Welcome. Today is December 8th. This is the Minecraft DevSync, and here we are. Well, let's just jump right into it. I don't really have any news for today. Chris, why don't you get us started? Sure. I did get a pull request for my device metrics code created today. I hope, guys, if we ever get, it's not huge, but if you get a few minutes to look into that, that'd be great. And then once it's approved, I'll see what I can do about getting it migrated up the platforms. So once I finished that, I started looking at some accounts and membership level type work. We're thinking about doing with maybe some different membership types instead of just the one and what each membership type means. So we have a document that Michael and I are working on. I went through that today, added some thoughts. I haven't quite finished yet, but once I'm done with that, I'll give even more thought to the technical side of it. You know, how do I need to change the database and what changes need to be made to Selene APIs and UI to support the things we're talking about? So that'll be the rest of my day today and probably tomorrow. Okay, I'll try to get you some feedback on that tonight. Okay. I muted myself. Ken, how's it going? Everything's going really good. So I got the four board working, everything's working record and play and all the hardware.  I created a couple of new drivers for the volume and for the leads on this particular board created the new personality that's all in there. I sent Gez a list of loose ends for getting the Panicor image running. I created a more detailed document for Gez regarding how Panicor can create the I2S stuff we need and what specifically has to happen with it. I'm ready to do a pull request for all this stuff. I just wasn't sure where to go yet. Gez, is that feature slash enclosure mark 2? Is that the branch you want me to be working off of? Yeah, I mean I merged that into the feature slash mark 2 yesterday so that it could go through the CI build process. So currently those two branches are equivalent. Okay, but I had a hardware support branch. Is the code that I had in hardware support in merged in there or no? Yeah, yeah, I took that because it was built for the sandbox image and had some hard coded file paths and things. Yeah, I switched that over so it can be used on Panicor and that's what that mark 2 enclosure. Okay, so the point is if I want to put a pull request together, I put it together against feature slash mark 2 enclosure. Okay, good. I'll do that and then tomorrow Derek should be able to bring up a mark 4 with a QT image in it. I can step him through over the phone how to check out that code line that I'll be committing to with the latest pull request code. I'll go over the hardware test code and you can actually test the SJ201 Rev4 with the hardware test routine. I'll add a record to it because I had problems with record and so at least because that tests leads and switches and volume and now it'll test record as well as play. And I'll get that to Derek in the morning and stepping through that. That's all ready to go. What is the demo meeting on Friday about? Josh will get to that during his time. Okay, all right, then that's it. That's what I'm doing. I'll get that pull request committed in the morning and guess can merge it and meanwhile I'll have Derek working off at the test the SJ201 Rev4. All right, great. So guess you're out now. Yeah, as Ken said, I took, well, as I just said, I took Ken's stuff and tweaked it a bit to work on PanScore and the SJ201 like buttons and everything and now working on that device. So can now, you know, turn the volume up and down and with all the hardware buttons and everything that's good. We had a regression with the audio recording of just a Polk Audio Permissions issue so PanScore is having a look at that, which I hope is not going to, I don't imagine it's going to be a big, big issue. But this is also, this is still the Rev3 so obviously Ken's stuff, the Rev4 isn't in there yet. I had a really good meeting with Blue Systems last night that I put notes about in the chat. If you haven't seen those, just a couple of dot points to some cool stuff coming down the pipeline there. And it really improved the response time of like the listening animation and things like that. And Community made some, well, did some reviews of PRs and things like that. I think that's about it. Okay, great. And Derek. So I've got, my SJ, I've got the SJ201s that Kevin shipped. I just got those about an hour ago. So I've been putting one of them together and you can see now the board mounts underneath and it mounts with all four holes. So that's a little stronger. Power comes off the back. Physically everything's looking good. I've got this new area on top where the camera goes up here. I don't have it actually in there yet because I forgot it, the office. Anyway, seems like that's going to work out. So what I've done is also been going back and forth with Josh on the audio chamber. I've got a solution, final solution there. He's going to test it. I was going to do a print. Hopefully it's got that started soon. And then putting together this SJ201 is kind of my last test of the laser cut hardware to see if everything's good there. So I already went ahead and uploaded stuff to update quotes. So once Josh gives me the thumbs up there, I think we are ready to order laser cut parts and 3D printed acoustic chips. So yeah, and then just want to get this one. I'll try to get two of them put together and start testing tomorrow with Ken's help. Awesome. Yeah, hey, that's exciting. The other thing is just helping review parts that we're ordering. Like I think I sent some stuff to Kevin to double check on the power supplies and yeah, just helping out as I can with stuff like that. Okay, great. And Josh, are you still around? Yeah, I'm wandering around here. So we got most everything on order. I think the only thing that's on that hasn't been ordered that's over $5 is the cameras. And they may have been ordered. I don't know. Everything else seems to be going good. We got international power supplies going. I'm going to review Derek's stuff. I'm actually going to make hand make another one of these. Your audio just cut out. Instructions on the Instructables and make sure that they represent what we're actually shipping. I think that's pretty much it. I did book a demo for Friday, so I called Pantacore and I pinned them down on a delivery time and basically said, hey, look, I don't, you know, you picked the time, but I want to pin you to it. So they picked, they said that they could be done Friday. So Friday we're going to do, and I want to start doing this on a regular basis, at least once a week. And I honestly, I think the developers should be doing it every day or every two days. Setting up a mark to from scratch from a blank image all the way to connected to your account with, you know, being able to stream music and whatever. We need to get that process 100% squared away. The metric for that is going to be the mom test. If my mom can set it up then then we're good. So with that, Derek may remember a very painful video when we were originally starting to ship the mark one where the device failed the mom test in a very spectacular way. So anyway, so we're getting all that stuff done. What's that? That makes me think it exploded. No, she just she, you know, went through the whole process and it'll be like a 15 minute video at the end of it she put it in the box put it back in the box set it in the table and said I can't make this work and walked away. Right. And, you know, that's definitely not the experience we want for our end users. You know, my mom's not non technical she's just, you know, expects things she uses Apple products let's put it that way. And she expects me to debug them, which I refuse to do. Okay. I wrote a script that converted documents from PDF to TIF and then back to PDF, remove metadata that that turned out to not have been the best use of my time. The other thing we came up with, which we talked about in the beginning of the call was starting to think about how we can reuse the mark one molds to go ahead and ship a mark, an update of the mark one later in the year. So we're having some conversations about that. Derek once this thing's fully nailed down from from your perspective. We need so Michael and I had a conversation today and it seems like sending these multiple China might not be the best, the wisest course of action for us so we need to get together here really quickly get on the phone with zero tolerance and start the mold making process for the mark two. So we need to pin down we need to pin down the design and be done with it and we need to get the 3D drawings off to Steve so that he can start making mold so we can start shipping in March. Finally, I've done some work. I'm writing a plan which we'll probably talk about at the marketing meeting related to how we, we tie in some promotional stuff to fund the patent suit with the delivery mechanism of the mark to and how we start queuing up people to ship the mark to, you know, we're, we're only going to be able to produce this at a certain rate, we, you know, obviously we want backers to get those units first. By the same token, we have had some very significant financial challenges show up that make it a lot harder for us to do that like paying patent attorneys hundreds of thousands of dollars turns out to be expensive. So, you know, we're looking to work with the community to help us to fund that and to provide some perks for people who are willing to kind of go to the back of the line for delivery or are willing to step up and and jump to the front of the line by by taking some additional products. So, we're having conversations about that. The goal is obviously to deliver our backers exactly what they paid for, even though it's a little late and ideally something that's better than what they paid for. So that's what we're aiming towards. However, you know, the financial reality on the ground is that we ran into some time controls that have burned a substantial amount of money. So that's me. Okay, well, thanks. Good update. And seems like everything's, you know, moving forward at least. I don't have much of an update from Kevin. We were going to touch base later today about the sj 201 production. So I'll hopefully have some actual information about that tomorrow. So that's it for me. Anything else that people want to bring up. Yeah, I wanted to say that kind of in line with what guest said about the blue systems update. I had a response several response we went back and forth live on that. One of my responses was an idea that I think I'd like for you all to kind of look at that about how we deal with device skills and maybe make them less device specific. Going forward. So just, you know, as you're reading through Gaza stuff read through that and provide me feedback. Okay, sounds good. We'll do. All right, anything else. All right. Okay, thanks everybody until tomorrow.


Everybody's heard the news about Colony Collapse Disorder and other problems that bees are facing across North America and really the world. And so the Institute has been doing a bee breeding project for three, four years now. And so we're out in our bee yard doing a field recording for this week's podcast. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome to podcast number 55 on September 16th, 2022, coming to you out of the Lotech Institute's apiary. That is our bee yard. This will be a little different today. We are out here in the hives. Hopefully you can hear us clearly. For those of you watching on YouTube, you can see this. For those of you listening to the audio only, you can head on over to YouTube if you want to see this one. But today I'll be interviewing my co-conspirator, just kidding, not really conspiracy. My friend Paul Zolinsky, who has been working with me to manage the hives we have here on the Agri-Cole campus. Agri-Cole is a prairie seed company and they pay us to have our bees here to help pollinate their crops. Thanks for listening to our podcast. As you know, many podcast providers put ads on podcasts. If you hear someone else doing the ad, then we're not getting paid for it. So if you want to support the work we do, which we will continue to leave as free and available to the public. But if you want to support what we do, head on over to patreon.com slash lotech institute and feel free to sign up as a supporter for as little as $3 a month. We really do appreciate everyone who joins up and how much help both monetarily and also mentally to have the support out there is a big help. Please head on over to patreon.com slash low tech institute and sign up. And don't forget to follow us on the social medias. Our Twitter is at low underscore Techno. Our Instagram is low tech Institute. We're on Facebook under the same name. We're on YouTube. You can reach us at our website, lowtechinstitute.org. And you can send me an email. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Now on with the interview and our discussion about bees and the project that we're doing out here at the in theory. All right. So I am here with Paul Zalinsky, my partner in crime for our bee breeding project out here at agricultural. So how long have you been beekeeping and what got you into it? Probably 10 or a dozen years. And they just seem cool. I guess when I was a kid, my dad had bees for a while before he decided keeping bees and teaching both of the had you busy in the spring and the fall. So it didn't last for too long, but they were always fun. So as soon as we got some space, I decided to get some bees and I had a couple hives and then a couple more. And they just kept living and making more hives until I had a ton of them. Well, briefly, you were almost going to go into the meat business and was. So yeah, I work at the DMV, but I didn't really like working in a cubicle. You didn't like working at the DMV. I know. Weird. Everyone likes working at the DMV. They're go all our DMV listeners. Right. It's already DMV people know, but yeah, cubicles, not much fun. So I was going to open a metery, but the amount of initial investment to open a metery and get licensing and facilities and labeling and all of that in place before you can actually make any money is daunting. And I did not have that much investment. So you can keep the bees without much investment and then just sort of put the money back in every year and kind of grow a little bit at a time. And eventually, you know, you'll have enough honey to make some meat, right? In theory, how much meat have you made so far? I've made a lot of meat. Oh, OK. I haven't sold any meat. I've made a lot of meat selling alcohol in the United States. Tough. Exactly. All right. And so what brings us out here today? What are we doing? Well, kind of just a routine fall checkup. Make sure everybody's looking good, getting ready for winter. Not much time left before winter in Wisconsin. And winter here, for my opinion, starts once the last thing is done blooming, which in Wisconsin is the Astor, pretty much the Golden on the Astor. Both of those are blooming now. So we've probably only got a little bit left before it gets. There's nothing blooming and it gets too cold for the bees to do much of anything. Yep. The other thing is, as everybody's probably heard, mites are the real big problem for bees these days. And this project was trying to breed mite resistant, mite tolerant treatment free bees. And we've been pretty unsuccessful with that. So as sort of a comparison this year, we're going to try to treat some bees and hopefully that'll go a little bit better. So we can back up a little bit and talk. So what's a mite?   But these are particularly Varroa mite, Varroa destructor. And they best name of all the mites. Right. It's definitely a good name, bad mite, good name. But they came from the Asian honeybees and they infest the Asian honeybees. But there they live in balance with the bees because the Asian honeybees are smaller and have a shorter brood cycle. So the only bees that they can reproduce on are the drone. And so the drones, if you, you know, harm the drones, it doesn't really harm the hive all that much. And so they live in balance with those bees. These bees, they've also been exposed to them for 100 years. They evolved together to have a balance thing. And then, of course, you know, in all our wisdom, we decided let's take European honeybees to Asia because, you know, they'll make more honey, blah, blah, blah. They got infected with these mites. These bees are bigger, have a longer brood cycle. And so they can infest all of the worker bees. And so they have no real control to their population. And they just get to the point that they will be so numerous that they kill. So we have to treat them with something that kills mites, but not bees, which is hard because, you know, putting insect killer in a box full of insects is a risky proposition. Well, I was saying earlier, it's kind of like a chemotherapy where you're trying to kill bad cells. You incidentally kill other cells or make the host also sick. So this is one of our yards. Our other yard we're not treating. And we have fancy, bought in queens that have the genetics that are supposed to be tolerant of or suppress the mites. And so we are going to let them ride the winter out and those survivors then will be split and we'll take the queens and kill them from here and use these bees as expansions for those other types is the hope, at least. We'll see a plan. That's yeah. So these will be treated, but we won't bring these genetics on. Because basically by treating, we're allowing all genetics through the genetic Olympics. And you only really want to take the metal winners that can do well without treatment. And those are really hard to find. But yeah, you ruin natural selection if you don't let nature select, which is probably why the Asian honey bees at the time a hundred years ago before they could put chemicals on, you know, they probably had a crash before they well, these are adapted, you know, wild honey bees. Oh, the Asians, the Asian honey bees. So they've evolved for who knows how many, you know, centuries together. I see. OK. So we were here a couple of weeks ago and we looked at all the different hives and we made notes on what we need to do to each one. This one's a little bit or it's not that weak, no, but it's weaker than its part than its neighbors. So we may end up giving it some honey, some boxes full of honey, just to give it that much more to eat during the winter. We don't usually have the problem of our bees dying for lack of honey. We usually have bees that die probably because of mites. We've had incredibly bad luck the last three years. Each year we've had pretty much a hundred year 100 percent die off because probably because of the mites, which is insane. It's quite a lot. So there are there are people who keep bees and supposedly try to be treatment free. So we were trying to replicate some of the studies that have been shown where if you have an isolated enough location, Gotland, Sweden is the the most right famous one. You'll lose most of all your bees. So 90 percent of your bees are so the first year. But then over time, the bees will there's a couple of different mechanisms that they can use to keep the mites under control and survive with the mites. And so you select for that. So we were trying to replicate that, but we used American commercial bees and doesn't really seem like our bees have what it takes to live without mites sort of within their genetics. So selecting for something that they don't have can be a difficult proposition. Right. So that's our theory anyway. So hopefully if we, you know, get some of these bees that people have been working with and already starting that journey more specifically rather than through natural selection, we've kind of done it with measuring mites loads, measuring for some of the behavior is some of the bees will actually sense the mites in the cells with with the young bees and they'll pull those out, killing the young bee in the process. But getting rid of the mites so that they can't reproduce. And that's called hygienic behavior. So some people will freeze a patch of brood and watch how quickly the bees clean that out or different things like that so that they're manually selecting for what nature would select for. But in a much more specific approach and they're actually selecting for the mechanism of being mite tolerant rather than the overall outcome of being mite tolerant. So our theory is if we maybe start with some of those queens.  Those have started down that path. So the place we got those treats less than half of his hives here. He measures the mites loads and the ones that are, you know, keeping up with the mites and he doesn't treat the ones that need some treatments. He does. So he's sort of selectively breeding, but much more purposefully. He's artificially inseminating. And he is artificially inseminating. One of the things that differentiates bees from, say, I don't know, cows. We're in Wisconsin. Well, let's use milk cows as an example. You know, if you have three heifers that give milk and one of them gives better milk, you're going to choose to breed that one up to help, you know, be the future of your herd. You're going to pick the bull. That's the nicest and biggest and, you know, all the best things you want in a bowl.  And there's going to be one bull responsible for all of the offspring. Bee queens, when they emerge and they're young, queen bees, unmated, they will fly out of the hive and go to what are called drone congregation areas, which we don't quite know how they know where they are. But all the bees in the area know where these drone congregations are. All the drones, the male bees will hang out there in the afternoon and the queens will go out and they will mate with 15 to 20 drones. And that will give her all of the sperm that she needs for her entire life. I mean, hundreds of thousands of bees. And so you can't really control unless you're doing artificial insemination. You can't really control what genetics are there unless you flood the marketplace, which is one of the things we tried to do. We tried to have so many hives with our own genetics that it would just, you know, they'd be mating with our own drones, but we just haven't had anything to start having any survival to encourage. So this year, like I said, we are going to modify that a bit. Yeah. And unfortunately, unlike, say, in Wales, where they've done this, where basically all the beekeepers in an area of Wales have banded together and said, we will not treat, we will not bring in outside bees. And they've created, you know, largely might tolerant bees in a region, but it's taken a coordinated effort of everybody working together. And we just don't have that here because in America, the bees are migratory. Enough bees are migratory. That means they go out to Florida and a big one, California for the almond pollination and things like that. It's basically like STDs. They're going out to clubs and being promiscuous, right? And so they are spreading the commercial beekeepers are not breeding for the same things that the recreational beekeepers. No, they they want their bees to be big and prolific in February when the almonds bloom right in Wisconsin, February's, you know, our coldest month. So yeah, they're just looking for different things. So they're selecting for bees that serve the purpose that they need served, which is producing honey, which is producing honey and or producing bees ready for pollination at a time that we aren't really ready for. And they winter their bees in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia. So they don't need bees that are ready to, you know, tolerate the winters that we need our bees to tolerate. They also treat their bees, you know, six times a year. They're constantly keeping the mites under control through these artificial means, which, you know, works for them. And they're making money and doing things. But, you know, you can buy honey at the grocery store for less than, you know, $20 a pound because this is it's industrial beekeeping. But those same genetics, then, are what the packages that people buy when you're starting bees, what we purchase to try to start this experiment are those bees and those bees, you know, aren't made to do what we're trying to make them do. I think last I heard one of the major package producers in this area is bringing in 80,000 packages a year. That's a lot of bees. Let's try to, you know, breed with our specific genetics that we're looking for. They're going to get drowned out by that, unless you can have a specific location where you are controlling the drone, which is our hope here, is that we would surround the area with hides with the drones that we prefer. Right. And then mate our queens in the center of that so that we could keep that selection going. And like we said, just for those that aren't beekeepers, drones, again, are males. They have no purpose in life other than mating with the queen. And then most of the bees that you'd encounter are worker bees, which are females, but do not mate. Let's not get into too many beekeepers listening. You know that there are laying workers, but we're not going to get into that. This isn't necessarily about how to beekeep. There's lots of great videos and podcasts about that. We're just kind of introducing this project that we're working on. So basically we're trying to do an artificial selection to help with, you know, put a finger on the scale of natural selection. But so far we've had such garbage genetics, excuse my French at the technical term, garbage genetics going in that we just haven't had success isolating anything of any use. And so now we're actually going to be treating the chemical derived from time that helps suppress or kill even the mite. So yeah, so this should be killing the mites. It's thymol, which when mites first showed up, people quickly jumped out and started using a bunch of harsh chemicals, different, you know, poisons, compounds, things like that to treat for the mites. Yeah, good success for quite some time. But in time, the mites became resistant to those in time. Give it time. They also, those chemicals tend to build up in the wax and they can sterilize the queen, sterilize the drone. They have all sorts of poor consequences as well as just, you know, commercial agriculture, huge corporations, dangerous chemicals into the environment, things like that. So we're trying a more natural approach as best we can. So we're using a product called Apagard that has thymol as the main ingredient. Thymol is just an extract from the thyme plant, which we all enjoy eating. It's also the main ingredient, the active ingredient in the listerine mouthwash. So overall, it tends to be a relatively sort of gentle, safe, natural chemical. There's a couple others, formic acid, oxalic acid, things like that. Those are the ones we tend to produce.  Are they using lactic now? Yeah, lactic acid, I've heard. And so there's basically in treatment, right? Think of the Dow, Dow better living through chemistry. So yeah, they're started out with very harsh chemicals and they still have hard chemicals. They're still available, but they're just nasty. So we're using more soft chemicals. And one nice thing you can do is combine this with behavioral things like perhaps basically the mites don't feast on the bees themselves. They feast on the larvae. And so a mite will more or less. Well, there's still bees. They're just they're still bees. They're baby bees. OK, they so they infest the cell right before it gets capped. So short term be life cycle. The bees have a larvae for it's like a little maggot for, you know, a week. Then they cap it over in the cell of the comb. They put a little wax cover on and it goes through a full metamorphosis, just like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It turns from this maggot into a bee. And while it's doing that transition as a pupa, the mites then infest those cells. They jump in there right before it's capped. The female might she then lays mags and produces some young and they feast on that bee while it's transforming. So basically they eat bee babies. If you want to really just like this, you might say that they eat bee babies. There you go. But when they when they eat, it's like a tick. And based on the body size, it'd be like having, I don't know, a basketball size tick on the side of a dinner plate. Yeah. On us. Yeah.  And so the the bees that are born are weak. They're smaller. They're more susceptible to diseases that can be spread by the ticks. So during the year, if you look up online, how long is a bee live? Usually on Google, you'll see something like 45 days. But that's not true of a lot of the bees that you're looking at in theory. If you're on YouTube, the bees that you see here, some of these are probably already getting close to winter bees. And winter bees have to survive, what, 120 days? Oh, long. A half a year. So so the bees actually in the fall, they know fall is coming and they produce what Scott said, winter bees. They're specific bees that are fatter, larger and more available to live a longer time through winter. And those bees don't take care of brood themselves. They don't fly out in forage. They just get ready for winter. And then those bees will hunker down the cluster up and they have to live through most of the winter. The bees don't start producing brood until March, February, something like that. So these bees need to live months and months instead of the four to six weeks that a normal bee would live. So if those bees get damaged by the mites, which happens to be when the mites population is peaking as the bee population starts to shrink down before winter, the mite population continues to skyrocket. So those bees get damaged more than any of the other bees and they just simply don't have the strength to live through the entire winter. And that's why people's hives will crash in the fall if the mites levels get too high or often in the early spring, just because those bees are too weak to make it through all the way until spring. Well, and if you think about that, that's another reason that they crash in the fall is you have kind of non complementary population curves. Basically in the spring, the bees are incredibly busy building up the largest population they can possibly do in the spring and early summer. And so their population peaks in the summer when there's lots for them to do. The mites, on the other hand, there's just a few that survive the winter.  But it's really more like one becomes seven becomes 40 and so on. Anyway, so they're building up more on a logarithmic scale. And so as the bees cool down and start producing less brood, the mites have been expanding and continue to expand into the fall. So you get to a point where the mites outpace. So you kind of see, like a lot of people show the graph, there's kind of this like curve, like a bell curve of bee population. But then there's just a line for the mites. So the mites keep going up and up and up and up and they don't want to slow down. But the bees do. And so that's where you you suddenly get these crashes and people say, oh, the bees crash, why is that? And it's because the mites per bee just skyrocket because the mites continue on their same trajectory they've been on, but the bees start slowing down. Right. So we're lucky we're still able to work without bee suits right now. We are debating whether or not we'd have to put on suits because throughout the summer, the bees don't necessarily mind us mucking around in their hives. But in the fall, it kind of becomes an all out race for resources. The bees are packing in as much honey as they can so that they can live through the winter.  All you can and then suddenly there's nothing to do. So you've got all of these worker bees that had been working hard, collecting stuff. And then they're kind of expend expendable because, as we said, they only live four to six weeks. So they know when fall comes around that they really don't have much use left. Right. So if they find a hive full of honey, they'll try to go steal it. Right. Even if, you know, they might lose their life in the process. They know that the the honey resources that they might be able to bring back are worth more to the hive than their own life. And so they're willing to go rob other hives. And so then the hives obviously need to be defensive to, you know, keep their resources for themselves. And so they get a little more defensive with us as well. Well, it's kind of a selection pressure too. They'll rob out the weak hives, which may not have made it or less likely to make it through the winter anyway, in theory. So they are basically taking the resources of the week to make sure that they're strong enough to make it through the winter, which is a bit of a selection pressure, but it's not just bees. I've seen a dozen yellowjackets so far landing in the open top of the hive because this open top of the hive can't be protected like the mouth. In the mouth of the hive or the main entrance, they have guard bees that will smell each bee coming in. And if it doesn't smell like family member, they will fight it or kill it or try to. But when the top's open, basically like having your back door left open, we just rip the roof off of their house. And they didn't have, you know, a security system in place to protect the roof of their house. So we're going to make some noise. So basically, if you're not watching this, Paul is taking a box full of bees and slamming it onto another empty box to get all the bees out, you know, as one does, as one does. And here we are talking about how lucky we are not to have to wear veils. So one of the things that bees do in the fall, coming back to what I was saying is they get fussy and they get a little say defensive defensive. Yeah, because they're trying to protect all of these calories that they've stored up. And here we are digging through them. We could be a bear for all they know. Luckily, bears don't have smoke. No, bears do not have smokers. Funnily enough, the a camera, like the camera that's shooting this video right now, looks like a bear snout. And if you put a camera, a DSLR right in the in the mouth of a hive, they will go right after it. It's amazing how how imprinted that form is in their subconscious or their garden subconscious. Yeah, oh, yeah, they will go right after that. So yeah, as you can see, if you're on YouTube and I'll describe it to you, if you're not, our hives are a motley crew of donated, built and purchased hive equipment because, you know, the first year we started was the beginning of the pandemic and we didn't know what was happening with funding or anything like that. So we've had a long and strange trip. Luckily, we should say thanks to the Blooming Prairie Foundation for giving us an initial grant to work on this that we were able to stretch out for a couple of years because of the pandemic, not making it possible for us to share what we were doing with people in person. This year, we've been lucky to have volunteers and others come out and help us and we get to teach them a little bit about keeping bees. And also they get to help us with a little bit of elbow grease, which has been part of our our goal is education. And we had talked about a wish that we could have a method that worked well for just, you know, run of the mill kind of mutt bees that you could buy anywhere in the U.S. in the spring and have a method for backyard beekeepers to encourage the selection that we need to have bees become resistant to these or tolerant of these mites. But yeah, as Paul said a little earlier, it seems like the genetic diversity is so muddled in the United States that we don't have what they have in Europe where they have local bees that stay local. As far as I know, they don't have migratory or at least not to the same level, the migratory bees in Europe. But yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, right in. Let me know. But it just seems like they have also saw some study about the genetic diversity of bees over the decades. And it's actually pretty interesting. It's gone down. Our genetic diversity has shrunk dramatically. Well, that's a shame because genetic diversity is kind of like the Darwinian way that we have a better chance of surviving. Right? Every population, every trade of every population exists on a bell curve or some sort of curve that's similar to a bell curve or maybe a little different, but mostly a bell curve, let's say. And, you know, most of the animals exist in the fat part of the bell curve because that's what works well in that environment. When that environment changes, the bees at the edge of that bell curve that are more diverse and maybe unusual today, but they'll actually be important for us tomorrow because we'll need some weird trait that they have. And with the bees, if they're all the same, if they all share this genetic material because they're going to California and breeding over and over amongst one another and being promiscuous, it's really makes it difficult. So for those who are watching, this is kind of a way to like do cheater quick inspections. If you just kind of tip up the boxes instead of lifting them off, you can see. And during the spring, summer stuff, you can check for queen cells on the bottom. Sure. You can from the bottom, you can kind of see up along the frames to see what kind of brood that you have and things like that too. So it's not a good thorough inspection, but it gives you kind of a quick idea. Didn't need any. All right. Yeah. I need our veils after all. That's sting number two. Oh, that's sting number one. Sting number one, well, that's good. But it's on my face. So this is why you should always wear veils. Do not follow our. Yeah. Exactly. I have no actual pharmacological knowledge to take this for what it's worth. But for me, I know when I take a Zirtec, I barely react to a bee sting. But when I don't, I swell a bit. Again, that you use that at your own risk. God's prescribing medication. We are not funded by Zirtec, although if someone from Zirtec's listening and you want to fund us, let me know back to why you're here. So if if you want to learn more about what we're doing, you can go to our website, lowtechinstitute.org, slash research. And there you will find one of our research projects. I think it's number two or three is called the brood project. Something like that on that page. Have a read there of all the different posts and publications that we've had about this. You can get some of the see some of the data that we're dealing with if you're interested. We'll also have other videos on our YouTube page showing you how to install, for example, a package of bees, which is a screened in box full of three pounds of bees and a queen. So that's kind of fun. We'll probably have some videos about splitting and other things at some point, but not right now. So yeah, definitely have a look around our website and our YouTube page to find out more about our bee work. Also says thanks to Paul for letting me bother him as he's trying to work here in the hives, asking him questions about what we've been doing. And hopefully we'll have more updates next year where we can talk about the survival of some of our bees here and how we're trying to split them out and make them more tolerant to Varroa mites, which again, it's one of the leading causes of much more fun to talk about the survival of your bees than the death. Well, it really is just an indictment of industrial beekeeping. The fact that we can't get any survivors. I mean, that's that or your beekeeping. But that can't I mean, you'd still have if you have 60 hives in theory, barring anything else, even a poor beekeeper should keep a couple of them alive. I've had just a couple of hives that I've been able to keep alive for years. So it's frustrating. I say if we couldn't keep any hives alive, then that would be telling. But since both of us seem to be successful keeping other bees alive, right? So it's got to be less likely that that's the cause. The one variable was treatment. So that's got that's got to be the driving factor here. So anyway, thanks for joining us on this slightly unusual podcast episode where we are out in the field. If this is popular thing, maybe we'll do more because we have lots of interesting projects going on around the Institute. We can talk about those. Maybe we'll do more field reporting if that's interesting. The Logitech podcast is currently put out, produced and hosted by me, Scott Johnson, our editor who's had to do extra work this week for the random footage that I brought in is Hina Suzuki. Our music is not yet determined, so that'll be in the show notes. Check that out for hearing about with the music that you're hearing now, probably in the background is. Again, don't forget to check us out and support us patreon.com slash logitech Institute or you can visit our website and find other ways to support us, become a member, things like that. Thanks to our Forrester and Land Steward level patrons and supporters, we hope to have a couple member events coming up. Actually, in two weeks we'll be out at the Apple Orchard with our members, picking apples and then making cider. If you're interested in joining us for that member event, now is the time to sign up. So thanks again for watching, until next time.


Marco Silva has been speaking after Everns 3 won the fee yesterday at Bournemouth and says quite simply we have to do better. He said we give Bournemouth easy goals, they didn't have to work for the goals after we were dominating the game. He said we have to become solid again. The team towards the end of last season started this season at 10 clean sheets in 13 games. We created chances and should have scored more but when you defend like that you're not going to win again. And he's right, he says it's a lack of focus. We addressed these types of things last season, we were solid at the start of the season and we need to address them again. And the frustration with that is obviously we could have moved up the table, we could have got ourselves into the top three but started to build some momentum. And you know we were poor last time out against Aston Villa and we followed it up in this one by being poor again. He said we told the players before the game that it was an important game, we could make a statement and we've gone out and made those mistakes. And that's the thing isn't it, we're talking about ambition, we're talking about trying to get in the top six, top four. Eventually you can't give goals away the way we did like this yesterday and the manager has to address it. Our away form is so bad, six wins of the last 41 away games tells its own story and Everton have to address this quickly otherwise you know the manager and the team aren't going to progress, it's as simple as that. Morgan Snidlin was speaking also after the game, he said everyone can see that we are smoothing forward but the next step like the manager has said to us and we can see as well is that you need to learn quickly from small mistakes. We cannot concede three goals against Bournemouth, it's not possible to do that and win a game with the number of chances and half chances we have. It's frustrating but we need to move forward quickly and learn. We have something good to do this season but if we keep losing games like this and not learning from it, it'll be hard to move up the table. That is it, this season probably more than ever. Those may be the top four now but certainly the top six is open because there's a lot of teams in flux, we're one of them but if we can get the right system and start winning these away games then who knows how high we can finish but one thing's for sure but if we, unless we improve our away form and stop giving away cheap goals, we're not going to be going anywhere other than staying around 8th or 9th and that's not going to be good enough for Farab Mishiri and it's going to put, I guess it's going to put Marko Silva under pressure which is not something that we want. Jank Towson is willing to leave Everton in January apparently according to Turkish media if his situation at Everton doesn't change. He scored a couple of goals in the week for Turkey and had an assist and was left out of the 18 for Bournemouth which is a bit of a mad one, a lot of people surprised with that. Listen, Jank in a week when he scored goals and played well I think it would have made sense to have him on the bench but the manager for some reason has made that decision, he'll call it a technical reason but you know, I don't know, I think you should always have a couple of strikers on your bench just to see if you can mix it up and obviously Moise Keane can play wide as well or you could go through the middle but he wasn't in the 18 and you know, this is Tom Davis suffered this fate the other week and he was back in the 18 but you know obviously it's how long, much longer is Jank going to put up with not getting a game and not even getting in the 18, that's quite worrying I think for him so he's obviously going to be monitoring this situation and see how that goes and in January if he gets the opportunity I'm sure he'll move on. Finally Stephen Pinar has completed his UEFA A licence, he's got his presentation from the Irish FA, he is of course an ambassador but has coaching courses for children back home in South Africa as well as Holland and you know, we now become, we've got our tether, we've got kale with his coaching bards, now we've got Pinar maybe in the future someone's getting a ban back together, who knows. That is it for today, make sure you subscribe, make sure you give this video a thumbs up and if you want to get more videos join us over on Patreon. See you later.


Have you ever bought a product from the drugstore or high-end? I don't care where it is just any product skin care makeup and Immediately used it and gone. This is for me. This was made for me. This is what I want to use forever I love this stuff and then as you got to use it You knew that you had made that right call right off the bat That's what we're bringing you today is things that we fell in love with the first time we use it Love at first use. I'm really excited to be able to be doing this video with you today because a very very Fun youtuber and beautiful youtuber here is Collaborating with me Mandy Lee if you guys have not seen this gal. I am telling you She is absolutely gorgeous and just to watch her is an absolute joy The looks that she creates she does seven looks one palette a lot and the looks that she creates are just gorgeous she has this gorgeous hair that is naturally curly and It's so full and thick and I just get so jealous watching her with that beautiful beautiful hair But she just seems to have so much class and she has just this air about her of being very comfortable on the camera Which I think is just a really great thing and she does all kinds of videos She does reviews and she does all kinds of tutorials like I said And I just fell in love with her like from the very first video I watched of her and then I was binge watching her so go over and please show Mandy some love and tell her that I sent you I'm really excited to be doing this with her And I can't wait to see what her five products are because we haven't even talked about it yet We just kind of let's roll with the flow and see what they are Maybe a couple of them might be the same so let's get into the five products that I fell in love with at first You so the first product that I'm gonna talk about is a higher-end product Mel Thompson talked about this on her channel I don't know whether it was in her Monthly favorites in December or if it was in her yearly favorites And it is this Becca highlighter and this one is let's see This is called pure pearl and I kind of I like Becca's highlighters But I'm the kind of person that doesn't like rush out and buy everything that she has new Because at times her highlighters can get a little bit textured on me. They just seem a little bit too much This one is not that way you guys. This is a really finely milled pearl color On kind of on the pinky pearl, but at the same time when you get it on it Just looks more of like a glassy pearl color and it doesn't have like too much So it's not like bam in your face disco ball or anything like that It just has this really nice sheen and I find that as I use it on my cheeks I'm absolutely in love with it So I was just gonna just put a little bit more on my cheeks for you guys So you can see I do have a little bit on but I just wanted you to see how that does and how that can you see What a beautiful sheen that gives you it's not like okay. I've got a lot of highlighter on It's just like this glow and oh my goodness. It is just gorgeous So that's the first one that I got that I thought oh my goodness Mel hit it spot on and I have just been reaching for it over and over again And I felt completely in love with it The next thing I'm happy to say is one that I actually just came across on Ulta's website in their new Arrivals and I immediately bought it because I thought okay. This is a mini. It's only 13 dollars and The minute I used it I knew that I was gonna end up throwing out almost all of my other eye shadow primers And that is the Anastasia Beverly Hills Eyeshadow primer and I'm telling you guys this fits the bill for so many things now This tube is $13 so that may seem like a lot as far as you know when we're looking at drugstore But I've had this tube ever since it was released what was a release like six months ago Maybe and I'm not even like halfway through and I do my eye makeup every day especially since I've been doing more and more videos and I want to tell you that that much Hopefully you can see there's a teeny tiny dot of that on my finger and that much is gonna go across your lid It's gonna cancel out any discoloration you have on your lid And it's just gonna give you a great canvas to start working with but The best part of this for me is that that grips your eye shadow so well Drives down very very quickly so it's not like super tacky You know sometimes you can get that when you're working with eye shadow primers You get where you almost need a powder on top of it and then start your eye shadow for me I want my eye shadow to grip onto that eye primer so that it stays all day So that I don't have to put an extra one in there And this is the one that does it and I knew from the very first time that I used it that it was going to be a Winter winter chicken dinner and I was going to be somebody that was purchasing it over and over again My second product that I fell in love with the very first time I actually fell in love with it when I got it out of the box and that was this huge elf powder brush And mine is obviously well used I use this for the dusting of the finishing powder across my face and it mine my powder is a little bit pink So that's why it looks like that. But anyway, um, this is super soft just hyper soft you guys It's 12 dollars and it's worth every penny of it. I got mine at walmart And it will you can just take a little bit, you know pick up a little bit of that powder Whether you're doing highlighting bronzing whatever you're doing Dust it across your hand and it's so light and airy that you're not taking too much off But at the same time you're not going to get like patchiness on your cheeks or anything And just dusting that across everywhere. So this was one that I I picked it up the day I picked it up I started using it I use it every time I do my makeup and that's not an exaggeration every time I do my makeup this brush comes out So I love this thing the next thing you guys are going to feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but I cannot live without this eye cream. This is the suko yaka suhara Eye cream and it's the urea eye cream and I have talked about it in my yearly favorites I talk about it in every skincare video. I do I talk about it With anybody that talks to me about crepey under eyes if I'm doing a tutorial on concealer This product is going to be talked about and it is because of how emollient it is And how fantastic it feels on my under eyes. I have extremely dry crepey under eyes I have deep deep wrinkles from laughing and squinting and all of that Stuff that we get as we get older But this is amazing and if my eyes are the tiny this bit sensitive where they're feeling like Okay, maybe I have washed them a little bit too aggressively or had to be a little bit aggressive because I had eye makeup on that wasn't coming off And then, you know, my it gets red blah blah blah.  I really slathered this on at night And the other thing is is that urea has a little bit of a property of being able to exfoliate And so it does it in such an extremely gentle way that being able to put it up underneath your eyes is just a Bonus because you know, we can't really put anything underneath our eyes to exfoliate But we need that tiny bit of turnover Underneath our eyes in order for our eyes to look younger and more youthful So I know I've talked about it over and over again And I say this every time if it ain't broke don't fix it This is my holy grail eye cream and I will not be without it like on my fifth sixth seventh tube something like that Love that stuff and I will never ever stray away from it So the next thing we're going to talk about is from Sephora the Sephora collection And these are the rouge gel lip liners And when I first got these I was like, okay, but this isn't a lip liner that's going to stay and I was a little bit Like I love the creaminess of it But at the same time I'm not crazy about that It's you know more of a lipstick like product But then I'm like tried them a couple of times and I was just like these are so nice So the first one that I'm going to show you My eyes are so bad you guys. Okay. The first one I'm going to show you is wild at heart And that is that one right there. Can you see how creamy those go on? They are the most creamy Lip liners I think I've ever ever tried and then this one is called bell flower Of course, this one's going to be my favorite because it has that little bit of lavender in it I'll tell you that if you go in with wild at heart first around the outer part of your lips And then bell flower on the inner part you have just this gorgeous Um, you know multi dimensional look on your lips that is so pretty And then this one right here is rum raisin rum raisin is one that I wear all the time because it's just like The color that's right in the sweet spot sweet spot between pink And um a little bit of red in there just so gorgeous It's so pretty. So if I want a little bit more dramatic look That's the one that I line my lips with and these go so good with any Lip products that you have like like today I have on just a lip gloss and a little bit of rum raisin underneath And I can't talk while I do that But it just turned out so pretty because I didn't have to do more because they blend so well With what other whatever other product you're using and then the last one I have to show you is called hot sauce And this is not hot sauce color. This is more along the lines of a kind of a muted Chocolate brown color and it goes so good with nudes. It's just a beautiful color So I would suggest that if there's a color that you love they have a Just a butt ton of colors you guys So there's a color that you really like and you want to try go into sofora swatch them See which one and you can also see the texture then I just I think that's what draws me into him Is the texture is that I don't feel like I ever get a lot of dryness on my lips and I just absolutely love them I think they're so pretty so that rounds out my five that I fell in love with the very first time that I used them And the reason that I have four of these is because I fell in love with bill flower the very first time I used it and I knew I was going to want more of them And I love all the colors that I've gotten and I've used so far So do you guys have items like this that you just fell in love with immediately because if there is something like that Is that special to you I want to hear about it And I make sure that I always read all of those and I'm always really interested to look at those So thank you so much for any recommend recommendations that you may give me beforehand I appreciate you all spending some time with me today and please don't forget to go see Mandy She's an up-and-coming and I'm telling you guys and you know, she is just a special special person And fortunately she lives here in Utah. She lives a couple hours away from me But we are hoping that we can do a meet-up sometime and we could do maybe a little together Where we're together collab type thing which we've talked about and we would love to do that for you guys That would be so much fun So I hope that you all are having an amazing day if you did like the video Please don't forget to give it a thumbs up Consider subscribing if you're not already I would really appreciate that and love to have you a part of our family So take care of yourselves. Love you much and I'll see you all in my next video.


Honeybees literally have 300 taste buds on the tip of their antennae to distinguish between the flowers which they taste. To know about the ecological importance of this amazing species, watch this video. The first importance is that these honeybees ensures biodiversity in the area in which they inhabit. We all know that one of the important roles played by honeybees is pollination. As pollinators, bees play an important part in every aspect of the ecosystem. They support the growth of trees, flowers and other plants. In turn, trees, flowers and plants serve as food and shelter for other creatures. So through pollination, the honeybees contribute to the existence of our interconnected ecosystems and allow a diverse number of different species to coexist. Through this, the bees helps in ensuring biodiversity. Now coming to the second important function of the honeybees. The produce of honeybees that is honey act as a food source for other animals. See bees produce honey to feed their colonies during the cold winter months. The honey produced by the bees is also used by other animals as their food source. Bees themselves are also a part of the larger food chain of the forest ecosystem. At least 24 species of birds including the blackbird, hummingbird and starling prey on bees. Many spiders and insects like dragonflies and preying mantises eat bees as well. So the existence of bees is necessary for the survival of the forest food chain. Now coming to the third important function of the honeybees in the ecosystem. Honeybees helps in conserving indigenous trees. Remember note that bees produce good quality honey when they collect pollen from a variety of flora. So to collect pollen from different types of trees and plants, they do a lot of work. Due to this, they help in the pollination of indigenous trees and indirectly help in their conservation. All these source that without honeybees or forests will not be diverse or gardens will be bare and habitats of birds and animals will decline. So ultimately conserving honeybees is important for the survival of us humans. Take a look at this article. As the name suggests, it's about the discovery of a new honeybee species in the western gods region. The honeybee species is named apis carinodian. It is given the common name the indian black honeybee. This species of honeybee got evolved from apis kerana or the asian honeybee. The bee got acclimated to the hot and humid environment of the western gods and evolved into a separate subspecies. To watch content like this, please subscribe to Shankarae's Academy's YouTube channel.