What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Epic Gardening

podcast. I'm here again with Peter Nelson. He is the director of the

pollinators film which just premiered last night. of the

director of the Pollinators film which just premiered last night at Newport Beach Film Festival.

So if you're in the area, hopefully you got a chance to check that out.

I'm sure there'll be many other ways to watch in the future that Peter can tell you about.

But what we're going to talk about today is that number that we referenced earlier on.

Peter said that a lot of these beekeepers are taking losses of 33 to 50% of their bees every year.

Now I personally don't know of any other business that would be able to sustain and

survive losses like that.

So maybe Peter we could just talk a little bit about first of all

that's the case how are these how are these beekeepers coming back year after year?

Yeah it's it's very complicated and it's the bees have an ability to they raise young very fast right so

a queen bee in peak season will lay 1,500 eggs approximately a day, right?

So you can scale up, a beehive will scale up

from where I live, coming out of winter,

a beehive might have 20, 25,000 bees in it, but then it'll scale up to 60,000

or so for a big beehive in the middle of summer.

And so bees can reproduce really quickly when the conditions are right.

And so what beekeepers will do is they split these hives and they find, they look at the

hives that they have and they say this is a productive healthy hive so I'm going to split it and so

they'll take they'll divide the hive they'll keep the existing queen in one hive

...