Chris Hiatt
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And roughly how many pounds of honey are you able to bring to market with all those bees?
Some years you can do 50 pounds, and that's kind of a below average year.
On a good year, we've done 100, 150.
My dad, way back when, used to make 250, 300 pound average in Alberta in the 70s before he started coming to North Dakota.
If we're below a million pounds, we had a bad year.
If we're above it, we had a pretty good year.
There's a lot less blossoms, a lot less bloom.
There's a lot of mom-and-pop dairies that went out of business.
There's less alfalfa than there used to be.
And there's less grassland where sometimes you can get sweet clover to grow just wild.
And then the whole varroa mite problem.
What does the mite do in the hive?
So the varroa mite, it's very tiny.
It's like half of a grain of rice.
And they are feeding on the fat bodies of these honeybees.