Plain Talk: Hot Bees, Ants and Weeds (291)

Episode 291 –  Plain Talk: Hot Bees, Ants and Weeds

Jim Tew

Hey listeners, you know the drill. I don't wear my windscreen anymore because the bees keep attacking it. I'm walking back to the bee yard. Listeners, it has been insufferably hot. I'll go ahead and tell you exactly where I am, even though when you listen to this, you won't be there It's July the 4th, and we've been under that heat dome. And everything has just been unreasonably hot. I felt like I was in my hometown in South Alabama again. I mean to see 87 at 9 o'clock at night is just unheard of in Ohio So I'm walking back and I want to talk about heat a little bit, but I want to come back with a more vibrant beekeeper to talk about how you can deal with heat if you're a bee guy working my way through the bar.

So this will be kind of a two-part segment, I suspect. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you here about uh once a week where I try to talk about something to do with just 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. 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 Tew

You know, I know I'm wearing you out. I am so sorry for that. But I know I'm wearing you out with this. I can't do it. I can't manage it. I'm old. I'm sick. I'm sad. I'm whatever I'm just a chronic excuse manufacturing system. But honestly, in this heat At my age, I cannot be out here alone running some kind of weed trimmer to keep the grass down. I grew up in Alabama, and not just Alabama, I grew up in South Alabama. It uh not uncommonly snows in North Alabama, but it's rare. In my hometown, Dothan, right on the Georgia, Florida line inside of Alabama And that's where I grew up keeping bees.

And I I can't imagine. No offense to Alabama beekeepers or southeastern beekeepers who might be listening or southwest beekeepers who have heat all the time I know you learn to live with it. I understand that. But right now the last thing I would want to do is to open these hives. There are several hundred bees on the landing board all fanning frantically. It thunderstormed last night, so I hope there's pools of water around for them. I used to put water out, and then it just got soggy and ugly, and then when I put it out, the bees didn't come to it. They've already found their own water sources I stopped doing it, even though years ago I would have hundreds of bees at these birdbath water sources Taking on water.

And I even had bees doing it when it was stunningly cold. And I talked about all that, and that's not where I want to go today. Where I want to go today is This just would not be a good time to open these hives. Number one, my my physiology is all keyed. I'm hot. I'm sweaty I would feel the stings a lot more. The bees are very active. It would destroy the cooling system they've got going inside the hive. So, why would I open that colony? I'm not. I'm not. If I were a young beekeeper and had exuberance, I'd probably rip right into it But I'm not doing that.

So in my late life form of beekeeping, I have to assume that the bees can fly about a half mile away to where there's a stream and it's never gone dry since I've lived here in 50 years, the Apple Creek. And I hope they can find water there. I'm just not trying to provide it for them. I know, I know, you're supposed to let a water hose drip You're supposed to put out containers. I know I know all of that, but there's so much now that I just don't do. More and more and more I become a natural beekeeper So I'm back here today. The bees are all vibrant, strong, healthy.

I want to walk over in this tall grass Probably going to pick up a tick and look at one of those little hives. You remember I talked about it Several weeks ago, by now several months ago, and their bees are still coming and going, so they have a queen in there, and they're surviving okay That looks good. I'm not going to open them either. I want to go back to where we had the dreaded swarm where we Jason and I pulled the The vacuum way back here, I put a little swarm over there out of the way so maybe it wouldn't get robbed out by being too close to the big colonies I'm walking back there now trying not to fall.

If I do, somebody dial 911 for me. And they're still flying Not a lot, there's just two or three bees. There may be a problem in that one, but just directly under the tree where Jason got the swarm down Let me ramble off the subject for a while. Jason has been a good friend of mine. He's about half my age. I've known him since the day he was born. His wife is Mexican. And last night I told Jason Bai he's moving to Mexico. So that's gonna be a loss for me. I'll go ahead and tell you that. He's been here several times. He was always a good A good podcaster to be here.

Plus, he's far more agile than I am. I don't know how it's going to work out if he finds bees down there Certainly I'll log out on our program and capture something, but that's a change. So what little help I did have, I'm losing that. When I lived in Alabama, I remember it distinctly. You would just sweat yourself wet. I got to move back to the shade. I can't sit in the sun So if you had on those old style bee suits that all they were was modified painter clothes. and an old A.I. Root screen veil and you'd sweat right through it and then immediately the veil would begin to rust from your sweat and then after you used it for hardly a year Then that rusted spot would break out and then you got a hole right in the middle of your veil.

And you put duct tape over it. Then you got to look around the duct tape until you buy another veil. So at least now with these ventilated suits and galvanized wire, I'm not galvanized, vinyl wire, vinyl screening, and the hoods has been a major improvement. And I have no interest in going back to the old hot cotton clothes. You'd sweat them wet, and then once they sweat once you perspired so much that the suit stuck to you, then the bees could much more easily sting through it. Especially at night. So I I understand you people who have to to live in high heat. My grandparents, you know, lived in a An old dog trot type house with the hall down the middle to go to Venturi pulling the hot air through the house at least at night, sometimes during the day too.

Sometimes they would sleep out there if the weather was particularly hot. They grew up at a time with no air conditioning and the way the way they dealt with it is they started very early, an hour before dawn. They fed animals while my grandmother cooked. Then they'd come back and eat, and then they'd go work in the field until around 10. 45, maybe 11. And in the heat of the day, long before daylight savings time, they would come back and sleep, nap during the middle of the day and then would not go back out to work until much later. I bet you that that philosophy would still work for hot weather beekeeping.

Get up as early as you can when it's cool. Go outside. Get your bee work done as quickly as possible. And then leave the bees alone during the heated part of the day. And under those conditions that warm, you could actually open the bees late in the afternoon. afternoon and they can still have time to recover. They're not clustering. They're going to mostly be outside by then to avoid the heat inside the colony. I think that it's proper to say that a lot of my grandmother's grandparents' grandfather's techniques for heat avoidance would work for beekeepers and avoiding the same thing. I guess a lot of you people in colder climates, Minnesota, Dakotas, are kind of rolling your eyes right now because this is not a topic really related to you, but it's related to me right now I don't know what all this heat means, but the bees seem to be tolerating it okay.

It just really, really reduces my entrance into putting on a full bee suit, lighting a smoker, and tearing into these colonies just to look. So my just have a quick look days of beekeeping. are pretty much gone. If I now at my age and this heat, if I open a beehive, there needs to be a crystal clear reason for it Let's move on to some other updates. The animal was a raccoon. The bedding and the The wearing down part seems to have subsided because the grass is regrowing. There is one over here that may still be nope, there's there's grass growing there too One of the cues that an animal is bothering it is that the front edge of the landing board will be bright and polished, where the animal has laid up against the landing board while it was eating.

Clearly not a skunk because there's not a bit of an odor out here at all. I'm gonna walk over again to a different shade. Being from Alabama, you don't stand in the sun, you stand in the shade This is a swarm that I picked up. I didn't pick it up. It moved in by itself. They're washboarding I never know what that is. We'll talk more about that probably next week. It's just a weedy, natural beehive. Bee yard. Everything looks okay. I don't know what else to say about that that would be relevant. I want to talk to you for a few minutes about ants. Because I have ants in most of my colonies.

If I had a bee suit on I'd start popping tops just to have a look, but I know what I would find. On top of the inner covers, I frequently have functional ant nest. of different species of ants that I can't identify. There's so many of them. There's carpenter ants and there's medium-sized black ants. And then in one of them there was really small ants. And I've tried to figure out how to ants and bees, both Hymenopterous insects, closely related, similar respiratory systems different lifestyles, how do they coexist? And my impulse, as I always do in so many cases, is to dump the ant nest and try to dis disrupt it.

And see if that helps the bees. Well when you go back the next day, either the nest has reconstituted itself Or it's a different nest. I don't know. But it looks like that ants and bees coexist in perpetuity It's been that way as long as I can remember. I've already mentioned my southeast Alabama roots over and over again. Well fire ants were just just unheavenly common. And I know I've talked about it with Kelm and others in the past, but it was a peculiar situation when I would read At the time, it was books and pamphlets. It was not on the web. There really was no web then.

People in Texas said that they actually killed beehives. And that was reported I am not arguing, I'm just saying that was not my experience with fire ants. Anytime I had an incubation mound piled up against A beehive, I had to to watch that nest, that mound, that incubation mound. Because if you stood at it while you're working bees, all of a sudden your feet and legs would be on fire, hence the common name given to these ants I dare say that in most cases strong colonies in some way, some fashion dealt with those ants because they seemed to coexist. I never actually found them in the colony.

They cleaned up the front of the nest so all the dead bee detritus was eaten and foraged on by ants and whatever else wanted to forage on that. But the thing that I really want to jump to is when a colony did die for whatever reasons, I don't know, possibly fire ants, the wax moths never had a chance. Because when the wax moths began to kind of take over as that colony declined, the ants were on top of it. The fire ants were on top of it. And seeing this happening and seeing that in Alabama where wax moths were actually available all the time, to see that in a n a nest that should have been completely consumed by wax moths was not consumed by wax moths, those ants were doing it.

They were foraging on those wax moth larvae. They seem to be, oh, someone may really want to argue with me on this, and that would be okay, because I'm I'm only know what I'm talking about from my experience in Alabama. I can't discuss ant predation in any other state. But they seem to be beneficial. There's the word. They seem to be beneficial to the bee yard basic operation. They suppressed wax moths, they cleaned up yard litter. They were they never nested inside the colony. They always nested around the hive stands that were down on the ground. While I give you a chance to chew on that, let's take a break.

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Jim Tew

So the thing I wanted to come back to you with on this ant business. Was to tell you that I actually began to use them as a wax moth control technique So when I would find a hive that was dead, that was sitting high on a stand, and the ants had not mounded against the base of it, they couldn't get to it. and there were wax moths beginning to attack this dead and dying colony, specifically those that were dead already. I would just take those things, those colonies that that deep, that super and go to the nearest fire ant mound, which was usually very close by, and I would jam that equipment right into that incubation mound until the ants were just rolling out and they were upset.

And then you leave it. I would leave it for about a day or maybe two. And then I would go back to it and move that ant-infested equipment about ten feet away and just set it up and then leave it for another day and then and then when I return to it The ants were gone, and they had spotlessly cleaned everything edible out of that colony. There were there were no No wax moth larvae of any kind. Am I recommending this as a type of control? Not really. I'm just saying that if you happen to have such a situation, you could kind of use it to your advantage, and the thing you get from it primarily is a sense of satisfaction that you're tormenting wax moths, which in many other cases could be considered a viable part of apiculture because they may be given credit for cleaning up old nests and uh preparing them for future bee nest or for squirrels or birds to move into that natural cavity.

So it just depends, is it a weed or not? Well it depends on where it's growing and whether or not I want it. That was my situation. That was my understanding of ants. It seems like ants and bees are always coexisting in some form I did a ChatGPT search and tried to find out, you know, how that bees deal with it. And it's very general that the bees fan, they carry the ants away. It was nothing miraculous. And the thing I didn't find anything out about was the ants opinion on this. What were they trying to accomplish? What was their mode of action? What were they trying to do?

They Ants were so small and they have their own sting, so it'd be sting versus counter sting. But yet somehow, most of the time, they seem to coexist. Every time I've seen ants really be a problem in a colony It was a small, weak, defeated colony that was experiencing failure to thrive. Now on this hot day In this hot bee yard with the wind blowing kind of cooking me evenly, I need to say that here in Ohio I have an ant problem of a different scope. Even if the bees are up on a hive stand Black carpenter ants move up into them and I've had a problem with expanded polystyrene equipment just being eaten alive by both wax moths when they're available and by ants when the opportunity arises.

So those black carpenter ants would just tunnel all through that thick expanded polystyrene hive body, bottom board, whatever. So anytime that there's been a s a possibility, some use of uh pliable plastic equipment, of course carpenter ants can readily eat wood too, and they will They were always up on the inner cover. All these ants that I see are up on the inner cover. And when I would see an occasional ant inside the colony, I had to wonder, well that did it drop off when I moved the inner cover, when I came out and disturbed things. The ants seemed to be co-living, coexisting. I've said before that the bees are basically beavers of the insect world because they colonize an area and then all these other critters move into it, raccoons.

Uh beetles, scavengers, all kinds of insects come to live here. Birds, toads, ants just seem to fit right in with that. I would mention earwigs, but that's an interesting story for some other time. None of those animals were systematically centralized in one area until the bee yard made it opportunistic for them. The point I'm making is that I've not had the best luck with expanded polystyrene when carpenter ants were available to tunnel through it because the bees couldn't get to them tunneling inside those thick walled hives. I also have smaller ants that live on the inner covers, black ants, and they don't they're just laying, all their pupae and larvae are just laying there.

They're not they're exposed up on the inner cover. Does that hurt anything? By disrupting that relationship, am I am I destroying some kind of ecological balance or are they possibly oh it would be heavenly if they were somehow eating mites I've seen on the screen bottom boards when they drop down to the aluminum plate that's down there that there would be scavengers down there and I assumed they would eat any Varroa mite that dropped down through But for right now, most beekeepers have historically said that ants are not good for anything and they have the ant traps that they put on the edge with oil.

And then the ants would figure out how to stream across the oil. There were always these things to be done to try to keep mechanically keep ants out. You couldn't use pesticides because that was such an issue That's the ant thing. I routinely have ants in these beehives that I don't routinely manage. If if everything comes to an ecological balance. In Ohio, the ants seemed to live on the top box inner cover lid, and they seem to be happy there. I don't know why. Are they protected? Is it warmer? Is it just a possible nest cavity? Why do ants leave their natural ground nest and move to a beehive?

And how are they getting up there? I don't I don't see trails of ants going up these beehives. I don't I don't know how they do it But I gotta tell you this, any any styrofoam equipment in Jim Tew's yard, I don't speak for anyone else. I can't put it on during the ant months. It can only go on during the cool months or the cold months. One last chapter. I don't know where I am on my time. I tried to set my phone and it's not working But I want to do one last thing. Yesterday I went over to Jason's Go On Away party.

I told him bye, had my picture made with him And I left after a while, ate some barbecue. I had a nice time, saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long time. And as I was leaving, I drove by a natural patch with an Ohio State sign professionally and boldly standing right before the patch that said Ohio Natural Grassland Tall Prairie Well hang on listeners because I'm basically sitting in that right now and I tried to describe it to you last year that when I couldn't take care of my bees. and for the previous years. This tall grass, weed, whatever thing would take over.

It had a lot of flowering plants to it, and I really brought in a a diversity of butterflies and native bees and animals and deer nesting back here. There's still the deer press back here and my neighbors did see a fawn coming out one day, so I've got a really small unintentional ecosystem here And I've have labeled this my Ohio Tall Prairie Grass Beekeeping Yard, just as a defense measure against not being able to justify why the grass is so tall back here. I just can't I just can't cut it all down. I I can't do the work. I can't stand the heat. In fact, I was just having a few medical tests done this past two weeks or so, and I'm happy to tell you that I passed them all I'm I'm relieved to tell you that.

But don't come out here and push it, Jim. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to make a trip to one of the national parks. My family is taking me. A biggie for me You know, you give up a lot of things. I don't water ski anymore. I'm not going to zip line. There's just all kind of things you give up. But in the new column, you get to do a lot of new and different things. And on this particular trip, I'm supposed to sit in a wheelchair so they can get me through the airport quickly to the next gate. without me having to hob along at my old man totter speed.

So you see, you give some things up and you acquire some new things. But when I get back, my plan is to cut paths to my bees and to keep the entrance opened up, even though it does shade. As I say that, I'm wondering If the tall grass actually shades the bees and by me open it, yes, it would clear a flight plat path, but yes, it also lets this hot summer sun hit the front of the hives. You know you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. But I've got to have I've got to have paths and and I can open pathways I'm going to see how that works to lay out to bring my my walk behind string tremor out and not try just to take down these weeds.

Some of them this grass, I don't know if it's weeds or grass or natural plants And instead of trying to fight everything and mow everything, I know you people, I've seen those pictures of your beautiful mown mowed yards and colonies painted. I just that's just not me. I can't do it So that's my plan. I have learned to justify the mess in my yard by saying it's a natural tall grass, Ohio Prairie. and I'll cut colorful paths to it and then all these things can grow and bloom and everything can have a nice time back here. I know, I know, I know that it's not traditional beekeeping And I know that nearly all of you are traditional beekeepers.

It's the right sermon for the wrong congregation. But you need to know that everybody listening to me who are is not here yet, you will be one day So it's okay if you begin to think and accept the fact that traditional beekeeping is not necessarily always the only beekeeping. out of sheer necessity. I'm going to have some visiting speakers, I hope, next week. We're going to address this heat thing more. I'm sitting here now just in the shade, just perspiring like crazy. This heat thing, I think, needs to be discussed again. Apparently, as the as the climate seems to be changing, maybe this heat thing is going to be More common than it has been.

I don't know. You know I'm done. Wanna get ready to make a a nice trip here. I'll be talking to you again next week. Thank you for listening. I always enjoy talking with you. Please know this, no matter how defeated, no matter how old, no matter how haphazard I sound, I always care about the bees and I always enjoy the bees and I always do enjoy talking about them. Until we talk again, I'm Jim telling you bye.