Dissuading Beekeepers with Anne Frey (191)

Episode 191 – Dissuading Beekeepers with Anne Frey

Jim Tew: Listeners, I'm here with Anne Frey, from Betterbee, and we've just decided rather extemporaneously to talk with you about what you do with people who think they want to get into beekeeping. Sometimes they're prepared, sometimes they're not. You've had some experiences, haven't you, Anne?

Anne Frey: Yes, there's a lot of customer interaction here, just casual people visiting or coming with their buddies when they pick up bees. There's sometimes a lot of chit-chat about people just casually wanting to suddenly start beekeeping. I like to make sure they have a little more preparation than impulsively starting beekeeping on the spot.

Jim: I think that's perfectly logical. I want the listeners to know, we may delve into some things that don't sound all that positive, but they are positive. I don't want people to have a bad experience with bees in any way. Let's talk about it, Ann. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, I come to you once a week, from Honey Bee Obscura, where we talk about anything and everything beekeeping. Today I have visiting with us--

Anne: Anne Frey from Betterbee, in Greenwich, New York.

Jim: We're quite a few miles apart, but let's talk, on this long distance system, and see if we can figure out what we would say to people who think they want to be beekeepers.

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.

Anne: When we start out a class online or in person, we always start with a few slides that list off why people like beekeeping, or why they want to. It might be like, "My grandfather kept bees," or, "I want to pollinate my garden, or my six apple trees." Things like that. They have concrete concepts in their mind, or they want honey. Sometimes it's just really vague, like they like the idea of bees on their property. It's just, it runs the gamut. The bees are the same amount of work, no matter what your reason was to start.

Jim: My thoughts at this point are, you're right, you're right, and you're right. The biggest headache I've had is, what does a beekeeper look like? You can't look at a person who's never kept bees and say, "You could do it, and you can do it, but you two over there, you could never do it." You can't look at people. There's no outward physical expression of who's a potential beekeeper and who's not.

Anne: Sometimes after you talk to them though, you get a feeling.

Jim: You do. If someone is a devoted gardener and an outdoorsman, outdoors person, what's the word for that now? They're comfortable around wildlife. That's one thing. If you're in the inner city, and you want to put bees on the roof of a multi-floor building, and you know much about bees, I'm concerned. That's going to take some pretty sophisticated beekeeping and be around other people. After you talk with the people, after you talk to them, you get a feel. I agree.

Anne: You got to let them do what they want though, because in the case of us, we are a business, and they're the customer. We just try to encourage them to take some classes. If they don't like that, we encourage them to watch our YouTube videos and go to conferences, just learn, learn, learn. What we really don't want people to do is just leap right into it and throw money at it, and then possibly quit in one year because they had troubles.

Jim: We both have these stories. From a bee perspective, they're just stunning. There was a man who kept coming back to the supplier and saying he had to have another queen, that these are just not working. For a while, he got a free queen one time, but the third and fourth time, he was having to pay. The supplier finally figured out that the guy was taking the queen and the attendants and releasing them on 10 frames of foundation-

Anne: Oh, no.

Jim: -expecting these things to grow into a beehive. You just can't believe that people can be so unprepared. I don't want to offend anybody, but you got to start somewhere, don't you? That guy needed to have read a few more books, because he went through four queens before they figured out that this was hopeless.

Anne: We actually have added line in the queen description page on our catalog that says, "A queen and her attendants will not create a colony."

Jim: Oh, you're kidding.

Anne: We had the same thing happen a few times.

Jim: Oh, I had no idea.

Anne: Bees are magical, but they're not that magical. That's like having a baby without knowing anything about babies.

Jim: That's going to be a shock. Don't even go there. My babies are all adults with their own teenagers, and I'm still trying to figure out how to raise them. Never ends.

Anne: I know. Just give a person a car with no explanation of how to drive and set them loose.

Jim: Then don't be anywhere around them. [laughs]

Anne: Don't be anywhere around them.

Jim: Listen, when we talk to people, I've always been an ambassador for beekeeping. It was my program at Ohio State, and at Auburn, and I was primarily extension and teaching. Through the years, you just hear so many stories, and you begin to sense. When you say it ran the whole gamut, I really wanted to jump in there and say, and it is such a gamut. It is such a range. You can see people who read, and understand, and learn, and become master beekeepers, and go from two hives to 600 hives, and build a building, and you think you're too hot. You need to slow down here. Nobody can maintain this energy output and keep his other job.

Anne: There's another job?

Jim: Yes. How many times do you see these people then begin to slowly fade out? Slow down.

Anne: Maybe burn out.

Jim: You can't help them. It's like watching someone slowly drown. You can't get to them. You can't pull back to that level of enthusiasm they had.

Anne: I heard a good talk last summer. I think it was Meghan Milbrath. She talked about how people are growing from this many hives, to this many hives, to this many hives. They have to think about how much comb they need each year. That settles people down, when they think they're going to go from 1, to 4, to 8, to 60, to 120. That's five-year plan. There's details about beekeeping that non-beekeepers or even first-year beekeepers haven't thought about. It's not just like buy the box, buy the bees, boom, you're a beekeeper. There's just so much more. The pests, the diseases, wintering.

Jim: The neighbors. [chuckles]

Anne: The neighbors?

Jim: There is so much more.

Anne: That annoying, difficult byproduct, the honey. What do you do with all that when there's too much of it? What do you do with the supers after you harvest? It goes on. There's more and more details.

Jim: I was eager to support some of those details when you were giving them. How do you grow from having a two-frame plastic extractor that's perfectly fine for the two colonies you've got, but then you decide to go to 12 colonies, and you find out that you're working yourself to death with that little two-frame extractor.

Anne: One arm is getting really strong.

Jim: Yes. It's got floating all boats. When you grow, all aspects of the bee operation have to grow.

Anne: Yes. It's not just going to be, "I'm going to get more honey." It's all the other things that are going to grow, too. That's something I think you have to grow into. I don't think that you can accept it when someone just tells you.

Jim: They frequently don't want to hear it. Let's take a break and hear from our sponsor, while we think about what we would say.

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Jim: We left off by saying we want to be supportive. We don't want people to just waste their money. We want the experience with bees to be a pleasant, rewarding one. Sometimes it's clumsy to tell people that, "You're not on solid footing." That makes you sound presumptuous, that makes you sound beekeepingly arrogant, and you don't really want to shoot people down, but you don't want them to go away. We've all seen them. "I want to get a beehive. What's it involving? I've got to get them right things." Right? You think, where do we even start on this with this person? I cannot sit down for the next 12 hours and talk to this person.

Anne: It's almost like the elevator talk. You've got to be able to say it very briefly. You're standing in the parking lot, or you're in the showroom of a store, or they just called you up on the phone. You can't spend, what'd you say? 12 hours?

Jim: Yes. [laughs]

Anne: I can't even spend 45 minutes talking to one person, when it's clearly, they need hours and hours and hours. I would just sum it up and ask them if they know anybody else who is a beekeeper, have they visited them, and could they shadow them? Have they come to an open hive class? Because that really gets people deep into it right away, before they-- They're able to observe it without having to jump into the water themselves. I had one person visit me one time, and he was all ready for his plan, all the way to the five year plan of how many hives he was going to have then.

He stayed in the bee yard with me for maybe three hours, and he had to step away. He just, he couldn't take it. The buzzing, the amount of bees near us on his hands. He just, he said, "Oh my goodness, I never knew it was like this." He decided not to start beekeeping. There's a story. He saved himself a lot of money and struggle, by being so forthright to go in and check it out before he jumped in.

Jim: My mind's racing while you're talking because there's been so many times that I don't think. I've been around bees so long, for so many years, that I just don't think. I just kind of misused my grandson, because we went back to do some quick work on a beehive, and I didn't know. I didn't realize that that beehive had grown to be a monster hive. We were lightly protected, and he got stung up more than he ever had been stung in his life. He told me later on that he had never seen that many bees in his life. He kept saying, "We're losing control. We're losing control."

You want to slap him on both cheeks and say, "We cannot lose control. We've got to get this mess back under control here, and get this colony closed up." I sometimes overstep, and I'm too presumptuous. When people come in, like the man you're talking about, this person you're talking about, it's probably the right thing. If they have some kind of issue, if we're taking them too fast, then it's my fault. Sometimes they just have a personality that doesn't become conducive for beekeeping.

Anne: Yes, it takes a certain amount of-- Like, you have to have your brain able to think differently when you're a beekeeper. The bees aren't going to do what people want them to do. The bees are going to do what the bees are going to do. You have to observe that, and accept that, and understand it's different at different times of year. It's different at different times of day. I had a new beekeeper once that said that he wanted to work his bees in the rain because at that, they couldn't fly up and sting him, because they would be wet.

I said, "No, don't work your bees in the rain. They're absolutely all home at that point. They're all there." Instead of a normal sunny day, where half of them would be out, and they're more content when it's sunny. Just like he was convinced he knew better. Sometimes you can't talk to people like that. They just won't listen. They have their ideas, and they won't change them.

Jim: You might want to be around with a video camera, when that guy goes up for the first time to work bees in the rain, it's a miserable undertaking. You're wet. You've worked bees in the rain.

Anne: They can still fly a little bit.

Jim: They can still fly enough to get to you, and they can certainly crawl.

Anne: They can sting. Yes.

Jim: Whatever you're trying to do on that hive better really be worth it, because it's going to cause grief to the bee colony.

Anne: There are people who are more experienced. They can help you and teach you. You don't have to invent brand new ways of doing things just because you're enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is great.

Jim: Naivete is not, though. Don't confuse enthusiasm with naivete. [chuckles] I want to be a beekeeper. I'm going to get one of these boxes. [chuckles] Right off the bat. I'm ashamed to tell you this, and the listeners, I want you to close your ears for a minute, but often, when I'm meeting someone for the first time, you think I mention bees? Absolutely not. After you've gone through 10,000 little bee stories. Why do you do that? Don't you ever get stung? My grandfather had bees.

I just don't want to go through it anymore. I don't want to bring it up, and I don't want to stand here while I'm in the checkout line at the grocery store and try to tell you how to get into beekeeping. I just mind my own business. Is that bad? I hope. [chuckles]

Anne: I can't [crosstalk]-

Jim: Don't be shocked. [chuckles]

Anne: That's another thing, though. Another aspect of it. Somebody was telling me once, he wrote a paper or a article, and the teacher was like, "Oh, no, this is the same thing that every freshman college student always writes." To that student, it was fresh and new. To the teacher, it was like, "Oh, same thing again." To all these people starting beekeeping, it's brand new to them. They want to hear the new story. To them, it's brand new. To us it's like, "Yes, this, this is this," but we can't let ourselves get into that mode, because that just doesn't sound great. It's too downtrodden.

Jim: You become that old cranky beekeeper who says, "No, that's not right. I'd never do it that way. I tried that and it didn't work." Then you're that guy on the back of the class, who's given the speaker and the presenter all these problems with their, "There's so many ways to do it."

Anne: Yes. Don't be the guy in the back of the conference room.

Jim: Just a bit ago, you really said something that I thought was almost profound. The bees are going to do what they're going to do. The bees have their rigid set of standards, and they're going to run their lives, whether or not we're there. They're going to run their lives in this fashion, with these various tenets that you and I and others like us have spent our lives trying to understand. So, when we talk to these new people, it's not like that you just manhandle these bees and they become like domesticated livestock. They are being coerced. We're trying to splice in to that lifestyle and coerce them into doing what we want them to do, but stay within their parameters.

Anne: Yes, we have to stay within their parameters. Yes, exactly. Yes, we're not breaking a horse or training a dog or something. We are working with what the bees do.

Jim: How many times has one who doesn't know bees said, "Well, your bees must know you, because every time I'm around bees, they sting me." No, those bees don't know me. Probably the most of the bees in that colony, if I just go in once every couple of months, they haven't even seen me before.

Anne: Yes. Yes. I've heard that a lot, too. It comes down to, how long do bees live, and people get into the concept, if you explain it all out like that. Like, these bees might see me once in their entire life, and they might not see me at all. It has to do with whether the person flails at the bees, when the bees are near him, or whether he's crushing them, or whether he's got the most disgusting dirty jacket that is full of its own stench and the bees hate it. it's just like so many things, that it's not, do the bees know you? Yes.

Jim: I've been trying to think how you and I and the listeners could develop a philosophy, a principle, a policy, how we talk, how we represent beekeeping, what we say to those who really have no clue how to get started. How much time do you have? When do you look like you're supportive? When do you blow someone off? Because everybody has an interest in bees. Everybody thinks they know something about bees. For that split moment, it's your time. What are you going to say to them? It's never easy, is it?

Anne: No, it's not easy, but just try to be encouraging, whether they are really in need of a class, or whether they're just chit-chatting. You don't want to get into the Varroa life cycle with somebody on the first conversation, but let them know there are classes and clubs. When I started beekeeping, I had no idea there was such a thing as a beekeeping club. I thought it was just this company that sold equipment, and this old textbook. That's all I had. The enthusiastic beginner might love the idea that there's one or two clubs around them, and they could then learn on their own. It wouldn't all be phone calls to you every three days. How about that?

Jim: That, too, is interesting.

Anne: That's profound. [crosstalk]

Jim: I've had people in my church, and here locally, who say, "Can I just call you when I have a big question?" "No, I really want you to go to a meeting. I want you to read. I don't-- If you've got a question, let's do it." I can't be a general-- That does sound arrogant. I don't mean to sound arrogant.

Anne: You sound like a mean, old guy.

Jim: I'm a mean, old guy. You're right. I should talk with the person right there and just stand there like 45 minutes. No.

Anne: Not today, though. Today's your birthday, right?

Jim: Today is my birthday. I'm wanting to go celebrate being 76 years old. I don't know if we can say this, but it's July the 18th, because this won't run on my birthday, but I'm happy to be 76. I really enjoy beekeeping, and I enjoy talking to you and to the listeners. It really helps me be an old man.

Anne: I like talking with you too, Jim.

Jim: Every once in a while. Not too often, right? You're being very kind. [chuckles] All right. I'll be back in touch in a few weeks, and we'll come up with something as stimulating as this whole discussion on how to become a beekeeper when you don't know anything about it. Thank you, Anne.

Anne: Thank you, Jim.

[00:20:17] [END OF AUDIO]