Gather Ye Honey – Brett Tempest

0:00:03	Beginning
0:00:30	Why did he become a beekeeper?
0:03:40	The 2011 Mecklenburg Beekeeper Association experience
0:03:55	Downtime during the pandemic
0:06:00	Between 2011 and the pandemic
0:10:49	The size of his apiary
0:12:55	How big is the operation and the apiary?
0:14:20	Other places of his hives
0:16:10	Tina’s work in the apiary
0:16:32	His typical day as a beekeeper
0:23:20	How does he extract honey in detail?
0:25:50	The reuse of honeycomb
0:27:10	Other uses of honey
0:31:20	Cosmetics process
0:32:10	The social structure within the hive
0:36:30	How does he produce queens?
0:41:40	The pricing of the Queen and the market in Charlotte
0:43:20	The honey market in Charlotte and prices of honey
0:49:25	Challenges and strengths of beekeeping in Charlotte
0:51:25	The land use development in Charlotte
0:54:10	His stance on the issue of the extension of bees
0:57:55	His vision of the future of the pollinators and the impact of the election on this issue
1:00:50	Is winter challenging as a beekeeper?
1:02:35	Individuals and organizations in Charlotte
1:05:05	Collaborating with other farms
1:06:40	Helping with catching a swarm
1:07:10	Vets in Charlotte
1:08:20	Tina’s work on social media
1:09:10	Giving his past self a piece of advice about beekeeping
1:11:22	Giving his past self a warning about beekeeping
1:12:30	His hopes for his work in the future and retire as a beekeeper
1:13:50	Misconceptions about beekeeping
1:15:05	His hopes for beekeeping in Charlotte
1:16:58	Is there any other question I should have asked
1:17:24	Ending

Hossam Yasser 00:00-00:07
This is Hossam Elganainy interviewing Brett Tempest on the 5th of November in 2024 at Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Today we’ll explore Brett’s experience as a beekeeper in Charlotte.Hi.

Brett Tempest
Hello.

Hossam Yasser
How you doing.

Brett Tempest
I’m doing pretty well. Thanks

Hossam Yasser 00:17
So a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UNCC and a beekeeper. How did this happen?

Hossam Yasser 00:24
What initially got you interested in beekeeping?

Brett Tempest 00:34
I used to frequently take a class in the evening. You know, I my wife and I don’t have any children. I, you know, would leave work and didn’t have a lot of obligations in the evening. And so I would enjoy taking classes at say CPCC or something. I took classes and everything from, you know, carpentry to refrigeration. Just something new, welding, you know, learn a skill. And one year I saw that the Mecklenburg County Beekeeper Association was offering a beekeeping class. And so I signed up for it, again, just as kind of something to do, you know, I didn’t plan on getting any bees. And then the classes, it’s something that’s still offered. It’s offered annually. It starts in maybe late January, early February, camera where exactly the start date is. And then by the end of March, you’ve had enough training to not be dangerous, you know, taking care of bees. And soI thought, all right, well, I took the class. I’ve got space, you know, I’ll get some bees. And so I ordered two hives of bees at the end of the class. And we’ve just kind of grown from there. So at first it was, at first it was a hobby, you know, we had two hives for a number of years. And then the bees make, you know, if you’re doing it right, bees make a decent amount of honey. So, you know, a lot of folks don’t, you know, unless they have some experience with bees. In our area, you know, an average hive might make 40 pounds of honey per year. And that’s without, you know, a whole lot of special beekeeping or treatment or that kind of thing. Treatment being, you know, moving them to a crop or that kind of thing. So, 40 pounds of honey is a decent amount, you know. And so my wife started selling it at the farmers market at York Mott, you know, which is the main state farmers market in this area. And we just sell it until we ran out. And then, you know, that making a little money off of it encourages you to grow a little more. So we bought, you know, more hives or expanded, bought more equipment, and then it just kind of self fulfilling, you know, you get a little more, you grow a little more, then you need a little more. So you get a little more, and grow a little more. And then I would say it was, you know, especially during the pandemic, you know, where I did have a lot of downtime, you know, and so I think it was during that time that we probably got to our current curation of our business. We added more products during that time and got a little bigger during that time,and we basically sustained that since.

Hossam Yasser 03:33
So when did you take those classes, like in the Mecklenburg and before?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, that was 20, probably 2011 or 2012 or so.

Hossam Yasser
2011 at the Mecklenburg.

Brett Tempest
Yeah,I was at Mecklenburg County Beekeeper Association.

Hossam Yasser
You mentioned also like a downtime during the pandemic. How could you like elaborate on this downtime? How was it like?

Brett Tempest
Well, you know, as I mentioned, it was for not having kids, you know, for people that I think had very frontline jobs, you know, they certainly had, you know, were very, very busy people that had kids that were trying to keep up with remote classes with the kids. And, you know, for me, I didn’t have that kind of thing. And so, you know, there were a lot of other things that I couldn’t do, but beekeeping was nice because it’s outdoors, you know, so you even in terms of doing it with other people, you felt safer doing that type of activity over something else, you know. And so even during that time I had, since I’ve taken the class, I continue to volunteer with the Beekeeper Association and I mentor new beekeepers every year. So part of the class is that you, you during the class, you’re assigned a mentor. And then you work with the mentor during that, you know, your first season or two. And so as I, you know, I was doing that during the pandemic, which normally if you had activities like that, it would have become very difficult to do. I mean, beekeeping is not a zoom, you know, activity. It’s a, it’s a hands-on kind of thing. But because it’s also an outdoor thing, it was able for me, I was able to kind of keep going with that. And also just even having the additional, you know, flexibility of so many things were canceled, you know, so you didn’t, things that you might have done that took up a lot of weekend time or something during normal times, you know, with that stuff being gone or travel being canceled, you know, the first part of the pandemic or as before the vaccines or anything. And you weren’t going to Thanksgiving dinner, you know, it was too dangerous. So, so just having that additional time in the schedule, I think is what enabled me to kind of, you know, you’re going to fill it with something. And for me, I filled it with beekeeping.

Hossam Yasser 06:04
So between 2011 and the in between time, how could you like tell us about this time, time in between the 2011 classes in Mecklenburg?

Brett Tempest 06:19
Sure. You know, I mean, you grow beekeeping is like any other agricultural activity in that, you know, dealing with living things, living things want to grow and expand, you know, so if you’re, if you’re keeping your bees healthy, you actually, you always have surplus. So there’s surplus bees, you know, because bees are reproducing themselves, you know, the hives are reproducing, their natural tendency is to want to reproduce and make more bees. So, so growing as a beekeeper, it’s actually very difficult to not grow as a beekeeper in the same way that if you had, you know, a herd of sheep, and you didn’t, you know, they were decently healthy, come back the next year and there’d be twice as many sheep. So, so, so beekeeping is kind of the same thing. I mean, your, your, your task as a, as a beekeeper is to, you’ve got to keep up with the additional equipment every time you grow, you have to have more hives and then more places to keep them. And so, our growth, although it was happening organically, we’ve only ever bought three hives of bees and in our entire operation, we purchased three hives of bees. And at our largest, we probably have had a hundred hives, you know, and that fluctuates every year, but you can, you can see the, you know, if you’re, if you’re doing it properly, the ease that you might grow is, is, is, you know, is impressive. So, so at any rate, that was what we were doing in that time. So, we went from two initial hives and then we probably had five or six and then we probably had 10 or, I remember at one point saying, if we ever have 25 hives, that’s going to, you know, that’s all we’re ever going to want, you know, and that’s, we grow to 25 hives and then you think, well, you know, probably, boy, at this pace, the next year, I’ll have 50, you know, and that’s kind of how you, how you go. So, so I think that’s what we were doing during that time. We’re, we’re figuring out how to do it at larger scales. So, you know, if you, when we had two hives, harvesting honey is something you do on your kitchen counter, you know, it’s not a, and then when you have 25 hives and you’ve, you know, you’ve got extractors and then when you have 100 hives, you need a bigger honey extractor and so that, you know, there’s a lot of growth of just even equipment or the spaces that you do things in. You’ve got to up fit a space to, you know, be able to, you know, sanitary, you know, health department compliant way process, you know, that amount of honey, building a customer base, we have a, we have a really loyal customer base and, you know, that, that didn’t come overnight. I mean, that came after season after season of, you know, meeting people at markets and kind of growing that. So, that’s, that’s what we were doing. And then, and I think the other part is, you know skill improvement, you know, it’s not a lot of beekeeping is all, you know, also like any number of other things that it’s, it’s, it’s easy to make a spreadsheet that says, you know, I had, I had one hive and I sold the honey for $500. So that means if I had 100 hives, that I could make $50,000 a year off this, which is just not, you know, it doesn’t scale in that, in that same kind of way. So I think a lot of folks with initial success in it can grow, grow faster in terms of the size of their apiary than they grow in their skill development. And, and beekeeping does require a lot of skill is the handling, handling the bees is part of the skill because you’re handling a venomous, you know, insect that, you know, at best could hurt you pretty bad. At worst, they hurt you and everybody else around you, you know, if you make errors. And then, you know, just tending to the health of the bees is something that, you know, folks can, if they grow too fast, they may realize that they just actually don’t have the knowledge to take care of that many living creatures, you know, that their skill and recognizing, you know, health problems with the hive may not, may not be there yet. So it takes, it takes a while to scale that part up.

Hossam Yasser 10:43
So right now you have 100 hives?

Brett Tempest
No, we’ve, we’ve had to just, you know, the, the size of our apiary is also scaled to different, you know, things, other things that go on in my wife, Tina, my life, the, you know, my job changed, I took on a more administrative role. And so, you know, that, that caused me to have less time to put towards the, you know, the bees, the, the markets for honey change, you know, you have, you know, people want, people want fresh honey, you know, it’s so, even though honey is not perishable in the same way that, say, you know, if I grew a whole bunch of lettuce, I’d have to sell it that week, you know, or, you know, not a vegetable farm or whatever the time frame is, but it’s certainly not going to last forever. You know, honey is less perishable,and that if I don’t sell it this week, I could sell it next week or next month, you know, but, but people don’t want to buy honey that’s two years old, you know, so you, you know, folks usually want it seasonally and they want it from that season. And so, so selling it, if you don’t, if you, if you have 100 hives and you made a couple of tons of honey, that you’ve got to actually be able to sell a couple of tons of honey.

Hossam Yasser 12:04
How many hives do we have, like,

Brett Tempest
right now? Oh, I’d probably say 60 to 70 or so. 67.

Hossam Yasser
And how many bees on those like 60 to 70 hives?

Brett Tempest
It depends on the time of the year. I mean, in the, when, when the hives are, you know, as big as they are during the year, there may be, you know, 75,000 bees in there, you know, and then right now, there’s their scale down for the winter, you know, it’s November. So now the size of the cluster in the hive would be more like the size of a volleyball or something, 20,000 bees or something.

Hossam Yasser 12:52
Okay. So I know that you and the wife Tina work in this apiary, but how many people does other people work also?

Brett Tempest
No, just the two of us.

Hossam Yasser 13:10
Okay. So how big is the operation? Like, does it only like, you have a place only for the honey and hives, or do you have like many other places to save other equipment or how big is the operation?

Brett Tempest
Well, we have, yeah, so we, those hives are spread across five different apiaries. So the apiary is like an individual bee yard. And so we have two in Concord, one in Mint Hill, one in central Charlotte, and then one up in the mountains in southwest Virginia. And so they’re spread and then the, you know, equipment is kind of staged in the place that we need it. So most of our bee, like hive equipment tends to be here in Charlotte, and we have a little storage area here for it. And then our processing we do up in Virginia, because we have it, that’s where we were able to build, you know, what they call a honey house and has all the equipment for extracting the honey and bottling it and that kind of thing.

Hossam Yasser 14:17
So that’s why you choose Virginia?

Brett Tempest
Well, no, we had space up there. The other one of one of the businesses that my wife runs is Appalachian Trail Hiker Hostel. And so at that, it, you know, in that location, there’s some land, which meant that we were able to move some hives of bees. There’s probably 20 hives of bees that we keep there. And then, and then there was an outbuilding that was gave us a good space to build the honey processing facility in that. So it was more a matter of where the space is. I would love to have that in Charlotte, for a lot of reasons, because I mostly spend my time in Charlotte. So it’d be nice if it was a little more convenient. But on the other hand, it’s, you know, it’s just where we had the room to do it.

Hossam Yasser 15:05
So could you tell me also, like, what is the differences between like, what you do and what Tina’s doing?

Brett Tempest
I do most of the beekeeping. So Tina, Tina has learned how to do all that stuff. And she she certainly does participate in it. I would say that 90% of the interacting with the bees, I do. And then I do most of the markets during the year. So we do, you know, we regularly sell at the Uptown Farmers Market. And before that, we sold at the U-City Farmers Market, you know. But I do most, I do those. And then she does most of the holiday markets. And she produces, she’s developed all of our products. So the, you know, the way that we package the honey, the gift sets, we sell a lot of gift sets. She’s gotten into candle making and does 100% of that beeswax candles. And then cosmetics, she’s developed all the cosmetics and produces all those. So she does the packaging, the product development. She handles the business side of it. So she does all of our, you know, bookkeeping and those kind of things.

Hossam Yasser 16:36
So can you tell me how like your day as a beekeeper goes?

Brett Tempest
Well, yeah, so it’s again, because I, you know, I have a full time job. So I typically, a day is either right after work, you know, during the spring, there’s a lot of inputs to beekeeping at that time of year. And so that might be the kind of thing where, you know, get off work at five, five 30 or something and go straight to one of the bee yards and do a task, you know, and work until it starts getting dark and then, and then go home. Or it’s a weekend thing. So it’s, you know, up early on a Saturday and trying to devote, I can get around to, if I do a long day on say a Saturday, I can visit all of our Charlotte area bee yards in the same day. You know, it’s a lot of driving, but I can do it. So it really depends on the season. In the spring, you’re kind of tending to their growth, you know, you want to create a big population of bees so that they can bring in plenty of honey. Other tasks are in that we have a queen rearing operation. So we produce queens. We’ve never really gotten that much into selling. I might sell 10 a year or something, but mostly they go back into our own operation. So that’s a task that, you know, I might be doing on a particular day is tending to producing queen bees. And then, and then during when you get more into kind of the summer, you know, the honey is typically ready from the spring. It might be ready around the end of June or early July is when the bees have properly cured that you could have sometimes people want really early honey. And so we might harvest a little bit early to kind of meet that demand. But but most of that we would process in July. So that day would look more like going and kind of reconfiguring the hive to remove the honey and then transport that honey to where we process it up in Virginia. And then processing is a different type of day, you know, that’s slicing the caps off and putting them in a centrifuge to get the honey out of the combs and then kind of straining it and getting it ready. Bottling is a big process. That’s another type of day. So one thing I really like about it is the variety, you know, it’s a different task at different times of year.

Hossam Yasser 19:17
Okay, so how often do you get stung?

Brett Tempest
You know, again, that even depends on the time of year and the spring. Everybody’s happy, you know. You can, I don’t even, I don’t wear a bee suit or veil a lot of the time in the spring because their bees are in a good mood. Everything’s looking up, you know, but then when it’s, when resources are tight, you know, late in the summer and they can be really crabby. I mean, it’s done 20 times at once, you know, if you don’t do it carefully. So I do get stung a lot. I, you know, I think bee keepers over time get to be a little less sensitive to it. So it’s not as big of a deal as, you know, like if maybe if you got stung right now, you might be pretty upset about it. Whereas if I got stung right now, I’m just gonna shrug it off. So this bee’s mood, is it like, you mentioned it’s connected to the weather and also with the resources.

Hossam Yasser 20:13
So what kind of resources does a bee need?

Brett Tempest
I mean, nectar and pollen are the two things that they go for. You know, in addition to just other typical, you know, necessities, water, you know, bees have a special forging force that is in charge of water. And in the summer, they move a huge amount of water around to keep the hive cool and meet their own, you know, need for water, just, you know, because they’re living creatures. But mostly what I’m talking about, you know, the is nectar and pollen. So when, when nectar is in short supply, pollen is pretty available for almost the whole year. But nectar is mostly available in the spring. And then there’s some, there’s a few summer sources around here, but it can get kind of dry during that time. And then there’s some fall nectar sources in our area. But yeah, so their, their, their mood is very strongly tied to, you know, the availability of those things. And if they don’t have them, then they, you know, those, they, if you have a lot of hives in the same area, they may start trying to steal them from other hives. So that, that causes the big, you know, obviously pretty cranny about that.

Hossam Yasser 21:35
But for those who are unfamiliar with beekeeping, what is exactly like nectar and what is pollinated?

Brett Tempest
Nectar is the sugar that’s available from flowers. So the, you know, the flower produces nectar as a way to attract pollinators. So bees are you know, honey bees are actually not native to North America, but the, there’s any number of native bees or other, you know, flying creatures, wasps, you know, some mobs, even some birds or pollinators. So, so the nectar is kind of the prize to visit the flower and move the pollen around between plants so that the plants become pollinated or fertilized to make seeds. And so the pollination is necessary for the plants’ life cycle, but then that the nectar that it’s providing is the kind of reward for the pollinator becomes their food source. And so the, the bees move the nectar back to the hive and they cure it by mixing it with enzymes and they fan it to dry it out, dehydrate it a little bit, and then when it’s cured it is preserved well enough that it becomes their food for the winter. And you know, if you’re a beekeeper then what you’ve tried to do is to make sure that they have, they made more than they need from the winter and then that’s what we take to harvest.

Hossam Yasser 23:17
I guess you mentioned a little bit like slicing the, the hives and slicing the honeycomb. So, I mean in details how do you extract honey? How does the process go?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, so in the, if you open a hive what you would find is a number of panels or what we call frames of beeswax that’s inside of some sort of a structure. So, you know, inside of the frame itself would just be like a picture frame. It’s a four-sided wooden panel and then they’ve constructed wax inside of the, that frame and then they, and as, as you know, the wax is, you know, in a honeycomb kind of a structure and then that’s what they fill. They fill those honeycombs with the nectar and they cure it until it becomes honey. So, you know, if you, if you were to go in right after they get it, the nectar is like water, you know, you could shake it out on the ground. It would be, you know, like maple sap before you’ve reduced it. It would just taste like water, there’s a little bit of sugar in it, you know, but it’s not yet honey and it’s through the curing process it becomes honey and then when they sense that it’s sufficiently dehydrated then they come back and they cap it with wax. So, they put more wax over the top of the honey to, again, it’s part of their preservation of it. They want, they’re, they’re, they’re doing all this to eat it during the winter so they need to preserve for the winter. So, when we go to take it,we take those frames which is the big innovation of beekeeping is to make movable comb because it’s recyclable. So, we can, we can remove the comb from the, from the box and then with a sharp blade or a hot blade or some, some sort of mechanism for that or even a scraper, take those cappings off the top of the cell, the honeycomb cell and then we put it in a, in a centrifuge. It looks like a giant washing machine and when, when it spins the honey comes out by centrifugal force and then, and then usually the beekeeper will do something to strain it because they’re, you know, there’s little bits of wax in it or, or that debris or that kind of thing and so strain it and then that’s, that’s what goes into the jar. There’s not a whole lot more processing than that.

Hossam Yasser 25:45
So, after doing all of this kind of process to the honeycomb, do you reuse it again?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so there’s still, you know, I mean, honey’s, you know, a sticky mess. So, even after you’ve done that, there’s still a little film of honey all over the comb and on the, on the wooden frame. So, normally what we do is we would give that back to the bees. The bees will come, if we put those outside, the bees come and clean all that up and they’ll be totally dry in two days. The, you know, completely cleaned up. They’re very meticulous about it. Bees are meticulous insects. It’s interesting how they work, but, and then we’ll store store those until the next year and we don’t do that indefinitely. Eventually the, you know, comb has to kind of be replenished and so, you know, but the most beekeepers, their biggest investment is in their comb. The comb is a real valuable.

Hossam Yasser 26:45
Is it easy not to break it? Or?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, it’s actually reinforced. So, it’s got a wire that runs through it that reinforces it so you don’t, otherwise in this centrifuge it might break. Okay.

Hossam Yasser 27:04
So, in apiary, you mentioned that you make like some kind of candles and you make other stuff. So, what are the uses of honey do you make beside like honey as a honey?What are other uses of honey?

Brett Tempest
So, we, you know, the regular liquid honey in jars, so that’s, that’s our, that’s the biggest thing that we sell, you know, the largest quantity that we sell. Then we also sell honey as comb. So, rather than using the centrifuge to extract the honey, we would just cut the comb out and then that, that’s kind of a gourmet item. So, people, people really enjoy, you may have seen it on a tricoterie board or something like that. You eat it on a cracker with some cheese or that kind of thing. So, we sell that and then at the end of the process you end up with a lot of extra wax because you’ve cut all those wax cappings off and you probably have, you know, culled some of the combs that are either getting old or sometimes they do break and so you have, you’ve got that material. So, that we melt down and it becomes cosmetic. So, we make by we, I mean Tina, I don’t have much to do with this part of the operation but lip balm and lotion bars are part of the two big ones there. We don’t make it, but we supply material to other people that make soap and then we sell it, we buy it back for, or buy it back from them. So, we sell them the material and then they sell back to us the soap. So, we also sell a soap that’s got our honey in it.

Hossam Yasser 28:30
But it makes the lotion both, right?

Brett Tempest
We do make the lotion bars and the lip balms ourselves, you know, in all the, and then the kind of slightly, you know, if you have wax it’s a little bit darker. We make all those cosmetics out of this very light capping wax but we also make a lot of candles and so the candles are another product of the hive that enables us to use the wax. It’s, you know, less than pristine, I guess you call it, you know.

Hossam Yasser 29:30
So, this process of making candles and the cosmetics, did it start lately or when did it start making them?

Brett Tempest
Not super lately. I mean, we’ve done, we’ve operated at the scale that we’re at now for probably five or six years and we’ve, you know, and part of getting to that scale was introducing those products, you know. Again, you, every time, you know, every time the operation grows you just, you have more of these outputs that you have to, if you want to sell more honey you also end up with more wax, you know, that everything kind of goes together. You know, if you, and then if you have more hives you’ve got more bees that you’ve got to figure out what to do with. So, selling bees, we don’t, we’ve never made that a big part of our operation but, you know, and especially in certain years, you know, we’ll get the permits to sell bees too so we do that also, you know, from time to time. So, that’s another product of the hive that we sell. There’s other things that are out there that we’ve never gotten into selling but other beekeepers might, you know, there’s other things in the hive. Propolis is one of them. Propolis is a product that they make by harvesting tree sap and they kind of, it turns into kind of a gum that they use for gluing things together in the hive but people think it has health properties and so some people like to sell that. We’ve never gotten into it. No, there’s other things. Royal Jelly is a, you know, secretion that they make that people buy for health properties and we’ve never gotten into selling that but there are other things that you’ll see beekeepers, you know, selling.

Hossam Yasser 31:26
So, how did you learn about you and, you know, making those kind of cosmetics? Was it easy process?

Brett Tempest
You know, actually, she, she learned, she had a cousin that got into cosmetics for a while and had a company and I think she just, I think she went to the cousin and said, “Hey, can you show me how to do this?” and the cousin actually helped by making the formulations, you know, because again, we didn’t know how to do it and so the cousin sort of showed her how to do it and helped her develop the recipes, you know, that she uses for it.

Hossam Yasser 31:58
Okay, so maybe the bees themselves, like, I have heard some expressions like drones. What’s the difference like between males, females and queens? Could you tell us more about forces who aren’t familiar with beekeeping life?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, so it’s, that’s probably one of the most interesting things about beekeeping is the social structure within the hive and so, you know, it’s something you can really geek out on but if you, they’re inside the hive, there’s one queen, usually one queen, there’s, there’s exceptions to every rule and so sometimes there might have a queen and her daughter who’s also a queen might be in the same hive but or, or sometimes you have two sister queens that are missing. Anyway, but they’re in, in a, in a, kind of typical hive, there’s a single queen and that queen is the only bee that can lay any eggs. She’s the only reproductive member of the hive and she’s all, she’s also the only one that has been fertilized and she’s fertilized by drones so drones are kind of the, the male type of a bee and they, and that’s, that’s kind of, it’s not their singular purpose in the hive, they do a few other things but, but they don’t forge for anything, they don’t go out and get nectar, they don’t go out and get pollen, they don’t bring water around, they play a role in keeping the hive at the right temperature and stuff like that but their main job is to fly around and find a queen and mate with a queen and they’re also only in the hive for a portion of the year so they’re in the hive from the spring through kind of the end of the summer and then you know after that they, they’re kicked out of the hive, they don’t winter with the other bees and then so, so that’s the two ends of the spectrum, the kind of the, the queen being the only reproductive female bee in the hive and then the drone, you know, being the, the male, the source of the sperm to, to fertilize the queen and then in the middle are all of the queen’s daughters so if you think of all those worker bees in the hive are the daughters of that single queen and because the queen mates typically with several drones when she goes out she usually mates with, you know, 10 to, 10 to 20 drones depending on the conditions they’re all either sisters or half sisters but there’s a number of different sort of families all with the same mother but different fathers that live in the hive and so that there’s a lot of evidence that those genetics result in specializations within the hive so you’ll have, it’s part of, you know, you would understand from biology that there’s the benefit to diversity is that you have lots of different strengths, you know, in, in the population so that’s exactly what is going on in the hive is that, you know, there’s a lot of genetic diversity from having several fathers of all these different sisters in the hive but, but that’s the, the, the one, one way that, you know, these within the hive the sexes of the bees are, you know, insects are very different from mammals and, you know, it’s, they’re more often called casts within the hive so the, you know, the queen is one cast, the worker is one cast and the drone is a different cast and they, it’s more related to the very specialized roles that they, they each provide.

Hossam Yasser 35:58
You mentioned like that you sometimes select 10 queens a year.

Brett Tempest
Yeah, you know, we’ll sell them here and there it’s just not something we, we, I think we have it on our website that, you know, we might have queens available and sometimes somebody will call and I’ll have some and I’ll sell them there. Sometimes I’ve used them all myself it’s, it’s not been a, it’s not been a huge focus to try to develop that part of the business and to, you know, into a main part it’s mostly we sell whatever we have produced that we don’t need ourselves.Yeah.

Hossam Yasser 36:43
So what is the process of raising a queen like how do you take a queen out of a hive? How do you, do you, do you, could you like have two queens at the same hive?

Brett Tempest
Well, so the way that I do it is by what’s called grafting so I, I, I select hives from my operation like I said I usually would have anywhere between 60 and 100 hives these days depending on the year and what else I have going on and everything. So, so I usually am monitoring, you know, hives that are very productive, that are, are friendly, you know, they’re not every time I get close to the hive coming out and, you know, stinging me or something so, so that, you know, more docile, less defensive bees, ones that haven’t had a lot of health problems, you know, so, so I’ll, I’ll mark those in some way, you know, use different methods over the year. Sometimes I give them stickers, you know, it’s kind of like getting a gold star if you did really good in school, you come up with this. So, so, so I would use different methods to identify those and then from that hive I’ll go in and I’ll, I’ll take larvae from, from those to be the, the future queens and so in bee biology, the way that a queen is made, any, any of the, any fertilized egg will, if you know, in normal conditions turn into a, a worker bee and the unfertilized eggs turn into a drone but you can differentiate the two in the hive because the cells that they’re laid in are different. So the drone cell is a larger cell, the worker cell is a smaller cell. So, but a newly hatched larva, so the egg hatches and a larva develops in the cell can turn into a queen if she’s fed, fed a special diet of royal jelly.

Hossam Yasser 38:50
Larva?

Brett Tempest
The larva, yeah, so the little baby bee which it still looks like a worm, it looks like a little grub or something like that. So if she’s fed a special diet by her sisters, then she, she’ll turn into a queen and the way that the sisters know to feed her the special diet is the orientation of the cell that she’s laid in and so a cell that’s facing out gets fed a worker diet and then a cell that’s facing down gets fed the queen diet. So what I do is I collect all those larvae and I put them into a special cell and turn it down and then the worker bees come along and say, oh, this one’s supposed to be a queen and they feed her the special diet and then she turns into a queen. Then it, towards the end of the process, so that takes, that, that takes about two weeks and then when the queen is ready to come out, you know, typically in a hive that needs a new queen, they would have made several of these cells and so her first job is typically to go kill the other queens. So I’ve got to get in there first and take that new queen and put her in her own hive that’s usually just like a little miniature version of a hive. So in a typical box, there’s 10 frames and what I do is I put her in a box that only has two frames, so it’s like a tiny little thing and we call that a queen castle. So she lives in the queen castle and they tend to her, she develops and goes out on her mating flights and then comes back and then after, after she’s been kind of successfully laying eggs for a couple weeks. So now, now we’re at the month mark, you know, she, it’s been a month since I first started, you know, creating that initial getting that larva and getting her kind of done up as a queen. Then I would, that would be the point that I would move her either to her own hive or you know, sell if I had extra ones, those are the ones that I would be selling. So that part, that part’s kind of, you know, I’m not the only beekeeper that would say this, I mean, that’s really the kind of more interesting side of beekeeping today, the truth. It’s always nice to make a big honey harvest, you know, if you have a good year and you think, oh man, I made three tons of honey. I mean, that’s exciting, you know, but the queen rearing and other kind of bee manipulation is the more exciting part to me, I think, of beekeeping.

Hossam Yasser 41:33
Okay, for the selling part, how much do you sell like the queen for?

Brett Tempest
Queens are usually, you know, $35 or so, you know, at certain times of the year, maybe a little more if there’s scarce. Yeah, I mean, it’s easy, it’s in the spring, it’s easy to find queens, you know, there’s a number of people around Charlotte that are doing queen rearing and so you can get one, you can order them through the mail, you know, it’s the, in fact, you know, there’s an outfit, there are a lot of outfits in Florida just because the weather, you know, it gets warmer earlier for their south, so they’ll start selling queens real early, like maybe in February, and ship them, ship them up or deliver them if you’re a real big customer, they might even bring them to you or you can go pick them up. So that time of the year is pretty easy to get queens, but then in the summer, it’s like too hot, you know, it’s difficult to get a rear, there’s a lot of other problems at that time of year, dragonflies are out, so dragonflies love to eat a queen bee out on our mating flight, so you know, you just get fewer of them back, it gets harder to do it, and so yeah, so at more difficult times of the year, you might find that people are charging a little more for them, if you buy a whole bunch of them, you might get a good deal, maybe they’re only $25 if you bought 50 of them or something like that.

Hossam Yasser 43:10
Okay, so what about like selling honey itself, like what are the prices and what are the markets you bought to be in here in Charlotte?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, we do, so primarily we do the uptown farmers market,it’s the things that we like about that one, we’ve been at that one for a good number of years now,and it’s a producer only market, so you have to have produced the product that you’re selling on your table, and so we like that, one we like being around the other farmers, you know, that whoever you’re seeing at the other booths, you know that they’re engaged in the production process of whatever they’re selling, rather than just reselling something else, so if you go to a bigger farmers market, you’ll find a lot of, there are a lot of producers that go to those, but you’ll also find a lot of folks are just, they wouldn’t bought something wholesale, and they’re just bringing it and selling it in that environment, you know, which people like, but not necessarily being producers themselves, so we like that, and I think that, you know, the customers that are attracted to it are, they’re able to find people like us to buy their honey from, that they know and trust produced it themselves, so you know, you might have heard that honey is one of the most adulterated products sold on the planet, you know, the people, you might buy honey from a, and get a really good price on it, so maybe you found some of the grocery store, and you, you know, jar of it costs three dollars, you have to, you’ve got to wonder how anybody was able to produce it that cheaply, you know, and most likely, based on testing, is that it’s a little bit of honey mixed with something else, corn syrup, or, you know, sugar syrup, or something like that, so, so it really is only by buying from a trusted source, somebody that you believe when they tell you that they produced it themselves, and here’s the kind of conditions they produced it under, and here’s how it was handled after they extracted it, you know, how did they, did they micro screen it, I mean, did they, it’s only by knowing the person, trusting them, and asking them the questions that are of concern to yourself that you’re getting the product that you, that you want, and so that’s, that’s why we like the producer market, and I think that’s why people like seeing us at the producer market, because they can ask us all those questions. I had an old lady come up to the booth, and she didn’t speak English, she was there with her daughter, when she was Ukrainian, and they asked, they probably asked me questions for 25 minutes before they bought a jar of honey, because she was that particular about, about what she was buying, and I was happy to be able to tell her the answers, you know, and to know every single step of how that jar of honey was produced, you know, it was, I did every piece of it, so I can tell her exactly what happened to that honey from the time it was in the hive, to the time that it was in the, in the jar. So anyway, that’s, that’s, that’s how we do it, you know, you asked about the pricing, I mean, pricing changes every year, there’s, you know, three years ago, we had a jar shortage, and the cost of the jars went through the roof, you know, I mean, there’s always stuff that kind of happens, there’s, we actually haven’t adjusted our prices for inflation very much, which is, I don’t know, something we probably need to figure out how to do, we just always feel bad about putting our prices up, but, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s cheaper, cheaper by the dozen, so in a, you know, some people buy from us in big buckets, which I think these days are probably almost $300 for a five gallon bucket full of honey, and then the smallest jar is an eight ounce, or 12 ounce jars, I think the smallest that we would routinely sell. We sell favors and gifts in bulk, not, we don’t usually have those on our farmers market table, but that’s smallest jars, $13. So it’s, these days it’s, you know, on the most expensive end, it’s close to a dollar an ounce, you know, then on the other end, it’s a big discount for buying in bulk for sure, and it’s usually only bakeries, meteries, breweries, I mean, they’re the ones that want the bigger quantities.

Hossam Yasser 48:02
Okay, I also saw like in your websites that you have like an online shipping section, so does it work as well as like the farmers market, or could you say like the farmers market is working more?

Brett Tempest
You know, the bulk of our sales are through the farmers market, you know, we also, we have a few places around town that are retail outlets that carry our, our stuff. The, you know, the online sales, again, it depends on the time of the year, around the holidays, we sell a ton online, you know, and people want gift sets, or, you know, we’ve at times even done big orders for gift sets, like if a business wants to send a gift set to all their clients or something, then, you know, we’ve worked with them to figure out exactly what they want to include, and then packaged it and shipped it out for them, and then, you know, some of those things have a little extra feed to them, but, you know, that’s one of the ways that that’s worked in the past. Yeah, so it depends on the time of year, I mean, normally we might get a couple orders a week off the website during the holidays, you know, during the holidays, Tina’s spending a huge amount of time shipping, shipping orders, you know.

Hossam Yasser 49:20
Okay, so what challenges or strengths do you have in Charlotte with Beekeeping, exactly in Charlotte, like?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, right now it’s land use change, you know, I mean, I can find a good, I can find a good spot to put these, you know, and then I’ll have a couple of good years, and then the next thing, you know, somebody’s put a development in and chopped down, you know, the forest full of poplars that were, you know, making a lot of tulip poplar nectar, and so it’s, I would, land use change, and then I think what comes along with that, just with densifying what’s going on is more friction with, you know, the neighbors, the hive, you know, bees can be kind of nosy during different times of the year, so, you know, set out a pie on their back porch to cool it off, and the next thing you know, there’s bees looking around it, and my idea of a lot of bees is very much different from a non beekeepers idea of a lot of bees, so, you know, there’s a lot of bees over here, and, and, you know, frankly, often it’s, they’re not even honeybees, you know, I think one of the conflicts that beekeepers often get into with their neighbors, which they don’t happen often, I mean, bees are usually pretty self-contained, they’re not, you know, I’ll get a complaint, “Oh, your bees are over here, I’ll get over there,” and they’re yellow jackets instead, and I’ll say, “Well, those aren’t my bees, they’re yellow jackets,” and they’ll look at them, they’re bees, you know, I mean, most people don’t really differentiate between different buzzing, you know, bugs and stuff, but, yeah, no, I would, I would say it’s land use change is the biggest issue within Charlotte, it’s getting harder to find places to put them.

Hossam Yasser 51:11
So, how could you elaborate more on just getting harder to harder to find a place like, couldn’t like bees go, goes on with this development, this like land use development?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, I mean, they, I think they’re very compatible, there’s certainly are places that you wouldn’t want to, you know, put an apiary, just because of the potential conflicts they might have with people, you know, walking by or, you know, the, their flight path is, you know, has to be kind of managed, but no, it’s primarily just the loss of the forage, you know, so I think there, I think there are two things that have to land use change, one is that you get developments that might have rules against keeping bees, you know, and in more and more, you know, places in Charlotte are what we’re building a lot of our apartments and so those are certainly places that people aren’t going to be able to keep bees in them, but a lot of subdivisions would have written into their, you know, covenants that they, you know, you can’t have bees there, so that kind of cuts those areas off, but even with the places where beekeeping would be permissible, you run into a problem of the development and construction ends up eliminating a lot of the really good forage for the bees, so, you know, what bees like are the really raggedy areas that people don’t like, you know, so the, sometimes people come to the booth at the farmer’s market and they say, well, what should I plant for the bees? And say, well, you don’t really need to plant anything, you just got to stop, you know, mowing your lawn, let the dandelions come up and stop spraying it, you know, don’t put out bug killer on your lawn because that kills bees too, you know, and people’s expectation for a bug-free environment, you know, if you want to go out and not have mosquitoes, so you called an exterminator and they came and sprayed all over the place, well, that does the bees too, and I know often people will tell me, you know, they’ll almost feel bad about it, they, you know, they’ll see me kind of scowling at the exterminator truck in front of their house and say, oh, don’t worry, he told me it doesn’t kill bees, and I say, well, you know, and you believe it, you know, how do you kill one bug and not another bug, you know, and so pesticides often come along with it to places that used to be woods but are now subdivisions or more likely to be very toxic to the bees, so that, yeah, that’s kind of the type of conflicts, I think, that come with land use change.

Hossam Yasser 54:07
So do you think like, is it like a worldwide problem, this idea of the extension of bees, the rest, the life of bees, is it like worldwide or like, is it like just a local problem?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, no, I think that with honeybees, it’s a local issue, you know, I, I think we’ve got to be a little more nuanced about our concern for bees, you know, and in a lot of ways, there certainly have been some really dramatic, you know, problems with bees over the last couple of decades. So a lot of people were, you know, learned about the type of health problems that bees were having with during a time of colony collapse disorder, and that was, you know, millions of colonies across the country, they’re fine one day and the keeper go out the next day and they’re gone or, you know, just the colony would just die quickly, and so people had a panic, you know, they, well, what’s going on with the bees, we’re going to lose all the bees, you know, the, how are we going to pollinate our crops if we don’t have all these bees, you know, 30, you know, 30% of our, of what we eat is, you know, bee pollinated. And so, you know, so that caused a big panic. But the flip side of it is, is because bees, honeybees are a domesticated agricultural, you know, endeavor is that domesticated bees have beekeepers that are looking after them, you know, in that very quickly, that problem was investigated and solved. And not to say that we don’t have other problems. Now we’re having, there’s a mite that’s causing a big problem. There’s another mite that is, both of these are invasive. There’s a new one that’s on its way here. You know, we’re basically one missed import of, you know, bee materials away from having this mite on our continent. And so, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that are definitely providing threats, but I think it would be akin to being concerned that domesticated pigs are at risk. You know, sure, there are things that they can catch and get sick, you know, but they also, there’s a lot of people that are very invested in their health. And so, so that’s something. But the, the issue, the, the lesson that I think we could take from observing the kind of health challenges that bees have had are that they’re facing the same health challenges that other native insects are facing. So if you’re concerned about bees being exposed to pesticides, then hopefully people can extrapolate that to moths and butterflies being exposed to pesticides and native bees that are, you know, are actually native to North America being exposed to the same pesticides and not having somebody looking after their well-being. And so I think that’s the nuance that I was getting at, is that, you know, people become very concerned about bees, but we need to parlay that into their concern about biodiversity in general and that the bees are going to be fine because there’s people like me looking after it. What I don’t have are a hundred colonies of native bees or bumblebees or moths or wasps or any of the stuff that’s supposed to be here. Nobody’s tending to them and they’re, they’re at great risk and losing them from the ecosystem would be a terrible loss.

Hossam Yasser 57:52
So do you have maybe any ideas or a vision about this biodiversity or stopping this like all of the insects and all pollinators extension?

Brett Tempest
I don’t know what we’re going to do, you know. I mean we’re recording this, you know, on a day where the election results are going to have consequences for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is who regulates those, you know, and the permissibility of new pesticides to reach the market with less scrutiny or even the removal of pesticides from the market that have demonstrated impacts to pollinators. Both of those things are going to be reduced, you know, if we have a weekend EPA or potentially no EPA. That’s unfortunately I think the, there’s, I think that’s even combined with, you know, there’s a Supreme Court case, the Chevron deference, which gave a lot of the, you know, regulatory ability of the, of our federal agencies, you know, including EPA to make certain decisions without very particular wording and legislation and that’s gone, you know. So I think what that opens the door to is that corporations being able to avoid even, even precaution in how their products are now going to be regulated, you know. So these political champs, I mean this is the consequence of elections. I mean that these, these are big political and legislative issues that are going to have a direct impact on biodiversity and it’s, you know, it is beneficial if somebody decides, you know, every single person that decides not to spray their yard is, you know, creates a haven, you know, for creatures to live in their yard. It’s going to be hard to, it’s going to be hard to do this one yard at a time, you know. I mean we really need, we need attention on a, on a broader scale that really only government can provide.

Hossam Yasser 01:00:36
All right. You mentioned a lot about how like spring is a good time for bees, but like how about winter? Does winter is a real challenge for you as a beekeeper?

Brett Tempest
It can be, you know, if they, if their health isn’t tip-top in the fall, then going into the winter can be challenging. I’ve kind of unintentionally gravitated towards a genetic tendency and might be, because I make all my own queens and everything, I, you know, I can see, I, I, there, sometimes there are things that I’m not intentionally selecting for that I’m unintentionally selecting for. And so one of those things is extremely small winter clusters. So on the one hand, that’s nice because I, you know, the smaller the cluster during the winter, the fewer resources they use to get through the winter and that kind of thing. But on the other hand, it just makes it easier for them to freeze. And we had, it was last year, a year before last, we had a really bad cold snap, the temperature plunged 40 degrees in just a couple of hours, and then bees just had no capacity to adapt to that. And so these really tiny clusters, I lost quite a few of them. Yeah, so winter, our winters are generally fairly mild and, and I haven’t found that it’s all that difficult to get them through the winter.

Hossam Yasser 01:02:06
What about the last hurricane? Did you have any loses?

Brett Tempest
I had no losses. I’m sure people further to the West, you know, I had one set of bees that do live along a fairly large creek and the water came within, feeded them, but didn’t, didn’t touch them. So I dodged a, dodged a bad consequence there.

Hossam Yasser 01:02:28
Okay, so did any organization or person here in Charlotte help you with those kind of like challenges? Does anyone here in Charlotte help them?

Brett Tempest
You know, beekeepers, there are a cohesive group and that, for one, we all love talking about bees so much. And often the, the only person that will listen for very long is another beekeeper. So it’s, you know, we do tendto stick together. So we have somebody to talk to bees about. I mean, you know, so our, our beekeeper association has both kind of technical programming where they’ll get together and talk about, you know, issues of bee biology or techniques or strategies. And we also, there’s also just social events, you know, so there’s one that they started doing a couple years ago called bees and beers. And we just all go and drink beer and talk about bees. So, and then they’re, they post an annual cookout. I mean, there’s a lot of really nice things that they do. But so, so that’s certainly a place where if you, you know, sometimes you’re going to request through that group, hey, does anybody have queens? I just had a big problem and I really need 10 queens and somebody have, yeah, I mean, it gives you a, you kind of know where different resources are that it would be hard to get just in the open market, but you can just go to a person and get it. So it’s, it’s a supportive group, you know.

Hossam Yasser 01:03:50
Is it the Mecklenburg Association?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, and a lot of counties have it. So Cabarrus County has a beekeeper association. Gaston County has one. I mean, you know, they’re all around. Not all counties, you’d have some very small counties in North Carolina that might have a, maybe more of a consortium with other counties, but a lot of the larger counties have their own bee clubs.

Hossam Yasser 01:04:21
So how many people are like in the Mecklenburg Association?

Brett Tempest
So every year, the, you know, the new people that are taking the class and joining it, and there’s usually about 100 of them at least. And then there’s all those standing members, which is a pretty good number of them too. So I would imagine it’s a few hundred in total. I don’t know how many of them remain or all that active. I could, you know, there’s, it’s like any other group. I mean, to pay your $5 and be a member is one thing to show up to a lot of meetings. I would say there’s probably, you know, 30 to 40 people that are highly active in terms of showing up to meetings and, you know, being involved at that level.

Hossam Yasser 01:05:11
Okay. So do you like collaborate with other beekeepers, with other farms? Maybe they want to like, pollenate their farm? Do you do those?

Brett Tempest
I have not with other beekeepers. I mean, that’d be nice to do. And, you know, or, or there’s certainly been times where we’ve, we’ve wondered about trying to hire somebody to help with some of this stuff. But, you know, finding a beekeeper skill set is usually going to be somebody else that’s so busy with their own bees that they’re not looking for any more work. But certainly with farmers, though, and so, you know, most of our bees are living on farms. And the reason that, you know, the farmers happy to have us there is because of the pollination. So we, you know, a lot of beekeepers would sell pollination services. So, you know, tends to be for big crops like almonds or apples, where, you know, the apple orchards might rent hives, you know, or purchase a pollination service. For bees, since I want to be able to keep the bees there year round, I mean, the bees just live at that particular farm or location. To me, as a trade, you know, it’s my bees will pollinate your stuff. And what I get out of it is I can keep them here and get the honey and that kind of thing. And usually you have, there’s the farmer usually gets gets a little bit of honey out of it too.

Hossam Yasser 01:06:35
So what about like, if someone called you and told you that he had like a hive in his like apartment or in his, the hell was this?

Brett Tempest
I used to, you know, it’s fun. It’s always fun to catch a swarm or cut bees out of a wall. And I kind of, I don’t have time for it so much anymore. When I, if I ever retire, I think I’ve been something maybe hang my shingle out again. It’s always nice to catch a swarm. I get a lot of calls about it for sure. But I usually have to turn them down or pass it to somebody else.

Hossam Yasser 01:07:10
So do we have here in Charlotte any like vet that is specialized in problems of bees?

Brett Tempest
I don’t know. You know, a couple years ago, they had a new law that said that for people that areusing, there’s some beekeepers use antibiotics in their hive. And it used to just be that you can buy the antibiotic from the feed store. You didn’t need a, you didn’t need a prescription or anything. And then a few years ago, they started doing it where you have to have a veterinary directive to get it. I don’t use antibiotics. So I’ve never actually had to go to a vet for anything. So I don’t, I’d have to go to the bee club to even ask if there’s somebody a specialized vet in the area, but I just haven’t needed it so far.

Hossam Yasser 01:08:18
So I also saw like your Instagram page and I saw like a lot of stories and a lot of you sharing your experience. So what motivated you to start writing about your stories in Instagram? And did this help you gain?

Brett Tempest
Yeah, you know, that’s that’s also all Tina’s doing. I don’t even, I don’t even have Instagram on my phone. So I may not even be aware of the you’ve seen it. It’s something that she enjoys doing, putting those stories together. And it does, I think that some of them are educational, you know, some of them, I think, inspire people to come and ask questions. I’ll say, oh, I saw this on Instagram and then,you know, starts a conversation about something with bees. So I, you know, it’s fun in that regard. But that’s, yeah, that’s all Tina’s doing.

Hossam Yasser 01:08:58
Okay. So if you could give yourself like one piece of advice, what could be like regarding beeKeeping your past self?

Brett Tempest
Like, oh, tell my pass up. That’s a good question. I think one thing would just be to be strategic about the placement of beards, you know, because it some people are very are really ruthless about that. I mean, they short drive, they don’t want to have to go very far. I, I mean, again, a lot of our expansion happened during the pandemic. And so, you know, I was really enjoying having all these different places to go, you know, I mean, the, and, and especially some of the farms where the bees are located are just really enjoyable places to go and be, you know, you’re out in nature, you’re in the woods, in the fields and, and, but I don’t know that I always put much scrutiny towards like the travel time and stuff like that. So there are times that I wish that my bees were all within a few miles of each other’s of them, whereas, you know, it takes a pretty long time to run the whole circuit. So I think, you know, probably something with that, probably something with, you know, the prioritizing bee health over, over honey production, I think if you’ve, I thinkif you focus on their health, then everything else is better. And, you know, I don’t know if I immediately appreciated that, especially as the operation grew, how much, how much time I should be spending on health versus other things. Yeah.

Hossam Yasser 01:11:08
Okay. So kind of the same question, like, what about like, giving your past self like a piece of warning?

Brett Tempest
Oh, this can take up a lot of time, you know, I mean, it’s, I, I, I, I enjoy almost every minute that I spend in a hive. You know, I mean, there’s, there’s very, there’s always a time where it’s like about to rain and, you know, you still have 10 hives to go through and the bees are cranky. And there’s always a point in the summer towards the end of the honey harvest, where I just have kind of a meltdown and think, why am I doing this? This is ridiculous. You know, got a perfectly good job. Why don’t I just, you know, stop doing this and do that. And, and then, you know, but, but then by the, in the middle of the winter, you really missed these, you know, and I can’t wait till spring to, you know, get back into the hives and do it. So on the one hand, it’s, it’s to recognize the tradeoff that, that although you enjoy every minute doing this, that it’s at the expense of something else that you could have been doing, you know, I could have been learning an instrument or something or learning how to cook or any of the other things I wish I kind of knew how to do, you know, but instead it was the bees.

Hossam Yasser 0112:32
So what hopes and dreams do you have for your form and your experience of future?

Brett Tempest
You know, I, one is that, that it provides me a way to step down in work, you know, I mean, I enjoy what I do as a, you know, university administrator as a professor, I mean, I enjoy that work, but eventually I’ll step down from some of those things and, and that, that, that the beekeeping will provide me with, with an avenue to remain connected in the community, you know, by going to the farmers markets to, you know, to, to have a, you know, a vocation, you know, to, to still do something that requires planning and thought and attention and expertise, you know, I mean, those, those are, you, you got to have outlets for those things, you know, so I don’t think I’ll ever retire from beekeeping. I do think I’ll retire from being a, you know, university employee, but I probably will be keeping until I die, you know, until I can’t lift the box anymore.

Hossam Yasser 01:13:45
So what is an aspect of beekeeping that people usually misunderstand or misconceptions?

Brett Tempest
I think that, I think people can’t imagine until they do it, how fascinating the bees are themselves, you know, that, that, you know, there’s no limit to how much you can learn about their biology or, or their behavior. And even when you learn, if you read every single, you know, paper ever, and book ever written about their biology, and you really were the foremost expert in that, you would still have miles to go in terms of understanding their behavior and becoming more intuitive about how the bees are going to react to certain things or respond in different, you know, so you, there really is no limit to your learning about it. And I, and I don’t, I don’t think people, I think when, if I mentioned bees to folks, the first thing they think of is getting stung. The second thing they think of is they like honey. I don’t like anybody thinks this is a fascinating bug, you know, and that’s the reason beekeepers love talking about bees, because they are just infinitely fascinating.

Hossam Yasser 01:15:03
So what do you envision for the future of farming or beekeeping here in Charlotte?

Brett Tempest
I don’t know. I mean, I think that, you know, Charlotte is certainly becoming more urban and, you know, which, which for the reasons that we talked about earlier makes it more difficult to keep bees, but New York City has a beekeeping club, you know, and bees living on the roofs of buildings and apartments and stuff. So I think that, I think it’ll get harder. I think it’ll be more difficult for people to find the places to do it. I think it’s going to get pushed out of the city more and more. But at the end of the day, folks love honey, and I think that, you know, I think that that level will continue to be a reason for folks to be in it. You know, either the beekeeper loving the bees or the market for local honey always being there, I think we’ll probably keep it. But again, it does, it gets harder. And, you know, just because of increasingly lax regulation of certain things, the hazard of importing pests to the bees. So, you know, our biggest problems with keeping bees in Charlotte right now are related to invasive pests. So there’s a, there’s a beetle that gets into the bees. There’s a mite that gets into the bees. There’s a, you know, and that stuff really, you know, more and more, you spend all your time dealing with that. So that makes it harder. But still, like, you know, as long as there’s bees, there’ll be beekeepers.

Hossam Yasser 01:16:59
Okay, so are there any other questions I should have asked you?

Brett Tempest
Probably regretting asking so many. No, I think I’ve gotten to talk about a lot of things. It’s been nice to, nice to have a, you know, a ton of audience here. Like I said, beekeepers love talking about bees and, you know,struggle to find enough opportunities to do it. So it’s, thanks for, thanks for your interest.

Hossam Yasser
Yeah, thank you very much.