Reflections on the 300th Episode

Reflections on 300 Episodes

Jim Tew
Hi listeners, I'm walking back to my scruffy bee yard. It's pretty close to September 10th or so. Summer is well underway.

Goldenrod has maxed out. Beginning to wane some. This, uh, segment today is selfishly from me.

I've been told that I talk too much about age, but I'm always shocked. To suddenly be officially an old man and young people hold doors for you and they let you step up in line and they help you at the airport gate. That was always for somebody else.

That was never going to be me, but here it is, me. I gotta get through the barn shed, you know that. Listeners, today is my 300th.

My 300th segment. 300 times I've said hello here. It's Jim Tew Coming to you from the bee yard.

I just can't believe it. I'd like to reflect some on that. Since January the 10th.

2021. Started then. Beekeepers on Jim Tew and 300 times.

I've come to you once a week. trying 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. 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
Listeners, uh, I had a web channel, I had a YouTube channel. And I made the, uh, decision to really go under that. So I spent oh, I don't know, four thousand three thousand five hundred dollars on a on a video camera a Canon high resolution video camera and I did the best I could to produce videos. I used the Apple system for editing and I really was putting my heart into it.

I had a few followers. I was never doing anything other than just playing. I wasn't trying to be the end-all, be-all video channel.

And Kim, Kim Flottum, kept coming to me saying he wanted to do a podcast with me. And I immediately turned him down. Because why would I give up video casting which had pictures and sound?

Just to do something conversational. It seemed like I could have been going backwards. Kim was the most persistent fellow that you've ever seen.

And after a week or two, he came back to me and he pushed me again. That this would be fun. And you have to, for those of you who knew Kim, you just have to love him.

That guy That guy could sell you anything. He kept saying, “It won't take—it won't take 15 minutes a month.” Let's just do it and see if you like it.

I still turned him down. On the third time, I don't know why I relinquished. Maybe I realized that if Kim was right, I did have 15, 20 minutes a month to make two Ten minute segments.

How bad could it be? We could talk about anything. It was just going to be conversational.

It was not going to be analytical. Sitting at a table during the break at a bee meeting. And he wanted that to be that kind of conversation.

All right, Kim, alright. I'll do that And I agreed to it. And we didn't do two to four ten minute segments before we realized that you could barely get through the introduction and the sponsor announcement before three and a half minutes was already gone. Then you had to talk at the speed of light to get any point across. So just within a few segments, Kim and I settled comfortably on about a 20 to 25 minutes segment.

My daughter takes about 20 minutes to drive to work every morning. She calls me every morning and she talks while she drives to work and somehow that 20-minute segment seemed to work With you people. Now when I watch a YouTube channel on a guy getting a truck out of a stump mire or A guy finding arrow points along the Ohio River.

I specifically looked for something around 20 to 25 minutes long. It's almost like my attention span has been altered. And I have to admit that I had a good time with Kim.

So most of the time it was a good time. Sometimes it was challenging. Kim and I were the old Siskel and Ebert kind of relationship.

We could disagree on things. Kim kept saying that eight-frame equipment was the way to go. Well I never saw eight-frame equipment.

I don't mind if you use it. I don't have any. I like it.

It's kind of quaint looking It's still around, but it's not as popular as the 10-frame, but he never missed a chance to sell eight-frame equipment, saying that as he aged, we needed the lighter weight Well as I aged I couldn't tell the weight was that much less. It was still too heavy for him and still made me cry and creak when I picked it up, but he loved it. So I let it go, but we argued back and forth.

He wanted to leave Queens in longer and longer and longer to be sure these expensive queens worked Released correctly. Longer and longer and longer made me uncomfortable because I didn't know how long the queen had been in the cage when I got her And I didn't want that valuable bug to stay in that cage for something like what, couple of months? I didn't know how long she had been banked before I bought her, so we disagreed on things like that. But we agreed on a lot of things too Kim loved to say, what's your time worth?

And I never said it on the air, I guess I'm saying it now, but would every time Kim would say it about every other to every third segment, what's your time worth? You want to repair frames What's your time worth? You wanna cut grass in the bee yard every week?

What's your time worth? Well every time he would say it, something on the back of my neck would stand up because I wanna know what else you were going to be doing with that time. Were you going to be taking a nap?

Well, I guess that's valuable to some of us, but if you're not doing anything else, then your time is just worth the life's time you've been allocated. So we cut and sparred back and forth, back and forth, and Kim's health began to go downhill. He kept failing medical tests.

He had heart issues. He had He had joint issues and so we would have to work segments around Kim's medical appointments and then Kim Got worse and there's no reason to be sappy and sad here. Most of you know the story on that.

Kim was the editor of the Bee Culture magazine forever By far the longest editor that Bee Culture has ever had in tenure. His health declined and declined, and Kim was always optimistic. He's going to be taking this radiation therapy and it's going to bring him right back and he'll be good to go again.

He was optimistic till the day he wasn't here So Jeff, the executive director of this podcast, who makes everything sound good, and I did everything we could to work with Kim. While he went through all that. It really had an effect on me.

Just after Kim was gone, as he was leaving, my wife got sick. I've told you about that through the years. It's been today It's a year and a half that I've not had my wife.

And I want to tell you, listener, that you, my friend We're right there with me during the darkest times of my life. This podcast began to mean ever so much to me. It was reality.

It was an opportunity to come back to the bee yard, sit here and talk to you for a while and things be normal. And when I went back in the house, things would be horrifically abnormal. I can't tell you how much you meant to me as a listener, giving me focus and direction.

This is all very selfish because some of you who are listening to this were going through or are going through now issues of your own. Guess I'm being selfish. It was very, very helpful to me to come back to my bee yard.

I didn't have to do anything. Just come back here and let the Duke Bees do their thing like they had always done, like time was endless. It wasn't endless.

I'm trying to tell you straight up, plain talk, that I didn't initially think that this was for me And then as time passed and since 2021, so many major changes have occurred in my life and the life of the podcast that it has become significantly meaningful to me on this 300th podcast. Let's take a break and hear from our sponsor while you try to figure out where is he going with all of this

Betterbee

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Jim Tew
After Kim was no longer available, it fell to me to do something. Kim and I talked about anything We talked about the last meeting we were at. We talked about how to have a good meeting.

We just talked about anything But after Kim was gone, that be kind of became a one-sided conversation, with me having a one-sided conversation. I began to go back to the bee yard. I began to follow my bees more closely, but I didn't really want it to be a how-to segment that you and I were having.

I wanted it to be that discussion at a bee meeting where we both had seen something in our colonies. And we were curious to know if that's appropriate this time of the year, if that's abnormal, whatever it might be. I went through that.

for quite a while. Try as I might, I've gotten older and older, and so picking up equipment and lighting smokers and ripping into the hives just to see something that I could talk with you about has become more and more of a non-option. The bees seem perfectly fine with me not doing that much with them.

A little mic control and then everything else is on their own. I lose some bees in the winter and I talk about that. Some of my bees survive the winter and I talk about that I don't cut grass as much as I used to.

Right now I'm in a weedy bee yard with all these plants that are blooming and are there are just foraging insects. everywhere. There's metallic bees on these blooms.

So I tried to talk about planting bee plants and bee gardens and whatever, and you know if I just do nothing I mean there are bumblebees, there's honey bees, there's metallic solitary bees. I just enjoy Coming back so much. So I've come up with all these sloppy names and I have offended beekeepers en masse who are not where I am on this beekeeping journey I love beekeeping, but I really don't love hard, hard, hot, sweaty work.

I live alone. I have three supportive daughters who know where I am all the time. They monitor my phone.

They monitor me if I don't answer the phone on the second call. And my closest daughter, I've named that the curse of the closest. The one who's the closest is the one who bears the brunt.

Unfortunately, it seems like I'm just surrounded by death and destruction, but my neighbor of 46 years, her husband died five years ago and over the weekend a month ago then she passed. So I'm surrounded by these things and they were such good neighbors. The man before he passed never complained about the bees being around his watering devices.

He seemed to like having them there. He said they were good for his garden. I talked to all these people.

I talked about the neighbors and what we went through and how close I am. I have a long narrow acre I put my bees all the way back at the back to get as far away as I can. And I've talked about the relationship with neighbors who are not beekeepers.

I stopped to buy some wood for my solo outdoor fire kit from the neighbor down the street who had a giant pile of wood and he didn't know me and I didn't know him. As it works out his name is Josh and my name is Jim. And I said I live down the street.

He said, yeah, there's some guy down there who has bees down the street. I said, well that that would be me. He's a new guy on the street.

I don't know how he knew that already But I'm that guy on the street who has bees and this jungle of a bee yard back here Kim and I would come up with different topics to discuss off the cuff. It would be something somebody asked about, a suggestion that you made, or something you wanted to hear about that we felt like we could discuss for 20 minutes. Topics were always as valuable as gold.

After Kim was gone and I was trying to pick up the slack and be a one-man band, For me, even, it became tedious. And I could tell if it's tedious for me, it has to be tedious for you And I found Anne Fry, who's a really proficient beekeeper. She works for Betterbee.

And she's become a fairly constant, frequent discussion factor here. She's gone a long way toward giving you good bee information that I'm just not qualified to give anymore I can give you anecdotal information, I can give you historical information, I can give you psychological information, but exactly what you should be doing and what the latest, greatest is. I'm far more dated than that.

This three hundredth episode is, you know nothing special. It would it be more special if I make it to four hundred or well, I guess five hundred will be a significant day On the 200th episode, I just made a comment that it was my 200th episode and then moved right on. But I'm in a different place now, physiologically and psychologically.

I just wanted you to know how much I've enjoyed doing this for you, how much it's made me think about what bees are doing and why they're doing it. It's made me grow. It's made me into my probably my last stage of beekeeping.

My daughters have told me to stop cutting my own grass. I've got a I'm not, it's an old Kubota tractor, diesel, mower deck on it. I've cut my own grass and cut other people's grass since I was 12 years old.

And my daughters told me, Dad, you got to stop doing that because we don't want you on a tractor by yourself down there since you live alone I've often thought that when I come back to the bee yard, I need to have every communication device known to man because nobody comes back here but me. This is my little spot in the world. And my bees, little spot in the world, if I could say that they're mine.

Where's all this going? I just wanted to tell you, on the 300th episode. How much I appreciate you for staying with me during the moody times, the blue times.

During the bad segments, you know you gotta have bad segments so you can have good segments every now and then. You can't tell good if they're all good. So every once in a while you just come across the dud that nobody really cares for, and the other times you come across one that really matters I'm always looking for unique discussions.

I've just come across the fact that something that was injected into my knee has a chemical name very close to some of the chemical components. of honey bee stings. I'm trying to go back to chemistry I cannot understand to see if there's something there that I could talk about.

It was a discussion this morning that Lyme disease seemingly has miraculously cured a woman who was massively stung by Africanized bees. Those kind of things interest me and those kind of things become a discussion topic. I don't want to be an authority.

I want to be a conversationalist with you and you and I talk and you interact and add and have your input too on topics that are really right at the cusp of my ability and sometimes easily within my ability. Is that enough? I hope to be here a hundred episodes from now, five hundred episodes from now, if Jeff can tolerate me and my lateness and my tardiness.

And my impromptu thing will continue to evolve. Dr. Masterman has sometimes been involved and has good suggestions. I'm going to follow up on some of those.

As I depart here, I'd like for you just to have a nice segment. Think about yourself. Think about your own bees.

Think about this flower field that I'm looking at that has all this activity on these fall flowers on a beautiful day. With the gentle breeze blowing on our 300th segment. We've come a long way together.

And I really want to say thank you for it. And I hope you stay here for a lot longer. On a fairly short episode, I'm Jim telling you thank you, and I'll talk to you next week.

Bye-bye.