Bee Suit Design with Anne Frey (201)

Episode 201 – Bee Suit Design with Anne Frey

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Jim Tew: Hey beekeepers, it's segment time again here at Honey Bee Obscura. What we're thinking about today is how we routinely put on our bee suit without thinking much about it. You know that putting on a bee suit hasn't always been an option for all beekeepers. In fact, in a way compared to the age of beekeeping, bee suits are a recent development. I've got my good friend and co-beekeeper here, Anne Frey. Anne, say good morning.

Anne Frey: Hi, Jim. Good morning.

Jim: Good morning to you. Thanks for talking to us today about this exciting topic. I'm actually looking forward to it. I've never talked specifically about bee suits and bee suit design.

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Kim and I talked about protective gear, but never specifically about bee suits. To make this thing formal, Anne, let me introduce myself. I'm Jim Tew and I'm here at Honey Bee Obscura where once a week, I try to talk about something to do with some aspect of plain talk beekeeping.

Anne: Hi, I am Anne Frey from Betterbee and I'm glad to be here.

Jim: Standby listeners, we want to talk to you for a few minutes and we want you to know right up front, thank you for being here.

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

Jim: Listeners, I want to say and suggested this topic, and I liked it right away because I've never really thought about it. I've got some old catalogs, just a motley collection. Nothing special, but some of them are pretty old. Back to the 1916, 1915, in 1921, you could buy a Tulle bee veil, you could buy one of two models, and each model cost a dollar. Or you could buy the material yourself, and if you were excellent at sewing, you could make your own bee veil, that was it.

Those two items and some gloves that had been modified for the purpose, but they weren't even modified with gauntlets and things like now. It was really, really simple. That was it, beekeepers. There was no bee suits, no half suits, no coveralls, no nothing. Whatever you wore was your business, and you pointed out that a lot of these old pictures, how beekeepers out there wearing bee veils and suits and ties.

Anne: It seems like to my feeling that they're dressed fancy, but it might've just been that the old-fashioned way of dressing for every day is what I call fancy now.

Jim: That's a good point. I used to wear ties. I always wore a tie when I gave a bee talk. I got a nice collection of bee ties and now I never have an opportunity to dress fancy. It seems people seem to have been more casualized if that's a word.

Anne: Even women that they show they're wearing a long dress, the everyday women's gear. I wouldn't want to do any beekeeping in a dress, I'll tell you.

Jim: Well, neither would I, I'll tell you. For a whole list of reasons, not the least of which would be a lot of controversy, but quickly getting off that topic and moving right along. So far as I can tell, this is just conversation listeners and Anne, the first time I could find a bee suit and the bee supply catalogs was in 1971, at an old Kelly Beekeeping catalog. I'm going to guess from a conversational stance, not from a review of the literature and all that kind of thing, that painter overalls were the first bee suits and they were just made available in bee supply catalogs along with a modestly increased number of veils, the [unintelligible 00:04:21] folding veil, those kind of things were coming into view then.

Why painter coveralls? Why painter? Why didn't they just go to some kind of overall contraption? Why those white coveralls? One of the reasons, I want to say it first before you say it would be because of heat. White would be a cooler outfit to wear. Can you think of any other reason other than just availability that painters already had to find out, meet people working in slaughterhouses, all kinds of businesses would wear these canvas coveralls?

Anne: Mechanics. They had like a tan or a light gray kind of style, but it's a coverall. I wish that the beekeeper catalogs had started out with the gray or the tan because then we wouldn't look so dirty when we get our white jackets all propolis. I think the white was a disservice. We got to have a time machine and go back and change that.

Jim: I really liked that comment. A bee suit only looks good until you use it the first time, and if you want to look like a novice beekeeper, if you want to look like a new beekeeper, have a nice bright white clean suit. I just had a flashback, Anne. When I was a kid, I tried to play a little league ball and I wasn't very good at it, so I got to play a little bit, but never very much. After the game was over, I'd go roll around in the red soil on the infield to get my uniform dirty so my parents would think I'd play ball more.

If you have a white bee suit, [chuckles] you need to go out and just dirty it up some, so you'll look more like an experienced beekeeper who's done this before. I guess the white suit was the takeoff on the fact that these suits were readily available, and in my old days, veils were all tie down, so when you put these white suits on, they had no zipper contraption, no connection, nothing, so you had to be sure that that veil tied around your collar, around your waist and all these contorted things that we did.

Anne: The little rings. People hardly know how to do that nowadays. It's the most inexpensive veil, so I've seen beginners get that helmet with a tie-down veil or the Alexander Veil or something like that, and then they just don't know what to do with these strings. It's so uncommon now. It used to be the most common.

Jim: That's exactly right, and they were contorted to put on, but once you suited up, you were good to go, and even in my earliest days we had duct tape, so those painter coveralls made no effort to keep bees or mice or anything else from going up your pant leg.

Anne: The pockets were open to go right through to your normal pants.

Jim: Which brings up my next question. This gets weird, but I guess it depends on how hard you're working and how hot it is, but sometimes you'd put a suit over pants and other times if you-- I've specifically, if you weren't going to be doing a lot, I just put the suit on, but it's a strange thing, Anne. We start out as beekeepers wearing everything we can wear. Gloves, veils, suits, duct tapes, tall boots, whatever it takes. I don't want to be stung.

That's really hurt but whatever, and then we do a slow strip over time. As you gain experience, you go to a half-suit, don't put that whole thing on. Maybe the gloves, maybe they're under the seat of the truck, and you get to a point where you're comfortable working bees. You just wear a veil primarily and everything else is someplace. If you need it, you can go get it.

Anne: The gaunt lighted leather gloves that have cloth all the way to your elbow, that was the beginner standard, and then we changed to more thin and then none. Maybe go back to the thin nitro. Definitely a good idea to just have the suit on or just have something more lightweight, which also beginners don't think of. They think of layering. Layering is the way to do it.

Jim: Layering is so hot. Even on an average day, it is so hot in that suit. The irony I was going to make, the point was that we start off fully dressed, completely dressed, then as we are in the mid-stage of beekeeping, we lighten it up, and then as you get a lot of bees, a lot being 40, 50, 70, 200 colonies, I'm back to full gear again because you know that you will take a fair number of stings if you work a lot of colonies.

Plus, you got to work. You got to get the job done, probably somebody's paying you. You can't dilly dally around so you back up, so you're back where you started, fully suited, and boy, those commercial beekeepers-- No, hey, commercial bee guys who might be listening, I'm not meaning to offend you, but that's some real rough looking bee suits because those suits are really, really used hard.

Anne: They do want to go fast and they've got to do it all day, so they're going to want to be completely protected and not dilly dally, as you say. They're not going to slow down because a few bees are buzzing around them. They're just going to put on that suit at the beginning and get going.

Jim: Let's take a break and hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back. We got more to come.

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Jim: Anne, there's no place to insert this so I'll just force it in right here. You mentioned a bit ago that the pants pockets on those painter pants and subsequent most bee suits are open to the inside so you can get to your pants pocket as well as to a pocket that's in the bee suit most of the time or the painter overalls, whichever you might call it.

I learned years and years ago that you could take the blower off that data and tripod bee blower and jam into that open pocket inside your bee suit with that blower running pretty much flat out and it would blast air through that bee suit.

When you were just hot as blazes and covered in sweat, stick that blower in your shirt pocket, blow that bee suit out like the Michelin guy, and stand there with all that hot air just blowing right out your veil and out your sleeve cuffs. It felt so good.

Anne: I hope someone took a picture of that.

Jim: I hope not, but it was helpful. That's the silly aside. If you look at catalogs now, it's absolutely stunning what's available. We've gotten away, in many instances, from white. I agree with you. One, couldn't they at least have been gray? I said it was heat. Maybe availability. Is there a third reason? Is there a bear thing that if you wore gray or darker colors you would resemble a bear and the bees would be more-- I don't know if that's true or not.

Anne: I don't know if it is, but I do know that a fellow I used to work with who was a very skillful beekeeper, he always wore blue jeans, pretty baggy blue jeans and they were dark blue. I didn't notice that he was getting a lot of stings on his legs. I hear that about the bear and the bees think the dark pants or the dark clothing is a dangerous animal, but I'm not sure I believe it.

I do know that the few times I've used black gloves, black cloth gloves in the winter to do oxalic acid and I just grabbed those cheap black gloves, the bees did seem to go on purpose to my hands and wrists. I don't know if that was a material thing or some smell that these new gloves have, but it's hard to tell. I think that maybe white was at the beginning because white material might just be cheaper than any dyed material. Then it was a tradition.

Jim: Well, excuse me, but you got me thinking about that. Maybe it was just the cheapest way to go.

Anne: We're cheap.

Jim: Yes. Most of the things in the catalog, you don't have to say anything since you work for a bee supply company, but most of the things in the bee catalog by far I buy just because I want them. Not because I have to have them, but I just simply want them. If I can make one more statement off the subject, I sometimes think that I want those things because I really can't spend all that much time in my bee colonies. It's such a limited thing. If I have all these other gadgets, trinkets, and toys, then I get to spend more productive time thinking about my bees. I don't know what it is, but-

Anne: This is psychology.

Jim: -there's all this gear now. Yes. It's in-depth beekeeper psychology.

Anne: Let's not get into too much psychology.

Jim: Thank you for saying that because I've just taken a recent shot at that and I'm not sure it ended well. We got all these options available to us. Do you wear a full suit every time you go out? Are you working small colonies? Do you dress according to what you're going to be doing with the bees and how big they are?

Anne: I always wear the same thing because it's easiest to just grab the same thing. I have what you call a half-suit. I call it jacket and it has the veil zipped to it and I wear baggy pants and nitro gloves. Whether it's a big honey production hive or nukes or I'm just going to get some queens out of the queen bank, it's the same setup.

Jim: Well, I agree 90%. I wear a jacket. I'll call it that, a jacket suit. I like to have on baggy jeans for a different reason. Not so much stinging but because I can pack the bottom part of the jacket suit inside my jeans and then I'm fixed there. You have this odd outfit on and then it's quick and dirty and you go, but it's a light suit. It's not ventilated. If I'm going to be moving bees at night, which doesn't happen much anymore, but where I have to do that, I would suit up flat out all the way down just because I don't want to have to stop in the middle of this with a smoker going and a colony open and bees all over me and have to go add more clothes at that point.

Anne: Oh, definitely. I didn't even think of moving bees at night because I basically try to never ever do that, but you're right. The few times I had to go at night, I put on two pairs of pants. I put on tall, tall boots. I duct-tape the connection between them and the pants. The big old gloves that have leather hands and the sleeve goes up to your elbow. Definitely that kind of situation, I'm completely suited up. You don't want anything to go wrong with moving bees at night.

Jim: It will go wrong, Anne. No doubt about it. If you move bees at night, just a few things going wrong is a good night. I want to add this. Sounded like I'm a frontiersman, but in my earliest years in South Alabama, when we would go out at night on a summer night whenever to work bees, you'd suit up more often than not just because you didn't know what else was out there. Poisonous snakes. Underneath almost every one of my colonies down there, almost everyone had one or two black widow spiders.

You're working bees at night, moving bees, loading bees up to go to watermelon pollination and you're not the only critter out there. Believe it or not, my protective gear then was as much for other things, not just bees. Throw that in the mix. Sometimes I would suit up heavy just to be sure that nothing could get to me, not just bees. Do you wear ventilated suits?

Anne: No, I don't because I feel like their sheer weight pounds hanging on my shoulders is not a comfortable thing. The ventilated suits seem to be too much. I like to just wear one layer cotton and usually nothing underneath because it gets too hot.

Jim: All right. I'm going to go with you to a point and then I'll do the counterpoint. I have one of those suits. It was fairly expensive. Getting off the subject again, my grandson asked if he could have it, what am I going to say? I gave it to him but I didn't really want to give it away, but I'm sure he's making good use of it. If it's a particularly hot day, I will put that suit on, but it is bulky. Multiflora rose will grab those suits and cling to them at just about impossible to get away from them. If you're going to be anywhere around briars, those ventilated suits, that porous material just cling to those stickers on those briars.

Anne: Where is Jim? He's stuck out there by the edge of the hedgerow.

Jim: Trying to cut down multiflora rose is just going to grow right back. I do wear them on occasion. I like them fine on that occasion, but most of the time, I'm back to the Anne Frey method of just wearing a traditional set of half suits or jackets that I've got. The big suit hangs out in the cupboard there waiting for the big day that's probably never going to come again. My suits are mostly white. I do have a couple that are sage.

Anne: A grayish green?

Jim: A grayish green, a faded green. I like that all right. I want to begin to wind down on this note. Basically, bee suits have evolved. We got them from painters probably just like we did hive tools that were window openers. We call them hive tools. They're actually just pry bars. You can use a hive tool for anything.

Anne: I've used a hive tool to eat some yogurt.

Jim: Any photos of that for future use?

Anne: Actually, yes.

Jim: [laughs] You don't have a spoon? They're not that expensive, especially plastic ones.

Anne: Out in the field, Jim.

Jim: Okay. All right. Make do with what you got. I don't know why we haven't made more of a fashion statement. Why haven't bee suits broken into the public persona? Why haven't high school kids become just crazy about wearing yellow and sage and orange bee suits to school? No. Bee suits stay right in our deal.

Anne: Well, it's a good Halloween costume sometimes.

Jim: It does. That's exactly right. My neighbor, who's not a beekeeper, dressed as a bee a few years ago and then my wife dressed as a beekeeper and people really responded to it nicely.

Anne: There's a beekeeping Barbie. I think kids are a little bit connected with beekeeping as a job.

Jim: You think it's coming? I don't know if it's going to make it or not.

Anne: I don't think it'll be a tidal wave.

Jim: Well, folks, when you put on those bee suits, then you have all of those options to choose from. You need to know that it's been a long evolutionary process over the last 50 to 60 years for you to get to this convenient point. Anne, do you have any final words?

Anne: I think that people should remember what we were saying about the commercial beekeepers who are dealing with hundreds and needing to go fast all day, and picture that, and contrast that with it being the same look as a hobbyist beginner because I think that's a very interesting fact. Before the beginner gets so comfortable that they change to a jacket or less and less of the protective gear, they look just like a person who's got the job as a full-time job, and it's the polar opposite of the hobbyist who's a start out.

Jim: That's the extremes.

Anne: Yes, but they're the same.

Jim: They're the same. Same equipment. Anne, I always enjoy talking to you. Thanks for your time, and you should have been doing something else.

Anne: No, Jim, it's fun to do a podcast with you.

Jim: Listeners, we will talk to you next week. Thanks for listening in. Goodbye.

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