likely came to there, and then they brought them up the coast of St. Augustine, North Florida here around 1565. We really don't have that documentation on it at that point. A lot of the islands I talked to and I'm visiting, I always ask them history-wise. A lot of times the French brought them in in 1788, in that timeframe, the early 1800s. Right around 1800, most of the islands had bees on them at that point. We get stuck with a few of them. They move bees around.

The first time I went into St. Vincent in the Grenadines a few years back, I got there, and the beekeeper prior to my arrival, the year before found American foulbrood. He said, "There's about 100 hives there. You're going to be the guy to go in and do the dirty." I get down there and I have a whole presentation set up that I'm going to-- and they just looked at me, went, "We don't have any bees. What are you talking about burning hives? There aren't any."

In two weeks, I was able to find three colonies of bees. I realized that you'd go to the restaurant and you'd go in and have a salad and you'd find them taking a razor blade and they're cutting up a gherkin pickle to put on your salad as your cucumber. They had no pollination at all. I had seen pollination crash on that front line, but we talk about what happens when you don't have pollinators. It was happening.

We were able to go to St. Lucia, we found hives there. We were able to deem them clean of disease, put them on a ferry. We brought them into one of the Grenadine islands called Bequia. We quarantined them there for six to eight months before we brought them onto the mainland. We got them back on the mainland and we got it back up to around 400 hives. We're ready to go and same thing happens. Boom. The crash happens again and now we're back down to 150 hives. "What's going on?" "Foulbrood is back." "No, it's not back, it's been there. It's here." "Did you get rid of all that equipment like you promised?"

Becky: Oh, no.

Bo: "No, we can't get rid of that. It's too expensive."

Becky: Oh, boy.

Bo: Thank goodness. Now, I was there this year and they've got it back up to around 600 colonies, but luckily most of that equipment has been rotted away and gone. It's a tough call to make across the board.

Jeff: That is Langstroth equipment then, right? Not the logs?

Bo: No. They don't keep logs there. It's not been a tradition in these British-- that were British-dominated islands. You don't see that at all. Haiti being so old and an independent nation for so long, they were just following traditions of whatever they were taught up in the mountains there. That's what they would work with. It was basically the logs. You don't see the logs in any of the other islands across the board. Saying that, part of my program is I actually wrote a guidebook on Caribbean beekeeping.

Jeff: Oh nice.

Bo: And so I've come up with something, a real basic guide.

Becky: Beautiful.

Bo: Just something small and simple. My background was in art, was an illustrator, so I've basically done little illustrations and just kept it a little black and white guide on what is going on in the bee world, to the end of it where I've come up with designs for hives, the top bar hive. I refer to it as a Haitian top bar hive where I can do four of them out of a sheet of plywood. If a sheet of plywood is costing me $40 or $50, I can get a hive built for $10 across the board.

Jeff: Just for our listeners, you're holding up a book. Is that book available commercially?

Bo: Some of them are online. Some parts of it are online and we're going to get it back on the website. I did have it on the website for a while. We're trying to get it back up again because it's such a big file, but we can get it back. I do have the blueprint on there and I've got the blueprint also available in Creole. Saying that, that's another problem that came into the intrude because I actually came up and had it translated into Haitian Creole and so we can pass that out when I go down. There's not an excuse to why or what's going on with beekeeping. I actually wrote the top bar hive blueprint in the back of it as part of it, so there's no excuses for not knowing dimensions and what's going on in the bee world. Here's basic information as rudimentary as you could get in terms for beekeeping.

It was a fun little project. I got it down to 32 pages. It would have been easier to do 100 pages. It's really hard to condense something really tight and have some kind of illustration along with it. It's nice to be able to go down and being able to hand somebody something and say, "Here." Then even in the beginning of it, I have belongs to somebody, pass it on to somebody else. If you're not going to use it, move it along. It's not to be thrown out a shelf or used for kindling starter.

Jeff: Or smoker fuel.

Bo: Yes, exactly. Smoker fuel is a big problem. That's what happens with a lot of the hives down there, and especially in Haiti with the Langstroth equipment that I do come across that is primitive, they don't have extractors, so they end up breaking all the frames or whatever they can come up with and then they turn into just kindling fire starters, and you find a lid on top of a box with nothing in it except squirrel comb. That's always an issue that you come across down there. I just did the big program. It was in Haiti. We were building hives and making frames, and boy, was it tough to work with down there, just limited equipment that you could work with.

Building frames is no fun task. They showed up. There's 2-inch-thick planks of cedar, 16 feet long that look like bananas, and they say, "Okay, build us a hive and make all the frames out of this chunk of wood." It's like, "What? Okay, off we go."

Jeff: Wow.

Bo: There's a lot of learning curves that you have like that. You think you're going to get into something of building equipment and it's not easy. Where do you start and stop, especially when you haven't explored and found out what they actually have. You get there and they have no table saw or they don't have a planer and it's like, "Okay, I need a planer, I need a joiner. I need equipment here to be able to build these jigs."

In Haiti, we were held up by-- they didn't have a hammer. There was one hammer in town and the guy was gone for the day, and nails become a big issue. Nails are the most hot sought-after commodity. Lumber is too. Lumber is very, very hard to come by in Haiti.

Jeff: When you think about it as a beekeeper sitting here and thinking about building frames and stuff, we don't even have to worry about whether or not we have--

Bo: No. We have such low worries with foundation and everything. There are some commercial beekeepers in Haiti. That's the crazy part. There are some guys that they have run quite a few hives, a couple of hundred hives. Bees are a little bit more aggressive. They've got a little bit of Africanization in them across the board, so they're not near as gentle as our bees that we're used to.

Jeff: That's not angry bee there in your office.

Bo: You hear my angry bee over here? It's playtime for my buddies. The Africanization is across the board in some genetics. We're even thinking a lot of that even in Florida. I see that everywhere now. Bees are a little bit more aggressive than they used to be, which is probably the saving grace for our genetic mite problem that we have. The only way we're going to get out of this is genetics and having that little bit of Africanization.

Jeff: How is the varroa problem there in the islands and across the Caribbean?

Bo: It's there. They don't have beetles as such yet. They haven't encountered beetles, but varroa is there everywhere. We actually did a program in Exuma here this last year. Jennifer Berry out of Georgia started a few years ago along with Savannah Bee Company. They brought bees in and really worked with it tightly. Had an inspector go down a couple of months ago and found no varroa at all on the island, somebody I really trusted being a bee inspector from Florida with a lot of knowledge and really knew how to do testing and really did extensive search and didn't find any.

Most of the islands have varroa. It's just part of it. They don't have access to equipment, chemicals, or anything. Actually, they have a real problem down there with it in Haiti. We actually make up our own amateur strips just going, getting cooking oil and dog dip at the animal feed store, and making up our own amateur strips. You really have to work with what you have on the ground. You really become a MacGyver in beekeeping, to say the least.

Becky: You have so many challenges in front of you, and so many opportunities to make a difference. Where do you see Bees for Development-- sorry, not Bees for Development. Where do you see Bees Beyond Borders in 10 years?

Bo: At my age, I'm hoping I can hand this off to some other younger entrepreneur, somebody that's dedicated to education, in general. My role about education, I guess, I want to pass it on. My mentor passed on as much as he could to me. He actually passed away last year. Kept bees up till he was 98 years old. It was really inspiring. Not that he knew what he was talking about, but it inspired me enough to learn and learn from the old traditions and ways and take it and move it forward. I'd like to see bees become a little bit more, not as feared as much in a lot of the countries, and the beekeepers taking and actually making a living from it on some level of it.

I do a lot of bee removal here in Florida, so I've got a couple of people in different islands that actually now have learned how to teach. I taught them how to do bee removals with a vacuum, and how to approach it and setting up swarm boxes with little top-bar hives, or even Tanzanian top-bar horizontal hives, and go to that next step. It's just really enjoyable to see these kids that are in their 40s now, or these young men that are able to support themselves, or a family, or have some supplemental income with beekeeping. I really like teaching the youth and the women's groups a lot. In Haiti especially, they're the ones that are staying home with the family around the homestead.

Haiti is a whole different situation with how the family structures are. The family plots have been divided up across the landscape, so they may have 10 acres 50 miles away or 100 miles away. They've got farms and they actually have these bizarre scenarios where they have families in different situations. It's really interesting to work with different groups in different scenarios. You're always trying to shoot from the hip and find out and learn what their needs are, and just work with that. Don't tell them what to do. Just advise them to get to that next level of beekeeping and income, some kind of sustainable degree.

Jeff: Definitely rewarding work that you're doing there. I'm sure the people you touch through what you're sharing carry with them for a lifetime, as you said.

Bo: You're hoping it does, and they're at least passing that information onto the next generation or to somebody else. It's a whole different aspect of beekeeping than we see here in the US. We're trying to work with some groups here in the US, but it's really hard to get established. We do have a few programs that we've worked with, but it's really hard to get to that next level.

Jeff: We're coming up at the end of our time. Is there anything you want to say before we say our goodbyes?

Bo: Enjoy beekeeping. Read, learn, listen, and stay tuned. Tune into a lot of the programs. We're trying to set up some more programs. We did it with American Bee Federation a couple of years ago and we had a Zoom program set up with that. Bees Beyond Borders, I did it all through the pandemic. We had the giants of the industry across the board. We did monthly Zoom calls. We're going to try to get back into that a little bit with American Bee Federation. I'm chair of education with that.

It's hard because most of the beekeepers there are commercial and they have knowledge already, so they don't need to hear a lot of the beginner stuff. There are a lot of beginners out there that really need it. There's a lot of podcasts out there that are really doing a good job across the board. I can't say enough about some of the YouTuber guys that are out there.

Jeff: We had Charlie Linder from American Beekeeping Federation in December. He is really working to promote and get the ABF across a broader audience than just the "commercial guys." I'm glad that you're working with him.

Becky: We'll certainly share your website with the listeners.

Bo: It's been fun. We're going to clean it up. I talked to my designer today and we're going to work on it again a little bit more, clean it up some more. We're going to get it out there.

Jeff: We look forward to having you back and learning more about what you're doing and the great work that you're doing with Bees Beyond Borders.

Bo: It's fun. I'm always up for I'm doing lectures and talking about it with other groups. I've done quite a few of those outside lectures, and it's been really fun to work with just exposed people to other ways with PowerPoints to show other techniques. Especially with Haiti has been real popular. People have no idea what log hives even are, how to harvest from a log hive. It's really fascinating stuff.

Becky: It is a great way to expand your knowledge of beekeeping when you're forced to see another method of keeping bees, so it can make a real difference.

Bo: It really does. It's really an eye-opener across the board. I just love seeing it. It's really hard to explain to people how rewarding it can be when you start seeing results a year or two down the line. We always try to do follow-ups on all our trips. There's only a few times that I've gone in somewhere and you hit it one time and go, "This is not going to work. These people are not receptive to learning at all." Most of the countries, you get in there and they really want to learn. You can get their appetite wet real quickly by just giving them some real cool information about bees.

Jeff: We enjoyed having you on the show today, Bo, and look forward to having you back.

Bo: Sure. Appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job and a service to all of us.

Jeff: Thank you.

Becky: Thank you, Bo.

Bo: Enjoy beekeeping.

Jeff: Bees Beyond Borders. Bo is doing some fantastic work across the Caribbean. There's so many islands down there and so many people. He admitted that he just can't get everywhere he'd like to get.

Becky: It's overwhelming. The work he's doing is so important. It reminds me of when we talked to Grace Foster-Reid, the point where some of us do keep bees for a living, but a lot of people keep bees for a hobby, a little sideline business. There are places, and a lot in the Caribbean where the ability to keep bees can make a difference in feeding your family and having a place to live. It brings it back to how powerful these honeybees are to people.

Jeff: I agree 100%. The power of the honeybee is beyond hobby. It's life-sustaining. That's so cool that Bo's working with people to help them achieve that level of living in an environment that it's fairly hard to live.

Becky: Thank you to Bo for navigating all of that hard work.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the  Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the "leave a comment section" under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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