This Guy Catches The CRAZIEST Swarms

How could I come to the Expo and not sit down with Randy, 628 Dirt Rooster, and just have a chat? Randy, thanks for having me back.

Thank you.

How's things?

Great, great.

Have you had a good year?

It has been a banner year for me.

Banner year for you.

Yeah.

It's really funny because you said you were going to come light to the Expo. Randy said, I'm not packing anything this year, we're not taking anything. You've brought a table and chairs and a sofa.

I brought a whole outdoors setting. And yeah, I didn't want to bring a trailer, but my wife said we have to set up something nice. So yeah, of course.

I love it. I love it. So I thought we'd do on this video here, because you've done so many cool videos on YouTube, is we just talk about some of your highlights, talk about the best bits from Randy's years in the bee. So go on, one that sticks out. What's the best memory you've got of YouTube bees videos?

The ones that really stand out that people tell me that they remember me for are the ones on the commercial yards where we shake down Hundreds of pounds of bees on a trailer or on the back of a truck. Yeah, we'll set up 18 or 20 hives, queen them, shake bees on them, and let the bees populate the boxes. So we'll make, okay, 20 hives like that.

Yeah, yeah, and that's a cool video, isn't it? Because it's just aggressive shaking.

Yeah, it's just something, you know, spectacular, and I don't know.

Cool. So talk me through that process, go on. If we were going to go out the back now, yeah, make up some of those You say you're putting a queen in. What's the process? If you need to rewind, how do you make them up?

So on that, it's commercial beekeepers from all over the country come here or come to South Mississippi to raise queens because they can get an earlier start down there. And it's a good place to raise queens. So they'll come off of almonds. They'll cycle 20,000 hives through 40,000, you know, in our surrounding area. Just within an hour of me, there's probably 80,000 managed colonies that come through. After almonds. So they come through, do maintenance, make splits, raise queens. And in all that moving, they bring in 460 or so hives on a truck, set them off, pull queens, set them back on, move them. All that field bees get lost, and then they end up clustering in trees.

Right.

So you'll have hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds of bees on a single pine tree.

Ah, see, see, this is where it's cheating. Yeah, because in the UK we get, oh, there's a swarm, and it's this little, this little ball like that. Yeah. And in America it's like, oh man, there's a swarm. Like there's 75 swarms in one tree, like all together as a mega swarm. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

And so it's just massive weight and it's breaking the trees and everything. So they're happy for us to come get them. And it's a good opportunity to play and make some hives. And it does make productive colonies. So we'll take those old queens that they're pulling, we'll put them in a cage, rubber band them to a frame and put them in hives. And so we'll populate 20, 24, 28 hives, shake all those bees on them, let them just kind of naturally populate those boxes. And set them out and they'll make productive colonies.

Do you know, all I'm thinking, I just like, my mind's going there. What would be a really cool thing? Say you had, how many queens, how many queens you might think they're like, 500 queens or something?

That they're pulling?

Yeah.

Thousands.

Oh, thousands. Okay. So if you did it and say you did a batch on the back of a trailer, I don't know, 100 queens or something like that, and you put all the queens in and you dump all these bees in, the bees are going to go to where the best queen is, right?

Yeah, they will.

So could you just like find the biggest cluster and say, right, that's the best queen? So I'm just going to take one.

So what we do is after we shake them down, we'll set them up in these boxes and set them on outyards. We'll come back in a few days and start evening out the populations because they do naturally go to the better queens. And so you'll have some boxes that are really super strong and overpopulated and some that are kind of— they're okay. So we'll start moving frames around after they've had time to lay up a little brood.

And once you've got the brood in there, it's easy, isn't it? Because they just like stay. I remember getting about— I got about 50 packages. I bought 50 packages, brought them down to my apiary, tried to get the packages of bees onto just Frames of foundation. Yeah. And I lost, I'd say I lost about 50% of them doing that. It was very silly.

Yeah, package bees are tough.

Yeah, you need drawn comb and you need brood, don't you?

So we only do nucs because of that.

I'm the same now. Nucs are the way forward. I've seen that over here. Nucs didn't used to be that popular over here. It was package bees, isn't it? Right. I see loads of people selling nucs.

It still is up north. So we're making some inroads with some producers up north. to get nucs to them in places where they're historically all package bees. And it's tough because everybody's got a mindset that package bees are the only way to go and you can't have nucs from the South.

Yeah.

But last year we moved a bunch up there and they saw the results and they're like, so they quadrupled their order for this year.

Oh, that's good.

And so, and the guy apologized to me yesterday on the bot sec. He said, man, I'm sorry to put that much pressure on you. I said, dude, I'm ready to grow. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah, good pressure, isn't it? Don't worry about the pressure.

Okay, right, so number 1 was putting all the queens in and getting the big swarms in there. What's number 2? What's the highlight from Randy's beekeeping career?

Wow, I don't even know, there's so many. It's more the people I meet because I'm a different place every time, every job is different. It's all bees, it's all the same thing kind of, but it's all different. And so I'm a people person and everybody we meet is different. So the ones that are really fun are the ones that get involved with us. They're terrified when we get there. Before we leave, they're out there tasting honey and handling bees and all that kind of stuff, unsuited. Oh my God, I never thought I would do anything like this. This is amazing. I've never seen this. And so then all of a sudden, we got a new subscriber.

Yeah. And do they, do they like watch the video? Because if you came to my house, yeah, say I wasn't a beekeeper, if you came to my house and I had like some trees or some bees, I should say, in a wall, and then you cut them out and did all the video and you said, oh, you can watch it on YouTube. I would be watching that video. I'd be so interested. Do you find that they watch and comment below?

A lot of the times, probably, I don't know, probably half the time they've found us before we get there.

Oh wow.

So I do all my bidding over the phone, and when we get there, about half the time when we open the door, they go, I've been watching you.

Oh, they know already, yeah.

Yeah, so we'll go in and walk through the process of what I have to cut or what I have to move, and they're like, yeah, yeah, you know what you're doing, just go. They give me the free run of the house.

Just leave you to it.

Cut the roof off as long as you put it back.

Do you have to do that? Are you like, you go in, you cut all the bees out, and you see a lot of that on the videos, But do you fix everything back up for them?

Yeah.

Yeah, you do it all. Okay, cool. And it is sometimes a big job doing that?

Yes, yes.

What's the worst one where you, where you thought, why did I start this job? Like, this is the worst thing ever. You must have had a few like that.

We have a lot of them that we try— so we're as least invasive as possible going into someone's home. You don't want to do a lot of damage to their home. It's the most valuable possession that they own.

And so we have to try to Sometimes not do damage.

So when you get in places where they have a copper roof or something, I don't want to tear all that apart. It's expensive to put back. I'm not qualified to fool with copper. And so, you know, we're getting into spaces where I'm a big boy, it's hard for me to get in tight spaces. And sometimes I got to bring on Mr. Ed or Pete or somebody to show, you know, just send him in. You're going into that space, and then I'll put a rope on your leg and pull you out when you're done.

Because it can get a bit claustrophobic. Like, I've done a couple up in attics and stuff, and it's hot. And we're in the UK where it is very much not hot, like it's pretty cold over there, and you're out here in the real heat in attics and doing stuff. Like, it must get a bit intense.

It is, and that's, you know, that's a lot of reason I don't go suited, because if you get up in an attic or in a joist space or anything, there's nails and nail plates and everything, and a vented suit is gonna snag on everything.

Yeah.

So you spend half your day trying to unsnag.

Yeah, yeah.

Now your suit's ruined, you've broken it up, cut it, whatever, but Definitely don't want that, do you? Yeah, so probably the most recent, and it wasn't a removal per se, a lady was selling her property and she had some hives on the property and had to have them moved so that they could open it up for viewing. So I went out to move it, to move these 2 hives just as a favor to her, and I said, I called her and I said, there's a lot of equipment laying here, do you— she said, yeah, take it all. It was a whole pickup truck load of equipment, and when I left, it was— and 2 active colonies, 5 stacks.

Wow.

So I left with all that, and she called me and said, I meant for you to come back and get this Maxxant extractor. And I said, oh, and it's an hour and a half one way. I said, oh well, I'll come back for that. And I said, what's the story of that old enclosed trailer? And she said, you know, you know anybody wants it? $1,000. I said, I'll get it. So when I get up there, I go inside to get the extractor. The whole— one whole wall of this barndominium has beekeeping equipment still in boxes. I said, what are you doing with all that? She said, just take it. Or her husband, just take it. And we get out there to that trailer and we opened the trailer up and it was their bug-out trailer and it had a generator, chainsaw, air compressor and all that stuff. And I said, where do you want me to put all your stuff? I don't want it.

Seriously?

So I picked up a whole Almost sidelined her beekeeping operation and a trailer and equipment, and that was just a month ago. And that's the trailer I used to haul up here.

That's so much fun, isn't it? I wish I had that haul. That's a proper haul. I'm getting everyone to say something about Cayman Reynolds, and you have not got to say something nice. It could be nice, it can be bad, it's just got to be honest. So Cayman Reynolds, go.

Cayman's a fun guy to hang out with, great guy. He has put together Something that I never could have imagined.

Crazy, isn't it? To see what he did with Scooter.

It's getting bigger every year. I've been here since day one, since the beginning, and behind the kind of behind the scenes helping a little bit. You know, not involved or part of it, but just it's turned into something that's almost like a family reunion when we come back to this thing.

It is, isn't it? I feel I feel a bit like that. Like coming back, I'm excited about like the stuff that's here, but it's meeting people, isn't it? And seeing people and just connecting and having fun.

I love it, and that's how I found you was through the expo or through was it Hive Life? No, it was the expo.

It was. It was two years ago, the expo.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So it was the year when Hive Life was just.

I had seen a couple of your videos, but I don't think I had subscribed yet. And then when I met you at the expo, I was like, oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's that dude with the excellent videos.

Excellent videos. Yeah. Well, look at the videographer now as well, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's taking off. But but Randy, I'll say I'll leave you to it. Thank you so much for the time.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

Awesome. Thanks.