Ron talks to Nina Bagley 6/29/2024

Ron talks to Nina Bagley 6/29/2024

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
It's Glenn Beck weekday mornings at nineoh six on fifty five krc the talk
station. Looks like we got somerain showers and thunderstorms today. I'll take
that. Mostly cloudy skies, highof eighty eight tonight, rain showers and
thunderstorms again. Cloudy sky's seventy oneon the Sunday partly mostly to partly sunny
skuys less human eighty on Monday,mostly sunny skuys again, seventy eight degrees.

(00:22):
I'll take that too. Seven fournine, fifty five hundred here at
fifty five KRCD Talk Station. Welcomeback here in the Garden with Ron Wilson.
You know, we talk a lotabout the bees on this show and
you know, trying to protect andbe friendly and all of that. Today
we're going to focus on the queen, the queen bee, like she is
the main thing that you know makesthese hives happen, right, the queen

(00:45):
bee. Uh to learn more aboutthe queen bee. And you know there's
folks out there that actually breed queenbees. So if you needed a queen
bee that you can actually go tothese people and they have a queen bee
to send to you. There are, as a matter of fact, the
one I know and that she doesa great job. Her website is Ohio
queenbee dot com. That's Ohio queenbeedot com. Is miss Nina Bagley and

(01:06):
she is with us this morning.Good morning, good morning. How are
you this morning? I'm doing realwell. How are you? I am
absolutely wonderful. Let me ask youfirst, Nina, you live in the
German village, and of course youknow small yards and all, and you've
got a beehive. There are yourneighbors ever worried about you living next to
them? No, no, fortwenty some years. No, they they're

(01:30):
not. They embraced them. Iwasn't talking about the bees. Oh me,
that's a different story. I knowthat. Yeah, I'm a good
neighbor. I bring you honey.Yeah, you're right, that's that.
They've got to enjoy that. Butyou know, on a serious note,
so let's talk about first of all, the queen bee. I mean,

(01:53):
she is, like, does shedoes the queen bee in the hive?
Does she create all the bees thatare in that hive? Yes, she
creates them all. So she's themother of all the being workers, Yeah
of all? Yeah, the workers, the drones. The whole hive relies

(02:15):
on her, so everybody counsel here. So how long do queen bees usually
live? They used to live upto about five years, but over the
years I've been noticing that just threeyears, probably due to our environment and
their nutrition and the drones not youknow, having enough semen and you know,

(02:38):
to keep her spermatika full. Sousually it's usually I'm seeing about three
years that we're replacing them. Andwhen you say so a bee keeper,
that somebody's doing this on a regularbasis. Obviously they know how to look
and find their queen bee. Isthat something they're always looking for? Starting
to make sure your queen beees ingood shape and that you've got one,

(02:59):
or if when she dies, dothey all just take off and leave?
Well, actually, what they'll dowhen like a new beekeeper or someone who's
just a beginner, or someone lookingit's not real good to look for your
queen all the time because you couldprobably kill her by accident. But if
they go in there and they lookand they see brood and a good brood

(03:22):
pattern and eggs, then they knowtheir queen is in there and she's doing
her job. So usually when Igo out and do inspections, I'll just
pull a frame and if I seeyoung eggs and brood, then I know
the queen is there. So Ijust shut it everything back up and let
her do her things. So withall of those two thousand eggs, two

(03:45):
thousand eggs a day, two thousandseggs a day, yes, twenty five
hundred, some people say fifteen hundred, but she lays a lot of eggs.
Wow. All right, So youknow, we joke a lot with
Barbie Butcher about the drones not doinganything. They just hang out and eat
and cause a lot of problems.But it's right. But they're the ones

(04:08):
that actually mate with the queen.Correct, No, no, yes,
they do mate with the queen.They do mate with the queen. Yes,
And the drones are very important forsomebody raising queens like myself. I
have very good drone yards because thequeen has thirty six chromosomes and that drone

(04:28):
has sixteen of her chromo zomes.But no father, he's identical to her.
So if he's awesome and they're awesome, then everybody then the queens are
going to be awesome that you breed. If you have bad drones, then
you're going to get poor queens,so that drone is very very important to
carry her genetics on. I actually, yeah, they are lazy, but

(04:51):
they are very important because we needwe need something. They have got it.
Well, I had a riddle foryou, who has no foll but
has a grandfather? Would that bemail B. Yeah, that's a hard
one to figure out, but that'sthat's yeah, thank you very much.

(05:11):
I'll be here all day. That'sa hard one to figure out, but
that's the way it works. Soall right, so you're throwing all this
stuff out out of and you gotto have great drones and all this kind
of stuff. How do you knowif you have great drones. Well,
if you've got a great queen andshe's surviving over the two years and she's

(05:33):
prolific and she doesn't have a spottybrood pattern, then I know I've she's
been mated. Well, it's whenshe comes back and she has a spotty
brood pattern and it looks like ashotgun shot, you know, shotgun pattern.
That's not good. You want anice, smooth brood pattern. So
yeah, you can tell if she'sbeen mated poorly. What do you mean

(05:55):
comes back from what from her matinggetting made it, she'll take a congrege.
She'll go off after Okay, ifI graft the queen, I'll graft
her and that'll be like a larvaethat's like eighteen hours old. It's smaller,
the better for the queen. Andthen after sixteen days that well,

(06:16):
actually the cell will be capped overin like five days. Okay, So
when it's capped over the sixteenth day, that be will that queen will emerge,
and I'm going to take about fivedays for her kite and her skeleton
the harden, so she can gotake a mating flight. And she'll take
a couple mating flights, and thenit'd take another five or six days for

(06:42):
her to start laying eggs. Ifit's raining out and the weather's not good,
she can't get mated. Then she'llend up having be poorly made it.
So it's good when the weather isreally nice, she'll go out and
there's a congregation area, she'll findit and she'll made up to twenty with
twenty different drones and that keeps thediversity going. Okay, so those are

(07:04):
the same drones that were in there, funny drones. So no, she
won't do she won't in breed withher. So we'll find drones in o
the yards. Really yeah, sure, and then they'll die. Then those
twenty guys got lucky and they die. What a way to go? I
guess I don't know, but well, yeah, I mean either that or

(07:27):
you come back to the hive andyou wait to October for them to kick
you out, to kick you outat that point, hang out and get
kicked out, or just die,have fun and just die, or just
die having fun dying having Talking withNina Bagley. She is a Ohio queen
bee breeder and her website is Ohioqueenbee dot com if you want to learn
more about this. So you know, so you are an official queen bee

(07:49):
breeder, so you supply queen beesfor other hives for folks that need a
new queen bee. So let's takea quick break and I want to come
back and you kind of walk throughthe process of what it takes to create
these queens and how do people windup getting them. Talking with Nina Bagley
again her website queen Ohio queenbee dotcom. Here in the Garden with Ron

(08:11):
Wilson, Landscaping lad Easier with yourpersonal yard boy. He's in the garden
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(09:01):
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Get Sean Hennity weekdays at three onfifty five KRC and online at fifty
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(09:46):
Here's our lineup nine o'clock Gary Sullivanfor the best in home repair,
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Then we've got weekend Dive, VictorGray, Sean Hannity. It all happens
right here on fifty five KRC BTalk station. Welcome back. You're in
the garden with Ron Wilson. We'retalking about queen bees, how they develop

(10:07):
queen bees. It's crazy, it'svery mind boggling. But our expert is
with us this morning, Nina Bagley, and of course her website is Ohio
queenbee dot com. She is athird of the three Stingers. Teresa Parker,
Yeah, Teresa Parker and of courseBarbie Butcher and Nina Bagley. They
get thrown out of a lot ofdifferent places and it's fun and they have

(10:31):
a lot of fun. You threetogether, I tell you what you you
are too much, all right,so talk talk to me more about this.
So you are a queen bee breeder, so you supply folks with new
queen bees. I mean, thewhole process of that just is mind boggling
to me. So you go inyour hives where you have your selected drones

(10:52):
that you know are great readers andall of that, and then you do
you select out the larvae that youwant to keep. Yeah, yeah,
the process. The process. I'vebeen teaching a lot of classes in the
spring, so that's what I donow, teach other people how to be
sustainable and raise backyard queens. It'sa it's a lot of work. You're

(11:16):
on a calendar, so you haveto it's all timing. So the best
time to raise queens is in thespringtime when the bees are getting ready to
swarm because they want to make queencells anyway, so that that's your best
time. When it gets later inthe summer, it gets hotter and it's
harder for them to uh to drawthe queen cells out. So what what

(11:37):
the process is is to find adonor colony, you're high. Like if
I've got a great queen that's twoyears old and I really love her,
and she's great and she's done great, and all the good quality is bringing
in honey. She's friendly, shebrings in pollen, and she's got a
great brew pattern. I would takeher as my donor to start raft and

(12:00):
queen off of her and you graft. So what you need to do is
get a box together with no queenin it, and it's I teach everybody
how to do a five frame nukeboxwith two full frames of brood. You
need lots and lots of nurse bees. That's the key. Lots of nurse

(12:20):
bees and the frame of pollen anda frame of honey. So you've got
four frames packed in this nuke fullof bees. And then you're going to
go take your grafting bar and gofind your material that you want to graft
off of the hive that you chose, and take a frame from her with
eggs on it. But you wantto graft an eighteen hour egg or even

(12:45):
a day. Anything above that istoo too old, okay, And so
turn into a worker and a queen. And you don't want that. You
want a good queen that's going tostart off early and get all the nutrition
and everything she eat with the royaljelly and the juvenile hormones and all of
that good stuff. So you pickthat right sized larvae and you put it

(13:07):
in a cell cup on this bar, so you do maybe ten, and
then you put it in that littlenuke you made up with lots of bees
in it, and you slide itdown in there. And you should come
back the next day and make sureyou have all these queen cells drawn out
for you, okay, And oncethey're all drawn out, once they're capped

(13:30):
over, you go move them intoa mating nuke, which is a box
a nukebox with three or four framesof bees in it with pollen and honey
and brood, and they'll finish thatcell off. You'll put that cell in
there and they'll take care of it, and on the sixteenth day that queen
will come out and then she'll hangout for about five days. Then she'll

(13:54):
go get mated in the congregation areaand she'll come back and out for about
another week, and then you shouldstart seeing let eggs after that, and
then you've got a viable queen.That's laying and doing well, and you
just want to keep an eye onher, make sure she's not a dud.
And then once you see that herbrood is nice and her pattern is

(14:18):
nice, then you can sell heror you can keep her and use her
in your bee yard. So whenthat's basically process. Okay, so you're
doing this every spring, and you'reknown as being a queen bee breeder,
so you're a source for queen bees. How many typically can you produce in
a spring season? That's the thing. It's getting harder for me because I'm

(14:43):
getting older and you need a lotof bees to do this. So in
a spring I can do about twohundred if I apply myself. It's a
lot of work. You need alot of bees because if you make two
hundred queen cells, that means youhave to pull sources from your hives to
make up two hundred nukeboxes. Followme, So you've got to have a
lot of equipment and you have tohave a lot of bees. So what

(15:07):
I've switched gears on. I dida bunch of queens this spring. I
just work with a couple people.Now they buy bulk from me, and
then I teach people I'm finding thatthere's a need for the new beekeepers now
to learn how to be sustainable tokeep our Ohio stock. So I'm teaching

(15:28):
them how to evaluate their hives,find good stock, and raise their own
queens so they don't have to buyqueens from Georgia or other places. Because
once you get a queen from somewhereelse, you really don't know who she's
bred with or what her pattern isor what she is. Sometimes she could
be great and sometimes she could notbe. So I just want to teach

(15:50):
everybody how to how we can bemore sustainable in Ohio. And you want
and so you want to keep thosequeens in the state of Ohio, I
mean, or local, rather thancoming from across the country. Right,
right, it's better if we haveour local Ohio queens. You'd get a
California queen, you get a Georgiaqueen, but we really don't know what

(16:11):
where they've come from or if they'vebeen made it, you know, and
sometimes you'll get it in a package. The new beekeepers by a package for
the queen in it, and theydon't know and the queen isn't doing anything,
and it's because she hasn't made itproperly, she'll start laying drones,
okay, and you don't want that. Once you got a hive that's a
drone layer, it's no use toanybody. So you want to keep the

(16:34):
high balance with drones, workers andthe queen doing everything they're supposed to do.
Wow, sounds like I mean,I just as I'm saying art.
It's an art and it's a skill. But once people figure it out,
it's fun. You have to havegood eye sight to go in there and
pull that little larvae out. It'stiny, I mean, it's very tiny,

(16:59):
so you have to have really goodeyesight. And a lot of times
people will pull a bigger one outand that's okay. They're new bee keepers.
They might pull one out that's twoor three days old and they'll get
a queen. But she doesn't haveshe's entercast, so she has worker traits
in her. So she's not realgood, so you know you would want

(17:23):
to replace her. Wow. Talkingwith Nina Bagley, she is an the
Ohio queen Bee. She's a queenbee breeder now teaching folks how to do
your own so and it makes alot of sense, it really does.
So she can be Yeah, itdoes. It does, yeah, And
of course if you want to learnmore about it, go to her website's
Ohio queenbee dot com. That's Ohioqueenbee dot com. I mean, the

(17:45):
process just mind boggle boggling. AndI know when you were doing this on
a regular basis and actually supplying andselling the queens the whole process where you
put them in the little cage andthen you put up some bees with them
and then ship them out from thatfive attendants. And that's another that's another
thing I'm finding too. I usedto ship a lot, but with this

(18:08):
heat, it's really not good toship a queen in this heat. There
there are spermatica shuts down, youknow, for a couple of days until
they can get you know, stimulatedagain. So it's better to just to
pick up the queen or have hershipped overnight. But the heat is really
hard on them. You can shipit, and some people don't get home

(18:32):
and get in their mailbox and thequeen is dead because it's set in the
heat all day. Right, youknow, Now once they get once they
made that you were talking about thismating flight, not once they made is
that forever? Is that a onetime deal. Yeah, okay, yeah,
that's the one time deal. They'llgo out a couple of times.
Yeah, she'll have enough and inher spermatica and laying people going until she

(18:53):
her pheromone drops out and layings aday. Yeah. Yeah, And the
and the beads are smart. Whenshe starts to fail, they'll replace her.
They'll start raising an emergency queen celland that danel and then uh they'll
replace it with a queen cell,and then a new queen will come.

(19:18):
So these are pretty smart. HowI was going to say, how they
figured that stuff out? I haven't. I just that just mind boggling.
I mean, you know, it'snot like they have you there teaching them
with a you know, an easelboard, saying here's what you do next.
Right. And I had one nightshe was beautiful and I couldn't find
her one day and I must havekilled her by accident. And I saw

(19:41):
her laying on the outside of thehive, and I thought I rolled her
by accident. But then when Iwent in, they had a bunch of
queen cells already going. So Ifigured let mother nature take its course and
let them just raise a new queen. And they did, and she's she's
she's a nice queen. Unbelievable,Nina beg. Now you know you you

(20:02):
got into this just because of theinterest of being a bee keeper, right
correct, Yes, just to keepbees in German village to pollinate. Nobody
had bees here twenty some years ago, and just to pollinate and keep the
bees going. And now you're seeingbees everywhere. And then I thought,
I met a gentleman and took hisclass for eight years and he mentored me

(20:26):
on how to raise queens. Hewas a master queen leader, right,
And you've taken it from there,and of course you came up with your
hive cover which is absolutely outstanding,all from your background, of course being
a professional seempsus. If you wantto learn more about this, go to
Nina's website. It's Ohio queenbee dotcom. That's Ohio queenbee dot com.

(20:47):
Nina Bagley, always a pleasure.Thank you so much for spending time with
us this morning. Oh well,thank you so much. And everybody go
out there and grab to make yourown queens and be sustainable. There you
go. Do you need any questions, help, just give me a call.
I'm glad to help She'll take careof you need to bagually, have
a great, great weekend. IQuick Break, we come back phone lines.

(21:07):
You're open for you at eight hundredeight two three eight two five five.
Here in the Garden with Ron Wilson. Rod gardening questions. Ron has
the answers and one eight hundred eightytwo three talk. You're in the garden
with Ron Wilson. This is fiftyfive karc at iHeartRadio station.