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I was recently invited back for an interview on In The Garden on KSQD Radio.
Joe Truskot and Steven E. Popp have had me on the show a time or two before and it’s always a pleasure to talk bees with them.
I hope you enjoy the program! If you have any follow up questions feel free to reach out to me through the email contact form.
Happy Winter Everyone and Stay Cozy!
A couple months ago I did a honey tasting event at Hotel Paradox for a visiting journalist. Sharon McDonnell interviewed me about the rooftop honey bee hives that Santa Cruz Bee Co. manages at the hotel. We had a lovely spread of tasting pairings provided by Solaire’s new executive chef, Stephan Shatto. I spoke with Sharon about the great variability in flavors of different honeys, utilizing the UC Davis Honey Flavor Wheel as a guide in our gustatory explorations. In the interview, we delve into some of the broader challenges that multiple pollinator species are facing in modern times and what you as an individual can do to help. I hope you enjoy the read!
For a handful of years, Santa Cruz Bee Co. has been keeping rooftop colonies at Hotel Paradox in downtown Santa Cruz. The hotel gets the clout of being a leader in this sustainability initiative and they also get the benefit of slow food in the honey that the hives produce. The hotel bar & restaurant, Solaire, utilizes the hyper-local honey harvest in their signature cocktails, desserts and other culinary creations.
Recently the hotel and restaurant underwent a major renovation. Just yesterday they had their grand re-opening reveal party and it was a smashing success. Santa Cruz Bee Co. was there teaching the party goers about the wonder of honey bees, doing a sensory tour of hive product, and tasting honeycomb from the flourishing rooftop hives with some choice food pairings.
Solaire also has a wonderful new executive chef who was recently profiled in our great local rag, Lookout Santa Cruz. I was glad BeeCo got a nod! If you’re in Santa Cruz, you have to go in and try his “Birds and the Bees Nest” dessert, it’s as delicious as it is beautiful!
I hope you enjoy the article and I hope you get to go eat at Solaire soon :)
<3
Autumn’s Greetings Everyone!
I am catching my breath after a long and busy spring and summer bee season. Now I see that I never got to share about my keynote I gave this past May at the 15th Annual Down to Earth Women’s Luncheon.
It is a lovely event in which women in the Agricultural industry in Santa Cruz County come together to network and fundraise to create/maintain a scholarship fund. This helps young, emerging horticulturists attend college programs specific to furthering their careers in sustainable agriculture.
Needless to say I was thrilled when I heard they were doing a pollinator theme and I was nominated to speak. It was a short keynote, and I focused on general pollinator support tactics for your own back yard.
Many people think the way to “save the bees” is by keeping honey bees, and this is not necessarily true. While keeping bees can be supportive to pollinator populations when done responsibly, it is not in and of itself an act of conservation.
If you want to help pollinators, leave the leaves under your tree! Don’t have a fully mulched and manicured yard. Buy organic seeds and starts, and refrain from using unnecessary agrochemicals in your yard. Maintain a brush pile and some fallow area for wood burrowing and ground nesting pollinator species. Try to keep it wild!
Thanks again to Driscoll’s berries and the other event sponsors for having me speak. It was an honor to get to speak to so many accomplished and strong women in the Ag. Sector.
And thank YOU for reading this far! If you are interested in having me speak to your group about the power of pollinators and the vast intelligence of bees, reach out!
Bee well and live light,
~Emily~
I was fortunate to get the opportunity to volunteer with Farmer-to-Farmer this year. Farmer-to-Farmer is a unique program in which technical skills are shared between experts in their field and rural community members in these partner countries who can benefit from this knowledge and capacity building. I was recruited through my Adaptive Bee Breeders Alliance network (a few colleagues have gone to Jamaica in the past 10 years on similar assignments).
My assignment title was “Climate Smart Apiculture” – keeping bees successfully in the face of climate change. I must admit tackling this topic was a little bit intimidating. Lately I have been at a loss for knowing how to work successfully amid the unpredictable weather events that are becoming more common. I do not think I am alone in this.
I did some brainstorming and figured that extreme weather takes on two main forms – too much precipitation or too little precipitation – and depending on temperatures, elevation, wind, microclimates, and the shape of your unique landscape, this will have a variety of impacts. For instance, much of the extreme weather we’ve been facing here in California lately – we just had our 11th “atmospheric river” event of this winter– is similar to tropical storm or hurricane conditions in tropical climates like Jamaica. Heavy rains, flooding and strong winds equate to similar management and hive preparation techniques. These would include practices like weighing down hive lids, maybe providing extra cover from rain, leveling and strapping down hives, making sure hive stand legs are stabilized in uneven/sodden ground, shimming hives to prevent water intrusion, etc.
Furthermore, for both long bouts of rain as well as drought, supplemental feeding may well be in order. Right now in California, we have plenty of blooms. However, with the heavy rains and windy conditions, the nectar and pollen can be washed/blown off the flowers. Even once the sun comes out, the floral resources are not available in the abundance that they were before the storms. This not only impacts the ability of bees to have adequate nutrition, but it has knock-on effects for pollination and crop production more broadly. We all know we need rain, but it sure is tough when it all decides to come at once right at the start of spring! I have been mitigating this through supplemental feeding in-hives usually with 1:1 syrup or fondant, but sometimes with honey stores from other colonies. Late season starvation can totally be a thing when then hives start brooding up and have many more mouths to feed. Nothing worse than getting a hive through the winter only to lose them on the last mile before the finish line!
The time in Jamaica was interesting. I ended up doing a lot more school and group teaching/presenting than I did actual in-hive workshops. I spoke to a few agricultural high schools and feel some of those students may well have a future in apiculture. And some of the younger kids I presented to were just precious! I was in a town called Santa Cruz in St. Elizabeth parish. Everyone got a kick out of the fact that I am from Santa Cruz, CA and my business name is Santa Cruz Bee Company! Some of the smaller hill towns where we went to teach were super rural and I got the impression that I may have been the first white person some of these kids had ever met. I felt a bit like a celebrity at times. One of my favorite moments was when one girl asked me if I had been to Starbucks before – in a tone like she was asking me if I had met Madonna before 🙂
I’d have to say aside from the personal connections I made with the kind folks I met in Jamaica, my favorite experience was trying their local cuisines. My top favorites were ackee (their national fruit – typically boiled and then mixed with saltfish, a relic of British colonial rule). It looks and tastes a bit like creamy scrambled eggs and is eaten for breakfast. It was surprisingly hard to find vegetables to eat there, so any chance I had I would have callaloo (Jamaican spinach) also typically mixed with saltfish and eaten for breakfast. They really have mastered chicken in all its forms – fried, jerk, baked, stewed– and I love that when you order that ask if you want leg and thigh or breast and wing. I’m a dark meat girl all the way, so loved that I got to choose! Some other excellent foods there are festival (deep fried flour & cornmeal sticks), bammy (steamed or fried cassava patty), coco bread, and escovitch fish (deep fried whole fish with vinegar pickled veggies). YUM—Writing this all I wish I could teleport right back there now!
I concluded the trip with Tim meeting me there for a little vacation time. One big tourist highlight was swimming in a bioluminescent bay at night with the glowing dinoflagellates. We concluded the trip in Montego Bay and got some pretty great snorkeling/free-diving in. I was glad to see some healthy/colorful corals (brain, antler, fan) amid the bleaching. The water is like 80-85F there so we could actually have ~hour long sessions which was ideal. We also saw some super cool nudibranchs, giant crabs, stingrays, and a ton of different fish species like box puffers, tangs, wrasses, damselfish, squirrel fish and lion fish.
In case you are curious, Farmer-to-Farmer is funded by USAID and operates alongside another organization called Partners of the Americas. They have programs in Columbia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana and Jamaica. Hopefully I’ll get to volunteer with them again one day! I recommend it.
Thanks for reading this far y’all.
Take good care and HAPPY SPRING!!!
~Emily
I was recently invited to present at the 80th annual American Beekeeping Federation conference in early January 2023. Over the past couple years I have been observing accelerated queen loss and supersedure, so I decided to pitch a talk called “What Happened to my queen? Translating queen quality for newer beekeepers” What it boiled down to was that it’s a multifaceted problem, but the issue very likely lies just as much or more in the drone populations and their sperm quality and viability (i.e. perhaps it’s almost entirely a drone issue)! If you would like to learn more about details of the talk, see the slides, etc. you can email me directly at santacruzbeeco@gmail.com
Aside from giving this talk, I was able to attend a number of excellent presentations. The show stopper, the current all-star of the beekeeping world, is Dr. Sammy Ramsey. His keynote was titled “How to avoid a pollinator pandemic”. He outlined the very serious lack of knowledge and deep need for apiarists and researchers worldwide to learn more about the Tropilaelaps mite. The Varroa destructor mite jumped subspecies hosts from Apis cerana to Apis mellifera. The small ectoparasite known as Tropilaelaps spp. (there are 4 species) has also transitioned– this time from Apis dorsata to Apis mellifera. These “Tropi” mites, as Dr. Sammy refers to them, are wreaking havoc in southeast Asia. They are about ¼ the size of Varroa mites, so even harder for beekeepers to observe in the hive. Tropilaelaps reproduce more rapidly inside the capped brood, and they inflict multiple feeding wounds on the pupae and on the adult bees. For this small amount that we do know Tropi mites, there is so much more that we need to learn so we can prevent major losses before they occur. It is likely not a question of If but When Tropilaelaps mites will arrive in the continental USA. We need to be prepared! To learn more about Dr. Samuel Ramsey, you can visit https://www.drsammy.online/ and to support his research, you can visit https://www.ramseyresearchfoundation.org/donate
There were multiple other well researched talks including one from Dr. Garret Slater about “Dud Drones” that helped provide a deeper context for my queen talk. One statistic he noted that blew me away was “60% of queen bees fail within 6 months” OMG! And it is not fair that we blame this poor queen quality on the queens alone. This is just where the lack of reproductive quality is witnessed/expressed. Drones have a very short window (about 48 hours early in their larval development) in which their sperm develops. If there are adverse/stressful conditions occurring in the hive during that time, then it’s entirely possible that their sperm viability will be impacted, which can then lead to poor mating outcomes for queen bees. This can then translate into weaker mating success/quality for queen bees. If queen bees are less well fecundated, then their queen pheromones will be weaker and that may lead to decreased longevity and/or escalated rates of supersedure. Poor quality sperm could also translate to less hybrid vigor in worker bee offspring which could then affect the overall fitness of the hive in the form of less genetic diversity. I look forward to learning more about Dr. Slater’s research through our collaborative ABBA group, of which he is a part.
Speaking of ABBA - and no I don’t mean the Swedish Pop Supergroup :) - I mean the Adaptive Bee Breeders Alliance. I am thrilled to be a part of this collaborative “supergroup” spearheaded by the inimitable Melanie Kirby. Several of the researchers and professional producers (field beekeepers) who are part of the research grant team of about 20 individuals were attending and presenting at the ABF conference. Megan Mahoney, one of the preeminent producers currently utilizing I.I. (instrumental insemination) of queen bees in a commercial breeding operation, gave an update on her breeding program/pedigree. Another member of ABBA is Dr. Kaira Wagoner. Over about a decade of work, she discovered UBO (unpleasant brood odor) in her research of honey bees. This ability of bees to smell varroa-infested pupae and develop hygienic uncapping behaviors is a crucial step in breeding mite-resistant bees. She is in the process of developing a commercially available product that beekeepers can utilize for hygienic testing and I will hopefully be a part of that pilot program this year through ABBA!
All in all, I am super grateful for the impassioned work of so many in the honey bee community I got to meet and reunite with at ABF. I am inspired to continue my education so that I can be the best bee educator, science communicator and pollinator ambassador possible. Stay tuned for upcoming updates about the work with ABBA over the coming 2-3 years. To learn more about ABBA and catch some of our past webinars from 2021, visit Melanie Kirby’s Website: https://ziaqueenbees.com/adaptive-bee-breeding-techniques-philosophies-for-the-future-webinar-on-april-3-2021/
If you made it this far, thanks! You must be a real BEEK!
Take good care of yourselves and remember- do your best to live like a bee!
Warmly,
~Emily~
Hi again Bee Friends,
Last week I was invited back on KSQD Santa Cruz’s show “In The Garden”.
We had a lovely hour talking about a variety of bee topics including best plant family forage sources for bees.
I hope you enjoy!
Take good care and as always, Bee Well!
-Emily
Hello Again Bee Friends,
It’s been a minute!
I was busy as a bee this spring setting up new colonies, maintaining my existing hives, mentoring new beekeepers and teaching workshops. For the past couple weeks, I have been taking a breather and a break to visit with family on the east coast.
During my time here I did however take an hour to talk bees with Mike James of HyperHive for his HyveTime podcast. I hope you enjoy our conversation where we discuss how we got into bees, how we structure our bee businesses and talk about treatment free management and VSH bees.
Thanks for checking in out, and please share with anyone who may be interested :)
Take good care and bee well,
~ Emily ~
KSQD, a local radio station in Santa Cruz, invited me back for another interview/episode on Joe Truskot’s show “In The Garden”. We talked about honey harvesting and other fall beekeeping topics. Have a listen and enjoy!
Bee Well and Stay Golden,
-Emily
As some of you may know, I keep rooftop hives in Santa Cruz at the Hotel Paradox. We use the honey from the hives at the hotel’s bar and restaurant, Solaire. We would also do team building educational events around honey bee education and honey tasting at the hotel. This is currently on hiatus due to Covid but we hope to start up events again soon. Here is the article if you want to learn more about what other local hotels are offering for team building events:
https://www.santacruz.org/meetings-meeting-blog/onsite-team-building-at-santa-cruz-county-hotels/
Hi All,
I was approached recently by Tammy Trujillo, the host of “Community Cares”, a show on AM 830 KLAA down in Southern California. We had a great ~30 minute talk all about honey bees- it was quite fun! Here is an archive of the interview if you’d like to listen yourself:
Hey Y’all!
It’s been a minute. Hope everyone had a restorative and happy winter and is planting seeds and prepping their bee gear for spring 2021 :)
I was honored to be included in the EMB’s Winter Print Issue highlighting local honey companies around the Monterey Bay Area. It was a lovely spread! Here is a link to the blurb/spread where you can see Santa Cruz Bee Company along side some other great local producers.
As always, if you want to purchase honey, honeycomb, propolis, raw beeswax, or other value added products, email me at santacruzbeeco@gmail.com or contact me through the form submission on this website.
Bee well and stay sweet,
~Emily
Hello Everybody,
I was fortunate to get a chance to sit down with Kirsten Traynor of 2MillionBlossoms for an interview. Kirsten is a co-host of the Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Bee Culture Magazine. Our discussion centered on what is means to be a “Treatment Free” Beekeeper, the differences in management protocol, the benefits and pitfalls of TF beekeeping and more.
Please have a listen and share with anyone else who may be interested.
Thanks!
-Emily
Hello All!
This past weekend I was invited back on Joe’s radio show “In the Garden” to talk more about bees.
We covered the recent Santa Cruz county fires, honey, murder hornets and more!
Due to Covid-19, I called in from my home to the station rather than going in-person. Unfortunately, my connection was not great so my audio is pretty choppy and warbly.
Hopefully you enjoy it regardless.
Much love, Stay safe, and BEE well,
-Emily
Back in January of this year, I was interviewed by Mandy Shaw who hosts and produces a wonderful podcast called Beekeeper Confidential . We talk a lot about my “origin story” around how I got to where I am today with bees. It was a lot of fun to talk with her, and I hope you enjoy listening!
Hi friends,
This past weekend I was invited back for a second time to the Santa Cruz community radio station KSQD to do a Bee Q&A with Joe Truskot on his show “In The Garden”. I actually have the recording from last year’s show as well, so I decided to upload them both here. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to share, and you can add comments if you have any additional questions, etc.
As always, you can connect with me on Facebook or Instagram @santacruzbeeco or email me at santacruzbeeco@gmail.com.
Stay happy, healthy and sane everyone- it’s a wild time in the world right now.
With deep gratitude,
Emily
Hello Friends,
A few weeks back I was invited to be interviewed on Notabig podcast, which is a new show being hosted produced and by my friend James Nakahara.
Give it a listen here: https://notabigpodcast.com/
Also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Pocket Casts if you prefer to listen there.
Feel free to drop a line here or on my Instagram @santacruzbeeco if you have a question or comment about the episode.
And if you like the podcast, please Rate, Review and Subscribe so that Notabig Podcast can be shared with a wider audience.
Cheers,
Emily
Hello Friends!
OK, so after several months, I am finally getting around to writing about my experiences at the 46th meeting of the International Apicultural Congress called APIMONDIA. This is the big beekeeping conference where honey bee researchers, commercial beekeepers, industry professionals, sideline and hobbyist beekeepers and all manner of freaky beeks get to converge and mind-meld. It was a fantastic experience that I have been looking forward to writing about- so here goes!
Apimondia happens every other year, with each meeting taking place in a different country. The 2019 Congress was held in Montreal, Canada in early September. I was lucky enough to arrive several days in advance of the meeting with my *new* husband, Tim. We were married in July, and this trip was one of many “mini-moons” or “multi-moons” we plan to take. Tim’s family is from Bangor, ME so we convinced his parents to make the drive from Maine to Montreal and stay with us for a few days to explore the city. Nothing like going on your honeymoon with your in-laws, right?! Tim’s mom speaks fluent french, so it was fun having her be our translator and watch the cute waiter at the French bistro flirt with her.
Once the congress began, Tim and his parents went back to Maine for the week, and my dear friend and beekeeping mentor, Rob Keller of Napa Valley Bee Co., and his girlfriend took the place of Tim and his parents at our airbnb. We did all have one night together, however, which we spent at O.Noir-- an immersive dining experience in which you eat in complete and total darkness with a blind waitstaff. It was quite a funny and memorable experience to share.
Ok, now onto the bee talk! It’s hard to even know where to begin. Whenever I am at conferences and bee meetings, I prefer to hand write my notes, as I feel like I can connect with the information better in the moment and focus on the speakers without having technology between us. When I returned home, I typed up my notes, which ended up being 14 pages! At some point soon as an addendum to this, I think I’ll post my notes to the blog separately as a stand-alone piece…
There was a whole lot of amazing information presented at the congress, and also a whole giant expo area with people selling beekeeping equipment, honey, books, you name it. Before the congress began, my father-in-law asked me why I come to these kinds of meetings. I told him it was 50% keeping up on current research and 50% networking. Reflecting back, I think that’s still very much true.
I will say one thing that has stayed with me in reflecting after the conference were the friendships I strengthened and new connections I made. This was the first time I was at a beekeeping conference where there were actually bee professionals numbered in the 10s in my age cohort AND my gender! Shoutout to Melanie Kirby, Tucka Bee, Ang Roell, and so many more! This is a big deal to me. For a long time there has been a serious lack of young beekeepers and an even more serious lack of young female beekeepers. I was thrilled to get to meet a good number of other young female beekeeping entrepreneurs and researchers; that was mega inspiring. I do wish there had been more P.O.C. and L.G.B.T. representation as those are also lacking sectors in the bee world, but there were a few notable exceptions that are forging that path and I am glad to see them represented and giving presentations.
Regarding the research that was presented, the track I went for was mostly treatment-free, queen rearing/breeding programs, locally adapted stock/darwinian beekeeping, VSH behaviors, and issues pertaining to keeping bees in the agricultural landscape (pesticide exposure, monoculture, etc). There were a lot of presentations on detecting fraudulent honey, products of the hive, apitherapy, commercial beekeeping, and community/development projects which I would have loved to attend but weren’t as pertinent to my niche.
Some of my biggest take-aways were around pesticide/fungicide exposure and the most glaring thing was that even a lot of those research results were contradictory or seemed to present different conclusions. This was a little disheartening, because I feel like for a long time, there has been a lot of misinformation coming from the companies that make both pesticides and the miticides that are used as in-hive varroa treatments. For a while, the narrative has been “it’s a mite issue” rather than “it’s an environmental issue, due largely to agricultural chemicals”. The jury is still out on how bad agricultural chemicals are for insect pollinators, but we know they aren’t good. It’s really hard to study bees in a lab, and there are too many variables to control in field tests, but what we do know is that these chemicals accumulate and persist in fat soluble hive products (wax and pollen) and there are likely synergistic effects. The effects have been noted to range from neurotoxic effects to endocrine disruptors to affecting the ability of bees to process and digest tainted floral resources. In conclusion, not great news.
Rufus Issacs gave a great keynote on the need for Integrated Crop Pollination. He made the astute point that since the 1960s, more and ore of the crops we are growing are pollinator dependent, and many are grown in monoculture. Land diversity is not increasing as quickly as our dependency on insect pollination is increasing, and this is a problem. In a time when our current food system needs pollinators more than ever, we are continually losing biodiversity and available “clean” pollinator forage in the landscape. Wild bee abundance has been mapped, and it is very low in intensive agricultural areas. We need to think about an IPPM approach, an integrated pest AND POLLINATOR management approach, on our farmland if we want to start moving in the right direction.
Some of my other favorite presentations were about hygienic behavior. This is a hot topic, especially among treatment free and “Darwinian” beekeepers. The research came out of Dr. Marla Spivak and researchers from her lab, as well as research out of Dr. Thomas Seeley’s lab. The main take-away from Dr. Spivak’s talk was about the hygienic uncapping that house bees will do when they smell mites reproducing underneath capped brood. The kicker, however, is that some colonies are more hygienic than others. We all know that bees are fastidious workers, and they found that some bees will re-cap infected pupae rather than clear it out of the hive. This is a net negative as it creates extra work and does not remove the viral pathogen source from the hive. Research from Peck and Seeley concluded that as much as 50% of infested cells were recapped in hives they were monitoring! So, needless to say, that uncapping behavior doesn’t always mean that the infected/infested pupae are getting removed from the hive as swiftly as we would like. I also learned through the work of Marla Spivak’s lab that the signal that indicates the presence of mites/parasitism and primes the uncapping process is called tritriacontane. It is my understanding that tritriacontane is the signal emitter from the scent of the varroa, and the signal receiver to do the uncapping process resides in the nurse bees.
As I noted earlier, it was a 50/50 between inspiring info and inspiring people. It was also just a lot of fun! I got to spend a good amount of time at APIMONDIA with my good friend Aidan Wing of Wings of Nature Bees. He lives fairly close to me and is both my local queen breeder/nuc supplier and a favorite queen rearing-collaborator. (I actually made a cameo on his poster presentation on Developing Regenerative Queen Breeding Programs at the congress!) Anyways, as we were both at the airport in Montreal about to fly back to the SF Bay Area, he said to me something along the lines of “This was the best week of my life!”. While I know this was hyperbole, there is still a lot of truth to it. It is hard to make a living keeping bees. But, for us truly dedicated folks who “caught the bug”, our lives have been touched by our winged friends in a way that can be hard to explain to non-beeks. We are a bit of a rare breed and there are definitely some odd ducks along us. When we get the chance to meet other like-minded beekeepers, especially those of us early in our careers, there is a certain kind of magic that happens. To anyone who is serious about keeping bees, I would highly recommend attending a future APIMONDIA congress. I do not think you will be disappointed!
And in the words of my friend Sam Comfort: BEST IN BUGS!
Much love,
Emily
Seasons Greetings Everyone,
I would like to share this recent profile of Santa Cruz Bee Co. I was interviewed for a local publication called “Discover Her” that highlights the work of women-owned businesses across Santa Cruz county.
https://discoverher.life/emily-bondor/
I particularly like how this publication linked to my relevant community partners in the interview. I believe that all good work is strengthened by the support and collaboration of partners in the local community. Thank you so all the businesses and individuals who have promoted Santa Cruz BeeCo over the years.
On this, the winter solstice, may we all take a moment to reflect on those who make our work and our lives more meaningful and impactful. Here is to more good work in 2019.
Cheers,
Emily Bee ~ SCBeeCo
Hi all!
It’s certainly been a while. I wanted to share this publication here. Back in March, I met a writer for South Bay Accent Magazine while doing a workshop at Hive and Hum in Santa Cruz. She was kind enough to interview me for this article highlighting south bay honey and bay area beekeepers. I was pleased to also see them use a few of my bee photos, too! I hope you enjoy the read and delicious recipes!
<3 and bees,
Emily
