Carl Lanore: Hey, hey welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. We have a great show planned, this is going to be a really easy show for me. We are going to be talking about honey. We are going to be talking with a career beekeeper or I like to call them bee charmers—it just sounds more exotic.
Stuart Dietz in just a moment and then later in the show we are going to be joined by Coach Rob Regish and super fan Shawn Knernschield to talk about a variety of things and I call that segment Shooting the Breeze because it is just a bunch of us guys hanging out. I can promise you this is going to be some interesting stuff discussed. We just don't have it all flushed out exactly what we are going to be discussing. You can be present for the organic process as it unfolds.
We all agree that last week's Come At Me Bro, my first attempt at a Q&A, was a disaster. It was a technological disaster thanks to BeLive TV. This week, I am going to try to use BeLiveTV one last time because they offer some things like being able to put questions right up on the screen that I can't do with just a regular livestream. We are going to try it one more time tomorrow 12 noon.
However, for those of you who can't be there live but still want your questions asked, I've had so many people say I can't be there live but I have a question, okay so email it to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We’ll post in on my Facebook wall and I promise you that I will name you as the person asking the question, unless you say you want anonymity in an email to me, and reading your question live and answering it live and then you can come back and watch the show afterwards because it will be up on the Super Human Radio network Facebook page.
That's the plan for tomorrow… 12 o'clock. Come and see the debacle that if it turns out to be technologically— we would be cursing and bitching about BeLive TV. That’s humorous too. A lot of people got a kick out of that. So I promise you I will make you laugh tomorrow.
Stuart Dietz, how are you?
Stuart Dietz: Hello! Good Carl. Thanks for having me on and thanks to Shawn Knernschield for acting as the go-between for—
Carl Lanore: Yeah, he is your agent now. Shawn is your agent now.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, your superfan Shawn Knernschield.
Carl Lanore: Yes, Shawn and I are friends now. We are friends, make no doubt about it. But anyway, how long have you been— So what do you prefer: beekeeper or bee charmer? A bee charmer is said to be somebody who can stick their hand in a hive, remove a hunk of honey in the hive and the bees will not harm them. That is not a beekeeper is it?
Stuart Dietz: That probably would be a very elevated level of beekeeper. I don't really put myself in that class.
Carl Lanore: Okay, so we will call you a beekeeper. So how did you become interested in becoming a beekeeper? When did this happened?
Stuart Dietz: Well, this was actually back in 1971 when I was a pretty young and just starting in the Boy Scouts of America. Back in those days they have beekeeping merit badge and it was my goal--
Carl Lanore: No kidding.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, and it was my goal to try to earn all the merit badges that were available, which was well over hundred, but I've always been interested in agricultural pursuits even though we didn't lived on a farm. And so one day I was at the Sears Roebuck with my dad and they used to carry a pretty good collection of merit badge pamphlets and I saw the beekeeping one and I started reading it and bought it and just became fascinated and so I didn't know a beekeeper at that point but my dad actually found an older gentleman that had a few hives and he let me come out and help me complete all those requirements for the merit badge.
Carl Lanore: That was nice of your dad, wasn’t it?
Stuart Dietz: Oh my dad and mom both were just— I wouldn’t have been able to do anything without them. There were just extremely—
Carl Lanore: Do you have children now Stuart?
Stuart Dietz: No, I don't.
Carl Lanore: Okay, well I do and I only hope that someday one of my kids is telling a story and says, “And my dad did this and this…” and that was like the gateway to something that they love because every father wants to be able to do that. So anyway, okay—
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, that is very true with my dad on a number of different ways.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, I get. So when did you actually have your own first hive?
Stuart Dietz: Okay that was in 1973. By that time I had done a lot of background reading and this older gentleman whose name was Carl Hultgren from Roseville, KS, he got me connected with the Northeastern Kansas Beekeepers Association. So I started to go to those meetings which have a lot of old timers with a wealth of knowledge and experience. That started be on my journey and of course back in those days, I was only 14 years old so my mom and dad actually put forth the money to get me started.
Carl Lanore: Okay, so now let's talk about that—that’s my next question. So basically you have to buy a beehive which they manufacture now. They look like a rack of drawers that go in and out and holes and all that sorts of stuff. So you have to buy a beehive, you also have to buy bees. Where did you buy your bees from?
Stuart Dietz: Well as it turns out there's a number of different commercial beekeeping operations primarily in the south and in California were the season gets started much earlier. And they will actually sell you an artificial swarm of bees which consists of typically about 3 pounds of live honeybees. They come in a wired with screen cage and then in a separate smaller cage within that large cage is a new queen bee that has been freshly mated.
And so she and the bees that are out of various hives haven't yet become accustomed to each other so when you get those through the USPS or UPS, either one, or in some cases larger beekeepers will go down with their truck and pickup hundreds or even more of these packages of bees in the spring. And so you know there are certain things that you have to do to install those in the hive and then you leave that queen caged up for a while where she is separate from those bees until they become assimilated with her.
Carl Lanore: So do they clash? You have like the clashing bees like they don't know each other and so they fight it out?
Stuart Dietz: Right! Particularly with the queen— If you typically just try to introduce a strange queen in a bunch of bees that are not her progeny, the bees will typically attack and kill her. So it takes a number of days for them to be acclimated with her odor and for them to have interaction with her in feeder and spread the chemical pheromones back-and-forth to the point where they will fully accept her.
Of course, she's the mother of the hive and so she lays up to about 2,000 eggs per day during the peak part of the season—I think 1,500 is considered typical but anyway— So any of those bees that become her progeny are actually all her daughters and in the case of the drone or male honeybee will be her sons.
Carl Lanore: Okay, so the hive itself, the masses of bees, are there males and females in bees or females only always queen bees?
Stuart Dietz: Yes, female is always the queen. She is a fully developed queen bee or I mean a fully developed female and she is the only one that is capable of laying eggs that will hatch actually with another female.
Carl Lanore: So we can clearly assume that the bee population, at least in captivity, produces a lot more males of the species than the rarity of the queen bee.
Stuart Dietz: Well actually a typical colony and its peak population or I shouldn’t say typical— I should say a good colony in the peak population, which here in the Midwest would be sometime in late May, maybe the mid-June, when most of the honey plants are in full bloom and producing nectar that the bees make honey from, there may be around typically 500 drone bees or male bees in the hive and the rest of them will be worker bees, which are underdeveloped females hatched from the exact same type of eggs as the queen does and again typically one queen who is the mother of all those bees in that colony.
Carl Lanore: So will all of those worker bees that are underdeveloped female bees eventually become fully developed queens?
Stuart Dietz: No.
Carl Lanore: That’s my point, that my point.
Stuart Dietz: Once they reached adulthood then pretty much it is a done deal. The queen--
Carl Lanore: So they either morph into—and morph is the appropriate word here when you talked about bugs—they either morph into a queen or they are sequestered to be a fully matured female bee that's a worker for the rest of her life.
Stuart Dietz: Yes.
Carl Lanore: That’s very interesting from both a philosophical point of view as well as a societal point of view. You know what I mean?
Stuart Dietz: Yes.
Carl Lanore: Interesting! So the queen can produce around 1,500 eggs a day and they will become bees and fall into place in the categories that we just described.
Stuart Dietz: Yes, yes.
Carl Lanore: Now, who actually makes the honey—So we have bees that go out and they gather stuff from the environment and then influences the honey production, is that then chewed and vomited out? Because I’ve heard that honey is actually bee vomit. Is that chewed and vomited out by the workers?
Stuart Dietz: No, technically it’s not bee vomit all because the worker bee has what's called the “honey pouch”, which is separate from their regular stomach that goes through their digestive system and so that honey pouch is of course internal and they do have to expel that from their—expel the nectar from the honey pouch and they give it to another bee typically in the hive which deposits it into a cell where it then resides as nectar and of course they add enzymes to it and then the bees well—you know whole army of these worker bees will fan their wings at very high speed near the entrance of the hive until an air current is produced that actually passes across the combs and ripen it down into honey. Because the nectar when they collect it, it depends on the floral source but you know typically it can be above 90% moisture and the bees will ripen it down into honey in order—
Carl Lanore: They basically reducing it like we would reduce a sauce on a stove—they are reducing it.
Stuart Dietz: Right and typically it is going to be 18% moisture or less when it is fully ripe and then honey.
Carl Lanore: Wow! So they actually create convection in order to reduce the moisture, to evaporate the moisture from the honey, thickening it, and making it the consistency that we love when we think of honey.
Stuart Dietz: Yes.
Carl Lanore: How fascinating. Now what do bees make honey for? They don't make it for us, they must make it for themselves. Is it a food source?
Stuart Dietz: Yes that's true. That is the carbohydrate part of their diet and typically they would consume it in the form of nectar but in order for honey to store over long periods of time it has to be ripen down so that the sugar tolerant yeast that are naturally present in the nectar will not cause it to ferment.
Carl Lanore: So they will eat the nectar right now while it’s fresh but this is their storage food when they do not have blossoms and blooms to come to create—
Stuart Dietz: Exactly right. Yes and that is what they live on through the winter.
Carl Lanore: Now think about how amazingly efficient nature is because I want to tell people something if you never heard this before, honey is one of the only things—I am talking about real honey not the stuff that's out there today they are calling “honey” that actually has corn syrup and other things but real, real, real honey has no shelf life. No mold can grow in it, no fungus can grow on it. In fact they retrieved honey jars from the tombs of the pharaohs that with thousands of years old and the honey was still edible, it was still good. So think about bees know something about preserving food.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Carl Lanore: Holy mackerel.
Stuart Dietz: And the other part of the bees’ diet, which is very important also, is the protein which they gather from—which they get from pollen also from various trees and other plants.
Carl Lanore: So is that the bee pollen that people are so crazy about buying and eating now? That's their source of protein because there are a lot of amino acids in there. Yeah.
Stuart Dietz: Yes, that is exactly right.
Carl Lanore: So when we are eating the bee pollen, we’re eating their protein. That’s terrible. We shouldn’t do that, we should leave them there.
Okay, here’s what I want to do. I want to take our first commercial break and when I come back I want to talk specifically about being a beekeeper and maybe some of things that people think they know about honey but they really don't. We are talking with Stuart Dietz. This is the Super Human Radio and I will be right back.
Carl Lanore: There is no doubt that when it comes to sweeteners, honey appears to be very different. And now we know why because honey is a manufactured food product--manufactured by a specific species. It's not sap coming out of a maple tree. It's a very sophisticated, very technical food product that encompasses a lot of stuff; minerals, enzymes and everything else.
A lot of people would like to say, “Oh, honey is just sugar… it’s just sugar. No different than table sugar.” It absolutely is very different than table sugar because of the process that goes into making it. Basically a meal replacement product that bees make.
Anyway, Stuart—we are talking with Stuart Dietz—so Shawn kind of alluded to—well let's talk about what could go wrong in the business of making honey today? What do we see that has become a deviation of the way honey has been made for thousands of years?
Stuart Dietz: Well of course modern beekeeping and commercial beekeeping were made possible by the modular movable frame hives that we have today that were actually came about through the discovery of the bee space which was made—that discovery was made by Rev. L. L. Langstroth back in the mid 1800s. And so the whole beekeeping industry just exploded from that point.
Carl Lanore: What do you mean? What was his findings?
Stuart Dietz: Well he found that as long as a space is maintained of a ¼ to 3/8 of an inch between the combs and the inside wall of a cavity that the bees used for a nest, that the bees won't build comb or glue it together with substance that they gather to patch cracks and such called “propolis” that is also gathered from the buds of certain plants.
And so that made possible with the design of a movable frame hive where you can actually—using another product called “comb foundation” that typically is a plastic or wax either injected molded polypropylene or 100% beeswax embossed midrib that the bees will build on. Just like they build their natural comb out in the tree only this cause them to build inside a wood frame that the midrib is installed on.
So that, they build nice straight combs and you can, not only examine the hive by removing these, which a typical hive will have 10 of these side-by-side in a box that has neither top or bottom and there's an overall bottom board and there’s an overall top and of course there’s an entrance on the bottom board where they can come and go at their will just as if they were in nature or hollow tree. And the bigger the hive becomes the more populous, the more brewed they have, the more honey they store. You have these additional boxes called the “supers” on top of each other as the colony grows. And so--
Carl Lanore: But see you just said something that that this is where the trouble starts?
Stuart Dietz: Yes.
Carl Lanore: So you can get bees to hive and produce honey in a modular box but getting the honey out has become—in humans’ quest to make it more and more convenient, there was a high popularize each(?) couple years ago that literally had all plastic inside of it—
Stuart Dietz: Oh yeah, the floral hive is what you are referring to.
Carl Lanore: And it had almost what would look like a water spigot on the bottom that you just turn and the honey flowed out and this is perfect in the human sight. Oh this is so great. But you talk about polypropylene injected molds, you talk about plastics, and then you talk about beeswax and propolis—see I got—I’m cool with beeswax and propolis but I am not cool with all the plastic that they using today in beekeeping because those enzymes and honey—as implied they are enzymes—enzymes are catalysts for breakdown of things that they come in contact with.
And I’ve got to believe that the plastic sometimes could—no one is testing for this I would imagine—leach the plasticizers—that we hate so much that are causing all this endocrine disruption—could leach into the honey that they come in contact with and stay contact with for a long period of time. What are your thoughts on that?
Stuart Dietz: Well yeah, I suppose with depending on the type of plastic although to my knowledge anyway, most of the plastics that would be used in any part of the hive construction would be compatible with European standards which are very, very stringent even beyond the FDA.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, but see when it comes—but Stuart, this is something that I feel very strongly about what I’m about to say.
Stuart Dietz: Yes.
Carl Lanore: The only plasticizers that are safe for us—I take that back, I want to rephrase that—the only reason some of these plasticizers that we think are safe for us are safe is because we haven't yet discovered that they're not and we will discover that. See, by and large the nature of making plastics takes chemicals that all appear to be endocrine disrupting in one way or another but we don’t find out until someone does an isolated study on one thing… BPA.
Now that they found out that the BPS is also bad. So pay(?) late to bad(?). All of these—I don’t believe that any of these plasticizers should be in our food supply today. Unfortunately they permeate our food supply but when it comes to honey, I got to feel like I want a hive that is basically wood, beeswax, or other inert material that occurr in nature but not plastic. Is that impossible today for beekeepers to produce honey without using any plastics?
Stuart Dietz: No, it not possible—I mean it's not impossible at all in fact a number of beekeepers are still not using anything plastic in there colonies and just using hundred percent pure beeswax comb foundation other than being reinforced with some very small wires so it won’t sag and it'll hold within the comb during the extraction process.
Carl Lanore: According to recorded history there’s evidence that beekeeping has been around since 7000 BC, so add another 2000 to that; so close to 10,000 years there is evidence from recorded history. However, there are fossils that are 150 million years old that imply that humans then were exploiting honeybees for honey.
So this is something that we’ve been doing forever but just recently I think that there are some challenges. What kind of chemicals are commonplace for honeybees to come in contact with even for—I mean I am not talking about Monsanto’s Roundup, well that is another show, that beekeepers by and large used today that may be are questionable.
Stuart Dietz: Yes, well in the course in 1987 was the first discovery in the United States of the Asiatic Varroa mite which is essentially it is about the size of pinhead and these things are just-- they are very difficult for the bees to coexist with the European bees that we have here in the United States because prior to that time in this country the bees have never been exposed to them. Now the bees over in Asia, which several different species, they’ve coexisted with them for thousand years—who knows how long?
And so they’ve built up a symbiotic relationship because obviously is not the mite’s best interest to destroy the bee colony because they had to have a host. So what happens when you introduce any type of a parasite or a disease, there’s something that have no exposure to it before it quickly destroys it. And so that's what happen here in the United States.
So the immediate reaction was to start in or chemical treatment regimen to try to kill the mites without significantly harming the bees. And the first commercially available product was called an Apistan Strip that was inserted into the brood nest—not when there is any surplus honey storage on the hive but just strictly within the brood chamber that consisted of the bee colony and the honey and pollen that the bees would use and these were impregnated with a chemical called fluvalvinate.
And so did a very effective job and personally I have never used this myself back in the 90s when I just made up my mind right from the start I could tell that it was just going to be a Band-Aid approach and sure enough then a number of years the mites built up a resistance to the fluvalvinate and now it is no longer typically effective even though it is still available.
So the beekeepers over the years of research, scientists have come up with a number of other chemicals, some of them naturally derived like Thymol, some of them that are very nasty hard chemicals, two of the most popular today are Formic Acid and Oxalic Acid which in very, very minute quantities, those exist naturally in the honey but in the concentration that they have to be used in to kill the Varroa mite can actually be very harmful to beekeeper.
In fact especially when using a formic acid gel pack or they’re sold as Mite Away Quick Strips in some cases, the beekeeper has to wear rubber gloves and respirator or you get a whiff of that stuff and that stuff can actually cause lung damage and there's been cases where the beekeepers are—
Carl Lanore: Oh, wow! But it doesn't hurt the bees?
Stuart Dietz: Well in fact, if it's not applied in the correct dosage at the correct temperature… it can. It's been blamed for brood mortality and in some cases it shortens the life of the queen bee. It dissipates very rapidly. There again the only time I've ever used this stuff was on an experimental basis with someone else's bees years ago. We’ve never incorporated it into our operation.
The advantage with it is it will kill both the phoretic mites, the mites that exist on the adult bees, as well as in the developing brood underneath the cappings of the bees—wax cappings of the bees will build over the bee pupa when they’re in development. There is no other chemical that is approved that will kill in both stages but you do have to—like I’ve said there’s been cases were the beekeeper wasn’t using the proper protective equipment—
Carl Lanore: And he got injured.
Stuart Dietz: They are even taking blood so it can be lethal.
Carl Lanore: I am going to—I want to skip our next commercial break. Robin Murphy posted on Facebook—and I was going to ask you towards the end of the interview but we’ll do it now and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about the influence that the foliage has on the flavor of the honey. So Robin Murphy says, “Ask Stuart if bees are truly being affected by Roundup Glyphosate and how the honey is possibly infected with this poison as well?”
Stuart Dietz: Yeah. It's one of those things where there's been a lot of varying results according to the areas of the bees are in. Obviously the unfortunate thing is yes the bees can pick up some of these agricultural chemicals and it can be a problem for sure.
I guess in one sense, one advantage is that—not necessarily a good thing but it minimizes any contamination of the honey is when the bees pick up the chemicals in the nectar, they often succumb before they ever make it back to the hives to pick [unintelligible] some of the toxic insecticides that are—
Carl Lanore: They kill them immediately so they never even get to contribute that back to the to the bees hive.
Stuart Dietz: That is often true. Now with the pollen, it is a little bit different situation because they pack the pollen on their pollen baskets which are just series of course hairs on the back of their legs and so they don’t get much exposure to that but what can also happen is the bees will actually detect that there are some foreign substance and something that shouldn’t be there and they will—any pollen cells back in the hive that they detect that they've got stored contaminated pollen, they will actually entombed that pollen in the cell propolis.
Carl Lanore: I've heard they actually built like they’ve closed off entire areas of the hive because they basically—and that area was loaded with different types of nicotinic pesticides and herbicides. I've heard that, I’ve heard that, so that is amazing. So the reality is the bees instinctively and intuitively in trying to protect themselves continue to protect the quality of the honey as well.
Stuart Dietz: Right! Yes. And then the bees also have a built-in mechanism of sorts were they can tolerate up to certain levels of chemicals and they can actually expel those from their bodies until it gets to the point where they just become too saturated and then they succumbed.
But it goes without saying that the beekeepers—the commercial beekeepers which are really the backbone that kept the whole beekeeping industry alive through their efforts. Of course that they have to because they make their living out of them and I’m talking about people who have thousands or even tens of thousands of colonies.
They are going to do everything they can to avoid placing their hives within range of were agricultural chemicals are going to be applied. They are going to avoid it like a plague because they don't want to obviously experience the losses. Now sometimes despite all the precautions there are serious losses from insecticides.
Carl Lanore: Have you loss? How many hives do you have currently?
Stuart Dietz: Currently we’re just around 60. I used to have—back when I did it more as a sideline, I have up to 350.
Carl Lanore: Okay but 60 is still a significant number of hives, right? Some people have one hive and they think they are beekeeper. So with that being said, have you noticed any losses and volume of bees due to the exposure to any herbicides and pesticides?
Stuart Dietz: Nothing that has been readily apparent. That is one in over—as long as we've had bees—I mean it you would expect that but I've been very fortunate in that area.
Carl Lanore: Okay, well that gives me hope. That actually gives me hope. I feel like okay. Yeah.
Stuart Dietz: There are some. There is a beekeeper out in Central Kansas. I remember he had a slideshow, this has been back in the early 80s, and he had absolutely devastating losses from seven applied to field corn in the middle of summer and he had locations where he had 50 to 60 colonies and they are just literally bushel baskets full of dead bees littering the area around his colonies.
Carl Lanore: How sad.
Stuart Dietz: In California in particular where agricultural chemicals are so widely utilized, it is also throughout the years has been a huge problem and then it's becoming more of a problem than in some parts of the Midwest as well. Just like this year a lot of crop dusting has been taking place through-- because of the higher Japanese beetle populations and they are those who attack the corn.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, they are so nuisance Japanese beetle, all they do is eat. They are like big—If they could be slobs, they would be the slob bug because they sleep all day—three and four laying on each other like drunken frat house brothers and then they wake up and they start eating again. They don't move until that rose head is gone and they move to another one. They are really gluttonous, slothful, unlikeable bugs, okay?
And real quick, I want to mention something before we go on to—I have to take this break. California in their abundant love of chemicals on their crops has destroyed virtually all of the hives that were there in California, that today they have to lease hives from outside the state and beekeepers bring them in and just to help pollinate the almonds.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, well actually though the—even though there's been a lot of widespread losses from pesticides with bees in the past, they haven't been wiped out by any means and that is largely attributable to the commercial beekeepers that have been able to keep the hives thriving but there's such—you know what I mean, California produces something like 80% of the world’s almond crop and so—
Carl Lanore: I know. Now keep in mind that almonds and avocados, which are both huge crops for California, are the thirstiest crops in the world. They required the most water to produce their fruits and California every year is in a drought.
Stuart Dietz: It has been for some years.
Carl Lanore: Yes, it is the most unlikely place to grow almonds. D o you think they say, “You know what? We don’t have enough water here, let them grow almonds in Washington state. It is a green area. It’s Colorado.” No, they have to grow them there and they have to bring the water in, they have to bring bees in, it is just humorous to me, it is just funny to me.
Stuart Dietz: Yes, but as you alluded to there is something like I believed current number is somewhat under—maybe just under 2 million colonies of bees required to pollinate Californian’s almond crop during its 3 week period like February I guess, early part from March typically depending typicallyon the area that you are in but the revenue from the almond pollination is actually been a huge boon to a lot of commercial beekeepers.
Carl Lanore: Oh I’m sure.
Stuart Dietz: The commercial beekeepers trying to make a living these stuff of a honey production, wholesaling out to packers alone. It is a pretty rough road—I mean it is a very rough road regardless of what kind of diversity you have in your revenue but particularly if you are just depending on the honey market. It’s been very difficult especially because of the influx of imported Chinese honey.
Carl Lanore: Well, I want to talk about this. So the next segment I want to segue into the taste of honey based on what the bees are foraging on. I also want to talk about is it true that honey is being counterfeited today? As a beekeeper, what do you see of this? Stay tuned, we will be right back with more Super Human Radio.
Carl Lanore: Welcome back. I am really fascinated by all these. We are talking with Stuart Deitz. We are talking about honey and bees and beekeeping. So when a beekeeper leases out 60 hives to an almond producer in California, who gets the honey?
Stuart Dietz: Well typically during that period in California—the almond pollination there won’t be honey produced, it will just be the basic broodiness part of the hive that gets moved out there and typically—
Carl Lanore: Okay, I don’t understand that. So you mean to tell me that when you bring a hive out to California, you leave some of the bees’ home namely—which ones do you leave home? The worker-- the workers are the ones making honey.
Stuart Dietz: No, it is still the entire bee colony it is just that—remember we discussed late earlier the supers or the modular boxes that are placed on top of one another.
Carl Lanore: Right.
Stuart Dietz: And typically a colony will consist of two of those modular boxes if they lived in year round. Anything that is stack on, any additional boxes that are stacked on top of those are what contains the surplus honey that the beekeeper takes for himself at the end of year.
Carl Lanore: Okay so basically you just give him enough room to live in and they are not going to make any surplus honey.
Stuart Dietz: Right. And although the bees will produce some nectar from the almond, a lot of times the beekeepers out there will have to really feed them with a lot of sugar syrup just to keep them alive because all they are doing is collecting pollen. Typically they are pollinating the almond blossoms—
Carl Lanore: Could they make honey from almonds like if you wanted to?
Stuart Dietz: Well they could but typically it's not going to enough for a surplus, it is just going to be enough for their own needs and almond honey—they even know that almond pollen is probably the highest-quality pollen there is because it is just so rich with protein but the almond honey itself is going to be very bitter and wouldn't really be a good table honey anyway.
Carl Lanore: That takes us into--that's a great segue into this next discussion. I don’t know, 7 years ago or 6 years ago, manuka honey became all the rage but basically manuka honey is manuka honey because the bees that make the honey gathered their pollen from the manuka tree and so that influences the flavor, the quality, and the content of the honey, correct?
Stuart Dietz: Yes, the nectar that the bees collect from the plant is going to be—I mean the honey—color wise, flavor wise, consistency is going to be dependent on that plant.
Carl Lanore: Right! And I used to say that if you want to grow Manuka honey in the United States, just find an area of United States that the climate is conducive to the manuka tree growing and grow them here and put the beehives in the middle of it let them do their thing. Yes or no, is that a fair assumption?
Stuart Dietz: Well that can be done it's just that in order to get a pure honey for any source, the area has to be just saturated with that particular plant or it has to be at the time when there's absolutely nothing else in bloom the get a pure—nearly pure source from whatever you're trying to obtain.
Carl Lanore: Okay so what produces the best-- I guess there is no best tasting honey, it's like saying what is the best spice? They are all great when you're doing something with them that you want to do. So tell me something what about flavor variations and the crops that donate that flavor variation.
Stuart Dietz: Okay. The biggest crop in the United States that is responsible for most of the honey production is probably sweet clover, which there is the yellow and the white varieties, and it produces a honey that is very mild, it even has somewhat of the cinnamon taste to it. It is some of the very best honey there is.
Alfalfa is another one. Tree crops like black locust which produces another very wide or water wide honey that is very mild in flavor and really excellent. Fireweed, up in the parts of Canada and Alaska is also known for very light, mild, excellent flavored honey. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got buckwehat which produces a honey that looks somewhat like used motor oil—very dark and purplish and has a very, very strong flavor which if anyone had a preference for sweet clover, they probably would have a disdain for the buckwheat but on the other hand people that like the full flavored, stronger honey would probably think that the lighter milder honey is lacking in flavor.
Carl Lanore: So as a beekeeper with 60 hives, I know that you must have these hives—you probably—I'm assuming that you go out and you find an area that is just lushly filled with that particular plant source and then you go and you knock on their door and say, “Hey, I’m a beekeeper, can I keep a hive on your property?” And maybe there is some sort of financial consideration that takes place or maybe you promise to give them a jar of honey every month or something like that. Is that what happens?
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, typically to make it feasible you're going to have at least a dozen or maybe a couple dozen or more colonies in one location. Otherwise, the commercial beekeepers that run thousands of hives are very common number would be 40 to 50 colonies in a location and yeah, sure, you're correct. I mean you do try to find areas that are hopefully have a lot of sweet clover or have a lot of potential for other nectar producing plants within a mile or two proximity which is big. Most of the—cover most of the range and how far the bees gather from the colonies. And so in commercial terms, I mean some of these guys have literally hundreds of locations with multiple dozens of hives of each location.
Carl Lanore: Could you—so earlier we’ve talked about how there's just not enough for them to produce in California, feasting just on the almonds and then a lot of them are receiving probably simple sugars and stuff in syrup forms and so on. Could you take a ginger extract, mix it with a little sugar and water and keep it close to the hives so the bees used that as well and with that then could you actually produce like a delicious clover honey that has a ginger infused flavor in it by just giving them access to something like that? Something that is healthy, something that is beneficial—could you do that?
Stuart Dietz: Actually that would be—unless you have the container labeled to show that it had other ingredients other than pure honey and then it would be considered adulteration.
Carl Lanore: But could that be a good adulteration? Could you say honey infused with ginger?
Stuart Dietz: As long as you have it labeled appropriately that would be fine.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, we feed our bees a little bit of ginger and they put it on the honey. I think people would love that.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, I don't know of anyone that has done that specifically I know that—
Carl Lanore: Well Stuart, Stuart, Stuart… you need to try it so we can have you back on the show and you can tell me, “ Wow, this honey taste like crap” or “Carl, this was the greatest idea.” Look, look. People are buying vodka that tastes like cotton candy today. Okay, they know that there are flavors in there. Can you imagine if you're angle was “we don't add the ginger, the bees do”?
Stuart Dietz: Right. And I know there is flavored honey out there where people will put cinnamon and various flavors in it especially with regard to creamed or finely crystallized honey.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, but see, but they are putting it in. That is the difference. Feeding it to the bees and having them put it in during the molecular building phase. That is going to be a huge angle for somebody in the honey business.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, the only problem I could see with it is that if you fed it in on sugar syrup to get the bees to take it then you no longer be dealing with pure honey.
Carl Lanore: I don't think people would care if you detailed it how we get the bees to eat the ginger; is we add a little sugar of water so that they eat that and they combine it with the honey they are making anyway, I don't think anybody will care. I got to be honest with you.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, the other issue is during the honey flow typically the bees are not going to take artificial sources of feed supplements very well because they are so busy gathering what's natural out in the field in which they greatly prefer. It is usually just in which—that brings up to another point; we really don't feed any supplemental feeding with our bees at all well. We just let them get through on the—make sure that they always have enough of their own supplies of honey to be able to survive.
Now some areas if you're involved in almond pollination, that is really not feasible or possible. Some areas of the country and parts of Canada, they produce tremendous crops of honey up on the Canadian prairie but when the sources dry up, they pretty much have to just mass feed the colonies to get their food storage adequate to go through the winter. So it’s a--
And another point I might bring up to make our honey unique from a lot of what is out there is that we just extract from the white combs that never have any brood reared in them. Of course the bees will—in the brood’s nest part of the hive, the Queen will lay eggs and then the bees developed in the cell—in the comb and as the bees develops, it goes to the pupa stage and leaves a brown pupa skin in the cell and then if more and more bees get raised, the comb turns dark brown-- almost black which is fine for the bees if they store their own honey and pollen in their but you don't really want to extract honey from brood combs even though you know some people do and doesn't really—aren’t really concerned about.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, you want to take it from the surplus area obviously. That is natural.
Stuart Dietz: Yes, sometimes and depending on your management techniques, you could end up with brood area in the surplus honey system. So we’ll make sure that we never extract any honey unless it just comes from a white comb that’s never have brood raised in it.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, that makes sense too. You don’t want that genetic material that's left behind to be in your honey. Let's be honest.
There is one last thing I want to cover. I actually text everybody telling them to that you and I would probably go over. This has been a fascinating discussion. So many of us has used honey and don't know the first thing about it; just like everything else that becomes popular and then there's a supply and demand phenomenon that takes place where the demand outpaces the supply so distributors start to do things.
We know about this in olive oil, we talked about it for years that a lot of olive oil isn’t 100% pure. They are putting in soybean oil, safflower oil, they are putting other stuff in it. We talked about it 7 years ago and recently some news TV show just did an exposé that olive oil is being adulterated.
The same thing happened with truffles, when truffles became all the rage, everyone wants their truffles in their chocolate, truffles in their food well they started to counterfeit truffles. I don’t know what they were using but they were using something else and restaurants were getting snookered and people paying exorbitant prices of what they thought have real truffles in it.
And I've read numerous articles that imply that this is now happening in honey because probably about a decade ago, everybody is getting the message that honey is magical. It can help some people get over there local allergies, seasonal allergies, people taking it at night and they say they don't snore, people taking it at night and they say that they're able to sleep all night because it stabilizes blood sugar.
So honey kind of became this cult thing and as usual the demand went through the roof at the big-box stores and Wholefoods and I've been told that now honey is being adulterated with corn syrup. And one guy told me if you put it in the refrigerator for a week it and it gets crystalline—and you know how honey gets hard; it's pure honey. If it stays a liquid—easy to pour out of the bottle—it has some amount of corn syrup in it. Now I don’t know if it is true but do you have any opinion about this?
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, that's not necessarily reliable because yes, in fact, keeping it at a refrigerated temperature 40° to 50°, it will crystallized more rapidly and most honey in time will crystallized but it depends on the level of dextrose to levulose, or fructose to glucose is to how rapidly that occurs.
Now there are some honey like tupelo honey from Florida that is highly prized and it will virtually—if it is pure, it will virtually never crystallized at least not for years and years and years. And so that would not be considered to be a reliable indicator although in some cases it could point in that direction.
Carl Lanore: Is honey being adulterated today? Do you amongst all—I mean you have been in this for a long time Stuart so you are like really—you are a beekeeper, that’s what you do. Are beekeepers going this is getting crazy like somebody found honey that was 50% corn syrup the other day?
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, that has happened. There's been different companies that had a product and these were companies that were distributing millions of pounds of product in certain areas that were convicted and fined for having adulterated product that was labeled as pure honey. Now of course on the store shelves, you can find what's called “imitation honey” or even there's some restaurants; one in particular that serves something called “honey sauce” in little package--
Carl Lanore: Yes, just like cheese food but it is not real cheese.
Stuart Dietz: And it is mostly corn syrup with a little bit of honey in it.
Carl Lanore: But it has it on the label, right? If you read in the ingredients, it says that.
Stuart Dietz: Correct. Yes.
Carl Lanore: But what about the companies right now that are selling on local store shelves and they are cutting their honey with other things; let’s say corn syrup, is there a way for a consumer to know?
Stuart Dietz: Probably not without having a lab that has the proper equipment and protocol to correctly identify that. There wouldn't be a good way because a lot—there's quite a bit of misinformation out there that in some cases unjustly levied against some of the honey that's on the store shelves. But in order to give the honey a long shelf life, in other words where it doesn't crystallized, because people want typically a liquid product unless it is sold in cream form and they know what are buying.
Commercial honey will be flash heated to about 160° and then run through a filter press which essentially removes all—I mean the vast majority of the pollen grains and other things and they rapidly cool it and that gives a product—it is still a good product, nothing wrong with it at all, it is still pure honey but it doesn't have all the qualities of raw honey that typically is available from the local beekeeper such as me and a lot of people around.
Carl Lanore: Is it important that people strive to use unfiltered honey?
Stuart Dietz: Well it does have benefits that pressure filtered honey does not have like we're talking about it has the minute pollen grains in it, it still has enzymes that are intact that heated pressure filtered honey does not have.
But one thing that I should also point out is that one of the big problems from a commercial standpoint in particular is that—this has a long history that take too long to go into right from the inception but China has been guilty of doing a lot of things that are really downright illegal let alone underhanded.
And years ago they were using a product called chloramphenicol for apparently to treat certain bacterial bee diseases in the colonies and that chloramphenicol was detected and so they came up with a process called ultrafiltration which is entirely different from pressure filtration but that actually chemically changes the nature of the honey but also makes that chloramphenicol undetectable and—
Carl Lanore: So you say undetectable, are you implying it's still there or are you saying it can completely removed?
Stuart Dietz: Apparently they've removed it at least the point where it could be detected at all. But the important thing is as at that point going through that ultrafiltration process, it so chemically changes the honey that it can no longer be considered real pure honey and that was finding its way unto store shelves or in industrial food manufacturing here in the US. And the Chinese were actually once they were caught in a number cases with shipments of that ultrafiltered honey—and like I say there's a lot of the other avenues of this whole problem with the Chinese honey in particular—that they actually started shipping through third-party countries like Vietnam and Australia and they were making it look like those were the countries of origin.
Carl Lanore: Yes, so it wasn’t detectable. Yes, that’s what I mean, they brought the country of origin so you didn’t know it was coming from China.
Stuart Dietz: Right. Ultimately in some cases may have been honest honey packers, it could've been finding its way into honey on the store shelves and this is something that the commercial beekeepers are constantly vigilant about.
In fact, back in the 80s and 90s when China was illegally dumping their honey on our markets in violation of the international trade laws under Clinton, he would do absolutely nothing about it and so the beekeepers actually raised enough money to hire the appropriate legal counsel and won their lawsuit but it's an ongoing process. It is something that they have to be continually guarded and vigil in about.
So that’s another thing like I say that's another reason why the commercial beekeeping industry is so vital to keeping beekeeping alive at all and the hobbyist, I think are like people like me; people that are considered sideliners are important from the standpoint of promoting local honey, promoting raw honey, promoting the virtues of the hive products whereas the commercial beekeepers are really supplying the financial backbone to keep everything going because their living depends on it.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, I like honey. I really, really do and I like local honey. I get honey from local farmers.
Stuart Dietz: Right! And another thing I should mention is that we—I just got married here four years ago and my wife, Nita and me, started producing comb honey which I never produced in the past.
Carl Lanore: I like that. The jar has actually a piece of the honeycomb which is basically it's paraffin—it’s wax, right?
Stuart Dietz: Yes, it is beeswax.
Carl Lanore: And I’ve eaten that, I’ve chewed it and eaten because if you chew it you get all the honey out of it.
Stuart Dietz: Right! It's perfectly digestible and that's the most natural way that you can consume and obtain honey is in the comb form and we are very--
Carl Lanore: That is how we would've done it if we were hunter gatherers. We would grab the hunk of that comb and we would just started chewing down on.
Stuart Dietz: Right! And so we’re very selective about what we package as comb honey and it has to meet certain standards for appearance and for flavor and for density, moisture content. And so it has been a really popular product and it seems like in this area; since others have seen the success that we've had with that they’ve seems like more and more beekeepers are—on a small-scale anyway—starting to market more comb honey.
Carl Lanore: Interesting, interesting. Do you have lots of different flavors of honey because you have your hives on different pieces of property?
Stuart Dietz: Well, just a few different locations. I think just 3 is all we have averaging 20 colonies per location probably, whereas back when I had over 300 hives, I had about 15 different locations. So they were spread out quite a bit more. But then I used to market about 30,000 pounds of honey through retail grocery stores in the part of Northeast Kansas that I grew up in and most of what we do anymore is rather than through retail outlets; just direct to the consumer.
Carl Lanore: Interesting! I’d like to try some of your honey if you are ever inclined to—
Stuart Dietz: Oh yeah. That is one of the unfortunate things that we didn't get to make a trip up there today as we had planned on bringing some--
Carl Lanore: Bringing honey… yeah, I know. For those of you who didn’t know but Stuart and Shawn Knernschield were actually on their way to Ohio to like the greatest roller coaster in the world event but it's gotten rained out because of the storms coming soon. So they are actually going to be in the studio and we are going to have this conversation. Stuart, do you have anything to plug? Do you have a website that you sell your honey on?
Stuart Dietz: We don't currently have a website. I have plans on having one but I can share our phone numbers or our emails.
Carl Lanore: Anything that you feel comfortable sharing so if anybody in the audience who wants to show some love and get in touch with you and get some of your honey.
Stuart Dietz: Sure. We can be reached at either 785-304-5905 or 785-969-6110 and my email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Carl Lanore: Holy crap! Are there still AOL email addresses out there?
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, I’ve got other emails too but that is the one that—
Carl Lanore: Okay. I just didn’t know that AOL was actually still a viable email service.
Stuart Dietz: In fact, yeah Shawn even used to have a netscape.net account.
Carl Lanore: Oh, I remember that also. Yeah.
Stuart Dietz: Actually the netscape.net will still go in to the AOL so that is one reason why I’ve kept the AOL as well because I used to use the netscape.net.
Carl Lanore: Well, I want to thank you so much for coming in to the show. This has really been fascinating. Lots of great information.
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, thank you also Carl. I mean obviously something like this weve just we’re barely able to scratch the surface. I many any of the topics that we covered could be discuss for days on in. So even with an hour or plus timeframe it’s pretty difficult to really cram a whole lot in there.
Carl Lanore: But we actually went over so just you know—
Stuart Dietz: Yeah, yeah, I realized that we are over almost 15 minutes.
Carl Lanore: Yeah, I am going disconnect with you, take a break, and I am going to have Coach Rob Regish and Shawn Knernschield on this show. Listen Stuart, thanks a lot brother.
Stuart Dietz: Thanks a lot Carl.
Carl Lanore: Take care. Alright, we are going to take one last commercial break. Stay with me.
