 And I would like to thank everyone that's there for support of this work and to share some of the results with you that you can implement in your backyard or on your farm very easily. My son, Yura Svet, who is here once told me, Daddy, it's strange. People become all upset about some sad news they heard on TV, but nobody seems to be happy about all the wonderful things they never heard about. And this is especially true about honeybees because everyone is talking about pollinators, but many times it is in the negative light. You hear about bees collapsing and disappearing and becoming sick and being poisoned by pesticides, but what I'd like to do today is share the good news with you that you might not have heard about. And even though there are beekeepers who are having trouble keeping their bees alive, there are certainly beekeepers whose bees are thriving and multiplying, and my apary is in the second group, and until 100 years ago all beekeeping was done naturally. And I would like to share with you some of the key principles that you can apply in any situation. If you go back in history, just 200 years ago, it documents that all farmers had bees in their backyards. It was just part of any homestead. 200 years ago in Russia, you would read that farmers not only had bees, but also managing these hives didn't distract them from their other agricultural activities. If you were a farmer in 1835, how many hives could you have without them requiring any effort on your part? Three, two, five. Wow. Here's the complete quote from this book. At that time, farmers, commonly, it was not like the biggest or an exceptional apary. They commonly had a thousand hives in the family, and managing these hives required barely any effort at all to the point that the adults who were doing their thing, plowing their fields, etc., and children were in charge of supervising aparies of 1,000 bee hives. Today people will tell me it's different because we have all the diseases and parasites that plague beekeeping, so this kind of old-style beekeeping is no longer possible. But when I was presenting a two-day natural beekeeping workshop in Montana, they took me hiking into a ridge above Bozeman, Montana, and there are bees living in cracks in rocks in Bozeman. I asked, what time of temperatures do you have in the winters here? They said, oh, this winter was not too bad. It was just minus 40 for a week, and then it warmed up to minus 30. Here's an evidence that bees, if left on their own, can survive in the harshest of climates found on this continent. So if they're not thriving on your land or in your neck of the woods, that means that something is wrong, not with the bees. They can live on their own in the wild, but the way you manage them. We have a blueberry farm not far from where I live, and I asked the owner how he pollinated the five acres of spray-free blueberry operation. He told me he was paying $1,000 in pollination fees for a beekeeper to bring and put a number of hives on his farm each spring. When I asked him whether he considered adding a few hives of his own, he said, you know what, I'd rather pay someone $1,000 to do it for me. So how can it be that 100 years ago people could have hundreds if not thousands of hives, and today even the hives that farmers need for pollination are usually leased for professional beekeepers? My family has been keeping bees back in Russia since 1972, before I was born. And my uncle, who is the beekeeper in the family, now well in his 70s, almost 80 years old, he just cannot slow down because bees keep multiplying. It's not the problem of keeping your bees alive. It's a problem of having too many bees. And today when someone comes to my uncle and says, we have a huge swarm hanging on our apple tree. Can you please come and collect it for free? His wife is chasing people away with the broom, saying, leave us alone. We have too many bees, as it is. We don't want any more. And he says, well, I'm averaging 50 to 60 pounds per colony, and we have 15 colonies. That's enough for a family of two. So I agree, 1,000 pounds of honey every year, that's plenty. Here in Kansas, in Missouri, in the Ozarks, 100 years ago, you have the books documenting that every household had bees. And they were not in some fancy hives. They were just the log gums that people would open once a year, scoop out the honeycomb, and leave bees alone for another year. Today, many more beekeepers around the world are practicing this style of beekeeping, where basically you open your hive just twice a year in the spring to check whether everything is all right with the colony and then in the fall to harvest your honey. One of these beekeepers is the Russian author, Lazuten, who keeps his bees in a very harsh climate with short wind of time for foraging in the summer. But the rest of it is completely devoid of any nectar sources, a lot of snow and a lot of cold. He started planting pollinated habitat, hundreds of different species of wildflowers, shrubs, and trees, and converted his farm into a pollinator heaven, uses horizontal hives with very deep frames, like you can see at my display, too, only propagates his bees in the simplest way of all by natural swarming. And we'll cover that with you, too. Plants are wildflowers for his bees. So in his case, even though the surrounding apparatus are suffering from the colony collapse disorder, he told me his only problem was actually selling all of the honey that they were harvesting from their bees. He wrote a book called Keeping Bees with a Smile. And after I read it in the Russian language, I thought, wow, this is the kind of approach that needs to be promoted here. And I served as editor of the English language version of Keeping Bees with a Smile. So if you go back to the very old books, they will tell you there are two important things in natural beekeeping, and doing it successfully with just a couple of hive bees per year. One, you need to have local bees. And two, you need to put them in a kind of hive that works great in your particular climate and matches your priorities and your interest. The good news about the local bees is that you don't have to buy them from some local beekeeper. Because even local beekeepers who might be selling bees originally got their stock from some place else. The most popular bee race raised and sold in America is the Italian bee, which is native to the Mediterranean part in Europe. And it's great for subtropical climates and South of America. But when you try raising Italian bees in Kansas or further north, you probably won't be nearly as successful because this bee is not winded hardly at all. So many beekeepers lose a substantial portion of their hives every winter. And bee breeders think it's a great thing because the same people who lose their bees in the winter come back for more bees in the spring, year in and year out. In this country, beekeeping can become an expensive hobby just because the bees that you get commercially are not matched to your local conditions, your climate, and your flower resources. So part of my SEAR project was to look at whether we can tap into the local bees resource because there are plentiful bees living in the woods or wherever natural habitat is available, living in the trunks of trees, in cracks in the rocks. And they've been there since they were brought by settlers from Europe. And even today, despite all the difficulties that commercial beekeepers face, these feral bees are out there without any treatments. Nobody is using medicine to treat them. Nobody is feeding them sugar in the fall to make sure they have sufficient reserves for the winter. And they are thriving. The good news is that the bees multiply every spring. And the wild colonies, as well as the managed colonies, will raise new queens. The queen is the special bee that lays eggs and produces all the offspring in the colony. So there is a new queen in a big cell called the queen cell. And when the new queen is almost ready to emerge from the cell, the mother queen takes half of the bees from the colony and they fly out of the hive or out of the bee tree in the woods and hangs somewhere on a branch in what is called a swarm. And they send out hundreds of scouts all over the place looking for a new tree hollow to move into. So instead of buying bees, what you can do is put a box like that one on a tree and their bees will move in. Everyone knows that you set up a birdhouse and birds will move in. But for whatever reason, we've forgotten what pioneers knew in this country. You set up a bee house on a tree in the spring and it will be occupied by bees. I'm having 50% success rate with boxes like that hung on trees. For every 10 that I set out, I would catch five swarms. And in more agricultural areas like yours, the success rate can be even greater because where I am in South Central Missouri, I'm surrounded by forests with big trees with their hollows in the trees. So my boxes compete against the real thing for the bees. But if you do not have the old-growth forest with big oaks and big cavities inside these trees, bees do not have too much choice. So when they swarm and are looking for a new place to move in, if they find your box, this is as good as it gets. And there are the beekeepers who have built similar boxes and are using them to report even higher success rates in agricultural areas. On my website, which is horizontal hive.com, I have free plans for building boxes like that. And they can be put together even from some scrap materials that you can get from recycling centers and such. And this is how much I got in my first trip to the recycling center with my Toyota Sienna minivan with their rear seats folded down. Everything I had on my lumber shopping list to build hives and swarm traps, I could get there for free. And they were happy that I am getting it because it meant less work for them turning it all into wood mulch. So you get a box like that built or you can purchase it and put it on the tree. It already has frames inside there where the bees will start building comb once the colony moves in. And it is preferable to set it up on a tree rather than close to the ground because bees are looking for tree hollows which are up in the tree. And also why? If you were a bee, would you prefer a cavity up in the tree or one closer to the ground? Closer to the ground is better because it's closer to the flowers, no? Raccoons, thank you predators. We need a poo. If you read, we need a poo. There is a terrific chapter on the bee tree and we need a poo trying to seal some honey from the bees. And when he was climbing up this pine tree, he was saying, it's a very funny thought that if bears were bees, we'd build our nests at the bottom of trees. And that being so, if the bees were bears, we wouldn't have to climb up all these stairs. So true, we need a poo knows that, you know, the higher it is on the tree, the more difficult it is for him to get to the honey. And if you mimic this, if you put the box when bees would naturally be looking for a cavity, the chances of them occupying it are greater. There was research done internationally on placing boxes like that on the ground, 10 feet up, 20 feet up in the tree. And they determined that placing at 12 or 15 feet off the ground attracts swarms much more than placing it closer to the ground. Then one of the elements of attracting the swarms of giving the box the right size, but this box is already the right size, because they don't like too small of a box. There is not enough room to store enough honey to last the winter. They do not like too big of a box because it's too difficult to heat in the winter. And it was shown by research again by giving bees boxes of different sizes that they prefer something between 10 and 15 gallons is in size. So this is about 10 gallons. Another aspect that they checked is how it smells inside. It's almost like you coming and checking out a new apartment. And if it smells moldy, it's not really appealing. So you need to send it so that when the scalp bees discover the box, it smells like a beehive. Two ingredients to that verified by research include propolis, which is the bee resin that bees are collect and they're used for sealing cracks inside their home. And I'll pass around one packet so you can smell it. And another one is lemongrass essential oil in slow release vials, which mimics their own pheromone that they release when they find their optimal spot for their new swarm trap from their owner, cavity nest. Also, I wanted to know that if what I'm present on is of interest to you, I invite you to join my email list on horizontal hive.com on natural beekeeping. I only send about two, three newsletters per year and they're limited to very important, interesting things or new books coming out or workshops and other things like that. And you can unsubscribe at any time. So you can put your email if you would like to be added and you can unsubscribe later at any time. So when I set out the first boxes, my wife was concerned that, you know, it works in Russia, but will it work here in the Ozarks? Maybe bees are different here. So she was encouraging me to buy some bees to start with, but I now am at 36 hives and I never bought a single bee because they just keep coming and coming and coming. A couple of weeks later, after you set it up in the spring, the swarming season in Missouri is May and June, primarily. Here it would be second half of May, June and maybe the beginning of July, but bees can't flying and swarms keep flying until as late as late September. So throughout the whole flowering season, you can catch a swarm. So there was one box occupied and when it is, you just climb up at dark in the evening after all foragers return to the box so you don't lose any of them. You cover the entrance and bring it back to your apiary or to your place where you transfer them into a bigger box which will be their permanent hive and then you take an empty box and put it back on the tree again. So there was one swarm trap occupied and then another and then another. Like this summer I caught 22 swarms. Consider that the cost of two pounds of bees is $120. The average size of my swarms is five pounds of bees and I caught 22 of them. So I caught like 100 plus pounds of bees, valued at $50 a pound. So just $5,000 in bees alone but not only the quantity is greater and they come for free. The quality is very different and this is what I was looking at as part of the SARE research. The statistic shows that when you buy commercial bees in the state of Missouri, half of all hives will die in the first year. So you lose half of your investment in the first year with the feral bees because they were honed by natural selection. The weakest ones died and the strongest ones kept reproducing in proving their genetics from one year to the next. So the local feral bees keep living for years and years of the colonies that I caught in swamp traps in 2013, 80% of them are still going today, four years later. So the survival rate of the feral bees that I caught as part of this research is 90% per year as opposed to 50% for commercial bees. And then another thing I love about bees, you never know what will happen next. Once I saw that there were bees in and out of the box, I went in the evening to collect the box and there was a second swarm that arrived and landed on this box. So I saw the spectacle of them deciding whether to go inside and merge with the existing colony or to fly off. Took me three hours to watch them making the decision. And it was the fourth of July and the fireworks were going off at the distance and people who were driving on the highway were blowing their horns, looking at the guy who is up in the ladder and celebrated the fourth of July so hard that he's just stuck there looking at the box. It was a lot of fun. So the box when you sat on the tree needs to be highly visible. If you cannot see it from 300 feet away, the bees will have trouble finding it too. So don't put it between the branches of a red cedar tree or another tree that has very developed branches low to the ground. Like oak trees or other trees with exposed trunk, the first 15 feet work much better. Also bees see the forking shapes very well. So the trees that are big in diameter with big limbs coming off them or forks in the trunk work real well. Also bees like using our highways and power lines for their own purposes and navigation. For a bee flying through the thick of the forest of vegetation, it's very difficult because she needs to fly fast and not to bump into any branches or obstacles. For this reason, if there is open area, they would fly along the highway or along the power line to get from where they need to go to back to their hive. This is why the trees that are on the edge of the woods, on the edge of the woods by the power line, in fence rows along highways, in backyards and frontyards and parks, anywhere where the tree stands out, they work much better attracting swarms than trees in the middle of the woods. And it doesn't even have to be a tree. If you are not into climbing on a tree, and by the way, you can set the swarm trap up into the tree by just tossing a rope over a branch, tying it to your trap and raising it like that so it can be done safely. But you can also put it on the roof of your garage or somewhere place else. Just keep the box well shaded so it doesn't overheat. This tree, not far from where I live, I call the Isle of Beedarn tree. When I was hanging a swarm trap, a red pickup truck stops in the highway. The farmer rolls down the window and asks, what the heck are you doing there? And I'm always nervous when people stop while I'm hanging my swarm traps and ask this question because it could be the owner of the land I'm setting it on. I always take care to put in on a tree that is outside the fence line, if there is any. But still, some people feel particular about somebody setting, goodness knows what, on a tree close to their land. And regularly I would have swarm traps that are shot at, you come and it's riddled with bullets. Sometimes people shoot at swarm traps when the bees are already inside. And unfortunately, I lost a few colonies this way too. So starting this season, I write something nice on the box. I can report that when I write the number of the SAIR grant on it, saying USDA SAIR, grant, nobody touches that. So this alone was a huge bonus. Also, if you write something nice about children, they're like, bees for children community project or saving local bees. These boxes never got touched, so it's a good practice. So this gentleman stops like, what the heck are you doing there? I say, almost dropped from the leather, saying, oh, I'm hanging box to do what? Well, to track some honeybees. You must be kidding. Yes, they can move into this box. I'll be darned. And he drove off. But the finest part came three weeks later. I'm on the same extension weather on the same tree on the side of the rose, taking down a box like that full of honeybees. It was a huge swarm, like seven and a half pounds. A red pickup truck stops in the highway. The same gentleman rolls down the window and says, and what the heck are you doing there again? I say, well, I'm taking down a box full of honeybees. I'll be darned. Okay, you don't need to know where the bee tree is that produces the swarm because the scouts from the swarm can travel for miles looking for the right location. But if you happen to know where the bee tree is, if you have a bee tree in your yard or if bees live in your home, in the wall, don't put it straight close by because just as humans like moving away from their mothers and fathers when they grow up, the swarms like moving away from their parent colony so as not to compete for the same flowers. So they spread through the landscape. And their research showed that if you, like I did, strap your swarm trap to the bee tree, it will never be occupied. But if you hang it 300 feet away, then it will have a very good chance of bees moving into it. So you bring it back home. There are already frames in the box that match the size of the frames in your big archive. You transfer them into your big archive and you put this empty swarm trap with a new set of empty frames back on the tree because you can catch two, three swarms on the same tree in the same season. My record is three swarms on the same tree just because a single colony living in the woods may cast three swarms or so. So if you caught one, it could be that they will be issuing another swarm within a couple of days or within a week. So we caught the first part very quickly. Where to get local bees? You can get a plenty by catching local swarms. How to estimate whether your chances are good or not? If you see honeybees visiting flowers where you are, that means you have a good chance of catching a swarm. Of course, if you live in a place where for miles and miles around, there is absolutely no flowering vegetation like only fescue fields or only corn. Actually corn and soybeans can be good sources of nectar and pollen too. But if there is absolutely nothing for bees to eat for miles and around, if you do not see bees around, then this would not be a very good place to put your swarm traps. But if you have some clover, same for an alpha, alpha and bloom, and you see bees on that, you can catch bees quite reliably in these locations. Just very briefly, I'll cover in the second topic of what to do next. And we can talk more at my table after that. But basically, the American hive model that is most widely used called the Langstroth hive represents a series of boxes that are stacked one on top of the other. And it requires quite a bit of experience for managing it properly. Not only that, but it can physically be challenging because when you need to handle a box like that and it is full of honey, the box can weigh 50 to 60 pounds and you're supposed to handle it in a position like that. One of my friend beekeepers, a commercial beekeeper from Michigan, joked that all the money he had made on selling honey in his career over a commercial beekeeper, he then had to spend on a heap replacements and knee surgeries and back surgeries after he was 65. And it was a very sad joke because he was speaking from his own experience. And I know that it discourages many people from getting into beekeeping, the prospect of handling all the super heavy boxes of honey. Fortunately, there is another system of beekeeping that was traditionally widely used in Europe and this is called the horizontal hives. In the horizontal hive, all the frames are on the same level and it has the benefit of saving you the trouble of lifting anything. You lift just one frame at a time. You can have access to all the frames at once. So if you need to get to the lowest box to check something, you don't have to disassemble all the stack and then do it and then reassemble the stack again. You can get exactly to the frame you need and do it with minimal intervention for the bees too. Another benefit of horizontal hives was the observation of European beekeepers that they produce basically the same amount of honey as the vertical hive, but with a very small amount of effort. Here is a quote from the French beekeeper who was one of the most well-known beekeepers in his time who documented that in Aperis where he only opened his bee hives once a year, he always had these horizontal hives in excellent shape and they're full of honey, extracting which was his only task. So he describes he would come there in September, open the lid of this long hive, pull out the frames with honey, spin them out in a centrifuge extractor, take the empty frames, put them back into the hive on the same day, close the cover and leave the bees alone for a whole year. Today, beekeepers who have any experience in this country don't even believe such style of beekeeping is possible. So I decided to test it. What will happen if you use this all-time approach of putting bees in the box and doing nothing for a year or two years? Will they die? No, my experience and the two years grand project to verify that the bees will be there. They will be just a little bit of mortality but it is natural in both managed and wild there bees. But they keep going and going and going, being productive and multiplying. So I put a small swarm that I caught in June in two or three years back in the box and they did nothing. I didn't feed them, I didn't give them any treatments. I do not treat my bees with any chemicals or not even with organic pest control methods at all, ever. And I opened the box one year later and this is what I saw. The whole box was filled with honeycomb up to 16 inches deep. There was plenty of bees and they brewed the young bees in development and look at all this capped honey that was still in the hive after the year was over and the winter was over. So this was the spring of year two after they got installed. So there were more and more frames like that in the small colony that persuaded me and I was able to verify on three dozen of my hives that yes, it is still possible to manage your bees in this old style fashion when you don't touch your bees at all almost other than when you need to harvest honey. Now people will object here that this way you are not maximizing your honey production per colony and I will agree with that. But if you add up all the expenses of managing your bees looking into a hive every two weeks as the beekeeping manuals prescribe, all the more expensive equipment you need to use using fungicides and the chemicals and antibiotics. FDA took samples of honey sold in America more than 99% of honeys and supermarkets had antibiotics in them just because this is the residue from what the beekeepers put into their own bee hives. So if you add up all this expense and you will spend a small fortune on chemicals if you want going this way, you're on time the mortality of your honey bee colonies then you will see that the increase in honey production per hive actually comes at a huge cost. My approach is to let the bees live their natural life don't contaminate the honey with any chemicals at all and have a product which probably in terms of quantity will be smaller than that of bee commercial beekeepers but the quality is such that the going rate for mass produced honey is two pounds or $2 a pound when they sell it in big 55 gallon drums I'm able to sell all of my crop at $20 a pound and I always sell out just because real honey that is free from any chemicals and free from any sugar I never feed my bee sugar and this is one other advantage of horizontal hives they're structured in such a way that the bees first fill their half of the hive with their winter reserves and then produce surplus that's stocked in the other back of the hive. So when I remove this surplus I'm sure that the bees have already stockpiled all the reserves they need for the winter so I never have to feed them sugar water going into winter and this is why by the way I do not certify my bees as certified organic even though I could because certified organic honey allows the beekeeper to feed bees sugar as long as the sugar is organic so I don't want to degrade the quality of my product to these are you know practice of converting sugar water or corn syrup into honey because I do not feel this is really honey from doesn't deserve the name. Okay, just a few more words on horizontal hives because there are no additional boxes for the bees to move into you can make the top bars of your frames touching this way there is no crack between and when you open the hive you are not exposing any bees it's not like there is a swarm of angry bees coming at you because you disturb them you are able to do what you need to do on the side of the existing frames adding more frames for honey storage or pooling frames full of honey at the end of the year. You can also produce propolis by putting on top of the frames are plastic sheets with incisions there and the bees will put their glue that you smelled and they're this product is highly sought after conventional propolis goes for $65 a pound. The one produced by the hives are that were not treated with any chemicals goes for $100 a pound. So it is just another thing you can produce from your bees. There was a question there. Yeah, this is just if you use conventional American frames this hive uses the American frames that have a gap between the top bars. So to prevent the bees from being exposed when you open the box you can cover it with a piece of canvas. But I give preference to the European style frames that do not have any gaps there because this way you open the box of bees and there is zero disturbance for them and zero stress for you handling them. Yes. How difficult is it to get these style frames from our traditional beekeeping supply companies? They do not carry these style of hives. I have free plans for building them on horizontal hive.com. I also sell them. The equipment I have here is for sale too. So if you are not a woodworker you can purchase it from horizontal hive.com. Including the frames. Including the frames. I make all the frames. So this is the standard used in Europe called the lands. To give you an idea in all of America there are 2.6 million hives in just one country in Europe, Spain which is smaller than the state of Texas. There are more than one million hives just using this frame alone. So it is a very widely used and respected frame and the beekeepers in Europe would not trade it for any other hive model because of the some of the advantages that we are covering now. Okay, then when you have a hive that is just one box you can insulate it properly. The stacked hive boxes you don't want to insulate because this would add to the weight of the box even further instead of being 60 pounds it will be 68 pounds. But because this is a stationary hive that doesn't go anywhere you can insulate it and the insulation materials for all my hives I can get for free too from the local sheep breeders who breed their animals for meat and the quality of the wool is not high enough to be marketable so they make huge piles of it and burn it in the spring so I can get it by the truckload for free. And wherever I present it if you have local sheep breeders you probably can get a lot of wool for insulating your hives for free too. And interestingly insulating your hives is extremely important not only where you have very cold winters but also where you have very hot summers because if you don't insulate your hives properly this picture is of a double wall hive with insulation between the walls. Then on a hot summer day most of the bees instead of gathering honey will be clustering outside the hive because it's just too warm for them to do any work inside. Finally, with the very deeper frames that mimic the deep structure of a tree hollow in a natural bee nest in the wild you are avoiding any danger of bees or losing contact with honey in the winter and dying from starvation. The farther north you go the more this problem becomes acute. The American frames are just nine inches deep so to go from one frame of honey to the next the bees have to bridge a gap of about one inch but if they're very hibernated and slow because of the cold they may die of starvation in the lower box of your hive even though there is additional honey up top. They just do not know it's up there because they're too sluggish. In the European style frame the honey is here, the bees are here they're able to move the whole winter up consuming honey and preheating honey with their own breath without losing touch of honey without any risk of them starving to death. So there is additional information in the book called Keeping Bees with a Smile that I am the editor of and there additional information on horizontalhive.com here are some of the pictures of some of my hives and some of the frames and the bees. Free plans on horizontalhive.com. If you are not comfortable working with power tools you can make a high building party. This is what we built or did where I live. We had 17 people coming together bringing their own tools and skills. At the end of the day we had 33 boxes like that build and 17 horizontal hives built at the cost of materials. So it doesn't have to become expensive. One of my friends said my mother spent $5,000 on her bee keeping hobby in the last five years. You know buying all these hives and then buying bees that they have to renew every year because they just do not endure our winters. Your experience can be different. Euraswet once told me daddy I had a dream about one billion bee colonies and because nobody sprayed them with pesticide not a single bee died and they collected so much honey that it lasted them one billion years. And you know here in the Midwest we have amazing local plants that produce fabulous honey and fabulous nectar. Here is button bush that grows wherever standing water is available. Blazing star and basswood and their red buzz and this is my number one best producing plant which is sumac. I know farmers try to get rid of sumac because it spreads and it just ruins your pasture but this is where my honey comes from and I bet I can get more in terms of even economic return from an acre of sumac on the rocky southern exposure on productive soil than I could get from the same acreage by running cattle there. There is more information on keeping bees with a smile as well as in two other books in the same series that I edited the English translation of Growing Vegetables with a Smile and Growing Fruit with a Smile there as a revolutionary in their respective areas as keeping bees with a smile is regarding bees. Do you know about these... Yes. ...curture came up with? Yeah. You hang them in a tree and they're really just for habitat. You don't extract any honey really just so that bees can swarm and... Thank you for your question. It's true that if your primary interest is pollination then you don't need even to have a box like that with frames in it. You can create any kind of cavity that is, as we know from research, from 10 to 15 gallons. And, you know, hollow logs will work great and just put it up on the tree and it will attract bees and it can stay there. If you are not getting any honey from there it will be there just for pollinating. But it's true that in many areas, including here, habitat may be the limiting factor for the bees. They may have plentiful forage but there are not sufficient trees with big collars inside them to allow the big population of local bees to be present. So if you provide this habitat, as they do in Germany and elsewhere and if your primary interest in pollination you can do it at even smaller expanse. However, I see no reason not to keep bees for both pollination and honey because if you do it using the natural methods and they are bee-friendly and non-invasive, you can do all the pollination you want without compromising the health and the vitality of your colony and get honey almost as a byproduct of what you do for boosting pollinator populations.