"You've mentioned at a certain point, beekeepers can get to a place where the bees actually choose the keeper. What is that about and what do you attribute it to?"
"Bees see the humble being in everything. The honeybee smells fear like a shark fears a drop of blood in the ocean - miles away. When you're scared and when you're upset, the bees feel it. I truly believe that there's a little bit of everything in everybody, that there's some of me in the trees around me, that there's some of me in you, that there's a little bit of you in all of us, that all of us make one supreme being if we all could come together, that would be all of us - but we are all broken apart - to make everything in this universe.
I believe that the bees sense the beekeeper in you, that when you see the older beekeepers working, that's because they have let their inner beekeeper completely out: they have no fear, they know what the bees like, they know what the bees don't like, they know how to work with the bees, the bees know how to work with those beekeepers. Old men in white rubbing their mustaches across the frames of bees is just amazing. When you're watching it, you're scared crapless because you see what their doing, but those guys have found their inner bee. You know, their inner freedom. They are no longer scared of anything. They are the jedi knight. You can throw anything at them, and they just deal with it. And it's okay to be that way. I think the bees see that.
I think that bees see the inner child. You know, my son is very young, and he plays with the bees, he catches them, he puts his eye up to the hive to see inside, they crawl over him. I truly believe that working with the bees you become a true humanitarian. You're working with the deadliest thing that mother nature could have put out there that kills man, it kills man, and we've even made it more deadly where it swarms faster, breeds faster, stings harder. It's the most deadly thing you're gonna play with, and these guys are out there without without any shirts or shoes on ripping the hives apart, pulling out honeycomb and eating it fresh, thanking the bees. You have to be one with yourself. I truly believe that the bees pick those out, because I know that they don't pick me because I get the crap stung out of me some days.
I know, I've worked with some guys - 20 beehives it takes me three hours to work through. I've watched these guys work 50 beehives and in an hour they're done. They check for mites, dysentery, hive beetles. I mean, they're going through a hive, they're checking queens, they're marking queens, they're singing along and they're having a great day outside, and as a beekeeper I think those are some things that you want to get into is to be humanitarian, to find your inner bee, to find your inner love for being outside. And I'm working with the most dangerous thing Mother Nature could throw at me, and we're working together, and they're pollinating my food, and I'm making sure they have a good clean home to live in. Those are some of the aspects I think of when I see beekeepers and that's why some of them are so good."
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"My grandfather told me - he says, "You know, you can do anything you want in this world. You can be anything you want. You may just not be as good as everybody else doing it. And I think that's what people who do that procrastination thing are doing - I think that they are scared and I think that they over-analyze everything because they want it to be perfect. And let's face it, if it was perfect, Mother Nature would have done it and none of us would have gotten involved in it. It's not that they are scared to get involved, it's just that they are afraid to fail.
You know, I built my raised beds, and guess what? I forgot to put stakes on the side of it it and it blew out. Totally blew out three yards of my dirt. No one wants to tell their neighbor that. They wanna say, "Yeah man, I was growing great squash this year, it was awesome in my raised beds." No one wants to hear about how they had to spend an extra day putting the sides on. You know? How do I know that? Because I spent an extra day putting the sides on.
I mean, I'm prone to fail...And sometimes you have to be the junkyard warrior. You have to go out to the pick-n-pull. You have to pull your own starter out of a car. And you have to go home and put it in, because taking it to the garage is gonna cost you $500 and removing it from this car is gonna cost you 50 bucks and three hours of your time. What have you got? I think people are afraid to fail. Nobody wants to be labeled a loser. No one likes to be called fat and no one likes to be called slow, but let's face it - there's only 10% of us in the world that have IQs over 187 and the rest of us are ditch-diggers baby. And I think that's what people are afraid of. The world needs ditch-diggers, man. I work as a custodian, and if I don't show up to work one day, the trash piles up, it starts to stink, the rats come and before you know it you got the plague. I'm the lowest guy on the food chain, and without me you guys get plague. Everybody's got a duty, and you just got to jump in there and get stung, you gotta get in there and get your feet dirty, and sometimes you're stretching wire and it does snap and it cuts your arm. I mean, you learn. That's how you learn. People procrastinate because they are afraid to fail, and failure is the biggest learning moment you'll ever get."
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"Someone had gotten to the point where they had learned enough to have constructed a hive, they had captured wild bees, put them in the box, and the next day they were gone. What would you think that was attributed to? I know that's not a lot of information..."
"Girls are picky. Let's face it. Girls are, you know, I'm married to one. She's picky. Girls like pretty things. And they like things aesthetically looking cool. They like good smells. If you're you're gonna get bees, you should start out with a small box to let them populate really good, and if the bees are leaving - I've had bees leave some of my hives too - they just don't feel like the housing is good for them. We're not moving into this craphole man. Bees do not like brand-new things all the time either. They like buying a used home that's been well taken care of. A brand new box, you're gonna have to add some lemon grass oil into it to give them that smell that there's been a queen in there before. Sometimes you put in some frames that already have some foundation built into them from another beekeeper so it looks like there's been something here before so it must have been a home that was good. Just dumping a wild swarm of bees - they're already used to a semi-dirty floor where the wood chips have fallen down out of the trunk of the tree down to the bottom of the trunk of the tree, so the bottom of the floor isn't a flat bottom board - it's a little rocky, it's got some bugs maybe crawling through it. They're kinda picky, but they're girls. So lemon grass oil. Put it inside the beehive. Some people put it in a cotton ball. I say melt some wax down and just add it to the wax so the wax has a permeating smell all the time. Those are things that make it more hospitable - make it clean, make it nice, but make it so it looks like you live in it, and they'll come and they'll live there."
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"If you wanna help beekeepers, don't use pesticides, don't use fertilizers, try to do as much natural planting as you can... Plant bee balm, plant sour wood, plant as much as you can everywhere you can. Feed the bees. Bees fly up to two miles for food production and have been known to fly up to five miles eating some of their nectar to get home again. So they'll go far. Just plant as much as you can and be as nice as you can. Right? no pesticides."
- Interview with Michael Jordan, Beekeeping with the Bee Whisperer, In the Rabbit Hole Urban Survival podcast
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