And you think about honey bees, and I'll confess this is probably something in my head I've done.

You know, I have chickens now here at the Epic Home Stead, six of them. I love them. They're amazing.

And then when I think about getting honey bees on the property,

I think of them as if I'm getting another type of livestock or another animal that I'm caring for on the property,

which technically, of course, it is certainly true that they are animals.

But Hillary Kierney, who's back in the podcast, found her a girl next to her honey,

she sort of sees it in a different light, which I tend to agree with.

I think I know where you might be going with this Hillary, but do you want to explain how you see them?

Yeah, so I think categorizing honey bees as livestock or even as a pet is kind of like, it's not accurate.

I think they're more similar to like a tree or like a plant, you know.

Because they live, you know, forever, they go on and on, but they're always regenerating themselves.

You know, it's just like a plant might have parts of it, like a tree might lose some ranches, part of it dies.

Sometimes the tree even falls down and then regrows from the same rootstock.

This kind of like long indefinite lifespan.

And then the way that they interact with the world, like it's not, I don't think of a honey bee colony,

even though there's individual bees that you can think of, they all have their own individual lives.

They also have this collective, a bee.

You know, that's what some beekeepers call it, the bee.

So it's like, they are a collective animal.

And they're interacting with so many things in the environment.

Like there's so many connections.

I think of the way that they all, at least 1000s of bees, like leaving the hive every day, going to flowers.

...