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>> Good morning, girls.
I am a self-taught beekeeper.
My wife's Buddhist uncle said,
you have a backyard,
you should have bees.
So this hive is doing great.
You can really see the different
yellows and oranges from
the pollen.
I've probably been stung
probably well over 100 times.
I actually am allergic to bees.
I wasn't allergic before.
Every time you get stung
by a bee there's chance
that you could develop
an allergy.
Or you can build up
a resistance.
I gained the allergy
about five years ago.
My hand swelled up like
a balloon.
But decided to keep with the
hobby, but I got allergy shots
for it.
I was a stay-at-home dad.
My background is in graphic
design and publishing.
I knew I wanted to do
something different.
Here in Madison there's a lot of
food producers that,
they really want to know
where and how the food
is produced.
My thought was the honey
that came from my backyard
was fantastic.
Well, if you had 20 bee hives
in people's backyards,
then you could sell the extra
and call it something like,
Mad Urban Bees.
I decided to kind of go for it.
I raised $10,000.
While doing that I ran into
people who were interested in
having bees in their backyard.
I put two hives in
a host's backyard.
I take care of the bees,
extract all the honey, do all
the maintenance on the hive.
And the host gets honey as rent.
So it works out pretty well.
[whistling]
From my hosts, I'm looking for
a yard that is going to
work well with the bees
and the people that live there.
Most of them are
total strangers.
There's only a couple that are
people that I knew.
I don't want my bees too
concentrated in town, because
then they'll start competing
with each other.
So I do literally have them
spread out all over Madison.
This is one of three sites
that I have that are
outside the city.
About 2/3 of all honey bee hives
in the state of Wisconsin
died last winter.
I lost about 50% of my hives.
Inside each of these little
cages is a queen bee.
The whole purpose of right now
this little nuke is just to keep
these queens happy and warm
until I can give them hives
of their own.
Standard mini marshmallows.
The point of the marshmallow is
it takes the bees about two days
to eat through that marshmallow
and free the queen.
By that point they've excepted
her, they've excepted her
pheromones in the hive.
So she becomes their queen.
At the height of the summer
the queen can be laying
2,000 to 3,000 eggs per day.
Here's one that's got
a lot of nectar.
Nectar from a plant is usually
around 80% water.
They will stand over it and
fan it and they will get
it down to 18% water,
16% to 18% water, and
that's when it becomes honey.
So this is new honey that
they've collected even at the
beginning of May.
I have gotten the question of,
you know, Hazmat suit or
exterminators.
That's a good spot.
Oh, good, they're active this
morning.
These are both new this year.
Oh, these look great.
Oh, oh, oh.
Definitely over five pounds
at this point, so this whole
super will probably have
anywhere between two and a half
to three gallons of honey
in it, hopefully.
Your garden's looking awesome.
I'm extracting every three to
four weeks from these hives.
Yeah, they're working on it.
Not a lot of honey yet.
So I'm actually going to vote
not to take these frames.
I like them to be about
70% capped and right now
this one's about a
quarter capped so we'll actually
leave that one in here.
I'm constantly learning
new things and I think
that's the important part.
Even though, you know, things
get a little bit repetitive,
I'm rarely bored.
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So this is my uncapper.
It does the job of taking off
the layers of beeswax that the
bees put on the honeycomb
to say that it's done.
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When I have a full batch,
it will roughly produce
about eight gallons of honey
at a time.
[machine whirling]
And there it comes.
The honey just is different
from each hive.
Two hives blocks apart can taste
completely different.
And some are minty,
some have an almost like a
cinnamon nutmeg flavor,
and so the the flavor of the
honey really does change
quite a bit given
the urban environment.
But last year I bottled
5,500 jars like this by hand.
It is a as local
as you can get,
it's literally from
your backyard.
Batch number 402.
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