Plain Talk: Exploring Bee Rooms (225)

Episode 225 – Plain Talk: Exploring Bee Rooms

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Jim Tew: Hey, Honey Bee Obscura Podcast listeners, it's Jim Tew here, trying to come up with a notion or an idea for how to tell you that I really wanted to be outside with the bees here in Northeast Ohio, but of course, we've had that weather snap where it goes back every night down around 30, back up to about 45 during the day. Here I go giving you a weather forecast because so much of beekeeping is directly related to the weather.

I just couldn't get back out. I was going to really be in the thick of it. This was going to be my year to turn things around. I'm trapped in the locker room. I can't get out to the playing field. Last night, I was thinking about an old notion here in Northeast Ohio that is simply not done anymore. Some of the old houses, oh, mid-1800s, early 1900s, had bee rooms, B-E-E R-O-O-M-S, bee rooms. Normally up in the attic. I had a technician who really got into this. I don't know how he found these people, but we would go out and look at their bee rooms, and these old houses they lived in.

We don't do that anymore. I can't think of a single modern example to refer to. I want to talk about why we did those things and just take a guess at why we don't do it anymore. Listeners, to be sure where you are and who I am, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you about once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I do something to talk about plain talk beekeeping that helps us, in theory, all be better beekeepers.

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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: Well, I'd all be living in a cave if I didn't tell you I'm not trying to use that AI technology that's available for helping you on anything. I asked the system to give me some idea of what's involved in bee rooms and houses, how they were constructed, and what was interesting about them. The AI technology wrote me back this as an intro. Honeybee rooms, or bee-friendly spaces within residential homes, are an emerging concept for beekeeping enthusiasts who want to keep bees close while ensuring safety and functionality.

Excuse me, while I just belly laugh. This is an emerging concept? Oh my stars. All those years ago, we lived with our bees. Not every person, but some people chose to live with their bees. A specific example that comes to mind was, as I've mentioned in the intro, I had a technician in my bee lab years ago who really got into it. If I ever see him again, I will ask him how he found these homes, these houses. I think that he just rode around, and as he was going to our bee yards all across the area here, he would look for houses that had marks, usually up high on the gables where the bees were coming and going, and then he would go ask if that was a natural nest or if that was an intentional site.

On one instance, in one of the specific houses we went to, it was really awkward for me. We got there around nine o'clock in the morning, and the people were still having breakfast and orange juice containers were out and broken eggshells were everywhere. I walked by and I said good morning to these people as we ask, how do we get to your bee room in your attic?

Off we did go up several floors all the way up to the hot attic. There was a small room. I would say it was half the size of a typical closet. It had a hole bored in the wall and you open the door, and in times past, there would have been free-hanging combs there. There were indications of that comb all over the wall. There were indications of wax moths. There were no frames, no effort to have frames. It was just a free-hanging feral swarm in the small closet in the attic of this house.

I tried to imagine what it was like to be a kid and to be told on Saturday morning that the dad wanted some fresh honey for their buckwheat pancakes. Go up top to the attic and break a piece of honeycomb off and bring it down to him. Don't you just know what an attitude those bees had. What I marvel at, one of the things about this, is that the change in us. At that time, this was not considered to be an extraordinary event. People lived with cockroaches. They lived with mice. They loved with house centipedes. You shared your living space with these other animals. It was not considered to be an extraordinary thing to go up top on Saturday morning and bring down a fresh piece of honeycomb.

It is so easy to get off the subject that the dad or the family or whomever would have eaten the wax and the brood and the honey, and they may have swallowed the wax or they may have discharged it from their mouth, I don't know. It was their call, but it was a treat. It was a sweet food, probably for breakfast, maybe for baking, who knows what. As I was trying to doze off last night, I was thinking, what a mess that must have been up there.

The attic of that un-air-conditioned house in the late 1800s, early 1900s, had to literally be hot as blazes. It had to really be a particular difficult place to live. One thing going on is that I think that people had access to plenty of bees. This is just me guessing, readers. How many of you have even heard of bee rooms, bee cabinets, and houses? In other instances, listeners, when I went to visit those areas, they weren't really closets so much as they were cabinets on an outside wall. You open the cabinet doors, and there was this free-hanging comb. I never saw a single bee room that actually had combs on frames or racks. The ones that we went to were just feral swarms. They weren't in a tree. I would say they weren't in the wall of your house, but they were. People put them there on purpose.

Sometimes they were on a lower floor, but if they were on a lower floor, they were usually higher than head height so that when somebody was working or walking outside, the bees would already be higher than your head. I always thought that this was interesting. This is more of a discussion of people than it is of bees because the bees are exactly the same today, almost exactly the same today, as they were at the turn of the century. It's people who were different, who were willing to actually live with their insects. Let's take a break, hear from our sponsor, and then I'm not done with this.

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Jim: When I was doing the search, trying to find information about bee rooms, I kept slipping over into the rut of a bee room being an observation hive room. A second rut that I slipped into was a bee room being an extracting room. Now, both of those entities are real, but this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a bee closet or a bee cabinet that was normally put in the attic up in the attic, up and away from all the human traffic, but not always. Sometimes it was on lower floors, but rarely on the first floor, and rarely right in the living area.

Now, as I tell you that, I think of a long past story of a student I had from Swaziland who said that she grew up with a cement beehive in her house, and normally, the cement top was used for a table. On the days and the times that her father wanted honey, now these were Africanized, not Africanized, they were African bee stock, aggressive, feisty, stingy. On the days that they wanted honey, all the family would get out of the house, and he would open the cement top that heretofore had been a tabletop, and would take out the honey that he wanted, close it all back up, leave the doors and windows open, and then all the bees fly out, go back to their normal entrance, and life would go on.

Those kinds of procedures, can any of you think of an example, not talking about observation hives, not talking about extracting rooms, but can any of you think where someone actually has bees in their house intentionally? Doesn't it make sense? Bees want to live in the wall of the house anyway, so these people who have the personality bent for it would just encourage it, would actually install the bees there. There was no effort to control queens or swarming or anything. The bees could live or die on their own. The only thing the homeowner offered was a protected cavity.

Now my AI-generated work got all fa-fa and foo-foo about ventilation and humidity control and all that, and I suppose if someone were working in that area now, those would be considerations. At the turn of the century, you get a cavity, and everything else is your problem. Now that bees are more dear to us, if someone did do it, they would probably have double entryway doors to keep the bees from coming out of this room, this closet, this whatever, getting into the living area. They would probably have ventilation fans running to keep the hive cool to some extent. None of that mattered, and I think, listeners, that it didn't matter because bees were so plentiful. If the bees in the house died out, if they couldn't make it work, then you would just go take the next swarm that you picked up, dump it back in the cabinet, and let that swarm have a shot at it.

I think in many cases, this is a beekeeper difference more than a bee difference. They were just inviting the bees to come live in a cavity inside the house. The problem with bringing bees in the house is that they're so picky about their living conditions. If you get them too warm in the winter, then they're flighty. To get them too cold in the winter, then they might as well have been outside. Why did you bother bringing them in? Humidity, ventilation, all of those things are issues. There was never, to my knowledge, I say again, to my knowledge, listeners, I couldn't find any good clear references to bee rooms. There was never any standardization of these rooms.

Sometimes it was just boards nailed over ceiling rafters. A cavity was formed. A box was made. They were allowed an outdoor entrance, and it said to the east, as though that really matters to this bee colony in the wall of a house, but sure, go ahead, have it face the east, away from human traffic in the house and away from human traffic outside of the house. It's a different lifestyle. It was a different way of thinking. It was a different tolerance for actually living with animals other than those animals that you chose to bring in. It was a different way of life, I guess.

Swarming would have been an issue. Overheating would have been an issue. Bees clustering outside would have been an issue. Honey not being produced at off times of the year. I would think when that person sent a kid, hypothetically, up the stairs to get a piece of honey, that they probably had a pretty good working knowledge of whether or not honey would be there and whether or not there was going to be any honey to break off.

When we think about the basic nature of what these early people were doing, they weren't beekeepers in the truest sense of the word. I don't know what you would call them, homeowners that allowed bees to live in their house? It's really hard to keep them slipping over into the rut of observation hives because so commonly that is where we're going. Now we all think about bees in the house and stepping on a bee and having bees flying around maybe the candle or the lamp that you've got burning. Those are the issues that come to mind.

One of the issues that I've never read about is what was that house like? What was that room like in the fall of the year when goldenrod and aster were coming in, and that spectacular, heavy, ponderous odor of those honey crops being made pervaded the house? I know that because I had an observation hive on my side porch to my shop here. In the fall of the year, you just about couldn't stay in my shop because of the odor of that fall honey crop coming in from goldenrod and fall aster being so prominent. I was asked to design an observation hive inside at the Nashville Zoo.

Now I've given up to getting off the subject because this was a beehive inside. The assignment that I was given was that the public could not be exposed to any bees whatsoever. I built an observation hive that had nine frames inside a central container. When it came time to change or manipulate or work the bees, I closed classically at the double doors that I had on the beehive. I captured the bees inside this box, and then I removed the entire nine-frame box. I took it more than three miles away. We did the bee work that we have to do or I refitted the second nine-frame box that I built, and we took that back to the Nashville, Tennessee Zoo, and slipped it right back in like a container. Then I opened those double doors and let the bees have access to the outside. That worked reasonably well.

I only bring that up because so often beekeepers do choose to live with their bees when they are in observation type hives or observation units. That is an example of modern-day living with your bees when we live with an observation hive. All of these things are for enjoyment, for practicality. I knew a beekeeper once over on the western shore of Maryland who kept bees in a garage. It was really interesting because he didn't use outer covers. When you keep bees in a garage with an outdoor entrance through the wall, it was really sneaky.

The neighbors weren't alerted. You worked bees inside, you could smell the smoke, but you couldn't really tell what's going on in that addition on the side of the garage. Maybe you could see the bees flying in and out, but it really controlled what was going on there. One of the things that always comes up when I'm reading about this is what do you do about all the mice that come to those rooms to eat those dead and dying bees that are there? Add that to the list.

What I wanted to talk about for a while was the type of person who would actually agree to bringing what would be considered in modern-day commonality, a pest. Instead of keeping bees out of the wall of your house, out of the eaves of your house, some people actually brought them in and put them there on purpose, and then used it as a honey crop producer. I think that's interesting.

Until we can talk next week, I'm Jim telling you, hey, consider putting bees in your attic, but don't tell anybody I told you to do it. Thank you. Bye. I'll talk to you next week.

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