Plain Talk: Bee Personalities (187)

Episode 187 – Plain Talk: Bee Personalities

Jim Tew: Listeners, thank you so much for listening. This is my time of the year, as hot as blazes. I'm going to go back to the bee yard and not do a thing in the world. I'm going to sit there and watch my bees because it seems to me that when I'm hot like this and the bees are hot, the stings hurt a lot more. Got to get through the barn here, come out the back, get down by my tractor. Good grief, it must be a hundred degrees in here.

Going out the back, got an apple tree, going to sit in the shade, talk to you about my bees, see what you're doing and what I'm doing. I'm Jim Tew and I come to you about once a week, usually on Thursdays, and I talk about anything and everything to do with casual beekeeping. I do it in a plain talk way because I'm just not a very tricky beekeeper.

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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: Jim back after the intro. It's late June. We're having one of those heat domes and it's the kind of thing where there's just not a chapter in a book, there's not a direct discussion. I wish you could hear the kids over on my neighbor's neighboring acre playing in their pool. It hasn't rained in a week, it's not supposed to rain today. They're in that pool. When I heard they were getting a pool put in, listeners, I just cringed because I can put out water here and water there and I've got a couple of bird waters.

Actually, the birds have been in my bird water, not the bees. I don't know where the bees are getting water, but you better know they're having to get water. It's only a matter of time before my bees and every other species of bee finds that pool over there. It's just a large, nice, inflatable pool, the kind of thing that grandparents buy for their grandkids. I was so relieved when I saw that my neighbor, the dad, had put a cover on that pool when he opened it up, got it going. They got to get water somewhere.

As I look at this, I've told you time and time again that I grew up keeping bees in extreme South Alabama, North Florida. A day like today would be typical, and the bees and I would have been much more acclimated, but I haven't lived in that area in decades and decades, and I've lost my acclimation. When I'm out today and it's 92, that is hot. I suspect that it's just as hot for my bees. I don't have them set up the way I would have all those years ago in a hot climate when I would stagger the supers, the deeps, so that they basically had vents.

They had open windows between most of the equipment sections. Just enough, just a bee space. You don't have to push it back two inches, just push it back three-eighths, no more than half an inch. That means you've got an entrance in the front, and don't forget, you've got an entrance also in the back. Later in the season, you shouldn't also forget that the bees have spent the whole summer using those upper entrances, and then when you're ready to close them up, take them off, take supers off, get ready for winter, there will be some momentary confusion while the bees struggle with that.

I have no interest in opening these bees. There's only a marginal flow on, if a flow at all. I can already say that as far as I'm concerned, the season for 2024 is winding down. In a strange, discouraging way, yesterday was the summer solstice, so today the day's a little bit shorter than it was yesterday. You know where we're headed. From this point on, I'm supposed to start thinking about winter, even though I'm telling you how hot it is, and I'm sitting here in a short-sleeved shirt with my beehive, my bee suit in my lap. I was hoping I wouldn't have to put it on, but here's a bee who's decided that I'm a villain. Pardon me while I bump and scrape my microphone, trying to protect myself. Just enough to keep talking.

Of course, see, the bees' personality changes. These were swarms last spring, and three pounds, four pounds of bees, they were decent swarms. I got them for free, they moved in on their own. I've talked to you about it, and I've written about it every chance I got. They were docile, they were focusing on getting the food sources that they needed while the food sources were available, and they weren't focused on stinging me and robbing. Now, just like I do, they realize that times are lean out there now.

It's hot, they need water, they're not finding a lot of nectar, they're still finding some pollen, but it's nothing like it was eight weeks ago. What I have to get accustomed to is that my bees' personality changes. I've already told you, I've had some really angry colonies that have chased me around and chased my grandson around. I've told you, I think, in other episodes. You just know, beekeepers. If you don't know, here it is, beehives don't have standard personalities. They don't have the same personality year-round.

Your best colony, your general colony, will not stay that way. It will undergo a Jekyll and Hyde change, remarkably soon, and then you've got to deal with that. They're going to be all stingy. I can see bees right now, every step of the way, fanning on the landing board. Peculiarly, this time last year, I would have had bees bearding out front. When it gets this hot, especially for you people in hot climates who are listening in a really hot climate, and you see those bees matted out front, that's just the classic old technique that my grandparents did of getting out of the hot house and going to sit on the front porch and hope that there was a bit of a breeze blowing and drink a short Coke and everything was good, except for the short Coke.

That's pretty much what these bees are doing when they beard out front like that. In some cases, that means you don't have enough space on the colonies. In other instances, it just means that it's hot, and inside the brood nest, their temperature are getting too high for the incubation temperatures, and the command goes for everybody to get out who's not needed inside the hive, and then to sit on the front porch and pull that wind current through there.

I would like to believe that in my artificial domicile that's designed for me more than it's designed for the bees, that when they're pulling that waft of air through the colony, that that's why my slipbacks, my upper entrances, are helpful because there's more spaces, there's more windows open. Can I word it like that? There's just more windows open when I have those slipbacks. At the same time, other bees are flying off and they're bringing back water that they're picking up from wherever they can get, and they're looking for dependable water supplies that's there all the time, but they'll take any water.

I suspect if I went back down to the shop and watered my tiny, tiny bee flower garden, which is remarkably active, even a small bee garden is active with pollinators, and I'll bet you if I watered it, I could find some bees on the cement pavers there that are picking up water because they're opportunists, they'll take it wherever they can get it. If you think about life like the bees, first of all, they're in a nest box that's not of their design. Their population is much larger than they would have in the wild because we did that. They don't have the entrances possibly. See, there's no standard entrance on a wild nest. Some are going to have great entrances for cooling. Others are going to be worse than what they've got here. They've got to do something to keep that brood nest cool. That's the primary thing. By keeping the brood nest cool, they also maintain temperatures that stop that comb that holds that heavy honey from softening and melting down, and then releasing that honey inside the nest.

What a mess that would be. Take a few minutes and envision what it would be like if your colonies got so hot that the honey supers above softened up enough to release the honey and let it ooze through. Think about that while we hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: Water collectors, I've written about them, I've thought about them, I've guessed, I've been right, I've been wrong. They're unexciting from a beekeeper's standpoint. The main thing we want from our bees is out there finding nectar and bringing back, and colony scale showing that they're gaining weight and they're just growing night and day. Without those water foragers right now, every one of these few beehives that I'm looking at would overheat.

Here's the irony, they're only bringing back just what, about a third of a drop? You would think that there would be clouds of bees. I suppose if the temperature is hot enough, there would be clouds of bees but right now it just looks like a day in the apiary. Bees are coming, bees are going, a few bees bringing back pollen. Everybody is busy except for the one bee that wants to buzz around me and my nose. There's always one. They don't bring back much water, so I've never really understood.

Kim and other authorities used to say that bees need anywhere from a pint to a quart of water a day, sometimes even a gallon in hot climates. I don't know where they're getting that water. They have to find something like ponds or streams. It can't just all be from the neighbor's pools and birdbaths and spilled water on patios. I don't know where they're getting it, but they know where it is. I've speculated that bees know their community much, much better than we do.

They're going someplace over to a near creek that's maybe a half mile from here. They're going to a pond over in a subdivision. If my neighbors leave the top off that pool, they're going to lock in on that. They know the environment. I've speculated in the past, if they know where those multiple water sources are, then they know a lot more about that environment. They know where there's nectar and pollen sources, and I think interestingly, they probably know where their neighboring beehives are. They don't drop in for friendly visits, but I've talked about robbing until we all got sick of it.

I won't go down that path again, but I think they also know where their neighboring beehives are. They can go check those hives, probably starting right about now, and they will analyze each other's individual colony strength to see who can defend their stores and see which ones cannot defend their stores and then they'll equalize. Here I am talking about robbing. I think bees know their community. I think they know their resources. They know where to get water. Think about this. I certainly do. How long does it take a bee colony to learn its community resources?

When I install a package, when I buy a split and I bring it here from 20 miles away, they're completely blind. It would be like dropping me in the middle of a city I've never been to and telling me to find a place to live and get something to eat. They must be in a complete quandary for a while, and I don't know what happens during that time. They must have some emergency mode where they equate their brood production, their food needs with what they can get, what they've got coming in. They must skew their population as much as they possibly can to foraging.

The bees that just came in, a really small swarm. I would love to have talked about it again. Got that small swarm. I just love working it, listeners, because it's just so small and so agreeable. It's like playing with a kitten compared to playing with a bobcat. I'm watching it right here and it's busily coming and I'm going to have to do something with it to protect it because these bigger colonies are going to bully it when times get real bad and they will rob it out.

They're all learning the resources of their community and I don't fully understand how long it takes for them to learn where all their resources are. I think during that period a beekeeper is a very good thing. I think the bee colony outgrows the need for a beekeeper. I speculate that at the outset, a beekeeper is a very good thing because the beekeeper can add surplus carbohydrate sources and can put on a pollen patty, can reduce entrances and do the kind of things that the bees can't do on their own.

If I left you with one central theme in this discussion that I've had up to this point is that my bees' personality changes in these hot climates from the directed, focused, go get the food right here, right now to defend what we've got and go get water because nothing else is in bloom, it's hot and the brood nest is overheating. Why does that matter all that much? In the great scheme of things, in the wild, maybe it doesn't matter all that much right now.

Any bees that die right now were in many cases just extra bees. There's nothing blooming and yet the colony is going to maintain 55,000, 60,000, maybe 70,000 bees. It's like keeping everybody employed when the income generation is just not there. All those years ago when we used to have organophosphate insecticides that would kill our bees starting right about now when sprays were being put on and pollination season was over and people weren't as careful as they should have been and bees were much more abundant, there were those who quietly behind the scenes would say, "No great loss because those bees that were killed off in the summer were only an expense in the colony anyway because they were having to eat stored food, there was nothing else for them to bring in."

It was only as the fall season approached with the fall flowers that we could once again say, "We need fresh bees, we need bees with a different hormonal content and a different physiological makeup to serve as winter bees." The summer bees, it was okay if there was a dip. I don't like dips, listeners. I would always panic when I would sense that my bee population was declining and I would go straight to dire reasons that there were diseases, there was a pesticide kill, there was a swarm, but never did I think good thoughts about those population dips that I would sometimes experience in the summer.

Then the bees will probably not go back to that, "Oops, we're so happy to see you here today." They probably won't go back to that place this year. Even in the fall when aster and goldenrods and bloom, they're still robby, stingy, defensive because this is it. They seem, I'm guessing and I have no authority to guess, but I'm guessing they have some instinctual response that this is it. There is no other aspects of this season. There is no winter flow. After those fall flowers are gone, if you don't have it, you're not going to get it.

I've always postulated that one of the reasons that the fall bees are not as friendly, agreeable, cooperative as the spring bees is that they still have a different mindset. I've talked to you now almost the entire length of my time and I could ask you now at this point, do my bees and your bees have a personality? Can we begin to understand that personality the same way we- -understand the personality of people and different moods that they may be in? When something has upset them, when something has made them happy, is it just 100% anthropomorphic to apply that, to think that about bees? That bees sting when they're angry? Bees hum when they're happy on flowers? We have these analogies all the time.

I've been essentially talking to you today about what I think to be the personality change that bees undergo from the spring season to the hot summer season, and then yet even another more mild personality change in the fall after they experience robbing and get prepared for the big dearth, the winter season. I really enjoy talking with you. I enjoy doing this. I enjoy thinking about bees. I keep saying this, but it's important that you know where I am as a guy talking to you.

I'm a longtime beekeeper who's long in the tooth. As a young guy, I would want to check my queens and see what honey stores they had and who was strong, and there's no diseases, mites. As an old guy, I want to sit in this chair and talk to you, enjoy the smells, enjoy the sounds, and just appreciate bees for what they are. Individual species that seems to have their own personality about them that demands respect and, in many cases, admiration. I deeply appreciate you listening. Write me if you need to. If I don't respond to you, please try me again. Whatever you do, please don't get angry. I'm just a one-man band. I'll be in touch next week, same time, right here. Thanks for listening. Jim telling you bye.

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