Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I got to ask you something that I've always wondered
about because I don't know if what.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You do or not.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
But when you get a jar of honey and there's
the bees wax in it, is that like what you
want to go for? What is why? And would that why?
Is that better than a jar without it in it?
And can you eat the honeycomb? Is the wax? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, So that's that's a specific kind of honey production
called comb honey production. So beekeepers will put if there's
a special type of frame you put in the hive
and the bees will fill it with You want fresh wax, right,
so wax can sit around for a long time. So
(00:50):
you designate that certain time of year when the bees
are producing honey. You put a box that's just designated
just for honeyney and anything they put in that box
you can take. And there's a way to have the
bees create their own comb. Right. Typically bee keepers will
(01:12):
use like a foundation that the bees build on. But
in order to make that comb honey, you just leave
the space blank and the bees they make wax.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
They have very active wax glands on their abdomen and
they take in nectar and they produce the wax. And
then in order to harvest that and produce what's called
comb honey, you basically cut it and put that chunk
of wax with honey in it into a jar and
you can sell it for a lot of money. People
(01:43):
really like it for things like tracouterie boards and like
and it is it's just wax. I don't produce comb
honey myself, probably should because you can sell it at
a premium. But people like the affectation of it. It
looks neat. You can put a frame out on a
on a on a buffet and you can take a
little spoonful of wax with your honey. But it's just
(02:06):
wax and you can eat it. It's perfectly fine to eat.
It's these wax and it's usually soft, these wax because
it's new. But yeah, I'm not I'm not quite sure
why people like wax in their honey on this.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
You know, I was wondering, I'm thinking, is that is
that okay? And maybe I've had some hard old wax
or something, because it's almost like the candy wax when
you were a kid, and you know in Halloween, right
wax right, So I didn't know if you could or not,
but you're right, And especially the charcuterie boards. Yeah, it
(02:41):
really looks nice when you see that. But then I'm
always like, can I eat this? I mean, it looks good,
but I want to eat it. I want the money,
and I can't. Yeah, yeah, you can eat it.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
There's perfectly fine to eat.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Okay, all right, So I want I want to have
the perspective because I think this will answer a lot
of things of Okay, you're a bee, you wake up
that day or I don't you know, I don't even
know if you sleep, but you're a bee, and take
us on a bee's life, on a day in the
life of a bee.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
That's that's a great question. That's so pretty, pretty complicated,
little critter. Have you seen the B movie, the Disney
version of the B Movie. Oh yeah, it's very cute.
It's like the Life of the Bee. They a cute movie.
Jerry Seinfeld plays the perfect It's lovely, except they got
(03:35):
one thing really really wrong, which is all the most
of the bees, the worker bees, are female, so the
male bees, the drones, really they don't really do anything.
They're there for the mating process. They're there only seasonally.
The it's it's a matriarchy in the hives. So most
(03:57):
of the bees are female, non reproduct to females. There's
one queen, right she is you can can you can
consider the queen like the reproductive organ of the hive.
So and when you talk about honey bees, there's a
turn called that's you social eu eu you social uh
(04:19):
ants are the same, uh termites are the same. It
means there's there's a big group, right that they all
work together and they have one one reproductive female. So
so that's how that's how bees work. So the b
movie kind of tells the story a little bit of it.
(04:40):
How bees are born. They they they they start as
an egg. So the queen lays an egg and those
little tiny hexagonal cells and much like every other insect
that goes through egg larva, cuba stage egg is a
little teeny egg for a couple of days. Then it
becomes like a little worm and it grows and they
(05:01):
feed that worm and it fills the cell and then
they cover it over and in the process they cover
it over, it's a little bit like a butterfly in
a chrysalis. So when the bee is covered, it goes
through a process called metamorphosis. So it goes from being
kind of a worm to having a segmented body, wings, legs, eyes,
(05:24):
and the day for the female the workers at its
day twenty one, they emerge as a young adult bee
and then they go through you know, they go through
a process. They basically have a career and they go
through different phases of their career and they start as
a nurse be and so they'll be they can't fly yet,
(05:48):
so when they're born, they do what children don't do,
which is turn around and clean their room. And then
they will be working inside the hive to kind of
clean things up and feed their their young larvae siblings.
And then as they get older, there's jobs where they
can unload the foragers, the bees bringing in all the goodies,
(06:10):
and they will unload foragers and they'll they could also
be part of the queen's court, so they could be
part of her retinue and kind of take care of her,
feed her, help her do well, do her egg laying business,
and pass her pheromone around the hive. And then as
they gets older, it becomes you know, it learns to fly.
(06:32):
They go on little orientation flights and so they'll do
they'll do a little practice flights out in front of
the hive, and then they learn how to fly, and
then they might become guard bees. They guard the front
of the hive, and then they end their life as
a forager. So that'd be the older bees, and they're
the ones that go out and fly and they forage
(06:56):
and about between you know, one and five mile rate
of the hive, and they go out and gather nectar,
which is their their carbohydrates, right, and their sugar, and
then they also gather pollen, which is their protein, and
then they also bring in water and then they also
bring in sap from trees and they create a substance
(07:19):
called propolis. So these are very productive. They and they
and they literally they work themselves to death. Right they
fly until their wings are tattered and they drop in
the field. So in the high season this time of
year in Texas, when it's warm and there's lots of
food for them, they work so hard that they have
a very short life. And then when it comes to winter,
(07:42):
they have a very long life because they stop flying
and they gather and they they form a cluster in
order to survive winter, and that's why they save up
all that honey. They they're they're storing up their food,
their honey, uh and and pollen for their for overwintering.
And really honey is their their winter food. They need
(08:04):
a lot of honey, particularly up north, and it's down
here in Texas they don't need quite as much as
they do up north. And then those bees will form
a cluster and sit there and vibrate through the winter
so they can live six months in the wintertime. They
can live three weeks four weeks in the in the summer.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
When they carry it back, they have it like they
store like on their legs. Is that what they do?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
They like? Yeah, yeah, well so they have they have
little baskets on their legs called a curbriculum. It's like
a it's like a little part of their leg where
they can fill with pollen. And when they bring pollen in,
it's different colors. It's kind of cool. You can watch
if you've got to be high, you get to watch
the bees come in and out and they have different
(08:51):
colored pollen on their legs. When they bring a nectar
or water or sap from trees to make propolis. They
have what's called a crop, which is uh it's basically
a storage tank. So they have a stomach. People say, oh,
you know, honey is b bar, right, yeah, that's what
I thought it was. But they don't really digest it
(09:13):
and regurgitate it. They take it in through their mouth.
They have a they have a prebossis like an elephant's
trunk almost. It's like a tube and that's where they
use to slurp things in and then they store it
in their little crop. This little this little bladder. So
they bring they can bring water, they can bring nectar,
they can bring sap and then but they also have
(09:34):
a digestive system, right, so they can also eat. But
that's not that's not where the honey comes from. So
they carry that little bladder and then they they come
back to the hive and they spit that out to
their sisters and they pass it one to the other.
So and the nectar comes in. They bring in nectar,
very thin right flowers, give that that that bonus food
(09:57):
to the bees, this beautiful carbohydrates. It's just simple sugar,
and so the bees slurp that up, bring it home
and then they chew it and they dehydrate it nectar
from flowers. It's very viscous. It's very runny, very wet,
so they dehydrate, they chew it, they chew pollen into it.
They use their wings to dehydrated in the cells and
(10:18):
they cure it. And when honey becomes less than twenty
percent moisture, then it becomes honey. Right, it's it becomes
a superfood that can last. I mean, they found honey
in King Tut's tomb that was still it'll crystallize. Right,
you've had that maybe in the pantry where your honey
(10:39):
turns crunchy. Yea and yea crystallized. It's still good. It
just needs to be heated and slow heated, not cooked.
So yeah, they make this superfood and you know, and
humans have been robbing it for first yeah years. When
you harvest, you call it robbing the hives.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Oh well, it's totally what you're doing, you know. The
neat thing about it. I've gone to culinary school and
it's in Napa Valley and we get to go to
all the wineries and taste all the different wines and
and and how much different they taste. Even though it
might be the same, great, but it's on the other
side of the hill where it gets more sun in
(11:23):
the morning or something like that. And here you can
you can just plant different flowers or anything different just
to spice up the honey the way you want to
flavor it, right, I mean, you can literally flavor your
honey with the bees.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
You would have to plant quite a lot, so bees
forage in a pretty wide area, so you're kind of
relying on your your local habitat ecosystem, but you'd have
you know, you definitely have regional varieties of honey, and
certain bee keepers can be in a in an area
that's you know, one source honey. You know, orange blossome
(12:00):
honey in the in the valley down in the South Texas,
you get you pretty much at a certain time of year,
you're gonna get mostly orange blossom honey. So you can say, hey,
this is orange blossom honey. My honey is a mix
of wildflower. But yet it is it tastes different, It's
different color, darker, lighter. There is a whole world of
(12:23):
honey competition, honey judging, honey tasting, very that goes that
goes very deep. But I actually like very vanilla honey,
the kind that you actually get in the grocery store
probably comes from North Dakota. The clover honey. It's that
kind of vanilla. I don't want to it's just just
(12:45):
simply sweet type honey. My honey here in Texas has
a has a stronger flavor, tends to be a little
more like an amber honey. And people you sort of
love it or and just like wine, you like what
you like, right, there's no there's no good or bad honey.
Some people love buck wheat honey or you know, different
(13:05):
different varieties. And so the bees do amaze so everything
they do. You know that they're always teaching me something
every time I go out into my bees.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Now, I love this. I absolutely love this. I have
Let's see which question do I want to ask you?
I have so many. I just love it. I just
love it. Well, you've got you've got a show with
TBS cover up?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
We do we got that?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, tell me.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's called Charlie Bee Company.
And you know, I named my business just like a
five year old my name, I'm Charlie. I like bees
as Charlie b Company. Right, So and startingsh like twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, a friend of mine approached me and he
was producing TV for nat GEO and going to Africa
(13:56):
and shooting giraffes and doing all this adventure stuff. Had
just had he and his wife had just had some
kiddos and she said, you know, the Africa trips, they're
a little they're a little much. I needs you around
a little bit more. And so he was looking for
a local subject and approached me and we'd been friends
for a long time. Ashley Davison is his name, and
(14:17):
we started shooting the video and we produced the season
if we produced the pilot and we shopped it around
and then we got on TVs twenty twenty one two
and it was just a it's just a blast. I mean.
The cool thing about the show is we look at
it like micro from dirty jobs, like micro from dirty
(14:41):
jobs for beekeeping. So I go out and kind of
meet experts and different aspects of beekeeping. And there are
many aspects of beekeeping, and we learned from them and
they kind of take me into their operation and put
me to work. And so season one was a lot
of that, also a lot of be removal, so that's
my specialty. So which every be removal we do is
(15:03):
an adventure, So all kinds of funny scenarios, all kinds
of nervous homeowners and crazy situations, and we get I
get stung in the face. The crew loves it When
I get stung in the face. That's just the best.
Charlie's face swells up like like a balloon. That's just
real good TV. Everyone has a lot
Speaker 1 (15:21):
So listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
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