Plain Talk: Thieving Beekeepers (204)

Episode 204 – Plain Talk: Thieving Beekeepers

Jim Tew: Well, listeners, I've calmed down a bit. I got myself agitated over a particular subject I'm going to try to address here today. Before I give you the subject title, I want to tell you, I've never written about this subject. I've never given talks about this subject. I haven't even talked about this subject with many other beekeepers because in a way it's sensitive. It's out there, it's happened to others other than just myself.

I want to spend a few minutes talking to you about things that beekeepers have borrowed from me or from my lab that they simply never returned. It kind of leaves you wondering exactly what was on the person's mind. If you think you can slag through this presentation, hang on. It's one of a kind and I don't think I'll ever try it again.

I'm Jim Tew and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura where I do some plain talking about some common aspects of 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: Many years ago, I didn't really have much interest. They weren't all that big of a deal, but I began to acquire old beekeeping catalogs. I've just written an article that'll be coming out, one of the bee magazines, sometime in December I think, about the value of these old beekeeping catalogs. They unintentionally gather and collect history of beekeeping. While they were trying to sell products, in many cases toxic products in the old days or pieces of equipment that are now long gone.

Or pieces of equipment that hung on for decades and then quietly went away with no fanfare, those catalogs are the only place I know of that you can go to and get an idea of how things were evolving. Exactly when did our industry change from glass to plastic, for instance? Well, you can kind of document that in these old catalogs. At the time, eBay was not even alive and well. You'd buy them here, buy them there, you'd see them, you'd pick them up. They were occasional. Sometimes people would give them to you. I began to accumulate them, and I probably got 25 or 30.

Before I finish this story, I'd like to say I had closer to 50. A good friend of mine was a avid collector of all things beekeeping. Oddly, this person is still a pretty good friend. My catalogs went away. Not all of them, probably two-fifths of them. Maybe as many as a half. You see I don't know. They were just old bee supply catalogs. I noticed one day that my catalog repertoire was greatly diminished. Leaving out a lot of details and not calling any names, I later talked with a person who strangely had very similar catalogs to mine, even with particular markings on them.

Some of these catalogs had been in libraries, and it was more than just a happenstance that a good deal of my catalogs were gone, and that this person now had catalogs with the same similar markings. I couldn't prove anything, but I'm still stinging about this all these years later because it's like someone stealing tools from a person who makes their living with those tools. I use those catalogs frequently. Not as a collector, but as a writer, and as a bit of a beekeeping historian. They're gone. I can't get them back.

It brings to mind the comment that I often hear-- often is too strong a word, that I sometimes hear on the media that, on the West Coast usually, that a bee yard has been stolen. The sad thing about that, it takes beekeepers to pilfer from beekeepers. I can tell you for a fact that it wasn't some guy working at a car dealership who decided he wanted to go out and load up a truckload of bees, and so he rented a truck and took off. No, it takes expertise. Isn't that disconcerting?

Back to my opening sentences, this is not really a common topic. It can sometimes be a news item, if theft is big enough, but it's not really a common topic. We just don't want to think about that. The person sitting next to you at a meeting, if given the opportunity, would load up your beehives and call them his own. Just like passwords, and just like all the other security devices we have, cameras and whatever, there is a developing field of technology now for putting these tracker objects inside beehives,

So that someone can ride along the road and just pick up a signal from the bee yard and telling them what yard it is, location, and whatever, and if you move that, then those hives can be tracked. The only reason, listeners, the only reason that technology has been developed was because sometimes beekeepers take other beekeepers' equipment. It's essentially unnerving. One of the things, other than the catalogs, that I've had a lot of trouble with was my books.

Now, I need to say that part of this is probably my fault because I have an interest in everything and I specialize in nothing, so I'm always attracted to yet another topic or another project. I tend to be scattered. As I talk to you right now, my desk looks like I've got multiple projects going on. When I was working in my lab, it was a public place. Beekeepers come, beekeepers go. Meetings were held there. I don't know. If I knew who it was, I don't know what I'd even do.

I noticed that some of my books were gone. This is the oddity. You see, for instance, one of the books that went away, that just vaporized, was Eva Crane's A Comprehensive Survey of Honey. The book is out of print. Now if you buy a copy of it, it's breathtakingly expensive online if you can find one. My good friend Kim, now departed, just stepped up to the plate and had an extra copy that he just handed to me. Now that book, because Kim's no longer here, is remarkably valuable to me.

Early on, when I began to realize that some of my books were just taken off, not a great number, I began to clearly mark my books with my name and Ohio State, clearly marking them. I also put a hidden mark. I'm not going to tell you where, but a lot of my books have hidden marks in them. You can snatch it up and show this unusual place in a book where the mark is. I have lost book after book after book. The annoying thing is, it would sometimes take me days or weeks to realize that the book was gone.

This is a possible scenario, especially with Crane's Honey book. Well, it must be at home. Yes, I bet you I took that book home to work on a talk. Then you'd go home and I'd forget to look for it for a day or two. You'd look out in the shop where I work. I don't see it laying around anywhere here. Obviously, if I were working, it'd be here on the work table. It's not here. Well, it must be in that back room at the lab. I'll check there. Then give it two more days to remember to check at the lab and the back room.

It's not there. Then I'd ask my office associates, not who I'm accusing of thieving but just, "Have you seen that book? Did I loan that to someone?" Then it would take about a week to 10 days to realize that this particular book was gone. I have no earthly idea where these books went. I don't know when they got picked up. I don't know how they got picked up. I got Eva Crane's book back, a second book that I got back in a way. Someone needed an old copy of my ABC & XYZ of beekeeping.

The sad thing is, it was an original book that I bought when I was a bright and shiny new beekeeper. I bought The Hive and the Honey-Bee and as quickly as I could, I bought ABC & XYZ. That was out at the time. It's got my name all over it, and that book vanished. That was painful, listeners. That was painful because that was one of my first beekeeping books. This vanishing book story had a strange ending. I want to ask you to wait and hear from our sponsors before I give you that ending.

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Jim: The way my ABC & XYZ story ended was that at any time I could, I just harped about the sadness of me losing one of my original-- I didn't lose it-- one of my first beekeeping books, Vaporizing. I mentioned it to my family that this book meant a lot to me and it was gone. I did not know, listeners, that one of my granddaughters was sitting there listening to everything I was saying. She took it upon herself to find the 54th Edition of ABC & XYZ on one of those channels that I don't use very much. I do believe it was Instagram.

For Christmas, she gave me my ABC & XYZ book back of the correct year. She was spot on. She had it exactly right. In a strange way now, that book is remarkably valuable to me because a granddaughter with no knowledge, not a word to me, I don't know if she-- maybe she couldn't find the book, she thought. She didn't say anything until she did find it, bought it, gave it to me, and signed it as being from my granddaughter of one of my first beekeeping books. In a way, that story had a happy ending.

The book from Kim, Eva Crane's book, Honey: A Comprehensive Survey, these books, as they have been replaced, have become very dear to me. Most of the books, I never get back. Other pieces of equipment that we just had all kinds of trouble keeping up with comes to mind. One was observation hives. People would come in, they're in a sweat. I've agreed to go to a school and give a talk. "I need an observation hive. Can I borrow one for four days?" I got to get the bees in it. I got to drive to the school. I got to give-- as always, the devil was in the details.

We didn't have a system in my lab for saying, "Okay, I'll loan you this on this day and I expect it back on this day." Then have some pre-computer accounting system for keeping up with that. We just ended up having a remarkable problem having enough observation hives in my own lab to use for our own agenda. To meet this issue, I came up with a gem tube brain-dead simple observation hive that was made out of number three common pine boards, and [unintelligible 00:13:51] and, plexiglass, and a few screws and nuts and bolts.

It made an observation hive. I built 12 of those. That took the pressure off our better, more viewable observation hives that would go to more upscale presentations. Do you know listeners, 25 years later, how many of those observation hives do you think are still in my lab? None. I have one here at home. What does a beekeeper think when they just don't, bring it back? I don't know. I'm not really hostile about it, but you borrow something, you just commonly bring it back.

I did resolve that issue. We were able to meet their frantic needs and be supportive of our beekeeping brothers and sisters who on short notice needed an observation hive. It became just an ever-ongoing burden to keep those things set up. I had a bee yard very close to my lab at a path that went right by that you could drive by. It was a walking path. 10 to 15 colonies. I was happened to be in the community there one day and I drove by. It was just a few minutes away from my lab. There was a big dead spot of grass where a beehive had been sitting.

I made the mental note. I wonder if some of my little office staff has moved that around. As usual, a day or two passes and I ask everybody, "What are you guys doing with that hive you move?" "I didn't move a hive. I didn't even been over there. What are you talking about?" Hive's gone. "Well, there's a hive gone. Did you pick up dead equipment?" "No, I didn't pick up dead equipment." You got to go through all this self-doubt to realize that hive's gone and we didn't take it. We didn't move it. I thought, "Well, thankfully that doesn't happen very often."

Listeners, as you know it's just like a bear visiting a bee yard. A week or two later, same yard, couple of colonies down because they knew which ones they wanted. They were picking and choosing the ones-- another hive was gone. This time we were much more in tune. Somebody is onto this and somebody has got some self-service beehive operation going on. By the time we lost the third one, we had to move them all. You don't know who's doing it. We had several hundred hives here and there. All they had to do was come up with another yard of ours.

It was all clearly branded on the fronts, on the frames, OSU. I have to admire people for taking on the responsibility of explaining why they have OSU-branded equipment in their bee yard or why some of their bee books have my name in it. It must lead to very interesting conversations and justifications about what's going on here. The way we saw that was to just pack up and move everything out. I got a call from a fellow I knew. Be sure you can't figure out who I'm talking about, because if I wanted him to know this, I would tell him, "You just leave it alone."

He called me from his area of work. He was kind of of love-- he's a fair beekeeper. He had two or three hives. They're a lot like my hives now. They need love and care. This was years ago when I could still love and care for my hives. His needed it then. That was the beekeeper he was always. He was calling me frequently for questions and updates, and we was always behind. He called me one day and said there was a swarm on his business property on a low-hanging tree, and he had no equipment with him.

"Was there any way that I could quickly, without notice, do anything and come get that swarm before it flew away?" Now, the way this conversation was going, the swarm would be mine, that he would rather someone have it than no one have it. I jumped through hoops. I'm a beekeeper. Sure. I've got a swarm. You got to drop everything, change your whole life. I grabbed a five-frame nuc, a couple of frames, a little bit of equipment. I was in a hurry. Off I did go. I got out there and it was a low-hanging tree. It was close to the ground. I shook them right in.

They went in and they stayed. I said, "Well, I'll come back later tonight and pick them up." He said, "Well, that'll work." He said, "That way they're here off the grounds." There was some stumble stuttering and some awkwardness. I picked up immediately that he wanted to come back later that night and pick that swarm up. Well, it's part of my job to support beekeepers and work for beekeepers and with beekeepers. I said, "Why don't you just keep this thing?" That was the right thing to say. "You keep this swarm." I said, "Then I'll get my box and my equipment back."

The strange story ends here. He kept the swarm and he kept my equipment. I saw him at a grocery store someplace, asked him how the swarm was doing. He said, "Oh, I got to bring that box back to you sometime," and he never did. I guess you could call him and ask to bring it back, but it's just a bee box. That was over the edge listeners to have somebody drive out to this site, hire the swarm and their equipment, give him the swarm and then him keep the box. Am I being picky there?

I don't want this to reflect on the guy, but it'll always be on my mind when I talk to him and around him. These things happen oftentimes at night. I've had photographic slides in the old days when slides were the thing. I've got slides that weren't returned. You don't have copies of them. "Well, you shouldn't have loaned them." "Well, I thought he'd bring them back." We've had honey at our honey sale. You see people just obviously flagrantly pick up a bottle of honey at our honey table and walk away with it.

I had a real bulldog of a technician at the time and he would chase them down and almost body slam them and remind them that that honey cost at the time a lot of money and now I'd be almost free. What has been my beef today? There are situations that we just don't talk about. I don't know if it's a personality type. I don't know if it's people beekeeping eagerness and passion for beekeeping. I don't know what it is. These are things that some of us have had to deal with all down through the years.

I've done you a great favor. I haven't listed all of them. I've just listed some that comes to mind. I've just got to quickly say, I had one of those tiny, tiny A.I. Root antique smokers. It was a small, small smoker. It was a silly smoker. It was brand new in the box. It walked off. I don't know who picked it up or when, but it was in my lab out in the hallway on a bookshelf as a demo and it and the box to this day are gone. Can you just say, I just kind of vented for 20 and 25 minutes here today and just got it off my chest? I love all beekeepers.

Even if I figured out that you were the one who took the smoker, I would figure out some way to justify it. There it is. It's just me venting. I was trying to write that article and I got watered up all over again about my supply catalogs being reallocated to different owners, probably better homes. Hey, I promise you this, next time we talk, it'll be on a bright, cheerful, upbeat topic. I'm fairly comfortable telling you we're never going to talk about this subject again. Thank you for listening. I look forward to talking to you about this time next week. Bye-bye.

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