Downsizing Your Bee Operation (157)

Episode 157 – Downsizing Your Bee Operation

Jim Tew: Honey Bee Obscura listeners, this is Jim Tew. This is frankly not easy to do. It's fairly common knowledge that, in fact, Kim did not survive his health issues. Consequently, the segment that follows will be Kim's last  Honey Bee Obscura podcast. I'd like for you to know that Kim was dedicated to all of these podcasts, to his bitter end, even as his voice was failing. It just reached a point where he couldn't do it anymore. Consequently, we will find a way forward. I do hope you enjoy mine, Kim's last  Honey Bee Obscura podcast here. Thank you so much for listening.

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Kim Flottum: Hey, Jim, you listening to this guy?

Jim: Well, I was until you came over. I've been down this path before. Why? What's on your mind, Kim?

Kim: Come on. Let's go out here. I got a question for you.

Jim: All right. Hold on.

Kim: Hi, I'm Kim Flottum.

Jim: I'm Jim Tew.

Kim: Today we're here from  Honey Bee Obscura, and we're going to talk about, of all things, downsizing your operation.

Introduction: You are listening to  Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the folks behind  Beekeeping Today podcast. Each week on  Honey Bee Obscura, hosts Kim Flottum and Jim Tew explore the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees in today's world. Get ready for an engaging discussion to delight and inform all beekeepers. If you're a long-timer or just starting out, sit back and enjoy the next several minutes as Kim and Jim explore all things honeybees.

Kim: Something hit me right between the eyes yesterday that I wasn't expecting, and I don't know why. It didn't come from somebody or somewhere or something. It just suddenly was right in front of me. What am I going to do next year? Boy, I didn't have an immediate answer. 10 years ago, it would have been, "Well, I'm going to get four more colonies, 10 more colonies, 20 more colonies. I'm moving bees over to, the next county." Yesterday, none of that came up. What about you?

Jim: Where did this come from, Kim? [laughter] Just to step out here and start talking, where am I? Give me just a couple of seconds to get my thoughts together. How would you word this? I think we're going to use this as a segment. I'm at a pivotal place. I was exactly like you and like most of the beekeepers who passed through all the beekeeping cycles. I wanted more. I wanted different. I wanted pollen traps. I wanted to raise my own queens. I wanted to move bees for pollination, make splits.

Kim, I don't want to be an old guy, but I'm just at a stage of life where I still want to keep bees, but I don't want to work a lot. If you caught me off guard the way you have and asked, what I'm going to do next year, I've been writing about it. I want to keep smaller, more beekeeper-friendly colonies instead of the big, productive, outgoing, beautiful, full frames of brood. I want to back it down some. Do you think less of me for that, or would you tell me if you did?

Kim: No, I don't at all, because I did that a while back when I went from 10-frame deeps for brood and 10-frame deeps for honey to 8-frame mediums for everything. Suddenly, my life got a lot lighter, so I've already crossed that bridge. Now I'm okay. I've got a stack of 8-frame mediums out there. I like 8-frame mediums. I can still lift them without crying or something.

Jim: We've talked about this when we weren't recording, but 8-frames are 2 frames better than 10-frames. That doesn't mean 8-frames are still light. They're lighter than 10-frames, but it's still a work, Kim. I could go 8-frame. I could be talked into it. The only reason I don't go 8-frame is I've got so much 10-frame equipment. The way I would go, either 8 or 10-frames, what do you know about keeping bees in a single deep and making them stay there, maybe with a Queen excluder? What's going to happen other than the obvious swarming?

Kim: If I was going to be completely honest, I think that's what's going to happen. You're pushing the limit on what bees-- Bees are set to grow. Beekeepers are set to keep them from growing. You can let them grow and give them more and more boxes, or you can try and keep them from growing. It ain't going to happen. You're going to be fighting bees all season long. You're going to come in one day and you say, "Dang it, I quit."

Jim: [laughs] Now I'm not going to do that. I will make mistakes on this. They're going to swarm. If I try to contain them to a single deep, just so I can manage the colonies, the big thing, Kim, is I have a lot of trouble getting down through my sometimes three deep brood chambers with maybe a couple of supers on top, because at some point you've got to treat for mites. That used to be just a Thursday afternoon job, but now it's a big deal. I've got to get ready for it, get suited up. I got to find the right day. It's just not as whimsical as it used to be to go do it. I would say, "Well, let them swarm."

Through the years I've come across beekeepers, and there's listeners right now who are just curling their nose and thinking what a waste this is. You got to wait till you're where we are. I remember those beekeepers saying, "Well, if I lose a swarm, it's no big deal. I just give bees back to the ecosystem." I thought, "Well, what a waste. You could have had 210 colonies instead of 209." Now I'm thinking, "Well, I'll just get more bees."

My attitude's changing, Kim. When you say, what are you going to do next year? I've been writing about it. Some of the readers have written to ask me how it was going. I want to downsize not just the colony numbers, but I'd like to look at downsizing the colony size, so I can actually open the beehive. I like photography. I like videography. When you got these big colonies and burr combs breaking and you're stringing honey everywhere and you got your valuable photography equipment out there, it just turns messy. It'd be so much neater and cleaner if I had puppy kind of hives instead of bulldog kind of hives.

Kim: You touched on something that I'm not going in that direction so much in colony size. Since I switched to eight frame mediums, my colony sizes have been, what's the word I want, comfortable? The number of colonies I have is not-- I got many.

Jim: I need to tell you right now, maybe I've not been giving you the right answers. You've been saying eight frame mediums every time, but I was still thinking eight frame deeps. Let's go back just for a bit. Eight frame mediums would be a lighter load. I can see why you're saying that. I was thinking eight frame deeps still. Some of my answers didn't make sense a bit ago when I was saying two frames less. I'm sorry to cut you off, but I was answering questions you weren't asking, I realize.

Kim: No, but you covered some stuff that I think it needs covering, but I'll go back to, it used to be a while ago. I'd look out of my kitchen window and I could see in my backyard, 10 or 12 colonies and I had them way in the back. I got a couple of acres and I got them way in the back, a couple out of my houses in the front and my colonies are back almost as far as you can go. Looking at them from the kitchen, they're not very big, but once you walk back there, but there's too many back there and every year, there's one or two less. I lose one or I give one away or something, but I still got too many.

The question is, my question is, that question that hit me in the, between the eyes yesterday was, "All right, I used to have 12, 15 colonies, now I want two or three and that gives me 10 or 12 or 20 colonies worth of empty, used equipment. What do you do with empty used equipment?" Some of it's been used for years and years. Some of it's not quite that old, but all of it's old.

Jim: What do you do? I have exactly the same issue. Corners rotted out, hasn't been painted in years. It could be a beehive again, if you were just desperate and you had the energy. What do you do with that old equipment? I've seen people who do clever things with some of them, you put a bottom on it and put flowers in it and put it on a stump or a retired hive stand and make a flower tray out of it. Other people stack those things up and turn them into improvised shelves, which look junky, but if they're in your barn, sometimes they're better than no shelves at all. I don't have a good solution.

The simple thing would be to pile them up and burn them, but I'm in the city limits.

There's a no open fire ordinance unless you've got hot dog wieners close by. I guess you could do that, but it's not much of a fire for hot dog wieners. I don't know, Kim. Could you load them up and take them to the dump? I used to read that was a primary way for spreading American Foulbrood. Was exposed, thrown away, discarded. You were supposed to burn and bury and do all that. I don't have American Foulbrood that I know of, my colonies don't. I don't know what to do with old equipment. Right now, it just sits around unloved with no future. Kind of like some abandoned military complex building in the middle of nowhere. It's just going to sit there till it rots away, I guess.

Kim: You mentioned one thing, making shells out of them. I take two and put a board across them and two more on top of that and a board across them, two more. I can make a tower. I'm a plant guy and I got more plants than I need. When I'm looking at plants and empty soup broods, I'm thinking shells. My deck is now up, has like four times as many plants on it as it would have if I didn't have all these shells. It's still boxes aren't there. Here's one thing I'm thinking. You mentioned Foulbrood. If I'm going to give them away or if I'm going to sell them, what's a good way to guarantee that there's no foulbrood ? Especially, if you're cleaning, you clean all the propolis off and the old paint and, the wax and whatever you clean, they look good. What's the guarantee that there's not Foulbrood lurking in some of those corners, someplace?

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Jim: I don't know, Kim, that you can give a cement guarantee that used equipment doesn't have any Foulbrood spores. In reality, I bet you that at some microscopic level, you could find a Foulbrood spore here and there, but it's in the wrong place. It's not where the nurse bees are going to eat it and get it in their brood food glands, but that's always a possibility, isn't it? Sometimes buying used equipment, being given used equipment is a great financial deal, but there is the chance out there on the horizon that that one lone old-fashioned disease may bring your whole operation down. It's a remote chance, but it's there, isn't it? No guarantees, Kim. I don't know of any guarantees.

Kim: No, there's a couple of things, while you were talking there that came to mind. Some of my old, old, old, old ideas. [laughs] There's a couple of things I can do. Now, you can't do this in every state, but I could take samples. I could take scrapings from the frame rests of all of these boxes, just a little one, and Ohio has a resource I could send that scraping down. They could test it and tell me if there's Foulbrood in it. It's free, so there's that. Before I sell them, I could take that, send them down to Columbus and have that happen.

The other thing I could do is take a propane torch and just singe everything so that once I clean everything off, all the wax and all the propolis and old paint, and then I scorch it, what's left is probably not going to have anything resembling American Foulbrood. I'm pretty confident of that. I've done it in the past and I've never had a recurrence, so I'm confident that that too might work.

Jim: I think that would work. I have never really scorched equipment all that much, other than something we're trying to make pictures of, for some future talk, but can I speak openly here? If I'm looking to buy used equipment and it's scorched, I'm probably going to get back in my bee truck and go, unless I know this person really well, like you. They say, "No, I scorched it as a preemptive move to be sure I didn't give a good friend American Foulbrood in their bees." If I'm looking or talking to someone I don't know and that equipment's scorched, I'm going to pass right on down to the hand tools and the lawnmowers and whatever else they've got at the yard sale and leave the bee equipment there. Just because I don't know why it's scorched. Are they out of business? Were they trying to get back in? Scorching is a good thing if you know the scorcher. Does that make sense?

Kim: Yes, that makes sense. I wouldn't approach somebody I didn't know for that very reason. I wouldn't want to sell something to somebody or give something to somebody and have them have to trash their whole operation because of my problem. If I have a report from people in Columbus and I got scorched equipment and I know the person, I'm pretty comfortable that might work maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. [laughs]

Jim: Tell me how did you get to this point? Are you considering all this selling and scorching because you've got the extra equipment that you're downsizing? Is that why American Foulbrood's on your mind? I would probably, honestly, find a place outside the city limits and have a bonfire one day. I have to be careful with that, especially if you burn in a field because you leave so many nails there. It's kind of a dirty secret, isn't it, Kim? What do you do with old equipment when you're downsizing or retiring it or whatever? Even if you make a flower box out of it, that's just going to be a flower box for three or four years before it's going to be one terrible looking flower box. I think that ultimately there's got to be a fire somewhere in your future.

Kim: I'm thinking maybe you're right here. Boy, I hate to think of that though. There's something else.

Jim: Before we get away, I want to tell some more truth. I am downsizing because of age and physical stamina and whatever, but I've also-- I've talked about it on these segments, I've written articles, but I've got a housing subdivision going right in behind me that just want to put houses, high density housing within 25 or 30 yards of my hives. It just seems to be a good time to ratchet it down some. All back to your first question, what are your plans?

I didn't plan for that to happen. I planned to be on my acre and have a soybean field from a neighbor for the rest of my years here. But no, no, that's not going to happen. We're going to have high rise houses and apartment complex and condominiums and streets and walking paths and complaints about the bees pooping on their cars. I have seen the writing on the wall. I need to downsize and cut back anyway. I wanted to add all that. I didn't want everybody out there who's our age to think, "Oh, my stars, I'm not going to do that. I still want full colonies and big honey crops," and that's fine. There's other reasons that I'm feeling hemmed in.

Kim: Yes, I don't have that yet. The county I'm living in is expanding. I see that as a possible future. I'm not looking at that as a reason to downsize. I'm just looking at that. I'm downsizing because it's-- I don't want to go out there and spend an hour. I want to go out there and spend 15 minutes and then spend 10 or 15 minutes watching and enjoying and saying, "Yes, I'm still a beekeeper and things are working and then head in for my plants." That's what hit me yesterday. It was right between the eyes. "Okay, I want to downsize. What do I do? Not only was the stuff I got bees in now, but the stuff that I had bees in is now empty sitting in the garage." I like hearing what you're saying. It ain't going to be easy, but I think I got some ideas that might give me some room to move around here.

Jim: At some point, everybody's going to have to deal with it. I didn't think I'd ever get to this point, but due to my increasing age and stamina, I still have a remarkable amount of bee interest. New neighbors coming in, it's just the time to reevaluate everything. I'm probably going to be doing some segments in the future, Kim, on fencing around your bee yards. Just get ready for that.

Kim: The guy in there is done talking. You want to go in there and see what's next?

Jim: When is the break? Let's find the break, so we can go talk to other people about bees.

Kim: Okay, all right.

Jim: All right. Kim, I'll talk to you later, buddy. I will go back in here. Thank you.

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