 Hi, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Farming Matters. I'm Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Sare program. I also farm, and I am excited to be here with you all today with Marie Flanagan, our communications specialist and producer of Farming Matters. And we have a very special guest, Megan Mahoney, who I think will blow you away when it comes to all things honeybees. And she's here to share a little more about her Sare farmer rancher grant. Megan, I'm going to toss it over to you, and you can share a little more about how things are at with your honeybee program and commercial beekeeping work. OK, thanks, Erin. I appreciate the opportunity to share what I've been working on. Yeah, so I wanted to take the time to talk to you today about basically a summary of our operation and also how we fit our Sare proposal into our existing operation. So in 2020, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a farmer rancher grant. And my program had to do with designing a honeybee breeding program that would benefit all beekeepers, including commercial beekeepers. And this is a breeding program design that is fit into an already existing commercial operation. And that company is called Clet Beekeeping. And that is a family of beekeepers I work with. And so essentially, it's selective queen breeding in a migratory commercial operation. So first, I wanted to share with you just our business model and then how we've taken this honeybee breeding program and integrated it into our business. My business is called My Honey, Bees and Queens. And it's kind of a play on my last name, which is Mahoney. Honey is in my last name. So I'm trying to advance to the next slide. There we go. So in a nutshell, we are commercial beekeepers. Beekeeping is our sole source of income. And the health of the bees that we are caring for is very, very important to us. If the bees aren't healthy and productive, then we cannot make a living. This is a photograph of our cell yard in Texas. And this is at full power. What you can't see behind these hives in front is that there is a dike that stretches back about a quarter mile. And there are hives on hive stands all the way down that dike. We're migratory. So that means that we travel between, in our case, Central North Dakota, Jamestown, and Southeast Texas. We're located in Texas near Winnie, Texas, on the Gulf Plain. And what we do is physically move the bees onto these semi trucks. And that's how they're transported across state lines. So in the wintertime and early spring, we're in Texas. And in the summertime and fall, we're in North Dakota. And you can see from the photograph on this truck that there are some hives that are starred. And I'm going to get into more later about why they're starred. That's how I can track my own breeders within the entire population of the colonies. We make most of our living from production of queen cells, queens, and honey. So the queen cells are what we produce mostly in Texas. The queens in both Texas and North Dakota. And the honey is mostly in North Dakota. And I put a picture of this barrel here because that's how we sell our honey. We sell our honey to a honey co-op that's beekeeper-owned. So even though we have a few products, queen cells are the primary product that we sell and the largest source of income for us for the year. And you can see in that in my hand there, that's what an individual queen cell looks like. And over to the left, in the cooler, you can see how we pack these individual queen cells into protective trays. And they're kept at a warm temperature with these hot water bottles. And that's how we deliver for pickup or for deliver to our customers or they can come and pick them up this way and install them in their colonies. So we already have an established business where we're selling queens and running our own colonies. But what we really wanted to do was take it a step further and start using more specialized stock. So this photo in the background is a picture of what carniolan bees look like. And they're quite pretty. They're not yellow. They're black and gray in color. And this carniolan stock was kind of the basis for building the breeding program in my proposal. And stock is really important to us because it can have a big impact on how healthy the bees are and how productive they are. And it's also important to our customers and whatever their business might be, whether they're selling queens, making honey or pollinating. So these carniolan bees are a well-known breed of bee. They are known to be gentle and productive, disease resistant. They're really known for being winter hardy because they're from the mountains of Europe originally. And in addition to all of those things, like I said, they are darker black or gray in color. And this trait, this dark black and gray is recessive and that's what makes it very difficult to create a viable breeding program. So while these bees are very desirable for many beekeepers, including commercial beekeepers, access to this subspecies of bee is not very broad. So it takes a specialized knowledge and method to breed this type of bee and select off of these bees. So that's what we wanted to do. We needed to design a breeding program that would be compatible and integrate into our existing commercial operation. So this photo is a photo of our holding yard. This is a temporary yard where the bees are staged waiting for a truck to come. And this is just temporary. We run about 2,000 colonies in our outfit. And so that equals about five truckloads, semi-truckloads of bees. So it's a lot of work to congregate these bees in a holding yard and get them on the truck as soon as possible so they can get to their destination with as little stress as possible. So in order to have a breeding program for these carnival and bees, you need to have an isolated area to mate, to mate the queens. And that's because the queens fly out of the hive and mate on the wing in the air. And so if you don't have a way to control who she mates with, you can't really control the outcome of her progeny. And that's why for us, artificial, instrumental insemination was really the only viable option because we don't have an isolated mating area. And I think very few people in the country do. There may be some mountain valleys somewhere, islands, but generally speaking, insemination is a very sure way and important tool to control your stock and predict the outcome. So these are queens that I've inseminated. I tag them with a unique number to be able to track who they are. And there's, believe it or not, there's an international color code for marking queens. So for example, last year the color was yellow and the year before that the color was blue, 2023 the color is red. So I also clip a small portion of the wing. On odd years, I clipped the left wing. On even years, I clipped the right wing. And that's if the tag falls off, I can track that that's still my queen. So the idea was to use an existing model that was put forth by Paige Laidlaw. These are two different men that were experts in honeybees and breeding programs. And essentially what their model showed was that if you have a base population of 35 to 50 breeders and you take daughters off of the selected high performers, as many daughters as you can off of each mother, you can see how quickly you would end up with a diverse and larger population. So for example, on the left there, those are my breeders, starred breeders. I would take a daughter off of each one. And you can see how even if I took 10 daughters off of four colonies, I would end up with 40 in the larger pool. And so that's what we're doing. And that's what we're doing within our own operation, but we're running two separate populations. So we're running an open-mated daughter population, which are represented by these orange hives. That's what I call the satellite population. And we're also running a complete 100% inseminated population. So I put together a little slide to sort of illustrate this concept. And you can see that the blue hives represent the instrumentally inseminated queens. And these are the colonies that I've, that the queen has been successfully introduced to. She's a black queen from trait desirable trait hives inseminated with drones from similar colonies that are not related to her. And over time, some of these colonies become star performers. And once they become star performers, they get promoted being proven inseminated breeders. So in that way, these two populations are interchangeable. And then once I have proven inseminated breeders, I take queen cells from them and I put them into our satellite population that is tracked within the larger clet general B population. And in that way, I can use drones from either my breeder population or my F1 open-mated daughter population to back cross into my inseminated population. So inevitably over time, hopefully over time, these satellite bees and the larger population, they have star performers that are selected out of them. And then when we raise cells back in Texas, all of those star performers from all three pools, the general population, the inseminated population and the F1 daughter population are what we use to propagate the queen cells for the following year. And I think this is a really powerful model because all of these populations can feed each other and help each other in the form of drones or virgins or queen cells even. So that's kind of how we were able to track and integrate our breeding population into our commercial population. We're running about 2,000 hives, like I said. And that satellite population is a really good way to tell how productive the stock is because we're running it all for production. And once they make it back to the cell yard when we're making cells the following year, if there's any sort of disease or traits that we don't like, then they're eliminated from that breeding pool. And so it kind of acts as a second filter for my carnival and population. It has to go through the production side and be selected out as being gentle, productive, healthy, black and disease free. So then like you saw the picture of the bees on the truck, these, I starred all of the colonies that are the inseminated population because I wanna track them and put them in unique yards in North Dakota. So those stars are really mostly for the forklift operator who happens to be my father-in-law. And that way he can see that those stars are my breeders and he places them for me in unique yards so that I can then catch drones off of that inseminated population. So these colonies are set up in a beautiful yard in North Dakota to make honey. So that's why there are the extra boxes on top of the colonies. Those are called supers. I also track for myself the mother line on the lids. So in addition to the stars, I can go to any colony at any given time and see which queen is supposed to be in there. And I'm able to verify that when I find her. That's my business partner and partner. He is catching drones in one of our breeder yards. You can see that that's a colony that is starred. Well, this is actually before I started using stars. I used to use blue 20s instead of blue stars. But we catch the drones from in front of the entrance and healthier, more productive colonies generally make more drones. So it's kind of an additional way to select for productive bees. And I love catching drones out in these breeder yards because what I'm looking for are big dark black drones that are fully intact and full of energy. And I never really knew that there were so many different colors of black in bees. But now that I've had this breeding program established and been working on it for a few years, it's like a rainbow of black out there in the breeder yards. So that's a really encouraging and nice thing to see. The motherlines and all inseminations are tracked just in simple spreadsheets. So by year, age, motherline, drone source and amount of semen. So at any time I can go back and head agree these out or see how they're related. And it makes it really nice in the field because I can just upload these sheets to my Google Drive and check them on my phone. And this is it in a nutshell, but I just wanna emphasize that it is a perpetual process. This is a dynamic population that's always changing. And the amount of work required to maintain a breeding population like this is extreme. And I think that's what makes it difficult and unattainable for most beekeepers. So I really appreciate organizations like SAR for supporting this important work and making it possible to do more selection and thanks. So I have to ask this, we might get asked this a lot. Like, do you think because honey is in your name that you're destined to be a beekeeper? Yeah, actually, I had never really thought about bees. I have always liked insects and nature. But I never knew anything about honey bees until I went to, I was in just an intro entomology class at the University of Minnesota, actually. And I chose honey bees to do a report on just randomly because it was always kind of interesting peripherally. But then I went to the entomology library and discovered that there was just so much information on these features. And it's more than just information. It's like the most studied insect in the world. And there are entire cultures around this insect. And I just became instantly obsessed and fascinated. And it just so happens that there's a famous and very intelligent professor that works at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Marla Spivak. And so I had the opportunity to work in her lab for a period of time. And that's when I first saw it inside a beehive and from the minute I saw inside a beehive, I basically felt like I'd found my destiny or calling. I don't know. You just felt like at home, I'm sorry. Sorry. I was 19 when that happened. So that's over 20 years ago now. And I always wanted to be a commercial beekeeper. And now I am. What would you say other than time, right? Like with some of the challenges with managing your queen rearing program? There's a lot of technicalities to it, but I still think the hardest part is the beekeeping itself. So if you are a beekeeper and you're interested in doing more breeding, if you have the beekeeping down, I think you're half the way there or more. I mean, because it takes a lot of bees to run a breeding program. To make, for example, to make all of the, we make little hives, they're called nukes or nucleus hives. And so that's generally what I introduced the queens into. So I can have the queens, but if I don't have the nukes to put them in, then I'm not going to achieve my goal. Can you share a little bit too about, you have a network of beekeepers you work with that we're kind of giving you some feedback on how well the queens did? Like there's that whole level of collaboration in addition to like sorting through all of the bee dynamics in your spreadsheets. Yeah, that's another, that's a really cool thing too, is that the customers that use the bees, I can use them as a bank if I wanted to. So for example, if I sold some breeder queens to beekeeper Bob, then Bob could then raise cells for me off of those breeders and then I could use them again in my breeding population. But the funny thing is about beekeepers is that, at least with commercial beekeepers, you don't really hear a lot of compliments, but you will hear complaints, you know? And so I haven't had, I haven't had very many complaints. And I think that's partly because we're doing the best job that we can, first of all, but second of all, we're running that population in our own production colonies. So we have a pretty good idea of what our customers are getting. What sort of, are you excited about heading into 2023? Oh, I'm really excited about the breeding program because it has changed so much since I started, I actually started it in 2019, then got the Ceregrant in 2020. That was a two-year project. And it's, the project isn't over, but it's just becoming more and more viable. Thanks so much for sharing with our listeners and viewers from all over and just wish you well with your bees.