We’ll be talking with two beekeepers tonight, first with Rocky Pisto, who is a commercial beehive manager, based in Oregon, who has been working in the northstate in recent months having his busy bees polinate local orchards.

Then we’ll talk with Lee Edwards of Cherokee, who is what we’d call a very serious hobbyist, maintaining a number of hives and doing demonstrations of bee culture in area schools.This is Ecotopia on KZFR, and tonight we are featuring an album by local/global musician and beekeeper, Mike Wofchuck. 

Our Interview with Rocky was prerecorded

Our conversation with Lee Edwards

On the phone with us now is Lee Edwards of Cherokee, who is widely known among the beekeeper crowd in the northstate for his astonishing knowledge of bees and their culture. Welcome, Lee.

1.  How did you get involved in keeping bees?

1B. Please tell us  a little about the size of your operation? How many beehives do you have? And approximately how many  bees do they accommodate?

2. What are the seasons like for beekeeping? Is the activity different  in the summer and winter?

3. Tell us a little about the life of a bee? What do they eat? How far  do they range? Do you feed them anything? What do you provide for  them? How long do they live?

4. How is honey produced?

5. Describe the process of collecting and processing the honey? When do you do that? What kind of equipment do you need? How long does the 
process take? How much honey do you get from your x number of bees? Is  your honey raw honey or pasteurized honey? What’s the difference?

6. Say someone would like to have just one hive and a small collection of bees? How would one get started?

7. What does one have to do to keep 
one happy, healthy beehive. And how much honey might they get from that?

Playlist

Tonight our music has been provided by Mike Wofchuk from the album, “Flight.”  As we’ve said, Mike is a local musician who has worked the national scene, and among other things, provides percussion for Ma Muse. 

On the Flight album, Mike does ALL the instrumental music, layering track on track to create the amazing sounds we’ve heard.  The Flight cd is available at the  Chico Co-Op  or at  cdbaby.com.

In addition, beekeeper Mike produces honey that’s also available at the co-op.

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