Plain Talk: Hot Bees (289)

Episode 289 – Plain Talk: Hot Bees

Jim Tew

Well hello podcast listeners. Honey Bee Obscura right here. Taking the walk back to the bee yard, I had a plan. That was just beautiful. Something I wanted to talk with you about. It was hot and sultry and humid and my bees were clustered outside and Some of them are hanging under the landing board. So I set up this presentation. It takes a couple of days to get a topic chosen and get everybody informed. And now I'm cursed with absolutely beautiful mild weather. So I want to go ahead and go through with it because I've had a lot of experience through the years with hot bees. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you here once a week or so at honey bee Obscura where I try to 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 honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. You're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started. Get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim Tew

Yep. It's like I expected. It is just a classically beautiful day.

You know, I'm totally caught off guard. There's been something going on in front of one of the hives. The grass needs cutting. And the grass is totally matted down So it's gotta be a raccoon. I don't know, now I'm completely caught off guard. I wasn't expecting to see that. Everything else looks normal Except for this depression area. There's been a deer sleeping back here in different locations. Still gonna stay on the hot hive thing, but now I'm surprised I don't see any more deer presses. Or what no there's one. What is back here?

There's a large area that's all matted down and pressed. And there's another smaller one, I guess I guess deer. Alright, I'm off the subject. I want to talk about hot bees, but I'm caught off guard because Just yesterday I read that in the area of Ohio that I'm in and all the surrounding counties, we are being recolonized by black bears. And I have a personal story.

Over in eastern Ohio, I had a beehive there at a friend's cottage. And Bears ripped into it two times. I wrote about it. I'm not sure if I was podcasting with Kim then or not But it what a mess those bears make. But this doesn't appear to be bears. because the hives aren't destroyed because in that paper I was reading put out by the Ohio Department of Agriculture, they specifically listed beehives as a target of bears. And they told me to put up an electric fence Well, electric fences have been suggestions for years and that's just does so much for whatever. It's not a perfect fix plus it's hard to maintain and it's expensive and you gotta whatever but I guess an electric fence is better than nothing.

What I did down in Tuscarores County, Ohio, is I lashed my colony to a tree and then I lashed it with ratchet straps. So at least if the bear was going to get into it, and a big bear still would be able to do it, it would want to have to work for it. I haven't had anything happen down there in a long time.

So I came out here to tell you that my bees have been clustering out front. They're hot. And I don't know that that's a d uh the wrong thing to do. I think it's a very normal thing to do, in fact. Because if they're getting out of the nest to provide some kind of safety and security and to temperature control, And the only way to do it, when I was just a little guy in South Alabama all those years ago and air conditioning had not yet become totally common People would sit on the front porch. I've always had that analogy that bees hanging out on the front of the colony is equivalent to us sitting on the front porch when the house was hot at night at my grandmother's. Maybe it's a silly analogy.

I don't know I think it's common knowledge that I grew up right on the Alabama-Florida line, not too far from Georgia. Dothan's my hometown. I haven't been there now in years. But it's my hometown. It's what's left of my accent all these years later. And it was hot there. All across the southern tier of Alabama and then across the southern tier of the U. S. It was hot. And I got used to it. And now I don't know if I if I went back and worked bees there, I don't know if I could still do it, to tell you the truth because of the heat.

Sitting down, knees hurt.

You know you wore the at the time the Walter T. Kelly Company sold a little elastic strap that went around your brow that was supposed to keep the sweat out and it did until you sweat it wet And then you just had this wet piece of whatever above your brow.

They're long gone now.

I actually went to a hazmat company when I was still working at Ohio State And under those hazmat suits they have air conditioning or cooling devices. It's a battery-powered vest that went over your torso And on the back and your belly, it had ice packs and some kind of coolant, and then there was a a pump that would circulate water and I thought this is just going to be perfect under a bee suit But it was not perfect and I can't explain why. Because you felt so weird for your arms and head and legs to be hot and sweaty in a bee suit. and your torso to have cold water circulating over it. So comfortable that I thought it would be, indeed, it was really more weird. than comfortable. And I have no idea what happened to that gadget.

It didn't work.

But through the years, heat has been A major factor. In fact, I would tell beginning beekeepers that we're all worry at worrying about stings, and stings are something to be worried about if you get too many. But a sting here and a sting there, that's just beekeeping. and you burn waves to tolerate it and then life moves on. But w once those uh stinging things became issues you got to suit up and once you suit up If the weather is hot, then there's just no way to get around it. You're going to be blistering hot.

We have some really nice protective gear available to us now. That's ventilated and air can get through We have veils that the front unzips so you can drink water and maybe get the occasional bee out. That none of that used to exist.

We used to wear modified painter outfits. that the bee companies would would adapt a zipper on so you could zip a veil on it or just tie a veil on it And then that was it. So once you heated that up, if you needed to get a drink of water, because believe me you wouldn't pour water through that old screen wire grid that used to be in front of the veil. You had to go over, Find a safe spot, get all the bees off of you, disrobe, as it were, and then take a drink of water, rest for a while, and then suit back up. And I tried to tell people politely that that is much worse than the occasional sting and that the issue would become trying to prevent that occasional sting. Putting on all those protective clothes is going to be something that's going to cause you significant discomfort. Used to sweat those painter suits wet, just totally wet, when I was in South Alabama.

And then there were there were the bees all around you and then add that smoker. I mean you had to take a shower for 30 minutes just to get clean back up and get all the smoke smell off and salt perspiration and get all freshened up. It was a young man's, a young woman's job to do all that.

It's not something that I could do now. It was a distracting thing to go through. And why am I talking to you about it? Why am I walking down memory lane like this? Because when I would come out and see my bees hanging out front, I would have all these flashbacks. I would have all these issues. that would occur in my mind about all the hot times that I had lived through looking at working bees, moving bees, taking honey off. It had to be something that was really in your psyche because otherwise it was hot work. Got a plane going over. I'm gonna take a break here from our sponsor while the plane passes over

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Jim Tew

Some of the most troublesome ordeals. Why why am I s is this negative? I hope it's not negative. I hope it's just plain talk But it was so difficult at night when you had to move bees for whatever reasons. And they were nice populous populated colonies. Two deeps, maybe sometimes a super, I don't know. It was rarely a single deep. So in those hot climates you bundle up at night and it's sultry and humid and dark. And you'd go out to find that every one of those hives had three or four pounds of bees amassed out front. or they're out front for a reason.

And under those conditions, could I say without any science that smoke doesn't act the same way If I tack on the caveat in my opinion, smoke doesn't act the same way, would that be okay to qualify that this is not science? Alright, when you smoke the bees out front and there it's dark, they're out front because the hive is hot, their inclination is mostly not to go inside. Their inclination is just to scatter everywhere. So there's bees all over the place. They're just all over the hive now because you've gotten that front cluster broken up and the heat I don't know of a of a good way to actually get around that.

I suppose if I had plenty of time and I knew that I was going to be moving bees, I would put a dot a deep empty super up top that was screened to give them more space to maybe stay in the colony.

Now I'm having a thought. How much harm is it for the bees to be outside? I mean they they're they're wild animals. They live outside. They need to be inside during the winter when it's clustered up, but I don't know that it's greatly harmful to have the bees masked out front. They would do it in natural nest too. I've have seen this in all down through my life as a beekeeper where you know there's a bee tree someplace and on occasion you'd go by and they're doing it in that tree too.

So it's it's a procedure that happens in the wild depending on the dynamics of the cluster size and what's going on inside there. I don't know that it's all that bad for the bees to be clustered out front so long as it lets them maintain the brood population temperature inside. But if you're having to take bees to watermelon or some kind of pollination project and you got to pick up those bees at night and move them out, it was it was just ugly, ugly work. The bees crawl everywhere and they're all over you. So let me tell you that all that business about I've been keeping bees for years and years and I don't have to have that have that protective gear. You do that night. You gotta have the full suit. You gotta have on a top quality veil and probably some duct tape stuck on you somewhere and a good set of gloves and it's clumsy and it's hot. You gotta light a smoker and keep it going with gloves on because you've got bees all over you. They're scattered everywhere. And you finally get them picked up and moved. So nothing about this is good for the bees.

But I'll just choose watermelons. but there's a lot good for watermelons to get those bees to those plantings for supplemental pollination for those big watermelon fields in the south, apple orchards in the north, but the climate's not quite so bad and the bees are not so testy. But I've had some long nights picking up bees, moving bees at night as a young man to different locations, making splits, having just what I thought was a good time. I was a real beekeeper doing real bee work. and it really was work. And there was always other things to think about in the south where I was then, because at night rattlesnakes come out of the dens and lay outside where it's cooler.

So you had to be aware of the fact that some of these snakes are active at night and all my life. I can only think of two separate occasions that I actually came across the rattlesnake in one of my southern yards. I gave it a lot of room. No, I didn't I didn't run try to assassinate the thing. I was never armed. It was always too much bee stuff to carry. to also have some kind of firearm there so I didn't have anything to t attack it anyway. But you better know that I never felt secure about that yard again. I always knew that Somewhere there's a snake and I've got some folklore that those snakes usually are paired. So if you see one Back out the way you came because somewhere close by there's probably its mate and you haven't seen it yet Secondly, and in a peculiarity of some of the yards I had, at night, with those bees clustered out front and these moves that I'm doing, I had to remember that underneath every one of my beehives was probably at least one, if not several, beautiful, glossy, clear black widow spiders. I was never bitten by one, I was never attacked by one, but I wore gloves.

So I'm telling you that there are times even experienced beekeepers, especially the more experienced you are And the more bees you're going to be coming in contact with, the more equipment you're going to have to have on to make this work. When I see these bees clustered outside in Ohio, I pleasantly flash back to youthful years when I had energy and stamina And I was able to deal with these things. Indeed, listeners, I wanted to deal with these things. Not now. I have no interest in picking up these beehives and moving them I have no interest in all the work that would go in with that. I had a nice time.

I do have a short story that has nothing to do with anything: I'm an entomologist, and spiders are not insects, but they get kind of lumped in with entomology. I thought those black widow spiders were the neatest things I'd ever seen. So I captured several of them and coffee creamers, you know, those little plastic coffee creamers with the lids at the time. I don't know what's available now, but they were clear. They were about an ounce and a half And I brought three or four of those spiders back to Ohio and I put them in an aquarium in my office. And I would drop in the occasional house fly. At the time we had plenty of flies because we had open turkey prairies for research projects. Flies were never in short supply. And so I would feed them flies and any other insects I'd come along with and then just watch them do their black widow thing inside. And one of my neighboring professors got wind of my unique hobby that I had in my office and he filed an official complaint, that I was keeping venomous animals in my office that would be a danger if they escaped.

And I suppose they would have been.

I suppose they would have been, and I was politely but firmly instructed to break that system down. My story kind of peters out there. The spiders didn't live that long anyway. They died I broke that yard down and moved it to Ohio all the way from South Alabama all those years ago.

And that's one of the times that I had to go out and do this move. It was a commercial beekeeper that was doing it for me. He was making the move. And what a child I was. I had about 25 colonies there. There were two deeps in the super on most of them. They were totally heavy and they hadn't been opened in quite a while. And so I, with confidence and with authority, explained to the commercial guy that there was no need to strap them up, that they were totally propolized together. He just barely laughed right out loud, and he went to his truck and got out of ten, fifteen pound box of hive staples and went around stapling every one of those things, they wouldn't have made it fi they wouldn't have made it five miles before those propolis bonds would have shattered and cracked and tops coming off and I realized what a childlike guy I was when it came to moving bees long distance at that point. He had to deal with the bees out front.

They all loaded him up because I was paying them and even though I could help I basically stayed out of the way.

I don't know where I'm at on time, but I've just got a sense that I'm kind of running out, but I want to go back to where I started One more time. I would try to but make pictures of these dened areas, but I don't think they'd show up. But something Has been attacking two of my hives. They seem okay. Yes, I do. I have a trail camera. And yes, I'm going to get it out, get the batteries charged up and see what is bothering my bees here. Some of you told me to put mulch in front of the colonies to keep the weeds suppressed. Others said to put down carpet remnants, pallets Anything else just to give the bees a clear landing feel. Well, another thing you can do is let skunks come in or raccoons. If it were skunks, I think I'd be smelling them. There is absolutely no odor, so it must be raccoons.

This is what I tried to tell you about. These bees cluster out front when they're hot. I don't know how bad that is because it's just another way of regulating temperature inside. I've half lightly misted them, hosed them down to see if they'd go back in. Nope, they just all faced uphill and shed the water off of them and they still stayed outside. So when I see these bees clustered out front, I go back and I have just copious numbers of memories of old times long gone.

Go out some time and look at your beehives on a warm night. You'll probably be surprised at how many bees are sleeping outside. Secondly I've said before that an apiary is a lot like a the beaver pond. The beavers build the pond and then a lot of things come there. Birds, fish, toads. Predators come to that beaver pond and use it too. Well when you put a apiary in, bees are the things that started it But everything else wants to live here too. Apparently deer and one occasion in my life, two bears on two separate occasions. And then there's apparently raccoons that have dug down to the grass and beat all the grass down. So they're having a good time back here too. And lastly, it's just a nice, beautiful day to be out in the bee yard.

I'm not doing anything, I'm not harassing anybody, I'm just watching somewhat of a natural ecosystem if my beehive bar offices can be considered natural ecosystems, watching them at work. I enjoy this. I enjoy talking to you.

Thanks for being so patient and listening and letting me reminisce about times that are now gone. I'm Jim telling you bye until we can talk again next week. Goodbye.