Bee Talk with Eugene & Diane Makovec (233)

Episode 233 – Bee Talk with Eugene & Diane Makovec

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners. Normally, I'd say it's Jim, but this time it's Jim, Eugene, and Diane. Yes, it's true. I've got the Makovecs here with me from The American Bee Journal by way of the Dadant Company in Hamilton, Illinois. Nice to have somebody sitting in the bee yard with me. Say hi.

Eugene Makovec: Hey, everybody. It's nice to be here. I'm just sitting here watching a yellow jacket go by, of all things. We're sitting in a busy bee yard, and it's nice to be here in Ohio, in Wooster. I don't know how to pronounce that today.

Jim: Yes, Wooster, Ohio. Diane, you're off-mic, but say something with force and authority.

[music]

Diane Makovec: Hi. I'm happy to be here. This is really nice sitting out here with Jim in this bee yard. Bees are buzzing. It's a beautiful sunny day, and we're happy to be here with you.

Jim: I'm glad to have the company. Visitors, I just want to talk to the Makovecs about what it's like to be responsible for a publication that has to come out every month since sometime in the 1800s. That's a lot of months.

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 will delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Eugene, how in the world does someone in your position decide to come to being a national beekeeping magazine editor? What was your circuitous path?

Eugene: Circuitous is actually the first thing that comes to mind when you say that, because I didn't come here naturally, I guess I would say. I did get a journalism degree years ago, but I guess I didn't want to write obits for a few years and things like that and work my way up to ladder, just maybe too lazy for that. I had another interest, which was printing, and I got into the printing industry. I spent most of my career working for printing industries, mostly in labeling.

At some point, I took up beekeeping and got involved in organizations and took on a newsletter for the state organization, which was a great thing because it forced me to go to twice annual conferences, where I got to listen to and meet people like Jim Tew and other renowned speakers and learn a great deal. I also met vendors like the Dadant Company, and at some point or other, I thought, if either of these magazine jobs opens up, I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and just see what happens.

Somehow, the ABJ job got by me. Joe Graham retired. I happened to be talking to one of the Dadant family about a year later, and I mentioned something about it. I wish I'd known that that job was coming open. He looked at me and said, "I wish I'd known you were interested." As it happened, about two to three weeks later, the current editor of the journal, Kirsten Traynor, stepped down, moved on to other things. I got an email one morning saying, "When can you come talk to us?" Within a matter of weeks, I was hired as the new editor of American Bee Journal.

It was really neat the way it happened, and it was a great thrill for me. I love what I'm doing. There are days when I wake up and I think I'm an imposter. I have no business being here. Other times I think, "Hey, I can do this. I'm doing well." I expect the truth is somewhere between.

Jim: Well, that's certainly a noble find. It is, to finally love what you do. I wish I could say that all my career I loved everything. I had ups and downs, but enough of that. Diane, what's your beekeeping experience?

Diane: It's much better than what it used to be. I always have loved bees. I was telling Jim my grandpa had bees behind his greenhouses, but he would never let us kids get close enough to them. We saw them buzzing around and pollinating the various plants that he had in greenhouses, so I've always loved bees. I always wanted to have my own bees in my own yard. It wasn't until I met Eugene that that dream came true. Shortly after we met, and I had my own place, he put up a beehive in my own backyard, and then he started training me and showing me where the queen was and everything about the bees.

Jim: Just like that, you're one of us.

Diane: Yes, and then you're hooked. That's it. You're just hooked.

Jim: You're hooked. That's a good way of putting it. What is it about that hook? There are some people that you could show them bees, and that would just be incentive to get as far away from you and those bees as they could get. Then you show it to the 35th person and they don't try to get away. They ask more questions. They stand too close. They don't have a veil on while you have a swarm. I've never known in my entire life how you find those people and how you separate them from the masses.

Eugene: What's interesting for me is I grew up with bees. My dad was a beekeeper, and I had no interest in it. It was just something he did on his own. He didn't really get any of us kids involved in it. It wasn't until years later when he got out of beekeeping, he was getting up in age and was failing health. Suddenly, I had to buy my honey at the store, and it wasn't the same. I started talking to my dad about it, and I found out that his dad had been a beekeeper, too, and that sealed the deal for me. Suddenly, I was hooked on beekeeping.

Jim: I became an entomologist before I was a beekeeper. After I got this bee disease, whatever it is, I went back to my entomology book, to this [unintelligible 00:06:19] chapter, and I looked up bees to see what I wrote because I was exposed to it during those entomology classes, but nothing sunk. I had really significant statements like drones or male bees that I had written in the margins, just nothing. Just this might be a test question kind of thing.

I can't explain, even in my own personality, why it didn't work then to have worked so well later on. As a magazine publisher, I don't know how you find the people that, within beekeeping, are beekeepers enough to want to subscribe to a magazine to read even more. It's like you're selecting from the selected.

Eugene: People think, "Why would I read a magazine when I can just go to YouTube?" Yes, there's a whole lot of good information out there on the Internet, but there's also a lot of not-so-good information out there. We like to think with both of the magazines that we're separating the wheat from the chaff for people and giving you the information that is pertinent and the information that is accurate.

Jim: Well, that makes sense. I've so often wondered when I read or listen to something streaming from YouTube or TikTok that I really know very little about who posted it. There's no addresses unless you happen to know the individual. What do you do? How do you look for proper information?

Diane: I go to Eugene.

Jim: You go to ABJ.

Diane: He is my number one resource.

Jim: What a testimonial. Great job.

Diane: [laughs]

Eugene: Smart woman. Good answer.

Jim: Smart woman. [laughs]

Diane: The second place I go is a prior bee club, Three Rivers Beekeepers.

Eugene: Bee clubs are very important. We give a bee club discount, in fact, for subscribers. You get a 10% discount if you go on to a beekeeping organization. We just always want to encourage that interaction between beekeepers. That's a big part of learning. I always tell people when they talk about jumping into beekeeping and they want my help, I always tell them, "You really need to take yourself to a workshop, join the local club, and I'd be glad to help you, and, of course, subscribe to the magazine."

Jim: That's good advice, and I want to comment on that right after we come back from a word from our sponsor.

[music]

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Jim: Giving advice is serious work. It needs to be right. I've often been apprehensive when you're trying to help someone get started and get them going. I really painfully know entirely too many people, who thought they could just get a beehive and put some bees in it and walk away from it and live happily ever after, and then somehow mysteriously get all this free hunting and pollination from it, and then nothing worked.

I'd get some of the most contorted questions that just made no sense at all. You don't want to be impolite to those people. They're trying to be beekeepers. They're just doing a bad job of it. They try to arrogantly without saying, "Well, that was the worst thing you've ever done." Do you have any suggestions on how you answer questions and respond to needy beekeepers?

Eugene: It can be very frustrating because a lot of people, like you said, think they can just put bees in a box and they'll do their thing. Unfortunately, there are some suppliers that are out there who suggest the same thing. "Oh, just buy our equipment, put some bees in it, and they know what to do and everything will work out fine. Just go out and get the honey later." It's very frustrating when people buy into that.

What's really frustrating to me, too, is it seems there are some people who really don't want to take the time, or maybe they're just afraid of their bees, but they'll put them in there. You'll go out, you'll help them look over their shoulder, maybe get in even, and do it for them, show them how you work bees and everything, and the next time we talk to them, it's months later. "I haven't been back in the bees, but can you tell me why they're doing this?"

It's tough to say at this point, but that's one of my biggest pieces of advice is you can't be afraid to get into those bees. You have to keep track of them, especially in the springtime, things change so quickly. I always have those people who will call me end of April and say, "Well, I haven't opened my hives yet this year." My first thought is, "Uh-oh," because they probably already swarmed at least once, and it's going to be tough to get much production out of them this year.

Now, there are a lot of people who are just the opposite. I really like the people, who I'm mentoring, that will call me and they'll ask me more informed questions like, "I've been doing this with my colony, and this is what I'm seeing, and I don't understand why that happened," but you know they're involved. They're keeping up with them and they're learning. They might say, "I read this here, I saw this there. Why does this person do it this way and somebody else does it another way?" I just really love the people who are involved both mentally and physically in taking care of their bees. It's so much easier to mentor someone like that.

Jim: I was just thinking, that leaves me out on both counts. I'm not mentally or physically able to do very much. I do a nice job sitting in this chair, looking at bees. I had a situation a few months ago that I was uncomfortable with. A friend had a friend who was wanting to get bees. I helped them. I actually did some podcasts on that. I don't mentor well. It's not my thing to go one-on-one. I'm, I don't know, too insecure, too busy, too something. Then they kept going.

He's also getting chickens and goats. That was just an alarm bell after an alarm bell after an alarm bell. Any one of those is going to be a gracious plenty for one year. If you do all three of those, my brother had goats, and it's just something to do all the time with goats. You've got chickens. How much time do you spend with them? Somebody's taking care of them while you're visiting here?

Diane: Yes. We hired a little boy down the street for $10 a day to go and check on them and give them some feed and some water. Don't forget the inside birds. We have two parakeets, too.

Jim: Oh, I wouldn't have known that. I was relieved when the person came back to me and said, "Never mind, my friend's going to just take up chickens." He decided to get rabbits instead of goats. Was I disappointed that this beekeeper didn't pan out? No, I don't think so. This was not going to have a happy ending. What are you doing for photos and that kind of thing? Do you encourage photos or pictures, or do you want people to read your magazine?

Eugene: I definitely encourage photos. When we have writers, more often than not, we'll provide their own photos. Sometimes we'll hunt something down. We use stock photos now and then. I like the personal aspect of photos that are taken by the writer to illustrate what they're doing. We also buy cover photos. We are always in the market for good cover photos. We are very proud of our covers in ABJ. There's a constant market for them.

I get a fair amount of photos sent in, and we have specific specifications for them. It has to be 9x12 vertical orientation, 300 DPI minimum. Those are specified in our writer's guidelines on the website, but most of the photos that I get in do not match those specifications. It's like anything else. You work with the ones you can work with. A lot of times, I'll go back and say, "Thank you very much. I can't use it for these specific reasons." They may come back and try again, or they might not.

Jim: There goes that answer. I was just about to ask you, are you able to take a photo that's generally too small and do something in Photoshop or wherever, and bring it up to speed?

Eugene: It's tough to do that. I know there's software now that can try and rescue a photo that's too small and make it into a bigger one, but we're talking about pixels that are-- If you've got 100 pixels across on something and you try and turn it into 300 pixels across, you're basically duplicating pixels. You're not getting any of that information that's missing. You can dumb down a photo from a large photo size to a small, but you can't go the other direction without losing quality.

Jim: I went through that phase with a Sony Mavica that would make one picture. I've got about three to four years of black space in my life where I made nothing but bad pictures, one after the other. Even though the camera dependably made them, and that was the early stages of digital photography, it left a hole in my digital life. Tell me what it's like to have to put a schedule together that includes a major respectable magazine every month. Do you live under constant pressure? Do you get used to the schedule? I mean, never a Christmas off, nothing? You're there on the job every month?

Eugene: You get used to the schedule, but it can be a challenge. You mentioned Christmas. Holidays really wreak havoc with the schedule because the printer's deadlines don't change. If Christmas falls in the middle of the week, you're losing two or three days there where nobody's doing anything. You've still got to have that magazine finished by a certain time, and our deadline really gets crunched by two or three days.

Same happens, say, the month of February. You're missing a couple of days there. You still got to get the same amount of work in. It can get challenging there, but it's really a cyclical job for me because everything just gets compressed into the second half of the month when all these articles are coming in and all these edits have to happen and re-edits and proofing and everything. Once it all gets done and off to the printer, and that proof is approved, then I can breathe for a few days. If I need to run somewhere, if we want to take a short vacation or something like that, that's when we do it is that first part of the month before things start to build up and go crazy again.

Jim: It sounds intensive to me. I don't know that I could do it. I tried to do just monthly newsletters, and for the first three months, I was just on fire. Then you miss a month, and once you miss a month, it immediately becomes addictive. I don't think there's going to be any kind of editorship role in my life.

Eugene: When I mentioned the journalism thing, that was another thing that I decided I didn't like was deadlines. I like to write, but I don't like writing on a deadline. It's difficult and I probably shouldn't say this within earshot of my writers, but I'm not fond of deadlines. I have to enforce them as much as I can.

Jim: Don't tell your writers that because they struggle with deadlines too.

Eugene: Now, I'll tell you one other thing. That little editorial I put in the front of the magazine is usually the last thing that's done.

Jim: Oh, okay. Just under the wire.

Eugene: If you want to find a typo in the magazine, that's also the best place to look.

[laughter]

Jim: That's where you have your little adrenaline inspirational spurge to get that done. That's what you're down to. Listeners, I've been visiting here on a sunny afternoon in my bee yard, which I don't usually take visitors to, but they have promised that they wouldn't take any pictures back here. I've been visiting with Eugene and Diane Makovec from the American Bee Journal. Been a nice visit. I can tell you that I'm not going to become a magazine editor. Thank you, Eugene.

Eugene: Thank you for coming.

Jim: Thank you, Diane.

Diane: Thank you, Jim.

Jim: I had a good time, and thanks for giving me a break and letting them hear someone besides me. Next week, you're back to me. Sorry, good things don't last. I'll talk to you next week, listeners.

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