Getting Your Bees Through Droughts (130)

Episode 130 – Getting Your Bees Through Droughts

Kim Flottum: Hello, folks. I'm back or at least kind of back. I've been gone a while. I've had some-- don't get old issues because they slow you down and you don't want to be here for a while.

I think I'm back and things are looking good. I've missed being here with all of you and with Jim and with Jeff on the other podcast. I'm sitting upright and I'm eating three meals a day and I'm getting outside. Speaking of which, getting outside, it has been dry here like you wouldn't believe.

Three weeks without rain. Jim, where you are down in Worcester, have you had that little moisture for your gardens and bees?

Jim Tew: Like so many other people across the country, 24 consecutive days. The humor is, Kim, that it rained incessantly through the spring season, the strawberry crops all muddled up because we had so much rain. Then just because we are as old as we are that it's going to dry up and it did. Then all that moisture dried up and went away and turned into dust.

Kim: It's seasons like this year that I'm glad I decided not to be a farmer.

Jim: Kim, it's good to have you back, buddy. I'm Jim Tew.

Kim: I'm Kim Flottum.

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Jim: We're coming to you from Honey Bee Obscura where about once a week we talk about something that's important to us about beekeeping. Today, we want to just sit here and reflect on what this drought has meant, coming right after a remarkable wet spell. If you're the bees out there trying to make a living, how does it go?

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: The big things of course, is there water out there for my bees, is there a pond, is there a creek, am I supplying water? I know we've talked about that before. This year, it's become critical. I've had water out by my colonies for this whole thing. I've got a big pan, and I've got rocks in it, and I've got bees.

You can't see the surface of the water anytime you walk out there because there's bees on the rocks and there's bees on the bees on the rocks and bees on the bees on the bees on the rocks trying to get at that water. I've got a pond. My neighbor has a pond about, I'm going to say 200 yards from my bees.

I took a look down there and there are a few bees down there. I don't think they're mine, I'm not sure. But they don't take care of the pond and there's so much algae on it that they have trouble getting water. They don't stay very long. My water's fresh. If you've got water shortages, I know we've talked about how, when, where, why, make sure you do it how, when, and where, and why so your bees have water.

Jim: Kim, while you were talking, this is completely off the subject, but I'm just wondering because you mentioned the pond and there's pools in my neighborhood. I'm wondering if my bees are there. Do you have trouble with the bees going to your chicken watering devices?

Kim: I used to way back when I was a rookie chicken person and wasn't thinking about chicken water and bee water. I went out there one day and sure enough, the chickens were-- I had maybe a dozen 15 chickens standing in a circle around the water or watching the bees drink their water. That gave me the message and said, "Oh, maybe I should be doing something different." What I did quick was I emptied that water and I put the water inside so the chickens could get to it but the bees wouldn't get in there then I gave the bees water in the apiary. That solved that problem. It could have been bad.

Jim: Well, it just drives home the point that the bees are really good at finding water. To you and the listeners, I can't tell you how they do that. They've sometimes have found-- this is off the subject, but they've just found minuscule amounts of water, a tablespoon leaking out of a water hose that I used yesterday. Yet two foragers, not just one, but two foragers found that. I'm not surprised they're bumming around your chicken watering devices, but how they find that, think about it. A chicken yard with all the ambience and aromas and bouquets around the chicken yard-

Kim: [laughs]

Jim: -they can still smell water or see water or whatever. What does this mean to the trees and the plants as all of a sudden they-- not all of a sudden, it took about 25 days, they go into a hard drought. How do the plants react to this?

Kim: I've been watching some of them in my yard. I've got a lot of flowering trees. Some of them just stopped blossoming. They didn't produce any more blossoms and the blossoms that they had were after about a week of this drought, no longer attractive to the bees. Bees were coming to them before then stopped and the trees were producing no more blossoms.

That's going to be interesting to go see tomorrow if they're starting up with blossoms again. I had several trees that were just spectacular bloom. The bees were just looking at them. There was that issue. The trees conserve moisture and nectar is moisture. Do I live or do I live to reproduce? That's what the message the tree was arguing with, I think.

Jim: When you were talking, I was sitting here wondering about a tree or a shrubs philosophy.

Kim: [laughs]

Jim: If they've got a two-week blooming season per year to produce flowers and attract pollinators, whatever that may be, and during that bloom period, it's either extremely dry or extremely wet or extremely whatever, does a plant say, "Oh, well, I'll just try again next year." Or does a plant try at all costs to produce a few seeds, or I don't know, because of the stress that they're under and the time constraint that they're under? Then it leads to your question, do they live to try another year or do they sacrifice everything and produce seed for this year?

I've seen dandelion flowering in December in the snow, and I'm thinking that plant has lost its mind. They're not going to be any pollinators, there's not going to be any seed coming from that. Why are they providing that energy at that point? I can't always explain what happens but we do know that when these droughts come along, the plants seem to shut down.

Kim: They do. Philosophy, good word. I don't think it's a choice. I think it's a physiological reaction to the environment. Over the eons that most of these plants have been around, you either do it right or you're dead and you don't reproduce. As long as we still got most of the plants that we had here for years, they must be making the right choices by choosing to reproduce with vigor and hope that I get seeds or to pull it back, tuck it in and say, "Next year."

Jim: Along the same line, and this will date this segment, right now Canada has those spectacular fires going on. Parts of this country, parts of the beekeepers here have had to deal not only with drought but with heavy overcast and smoke. Overall, when we're talking and sympathizing with plants, this has probably been a pretty tough year for some plants to find appropriate weather and time to produce a honey crop. Yet there for a while when it was wet, it was a good strong flow coming in. It got off to a good start and then it just ran out because of the drought that came along.

Kim: You got smokey honey. Have you ever dealt with smokey honey?

Jim: No, I've never been around a beehive that had that much smoke. You sound like you're doing some value-added procedure to make-

Kim: [laughs]

Jim: -a unique honey that goes with bacon or something.

Kim: I have a friend out West who puts his honey crop in 50-gallon wooden bourbon barrels and ages it in there. When he pulls it out after six, eight months, it's like nothing you've ever tasted. That gets away from the smoke air. Smoke, well, it affects the flavors of wine. People in California will tell you that. I've tasted smokey honey over the years and I wouldn't be surprised to some of the folks on the East Coast. Now, what do you do? Do you market that as a special crop and say, "Once in a lifetime smoked honey," [laughter] or-- Tell us how you do it.

Jim: Or once in a lifetime smoked honey and you go the other way. No, you brought this up. I'm going to let you work yourself out of it. Let's take a break here from our sponsor while we decide where we're going to go from here.

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Jim: Now I'm getting back to the smoked honey thing. I'm going to leave that with you. It doesn't sound all that good, but you said that somebody was aging it. I guess I better try it before I decide if I want it or not. I just don't know anything about it.

Kim: The other part of that equation is of course, how much honey do you harvest? How much is there? If you have a colony that normally produces about 40 pounds of honey that you can harvest, and right now you're sitting at about 15, three steps back and say, "Better luck next year."

Jim: It's just the beekeeper guess, isn't it? You have to stand there right now and decide how much to take for yourself, and how much to leave for the bees. At that moment, we'll be doing this in the next month or so, taking honey off. You're making decisions about what those bees will be dealing with in the dead of winter. You're just making a long-term difficult, sure, hope I win this one kind of guess.

Kim: I've been reading a book by Tom Seeley. It isn't out yet, but it's coming out, and it has to do with swarm and swarming behavior. One of the aspects he looks at is how much honey bees need. He pretty much points straight at-- from his part of the country now, this is the East Coast. He points at about 40 pounds of honey to get a colony through a winter in his part of the East Coast. I go out there now, and I look and I say, "Okay. I got 75 pounds of honey on this colony. Can I harvest 35 and leave that 40, making sure that there's at least 40?" If there's no honey flow between now and October, and there might not be, I've robbed them of winter.

Jim: Yes. That was exactly what I was trying to say a bit ago, that I'm being required to guess how much of this mildly honey crop this year so far. Now it rained today. We're complaining about the weather, and after 23 days here where I live in Ohio of straight good, clear weather and smokey some days, but the rain finally came last night about an inch and a half. Kim, just overnight my respite from grass cutting went away. It just took literally overnight for that grass to respond and green back up. The septic field's marking to green back up, and everything looks good again. If it doesn't rain for 21 more days, it'll all happen again. You know what? We've danced all around this and neither of us have used the word scales or scale hives.

Kim: Yes. Good point.

Jim: It's a shame, as many times as we've talked to Jeff, and Jeff talked to us, he keeps his bees on electronic scales. He's actually much more in tune than we are. Those beekeepers who go to the trouble of putting bees on scales and weighing can now have the modern ability to sit in there while you're watching television and see if your bees did anything that day. I need to be putting my Christmas list together. I think that might make the shortlist. You're old enough to go back when we used old platform scales that were at the feed store, and you had to put these heavy scales outside and go out and weigh them. Then all the scale contraptions that have come along, but a scale underneath a beehive is really a remarkably useful thing. If you do it over time, you develop a sense of what to predict as you look at past years and anticipate future years.

Kim: Got a quick question for you. Did you anticipate three weeks without rain this spring?

Jim: No, I didn't. Did I anticipate it? No, I didn't. Did I anticipate it? It's Ohio. It's Northeast Ohio, so yes, these things happen. I've seen that ground crack before this clay soil that we have. I've seen that ground crack before when it dries out. No, I didn't anticipate it.

Kim: Yes, that's the thing. It's your best guess is what it comes down to more often than not. Knowing what happened the last 10 years and what might happen the next three weeks, you guess and you hope. I guess that's what it comes down to.

Jim: We've talked about water in the past, and I've talked about my neighbors and your bird waterers and all that. I didn't go crazy this time, Kim. I tried to put some water out. You said that you had all that mat of bees, but it was hot and dry. I had other fires to fight, if you'll pardon the pun. I thought they'll find water somewhere. There's streams, there's ponds, the surround. When I did put water in the bird watering devices, I never found one bee. In the past, I've had hundreds, thousands. They clearly have to have time to get to know those watering locations.

When you go into a 21-day drought, if you were doing what I was doing, it wasn't keeping the waterers filled, then they've already got their other sources worked out. I hope they do. If they don't, they're going to be water deprived. You did the right thing, I think, keeping fresh water in yours. After I've written and talked and complained and harassed neighbors, I let mine run dry. Then when that 21-day, 22-day drought hit, my bees had made other plans.

Kim: Yes. Way too often, I'm pretty sure that bees are smarter than I am. [laughter]

Jim: That's true. They're out there right now doing the best they can. Are you still keeping water there, now that you've had an inch and a half of rain last night? Were you going to be out there today filling that watering device again?

Kim: It's full, and I keep my eye on it. I try never to let it go dry because once it goes dry they go, "Let's go find it someplace else." Then it's the kiddie pool next door or the hose faucet on some neighbor's yard or something. It's one of those things that's easy to do. It doesn't cost you any money, and it keeps all of your neighbors happy.

Jim: That's true. Then I'll be getting off the subject when I tell you that it'll keep them happy to a point, but that doesn't mean the bee is going to stop visiting their water sources, especially if they have those landscape ponds. I'm getting off the subject. This whole thing was with the drought and what it means to the honey crop, what it meant to the bees, how they worked their way through it. They seem to have been all right. I've got boxes full of bees back there. In fact, in some future segment, I may chat with you to see how you could do an old beekeeper split procedure on some of these big beehives that are back there that I've stacked up again before the drought and during the drought.

They were still finding a little bit somewhere. They still kept a piddling amount going on until the last few days of interruption.

Kim: I think if we give it a week, he says carefully, and let the dust settle, we'll know more in a week and certainly know more in a couple of three weeks. Today it's 70 degrees cloudy and cool. There's no demand for water in that beehive at all. There were no bees in the water when I went out there this morning. What's the next week, three weeks the rest of the season going to bring? I got a quarter. You want to call it heads or tails?

Jim: [laughs] Oh, no, I'm not going to call it because it would be wrong. The bees are always clever. You said a bit ago that they were more intelligent than we are, and they certainly are. They seem to blow through this thing, but I never heard bees crying.

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Jim: I didn't see any bees dying, and so they seem to have a plan. This is not anything new to them.

Kim: Keep a good thought. We'll see what happens, what comes next.

Jim: All right. More later sometime, friend. I'm glad you're back.

Kim: I am too. I missed this, and it feels good sitting up instead of not sitting up anymore. We'll see what happens.

Jim: Do whatever it takes to keep doing whatever needs to be done.

Kim: [laughs] Okay. Next time.

Jim: All right. Bye-bye.

[00:19:38] [END OF AUDIO]