Ryan Paul: Paul Mitrano, Blackwater Honey Forge, thanks again for joining us. Tell us a little bit about “the why” behind your organization and how you got started.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Much like anything in my life, it started by happenstance. I have always been fascinated with the outdoors, nature, and critters of all kinds. When I was a kid, I was always the guy playing in anthills and checking out bugs. I love animals—that’s probably one of my largest character traits. For years I’d thought about bees but never had an appropriate property to try them until about six years ago. I had a good amount of acreage, so I decided, ‘I’m going to try getting two beehives. I’m going to try to see what bees are all about.’ And I was hooked instantly. If you think that chicken math is a real thing where you have two chickens and then four chickens and then 12 chickens and then, “oh my god, how did I get this many chickens?” Bees do that to you tenfold. You just want more. It’s enthralling when you open the cover and see this entire ecosystem—a whole ecology within that hive—which is a phenomenal aspect to work with and manipulate. 

People love the product; you don’t have to sell honey. Honey sells honey. And people that love it, really love it. To be able to share the fruits of the labor with friends, with family, put them in storefronts at my farm stand – that actually brings me a lot of personal joy. So part of the reason why I do this is because it’s fulfilling to me. Not only being outdoors, outside working with these insects, but there’s a reward at the end of all the hard work as well. And there’s a smile on my face and there’s a smile on the face of my friends, my family, my customers.

Ryan Paul: Yeah, I’ve been to your farm and you were gracious to take me around and show me the gardens and the ducks and the duck pond and I thought about how there is this little apiary tucked in the back here on this farm. There’s a cohabitation aspect to it, right? So, you have pollinators to help with your garden. You have water sources right there for your bees. Actually, at the time I didn’t realize…. I looked at the duck pond and said, “Oh, that’s where the bees drink.” And then you said, “No, no, there’s a river back there.” 

But, I was curious, did the beekeeping thing come from this idea “I want to be able to grow a large garden and it would be great to have some pollinators around…” what got you in that farming space to begin with?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Well, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of sustainability to begin with. And as a matter of fact, I used to operate under a different LLC basically as an excuse to sell the plethora of duck eggs and chicken eggs that I had before the bees were ever a thing {in my property}. So, I created a different LLC with someone who’s now an ex, and we both enjoyed this idea of “why are we buying all our food when we can make some of our food and we can grow some of our food?” Then you know if it’s organic or not, you know, where it’s coming from.

 Um, there’s always been that I love that holistic approach and it’s not always doable, but even just getting your foot in that door is better than not. So, I didn’t necessarily get the bees with the intention of making my garden better because, I’ll admit, I don’t have the greenest thumb. I’m not the best gardener. I can make stuff happen, but my neighbor, my current neighbor definitely loves it. He’s been a gardener for 40 plus years and he definitely enjoys a greater squash yield because of the bees. I think in general the reason why I originally got them is to try and learn something new. And like I said, I was instantly hooked and fascinated. So once those hooks were in me, I wanted to know more and be able to do better because I’m not necessarily a man of half measures. If I’m going to invest my time, which is our most limited resource, then I want to do it well.

Ryan Paul: That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s a really good point; time and health. I think differently about our time and our health as our crucial limited resources.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah. And if you lose one, you lose the other.

Paul Landrum: But as you grow, as you’re growing, your bees are multiplying like crazy, I’m sure. And you see what the impact is. Are you feeling better about sustainability… that you’re making a difference?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: That’s actually one of my core focuses this year, now that I’ve rebranded as Blackwater Honey Forge™ and really focusing on a business aspect as far as profitability, at least to a point that it’s self-sustainable with a little bit of extra income. In a perfect world, the bees are growing. And that’s kind of the mark of a decent beekeeper or not. If somebody’s been a beekeeper for 10 years, but they’ve bought their bees every year because they die every winter, then they’ve spent 10 years being a first-year beekeeper.

Paul Landrum: Yeah.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: And you know what? I’ve been there! Last year, because of a silly equipment choice and some experiments that I ran on mine, I lost 10 hives, which at the time was all the hives that I had. So, I had a 100% loss over last winter. This winter, I’m coming out stronger than that. And like I said, there’s different manipulations that you can do to assist your bees in growing. And I’m going to turn my 10 hives this year into 30 to 40 because you can work with the bees to help them propagate and expand further. And so, yeah, I’m definitely expanding.

And as far as when you have more bees, they’re absolutely out doing more bee things. So by nature of them being more prolific and healthier, it’s helping everything else around. And that’s including the creatures that eat my bees. You know, the dragonflies do better, the birds do better, the ducks do better when they go to the wrong pond.

Paul Landrum: Well, you know, how do you keep your bees from freezing? How do you maintain them? I know they go dormant, but you have to take care of them, right?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: The bees cluster during the winter. And essentially what they’ll do is in that cluster within the hive there’s different rings of bees that have different jobs. And on the outermost ring of that, you have what’s called heater bees that vibrate in a certain way that generates heat and brings it in. And in the middle of that cluster, somewhere, is going to be the queen because “no queen – no bees.” So as they do that, they move around the hive to the different resources. So going into winter, it’s all about healthy bees. And by healthy bees, it’s monitoring, pest management, mite loads, varroa destructor loads. And if you manage those, then the viruses that proliferate are also in check. And then making sure that the resources are in place for them. They need to go into winter with a certain amount of resources available because if they run out, then they’re doomed.

Ryan Paul: So, you kind of have to play doctor in the late fall – make sure you’re doing a lot of diagnostics and making sure that the health of the hives, you know, you’re assessing that before they start to winter because once they’re hunkered down, you don’t want to disturb them, right?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Correct. Yeah. Especially depending on the makeup of your hive setup. The last thing you want to do in the winter is open that hive and break what’s called the propolis seal because they’ve sealed everything nice and tight – because the bees know what they’re doing… and it’s us that go in and mess it up. So that’s why there’s this concept that the beekeeping calendar actually starts in August. In August, that’s when I take all of my honey off. I steal from them and I take everything that I want. And at that point, that’s when the calendar starts. We’re getting you ready for winter. We’re taking care of mites. We’re making sure that you’re fed if you need to be fed. I’ve also spent four+ years planting seeds of Aster and Goldenrod on my property, which is a phenomenal fall time pollen and nectar source for the bees. That way, I don’t have to spend as much on sugar. They get the plants they need to help them go into winter right there.

Ryan Paul: Wow. Aster and Goldenrod. Awesome

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. So, up here in the North Country, that’s uh uh in the Northeast, those are very very good late season nectar and pollen sources.

Paul Landrum: We even have Goldenrod down in Miami.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: I can’t remember the number, but there’s a ton of different Goldenrod species that grow all across the country.

Ryan Paul: They grow like a weed, right? They’re pretty prolific?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: It’s essentially a very tall weed that grows on the borders of fields and things like that. But I’m trying to pack my meadowlands full with it. The ones that I grow on my property can reach up to about five feet.

Ryan Paul: Oh, wow. Okay. I was looking for something like ground cover for hills around my property that’s easy to maintain and that I don’t have to cut way back.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: I’m sure we could come up with something…. Red and white clover. And that it would be great for pollinators, too.

Paul Landrum: That clover is good hunting.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: It is. It is a very prolific honey. Uh you want to talk about high honey yields, look into Canada and the Dakotas and stuff where they have canola and the amount of honey that those generate is just mind-blowing.

Ryan Paul: Okay, this is awesome. Great information. We already touched on a lot of these questions, obstacles. Defining your success beyond profit and performance. I think you kind of also touched a little bit upon that – you want your hives to do well. Just the fact that you’re potentially growing from 10 to 40 this year is, I mean that’s a huge success, right?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. And then of course that’s just a springboard. That’s this year’s plan. And as long as I can perform well on that plan, next year’s plan springboards into outyards. So then I can have 30 hives in other properties. You know, it depends. There’s no limit to how big I want to grow this other than maybe how much time my wife will allow me to have doing it.

Paul Landrum: Well, in each place that you go, neighbors or friends or even on a business application, the yield on those farms that you go to or even private backyards and their own  vegetable gardens are going to increase in quality and quantity.

 
Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Oh yeah. Well, quality for sure because the good thing is, I live in a very rural, small-town, farm-friendly area. My town only has I think 23– 2400 people in it. There is literally not a traffic light in town. We don’t have a store in town. If you want to buy something at a retail location, you have to leave the town. So, there’s really good, small, family farms that would have the appropriate acreage for what I need, especially along river banks and things like that. The neat thing is, even in the same town, five miles away, you’ll end up with honey that tastes different than the honey from my property.

Paul Landrum: Oh yeah. It’s up to the bees to decide what they’re going to, unless you put it into a specific field. You know, down here we have “orange row.” In Alaska, they have fireweed which is hot honey.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. Yep. I’ve heard that fireweed’s a great one. And I have a little bit of fireweed on my property, but not much.

Paul Landrum: Yeah, that’s a delicious honey.

Ryan Paul: So, are you thinking about expanding to partnering with other farmers in the area and expanding your hives to those spaces? I mean, is that your audience right now? Is that who you’re looking for?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: In part, yes, because there’s only going to be… I have a 30 acre parcel myself, but you’ve been to the farm. There’s only so much room where I can put the bees because a lot of my property is elevation and ledge and things like that. So, if I want to go beyond a certain hive mark and increase my yield, it’s going to force me to find other locations to put the bees on. And whether that’s going to be just other folks in the town that uh want to host bees and will take a nice honey bribe from me. Uh, that will be my rent payment – is my plan.

Or what I’d like to do, and this might be a next-year thing versus a this-year thing… once I have enough hives set up, I’ll have some hives on a couple of different trailers, and then I’ll start calling up local orchards, blueberry farms, local apple orchards, and, you know, see if they want to do short-term pollination services for, you know, I’m not not going long distances, but I’m, you know, 30, 50 miles away if they don’t currently have bees on their on their property.

And the house that I lived in before the one I’m in now, I live near an apple orchard. And the gentleman actually approached me at one point. He said, “You know, I only had two hives at the time,” but he said, “If you get more hives and they’re nice and strong, come and talk to me about pollination services.” So, there’s a need for that. There’s a want for it. And if I can supply that, then not only am I literally helping out that business, it helps me out, too.

Ryan Paul: That’s really cool. The naive outsider like myself would look at what you’re doing and say, “He makes honey and then he can sell the honey.” I never thought about selling pollination services. And the reality is, that’s a better growth plan because you’ll just strengthen your hive and your operation overall and build up your resources.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Oh, yeah. With beekeeping, it’s never a one-legged stool. You have to have branches to that stool. And so that’s why, in addition to the pollination, I also make what they call “value added” products as well. I make lip balms. I make beard balm. I make a body bar. I make beeswax candles. And those are all things that I’m prepping to roll out this year. I already have all the labels created and everything else.

Paul Landrum: Oh, that’s cool. So, you’re really going full blast into this.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah, I don’t give myself a lot of free time. And that’s one of my big goals this year. One of my personal goals is to make sure that I’m at a farmers market at least once this year to see how I like it, to see how it goes and to see what my weak points are. But part of beekeeping and the thought of going to a farmers market is that, people are fascinated by bees and even people that don’t keep them. And I love that personal interaction. If I can have a five-minute conversation with somebody and then they walk away afterwards, whether they bought something or not, but they have a better appreciation for the honeybee, then that’s a win in my book.

Ryan Paul: As we travel occasionally, we’ll come across farmers markets. We found ourselves in one at the famous Pike Place Market where Starbucks was born in Seattle. And then just this past week, in Tahoe, when we went back to Reno, they were having a farmers market in town. And in both cases, we left with honey. Like, that’s what we do, we won’t buy anything else but we’ll buy honey because it’s cool.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Because it’s so regional.

Ryan Paul: It’s regional so you get a different flavor. We got buckwheat honey and blueberry honey out in Seattle. And this Reno honey, it’s super viscous.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah.

Ryan Paul: That’s the thing I’m most interested in. It’s really thick, which I don’t think has to do with anything other than their processing but um and maybe just because it’s a dry, real dry environment.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: It may be uh to do with the moisture content in the honey. If it’s a very dry honey, it’s going to be more viscous.

Ryan Paul: Yeah, it’s a dry honey. It’s like, you know, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s almost on the way to wax.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Well, that’s like when honey crystallizes, a lot of people think that the honey’s gone bad. You know what? Give me a spoon, that stuff is amazing!

Ryan Paul: But it sounds like you’re kind of doing market research in a really organic way. You’re going to these farmers markets and you’re going to talk to people and see what their needs are. You’re talking to farmers. You’re looking for the natural ways that people can benefit from what you do, what you love, and what you care about.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. I’ve even printed up a retailers checklist that I show when I’m talking to retailers and make my elevator pitch to show them what I offer, what the price breakdown is, what the MSRP is, what the markup and margin is based upon those MSRPs. So, it really is, “here’s what I provide. This is how much money you can make.” Because that’s really what you’re doing when you go and you talk to a retailer and say, “Hey, do you want to carry my product?” It’s not like, “Hey, will you give me money?” That’s not what it’s about. I’m trying to help you make money at your store. And as long as you can have that conversation with integrity and honesty and provide the quality of a good product, that’s a done deal. That’s a no-brainer.

Ryan Paul: For sure. And like you said, honey sells itself. Some of the other products, I’m interested to know where you look for these. They’re not waste products, they’re like sidestream products, right? There are these additional benefits to things like wax and stuff like that. You know, it seems like it’s a great way to use up some of this other stuff that maybe you have lying around. What are your thoughts on the viability of that? Because again, your time is limited.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: It’s all about maximizing the use of everything. But to think of beeswax as a byproduct is probably the furthest from the truth. The wax in a hive is probably just as valuable, if not more so, than the bees. A drawn comb frame allows the bees to live, to breed, to make more bees to do all of this. And the amount of work it takes for a honeybee to go out and collect the nectar, to make that wax, which they eject out between the little plates of their bodies, it is a product worthy of its own attention, just as much as honey.

Ryan Paul: Is it more valuable just to keep it part of the hive structure then to make these other products that people like, like candles?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: It certainly could be and it all depends on what you’re trying to do. If you want to maximize your honeybee production or if you want to have those value added products. Now, I’m looking for a balance between the two because in part of my expansion this year, what that involves is buying a ton of new bee equipment. So now when I get my new bee frames that go in the hives, those are either unwaxed or only have a small amount of wax on them. So it’s up to me to add more if I want and try to make sure that I set my bees up for the most amount of success possible. And there’s definitely a balance of “do I want to take this 40 lbs of wax and put it towards that or do I want to make a bunch of lip balm and candles out of it.”

Paul Landrum: How many bees do you think you have? How many supers do you have on each hive? 

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Well, bee population fluctuates heavily throughout the year. It’s incredibly seasonal. So, going through winter right now, and that’s even breed specific as well. Different breeds of bees will go through winter with less. But let’s say on the low end where I’m looking at about 10,000 bees in my hives right now, come the middle of summer when they’re gang busters and they’re going to town, uh you’re looking at 50 to 60,000 bees in a double deep style setup. And that again, it depends on how your hive structure is set up. Now, as far as supers in my forage area, I plan on (my goal) is to get two supers of honey off of each production hive. And that’s a medium super of honey, which will yield anywhere from 30 to 40 pounds of honey per super. So each hive I’m looking to yield hopefully, you know, 60 to 70 pounds of honey.

Paul Landrum: That’s amazing. It’s amazing how much they can create. Do you sell royal jelly or anything like that?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: No, I don’t harvest or sell that at all. I’ve never looked into it. And also, I don’t pollen-capture either. Not that I don’t see a benefit to pollen capturing, it’s just one extra thing I just don’t take the time to do currently. And I figure the bees probably have a better use for the pollen than me.

Paul Landrum: And royal jelly, that’s your breeders.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: For sure. But the good thing is… I don’t know if you’re familiar with queen grafting at all, but that’s a skill that I taught myself last year. And when you’re grafting from the larvae to make all your new queens in, they should already be sitting in a little bit of royal jelly. If they’re not, you probably have a nutrition problem. So assuming that they’re already in that little bit of royal jelly and you go along with the process accordingly, they should feed those larvae as needed.

Ryan Paul: You have so many skills in this space now. Um, a lot of products that you’re able to focus on. You waste nothing. You’re looking at farmers markets as opportunities for not only understanding market needs, but to sell some of your products that you’re making. You’re looking at pollination services for local area farms, but you also have a YouTube channel and you have this other audience potentially that’s just like curious or naive people that don’t know anything about bees that want to learn – bees are fascinating like you said, and you have an opportunity to educate – where’s this YouTube thing going for you, like what kind of got you to think, “all right, you know, I’m not doing enough. I’m not busy enough. How about I also set up a camera with a few different angles and show people what I’m doing and edit these videos!”

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah. So with uh YouTube, you know, it’s… YouTube is great. First and foremost, I consider it a resource. I have probably watched hundreds, if not thousands of hours just dedicated to beekeeping on YouTube. YouTube, and maybe this is a bad thing to say, but YouTube is my replacement for books. I’m not a big reader. I watch YouTube and…

Ryan Paul: It’s a huge education. It is the number one educational platform on the planet right now.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah. So, if I can inspire, educate or showcase my mistakes and have people learn from those, then I am willing, ready, and able to do that. And you know what? I have fun doing it. And the cool thing is that it almost started out as just a neat way for my family to see what this is because I always get, you know, you sit down at a family get together and you get a ton of questions and it’s like, “well, go over here and watch this.” And the really neat thing about YouTube is, it’s not just me educating others. I have learned probably equal amounts if not more from my own channel in people commenting back.

For for instance, something that actually really helped me in the business creation side of things this year is in a couple of my videos, I talked about making use of barcodes and obtaining actual, licensed, official barcodes. and I was going to go one route that was going to cost me a lot more money. And I had a commenter that said, “Hey, don’t do that. Do this instead.” And for your size operation, it’s going to work flawlessly and save you hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And there’s not going to be any annual upkeep. My original plan was going to have, you know, an annual upkeep fee. So, I get to learn from my own channel while sharing, you know, my knowledge, my mistakes, and all of my stumbly words.

 Ryan Paul: So, the benefits are like multi-fold. And it sounds like in some ways, this is an opportunity for you to give back to that community that’s been supporting you as you learn, to continue to learn more, to share with your friends and family. Like it just makes it easier to get into the details with people.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. And there’s an additional benefit that is, as I continue to do this and as it continues to grow, if I do hit that monetization point and I get a little bit of passive income because all I’m doing is sharing something I’m passionate about. I’m not going into this to be a full-time YouTuber, to make that my career. But if I’m sharing my passion and that gives me a net benefit, whether that’s information from commenters or financial – I don’t see a downside to that.

Ryan Paul: Nope. That’s great. So I came across a post from you because we’re friends on Facebook and you were sort of talking about your rebrand and uh and I’ll be honest, when I saw it, I went, “Oh, he’s getting a little serious here.” And it reminded me of this little project that we’re trying to run. And I was so grateful when you said yes. “Uh yeah, I’ll talk to you about what I’m doing for like an hour with some strangers and yeah…”

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: But this is my farmers market right now.

Ryan Paul: Exactly. That’s it. We just, you know, at the end of this, we just need to find a place, a link where I can, you know, buy some honey and have it shipped.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: I’ll work on that for you. I’ll get some down to you.

Ryan Paul: Thank you.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: You’re welcome.

Ryan Paul: I noticed that you had this video that you produced and you used AI to produce it. And I thought it was great. I really did. And then one of our other friends who I’ll let remain anonymous kind of commented like, “Don’t you know AI is harmful?” And it just reminded me how we can’t do anything without complexity, right? And there’s this “friend or foe;” “harm or help” element to any technology and we have to talk about it – try to unpack it. That’s kind of what keeps the whole machine going. But I was really curious, and we don’t have to get too in depth here… It could just be, “yeah Ryan AI is there. It helps me. End of story.” But, you know, we’re thinking about it all the time as marketers and it’s eroding a lot of I… I should say, well, erosion’s not wrong, but erosion does also suggest it reveals new opportunities, right?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: May I ask a question? Do you consider it a competitor or an asset?

Ryan Paul: Yes.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah.

Ryan Paul: Yes. And yeah. I mean that’s the thing. It’s both, right? It’s going to compete with parts of what we used to do that we enjoyed. I hear a lot of people complain, “I don’t want AI to do creative work. I want it to do my dishes and laundry. I like the creative work.” A lot of humans feel disappointed that it’s taking the parts of the job that they enjoy doing, but it’s also taking a lot of tedious stuff off of our plate, too. I mean, these AI notetakers are incredibly helpful. We’ll get a full transcript of this conversation, which I never read because it’s too much, but we get this executive summary that’s unbelievably accurate, and I’ll just read it, and I’ll be like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what was said. That was the context. That was the framework. That was the sentiment. Great.”

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: I do similar things on YouTube. I take the transcript of each video and I run it through an SEO optimization prompt and that goes in the description of each YouTube element. Obviously I can only speak for myself, I can’t speak for all of humanity. But in regards to the “how would you / why would you use AI when it’s depleting all these natural resources?” Well, one thing I’m going to initially claim is ignorance. I had no idea about all of that. For me, AI is a facilitator. I love being creative. I’m a creative person, but I don’t have the skill set to match those ideas. So for me to be able to go on to an app or a website and say this is what I’m envisioning, text based or image based or video based, help me create this thing to achieve my goal, and it spits that out in 30 seconds where I would you know… with website design, if I had to learn HTML, that’s going to take me years versus “hey, here’s my idea” and it spits that out. So it’s a facilitator. Now there is push and pull. There’s give and take like everything that you say. But you know what? When I click yes on that end user license agreement for whatever program I’m using, I didn’t read the whole thing, but I don’t think it says what it does to water there, to inform me that “hey, when you’re going when you’re using our service, by the way, you’re going to use this many gallons of water while you’re doing it.”

Does that mean I don’t appreciate that? No. Our natural resources are incredibly fragile and incredibly limited. And I don’t want to shift it and say, well, look at this industry and look at this industry and that one, but there’s a give and take to all of those things. And so that I would just hope that in the future, because it’s not going anywhere (AI is too useful), it empowers us and makes us more efficient, whether that’s efficient in bad ways or good ways. But what we need to do, hopefully as a society, is learn how to use it responsibly and if we’re actually destroying this water, learn how to turn it into drinkable water, then let’s solve that problem. Heck, I don’t care if we use AI to solve that problem. Let’s solve it, you know. But as far as the detriments, like I said, I’m going to profess ignorance. I haven’t researched it a bunch. I just know that when I use AI for the amount that I use it for, I find it incredibly helpful and my time is very very limited and it helps me and it empowers me to do the things I’m trying to do with it.

Ryan Paul: Yeah. And you know, the other thing that people don’t often appreciate is someone like yourself, if you didn’t have it (AI), you might even be willing to throw a little money at an artist or a creator or a graphics designer, etc. to help you. But, they’re hard to find, you know, like to get people to help you to do things is not easy.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep.

 Ryan Paul: Like, where’s the farmers market for graphics design? Fiverr? I’ve been to Fiverr. It’s also kind of a cesspool of nonsense and it’s very difficult to navigate. AI has lowered the barrier so much for us to just empower ourselves to just take action. It’s going to be impossible to ignore. So like anything though, any technology that scales, we do have the power to shift right. I’ll use the example of freon, right, in refrigeration when we went from ice boxes to electric run refrigeration with compressed gas that happened to be an ozone depleter. We scaled that globally, massively, and within just a generation essentially, we learned that it was very harmful to the environment and we basically completely changed the industry, right?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yep. Now we get a new type of refrigerant.

Ryan Paul: So, yeah. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes. And I think that’s the best we’re ever going to get is that kind of process. So when it comes to the impact on our ecology, you know, we’re concerned about not just AI, but just the tech industry at large, you know? Meta’s server farms that they’re building in Scandinavia because it’s already cold there. Like, “yeah, let’s keep dumping that heat into the polar caps. That’ll go well.” I don’t know what the impact is. I’m only here for another uh couple of decades, right? But it’s stuff that we do think about and I think we care about future generations. You have kids running around your farm. You know, we’ve got some responsibility to think about the torch that we’re passing on and what is it going to light?
 
Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Yeah.

Ryan Paul: What future is it going to light for our kids? This is why we want to talk about the confluence and intersection of these two spaces. And so, I’m so glad that you had some thoughts on that. I’d like to hear a little bit more as we close on what your mission is with the footprint that you want to leave behind uh with this work that you’re doing.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: For sure. Well, so you just touched on it greatly as far as the passing of the torch and really what that speaks to is being future-minded. We can always operate in the present. That’s easy. But we do need to ask ourselves as people what we’re doing and how it affects our kids and our kids’ kids and how it’s going to affect me in 10 or 20 years. And I don’t know that I’m going to be able to solve the world’s problems, per se. But there’s definitely things that I can do and steps that I can take to inspire my children to make better decisions. Heck, you know what I would really love to do? I’d really love to inspire them to be beekeepers sometime, right? Right now, they’ve gotten stung a couple times. They don’t love the apiary that much. They don’t want to come out. But if I can work on their confidence and show them how to interact with nature on a personal level where you can really invest in it, maybe they don’t become beekeepers, but maybe they do that with a different animal or their gardens or whatnot. Then, as you do that and as you learn to have a personal investment in the fragile things around us, you cannot help but ask yourself the questions: how do I make this better and how do I make it last? 

And like you just said as well, I think it was before you started recording, you were talking about the ecotourism aspect. We want people to go to these wonderful places, but we also want to encourage them to interact with them in a way that is helpful to the surrounding areas. So that way, when people do go and travel and check out these locations, they’re not just doing all the quick easy things that the hotel is offering, they’re actually going out to the locals and checking out the local ecology, the local impacts, and checking out those things. And I think that’s what I’m doing in my tiny little town, you know, I’m not the big resort or anything like that, but if I can inspire some good conversations between people and they figure out the importance of the bees and what I’m doing and how they’re helpful, then that’s good.

Ryan Paul: I’ve been to your farm. It’s not easy to get to. I wouldn’t recommend a short visit, but I think there’s people that would love to hang out in that space for a couple days. Is that something that might be appealing to you, to kind of have a place where people could hang and learn and you could have them interact and build more experiences that way?

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: I’m going to answer it in this way. It wouldn’t be unappealing to me, but I think that is a whole other business venture all in itself. However, something that is really neat that I am very excited about is that I had another good-sized local beekeeping farm recently reach out to me from the next town over and ask me, “Hey, I’ve been thinking for years about running a bee school, and if I do this, would this be something you’d like to be a part of and speak at this bee school?” Absolutely. So that’s a thing that could be achieved in a sense.

Ryan Paul: Baby steps. And I’ll tell you, your steps are not small by any stretch. You’re taking big strides, Paul. And you know, you have to walk before you can run. But I feel like, boy, you are close to sprinting here with this thing. So, congratulations on the rebrand. And everything that you’re doing, It’s inspiring.

Blackwater Honey Forge LLC: Thank you.