Funny thing about beekeeping, you meet a lot of people for such an isolated hobby. In our travels, we have met so many folks who love bees, love honey, or are just interested in the process of beekeeping.
As part of our social network, we met Arnold Knight pretty early in the going. It's always great to meet other local beekeepers and share tips and tricks with each other and one day we were able to go to Old Orchard Beach to meet up with Arny and talk to him about his beekeeping experience. Arny Knight (pictured left) is the owner of Uncle Arny’s Apiary. He lives on a plot of land that has lots of foraging for the bees as well as a pond for a water source. He calls it “utopia”.
“…one of the best things about failing is you can teach others about the failure.” ~ Arny Knight
Arny has been a beekeeper for about 4 or 5 years. We learned a lot from talking to him for this interview. He gave us a pretty unique tip to add rice to a sock, tie it off and put it in the feeder box during the winter. Arny can attest to the fact that it absorbs the condensation that forms in the hive (one of the things that has gotten some of our hives over the years). This will surely come in handy as we ready the hives for winter (really.. is it almost that time??). We also learned that tipping the hive as much as 1 inch during the winter can help to drain off excess condensation as well as not to bother with quilt boxes. Arny swears by tar paper, rice and tipping to keep his hives free of condensation.
Once we traded wintering secrets, the topic of the larger honey industry came up. We know that not all honey is created equal. We’ve see Netflix docuseries explaining as much (Rotten: S1, E01 - Lawyers, Guns & Honey). Some honey may be cut with as much as 1/2 corn syrup. This is not only not good for you to eat, its also just as expensive as locally produced honeys in many cases. Additionally, corn syrup isn’t good for the honeybees so it’s just bad all around.
We want to thank Arny so much for all his time! Please take a minute to check out his page and give it a thumbs up!
~Chris, the boxing beekeeper
YOU CAN FIND THE FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW BELOW.
Full Transcript:
Chris: Hey everybody, thanks for joining us for “He Talks Hard”. Boxing Beekeeper here, and I’m here with Arnold Knight who runs the Uncle Arny’s Apiary page on facebook, so go check that out and like it. Hi! Arnold, how long have you been keeping bees?
Arnold: Um, probably about 4 or 5 years.
Chris: Ok
Arnold: It’s always been a thought. Probably a whole year on learning how to do it before I actually did it. That’s the important clue. You just don’t want to get a hive and not know what you’re doing because it’s a lot of money involved in this.
Chris: It’s, it’s a dirty and expensive habit. Yea, the beginner’s classes are so important. What made you choose bees?
Arnold: You know I don’t have an answer for that. I really don’t. Maybe it’s a secluded hobby. I don’t know. I do, I’m just like an oddball really, because, not only do I do bees, I also gold prospect, you know, and that’s not a common thing either. You know so, it was just something I just happened to, maybe an internet crawler, you know them random pages you get on on facebook or something like that, it was maybe something like that and I was just like, well, maybe, let me look into that a little more. And I got more and more interested and next thing I know is I’m buying books and I’m really excited on reading these books and I’m like “I want to do this!” So, you know, after I started buying the simple stuff and I had a lot of failures, A LOT of failures.
Chris: Here, here
Arnold: And at every failure, you learn. And you get better and better and you know, one of the best things about failing is you can teach others about the failure. And it’s all about the bees. You know, so now I’m a huge advocate of bees. You know, if we don’t have bees, then you don’t have a grocery store, you know, your store is empty.
Chris: Yea. So, we’re down in Old Orchard and I’m noticing, and after this, I’m gonna pan out into the field that we’re in, that there’s just tons of forage um, you don’t have to get very far out of the city center, um, before you start seeing native plants, fields, um wooded areas. Ah
Arnold: Everybody has a garden. My wife actually buys wildflower seeds and off season she’ll be walking the dogs through the fields spreading the seeds. You know this is, this place right here is utopia. It has everything. It has a little pond down on the far end of the field. It has all kinds of wildflower. You know, it creates my honey to be red at the end of the year, and that’s really really good honey. It almost has like a tangy pepper taste to it too.
Chris: Hmm
Arnold: Oh it’s beautiful honey, I love it. So.
Chris: We’re going to have to figure out what’s growing here that, that makes the honey red. So, I’m a open to any advice, for sort of, the problem I’ve been having is getting my bees through the winter. That’s sorta my focus this year, is um how I’m gonna prep them and get them ready for the winter.
Arnold: Ok. I failed. I’ve done quilt boxes, and I have done many different varieties. The thing that works for me, where all my hives survived, was to minimize their space. Give ‘em the room, you know, you don’t want ‘em to swarm or anything but you know, you want to do this in maybe October. If you have a deep on the bottom for the brood, which is probably by October, going to be empty because she’s not laying anymore and then you have a deep on top that has full of honey. That right there alone, should be fine for them in the winter, but they’re still gonna work on the good days in October and November. So they can always fill up the brood area. Um, then you just wrap it in tar paper and, that’s all you need, you know. Don’t do the quilts or anything. And on the top feeders, I’ve discovered, I kinda, I don’t know if other people do this, but I didn’t learn this from anybody, I kinda made it up and it works great, that a knee high (sock), fill it up with rice, tie it off and just throw it on the top of your feeder and that will, the rice will absorb any condensation it comes in contact with. Because condensation will kill your bees during the wintertime. Because it will collect and drip down in you hive. And then of course, tilt your hive to keep the condensation that does arrive away from your bees, the cluster.. other than that…
Chris: That’s the first time I’ve hear that trick about sort of leaning it forward so I’m excited.
Arnold: Oh yea, I lean it as much as I can without it actually tipping over. You know, the back, I, I like to lean it towards the front entrance, um, I guess it really doesn’t matter. But the front entrance would be the better for it to drain away. Um, probably a good inch, at least. And an inch is quite significant when you’re looking at the tilt. So, yea, and that’s worked for me. You know, just the simple tar paper because the sun will hit the tar paper and that will give you any of the heat. Because cold will not kill the bees, the condensation will and hunger, and of course your mites. So, get rid of all them um, treat them in October. Once your honey, once the human honey is off your hive and that’s home and in a bottle or whatever, then you can come back and treat, treat your hives with you know, acid, oxy, is it oxysetaline, no whatever that acid is
Chris: oxalic acid
Arnold: oxalic acid yes, Treat it with oxalic acid and just, you know, winter clean up. That works best for me. And the beauty about it is, all this is all natural. You know, it’s not that stuff, the honey that we get, you and I as beekeepers, you know, I never realized this before, but if you go to Shop n Save or any supermarket and look at this honey that is bottled in New York but it was harvested in Indonesia. And you can do some internet searches on that and its crazy what you learn and you’ll never touch it again. It goes into a red bottle from Indonesia. Goes to Kuwait, goes into a blue bottle and just to get rid of the tariffs, you know, and the taxes, it’s like, and it’s not even really honey.
Chris: There’s an episode on Netflix of a series called Rotten and the first episode is on um the honey industry and how you know, a great deal of the honey is cut with, um, corn syrup.
Arnold: Oh yea, and corn syrup kills your honeybees so, stay away from your starch. And not to mention, did you know that if you take real honey and you drop it on a plate and you know how people gold pan with the water that swirls around? A drop of honey and you swirl it around with a little water, you’ll see a honeycomb because honey actually has the genetic memory of it’s comb. That’s a great trick! Try it out sometime.
Chris: I’ll do that when I get home.
Arnold: But if it’s real honey, you’ll see a honeycomb appear in that drop of honey that you put down there.
Chris: That’s amazing.
Arnold: It’s all on my site, you know I put all that interesting crap on there, so yea.
Chris: Thanks for having us down, and again everybody, if you could go over to Uncle Arny’s Apiary, check it out and hit that like button!
Arnold: Nice to meet you all!
*Note the views expressed in this interview are solely that of the interviewee and not He Works Hard for the Honey.