Queen Bee Honey Company in Alpine, Oregon built up from a Datsun pickup truck to a commercial beekeeping business. In this episode we hear about how Karen Finley built her business and the increasing problem of lack of summer forage for honey bees in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

The BEEvent, hosted annually by the Linn County Master Gardeners, provides gardeners and small farmers with essential knowledge and practical tools to support and protect bee pollinators. This week, Master Gardeners Ranee Webb and Rich Little join us to share what's in store for this year's event.

Register for BEEvent: https://www.linnmastergardeners.com/beevent

Information on Mason bees and BeeNotes: https://www.linnmastergardeners.com/pollinator-info

While there has been a lot of attention to the plight of wild bees, we are increasingly discovering that there is a lot more that we don't know. A state checklist of bees is a great starting point for taking stock of what we do know. This week I am joined by Chanda Bartholomew, who is an Entomology Collection Taxonomist with the Pest Program in the Plant Protection Division of Washington State Department of Agriculture. She is the lead author of "An annotated checklist of the bees of Washington state" that was published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research in November of 2024.

Link to the article: https://jhr.pensoft.net/article/129013/

This week on PolliNation, Fred Weisensee from Dancing Oaks Nursery in Monmouth, OR shares tips on creating a pollinator rock garden using native and exotic plants inspired by Oregon's high-elevation landscapes

Dancing Oaks Nursery: https://dancingoaks.com/?srsltid=AfmBOop6NnUpe5hUTS6OTTJ6rIc96DsuGBJ5Ndz3YCq_cjGiagJD2ZFT

Karen Pedersen is a fifth generation commercial beekeeper and apiary owner in Cut Knife, Saskatchewan, Canada. Pedersen Apiaries make hundreds of pounds of honey bee colony, while wintering single brood chamber colonies outdoors when temperatures are -30F below. She also leads an impressive stock improvement program. Harry and Andony find how she does it in this week's episode.

Pedersen Apiaries website: http://www.pedersenapiaries.ca

Bee Maid Honey Coop: https://www.beemaid.com

Harvesting Honey: https://youtu.be/CNc-AfvCgLA?si=I867-OJNHnC4qaA6

In this episode we learn about an effort to map pollinator habitat, as well as their stories, in Southern Oregon. The Southern Oregon Buzzway is a collaboration between Southern Oregon University and Pollinator Project Rogue Valley.

Pollinator Project Rogue Valley: https://www.pollinatorprojectroguevalley.org/

Southern Oregon Buzzway Map: https://www.pollinatorprojectroguevalley.org/rogue-buzzway-maps

Dr. Jamie Trammell's work: https://sou.edu/academics/environmental-science/faculty/e-jamie-trammell/

This week on our Commercial Beekeeping segment, Nick VanCalcar from VanCalcar Apiaries in Amity, Oregon joins us to discuss the importance of doing your own fabrication in beekeeping operations.

There are over a thousand species of bees in the Pacific Northwest. However, The resources available for someone to tell the bees apart is lacking for this region. In this episode we hear from the team that is working to solve this problem. Carol Yamada, Lincoln Best, August Jackson, Jim Rivers, Joshua Dunlap & Joe Engler discuss their publication of four new taxonomic keys for the bees of the PNW.

Early reports are that there may be a large loss of commercial honey bee colonies across the U.S. this winter. In this episode we are joined by co-host Harry Vanderpool to talk with Russell Heitkam. Russell is a second generation beekeeper and Northern California queen, queen cell, package, and nuc producer. He also brokers about 7,000 hives from Oregon and Washington for almond pollination.

Filter strips surround agricultural fields and reduce soil loss and pesticide effluent reaching streams and rivers. They can also host flowering plants that bees and butterflies like. We talk to Dr. Amy Toth about whether these narrow ribbons of land can actually benefit pollinators.

Toth Lab website: https://www.tothlab.org/people

Episode 246 on filter strips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIcDh_SreU