Challenges of Beekeeping In Wildfire Area

0:00Book a Loved by Guest Property with Virbo, and you get a top-rated vacation rental that's love for all the right reasons, like being in a great location or having great amenities. Oh, I love my Virbo for the view. Good reason. Ooh, I'm the sauna. Sweet. Another good reason. And that it's one of those good saunas with the hot rock thing? Oh, love a good hot rock thing. Fancy. That's also a reason. Don't worry about surprises. Book a Virbo you'll love with the Love by Guest filter. You know, you Virbo. And then there are the beekeepers,

1:03watchful stewards of this ancient symbiosis. Part agro-scientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, Larry, and Curly, tending to the bee's needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off, flapping, and flailing, like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Bekeeping Presented by our good friends over at Man Lake. As if beekeeping wasn't tough enough, imagine doing it in one of the most wildfire prone areas

2:05of the planet. That's all coming up on today's interview. But first is beekeeping legal where you live. Do you know the laws? If you live in a rural area, the easy answer is usually yes. But if you're in a large city or suburb, the local ordinances can be all over the place. One example is a controversy brewing right now in Barbara, to Ohio, population of about 25,000. The city already has an ordinance dating back to 1957, but it has no real regulations. Just a stipulation that the city at their own discretion can make you get rid of your bees if they want to. Local beekeepers are backing a new ordinance that makes bee hives clearly legal with some common sense regulations about setbacks, number of hives per lot size, etc. But some residents don't want any bees at all, including one who spoke out about her severe allergic reaction

3:07to being stung. Then let's say you live within an HOA. It may have its own rules against beekeeping. I guess the bottom line is get involved. Let your voice be heard. Also, let's make sure we're good neighbors and good stewards of the bees to minimize the impact on others as much as possible. Of course, if your neighbor has a garden and fruit trees, they may be thrilled that you have bee hives. If they have a swimming pool, maybe not so much. The simple fact is the world needs bees and we need to get along with our neighbors. With responsible actions and respect for others, I believe we can do both. All right, now let's jump right into the middle of our fun discussion with Eli. This is Buckwheat. Hi Buckwheat. Hey buddy, can you see me? I don't think he likes me yet.

4:08Buckwheat's named after the summer bloom that we get here in Southern California, California buckwheat. Yeah. I've heard different things about buckwheat honey. Some people say it doesn't taste very good. What do you think? Well, you got to differentiate this buckwheat. People make out in the Midwest and such. I think is a different flower than the California buckwheat, which is a totally different genus of a flower and makes a really delicious honey. It makes usually a summer honey. And we have a couple different species, but they're like endemic to California. So our California buckwheat is absolutely delicious. I really should introduce you before we go any further, Eli. I'd like to welcome to the show, Eli Likker Mark, coming to us from Southern California. Good morning, Eli. What's up? Good morning. Thanks for having me. You got to meet Buckwheat already, and that was awesome. And what kind of a dog is he?

5:09She is a red healer. I'm sorry, my apologies, Buckwheat. For calling you a he. She is a red healer, okay? Okay, so actually Buckwheat is a red healer or a Queensland healer. And she is the puppy of a litter of one of the owners of my apiary properties where I keep my bees. He's like a wild guy in Topanga where I live, who has like three or four of these dogs, and he let them all breed, and he made a bunch of litter's puppies, and Buckwheat was one of those. So she's like a true, you know, be our dog. So does she get along with the bees? Does she get stung or anything? She despises the bees. She will cower in fear if even of any kind of buzzing insect, even if a motorcycle drives by, she thinks it's a bee, she'll be running, she hates the bees. We had a chocolate lab, and she would go out with me in the be yard.

6:11And as far as I know, never got stung. She had no problem. It was weird. Good vibes. Because I've seen pictures online of labs that have been stung on the face, and they look all goofy and stuff. But we're here to talk about beekeeping, and it's going to be fun. Would you describe yourself as a small commercial beekeeper or an individual commercial beekeeper? What would you call yourself? You know, I've been working for years in this kind of in-between zone. It's my only job. So I'm definitely a professional beekeeper. I have other jobs I do on the side, but this is my main focus. I have about between three to six, seven hundred beehives that I manage. And that fluctuates mostly just because either I'll sell bees off, or I'll take a bunch of losses, or I'll make a bunch of splits, and grow a lot one year. But essentially, I think what defines me as a commercial beekeeper is that I have a flatbed and a forklift,

7:15and I move my bees like that, and I participate in the almond pollination. As far as my designation, I think I'm like a small commercial operation, a one-man small commercial operation. Yeah, a few hundred hives versus the guy with 10,000 or 50,000 hives, and a whole ton of employees and fleet of trucks. And that sounds too big to manage to me for it to be fun. I think you're the size where you can do it full-time and still have fun at it. Would you say that's it? I think if you have fun working non-stop and having some great victories and some epic failures, if you enjoy that, then yeah, it's pretty fun. Do you enjoy that? I think I do. I think I really attracted to how challenging this practice is, and how it keeps moving out from under me. Every time I'm like, okay, I got it.

8:17Something happens either in my personal life or in nature that just keeps it from being easy. Let's just call it that. And there's always so much to learn. Yeah, and everyone out there knows if you've done any beekeeping, you start out and you're like, wow, this is so easy. Right? And then you quickly realize like, this is not easy. There's so much to it and there's so many challenges. Even in the last, you know, a couple of decades that have made beekeeping really different than it ever was before. If you think it's easy, it's because you so far don't know what you don't know. Yeah. We'll put it that way. For those that are maybe hobbyist or a sideline beekeeper and thinking about working their way up, I want you to talk about a couple of different things. One, tell me about your day today as an average day because we were going to do this a couple hours ago and I got a text from you saying, we're having bee problems

9:20and need to postpone this a little bit. So what's a bee problem? And then I'd love to learn how you've made the transition from being a hobbyist and getting up to where you are now. Okay. The context for this morning was that we actually did most of our final harvest for the year. We pulled all the supers off of our boxes that are out in Malibu right now. It was a tough honey year for us. And typically we do like two or even three harvests out there. And this year we just pulled this one. I just left all the honey on to the end of the year. So we had a kind of a victory yesterday. We put, we got two pallets of honey, which is pretty good. Those are deep boxes. That would probably be like a drum, drum and half of honey. Or maybe two drums. It took it to the kitchen, which for me is about a 20-minute drive away. Dropped it off and I had to pick up all the spun frames from the last harvest we did. So I put those on my truck and last night I worked until about 6-7 pm. Got home and I said, you know what?

10:21I can't go drop these off at the B yard. And I can't leave them at home because what will happen is all the bees from the neighborhood will come and start to rob those spun out frames. And I live on a property with a five-year-old and a renter and I have neighbors. And they would not be happy about that. It would be a bee storm. So my plan was to wake up early about 5 am. Everything was loaded on the truck already. I had a forklift on the back. Drive to the B yard. Close this B yard. Drop it off. Get back. Have some breakfast and have our interview. I got to the B yard and about 7 am. And I'm unloading all the boxes. And I just realized everything is kind of disorganized. So I'm reorganizing things. I'm getting off the forklift, getting on the forklift. This pile tips over, falls on the ground. All of a sudden I realize it's like 830. It's just to be home for our interview. And the bees have already gotten on the frames. And I didn't put on my bee suit. So now I'm fighting off bees that are robbing the boxes.

11:23I'm getting stung all over. And I'm swatting at bees. At a certain point it hurts. But I just feel kind of silly. So it took a really long time. Got everything organized. And kind of like got out of there. Like I had a couple things back on the truck that I need. And I just rushed home. That's not a typical morning. But I don't think there is a typical morning. It's sort of like always something new to do. But that's kind of a typical issue that comes up. I have a project. And it just doesn't turn out the way. I planned it to turn out. It wasn't just today. All right, tell us a little bit about your journey from hobbyist on up. So I started out beekeeping. I first discovered beekeeping. I'm a big surfer. So I went on a surf trip. I was like 23 years old. And I ended up in central Chile. And Chile has a really vibrant beekeeping culture. It has a big commercial beekeeping business. And it has a lot of really smart people doing beekeeping down there.

12:25And I met a guy who lived near where I wanted to go surfing. So we kind of did an exchange. I had never done beekeeping before. I stayed with him. I helped him with the bees over the winter while I just surfed. My brain's out. And then when I came back to California, my father had met this guy. Yet my father had had a swarm land on his house. And rather than have the swarm removed, he had the swarm hived into a box. So my father just had a bee hive. I said, oh, I know how to take care of that. So I started out like that. Like just how a lot of hobby beekeepers start out by catching a swarm. But I really liked it. I don't know something about it was so, again, it was like something so challenging and new and weird. And I ended up working with the gentleman David who did the swarm capture. I ended up working with him for a couple of years doing a swarm capture, hive removal, stuff like that. And I just failed every year at keeping the bees.

13:26I could catch a lot of colonies. But every year they would all die. Well, why are they dying? Someone said, oh, you have to treat for might. Oh, okay. Someone said, oh, you have to feed them. Oh, okay. I didn't know any of this stuff, right? So I slowly built up and all of a sudden I had like 40 hives. And then all of a sudden they started surviving. I had 100 hives. And I built up to about 120 or 200 hives. And I was still a total just novice. But I had, I was having success. And then a big fire came through. The Woolsey fire in 2018. And burned all my hives. And I got an ELAP payment. And I decided I said, oh, I could cash out or I could just build a business. So at that point I thought, why not just build a business. So I bought a bunch of new boxes. I bought some bees. And that was sort of the genesis of the organized bee business that I've now running today. So big surfer. I need to introduce you to the head of man like he surfs a lot and he lives just up the coast from the away.

14:31Oh, yeah. We'll talk later. I want to hear about fires because you're in an area. We always hear about the Santa Ana wins and the great big fires and stuff. You got wiped out one year. Has that been a problem in other years too? Well, we had that fire was like pretty significant. That was like, you know, we're in this kind of era of these mega fires that since like the 2020s is just sort of like shocked everybody year on year. It's like the next bigger fire, the next biggest fire. That fire was pretty remarkable because of just like how much acreage it burned up. And that was a very like the Santa Monica Mountains like fires not new happens all the time. Right? Like this is the environment that I've chosen to be in. It's actually a great environment for bees. We have beautiful sage blooms. We have little sumac in the summer and toy on and we have the buckwheat. We have really nice native plants that make beautiful honey. But it's a very variable environment. So it goes from El Nino year where we get like 30, 40, 50 inches of rain to last year.

15:34We got like 11 the year before that. We got four. So it's these like drastic swings of environment. And part of that is the fires. This last year, January 20, 2025, we had the palisades fire. And the palisades fire was very close to home. I grew up in the palisades. I started my business in a place called Rustic Canyon, which is on the east end of the palisades. Everything in that area burnt. And actually I was talking about my honey kitchen. It's in that neighborhood. Still, that's where my parents live. When the fire happened, I was pretty certain that the garage where I store my honey drums burnt to the ground. And I believe there was something like 16 drums of honey stored in that garage. I watched the fire. Very, very fire aware ever since that 2018 fire happened. And I was convinced it was all gone. Luckily, it wasn't.

16:34Everything around the garage was torched. So I got really lucky. I couldn't get to the honey because there's like a bridge to get to that garage. And that bridge burnt. So that honey just sat there for six months. And I couldn't get to it. But I mean, fire is so important. It's such a big part of our life. I actually, after the palisades fire started training as a firefighter. And I now worked for the Los Angeles County Fire Department as a coal firefighter here in Topanga at Station 69. So it's part of my life with the bees and part of my life outside of the bees as well. Beekeepers all over the world are thinking, well, I've got Varroa. I've got snow. I've got all these issues. There aren't that many that are dealing with wildfires. I mean, how much can you even do about it? Sometimes you can see a couple days in advance. Oh, there's a fire headed this way towards this apiary. I'm going to go move my 100 hives out of there or whatever the case may be.

17:38And you can do that if it starts too close. You can't. You can keep all the vegetation and mow down. I mean, what would you need in a big fire? You'd need to go out. What, 50 yards, 100 yards or something from your apiary to have everything mowed down for your bees to still be okay. If they stayed, what would it take? Yeah. So there's a couple of things that I've learned to do. None of them are foolproof. And like you said, you know, if a fire starts close and the wind's blowing, there's nothing you can do. Like the Santa Ana winds, like what happens with the Santa Ana winds? When a fire starts on a low humidity high wind day, there's nothing you can do. Because even if you clear vegetation, you're going to get embers. The size of small tree limbs flying through the air, landing up against highs. On this podcast, you often hear a lot of talk about winter preparation. And there are many different philosophies, mostly involving hive insulation.

18:40But what you haven't heard until now is a solution where insulation is built right into a traditional wooden hive body. That's what Manlake just did. Created an insulated wooden hive. And really guys, this is a big deal. I hope you'll take a look at it. Beekeepers have been trusting Manlake for over 40 years. So if your winter prep involves feeding, mite treatments, new insulated hives, or even hive hugger insulation for your current hives, you can find it all in one place. And right now, Manlake is offering podcast listeners $10 off your next order. Just enter code MLBLove10 at checkout. That's manlakeltd.com discount code MLBLove10. When my hives burned in the Woolsey fire, they were in cleared meadows. And when I got there, all that was left were piles of staples from the boxes.

19:43So once the wax ignites, it burns so hot that it just will ignite all the other boxes around it. That being said, I'm still here. I'm still keeping my bees in those same locations. I do have like a much more rigorous clearing practice now. I try to clear like at least 30 feet away from the beehives. But that's an enormous job. And this is not, we're not in a meadow. We're not in grass. This is like thick brush, sharp rail. So very thick. It's a huge expense for me to go out and chainsaw up, you know, a huge portion of mountainside. So there's that you can do prep, you can clean up. There's another thing I do, which is like, you know, if you clean up enough, you just go to the beehive and you pick up the pallets. This is something that a friend of mine event toward does. And he just moves them towards the middle of the yard. So just squish all the bees together so that they're not near the brush on either side. Who knows if that will really help in a big event. And then the last thing is like I actually pull out of the mountains if we're in the fall and try to consolidate in locations that are easier to load in and out.

20:52Because a lot of my locations would be pretty dangerous to be driving in with a fork lift and a flatbed on a windy day, you know, with a fire bearing down on you. You wouldn't want to put yourself in the middle of the of those conditions. So I try to just consolidate, pull them out, put them in places where if there was something to happen, we could show up and pull them out. And then, you know, other than that, you just, they're just beehives. So it's not really worth risking your life for some bees, even though we do that kind of everyday. Yes, you do. All right. I know a big part of your income is honey. Tell me about the different crops of honey that you get. Every year is kind of different. I've learned that I can't be that creative because it just doesn't work for just like what a customer wants. Like people, they want variety. They want to see the real deal, but they also don't want to get confused by too many options. Right. So I fit my honey into kind of four general categories.

21:55I have my Topanga Harvest, which is just colonies and Topanga Canyon, which is where I live. I have to do the farmers market here and you know, that's my community. That honey is about 120 colonies that live in this canyon. And it makes like, that's basically my summer harvest for Topanga. So that's a honey that's made from little sumac, toyon. These are native plants of the Santa Monica Mountains that produce kind of like a red honey, toyon. It has like a burning sensation in your throat. So it kind of has like medicinal feeling. I really love that honey. It's really special and really beautiful. And I make it like, you know, five minutes from my house. So that's pretty nice. On a good year, we'll make sage honey. And the sage is early sage is like a black sage that we make, which is a very clear, very light, very resistant to crystallization honey, really special. And then we also make like a purple sage, which is a little bit darker, a little bit redder, more amber, which is also very delicious, but not as kind of like rarefied as the black sage.

23:03So I call that my purple sage or my sage. And then I make a western Malibu, which I'm not sure if I'll continue doing it just because like the concept was from the beginning that I was sort of tracking the plants, post the Wolsey fire. So when you burn the mountains and until in California, you get a whole new plant succession that comes after. And you also get a whole kind of different type of honey. It was mainly this one plant that the beekeepers call it wireweed. I've heard other people call it deerweed. It's in the pea family and it's a little yellow red flower that just like blanketed the mountains after the fire. And it made an incredibly light honey with almost like a hint of cinnamon in it. And I made a ton of that in the three or four good rain years after the big fire spester. And then the last the last one I call coastal wildflower and it's sort of like whatever I can harvest after June basically.

24:03And it's a darker honey, typically buckwheat honey. And that's a more rich earthy honey that I sell. You mentioned honey kitchen. Is that just a place where you're harvesting honey or is that where you're bottling or what's what's a honey kitchen? I call my honey kitchen basically my extraction room. It's a garage that I've put in some sinks. I've put in some you know surfaces. I rescued a like 1956 cow in uncapping machine. You know like with the vibrating knives like it's made of cast aluminum. It's probably you know it's as old as my older than my parents. And I rescued that and rebuilt that and I have that set up and I have a couple of extractors set up. And then I use it mostly just for extracting honey and for spulks storing drums of honey. I do my bottling here. I've outfitted a container to be a kind of my bottling room. I try not to do both but I do try all the sticky stuff I try to do there.

25:07Yeah, leave it someplace else. Yeah. I get it. I have a feeling that you're going to have some really a couple of fun wild and crazy beekeeping stories. This is something that I really enjoy talking about with people because we all have them. It reminds us of the fun and some of the love of beekeeping. Can you think of one or two you can share with us? Yeah, so I'm small commercial beekeeper. It's kind of unique that I'm here in Los Angeles. Right? Like in LA County there's a few of us in West LA. Not many. Right? I think I'm really the only beekeeper at scale. And so the little weird I'm kind of like driving around these like super fancy neighborhoods in like flat beds, pulling forklifts with bees on the back. It's a pretty unique kind of juxtaposition of cultures. And I grew up actually in a family where my parents worked in the film business. So I'm not really like a farmer lineage.

26:11And so for me too, I'm like very aware of I'm like in this old truck making a mess whatever. Like a friend of mine once said that I was a menace to society because everywhere I go people are just like getting stung by bees. So the story I wanted to tell was kind of like tying that in when I first sort of had this feeling, this need to like kind of step it up. I started borrowing equipment from another beekeeper. For many years I just kept my bees in the mountains and left them there all year and grew them big. And we have like we have kind of I would say probably some of the meanest bees in terms of the feral bees population here in Southern California. I've heard of the Florida bees being pretty mean but our bees are pretty nasty. If you don't change your be your queens out all the time you end up with feral bees in your colonies. And then when you're you know moving bees around and such like they're not nice bees right they're not just hanging out on the truck.

27:16Well you've got Africanized genetics in there. Oh yeah. So that's actually that's like a whole nother story to talk about is just how how it is to keep bees in this environment when you're basically chasing down any any queen loss means you might turn out you know with a monster queen in your yard. So this was early on in my growth towards being like a more commercial beekeeper. I started borrowing equipment so I borrowed a forklift and I borrowed a truck. The only problem was the only truck I could borrow was like a nineteen eighty nine F two fifty that had been sitting in this guy's yard for God knows how long he hadn't driven it. He all his other trucks were out working. I'm collecting the bees for the almonds. I said no problem I'll make it work. So I went and I picked up I think thirty two colonies it was about eight pallets I put them on the truck. These are doubles these are ferocious mountain colonies that are in double deeps full of honey ready to go to the almonds and I'm driving through Malibu and there's a there's a road called Canaan road.

28:24And canaan is like a long long long descent out of the mountains and I've never really driven a forklift that weighs seven thousand pounds eight pallets of bees. I had no way what four five thousand pounds maybe a little bit less than that but maxing out this truck. I'm coming down this mountain and I smell this smell and I'm like oh my god there's something on fire right. And this is the end of the season getting ready for the almonds it's like this is excitement it has to happen now right like it all of this needs to happen immediately or else we're going to miss this opportunity. I pull over I get out of the car and the all of the breaks and the rotors are on fire. It's because I'm going down the hill all riding on the brakes the brakes were not adjusted correctly and my break rotors are just on fire. I go in the car there's nothing to put the fire out except for like my coconut water that I got at the gas station.

29:24So I put the fire out with the coconut water I get back in I call the owner hey I'm sorry I set your car on fire he says oh don't worry you just need to keep driving. I said I have to keep driving. He said well if you don't keep driving then the rotors are going to freeze and you're going to be stuck forever and you got all those bees on the truck so you better go. I'm like okay I'm only halfway down the incline. So this was probably about five six maybe like seven eight o'clock at night it was dark already I had a newborn at the time and my partner you know she was worried about me I call her I say hey my car my car start on fire I don't have a phone charger my phone is going to die. I don't know what's going to happen I'll see you later tonight right so then I get back in the car and I'm driving them and he'll wait to get her worried. Oh my gosh so yeah I put it in first gear I'm using the trailer break to break me going down the hill and I'm carrying a big fork lift too.

30:27And I think I worked till like that night like three four in the morning driving at like 10 to 15 miles an hour dropping off those colonies you know where they needed to go turns out she had left the house you know an hour later looking for me she said oh I'm going to go look for him. I said I don't know why she would do that but she ended up looking going driving around to the night left the baby with her sister something like that it was total mayhem the thing I remember was when my phone was dead and I knew that the car could drive in as long as I went safe slowly. And I remember was like this quiet night and I just felt like like there was all this chaos happening around me and I just felt like this is exactly what I should be doing right now you know like just disaster after disaster and I'm just keeping cool. And it's just me and these monster bees just doing what I need to do and like I think anybody else would have just been not anyone else but people who were not meant to be beekeepers would have said this is insane I'm never doing this again and I remember that's when I got like kind of hooked I was like this is wild and crazy and this is what beekeeping should feel like.

31:44Yeah you don't seem like someone that wants to just sit behind a desk all day long Eli you need the craziness I love it that was a big turning point for you yeah yeah alright before I let you go how about a little advice for a young beekeeper out there I would say it just don't be afraid to make mistakes I would say to try things to try to focus on the basics. Forget about your equipment on your suits and just focus on the queen and the health of the bees and the mites and let them teach you what they need and just practice listening and watching and observing and yeah just keep at it because you slowly slowly build up these instincts and you don't realize it but the more you see the better the better you are at identifying what's going on. One actual just super practical thing is if you really love beekeeping seek out a beekeeper who's got hundreds of hives and just go open beehives you know like when you open 50 beehives in an hour you really get a sense of what the bees are doing and what they're what they're needing just looking at one or two hives really hard to get a sense of what the season is doing and what the bees are doing.

33:10So I think that would be like a great practical move for someone who is really trying to learn. Alright Eli, hey thanks a lot for being with me today. I'm going to have to get down there to Southern cows sometime. You better bring a good bee soup because the bees can be kind of nasty. I'll bring a good bring to it all wear balls off a mouse hat. Yeah. So if you've got any questions or questions about beekeeping, please let us know in the comments below. If you have a guest suggestion or a topic you'd like to discuss on the show, shoot me an email Eric at beelovebekeeping.com and remember if you're not just in it for the honey or the money you're in it for the love.

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