Episode-2023- Charlie Mohr on Hole Nesting Bees for Pollination
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The Summer Leaf Cutter Bee, A Bee You Can Raise this Year on Your Property
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Charlie Mohr is part of a Washington State business called Crown Bees that opened their doors in 2008. Their mission is to provide more food for the world using hole-nesting gentle bees.
Crown Bees supplies native bees, products, and great education through an online website and hundreds of nurseries across the US and Canada.
One of their key features is that they care about what they sell. They send out a monthly BeeMail newsletter telling their readers exactly what to do and expect each month for raising hole-nesting bees.
Today we discuss how you can raise hole nesting bees on your property to improve bio diversity and pollination with as little as 45 minutes to one hour of work per year, yes YEAR on your own property.
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Comment on the bamboo- I live in Kentucky, and there are large patches of native bamboo all around this area. Called River Cane (apparently they’ve recently decided that there’s also a distinct different version called Hill Cane) Arundinaria gigantea, and it can get to around 30 feet tall, in good conditions.
If using native bamboo, I have one observation- they shrink a bit when cut, and if you cut them into the individual sections as you would for creating bee habitat, then you want to do that AFTER they’ve dried- do it before, and the open end will shrink and deform SEVERELY. Had a few almost close entirely.
Assume any bamboo bought from a store is from out of the country unless labeled otherwise, or if you have learned how to differentiate them based on how the leaves attach to the stalk.
Aside from that, lovely interview, excellent business. Nice website even.
Funny story- we’ve had a bunch of mason bees nesting on our house; where the windowsill is, there’s a small section on the outside that forms a convenient tunnel for them, and they’ve nested there for years. First noticed this when I was sitting on a chair right next to a windowsill and a little black bee kept buzzing around right by my shoulder.
Excellent interview! Fascinating info, and important. Thanks!
On mining, miner gate works but it’s slow to pay out and relatively unreliable when you attempt to transfer coins.
I’ve been bitcoin mining for a while using antminers. That’s dedicated ASICS hardware. I use BTC Pool. 1 Tera hash yields about $1.25 a day. An S5 miner does about a terahash. An s7 makes $5 a day, and S9 makes $15 a day. Right now an S7 costs about $400 on eBay. If you have ever 20 of them, you’re making $100 per day passively. That’s 20kWh to run it, so subtract that, and you’re at $50-$70 a day after an $8000 investment in hardware.
You can rely on about a 6 month payoff on most ASICS setups. The catch is Bitcoin needs to keep going up to maintain this. If the price stabilizes, ROI drops as difficulty rises. You can make money doing this, but it’s a risk.
Mining Ether is a fools game. When they move to proof of stake you become a virtual miner simply by having Ether. So you stand to gain more by buying it now and not having to pay off hardware before seeing a profit. When the ice age hits, all those people will swarm to monero for GPU hashing.
Just listened to the show last night. I spent about an hour today watching about 10 different species of bees, plus wasps, on my mint plants. The multiple pitçhed buzzing from the different bees flying around sounded pretty çool.
PS. When i saw the peppermint getting ready to flower, I harvested about half and left the rest to flower for my neighbor’s honeybees. I didn’t realize there were so many others around. I’d suggest doing the same for any herb or plant that should be harvested before flowering.
Jaçk, thanks for bringing new, interesting topiçs. Charlie, thanks for the information and your dedication to something that matters.
Thanks for a great interview. Very good information – nice interplay between the host and Charlie. My bees are arriving the end of the week. A very responsive company.
Regarding crypto-currency mining. About 3 years ago, some people in our company got the bright idea to use company computing resources to mine bitcoin. In their mind, the idle CPU cycles weren’t being used so what was the harm? Needless to say, they don’t work for us any more.
During the forensic process of catching them, we learned a lot about the mining process. Keep in mind, this is 3 year old data and I have not refreshed it based on current technology. At the time, we discovered the biggest flaw in the mining process – the cost of electricity. The electricity cost to mine was many times the value of bitcoin produced. This was based on large mining pools which make the value produced fairly predictable.
Back then I found web sites with calculators that could predict the amount of electricity needed, and it was always more than the bitcoin value produced.
During the testing, we used a kill-o-watt meter to measure the power consumption of the computer. You would be shocked to see how much power you consume when the CPU redlines at 100%. One PC we tested consumed about 40w when the CPU was idling, but it jumped to over 200w at 100% CPU.
The bottom line was that mining using a PC was only economical if someone else was paying for the electricity.
So two things.
One likely they didn’t know how to do it efficiently.
Two you say it was not profitable, but I’d like to know, given the price of BTC was about 400 dollars or so at the time of your investigation, how profitable is it with BTC at 2,000 dollars?
If mining, done right wasn’t profitable no one would do it.
There was a time when you could take an old POS machine and mine a coin a day, then a coin a week, at that time it was BARELY break even, but coins were worth 20 cents. What is the value of that activity from 8 years ago today?
Today to mine efficiently you need high end GPU miners. Machines built to mine. Why? It gets harder over time! Exactly as it is supposed to.
Agreed. I’m a big fan of crypto-currency and what it means. I just never got into the mining. Back then it was easier to buy it. When this incident occurred, the GPU miners were still like little thumb drives with GPUs. The big GPU cards were very new. The price today is so much higher that it should be more cost effective.
I still don’t recommend getting fired from a 6-figure job like these retards did.
“I still don’t recommend getting fired from a 6-figure job like these retards did.”
Oh that made my day!
I’ve chosen to be offended because you used a politically insensitive word (retard). I’m now going to go cry in a corner until someone comes and takes the bad words away. 😛
I’m excited to see what happens when filecoin comes out.