Plain Talk: Old Beekeeping Books (296)

Episode 296 – Plain Talk: Old Bee Books

Jim Tew
Hey listeners, it's Jim. Again. Flying by the seat of my pants.

Again. I frequently watch on YouTube some guy, this is not an endorsement, just a conversation, some guy named Matt, who runs a heavy equipment company, unique vehicles. He goes out in the deserts into rough areas in the west and he retrieves any kind of vehicle, but mainly an off-road vehicle that's gotten in serious trouble or whatever, and he brings these things back He shows all the mechanisms and the wrecking and the four-wheeling and the whatever for getting them out.

And this is all I want to tell you. He always starts his shows by giving the weather and the weather conditions.

And I suppose it's supposed to have an effect on what the equipment's going to do. Well, I have that same tendency. Right now it is a classic morning.

The rain is coming down straight. There's no wind velocity. There's occasional distant thunder that may or may not pick up. You gotta be in the mood that I'm in.

So I want to talk to you for a few minutes about old beekeeping techniques and procedures and as usual I want this to be a conversation because if I'm nothing I am not a historian an historian or a historian I'm not sure which. Let's talk about that here. I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you here pretty much once a week at Honey Bee Obscura, where I just try to talk about something, usually 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 Tew
To close the window just in case something happens with the rain or whatever that I'm not expecting. Do you remember Jason who helped me hive the crazy swarm with the vacuum and went through all that process? He's been on several times.

He's a good beekeeper who doesn't keep bees. He's in his 40s and he's got a lot of life to live before he really settles down. And right now he has moved to Mexico permanently.

So we may still talk to him sometime on the recording system here as he gets his feet under him and finds something to do with bees. But till then, my young friend Jason has left me. So now I've got to do all this ugly bee work by myself.

As he was leaving, he kind of divvied up. He worked for our local library system here as the internet coordinator and the electronic maintenance person. And he loved books, so he had a lot of books.

His mom is keeping them here for him. But he gave me all these books I don't collect old books, but I respect old books. I've never had the money to buy a vast number of old books And then how I would love to get off of old books into the new world of artificial intelligence and what it knows, what it scans.

I used to go to Internet.org, I think it was called Internet.org.

Archive.org. Archive.org. This is the danger of having a casual conversation spontaneously. And if you dig through that, there's some full-blown, really readable old bee books that are text, or that are stored there that are just as readable as they are anywhere.

I used to enjoy doing that on days like this. I guess I'd like to say I don't want to live in the past. But I respect the past.

Does that make sense? I've picked up these books, and this is going to really be clumsy. I don't know how I'm going to do this for sure without you hearing papers turn.

And wanting to give you the flavor, when I open this, it says Ms. M. H. Burr. Union Ridge, Iowa, and the Spencerian script can only be described as spectacular. Did everybody write that way?

And in 1862, it's just beautiful handwriting. And when you go through these old books, every one of them is coming all to pieces. What's my response or my responsibility, listeners?

Am I supposed to get all these books rebound? Or do I just let them disintegrate? When you open a bee book like this, it's a walk down somebody else's memory lane.

I'm having to lean away from the microphone. Because the book comes all to pieces if I try to lay it down. For instance, the use of tobacco smoke.

Would you want to know about that? Let's see what they say about tobacco smoke for These are really fragile papers. Use of tobacco smoke.

I would not do it for $50. The bees would sting me to death. Stop a moment if you've never tried the efficacy of tobacco smoke.

You know nothing of a powerful agent. This is the grand secret of success. Without it, I admit that it would be somewhat hazardous, but with it.

I have done it in time after time without receiving a single sting and no protection whatever for either hands or face." Well, we're not going to be using tobacco smoke But we are going to I got distracted because I looked across the page. This is what these old books do, listeners.

Tools for cutting out comb And don't you know I have been looking for this all over because I want to I want to tell you almost as a warning, I gotta put a mark on this page. And I don't want the sticky paper to be stuck to the book. I'm going to tell you sometime without warning, I've gotten interested in hive tools because they are so mundane.

The hive tool that we use hasn't changed in almost a hundred years. And I can't tell which came first, hive tools or window openers, made by the Hyde Company and sold at Lowe's that look just like hive tools. Did beekeepers do it?

So here is in this book, readily made from an old piece of scythe The other tool is for cutting off combs at the top or any other place. It's merely a rod of steel. Because see when you kept bees in box hives, you're gonna have to hear all this again.

When you kept bees in box hives and skeps, you didn't need hive tools because there were no frames. So they used different knives, and I have never seen one. And don't you know Jason was a blacksmith, so before he left, he went out to his forge at a historical village and made me one of these tools to my specifications And I have looked all over for these tools.

And while I was talking to you about the use of tobacco smoke in a book published in 1862, there's one of those hive tools that I've been looking for. I'm sorry. I enjoy doing this.

Can I say it again? I don't want to live in the past, but I respect the past. And I increasingly, as I have grown old, I have a respect for those who went before and for the world that they lived in.

And now we see our world as a snapshot of the way things will be. No. I would suggest with respect That it's just a snapshot of how things are right now. Whoever he used to go to all those video stores and stand there and check out videos.

Well, it looked like at the moment that we'd be doing that for the rest of our lives. So I can use that as a quick example of how a snapshot in time, Blockbuster. I couldn't even think of the name of them for a while.

I mean, at the time, Blockbuster, I suspect, thought they would be here forever. But technology always changes, and beekeeping reflects that. So the beekeeping we're doing today will not be the beekeeping that we'll be doing 25, 50 years from now.

Guaranteed. Guaranteed. I hope it'll be better.

I suspect we're going to have other pests to deal with, but I hope that we keep developing tools to deal with that. Wow. Am I forever off the subject?

Let me take a break and rewire my brain

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Jim Tew
Here's a little Beehive book. That I bought somewhere at a show. It's just called Beehives, Work Handbooks.

And it tells you how to manufacture everything and it tells you how to build a lot of long-gone hives. And all these old books really like to have these automatic swarm catchers. So that we catch the swarm before they ever left.

You know that I talked to you about that trap that goes on the front That a queen and drone trap that was supposed to capture the queen as she left, and then you'd once you had the queen, how you would see her, I don't know, because There would be a lot of drones in the trap and workers, and then you'd have to see the queen in there too. But then you'd move the entire trap over to wherever you wanted the swarm to land, and then the swarm would land on the queen. It now I'm off the subject again, Jim.

Stay focused. That gadget did work, but it didn't work well enough. It was clumsy.

You had to be You had to almost live with your hive to know when the swarm is issued and when the queen was in it and whatever. So here's another one. It's called the Bennett Self-Divider.

And it's made from zinc coinage clotters and a board, and all you do is you face a hive to the hive That's quite that's considering swarming. And you close off the entrances except for a tunnel, just literally a classic tunnel, board underneath, and then this queen excluder on top And then in theory, as the swarm issues, the Queen, wanting to go, crazy to go, runs down this queen-excluded tunnel. to the empty hive.

The other bees are following her. Any bee that wants to get out and leave can do it. But then the queen is successfully trapped, I'd say, successfully, in the new box and then all the bees flying around come back and find this queen.

I didn't read all this. If you tried to read all this stuff, I mean you're just going backwards. I should be reading all the current bee magazines and listening to podcasts.

And looking at the future instead of looking back so much. But I didn't take time to read all this, but I wonder immediately that queen is really capable of flying. What's going to keep her in there unless you immediately put a queen excluder material over the door so she can't get out?

and attract the other bees to it. I don't know of anything that we're doing like this now. Here's another one called the Alley Self Hiver And it's the same principle except the colonies are set side by side, and there's a wire tunnel that connects two queen-excluding device boxes on the front So again, in theory, the queen comes out, can't get through the queen excluder, goes down through the wire, and then enters the other empty box.

And then she's followed supposedly by very happy bees that are chasing her down into the empty box. I have no idea if it works or not, but I love the little book. Here's a picture of something called driving irons And I'm going to read you what he says because this is the only reference to it.

And I don't know what it means. The driving irons are shown in figures 150 and 151, and they look like Hive staples, I guess. You know, and maybe that's it.

It'd be advisable to make a great number of these sets as they are easily lost. They're made of wire near one quarter inch thick, the loops of which, shown in 150, have loops on either end, are nine inches apart, and the ends are about one and one half inches long, roughly pointed with a file.

About twenty inches of wire are required to form these devices And two like that and one like figure fifty one form a complete set. And then it gives this requires about fifteen inches of wire. And then that's it.

He moves on to why you should not make your own Bingham knife. So now I've got a puzzlement. I don't know what driving irons are in bees.

I'm learning to use this system, artificial intelligence. I'll ask the world if anybody knows, but it you know, you learn some things and then you forget some things. Here's one thing called a comb cutter.

And that's really interesting. If you're old enough to remember the old Dadant Duracomb and Duragilt, you remember there was a hole in the lower corner of each end of the comb, and it was to allow for migration during the winter. Well, I respect the Dadant company.

They're still a vibrant bee supply company, but I never thought that really made a lot of sense because if by the time The bee got down to the corner hole to get through. It might as well have just gone around the bottom of the frame. It didn't matter that much.

So being a young, energetic, going to be a scientist kind of beekeeper, I thought it'd make much more sense just to cut these holes right in the middle of the comb, so the bees can freely move between combs back and forth. So I took an old-fashioned cork cutter and I cut a hole three-quarter-inch right through the comb, right through the plastic center. And I had these five or six holes right down through the middle of the comb going horizontally.

What do you think happened Yeah, think for a minute. What do you think happened? In the spring months, the bees filled it all in with drone comb and plugged it all up. I thought they would just relish the entrances between frames, but they didn't relish it at all.

They covered them up. So here in this old book is how to make a comb cutter So you can cut combs. It's a simple tin plate cylinder about one inch in diameter and four or five inches long.

And then there's this that you cut the combs and allow the bees access. shortcuts between these frames so they won't have to move around like that. Here's a Cheshire transferring board.

These old books spend a lot of time Telling you how to transfer bees. I've given you two or three episodes on this podcast because I think that I was in the bottom of the ninth with two outs when I came along because I transferred these from box hives and there are no box hives now. But these old books gave a lot of information about how to transfer these bees.

Every book I pick up is just coming all to pieces. I love some of the wording. Here's a chapter on the ingenuity of bees This subject defies description.

To mention half of the instance of ingenuity seen in a large apiary would fill a book And in the building of combs and the formations of cells, design is strikingly evident. Honeycombs are made to dip to the bottom. If a piece of guide comb is put in wrong side up, The bees adopt it as commencement, but reverse the dip of the cells, so as to make them better shaped for holding honey.

The stays and props that would be burr combs to you and me, frequently given to weak places and loose combs display great ingenuity. This book is just tearing all to pieces. I got to hold it with two hands They get involved in nadiring.

Nadiring may be sometimes used as artificial swarmers. Suppose a hive is nearby. Well, what's nadiring?

I'm not going to read all this to you Nadiring was when you didn't super. Instead of supering top to bottom, you could also bottom super, but nadiring was done to the side. So bees were allowed to move out of the wall of the of the original brood nest area into side walls.

It's a little bit like a the peculiar long hive That would go from horizontally. So in theory, you wouldn't have to pick it up. Nadiring has really fallen from favor.

So there was bottom supering. There was a name for that I can't remember. But nadiring is disgust with these old techniques.

I'm down I'm rushing because I know you probably tired of hearing this and it's just me who's really enjoying it. They've made actual division boards. And when I when I was a young beekeeper, I built actual division boards.

On page 137 of Pettigrew's book, if I break it back, it'll crack all to pieces. Controlling Act of Congress. Where is the date?

Don't rip the pages. 1878. 1878.

A division board. A close-fitting division board for contracting the chamber. That's the brood chamber, is very important.

And though unappreciated by many excellent apiarists, still no hive is complete without it I found it especially valuable in winter and spring, useful at all seasons. And then it tells you exactly how to make it. And then when I turn the page.

It says that A. I. Root made a padded division board. And I'm putting you through all this because I wrote an article for some of the bee magazines and went to the next level. It was just a step away from making that gadget hollow and calling it a division board feeder.

I now I'm too caught off guard because the very next step is the Huber hive. There's all of these hives If I just turn the pages and start looking, all of these hive designs, and I would say that none are made anymore. Well that none are made, but I would say that it's not different today.

There's all these different styles and kinds of hives that are readily available to you. The Warré hive, the Top Bar Hive, the Flow Hive. I mean I suspect, if I could be a historian at all, that we'll probably have as many hive variations today as we've ever had, even in the old days, with these old hives that are now all on the junk heap.

I'm sorry for putting you through this. It's entertaining to me because I held the book in my hand. I enjoy going back, I enjoy seeing the way things were, and it makes me appreciate even more the way things are now in my snapshot of beekeeping.

I'm gonna finish on a book that just has been living in absolute fame for years, and it's Fifty Years Among the Bees by C. C. Miller. It's just a very readable book. This guy just seemed to have brought together at the time, culminating all of the aspects of modern beekeeping.

No excluders under supers, correct bee space, requeening in a good season. They do something called hive pruning. They wanted to get combs in Miller's book and other books.

They wanted to get old combs out. Isn't that interesting? That these old guys were trying to recycle combs.

And I don't really know why. I don't know if they were aware of the cells becoming smaller or what. I gotta stop, but I gotta stop, but I keep wanting to say one more thing.

Keep in mind we had some really hot bees back then with Apis mellifera. So when that guy was saying he was using tobacco smoke, he was probably working some really nasty bees. But then we also go through the advent of the Italian bee arriving and that bee taking over and the other strains that came in, the Caucasians and all the others.

that we had for a while, and now we have our special bees that are specially bred instead of specific races of bees. This is our time, this is our place. This will not be the last time and the last place.

And as long as these old books exist, we can go back and visit the time and place of other people. On this pleasant, rainy day, very consoling, very smooth, I just wanted to talk to you for a while. I really appreciate you. I'm Jim. Bye-bye.