Plain Talk: Trusting Your Gut (252)

Episode 252 – Plain Talk: Trusting Your Gut 

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Dr. Jim Tew: Hi, Honey Bee Obscura Podcast listeners, it's Jim here in the morning sit down with you. I was going to try to spend some time talking about the value of making gut decisions. We all do it, we do it in all phases of life, and we do it in our beekeeping too, but I don't know of anybody who's ever tried to write about it, talk about it, or how do you develop the repertoire of memories and experience to have confidence in your gut and its decision-making ability?

I've got a story, of course, where my gut spoke to me and I hesitated, and it was right. I want to tell you that story. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I try to do the best I can to make beekeeping real with plain talk.

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 honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: I confessed to you, in a recent episode, that as far as I'm concerned, I'm just talking to one or two of you. It's inconceivable to me that people all over the place are listening. Got some requests for information from Australia that I have to admit I haven't responded to, and I am going to do it, to the Australian listener, if you happen to be there. I'd just do a better job if I just envision me talking to one or two of you.

Listeners, do you remember that my grandson came in white hot and was just bonkers for bees? That was one of my first gut reactions. I was just humbled. His name is Will. I wish he wouldn't know that I've made this segment, but I have no doubt he'll find out about it, so I'll have to face him at some point. He was a high school senior, and I knew that this is not the best time to really flame out for beekeeping, but he wouldn't have it. He was just white hot keen.

He found a reluctant buddy, and they ordered two packages. I helped him put those in. One died almost immediately. It was weird how fast that package died. He has a hectic life. He was a sports person, had on various teams, and he was a bit of an academician, and he had a lot of interests. When I faded and I had to go back home, then the bee thing calmed down some, but he would ask every now and then, and when I would go back to visit, we'd go out and have a look.

My gut told me that this was not going to be the beginning of my grandson's bee project, but I do think that he's going to have bees when it's more practical for him later in life. Gut feeling number one, "This project at this time is not going to work," but here's the oddity. That neglected package that was only given a few meager feeding sessions is in a nice wooded area up in an open paddock in that area. I didn't see them again, and I'd get occasional comments from Will that they were still flying.

Finally winter came, and I thought, that'll be the end of this. My gut feeling told me that colony would die in the winter. Don't you know, it didn't. After I had everybody prepared for the other colony dying, it didn't die. It survived the winter. Indeed, listeners, it looked pretty good. Finally, how did that go? I'm trying to be exactly correct here. Finally, I had a chance to go back to Michigan from Ohio and have a visit there. I think I'd been told that there were some dead bees on the landing board.

When I got there, did come a heavy rain, and the dead bees had washed away, but when I opened the colony, the smell is so classic that you just want to slug yourself. It was clearly the smell of American foulbrood. I probably talked about it a little bit. I think I may have done a podcast. I don't know if I decided to send it or not, because it was frightening to me that Will and his buddy had one colony, and how in the world could it possibly have to me the most dreaded disease in beekeepingdom, even more dreaded to me than varroa mite.

I pulled out frames and there they were, the punctured sunken cappings and the twisted larvae, which was a queue, isn't it, experienced listeners?

The odor was there, and it was a good bee population, but my mind was racing at that point because I'm an Ohio beekeeper trying to help some novices in Michigan. I scurried around and tried to find some professionals who could tell me what the Michigan laws are based on this. Is it immediate colony destruction, or am I supposed to have the inspector come out? I don't know. Honestly, with no disrespect to any Michiganders who are listening, I'm still not sure exactly what the laws are.

Before I had to implement that decision, I stood there listening to my gut. This smells like American foulbrood, but they've had a significant brood die off, spotty pattern. That could just be the odor of putrefying dead larvae. The thing is, if I did have to sacrifice this colony, it would be the largest bee colony that I've ever had to kill. It probably had, I'm estimating, 35,000 or 40,000 bees there. The pattern the queen was putting out was really a nice pattern, but about half of the developing larvae were afflicted to the point of death, so it had overwhelmed the housekeeping staff.

I went back to the notion that I've got to destroy this colony. I went home that night, and I did the thing with soap water, got the soapy water out, and went back out there. As I've told you so many times already in this presentation, what is that feeling in the bottom of your gut? "This doesn't look right. It looks wrong from a health standpoint, but it doesn't look right from an American foulbrood standpoint."

Let's take a break, hear from our sponsor, while I finally get my thoughts together. I'm rambling on and on here.

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Jim: Listeners, I had everything mixed up. Just like then, as I am doing now, I hesitated. You need to be right. This looks like American foulbrood, but it doesn't look exactly like American foulbrood. I reviewed the symptoms. It had some punctured cappings, it had spotty patterns, it had the putrefying larvae, pupae. Some of the larvae were twisted into the cell, which would have been European, but this is not European. I'm comfortable saying that this colony had not been treated for mites.

I wanted to say that this could be something called a varroa bomb, where this colony just crashes when it finally meets a peak population of varroa and is overwhelmed by it. The only time I've seen those bomb type situations, they were classic. There were dead bees everywhere. There were dead mites everywhere. There were pieces of bees. This colony was fairly clean. It was not perfect, don't get me wrong, but this colony was fairly clean. I didn't know what to do then. I'm not even sure I should be talking about this now, but I decided to let it go.

The oddity is the guy has been very supportive of the bees. He's really been pleading their case that there's a lot of bees flying. He's not a beekeeper yet. I think he will be one day. He says there's a lot of bees flying and they're bringing back pollen, and so I get these improved diagnoses from him because he pleads the bees' case. Oddly, listeners, I wanted their case pled. I didn't want to do that job. I elected not to do it, and I've walked away from them. The thing I wanted to talk about was the gut.

I've talked to everybody that I knew. We all agreed that many times that the unbridled effects of Varroa untreated on a populous colony can kill so many broods so fast that they putrefy, and then the worker bees try to clean things up. It has the look of American foulbrood when it's not American foulbrood, but the difference is significant, because with American foulbrood, as you know, you have to destroy everything in the world. You have to burn the equipment, just kill the bees, burn the bees, destroy everything.

After all these years, we still don't have anything better than just destroying everything for nipping that American foulbrood in the bud. I was going to have to decide if that was the case or not, and it just didn't feel right, so I let it go. I'm happy to tell you that, in fact, it was not American foulbrood and that I'm not a cool guy. I don't have advanced wisdom here, but it just didn't feel right. Consequently, I stumbled through it, and I made the right decision. Now the colony is still probably going to die this winter, even though I predicted it would die last winter, but it's just not good for a beehive to have no varroa control procedures at all.

Now this sounds like more of my sloppy beekeeping, but I promise you it's not. It's just some young beekeepers who were really eager to get involved in this, had some bee buck fever, as it were, and then fairly predictably moved on from it. Many other times, you go by what your gut tells you. My gut told me that something wasn't quite right. In fact, it did not work out. It didn't pass the test of being American foulbrood. That one, at least that decision was correct, but the decision now has to be, could that colony possibly have anything done to it by novices who don't really know anything about beekeeping, and I think probably not.

If they can't survive this winter, then I wouldn't be surprised. There are so many other times that your gut tells you, that your gut talks to you. I'm sitting here now watching the bees come and go as I've done so many times with you here. There's the strong odor in the air. There's energetic bee flight. So far, they haven't come for me. I do have on a half suit, but I don't have the veil up. The bees seem focused on foraging. They're not fighting each other. They're not tussling and squeezing through cracks and crevices. The odor is still in the air. The season is clearly passing.

The goldenrod comes first, and now the fall asters come in. I've told you in the past that I frequently thought that they got more from the fall asters than they got from goldenrod. Rather than push my luck and walk up there, I told you I was going to open some of these colonies up and equalize the equipment, but then it rained consecutively for four or five days, something we needed because of the drought. It threw my timing off, so I still have that on my to-do schedule just to get these 10 colonies or so in a position where they would have a fair shake at getting through the winter.

I don't know if you have instances where your gut has talked to you about a queen, something along the queen lines. Many years ago, I had a queen from a package that was a beautiful queen. She had a great personality. She smiled nicely, but she just had a horrific brood pattern. I'll bet you Kim and I talked about her because I just really hated to crush that queen's thorax and replace her when she looked so dynamic, and she was just not laying any eggs. She had a very marginal, spotty pattern.

It seems like there may have been a brood or percentage too much. For a package queen, she should just be going crazy. I made the note that I've got to replace her. Then there's the gut thing where she just looks so good. It looks like she's got so much potential, but she's got to go. I didn't make it the highest priority thing I had to do because I had other packages I was introducing at that time, so I could equalize them and do whatever. I put it off for a while. After a week or two, I came back. There was some brood there. Still wasn't good, and I made the secondary thought, "She's just not getting it done. She's got to go."

I checked on the availability of queens. They would have some in a week or two, so I decided that would be the D-day for me. I would go pick up a queen when they came in a couple of weeks. Don't you know how this story has to end, or I wouldn't be telling you. A week or so before I went to pick up the queen, I had a look again, and all of a sudden, she had exploded. She had brewed everywhere. It was nice plated. Perfectly healthy brood. It was everywhere. She has, to this day, reigned supreme as the queen that took the longest time to start brood productivity.

I have no idea why she was so tardy and starting up. Then there's those times when you feel good about your gut feeling that something pushed me to love that queen, to give that queen a chance, and yet another chance when she kept blowing the chance that she had been given already. It sounds like that this is like a gift, right? No, because we need to talk about all the times that your gut talks to you, that my gut talks to me, and then my gut ends up being horribly wrong.

I bet you that in the scheme of things, if we took gut-influenced topics and reviewed them, that we would see that we're probably coming in at about 50/50 for every time I let a queen stay in place and for every time I decided this was not American foulbrood, then there was a time when I didn't think that colony would swarm that day or whatever and it's gone and it took off. Gut beekeeping is something that I think we all do. How could we not do it? That you look inside a beehive this time of the year and it looks like there's plenty of honey there. Your gut tells you it's okay, so you go to the next colony. I guess it's just the voice of experience talking.

I was relieved not to kill those bees, though, and that was the whole purpose of me sitting you through this discussion, because I just did not want to do that again. I've written articles and I've talked to you. Exterminating bees, destroying bees, is a very, very dirty job, and it's really unfortunate that beekeepers are some of the best individuals suited, literally suited, for doing the job because on one hand, the very things we love the most are the ones that we're the best suited to destroy when the time comes around.

Listen to your gut, but you decide when your gut's speaking loud enough that you should respond to it, and then on other times, don't listen to your gut and do what you think is right from analytical perspectives. I enjoy talking to you every week. I really appreciate your patience with me and letting me go on and on. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week. I'm Jim, telling you bye.

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