Plain Talk: The Survivor Hive

Episode 183 – Plain Talk: The Survivor Hive

Jim Tew: Listeners, in a previous segment, it might have been the very last segment, I mentioned that propolis was an underappreciated, underloved, misunderstood hive product. When I was giving you that thought extemporaneously in that segment, part of my limited brain power was being allocated to an old memory that I had about the most spectacular propolis use in a beehive that I have ever seen to this day. As best I can, I'd like to relive that story just to give you my perspective of exactly how far bees can go to use propolis and to manage propolis inside their hive. I'm Jim Tew, I come to you once a week from Honey Bee Obscura, where we try to talk about something to do with beekeeping in a very plain talk way.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: As with any old memory, old story, you have to know how I got to that point. If I just dive right into the propolis component, it wouldn't make a lot of sense as to how and why. I got to give you the backstory, and the backstory approaches being painful. Let me get through that as quickly as I can to explain to you why this colony ended up in the position that it ended up in. In the early 1980s, for most of you, that was before you were even born. In the early 1980s, '82, '83, '84, when I was at Ohio State, I went through a real flurry of international interest in beekeeping, and over a five or six, seven-year period, students from 12 or 15 countries came to my lab for varying lengths of time, for varying certificate or degree programs, and they brought with them a wealth of information about beekeeping from their particular country, Indonesia, Swaziland, Myanmar, it was Burma then, Africa, Somalia, all parts of the world, it seemed.

The Western world, at one time or another, wanted to know more about bees, particularly queen rearing, and most of them wanted instrumental insemination work, a project that I thought they probably would not need for decades and decades to come, but that was so glamorous, and that was high-tech technology. It was something that they could afford and do and buy, and so most of those countries wanted that technology. Maybe they used it, maybe they didn't, I taught it, but I'm off the subject. When we had that class there, it seemed to be appropriate to capture their information as to how, if they knew bees at all in their country, what they did, and we would duplicate it as best we could.

I had my technician, he was really an accomplished beekeeper, set up what we called the International Yard, and it was in a difficult, remote location. We already had 15 or 20, maybe as many as 25 yards across the research center, and even though we were on thousands of acres, it was getting picky to find yet another space to put beehives, so this location was difficult. You had to actually drive down rows of corn to get to it, so most of the year I couldn't get to the yard, only in the early season and only after the corn had been harvested could I randomly and freely get to the yard.

In that yard, we had, at the time, they were called Kenya top bar hives. Now more and more people just call them top bar hives, but that's a segment for another time on why the Kenya top bar hive and how the Canadians were involved in it, goes on and on. That's a deep story too, for a different time maybe. There were Kenya top bar hives there. There were Botswana long hives, there were various types of modern-day scap straw hives. There were baskets, wicker baskets, coated in cow dung, there were box hives. There was everything at the time that somebody else knew anything about that could be kept internationally, and there were some modern hives there from Denmark and Sweden that were just as modern as they could be.

It was a strange yard. I think most of that I would try to photograph everything and beekeeping, I've just always tried to photograph or video everything just because I wanted to save the moment, I wanted to be able to talk about it, and for reasons that escape me, I have precious few pictures of this yard, maybe one or two. I can't really show you a lot of what was going on there. That whole episode passed. At the time we were getting international funding from the Heifer Project and USAID and the US. Department of State and other countries paid their own way.

I don't know where or why we went through that phase where international beekeeping was such a hot topic. I went to multiple countries, I traveled a lot during those years before it all began to wean away, plus I was getting tired anyway, it was hard travel. That's the yard, people, that's the yard that was set up. Here's the irony, when that corn had been harvested, probably 500, 600 yards, I'm having trouble here because maybe no more than 1,000 yards, going down a major two-lane highway, you could look off to the left through that 800, 900 yards into that thin tree line and you could see that yard.

There's no worry about anybody getting to it because it was so difficult to approach, and most people would not be looking over there anyway, but there it was. All right, that's chapter one. Chapter two is everything faded, everything passed, everything went away, and there was that yard out there, more and more and more unloved, unattended, grown over, international project had faded out. It wasn't long before the hives died out, Varroa was being introduced. We couldn't control it very well, so all those beehives basically went away.

Now all these years later and after the tornado we had in 2010, I don't know where all that equipment is, probably destroyed. Chapter three, when I would ride down the road, down this significant, major two-lane highway through the years, I'd always look over there and I'd reminisce about the international apriculture years and all that we did, all the unique people, all the strange clothing, all the eating restrictions. All of the interesting managerial procedures they used on their hives, all of that diversity was a phase and it went away. As I'd look out across that now empty yard and have those memories, I would always think, that looks like a beehive out there.

Then I'd drive on, it's cold, it's raining, it's wet, the memory passes and I would drive on. Months later, drive back by, have the same series of thoughts, you'd look out there and think, I think that's a beehive out there. I drove by up and down that road because we had significant numbers of yards down that road in the other locations, and I would frequently have that thought that that looks like a beehive through those thin trees. I talked to my technician, all that equipment had long since been cleaned out, rotted, destroyed, whatever, it was gone.

I can't tell you why, but on a whim, I was driving by one day and I thought, what, listeners, I thought, that looks like a beehive in that thin tree line across that cornfield where that international yard used to be. The corn was gone. I locked in my four-wheel drive, I went chug, chug, chug making lefts, avoiding the sinkholes and the wet spots, I finally got back to where that yard was. Listeners, the first time I had been there in 10 or 12 years, it was like going back to where some ancient civilization was. There were some post holes still, there were some posts where we had the Kenya top bar hives suspended off the ground.

There was some old railroad timbers we were using for hive stands, and yes, there was an eight-frame beehive colony stacked four deeps deep that for some reason had been left there. When I was driving by, all those years, 10 years, 12 years, it could have been

longer there was a beehive there all that time, and yes, there were bees in it. Stew with that for a few minutes while we take a break to hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: I can only say that I was shocked. It was maybe since it was eight frame and standard hive depth. Maybe it got left there because we'll go back and pick that up later and put it back in with standard bees. I don't know. My technician had no memory of it. By then, he had taken a different job at the research center and I had to look him up anyway and he just had no recall of that beehive being there. Why am I putting you through this? That hive only had a flat board cover on it when it was left there. It was a very simple hive because those were simple hives in that yard.

It only had a flat plywood cover. I want you to hold on for this because most of that cover had rotted away. The bees had steadfastly replaced the rotted areas with propolis. There were layers and layers and layers of old propolis, more recent propolis, fresh propolis, dried propolis, faded propolis, but they basically had a hive cover that was probably a third propolis. That was amazing enough. The bottom board and the landing board had completely rotted away. The four eight frame deeps were just sitting on the railroad ties that we were using for hive stands.

The bees were freely flying in and out of the bottom and any other hole that they wanted to. That propolis part was not just for the top. They also propolized all around the holes, all around the spots where they were using for entrances. They had reinforced it with a layer upon layer upon layer of propolis. There, those beehives, those bee deeps had been sitting there for what by then I would estimate 20 years. Who knows how many swarms had come and gone. I had the thought that these are the only 40 frames out of the thousands and thousands of frames that I have.

We had several hundred caught hives at one time at Ohio State. Those frames and those in that colony were the only frames that I knew of, the only combs that had not been exposed to pesticides and miticides because of Varroa. That beehive had missed everything. It had never been treated one time for Varroa. I don't know how many times the bees died out and were replaced by swarms. I don't know. That comb had never been contaminated. Then I found that beehive and I thought, all right, what should I do? This beehive has cared for itself, yay, all these years, probably around two decades. Does it need me fixing it or should I just leave it alone?

All those years ago, I wrote an article in Bee Culture magazine and I asked the readers and I told them that for the moment I had just walked away from the colony and left it there. It had been running its own life all these years, had been doing it very well, how could I make things any better for them other than replacing a cover, maybe put a bottom board on it. Those were cosmetic things and the bees didn't seem to need it. Most categorically, the reader said, leave it alone. That hive has its own destiny, its own id, its own personality. That hive does not need a beekeeper. That's where I left it.

Now, this story doesn't end there, so don't turn away from me, please. I left it just like I found it. I drove away from it. Then, you know the drill, I would drive up and down the road. The years would pass and I would think, yes, there's a beehive back there. About once every two years, I would drive back there and check it out. It would just be sitting there. It would be a little bit more broadened, a little bit more wretched looking. The bees were still there and this thing had become more and more and more a propolized box. I want you to understand that this was just in common pine board lumber that had been exposed to the weather for decades.

It just did nothing but speak volumes and volumes about the ability of propolis to coat and secure and protect the surfaces inside the hive. I can guarantee you, if there were just four empty boxes sitting out there, for what's now close to 25 years, they would mostly be rotted away. Yet here this thing was, still chock-a-block full of bees. On about the fourth trip that I went out there, after probably four to five years, a huge windstorm with high lateral winds had come through and had taken out the sycamore tree that had always shaded that very lucky persistent bee colony.

When that tree went down, the root system flipped up and of course, it could easily pick up those timbers. It flipped that hive over on its back, and because the hive bodies were mostly propolis, it did not break apart. I set it back up, I put it back together, and I wrote an article about it. I was castigated that I should have left that hive alone, that it was its destiny to lie on its back and to function that way. I didn't photograph any of this. I don't know why I did not photograph any of this. I set it back up, and then I left it alone. It had the same propolis top, it essentially had no bottom board, and it still had a lot of bees in it.

Lying on the back in the water for a period of weeks had not done it any good. This was a serious setback for what had been a very persistent colony. I set it back up and I left it. I'm winding down now. I don't mean to drag this story out, but this story went on for decades. Decades. I went back to visit it. It's not an easy yard to get to. Even though you can see it from the road, it's not an easy yard to get to, and it's a very seasonal yard to get to. I'll explain that. That thing had blown over again, and this time it was not successful. Realizing that I had been criticized before for setting it up, I decided even with the criticism I had faced about leaving this hive alone, this hive was now empty.

I did set it back up and I thought if the bees want to reoccupy it, here it is. A year or so passed, and I went back out and the hive had collapsed without the bees in it to maintain the propolis coatings and shields. The colony had begun to decay. The bottom hive had collapsed and it had fallen over, and this time I left it. The last time I saw it, and one day, yes, one day I will stop by there and have a look at it again. Now probably five years have passed, and if I can predict just exactly what happened, I would think it's just going to be a rotted mess.

That colony had one first class story and is probably the premier hive that stands out in my mind. All the hives that I've ever seen, that I've ever worked with, this hive is the one that impressed and whose legacy stays with me the most. It really showed me the power of propolis and what the bees can do when they consistently replace, restore, refurbish, repair. They can make a box go a ridiculously long time. I had all that thought in the previous segment when I said that bees can really use propolis to maintain their hive correctly. This story has an exaggeration factor of none. This really happened the way I tried to describe it as best I can. This is an important memory to me. I always think that propolis is underrated and far more important to the bees than we realize. Until next week, thank you for listening to my ramblings. I'm Jim telling you goodbye.

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