Plain Talk: Changes in Beekeeping (192)

Episode 192 – Plain Talk: Changes in Beekeeping

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Jim Tew: Hey, beekeepers, I learned a long time ago that it's always much better to be painfully truthful, speak up front, speak directly than it is to try to make something to be more or different than what it actually is. A week or two ago, I talked to Anne Frey from Betterbee. We went through a series of quick discussions about particular points that was in her life at the time. I enjoyed that whole concept, so I want to try more of that on my own with some things that I've changed in beekeeping. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week from Honey Bee Obscura where, each and every week, I and my occasional visitors discuss some aspect of practical, plain-talk beekeeping.

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: I confess straight away that I got this idea because of the event that we went through just a few weeks ago with Anne. I had an interest. I just stumble into these things. I rarely have any particular guiding direction. I just stumble through beekeeping. People have complimentarily said, "How do you come up with all these topics for segments and for articles?" I don't know. You just fall into them. You don't realize they're a topic until someone asks a question that either you can or you can't answer.

I was looking through old catalogs and I came across a remarkable old hive tool, which made me think, "Well, this isn't the typical window-opening device that we use today. This thing was more of a multi-tool in 1910 or so." I became interested in how this whole hive-tool thing worked when it started. It's not all that old as a tool. It's really more of a recent thing. I've actually got a blacksmith making me one of the ancient tools that was not used to remove frames, but it was used to cut combs from the walls of box hives and from log gums.

I was struck by how much this has changed all the way from that unique blacksmith-made tool all the way up to this host of tools that are available today in the bee magazines. I was going to talk about hive tools. Well, that seems like a lot to spend 20 minutes talking about hive tools, even though it would take 20 minutes to discuss each and every one of them and how to use them and how to open contrary hives that are really glued together. It seemed like a lot. I've sat there thinking how much they've changed, how much hive tools has evolved.

In 1971, '72, when I started beekeeping, you either got a small hive tool or you got a large hive tool, and that was it. Look at the variety of tools that are available today. That's it. That's how I had the thought that I'm talking to you about today. That's how much things have evolved. Things have changed. Things are different. Things are better. Things are worse. A quick aside before I get off the subject.

Listeners, I think this is a good sign. I think it indicates that our small industry is evolving, changing, growing, adapting, diversifying, failing, succeeding, but it's alive, at least the beekeeper component. The bees have always been bees. They stay steady-state. They stay on target. They say, "Fine. It's us that change, evolve, require, need, move pest around. We're the ones who've had all the diversity to it." The changes in beekeeping. All those years ago, when we talked about insecticide kills, it was not the invisible what's causing this.

Where are all the bees? Is this a pesticide or not? Oh, wow. It was not a problem. Every bee in the colony would essentially be piled up at the hive front dead. I haven't seen that kind of thing in decades and decades with the old organophosphate insecticides and how they could kill everything. They went through all kinds of pesticides that the bees could actually take back to the beehive and then they would feed the brood this toxin. It was just horrific to live through all this.

The change that I'm looking at here, it was drop-dead easy to tell that your bees have been hit by a pesticide kill because they were piled up in front of the hive in great numbers dead. You had to wonder if you could reuse that comb. Just how contaminated was it? Change here, our pesticide use now is much more insidious, much quieter, much more difficult to document. I don't always know if it's actually insecticide. Sometimes it seemed like it could be herbicides. That's a change from the early years of my beekeeping experience.

The next thing, when I started in beekeeping, trapping pollen was a huge deal. It was just all the rage. It was an underutilized product. It had great potential. Once you acquired this pollen, you could put it on your Caesar salad, or you could use it as a protein substitute. The sky was the limit. There were people who gave talks and had companies and ran the gauntlet of publicizing and buying and extolling the virtues of pollen as an animal and as a human food.

It was common knowledge that horse breeders who raised high-dollar horses liked to feed bee pollen. Apparently, I never knew one who did, but it was rumored because it was such a nutritious food and the horses performed better. The change is, yes, you can look at the web. You can get pollen traps anywhere. That bright light of hype, even overhype of promise, that did not seem to materialize.

I'd like to suggest that we hold on. Because as we look more and more toward insects, at least as animal food and possibly even as human food, there's a possibility, wouldn't you think, that this consuming pollen could come back as maybe, yes, a human food or a food additive. I don't know. I want to tell you a story, but I want you to wait for it. Let's hear from our sponsor for just a few minutes.

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Jim: I'll tell this. I think that I told this story when Kim and I were doing these segments several years ago, but it really had an impact on me. Has a happy ending, I think, but I don't want to offend those of you who do, in fact, eat pollen on a daily basis. It is nutritious in many cases. I had international visitors. It was quite an entourage of important people who could make big monetary decisions back in their country about supporting this program or not in beekeeping.

I was showing them around. I had arranged to have particularly docile hives so that no one would be stung. A lot of work, a lot of work. I opened the drawer on a pollen trap and there was an absolutely beautiful drawer of mixed-colored pollen. They had never seen it before. I was even impressed. Through the translators, they asked, "What can you do with this?" I boldly said, "Well, you can eat it and then you can also feed it back to the bees."

You can use it for animal feed. We don't really know all the potential uses for it. Great protein source if you have the enzymatic system to digest it. To make my point, I just jammed my hive tool in it and picked up what must have been about three-fourths of a tablespoon. I popped that stuff right in my mouth to make my point. Having never really eaten that much pollen in my life, whoa, I was really surprised at how weedy it tasted, how earthy, how uncooked.

This is where I'm getting in trouble. I'm going to offend someone who sees pollen in a light that I didn't see that day. You swallow this gummy stuff and everything seems all right. We want it to be gritty, but not quite, and off we did go. This is a queen production unit. This is where we [coughs] begin to [coughs] cough a little bit. This is a queen production unit where we rate, "Oh, I can't get my breath. [coughs] I don't feel right." I went on about.

This was all within three minutes of me eating my pollen meal when I realized I'm having a reaction. I'm having a respiratory reaction to that pollen that I just ate. Then I did that thing everybody says you're not supposed to do. I found a reason. I gave this group of people off to my students to finish the quick tour and off I did go back to my office. For what reason? To sit there and quietly die? Well, the issue passed, but my point would be, I suppose, I overdosed myself on pollen. I had no reason, no idea I was going to go in and spend this much time on this.

Pollen is a remarkable food source. I do believe that it's been underutilized. It seems to me like there would be use for pollen. There's all kinds of issues with collecting pollen from our environment now. Was it exposed to pesticides? Was it exposed to cosmic dust? All these issues. How clean is it? Can it be sterilized? I don't know, I don't know, and I don't know. You can still get pollen traps. You can still trap pollen.

Most of the time, we're just doing it to feed back to bees. I would probably just suggest you go buy a pollen substitute rather than doing all of that. If you want to try an aspect of beekeeping still available to you but not quite with the bright light that it once had, try pollen collecting. How about slatted racks? When I first started in beekeeping, that was the rage. Our engineer for this program who makes me look better than I am each week, Jeff, apparently uses slatted racks a lot.

I think they're probably a good piece of useless equipment if that makes sense. When I've used them before, I like them. In their heyday, I see it as their heyday. Actually, these things have been devised by C.C. Miller probably 80, 90 years ago. Even had something called a Miller bottom board that had this slatted rack built into it, but then some clever person came up with a slatted rack that you could put onto a standard bottom board.

What is a slatted rack? Well, quickly, and maybe a discussion for some other time, it looks like an old-fashioned washboard. All it does is break up the airflow apparently going into the colony. Cold air or maybe hot air, doesn't whistle up through the colony, making it difficult for them to control the humidity and the temperature with that wide bee space between the frames. Now, I want to get this off my chest.

After Varroa came along, the designers of this turned the slats so that they now run directly under the frame bottom boards. Up until that time, they ran across the frame bottom boards, bottom pieces, bottom slats. The idea was, well, they didn't want the Varroa mites to fall off the bees and then drop down and catch on those cross pieces on the slatted racks. They turned the slatted racks so that the mites would go ahead and fall out.

Well, my argument is that defeated the whole purpose for redirecting the ventilation inside the nest. I've always threatened to go back and rebuild a proper slatted rack, but they're available in the catalogs. If you decide that you want to try that, have a look in the literature and see if it fits your need, your interest, and everything there. Slatted racks. If I had a lot of bees and had a lot of energy and had a lot of time and had even more money, I would probably use them. Who knows if they're really worth the effort or not?

Scale hives. 1971, 1972, '75, if you wanted a hive on a scale, you did whatever it took to get one of those heavy-duty, old-fashioned, no-nonsense, used to be at the feed mill that could handle a 200-pound bag of animal feed. Somehow you had to find one of those. Then you'd put that thing out in the weather where it was never designed to be and you'd put a beehive on it. The biggest problem with that was to get the weights, the counterweights that it took to balance out the weight lever.

They were always lost. They were always gone. When we were using these at the University of Maryland, I had to always take the weights inside so someone who, other beekeepers, other people who had these antique scales wouldn't take our counterweights so we could use those to weigh our bee colonies. I never knew how accurate these things were because that mechanism set out in the weather exposed, but that was it. That was how you used scale hives. Look at what you've got available to you now.

I would suggest you go to Google and check out all the possibilities that are available for now electronically weighing your beehive and then sending that information to you while you sit in front of your television, not out by the scale hive, trying to balance it out with exactly the right counterweight system. Scale hives are still around, but oh my stars, how much change there has been and the scale hives then and the convenience and the accuracy of the scale hives now.

How many of you have a solar wax melter in your bee yard? Some of you do. I'll bet you some of you. Most of you don't probably. For me and for beekeepers like me, when we first started 20, 30, 40 years ago, it was just considered to be an appliance in every bee yard. Everybody had to get one. I built my own. I built a deluxe thing with two panes of glass and you were supposed to paint the inside black. People wanted to paint it white, but you wanted to paint the inside black to absorb the heat and hold the heat and then balance it off the glass.

It would get hot as blazes inside that box if you had it out in the bright sun under this solar wax melting procedure. I have no idea what happened to mine. I just have no idea where that thing went. It was a heavy deal. Oh, they had a really ugly side to them. They would just totally, nearly destroy the wax. It would bleach it out. There was no yellow, no dark, no anything. If you had an old comb or if you had some wax that you chipped off, burr combs, brace combs, if you scrape the bottom boards, go throw it in the wax melter.

The wax melter would, in theory, melt it down. The wax would flow out free heat, drip into the drip pan down below. I didn't search the web, but I know they're still available. If they're not available, the plans for them are. A short story. I took some storm windows, antique things over to the restore. I said, "But you have any use for these things?" He said, "All my stars, yes." People take those old storm windows and they improvise small greenhouses, small plant-starting boxes. Everybody wants those things.

Well, pregnant pause. I was suddenly sick. My thought was I want to put this thing right back on my truck. I want to keep these myself, but I'd already committed to it. He already had them unloaded. I was thinking when I was unloading them, "I could make a wax melter out of these things." You decide if you want to buy your own or if you want to build your own or if you want one at all. Just on a parting note. Some of those things are on a pivot. You could pivot them during the day to always keep it facing the sun. I haven't had a wax melter in my yard in years.

Real quickly. I've always thought that would be a way to improvise a simple, quick, cheap, and dirty wax melter, solar wax melter, just by using a deep brood box and a couple of sheets of glass and a bottom on it and make it work. I never have pursued it all that much. This has nothing to do with anything, but how about bee beards? One of my son-in-laws has got it in his mind. He's not a beekeeper. He never will be, but he's got it in his mind that he wants to wear a bee beard.

I don't know what's up with that. I've tried to tell him that, "Things can go wrong up your nose and your ears. Why do you want to do this?" He just got it on his mind. I don't think I'm going to do this, but the oddity is 30 years ago, bee beards were just a common event at county fairs and at agricultural shows, bee meetings. See, I'm not really in circulation. Let me put a disclaimer here on everything I've discussed. It may be that such things, such events are happening.

Some of the procedures I've discussed as though they've changed or not even available. I could be dead wrong. I'm just maybe not in the right place at the right time, but I don't see or hear of bee beards nearly as much as I used to. It's so often the case. Kim and I have discussed those things on how you put them on and some idea of why some people would want to put them on and some of the TV crews that came out to my lab to film people doing this. All of that to me seems to be gone.

Bee beards are still out there. Bee beards are still available, but I'm not going to be wearing one anytime soon. I hope I can talk my son-in-law out of it. I've enjoyed doing this. Just to let you know that I'm trying to constrain myself and not just kill you with this kind of thing. I've stopped when I was hardly a third of my way through the list. Probably two or three or five sessions from now with your permission, I'd love to go ahead and pick up and look at some of the other changes that we have experienced and our evolution in beekeeping. I always enjoy talking to you. I continue to enjoy my bees immensely and I appreciate the time you spend here as you listen to my ramblings. I'm Jim telling you bye.

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