Creating Bee-Friendly Urban Habitats with Susan McElroy

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast, with guest Susan Chernak joining us to discuss traditional beekeeping, skep hives, and what it's like to have honeybees as roommates. Susan has been making skeps for nearly a decade and has since explored log hives, among other practices, which we'll discuss In this episode. We'll talk about the viability of beekeeping in the modern world and what responsibilities we have as beekeepers that may not have been evident in the past. Susan's also the author of a number of New York Times bestsellers, all of which you can find online. If you'd like to read some of her work, including Animals as Teachers and Healers, Heart in the Wild, All My Relations, Why Buffalo Dance, Courting the Wild, and Animals as Guides for the Soul, check out her books and I hope you will all find this interview as insightful as I did.

Andy:

Susan, thanks so much for coming on. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you're doing?

Susan Chernak:

Well, I've been kind of a nature nut for many, many years, and then I just became a zealot about bees after I went to a really wonderful two or three-day retreat given by Mikhail Tili, and he did a special program called I think it was like the sacredness of bees, and I went there and was with about 14 people, and we were standing in front of hives and just experiencing bees.

And I went there and was with about 14 people, and we were standing in front of hives and just experiencing bees, and I just came away completely obsessed and just dove in with both feet and was blessed to be working with a woman, Jacqueline Freeman, who's always been into beekeeping in a more natural way. So, we hit it off well and have been sharing notes and ideas for years. And then we recently wrote a book last February that got released, called What Bees Want, which talks about our method of giving bees what they want so that they can thrive.

Andy:

Yeah, the idea of what bees want. I feel like if you've gone through the traditional beekeeping education, you're taught about these regimens of chemicals and feedings and all of these different things, and generally, it's around how do you keep your bees alive and how do you get more honey. And I think, as humans, we know that being fed and being kept alive are not what makes us happy. This is not what makes us fulfilled. I mean, we need those things, but without certain other components, it's not a satisfying life, and ultimately, it's not necessarily going to be the most healthy.

Now, I had a whole set of questions, but a couple of minutes ago, you just showed me your wall, and it's open, you know. I'll let you describe it. Tell me about your wall.

Susan Chernak:

In my bedroom. Years ago, I decided that I was jealous because Jacqueline had bees living on her wall next to the chimney. I thought I would like to live with bees, so I had a contractor come into my bedroom, clear the space between two joists, and extend it out just a little bit, so it's probably like a 32-liter hive. It's not really large; it's about five feet tall, and I put a plate glass on the cover of it with a drape a black drape hanging over it, so the bees are always dark. And then I've got a little bamboo tube that goes out to the outside. So bees come and go, and I've had this hive going for a nice number of years now, and they had expired last year. They didn't make it through the winter, but by gosh, in spring. Now they just show up. A swarm just flew in. So that's the second time now swarms have just flown into this hive.

So kind of, if you leave the honey in there and the other bees in the area come, I think all the bees in an area know where all the available hives are. Where are bees living? Where have they vacated from? What's good real estate? So this little thing has always been fabulous real estate for bees, and I've been able to watch them. I watch them at night in a dark room with a red light so I don't disturb them in any way. So when I look at bees, I don't see them running for cover or trying to hide or get out of the light or protect themselves. I watch them just doing what bees do.

One of the things I learned about them is they like to rest a lot, and when the bees are tired, they'll wander into all the little empty cells, pack themselves in there upside down, and snooze for about a half hour 40 minutes and then they'll come back out and start working again.

And I learned that the queen bees, when queen bees, a lot of them hatch out. When the virgin queens hatch out inside this hive, I usually hear between six and eight of them. I can just hear them tooting all the way across the room, and I realize that the queens don't. They don't argue with each other or have fights. The bees in the hive select the queens they want, and the bees will chase out and kill the queens they don't want. So it's not about, oh, this tooting sound is actually a queen challenge song to the other queens that are still in the cells, and it's like, no, it doesn't really work like that. The bees determine who will be queen, and so I've got to watch a lot of fascinating behaviors that you just don't read about at all.

Andy:

And so it's much more democratic than we're, I guess, traditionally led to believe.

Susan Chernak:

It's much more democratic and also a lot more brutal. They really do throw the drones out, those queens, when they run for their lives, and they cry. It's like, holy cow, but what they end up with is a beautiful, functioning unit for all of that. So there's this kind of difficulty and challenge in their lives, and what looks like sad and horrifying actions, but it serves a pretty darn perfect whole.

Andy:

Yeah, it blows me away that it's 2022 as we're recording this, and we don't know something as fundamental as how a queen is selected in a hive, despite the fact that honeybees are the main pollinator for so much of our food. We don't know something that's so topical and, you would think, rudimentary and basic around how these beehives operate.

Susan Chernak:

Well, actually, the only studies that have been done on bees where all of the information about their supposed natural history comes out is by people studying bees in boxes, box tithes. Nobody has studied bees in the wild or seen what their normal lives are like until very recently when Thomas Seeley in this country and Torben Schiffer over in Germany started doing very detailed data studies on how bees live in trees, how bees live in caverns that they choose, what is their life really like? And it's astounding. Basically, the way that Torben puts it is, you know, if you want to learn about the natural behavior of polar bears, you don't study polar bears in the zoo, and that's what we've been doing.

We've been studying bees in the zoo, and what they're doing in the hives is having to make incredible adaptions. They're always fighting the crisis of where we have placed them, and it's startling when you start to realize this is an insect in survival mode every moment. Now, the bees on my wall aren't. They're tremendously insulated. I don't bother them in the least, and they're very calm and relaxed. I never have to use gear with any of my bees because I don't push them, I don't stress them, and they live very peaceful lives there.

It's not the chaotic rush when I used to have top bar hives, and I would pull out the frames and look; there would be bees running all over the place In the hives. There's no frantic activity when they're left to their own devices. Bees actually they've demonstrated now actually rest about 40% of their days, and we don't even see or understand that because what we've been doing is studying bees that are pushed to the margins and saying this is how they behave. That's like taking trauma victims and saying, oh, this is a typical well-balanced person; this is how people behave, and what we're doing is only studying people in states of trauma, and that's what bees are. The way that we force them to live now in their box lives is just absolute trauma.

Andy:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Susan Chernak:

Oh, here's another odd thing about them. In hives that I have read about for years, in the winter, bees cluster. That's what they do. This is a natural reaction. When the temperatures get cold, they'll cluster tight in a hive. The outside of that cluster will be the heater bees, who fan and try to keep warm the bees in the interior, and that's how they'll get through the winter.

In a log hive, in a wall hive, or in a skip, they don't cluster; they're moving all winter long. When you read about that, it wants that because the bees are going to be active, and they're going to be eating more honey. When bees cluster in a box hive, they will use 10 times the amount of honey to get through the winter that a bee in my wall hive or in a skip or log will use because to heat themselves takes incredible energy; they're just roaming, eating a little bit, grooming. A lot of varroa grooming happens during the winter months. So, bee clustering is not a natural behavior of bees. It's a forced response to a desperate situation, and we have no,’ and we have n’’ and we have normalized it. This is what bees do. No, this is what we imagine bees do.

Andy:

So you brought up a couple of different things that kind of made me start thinking about some of the only things that as a treatment-free, natural, whatever term you want to use beekeeper, you know, one of the biggest challenges is around moisture during the winter, and it makes a lot of sense that in natural whatever you want to call it the wild bees wouldn't cluster because there's like this major concern around like moisture, and you know the moisture from a hive-like dripping down on the cluster, but if they're not clustering then they don't have that problem, which does make a lot of sense and I never really thought about it until you brought this up.

I wanted to bring you on because you've been working with Skeps for quite a while. First off, the last I heard was four years ago, so are you still working with Skeps? Yeah, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how you mentioned you worked with the Top Bar Hive, why you ended up getting involved with Skeps, and kind of what that learning process is like?

Susan Chernak:

Oh, it was a very steep learning curve. I started out with Warre hives and then I decided to go to top bar hives because I thought it would give me more access to the bees, which it did back then when I thought that access to the bees was a good thing. I realized, working those hives, that the more I was in and out of them and trying to help the bees, I'm going to condense the group for the fall and I'm going to do this in the spring. Any manipulations that I made were totally ineffective and useless and just pretty much made my bees mad.

And then I saw a picture of a sun hive, which is like a double basket woven hive with a top basket and then frames inside of it and then a hanging bottom basket, and I thought now this, for some reason, just struck me as making more sense. So I actually found the first sun hive-making workshop in the US, and I went and I built one, and I realized I didn't like it. It was a big hive and I was always bumping into it because you have to hang it up, so I'm always like knocking it to the bottom of it. It's like this is kind of unwieldy, but I love the idea of the coil weaving and I thought I just need a skep. I need a smaller version of this. This is much more thickly woven and that's the way that I really want it.

But I don't live in an area where I can find organic ryegrass or any ryegrass at all, so I ended up having to look for long grasses that might work, and I started finding some. Some of the feathery grasses that are ornamental grasses actually have really long, tall stalks, and that works. So I started cutting those, and then you have to cut them, Then you have to dry, dry them all, Then you have to clean all the stalks, and then, when you want to do the weaving process, you have to wet them down so they'll be bendable and pliable. There are certain tools that you use, and making them is a very old-fashioned process of what's called a coil weave. You've just got one long coil, and you keep spinning and spinning and spinning all the way up to the top. I weave them about two inches thick, and weaving them is like working with an angry boa constrictor.

You're trying to bend these really tough grasses into a perfect, nice round coil, and there are people that are like skep masters and they can pop out a skep in a day. For me, it takes about two hours to do one coil. So when I finish the skep, I look at it, I count the coils, and the tiny coils are actually harder to do than the big round coils. And that's how I add up how much time it takes me. And they take me, oh gosh, 24 hours to 36 hours, and I never just sit there all day and weave, so I'm weaving them over weeks.

So there's a real labor of love involved with them. And then, once they're done, well, obviously, they can never set out in the weather. So you have to clone them. You put a coating on them, traditionally a mixture of cow manure, clay, some wood ash, and maybe some sand, which doesn't protect them from rain. It protects the grass from UV light, which will break grass down. So if you have one of these cloned and undercover, the skep can last for 100 or 150 years, and if it gets damaged, you can reweave parts of it and fix it. So these are really heirloom hives and because the inside is rough, because of the grass coils and the spinning coils that hold the whole thing together, the bees propolize like crazy. The inside of my skeps are red and that is super healing for bees, and the skeps wick the moisture off of the bees. So they're extremely small, healthy environments for bees, and I love having bees in them.

People say well, how do you collect honey? Mostly, I really don't. When a hive perishes, which I've perished all the time these days, I'll collect some honey, mostly that honey. I just perish all the time. Then I'll collect some honey, and mostly that honey. I just freeze it in the comb, and it goes back to feed bees having a rough time, a brand new swarm, or something like that. But I just find it a wonderfully relaxing way of keeping them. I've had up to eight hives in my yard. I would never do that again. I'll keep two or three now.

When people talk about how difficult it is that honeybees are actually stripping the environment, it's humbling and it's humiliating. When you bring 10, 20, 40, 50, 80, 500 hives into a neighborhood, you have just environmentally trashed your entire neighborhood to get the honey you want, putting every other animal at risk. When you put all the insects at risk because there's no more food for them. The honeybees have stripped it all out. Then the birds go, and once the birds go, all the animals that would normally feed on birds go. All the animals that would normally feed on insects, like the smaller critters in your yard, like possums or anything like that, just go. There's no place for them. By bringing in a mass of honeybees in poorly insulated, inappropriate homes, you have just become a destroyer of your entire two-mile radius area where your bees hunt. So, I've just become much more radical in my approach to keeping bees.

I don't call myself a beekeeper. I think beekeeping as an industry has come pretty darn close to wrecking the natural environment for a product that is not even a necessary product. Honey is a luxury, and so for this luxury, we've stripped our environment of a percentage of insects and birds and everything else. So I just keep a few hives in my yard, and I have a massive pollinator garden where I have all kinds of. I take coffee cans, and I stuff them full of bamboo pieces. You know, about eight or nine inches long.

I've got hundreds of them up in my pollinator hotel, and man, come spring, I have? What do I have living up there now? I have, you know, a gazillion mason bees. I have leaf-cutter bees; I have grass-carrying wasps, mud daubers who move in and live right next to the bees, burying wasps, and mud daubers who move in and live right next to the bees. And I well, who else do I have in there now that I never kind of know? Some of them are packed full of little stones, and I'm thinking, well, what bees are these? But boy, do they use it. And that whole pollinator hotel buzzes all summer long. So, I know that I've got an environment that will host the native bees, as well as my few little colonies of honeybees.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think you brought up this really good point about if we're going to keep bees, the responsibility we have to not just do it ethically in terms of scale, but also in trying to. You know, with a Langstroth hive, like you said, they're burning all this energy, so they've scraped all this pollen from an ecosystem, and then they're wasting it to stay warm because we're not giving the right yeah, so it's not even like they're converting it into honey and you're like well, this is the most efficient way for bees to produce honey.

They're taking this pollen, but are they using it for something really useful? They're not. They're doing it just to try to survive.

Susan Chernak:

They're trying to keep warm.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, for most people, I think it's a failure rate right now around 50, 55%.

Susan Chernak:

I mean, it's not working. You would think that we would figure that out. I mean, the whole industry is collapsing. But man, they are hanging on to the hives, to the numbers of hives, to the chemicals being dumped on bees, and it's like you don't understand. We don't have the capacity to provide them with that. That's the most stress-free, and that's what will give you the best results. But the other thing, too, now is because of bee breeding.

Torben says it's not just having the perfect hive. Now you can have the perfect environment for the bees, but the bees themselves can be so marginalized they don't know how to behave. And he said, you know, he's putting up all these logs and things for them, and he's finding some, you know, know how to work it and work it down. And bees that have lived in boxes and on frames don't even know how to construct comb from the top of the hive down.

They'll start building from the top up. That means the whole, the bottom up. So that means the whole top of the hive ends up empty for a length of time. And it's like these bees don't know what they're doing because we bred them to have a lot of honey, not to make propolis, because propolis sticks everything together, and we don't like that, and we've raised them not to be aggressive and a lot of the things that we bred them to do have nothing to do with them staying alive at all.

Andy:

Yeah, it's the same thing. I also have some sheep as well, and I feed a lot of tree hay like just leaves and leaf litter. You know, you read, or you talk to other people that have had livestock, and they'll say, oh my, you can't feed black locusts to your, to your sheep. They'll die. And it's like, well, they won't if they consume just a little bit of it because it there's a lot of really great medicinal properties of the, the tannins and things like that that are good for them and for keeping things like worms down right. But they've lost that knowledge because it's not being passed down generationally. It hasn't been allowed to be a, um, a tool for selective breeding, that you know, the species that are the, the specific animals that know not to eat too much of it and things like that, and we've done that to honeybees as well, which is frightening.

Susan Chernak:

It's very frightening because the effect of honeybees on an environment is enormous. I think one of the first stories Torben told me about it that really got him to look at it was there was a very large flower farmer in Berlin, and a honeybee keeper wanted to ask if he could put his hives on the property, and the flower guy thought this was just great, he'd. Oh, they're gonna pollinate my flowers, and there'll be bees, and this will be wonderful.

And then what he discovered was honeybees come in such a mass, and they are such efficient pollinators of one particular thing that the minute the flower is pollinated, it closes down, and it stops, and it shrivels because its job is done. Well, when you have honeybees coming in, they will quickly wipe out a whole field of a certain kind of flower. So this guy was going, you know, I'm used to these flowers surviving at least the amount of time for me to get them to the florists, and he said they're dying in the fields because the honeybees are so effective at what they do that the flowers go. Ok, done, we're all gone. And he said, get these bees off of here, get these bees off of here. And he tried to sue the guy for putting the bees on because of what it cost him.

And you also figure that all of the nectar that these bees are gathering the beekeeper owns, none of these bees are gathering. The beekeeper owns none of that. He sends his bees out, and they'll rob your garden or rob anybody's garden, and then he'll get the honey, and he makes money off of it. But it's like, this is not right. You know, this is not right at all. So it's like this kind of usurious industry that depends on the goodwill of the environment and the acceptance of a very ignorant population who just doesn't know about these things. And then you have the disaster that we have now, and then the whole bee industry is collapsing on itself, and they keep saying it's Varroa, it's Varroa, that's baloney, that's just baloney that it's varroa. It's these horrible practices of keeping bees that are destroying them. They're just destroying them.

Andy:

I think it points to the fact that when we talk about, you know, like you were saying, you might be trying to plant a pollinator garden for native pollinators, and these honeybees move in that we do not understand this concept of like the commons in a very traditional sense, that if we are disconnected from this construct of nature, ecosystems, whatever that if we don't have that relationship, we can't truly value it and understand the complexity of it and make conscious decisions about and fully understand the weight of the decisions we make.

You know where I live. Beekeeping is not super common, but you know, I can drive around, and I can point out where the beekeepers are, and there'll be people with, you know, 12 hives because they want to make a couple extra thousand dollars a year or whatever. And it's like you could do so many other things for that money without creating the density of having that kind of hive, that many bees in one location, and without understanding the weight of where your ecosystem is, what that landscape.

You know if, if I live in a very, you know, forest dense area that's primarily pine trees, there's not going to be as much forage as someplace a prairie that might be able to carry that same, that same honeybee load, those are totally different ecosystems that are designed for, you know, supporting different species, and that piece of the conversation is never really brought up or even truly understood, even in like what someone might consider themselves a conscious beekeeper. That probably has never crossed their mind.

Susan Chernak:

Sadly, you are absolutely right. Sadly, you are absolutely right. I mean, when bees are left to their own, they will set up their own densities, how many hives they feel an area can support. They won't overpopulate a spot at all. But when we moved in with dozens of hives or hundreds of hives, my gosh.

People are not thinking about the ecological impact of this at all. And I know here on the West Coast, we have the Xerces Society, which is all about invertebrates, and they've always been really against honeybees. And when I called myself a beekeeper, I thought, why would they do that? Because I didn't know. And then I started learning about it, and researchers started publishing information about it, and it was like, you know, people say to me, oh, thank you for saving the bees. And it's like, are you kidding? Beekeepers are destroying the bees, they're destroying the rest of the environment along with it. No, I'm not going to claim that anymore at all.

This idea is that if you have them and you keep them and love them, you must be doing something good. It's a nice fantasy, but it's got nothing to do with the science of how it's actually lived out on the ground, and I don't think that beekeepers are looking at the major issues of what their industry is doing by breeding really deficient bees who really can't make it year to year, by breeding bees who don't even know how to make their own queens anymore or how to select their own queens, but you put a new one in every year.

What do the bees know? By suppressing swarming, which is the most natural behavior of bees and how they repopulate the world, you teach them not to swarm, you make them not swarm, you do splits of your hive, you don't allow them their entire reproductive rights, and then you keep them in these flimsy little boxes where they're spending all their time trying to heat and cool, heat and cool, heat and cool. That's where all their energy goes; this is an effective system.

The system that people used to have on their farms was a couple of skeps because you could weave them yourself, and before skeps, people kept them in the walls of their houses. In lots of other countries and third-world countries, the Mongols actually kept them in the… Are those yurts? They actually would bring a hive into the yurt. They kept it in the yurt around a little curtain, and the bees came and went and lived with them there.

So there was this very personal relationship in old, old homes. It was stone homes, and they had a little area in their homes that would have a little wooden door where you could open it, and that's where the hive would be. And if you needed honey, you snapped off a comb and then closed it. So the bees lived with you, and you had this wonderful relationship with them. In a house, you're helping the bees keep warm, and you know the temperatures are very consistent.

But we've gotten to this very industrial thing with bees and then by migrating them, driving them around to different places. That's how Varroa got spread in this country. In one year, we drove it from one end of the country to the next, and bees are creatures of place. Boy, they know their place; they know every nook and cranny and what's going to grow next year and where it's going to be. And we're driving them all over the place, so they're strangers in their environment, and there's this tremendous effort to go, OK, where are we? Where are we now? Where are the food sources? What do I do? And then they just get a system going there, and then they're moved to another place. It's criminal. I think it's completely criminal Once.

Andy:

I think it's completely criminal. Once you put it in the context of trying to imagine yourself as the bee, you're like, "Oh yeah, this is absolutely insane." Yeah, it's wild. Now you've brought up this point about being very—I don't want to say you're anti-beekeeping, but kind of anti-beekeeping.

Susan Chernak:

Don't say you're anti-beekeeping; say, "Yeah, I don't believe in beekeeping. I think it's a danger, I think it's a danger, I think it's a danger, so I'll just come right out and say it, but you still ke

Andy:

So I'”

Andy:

So I'm like I want to kind of parse that out a little bit and you know what your thoughts are on, like ethical beekeeping, and if so, if there, if there is such a thing as ethical beekeeping, which I think there is A) what that looks like, and B), I guess, how do you? Yeah, we'll start with what that looks like and, I guess, why.

Susan Chernak:

Okay, for me, what it looks like is checking out my neighborhood and trying to figure out how many people are growing flowers and plants and everything else. How much forage is probably here? People are growing flowers and plants and everything else. How much forage is probably here? I live in town, and a block down from me, there are like 14 or 15 very mature black locust trees, so that's tremendous forage for the bees in the spring.

I know that the bees that I keep generally don't stay in my yard because I watch. I don't have a lot of honeybees in my yard all summer long because they're in the trees. They're in the areas where they can really pull in a lot of honey quickly, which is trees. Here in the Northwest we get tremendous blooming trees all spring and for the beginning parts of the summer the bees start to come back into my yard. In the autumn, that's when I see them coming back, and so what I've done, I like to think of myself as an ethical keeper of bees I plant like hell.

I mean, it's all organic forage in my yard and I plant for what's not available for them out there. So I plant a lot of fall forage, I have a lot of asters, I have a lot of sedums, I have a lot of goldenrod and that's so. The honeybees come back at that point. At that point in the fall, when they come back into my yard, I'm going to have a lot of honeybees All summer long. My yard belongs to all the native bees, because the honeybees aren't much there. I'm full of all the bumbles and the longhorn bees and all the little individual living bees. I've got so many of them, I can't even name them all and I watch them and I notice as their numbers come up and they go down.

So I've tried to create an ecosystem where everybody can share and everything works out well. Create an ecosystem where everybody can share and everything works out well. And, Jacqueline, you know, my colleague said that she had, at a point, 10 or 12 hives and then realized that she wasn't seeing the bumblebees that she used to see and she went oh my gosh, this isn't working. So you start asking yourself why is this not working? Well, you read about bees, and you read that when they populate themselves in areas, the hives are very far apart; they're not concentrated in any area at all. So it's like, okay, we got to start doing that, we got to drop the numbers down and then the other ethical way of keeping is you have to keep them in species.

Appropriate housing and boxes are not. Bees don't do well with corners. Corners hide pathogens. Corners are harder to heat and cool in the way that bees have their heating and cooling system. So just the corners are bad enough.

The frames are hideous because when bees build on their own, the space between each comb is its own private room. There's no air coming in except the very bottom and if the bees want to close off that, they can run propolis or honeycomb across that. They actually have areas in the hive. I've been reading that they consider quarantine areas where bees that aren't doing well will stay there. I mean, each comb is its own room, but when you have frames that you lift out, and, oh my gosh, you hate that burr comb, and you knock it all off, that means that the bees can't heat and cool a few frames.

They have to heat and cool the whole hive because there's no area in the hive that has doors. We've taken away the doors from. Because there's no area in the hive that has doors. We've taken away the doors from our bees and they can't function like that. Well, they do function, but they function at a very, very high cost to themselves and the environment. They function at 10 to 15 times the amount of honey nectar needed just to try to manage the temperature of the hive so they can raise babies and take care of their honey stores. So the boxes don't work. The flimsiness and the thinness of the boxes don't work. But we also have forgotten to understand about, like you were talking about, condensation.

Condensation for bees is a really big deal, especially during the winter. They're all in there breathing In a tree hive or in wood, which is where our bees have come from. We've got this apis, who is not an African bee and's been living over in England. That's where they all came from, so they've been used to living in tree cavities and wood. They have a very fascinating relationship with wood.

When you make a box hive, that's not wood, like that's in a that's in a log, because the way that you're cutting it depends on whether the moisture will wick in or whether it will run off. In a log, everything all the moisture gets sucked up into these wicking agents in the whole top of the tree so you don't have condensation falling onto the bees. If you have condensation on the side of the hives, the bees propolis it, and they channel it. And they channel that water into little pools.

That then becomes propolis drinking water for them, so they medicate themselves with their own water. In an environment like that, they also live with 4,000 to 8,000 other species. So, bees really do take a village. When you put them in that box, you wipe out every symbiont that's ever helped them. I get people saying to me, "What do I do about wax moths?" Leave them; they're a helper.

They come in; they'll take out the crummy stuff. I have them living in the bottoms of all my steps because I stick my steps on top of hollow log rounds like eight to 10 inch high. So in those log rounds all the critters move in. I got pill bugs and springtails, and hopefully, I have book scorpions in there. I don't know earwigs move in. I have whole ant colonies living in there, and there are wax moths all over it. They never go up into the skep. When the skep fails then they'll move in.

But the bees keep them down, and they're down there, and whatever drops, including dead bees, these guys take care of down below. So we've taken the village away from the bees. We've put them in a flimsy little box with corners that they can't manage. We've put them in a place with no doors, so they can't regulate room temperatures, and then we wonder why we're losing half of them yearly.

Andy:

Yeah, it's not surprising at all, the more you start thinking about it.

And what I've really been hoping with this mini-series is, while this podcast hasn't been about bees necessarily, I guess applying the same sense systems thinking that I think has become more prominent in some of the, I guess you could call like alternative agriculture, and realizing like we need to be working with the ecosystems around us instead of trying to imprint these ideas of what we think sustainable, efficient agriculture looks like.

And I'm hoping with this series that, people will listen and kind of jump over those. What was three, three and a half years of trying to do it the way I was taught at beekeeping school? And instead of wasting all that time and money and effort and killing all these bees to start thinking about, okay, let's apply the systems thinking to beekeeping instead of a regimental like chemical treatment system and the industrialization of, as you said, those Langstroth hives and how those don't meet the needs of the bees themselves, and to think again like you had said, this idea of the bigger ecosystem what are the impacts of my decision to keep bees? And not that you shouldn't, but rather to to understand the implications of what you're doing yes, um and and around. That, like this idea of the skeps, I think, is really. I love the idea of skeps. They're really intimidating, though.

I've been around the block now with bees, and I still am kind of intimidated by skeps, partly because, in some cases, they're illegal in the U S and partly because I think there's just not a lot of resources about how to do it. So, could you talk a little bit about that piece of it, the more logistical side of beekeeping with Skeps?

Susan Chernak:

Yeah, it's kind of a hoop. I live in a small town, and in our community, we had bee codes that hadn't been looked at in 40 years I was running a small bee nonprofit then, and we took a look at this and went these are horriblet we go to the city and say, hey, you need to update this? So I did, and they said, well, what should we do? And so we got to write the B codes. So we said any appropriate, you know, species, appropriate housing is acceptable for them. So we made room for skeps or any kind of alternative’ of alternative hives.

The only reason that skeps aren't appreciated is because of the industry. they're not easy to inspect. You can't just pull and see exactly what you're looking at. You really have to take your time, and our town has no bee inspectors anyhow. So why are we requiring hives that can be easily inspected? When you really start looking at it, it just gets foolish. But I have to say that I've gotten to the point that if I were to start over again right now, I wouldn't use the skeps.

Logs are so much easier. They're so much easier to find Sections of logs that are rotted out. Anybody who's cutting down a tree doesn't want those. You just hollow it out a little bit and put a big, thick slab of wood on the top, and you have a perfect hive. And then, when the bees expire and move on, you pull that slab off the top, you gather your honey, you put the slab back on, and you let other bees find it because that's prime real estate. You don't even have to go out and buy bees. They'll move into those.

And I would use logs. They're super thick; they're round, they're perfect, and they allow all the symbionts for them. They're no big deal. And because you didn't go out and get the bees if they just moved in, that's not a managed hive; nobody can complain to you about that. It's like, well, I don't own these bees, they just move in. That's not a managed hive; nobody can complain to you about that. It's like, well, I don't own these bees; I just have a log here, and they flew in. Okay, that's not a managed hive, I'm just leaving them be. And I have not heard any inspectors complain about that kind of thing. If they are, it's like god, get a life.

Andy:

I mean, come on, that's just that's such a beautiful like, that's such a beautiful concept because it's like taking the American system of like technically, this is not breaking the law, and like it, subverting it and applying it. You know, that's something we see like I, I do taxes for my paycheck every week, and people do that. What they do with the tax code is they find a way to technically not do the illegal thing but get as close to it as possible. But you've completely subverted that, and that's just like a very beautiful reaction to the system that has tried to stop these traditional methods.

Susan Chernak:

Yeah, and the traditional methods are. Those are the ones that work. The farther back you go, the better that they work. Bees are meant to be kept on a property like a dog or a cat. You've got your cat there to take care of the mice. You've got your dog there to maybe take care of your sheep and make sure nobody comes onto your property. And you've got the bees there to help you pollinate your plants, take care of your sheep, and make sure nobody comes onto your property.

And you've got the bees there to help you pollinate your plants and take care of your vegetables, and you get a little bit of honey on the side, so they can easily live with us very, very, very comfortably. But when we start going into an industrial way of thinking about bees, we start killing them, and we start killing our environment all at the same time.

Andy:

Yeah, Susan, I have learned so much about bees in this conversation. It's been fantastic. I know you've got a book that just came out. Could you plug it? Do you have social media anywhere people can see more of what you're doing?

Susan Chernak:

Jacqueline and I have a Facebook page, a website, and a book called What Bees Want. You can find them anywhere. It's a lovely book about how to modify a Langstroth so it becomes healthy for bees.

So you can take these things and change them in ways that actually become bee-friendly, and maybe, if we get more bee-friendly, everything will start to look better, the bees will start to be healthier, and our ecosystems will start to be healthy. But that's. We can't go on the way that we're going, and I'm so glad for people like you who are looking at these kinds of issues and saying you know what sustainable agriculture really looks like? You know how does it really happen on the ground?

I just live on a little city lot, and I've created this place from the ground up to be enticing to bees and any other critter that comes in. Everybody's welcome here, and you know, now I've got possums roaming through the yard and squirrels everywhere and more and more birds. Because I don't cut down any of my flowers, you've got to leave the seed heads up all winter for the birds. We don't even think of how we could easily help creatures, even in a backyard. We could be creating little, tiny, beautiful Edens so easily if we just use our minds to go. How would it be to be a bee? What would it be for the bees to work? How do the bees work together with all the other insects? It just means a little bit of thinking and getting totally away from the common methods we have adopted over the years that are so destructive.

Andy:

And you bring a lot of optimism to that, which I can. It's very easy when you start going into these types of this kind of thinking to get very pessimistic because it doesn't seem like anything's changing for the better. But you bring a lot of optimism to it, so I appreciate that.

Susan Chernak:

Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Andy:

Yeah, so I'm going to be grabbing that book. I have not read it yet, so again, thank you so much. This was really great to hear.

Susan Chernak:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode 147 of the Poor Proles Almanac.