Plain Talk: Looking Back 200th Episodes (200)

Episode 200 – Plain Talk: Looking Back 200th Episodes

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners, it's Jim Tew here. This has been a fairly good week. Fall is here. Leaves are falling. The air is brisk. There's that odd fall smell in the air. Football games, street festivals downtown, pumpkins out everywhere. You know the drill. This discussion today, this talk today, these rambling comments today are in reflection to the fact that we're celebrating, even if it's a personal celebration. This is the 200th time that we've cut a segment for Honey Bee Obscura.

Now, you'd think we'd finally get it right after 200 times, but every one of them has their own personality, has their own microphone issues, has their own topic disruptions. Every one of them has their own personality. We've learned a lot, but we still haven't learned enough. Could you and I think about this for just a few minutes and discuss what we've been through to get through 200 episodes? Just to be sure you know who we are, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week where we talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping.

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: Sometime in late 2020, Kim Flottum came to me and described this whole podcast thing to me. Through the years, Kim and I had worked on various videos and written projects. We had never done an audio project. I had a lot going on, and I was semi-retired, and my facilities and equipment, and capabilities were minimal, so I didn't feel like I wanted to take it on. Kim was persistent. If you didn't know Kim, he had a degree of persistence, and he was also the salesman. He convinced me that in just 20 minutes a week, we could do enough work for a month.

That was quickly found to be bogus. Listeners, it takes a lot more time than that. A 20-minute segment just on my end probably takes closer to an hour, and I don't know how long it takes for the editor to cut and paste to make everything right, but I enjoyed doing it almost from the get-go. Do you old longtime listeners remember that the very first segments were 10 minutes long? Kim and I quickly figured out that in 10 minutes, we barely have enough time to even introduce ourselves and talk about the weather and what we'd been doing before you're almost halfway through.

It stretched to 20 minutes, and that was feedback from you listeners. That 20 minutes was pretty much about the time where you were driving from here to there, or about all you wanted to spend on at one time. 20 minutes is not magical, but on the other hand, 20 minutes is magical. On January the 10th, 2021, we did the first segment, laid this thing out, and we took off. What our effort was to be, and it still is, is to talk a round beekeeping. Not a lot of specifics because you're probably driving, you're probably sitting, watching, doing something else.

No pencil, no paper. Why give all details and figures and procedures for varroa control or swarm prevention or whatever? Just talk lightly about beekeeping as though we were at a meeting and we're sitting at a table during the break just chatting. That was the whole motif. As you painfully know, listeners, there never has been a script. Kim and I would just interact with each other and discuss things as they came up. Sometimes we agreed. We usually agreed. Sometimes we didn't agree. We were always polite, but if we didn't agree, we would make our points and then move on.

That was the start of the whole thing. I remember the first time that I was aware that we had really committed to it and had evolved to a degree, was when we went through the 100th segment. That whole process was an interesting topic. We had did a presentation on 5,000 years of beekeeping in 24 minutes. Of course, we had to just hit a point, hit a point, hit a point, hit a point, and keep going, because that was a mouthful to undertake. Never mind the first three or four or five minutes having been discussing the fact that this was our 100th segment.

I've enjoyed doing this very much. I've learned a lot about the technology of producing a podcast. That doesn't mean that I'm good at it, it just means I've learned a lot. I've come to base my schedule of life around that next upcoming presentation and what you got in the can and what's good to go. You need to know a lot of topics just crash and burn out, and before they ever get to first base, either I or Jeff Ott, the engineer and producer of this show will say, "Whoop, that didn't work." "Not enough content, too many mistakes, grammatically," or whatever. "Can't be corrected." They get dumped.

We blew right by the 100th anniversary, the 100th segment with eagerness and enthusiasm. Kim and I were going strong. Real quickly, I need to get into it and then get out of it on as positive a note as I can. Kim's health began to fail sometime thereafter, and no reason to go into it greatly, but Kim was completely devoted to the whole concept of Honey Bee Obscura and to the other podcast in the system here. He was spending a significant amount of time working on podcasts. It meant a lot to him. It was his retirement job, and he was flat out and he didn't want to quit, but his health continued to fail.

That included his voice. His voice failed. He had a lot of trouble with his voice. We hung on as long as we could and we hung on until we couldn't. We lost Kim. That was a shock. We tried to mask it. We'd never been through this before. We didn't know what to do, what the procedure should be, what the correct protocol was. Kim left a hole that required us to work around it. Kim and I had known each other for decades, and decades, and decades. It was just not easy to find someone to step in. Just to fill the void there for a few weeks until we could find something to do, I began to do them by myself.

Not that I'm a hero, not that I'm good at it. Not that this was the right way to go, but that's how that evolved. Not because we had or I had a grand plan, but because it's almost Thursday and it's time for another segment. At that point, I began to do it pretty much by myself. Can we take a break at this point and change the mood, hear from our sponsor, and then come back and see where this is ultimately going?

Betterbee: Winter is coming. Prepare your bees for the cold months with better bees-insulating hive wraps, outer covers, mouse guards, hive straps, and more. Visit, betterbee.com/winterprep for tips and tricks to help your hive withstand the harsh weather.

Jim: Before the break, I told you that I had become a sole source provider, but I have had and do have and will continue to have occasional guests. It's dangerous to begin to list them because after we've done so many segments, I'm terrified that I'm leaving someone out. I need to mention Jeff Ott and the interlude between Kim and no Kim. He stepped in a lot. Jeff's a very prominent beekeeper. He also runs the system behind the scenes and cleans up my bad audio tracks and makes me sound better than I am. Jeff and I worked together for a while from Beekeeping Today Podcast. Becky Masterman.

Dr. Becky Masterman from Beekeeping Today. Superb beekeeper, knowledgeable, has her hand in bees all the time. We work together a lot on a temporary basis. I found Anne Frey at Betterbee who also works for our sponsor at Betterbee. A very adept beekeeper. Easy to talk to. Interviewed her multiple times. We've talked to both of the editors of the beekeeping magazines, Jerry Hayes and Eugene Makovec, have done superb jobs and will seemingly within reason come back when we ask them to do, to sit here and talk to you folks about beekeeping.

One of the ones I enjoyed the most, and that was unique to me if you're a regular listener, was my grandson. He decided he wanted to be a beekeeper. In addition to being now a high school senior and a football player and a musician and a young man about town. Beekeepers, how clever do you have to be to say that this is going to be an uphill battle for beekeeping to compete with all the exciting parts of his life? I really enjoyed talking to my grandson, Will. He's still into it, but he has it kind of in priority, in position.

It's not the peak priority in his life, but it keeps the bee colony going. Started with two, one died almost immediately, and then the other seems to be thriving reasonably well. Between you and me confidentially, I'm looking to see that colony die during the winter. Let's see what kind of commitment there is next spring when he finds out that he's back to first base, I guess he's back to the batter's box starting all over again. I've enjoyed talking to those people. I want you to know that I've got other people lined up and once or twice a month to give you a break from me going on and on, we'll talk about beekeeping from their perspective.

People ask me all the time, "Don't you ever give out a topic?" No, not really. As you very well know at all levels, beekeeping is complex. The beekeeping industry is complex. Beekeepers are psychologically complex. I've tried to talk about that. There seems to be endless information and just about the time you discuss a topic, then something changes and modifies, so the topic is worthy of being reviewed again. I've had a really good time discussing those various aspects of beekeeping, being challenged.

Throughout the way here, and maybe later, I need to say that the only reason, listeners, the only reason that we got the 200 segments was because of you. Without listeners, we had no reason to exist. It's always been the greatest compliment, and at the same time, the greatest responsibility to do something worthwhile, meaningful, I'd like to think relaxing and enjoyable, once a week, 52 times a year. We are nothing without you listening, and we always realize that. Many times you write me and I try every time to return some kind of comment, some kind of acknowledgment, but listeners, sometimes I just miss it.

It comes in on multiple formats. I'm just a one-man band. I'm a semi, mostly retired guy with limited technical equipment and even more limited technical ability. If I didn't respond to you, don't give up on me. Know that it wasn't because I was arrogant or aloof. [chuckles] It's more because I'm incompetent and sometimes overloaded. The biggest thing we need to acknowledge here very firmly is that without you listening, we don't have a podcast. Some of the things I've really enjoyed talking about was the fact that bees live in two worlds and two dimensions.

They live their own life as they would live if there weren't a beekeeper on the planet. Then secondly, they tolerate beekeepers and will live in their world reasonably well, but I've talked about the conflict that that brings up between beekeepers and their bees on multiple segments. Swarming comes to mind immediately, how do I stop swarming, tear down queen cells, replace the queen every two years, at least if she even lives that long? Years ago, the comment was made that she should not even hive a swarm and lead the queen in it because it already clearly had a swarming propensity.

Beekeepers in the natural scheme of things, swarming is all that keeps the bee species viable. They absolutely have to swarm in the wild or they die as a species. You see here is the conflict of beekeepers wanting to stop something that is so vital to the bees. That's one of the conflicts that I enjoy talking about and I still enjoy exploring. As that swarm majestically and mysteriously flies away with my $45, $55 queen marked leading the way, on one hand, I'm just as sick as I can be, but on the other hand, it is a marvelous moment.

I've always enjoyed talking about that. I've enjoyed talking about robbing. What a pain that is. How do you stop robbing, what to do about robbers, and what are the unique attributes of robber bees? I have no science to support this, but I'm really comfortable telling you that robbing and the bee world, not in the beekeeper world, but robbing and the bee world is totally sensible, valuable, valuable resources are saved. They are stolen, for lack of a better word, reappropriated, moved, reallocated to a different nesting hive for the winter.

That meant that some of the colonies had a better chance of surviving the winter while other colonies are left destitute and they're going to die. You see, as beekeepers, we have this sense that our colonies should live in perpetuity, but in reality, in the wild, bees are dying all the time and wax moths are clearing out the nesting cavity in a tree. Some other obscure protected darkened place, and another swarm moves in and tries it again, shoot until you win kind of thing.

I spent a lot of time talking about robbing because it's so damaging to beekeepers and so demoralizing, but in the bee world, it's so completely normal. Winter kills. You did something wrong and your bees died in the winter. Kim and I, and that I alone, and I with guest speakers would talk about ways to, in some way, forestall winter kills. I got to tell you, beekeepers, just as I've tried to tell my grandson, nothing could be more natural than bees not making it. It's just nature's way of taking those out of the gene pool that didn't do something right.

You see where it comes in conflict is in the beekeeper world, you paid for a package of bees a year or two ago, you nurtured the queen as best you could. You put feed on the colony, you fed pollen substitute, you wrapped, you tried to keep the mite population down. You did all those things to keep that colony alive and it still died. Sometimes it is something that the beekeeper did, but more often than not, it's just the fact that all colonies don't make it all the time.

I've enjoyed talking about the conflict between the natural world and what happens naturally and between the beekeeper world who's trying to do everything they can to save their investment and to keep them looking silly because they put money in dying bees. Speaking of putting money and dying these, how about paying big bucks for a high-value queen? I was intrigued to go back and look all those years ago when beekeepers first began to try to improve their stock by using magic queens from somewhere else in the world, that those queens were absolutely just as expensive, even more expensive, adjusted for time change as our queens today.

I found that intriguing that in our historical annals of beekeeping management, we have paid this much money for queens or even more other places in our lives. We do that only to have a queen fail and they turn up with laying workers. Then here's the same series of questions. What did I do wrong? How did this happen? We've discussed the fact that queens fail all the time. Queens fail in nature. Nature cleans up the mess. They have a system for it. The species tries again and it works. Laying workers really become a headache, a concern, a reason for a book chapter, and the beekeeping part of the world.

If you have a queen fail, it just happens. You try to watch for it. If there's enough season left, you might make some changes, but otherwise, you just miss that one. You'll make changes the next spring and start over again and hope that that year is even better. That's an example. How about those skunks on the yard? It just never ends, doesn't it? Should you wrap the colonies? We just talked about that in a recent piece. These are all issues that we try to discuss in plain talk beekeeping and all at the same time, address the reality and sometimes the finality of it just not working.

I know that look in starry-eyed beekeepers who have done it for a year or two wanting to know, sadly, like their pet puppy died, what did they do wrong? Sometimes you honestly didn't do anything wrong at all. It just went that way. I've enjoyed every time that I've been through these discussions with you. It gives me purpose and function. As a-- What would I call myself? An ancient apiculturist, it keeps me functional, it keeps me working. To you, the listeners, I deeply appreciate it. Jeff Ott appreciates it. We would just not be anything without you hanging on and listening to our ramblings every week.

I hope you'll keep coming back. We are excited to continue this. I continue to enjoy it. We've adapted to a lot, we've evolved a lot. We'll keep evolving or do whatever it takes to make it the best program that we can, and have a look at our webpage. We spend a lot of time on that. I wish at some point you'd have a look at that just to see all the attributes that are available to you. Until we talk again next week about a more routine bee topic other than 200 segments, thank you for slogging through this. If you want to write me, if you've got some suggestions for topics that we could cover, give it a shot.

Hey, thank you. Bye-bye.

[00:22:15] [END OF AUDIO]