January 23, 2018 • 27 mins
For the debut episode of "Geeking Out," Kristian sits down with country artist Granger Smith to discuss the fascinating world of beekeeping! What's royal jelly? You're about to find out. Also, the two friends play "Trade Ya," and KB talks about one of his favorite songs of all time.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, This is Christian Bush and welcome to the first
episode of Geeking Out, my new podcast. Every episode is
a new person talking about what they're obsessed with that
has nothing to do with their job. The only requirement
is that they're totally geeking out on it and they
(00:20):
want to talk about it. From Game of Thrones to
craft beer, from rescuing dogs to remodeling airstream trailers, from
collecting retro Barbie dolls to three D printing. Tell me
about what you love, why you love it, how you
got into it, what makes it awesome, and really why
someone else could get into it too. Each episode is
presented in three chapters. In chapter one, my guest and
(00:43):
I will go deep diving on whatever they're passionate about.
Chapter two is a game I call trade jo, where
my guests and I turned each other onto one thing
that we've just discovered. And Chapter three closes the show
with me talking about music that I'm currently geeking out
on and why I believe that curiosity is contagious and
that life is better with a soundtrack. So let's go
(01:07):
Chapter one. This week's guest is Granger Smith. Granger is
my label mate at Wheelhouse Records. Whose debut album, Remington's,
featured number one hit back Road song. You might know
(01:27):
him better as his alter ego Earl Dibbel's Jr. If
you're not already a member of the Nation, you're about
to be. Because I'm always moving around and I can't
always predict where my perfect next guest will appear. I'm
sometimes on location. So here Granger and I are talking
in the lobby bar of Hilton Garden Inn and Charleston,
(01:49):
South Carolina, after a show that we played together for
the local radio station. You can hear us occasionally laughing
with our band at the table, or uh talking to
the waitress, or enjoying that old time tradition of a
last drink before bedtime. Enjoy I mean with a Granger
and I'm eating French fries. Awesome. Yeah we are, UM,
(02:11):
so welcome to the podcast. It's good to be here.
I like this podcast. You know it's on location. We're
in a lobby about us. Say they're not even paying
us to say not yet. You know what, I like
your entrepreneurial spirit and that's one of the things that
really bonds us, you and me. Besides we're on the
(02:31):
same record there. Um Okay, So you know, the reason
that you're here, or at least I'm putting you on podcast,
is because I'm interested in what you're into right now,
what you're kind of geeked out on that has nothing
to do with your job. The first thing comes from
(02:51):
my mind because I was just dealing with this yesterday.
But I'm into bees. I'm a beekeeper. It feels awesome
to say that. By the way, I'm a I'm a beekeeping.
I am a new beekeeper. Your new beekeeper. Huh. Aren't
like people from Brooklyn that are like hipsters into beekeeping?
Probably so? Um, but so are farmer type guys too, right.
(03:12):
So there's because my bees are not garden bees. They
actually have you know, space country country are these are? These?
Are these free range bees? Free range country? Somebody asked
me one time when I first brought this up. They said, so,
(03:34):
how do you get into their area? And I said
what area? And they said, you know what the net
like the little house with the net. And I said, man,
they just go everywhere. How they know when to go back? Well,
I don't know. That's its nature's mystery. They know how
to get back. They travel five miles every day. Bees
(03:55):
travel every day. They will go miles in their life,
and they only lived thirty five days. Let's facts keep coming. Okay,
how did you get into Okay, I it's probably started
with me with fruit trees. I love trees. I love
planting trees, I love established trees, I love planting new trees.
(04:21):
I like planting seeds. I just for some reason, I
think my dad was into it. It's in my mom's
side of the family too. There's something about it. In
every house I've ever lived in, I've planted a tree
at some point in my life. I got into fruit
trees about four years ago. I got two peach trees,
two plum trees, um pomegranate. I have BlackBerry bushes and
(04:43):
a fig tree, all kind of this one little area.
And the number one way to really escalate the pollination
is beats. There's number one pollinator for any I mean,
there's there's butterflies, there's other things, but birds, But the
biggest pollinator of anything is bees. And so I thought, Okay,
(05:07):
what do I have enough bees? I don't know. I
don't know. How does anyone know if they have enough
bees in their area? And I've seen bees, But but
then I started thinking, what if I brought in beat
A lot of people do that, I could bring in bees.
So I started researching, looking on the internet, typing in bees.
How long ago with this? This was about? This was
the right around two years ago. And the reason I
know that is because I went to a show. I
(05:29):
was a show and a friend of mine from high
school shows up and we were just talking and I'm
happen to mention I was interested in bees, and he
goes me too, I'm actually about to buy something from
my house And I said, wow, that's incredible. I said,
I wish I could do that, but I'm touring all
the time, so there's no way I could go buy bees,
(05:49):
build the hives and paint them and get them. I
would love to one day, ten years down the road,
and love to do that. And he goes, tell you, what,
whyn't you just give me your credit card number, will
buy a couple of hives for you, and then I'll
go buy a couple of homes from me. We'll deliver
them all to my house. I'll set it up for
you and I'll get the bees going at my house.
That way, I'll get the hard part, the really, you know,
(06:13):
the extensive work that it takes, the early be years
or tough years. And I was like, that's awesome. Yeah,
so he did it. This was so he got he
ordered him. He got him in about six months later.
So he had him at his house about a year
and a half. And then this was the year when
they're established strong, ready to go. And he called me.
(06:34):
He's like, hey, your bees are ready. So I got
them in March this year. Um so so now it's June.
So I went down and to San Antonio. I'm in Austin.
He was in San Antonio, drove down and uh, he
put them. We put them. We took them out of
their hives and put them in nukes, which was really funny. Yes, yes,
(06:58):
so we take the frames of their brood box. This
is getting crazy. But the brood boxes where the bees.
As you could tell, I'm am obsessed with this, But
the brood box is where um that's where they live.
That's where the queen lives. That's where she makes all
her larva. That's where they make all their their food.
(07:18):
That's going to supply him for the winner. At my house,
I need a brood box bread box. My favorite new
indie band yes, bread box is amazing. So what you
take the brood box and then you put a queen
excluder on top, which is a screen that allows all
the rest of the bees to go through it. But
she can't because she's too big, so it traps her
(07:40):
in the brood box, which is fine. She needs to
be busy making her eggs, layer eggs. And then you
you put these supers on top. A super is essentially
the same thing as a brood box. It's got tin
frames in it with a little little uh manmade honeycomb
replica that they go. They are attracted to and they
build out their comb. So when you put a super
(08:02):
on top of a broodbox, you never touched the brood box.
That's their food, that's their supply, that's how they live.
But the super on top of that is what you
can harvest for your own honey. You can pull that out, Yes,
they don't need that. You can make two supers on
top of that per hive. So we take the brood
box frames out. You've seen the frames on everyone's seen
(08:24):
the frames. You take the frames out and we put
them in this little, this little nuke, which is basically
a cardboard box that you put the frames in and
then close it seal it. So I take those so
I put all the bees in there. It's crazy, seal
it up. Put them in the back of my truck.
Is it like a kid? Like a kid's on board.
(08:44):
I'm gonna dry fifteen thousand bees in each hive, and
I had two hives. I had thirty thousand bees in
the back of my truck. I had to pull over
and get gas on the way there, and I was like,
oh my gosh, you know, because because not all of
them made it into the into the sealed box. You know,
some of them are just kind of around and there.
(09:05):
But they're just gonna keep up. So I get to
my house and I put on the suit and I'm
following the exact instructions that he gave me. I build
the hive just like it was at his house. And
then my wife and I, luckily I had her with me.
We're smoking him too. You smoke him with a little
little smoker because it chills him out. It disorians. This
(09:27):
is not like a Washington State. It's a little bit different.
Is a different kind of smoking, but essentially the same
the same effect. It chills him out. M out distorians,
Can we stop? Are you actually stoning the bees? You're
stoning the bees totally? I love it. Yeah, cedar chips,
(09:50):
that's what we want to call it. Yeah, yeah, So
my wife and there we are. We're, you know, smoking
them like crazy. We open up the site of opening
up that that nuke for the first time and seeing
them in there, fifteen thousand bees and you've got to
reach in there with your hand, gloved hands. You've got
(10:10):
to pull out a frame and they're just coded on
each side of the frame, and then walk it over
and put it into their new box, like here's your home.
It is the biggest rush I've had. I was. I mean,
my heart's pounding. I'm holding YouTube. Yes. So then you
(10:34):
have super is built on top of right exactly. So
what happened is the queen. Everyone's attracted to the queen.
She's the leader. And I didn't see her. I could have,
but I was preoccupied. But she was somewhere on one
of those frames, crawling around. You could see her because
she'd be bigger than all the REPSOD So I put him,
I put him into the food box and then I
cover it with the being the queen excluder, and then
(10:57):
I put the um. I I didn't put a super
on yet because they don't need it yet. They needed
to fill out the rest of their frames, right, But
I did put on a little a little feeding box
on top, so that feeding boxes half sugar half water mish. Yesterday,
for the very first time, I went in there and
added a super because they had filled out their brood box.
(11:21):
So when I took off the feeding box, they had
been building comb all under the feeding box on top
of their brood box. So I just was like, hey,
I gotta I got a spoon and a tupperware and
I just pulled off all of this comb with a
big spoon and put it into the tupperware and got
(11:42):
back and I had a whole bowl full of honey. Okay,
So how often do you think about the bees now
that you're out on tour. I think about it all
the time. I'm texting my wife that you feed the bees?
You know, the strangest, the strangest text. And do you
have children? I do? We have three little ones. You
do you like worry more about the bees than the children.
Since I'm a man, probably not to be honest. Let's
(12:04):
be honest, probably not, but I do think about him
a lot and my kids. I would think that bugs
are kind of icky to some kids. But they want
to put on the suit and they want to go
right up to the box. And if you look right
at the entrance, they have a little entrance. It's it's
an inch long entrance and they they go in there.
(12:24):
And these bees constantly going in, constantly going out all
day long. And the ones going in got the little
pollen sacks on their legs and they're going in. They
deposit the nextar and the nectar and pollen they head
to right back out. The funny thing is, if you
watch it close enough, there's these guards. There's bouncers, but
guard the outside seriously. They check i'd ease, and they'll
(12:48):
find a little robber by that tries to get in there.
He's either a local bee or he's one from next door,
and they will kick his ass. Kid, they will kick
the ship out of Have you slow mode your bees yet?
Have you gone to the SlowMo setting on your phone?
I phone? That's a great idea. I should do that. Okay,
I have not done it. That's a great idea. Yeah,
(13:09):
when when when when we do when we post this podcast,
we need to have at least a SloMo of your bees.
I will have that done for you. Okay. So, um,
now that we understand the full breadth of your obsession, um,
and why you're kind of geeking out on this, how
would you recommend someone else get into this? Like? What's
the gateway drug? Well? How do you start? Um? You know,
(13:33):
the internet is so full as of any other subject,
it's just full of It's a wealth of knowledge of
of ways to use. Yeah to to be able to
sit there and watch a YouTube video of a guy
actually setting up it's really easy. You can get everything online,
deliver it right to your house. And a musician like
me traveling all the time, it makes it tough. But
if you're nine to five or this is this is
(13:55):
easy you could You could literally do it in your garden.
Is it in a morning? Ritual? Is an evening? Like? Well,
I have learned that in the afternoon my bees are crazy.
In the afternoon, they're crazy, They're they're way more chill
in the morning. They're really calm at night, and when
it rains they all go home, they all go home. Yeah,
(14:17):
so these bees live thirty five days. This is what's crazy.
So the queen is like any other normal bee. She
lives longer because she's been fed the royal jelly from
not making this up. The royal jelly. It's like straight
out of a Disney movie. Now, when she's at the end,
they will elect a new queen out of the worker bees.
(14:39):
I don't know how they elect one that, but they
all find one. She gets elected and they feed her
the royal jelly and she grows to the size of queen.
I think, I think I think they're doing that in
the UK right now, Chapter two. In every episode of
(15:09):
Geeking Out, I see if I can trade one thing
I've discovered recently with one thing that my guest has discovered,
like a friendly exchange. I call it trade you. So
this is called trade you. I'll trade you one thing
for one thing. Right, you turn me onto something, I'll
turn you onto something. So I'm obsessed currently a little
bit with cold brew coffee. Right, and so this is
(15:31):
coffee that is steeped for a whole day. It takes
a whole day to make a gallon usually if you
do it the right way, and there are there there
are a lot like Kraft beers. You know there are
people that are making this. And one of the cool
things that it does it takes the acid out of
the coffee, so that doesn't hurt your stomach. The awkward
thing that it does is it triples the caffeine. So
(15:52):
when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, if cold
brew that would be normally your regular cup of coffee,
it's now like you're on adderall right, you gotta be really,
really really careful not to overdo it. So the cold
brew coffee that I love is obviously from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's called Banjo coffee. But when somebody turned me onto
(16:13):
not just the cold brew, but recently mixing it with lacroix. Lacroix,
you know this, uh, this soda that's not a cola, right,
and it's a coconut version. Everybody's got there on the
rider these days. Yeah, Well it's awesome because it keeps
you off drinking dice coke. Right. Um, But the lacroix,
(16:33):
or the lacroix that I love now current obsession is
a coconut which tastes like sunscreen. Um, if you could
drink sunscreen that's carbonated, or the cold brew coffee half
and half exactly into it with ice, a glass of ice,
cold brew coffee, and the coconut lacroix, lacroix, however you
(16:55):
want to pronounce it. It is the most refreshing summer
drink ever. It's like coffee plus it's like a Mound's bar,
but coffee but has zero calories. Okay, that's incredible. I
don't have a name for yet, but that's that's what
you need to text me. That word for word, what
you said, I'm next to that plus that equals joy. Okay, Okay,
(17:22):
now you turned me on to Okay, I'm gonna I'm
gonna turn you. I'm gonna turn you onto something because
of you said cold brew coffee. This guy's probably know
what I'm gonna say, cold water therapy. It's a lot
less enjoyable than cold brew coffee. You gonna put it
that way. But cold water therapy is something I got
into because, um in December, I broke a couple of
(17:44):
ribs and punctured alone, fell off the stage when I
when I got home, I wanted to be able to
recover as fast as possible. I just hate sitting on
a couch and recovering, and I didn't want anything to
slow that down. So I started researching how how would
Troy Aikman, you know, recover the fastest he could possibly recover,
(18:06):
or how would any you know, NFL quarterback figure this out?
Because I fin I kind of put those guys as
the guys that would have the ultimate scientists a lot
of money, right, So everything came back to cold weather
therapy as that you know, you know, all professional athletes
take ice bass and there's a reason. So I really
(18:29):
got into this. And this was in December, so it
was perfect because I would I would go to my
pool and I would measure my pool at somewhere in
the mid fifties. This is in December, so so it's
that actually sounds to some people that sounds warm, but
that's freaking cold. It's freaking cold, especially when outside. It's
(18:52):
in the forties the temperature outside. So I would I
would go get in there, and I started in a minute.
Then I worked up to ten minutes, but three minutes
is what I preferred. But what's crazy is you go
in there and with whatever your whatever your ailment, or
maybe you don't have an ailement, you just you just
(19:12):
want to be completely what happens is you get completely
recirculated with all your blood. Tell me how that works.
So you jump in and you have you have the
the Caveman brain effect of I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die.
You do you think I'm going to die, because that's
what it feels like. So every all the blood in
your body rushes to your court and it holds there
(19:34):
to protect your vital organs. That takes about thirty seconds.
Because I had a timer. Every day I would do
this and had a timer. It takes thirty seconds for
all the blood in your body to rush to your court.
When that happens, you hit a euphoria. Ah, this isn't
too bad. You're kind of just bobbing in the water
like hey, and everybody's like you Okay, It's like it's
not too bad. And at that point you're good. You
(19:54):
could wait for ten minutes if you want. Thank you.
This is perfect. Anything we need to get out, Thank you,
thank you, Thank you for being here. Man. Now we're
gonna eat our food. Yes, thanks Buddy Ranger Smith. Chapter
(20:17):
three me geeking out on music. Surprise surprise, right, all right.
This week I'm diving into a record that was a
really big deal for me, and later in life I
got to explore it in in in a brand new way.
But the artist name are the Police, and the album
(20:37):
in question here is Ghost in the Machine, and when
you look at it, it is a black album with
like a digital read out looks like a digital clock,
but each of their faces the way they did it
with the you know, sting of spiked hair and and
Andy Summers hair is going to the side and stuff
like this, and it's it's a very enigmatic record for them.
(20:58):
But what's most interesting to me is the second single
off of this album was called every Little Thing She
Does Is Magic. And I was always obsessed with this
song for a very specific reason. I at the time
that this came out, or at least by the time
I heard it, I believe I was let's see what
(21:19):
year did it come out? In? Eight one? So by
the time I really dug into this record, I was
twelve or thirteen, and I was learning to write songs
at the time, and um, you know, these Police songs
were complete thoughts and complete statements, and they they sounded
like nothing else on the radio. Is some sort of
strange British reggae rock and every little thing she does
(21:42):
is magic. Is exactly like you know, a squared off,
well written pop song, or even a country song to
that matter. And what was fun to me about the
recording is that there's just very little going on until,
of course, the drums sort of take over in the courses.
And the obsession that I had was kind of these
(22:02):
beautiful melodies in the verses and here that's what they
sound like. Okay, So the way this kind of works
is I had suddenly been listening to Adam and the
(22:24):
Ants and a couple of things that probably a kid
from East Tennessee just had no business listening to. And
I realized that you could put things on top of
each other. And I was trained as a classical musician,
so it made sense to me. Counterpoint, Uh, you know,
one one part of the score layered with another part
of the score later both that had appeared individually earlier.
(22:46):
And what happened so at the end of this song,
there's what's called a fade. And nowadays, you know, we
just kind of draw a fade on a computer, but
at the time you had to actually physically have your
hand on the fader, the master fader on your counsel
and then you would slowly fade it down right, and
depending on how much coffee your engineer had had that day,
(23:07):
your fades were quick or you know, depending on how
much of a I don't know, a stoner or something
that they were, that they would if they would fade
it slowly right, and it would be the perfect timing
on how to close the conversation of a song. So,
this particular song has a fade in it that um
(23:28):
has always always perplexed me. I was the kid who
as the song faded on the radio, I would turn
the radio up and up and up to try to
counter the engineer turning it down. I kept turning it
up and up and up because what Sting had done
and the guys and the police had put one part
(23:48):
of the song of the melody over a different part
of the music, and it only happens on the fade.
And I thought to myself, man, it is the coolest
thing I've ever heard. So here here's that part, all right.
(24:13):
So fast forward, let's see, almost eleven years or twelve years,
I end up as my job getting a record deal
with my my friend Andrew Hira and Billy Pilgrim and
now we are literally in London and we get to
work with Hugh Pagam, the man who produced a lot
(24:36):
of these police records, and I can't help but ask
him when I finally get the like one social time
moment to say, Hugh, please tell me what does it
What did it sound like for the rest of that song?
Because the ending of that song, and I know you
produced it, was one of my favorite things of all time,
(24:58):
and I always wondered what the tales out version of
that is, tails out being you know, we all recorded
on on actual tape and the tail of the tape
if if you hadn't have faded it down on the fader,
what how long did that song go? What could I
hear the rest of that song? And uh, he laughed
and he told me the story of it. He said, well,
(25:18):
that song was actually the demo that we had. The
drummer played to the demo that Staying had already made
and literally the end of the fade is where the
tape runs out on the machine. So um, at least
I know that, uh there there was nothing that happened
after that, so I don't have any fear of missing
out of what's there. But it is in its entirety
(25:44):
one of the more formative songs in my life that
taught me how to reimagine the music that you're making.
Maybe all of it can squish on top of each
other and work out so here it is. Every little
thing she does is magic the Police. I hope you
(26:16):
enjoyed the first episode of Geeking Out, and we are
already hard at work on the next one. Are you
obsessed with something amazing? I want to tell us about it?
Right to us at geeking Out with KB at gmail
dot com and you might be a guest on an
upcoming episode. Come find out more about me and this
podcast at Christian Bush dot com as Christian with a K.
(26:40):
Follow me at Christian Bush on Twitter, Christian Bush on Instagram,
Christian Bush on Facebook, Christian Bush everywhere except for Snapchat.
It's Christian M. Bush. Thanks to Bobby Bones for the
opportunity to build this podcast, Brandon Bush for making the soundtrack,
Tom Tapley for audio wizardry, and Whitney Pastrick for being
a great produce sir, making this whole thing possible. This
(27:02):
is Christian Bush Seeking Out. Thank you for listening. H
Hello, This is Christian Bush and welcome to the first
episode of Geeking Out, my new podcast. Every episode is
a new person talking about what they're obsessed with that
has nothing to do with their job. The only requirement
is that they're totally geeking out on it and they
(00:20):
want to talk about it. From Game of Thrones to
craft beer, from rescuing dogs to remodeling airstream trailers, from
collecting retro Barbie dolls to three D printing. Tell me
about what you love, why you love it, how you
got into it, what makes it awesome, and really why
someone else could get into it too. Each episode is
presented in three chapters. In chapter one, my guest and
(00:43):
I will go deep diving on whatever they're passionate about.
Chapter two is a game I call trade jo, where
my guests and I turned each other onto one thing
that we've just discovered. And Chapter three closes the show
with me talking about music that I'm currently geeking out
on and why I believe that curiosity is contagious and
that life is better with a soundtrack. So let's go
(01:07):
Chapter one. This week's guest is Granger Smith. Granger is
my label mate at Wheelhouse Records. Whose debut album, Remington's,
featured number one hit back Road song. You might know
(01:27):
him better as his alter ego Earl Dibbel's Jr. If
you're not already a member of the Nation, you're about
to be. Because I'm always moving around and I can't
always predict where my perfect next guest will appear. I'm
sometimes on location. So here Granger and I are talking
in the lobby bar of Hilton Garden Inn and Charleston,
(01:49):
South Carolina, after a show that we played together for
the local radio station. You can hear us occasionally laughing
with our band at the table, or uh talking to
the waitress, or enjoying that old time tradition of a
last drink before bedtime. Enjoy I mean with a Granger
and I'm eating French fries. Awesome. Yeah we are, UM,
(02:11):
so welcome to the podcast. It's good to be here.
I like this podcast. You know it's on location. We're
in a lobby about us. Say they're not even paying
us to say not yet. You know what, I like
your entrepreneurial spirit and that's one of the things that
really bonds us, you and me. Besides we're on the
(02:31):
same record there. Um Okay, So you know, the reason
that you're here, or at least I'm putting you on podcast,
is because I'm interested in what you're into right now,
what you're kind of geeked out on that has nothing
to do with your job. The first thing comes from
(02:51):
my mind because I was just dealing with this yesterday.
But I'm into bees. I'm a beekeeper. It feels awesome
to say that. By the way, I'm a I'm a beekeeping.
I am a new beekeeper. Your new beekeeper. Huh. Aren't
like people from Brooklyn that are like hipsters into beekeeping?
Probably so? Um, but so are farmer type guys too, right.
(03:12):
So there's because my bees are not garden bees. They
actually have you know, space country country are these are? These?
Are these free range bees? Free range country? Somebody asked
me one time when I first brought this up. They said, so,
(03:34):
how do you get into their area? And I said
what area? And they said, you know what the net
like the little house with the net. And I said, man,
they just go everywhere. How they know when to go back? Well,
I don't know. That's its nature's mystery. They know how
to get back. They travel five miles every day. Bees
(03:55):
travel every day. They will go miles in their life,
and they only lived thirty five days. Let's facts keep coming. Okay,
how did you get into Okay, I it's probably started
with me with fruit trees. I love trees. I love
planting trees, I love established trees, I love planting new trees.
(04:21):
I like planting seeds. I just for some reason, I
think my dad was into it. It's in my mom's
side of the family too. There's something about it. In
every house I've ever lived in, I've planted a tree
at some point in my life. I got into fruit
trees about four years ago. I got two peach trees,
two plum trees, um pomegranate. I have BlackBerry bushes and
(04:43):
a fig tree, all kind of this one little area.
And the number one way to really escalate the pollination
is beats. There's number one pollinator for any I mean,
there's there's butterflies, there's other things, but birds, But the
biggest pollinator of anything is bees. And so I thought, Okay,
(05:07):
what do I have enough bees? I don't know. I
don't know. How does anyone know if they have enough
bees in their area? And I've seen bees, But but
then I started thinking, what if I brought in beat
A lot of people do that, I could bring in bees.
So I started researching, looking on the internet, typing in bees.
How long ago with this? This was about? This was
the right around two years ago. And the reason I
know that is because I went to a show. I
(05:29):
was a show and a friend of mine from high
school shows up and we were just talking and I'm
happen to mention I was interested in bees, and he
goes me too, I'm actually about to buy something from
my house And I said, wow, that's incredible. I said,
I wish I could do that, but I'm touring all
the time, so there's no way I could go buy bees,
(05:49):
build the hives and paint them and get them. I
would love to one day, ten years down the road,
and love to do that. And he goes, tell you, what,
whyn't you just give me your credit card number, will
buy a couple of hives for you, and then I'll
go buy a couple of homes from me. We'll deliver
them all to my house. I'll set it up for
you and I'll get the bees going at my house.
That way, I'll get the hard part, the really, you know,
(06:13):
the extensive work that it takes, the early be years
or tough years. And I was like, that's awesome. Yeah,
so he did it. This was so he got he
ordered him. He got him in about six months later.
So he had him at his house about a year
and a half. And then this was the year when
they're established strong, ready to go. And he called me.
(06:34):
He's like, hey, your bees are ready. So I got
them in March this year. Um so so now it's June.
So I went down and to San Antonio. I'm in Austin.
He was in San Antonio, drove down and uh, he
put them. We put them. We took them out of
their hives and put them in nukes, which was really funny. Yes, yes,
(06:58):
so we take the frames of their brood box. This
is getting crazy. But the brood boxes where the bees.
As you could tell, I'm am obsessed with this, But
the brood box is where um that's where they live.
That's where the queen lives. That's where she makes all
her larva. That's where they make all their their food.
(07:18):
That's going to supply him for the winner. At my house,
I need a brood box bread box. My favorite new
indie band yes, bread box is amazing. So what you
take the brood box and then you put a queen
excluder on top, which is a screen that allows all
the rest of the bees to go through it. But
she can't because she's too big, so it traps her
(07:40):
in the brood box, which is fine. She needs to
be busy making her eggs, layer eggs. And then you
you put these supers on top. A super is essentially
the same thing as a brood box. It's got tin
frames in it with a little little uh manmade honeycomb
replica that they go. They are attracted to and they
build out their comb. So when you put a super
(08:02):
on top of a broodbox, you never touched the brood box.
That's their food, that's their supply, that's how they live.
But the super on top of that is what you
can harvest for your own honey. You can pull that out, Yes,
they don't need that. You can make two supers on
top of that per hive. So we take the brood
box frames out. You've seen the frames on everyone's seen
(08:24):
the frames. You take the frames out and we put
them in this little, this little nuke, which is basically
a cardboard box that you put the frames in and
then close it seal it. So I take those so
I put all the bees in there. It's crazy, seal
it up. Put them in the back of my truck.
Is it like a kid? Like a kid's on board.
(08:44):
I'm gonna dry fifteen thousand bees in each hive, and
I had two hives. I had thirty thousand bees in
the back of my truck. I had to pull over
and get gas on the way there, and I was like,
oh my gosh, you know, because because not all of
them made it into the into the sealed box. You know,
some of them are just kind of around and there.
(09:05):
But they're just gonna keep up. So I get to
my house and I put on the suit and I'm
following the exact instructions that he gave me. I build
the hive just like it was at his house. And
then my wife and I, luckily I had her with me.
We're smoking him too. You smoke him with a little
little smoker because it chills him out. It disorians. This
(09:27):
is not like a Washington State. It's a little bit different.
Is a different kind of smoking, but essentially the same
the same effect. It chills him out. M out distorians,
Can we stop? Are you actually stoning the bees? You're
stoning the bees totally? I love it. Yeah, cedar chips,
(09:50):
that's what we want to call it. Yeah, yeah, So
my wife and there we are. We're, you know, smoking
them like crazy. We open up the site of opening
up that that nuke for the first time and seeing
them in there, fifteen thousand bees and you've got to
reach in there with your hand, gloved hands. You've got
(10:10):
to pull out a frame and they're just coded on
each side of the frame, and then walk it over
and put it into their new box, like here's your home.
It is the biggest rush I've had. I was. I mean,
my heart's pounding. I'm holding YouTube. Yes. So then you
(10:34):
have super is built on top of right exactly. So
what happened is the queen. Everyone's attracted to the queen.
She's the leader. And I didn't see her. I could have,
but I was preoccupied. But she was somewhere on one
of those frames, crawling around. You could see her because
she'd be bigger than all the REPSOD So I put him,
I put him into the food box and then I
cover it with the being the queen excluder, and then
(10:57):
I put the um. I I didn't put a super
on yet because they don't need it yet. They needed
to fill out the rest of their frames, right, But
I did put on a little a little feeding box
on top, so that feeding boxes half sugar half water mish. Yesterday,
for the very first time, I went in there and
added a super because they had filled out their brood box.
(11:21):
So when I took off the feeding box, they had
been building comb all under the feeding box on top
of their brood box. So I just was like, hey,
I gotta I got a spoon and a tupperware and
I just pulled off all of this comb with a
big spoon and put it into the tupperware and got
(11:42):
back and I had a whole bowl full of honey. Okay,
So how often do you think about the bees now
that you're out on tour. I think about it all
the time. I'm texting my wife that you feed the bees?
You know, the strangest, the strangest text. And do you
have children? I do? We have three little ones. You
do you like worry more about the bees than the children.
Since I'm a man, probably not to be honest. Let's
(12:04):
be honest, probably not, but I do think about him
a lot and my kids. I would think that bugs
are kind of icky to some kids. But they want
to put on the suit and they want to go
right up to the box. And if you look right
at the entrance, they have a little entrance. It's it's
an inch long entrance and they they go in there.
(12:24):
And these bees constantly going in, constantly going out all
day long. And the ones going in got the little
pollen sacks on their legs and they're going in. They
deposit the nextar and the nectar and pollen they head
to right back out. The funny thing is, if you
watch it close enough, there's these guards. There's bouncers, but
guard the outside seriously. They check i'd ease, and they'll
(12:48):
find a little robber by that tries to get in there.
He's either a local bee or he's one from next door,
and they will kick his ass. Kid, they will kick
the ship out of Have you slow mode your bees yet?
Have you gone to the SlowMo setting on your phone?
I phone? That's a great idea. I should do that. Okay,
I have not done it. That's a great idea. Yeah,
(13:09):
when when when when we do when we post this podcast,
we need to have at least a SloMo of your bees.
I will have that done for you. Okay. So, um,
now that we understand the full breadth of your obsession, um,
and why you're kind of geeking out on this, how
would you recommend someone else get into this? Like? What's
the gateway drug? Well? How do you start? Um? You know,
(13:33):
the internet is so full as of any other subject,
it's just full of It's a wealth of knowledge of
of ways to use. Yeah to to be able to
sit there and watch a YouTube video of a guy
actually setting up it's really easy. You can get everything online,
deliver it right to your house. And a musician like
me traveling all the time, it makes it tough. But
if you're nine to five or this is this is
(13:55):
easy you could You could literally do it in your garden.
Is it in a morning? Ritual? Is an evening? Like? Well,
I have learned that in the afternoon my bees are crazy.
In the afternoon, they're crazy, They're they're way more chill
in the morning. They're really calm at night, and when
it rains they all go home, they all go home. Yeah,
(14:17):
so these bees live thirty five days. This is what's crazy.
So the queen is like any other normal bee. She
lives longer because she's been fed the royal jelly from
not making this up. The royal jelly. It's like straight
out of a Disney movie. Now, when she's at the end,
they will elect a new queen out of the worker bees.
(14:39):
I don't know how they elect one that, but they
all find one. She gets elected and they feed her
the royal jelly and she grows to the size of queen.
I think, I think I think they're doing that in
the UK right now, Chapter two. In every episode of
(15:09):
Geeking Out, I see if I can trade one thing
I've discovered recently with one thing that my guest has discovered,
like a friendly exchange. I call it trade you. So
this is called trade you. I'll trade you one thing
for one thing. Right, you turn me onto something, I'll
turn you onto something. So I'm obsessed currently a little
bit with cold brew coffee. Right, and so this is
(15:31):
coffee that is steeped for a whole day. It takes
a whole day to make a gallon usually if you
do it the right way, and there are there there
are a lot like Kraft beers. You know there are
people that are making this. And one of the cool
things that it does it takes the acid out of
the coffee, so that doesn't hurt your stomach. The awkward
thing that it does is it triples the caffeine. So
(15:52):
when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, if cold
brew that would be normally your regular cup of coffee,
it's now like you're on adderall right, you gotta be really,
really really careful not to overdo it. So the cold
brew coffee that I love is obviously from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's called Banjo coffee. But when somebody turned me onto
(16:13):
not just the cold brew, but recently mixing it with lacroix. Lacroix,
you know this, uh, this soda that's not a cola, right,
and it's a coconut version. Everybody's got there on the
rider these days. Yeah, Well it's awesome because it keeps
you off drinking dice coke. Right. Um, But the lacroix,
(16:33):
or the lacroix that I love now current obsession is
a coconut which tastes like sunscreen. Um, if you could
drink sunscreen that's carbonated, or the cold brew coffee half
and half exactly into it with ice, a glass of ice,
cold brew coffee, and the coconut lacroix, lacroix, however you
(16:55):
want to pronounce it. It is the most refreshing summer
drink ever. It's like coffee plus it's like a Mound's bar,
but coffee but has zero calories. Okay, that's incredible. I
don't have a name for yet, but that's that's what
you need to text me. That word for word, what
you said, I'm next to that plus that equals joy. Okay, Okay,
(17:22):
now you turned me on to Okay, I'm gonna I'm
gonna turn you. I'm gonna turn you onto something because
of you said cold brew coffee. This guy's probably know
what I'm gonna say, cold water therapy. It's a lot
less enjoyable than cold brew coffee. You gonna put it
that way. But cold water therapy is something I got
into because, um in December, I broke a couple of
(17:44):
ribs and punctured alone, fell off the stage when I
when I got home, I wanted to be able to
recover as fast as possible. I just hate sitting on
a couch and recovering, and I didn't want anything to
slow that down. So I started researching how how would
Troy Aikman, you know, recover the fastest he could possibly recover,
(18:06):
or how would any you know, NFL quarterback figure this out?
Because I fin I kind of put those guys as
the guys that would have the ultimate scientists a lot
of money, right, So everything came back to cold weather
therapy as that you know, you know, all professional athletes
take ice bass and there's a reason. So I really
(18:29):
got into this. And this was in December, so it
was perfect because I would I would go to my
pool and I would measure my pool at somewhere in
the mid fifties. This is in December, so so it's
that actually sounds to some people that sounds warm, but
that's freaking cold. It's freaking cold, especially when outside. It's
(18:52):
in the forties the temperature outside. So I would I
would go get in there, and I started in a minute.
Then I worked up to ten minutes, but three minutes
is what I preferred. But what's crazy is you go
in there and with whatever your whatever your ailment, or
maybe you don't have an ailement, you just you just
(19:12):
want to be completely what happens is you get completely
recirculated with all your blood. Tell me how that works.
So you jump in and you have you have the
the Caveman brain effect of I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die.
You do you think I'm going to die, because that's
what it feels like. So every all the blood in
your body rushes to your court and it holds there
(19:34):
to protect your vital organs. That takes about thirty seconds.
Because I had a timer. Every day I would do
this and had a timer. It takes thirty seconds for
all the blood in your body to rush to your court.
When that happens, you hit a euphoria. Ah, this isn't
too bad. You're kind of just bobbing in the water
like hey, and everybody's like you Okay, It's like it's
not too bad. And at that point you're good. You
(19:54):
could wait for ten minutes if you want. Thank you.
This is perfect. Anything we need to get out, Thank you,
thank you, Thank you for being here. Man. Now we're
gonna eat our food. Yes, thanks Buddy Ranger Smith. Chapter
(20:17):
three me geeking out on music. Surprise surprise, right, all right.
This week I'm diving into a record that was a
really big deal for me, and later in life I
got to explore it in in in a brand new way.
But the artist name are the Police, and the album
(20:37):
in question here is Ghost in the Machine, and when
you look at it, it is a black album with
like a digital read out looks like a digital clock,
but each of their faces the way they did it
with the you know, sting of spiked hair and and
Andy Summers hair is going to the side and stuff
like this, and it's it's a very enigmatic record for them.
(20:58):
But what's most interesting to me is the second single
off of this album was called every Little Thing She
Does Is Magic. And I was always obsessed with this
song for a very specific reason. I at the time
that this came out, or at least by the time
I heard it, I believe I was let's see what
(21:19):
year did it come out? In? Eight one? So by
the time I really dug into this record, I was
twelve or thirteen, and I was learning to write songs
at the time, and um, you know, these Police songs
were complete thoughts and complete statements, and they they sounded
like nothing else on the radio. Is some sort of
strange British reggae rock and every little thing she does
(21:42):
is magic. Is exactly like you know, a squared off,
well written pop song, or even a country song to
that matter. And what was fun to me about the
recording is that there's just very little going on until,
of course, the drums sort of take over in the courses.
And the obsession that I had was kind of these
(22:02):
beautiful melodies in the verses and here that's what they
sound like. Okay, So the way this kind of works
is I had suddenly been listening to Adam and the
(22:24):
Ants and a couple of things that probably a kid
from East Tennessee just had no business listening to. And
I realized that you could put things on top of
each other. And I was trained as a classical musician,
so it made sense to me. Counterpoint, Uh, you know,
one one part of the score layered with another part
of the score later both that had appeared individually earlier.
(22:46):
And what happened so at the end of this song,
there's what's called a fade. And nowadays, you know, we
just kind of draw a fade on a computer, but
at the time you had to actually physically have your
hand on the fader, the master fader on your counsel
and then you would slowly fade it down right, and
depending on how much coffee your engineer had had that day,
(23:07):
your fades were quick or you know, depending on how
much of a I don't know, a stoner or something
that they were, that they would if they would fade
it slowly right, and it would be the perfect timing
on how to close the conversation of a song. So,
this particular song has a fade in it that um
(23:28):
has always always perplexed me. I was the kid who
as the song faded on the radio, I would turn
the radio up and up and up to try to
counter the engineer turning it down. I kept turning it
up and up and up because what Sting had done
and the guys and the police had put one part
(23:48):
of the song of the melody over a different part
of the music, and it only happens on the fade.
And I thought to myself, man, it is the coolest
thing I've ever heard. So here here's that part, all right.
(24:13):
So fast forward, let's see, almost eleven years or twelve years,
I end up as my job getting a record deal
with my my friend Andrew Hira and Billy Pilgrim and
now we are literally in London and we get to
work with Hugh Pagam, the man who produced a lot
(24:36):
of these police records, and I can't help but ask
him when I finally get the like one social time
moment to say, Hugh, please tell me what does it
What did it sound like for the rest of that song?
Because the ending of that song, and I know you
produced it, was one of my favorite things of all time,
(24:58):
and I always wondered what the tales out version of
that is, tails out being you know, we all recorded
on on actual tape and the tail of the tape
if if you hadn't have faded it down on the fader,
what how long did that song go? What could I
hear the rest of that song? And uh, he laughed
and he told me the story of it. He said, well,
(25:18):
that song was actually the demo that we had. The
drummer played to the demo that Staying had already made
and literally the end of the fade is where the
tape runs out on the machine. So um, at least
I know that, uh there there was nothing that happened
after that, so I don't have any fear of missing
out of what's there. But it is in its entirety
(25:44):
one of the more formative songs in my life that
taught me how to reimagine the music that you're making.
Maybe all of it can squish on top of each
other and work out so here it is. Every little
thing she does is magic the Police. I hope you
(26:16):
enjoyed the first episode of Geeking Out, and we are
already hard at work on the next one. Are you
obsessed with something amazing? I want to tell us about it?
Right to us at geeking Out with KB at gmail
dot com and you might be a guest on an
upcoming episode. Come find out more about me and this
podcast at Christian Bush dot com as Christian with a K.
(26:40):
Follow me at Christian Bush on Twitter, Christian Bush on Instagram,
Christian Bush on Facebook, Christian Bush everywhere except for Snapchat.
It's Christian M. Bush. Thanks to Bobby Bones for the
opportunity to build this podcast, Brandon Bush for making the soundtrack,
Tom Tapley for audio wizardry, and Whitney Pastrick for being
a great produce sir, making this whole thing possible. This
(27:02):
is Christian Bush Seeking Out. Thank you for listening. H
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