Plain Talk: How Not To Remove Bees! (185)

Episode 185 – Plain Talk: How Not To Remove Bees!

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Jim Tew: Listeners, I have boasted multiple times, I have tried to make this a special year for me. This year I'm 75 years old and I've been keeping bees for 50 consecutive years. That's not a record breaker, but it's a lot for me in both categories. I got a lot of old memories and they become more and more valuable to me and more and more they're personal. They're my memories.

As we speak, as you keep your own bees, you're developing your memories and then one day you'll be telling younger beekeepers what it was like when you were a young beekeeper. I want to give you a couple of stories on what not to do when you're a new beekeeper with very minimal information and expertise. I'm Jim Tew and I come to you once a week at Honey Bee Obscura where I talk about anything and everything that comes to my mind.

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 honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. 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've got a small colony back here. It's just a tiny little swarm and it's so easy to work. It's so enjoyable to work. It's been really hot the last week or so, two weeks, really, really hot. I've done a podcast or two and written an article or two on how tricky it becomes when you're trying to work bees in hot weather because you're hot and the bees are hot and nobody feels good.

You have to admit, listeners, this is not as much fun as you would like to think it would be. I'm drawn to that little colony. I enjoy tinkering, working, photographing. It's like working a kitten in comparison to working a bobcat, a lot of difference there.

When I was as young as some of you people are in beekeeping, the world in bees was significantly different. I could spend two hours telling you how it was different. Very little plastic, a lot of glass, a lot of metal, not many options. Some major bee companies, everything was traditional just all those years ago.

Listeners, I had the three books of the day. [chuckles] Isn't that funny? Look at how many bee books are available, I mean, literally thousands. In my beekeeping youth, there was approximately three major books, the ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping, The Hive and The Honeybee, and now a book that's completely out of print called Beekeeping by Eckert and Shaw. I had those books.

You see, there was no web. We had a party line telephone system. Our television had three stations and they were all black and white. There was no way to record. You get the idea? You get the notion? Things were really different then. Beekeeping was different then. It was mostly a man thing.

The women, no offense, don't be rotting me now, but no offense, the women sat in the back of the room and crocheted and waited for the break when they would put out the cookies and the food that they have brought. Now, women are absolutely major players in all aspects of beekeeping. Change, change, change everywhere you can think of.

I'm going to tell you a couple of stories and you're going to say, "Well, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Why would you do that?" I did that because I had no experience. There was no web. There was no short course. There was no ready source of information that you just couldn't call up a web page, you couldn't watch a YouTube video. You basically had three books, you'd go to a meeting once a year for the state, maybe. If you're lucky, a small county meeting, that was it. Talk to a friend, if you had a beekeeping friend.

I stumbled into beekeeping in an academic setting at Auburn University. I accidentally took a class. Sometime I'll tell you that story. It's weird why I'm sitting here in beekeeping talking to you today. I need to tell you that when I fell into beekeeping, I had, at that time, and to some extent now, one of the worst cases of bee fever that one could have. I went insane over bees.

Right now my thoughts are racing. I had an eccentric uncle who kept bees. He helped. I had beekeeper friends that I had-- not intentionally, but I had beekeeper friends that I had made. They helped. Otherwise, I read what I could read, and then I've tried to work, understand, study bees night and day. I'm still doing that 50 years later. Still doing that very thing.

I found in one of those classic southern houses that are all gone now, unless you found them at a museum or something, they were pre-air conditioner-era housing designs. They were built for the un-air-conditioned south. They had something called a dog trot. They had a center-open hallway right down the middle of the house. It was open on both ends, and you say, "Wouldn't you freeze to death?" Where they were, where these houses were popular, no, you would not freeze to death, not even in the winter. It was hot there most of the time.

You see that open hallway would form a venturi, and would, in theory, pull a waft of air down that hallway, and in theory, help cool the house. A very high-gable, high-pitched house and the idea behind that was as the heat rises, they would try to get the heat away from where they were living. Finally, the house would sit up on pylons, 24 to 30 inches off the ground so air could circulate all around the house, and help keep it cool, and it also gave the dogs a great place to call home under the house. That house, that design, on a farm that the church member that I knew said there were bees in that old house, and they were planning on tearing it down. Hearing that I was a nutcase for bees, he wondered if I wanted to go get those bees out of that house. Absolutely.

Listeners, it didn't bother me that I'd never done this in my life, but thinking that I could think like a bee, I'll just work this system out, and I will take them a nice new modern hive, and I will offer it to them, and those bees will just be astounded at their good fortune. They will come out in great numbers in a parade-like fashion, and they will march into that new hive, and they will live in all the modern aspects of beekeeping-dom. That was my ridiculous plan.

On a hot summer day, my dad agreed to go along. He sat in a 1958 Chevrolet across the way under the shade of a pecan tree. I took out an 8-foot A-frame ladder, opened it up next to this tall, old, clapboard-covered house, and I got up about 6.5, 7 feet off the ground where those bees were going into a knothole in the wall. Bam, bam, bam, I nailed up, hot as blazes in the sun, sweating, I nailed up a bracket, actually two brackets, to set that hive on.

Now, all of you experienced beekeepers, when I'm bang, bang, bang on the wall of that house, what do you think's happening? They were becoming agitated, but ironically, they didn't come for me. They didn't come for me, and that was a good thing because I didn't have protective gear on. Since this was going to be a positive event for both me and the bees, I didn't even see why I would need protective gear.

Insane point number two. I put the hive there, and I watched and waited for the excitement to grow in the nest as they realized what options was available to them. I must have stood there 20, 25 minutes, and indeed, a few bees did land on my new landing board, but then they just ran down my landing board and went right back in the house. I was thinking, "Hmm, maybe the word doesn't spread as quickly as I thought, and maybe I should help them along. Maybe I should just, pull a piece of the siding off, and that way they can clearly see that the new hive is there, available to them, and that will then help them find their new way to their new hive."

Using that same hammer, I managed to break off a piece of siding. While I reminisce and think about what happened next, why don't we take a short break and hear from our sponsor?

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Jim: Help me out here, experienced beekeepers. After I'd banged on the wall of the house, after I'd thumped and bumped, after I was in their flight path for over an hour, the coup de grace was to pull off a piece of the siding that their nest was attached to. That was the last straw.

In retrospect, I bet you those bees, completely unimproved, were probably strains of Apis mellifera mellifera, the old German black bee variety that we used in this country decades and decades ago before ligustica became so common. Yes, they did exactly what you think they would do. They came for me. They were not coming to go into that new hive. They came for me.

I was completely unprepared. I really had no plan B. I need to tell you, indeed, I did not fall off the ladder. That's a good thing, but I got down the ladder and I knew with that cloud of bees around me trying to get in my eyes, trying to go up my nose, when you try to breathe, you'd possibly suck a bee in, you're swatting and you're beating yourself to death, and you don't care who sees this, and if I can just get to the car, then I can get away from these bees.

With what vision I had left, I began to try to get to the old '58 Chevy, and I could remember seeing my dad cranking his window up just as fast as he could. Now, you see, in those days, there's no power windows on those old cars. You had to crank the windows up and down. Can you draw a picture in your mind of my dad seeing what's happening to me and what's about to happen to him, him trying to get that window closed as quickly as he could?

Then I had the oddest thought, listeners. I thought, there's a good chance he's going to lock the door. Realizing that I didn't have time to roam around that car, pleading with him to let me in, if indeed he did lock the door, as an aside, he did not, but I didn't know that at the time. I went straight for the bushes. I went straight for the overgrowth and the unkept bushes that now surrounded this abandoned house farm site.

At that moment, I had a default thought kick in. "Don't get snake-bitten while you're trying to get away from bees." Because say we're in that area, we grew up with the absolute knowledge that under some of these conditions, you could expect to stumble upon a rattlesnake and they didn't care for being stumbled upon. I took a brief minute, second, millisecond to think, "Okay, look for snakes." Then I pawed through the brambles and the undergrowth and I finally got away from the bees.

It was one huge lesson that I learned that day. No, the bees are not going to leave their antiquated archaic cavity. That is their nest site. They're there for the moment. They may or may not survive the winter. They want to cast a swarm. They want to make enough honey to survive and to thrive, but they really don't care about a new beehive box with two coats of latex paint on it and 10 frames of foundation. That was not enticing to them. That was what I learned that day.

I had to go home with eyes swollen shut and puffy lips and my pride in my back pocket because I did not know nearly as much about bees in those early years as I thought I did. Just so you know, not that much has changed. I still don't know as much as I'd like to think I know. There's a chapter two. After giving up on that project, I don't know what happened to them or that house. I didn't care. I'm not going back there, and I might add, neither is my dad.

There was a second opportunity, this time more civilized. It was in a tenement house near my grandparents' farm where I spent much of my life. It hurts me to say that because we've sold that farm that was in my family for three or four human generations, but everything changes. No one lived there anymore. I moved away, as did my brothers, and so with my heart in my throat and feeling sad even now, we sold the place.

Down in the bottom, neighboring house, which was probably a half mile away, was a house in the weeds with typical overgrowth and this house being abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and there on the wall of the house, at neck level, was bees coming and going. Now this time I got sophisticated. This time I bored a hole in the back of my equipment to coincide with the hole in the wall. Then I bored a hole in the front because with me being an experienced beekeeper now and having learned a lot about getting bees to come out of the house, I closed off the entrance and gave them a hole in the front to simulate the hole that they had been using in the wall of the house.

You see now, now the bees have to go through my equipment, make that long walk, about 19 and seven-eighths of an inch, they think the outside dimensions of a deep are, to get to their original opening. Then when they come to their senses, they'd see what a great facility this is that they're having to come through and they would move out of the wall into my equipment.

Call on those experienced beekeepers again, what do you think happened there? Interestingly and cleverly with their tiny little brain, super esophageal ganglion that's roughly half the size of a typewritten period, most bees quickly learned to make the walk through my equipment back to their entrance, following exactly the same rules and protocols that those bees followed in the first nest episode.

They had a home site, they were happy with it, they had no real interest in leaving the home site they had, rebuilding all that, trying to get ready even for the Alabama winter. There's still going to be a dearth and they've got to be ready for it during the cold months or cool months, so they're not going to move out, Jim, good grief. What are you thinking about?

I left that up for about a week and went back to harvest my reward to find out that the only bees in that box were the bees in transit, going from the wall of the house through my equipment and then out the hole that I left them there in the front. That's all that was going on. That was all that they did.

I took my box down and I realized and admitted that I needed to do a lot more talking and reading and understanding about removing bees from the walls of houses or from tree trunks or whatever. I'm happy to tell you that I did progress and that through the years as a younger man who didn't mind hanging off a ladder and working off scaffolding and whatever, I did successfully do cutouts as they're called now and took bees and removed them and saved them in many cases. What started as a labor of love for some, not for me, but for some turned into an economic endeavor. They would do that for big money because it's not worth it just for the bee resources that you get and the amount of work that you've got to do.

If you're young and eager and you want to save some bees, I'd recommend that you try it. Get it out of your system. If you want to really try this in a serious way, read and study what it takes to do it. At some point, I guess we can talk about that and go through the exact procedure on what I'd recommend and others I hope would interact and how to get those bees to come out of the house. You've got to surgically remove them. They won't come out on their own.

I must have, how many? Don't exaggerate Jim. I must have 30 to 40 stings. I didn't get stung so much at the second site. First site was pretty mercilessly. That's a hard word to say, was mercilessly.

I learned a lot. It's valuable memories. You see, when you've been doing this as long as I have and as long as some of you listening have been doing it, you accumulate all these memories that are dear to you. Pretty much dear just to you. I learned a lot. I grew, and now that I'm sitting here on a rainy, hot, summer afternoon with the farm sold and with a lot of the players and people who were involved in these stories no longer here, I treasure my memories.

I hope that you enjoy beekeeping and stay in it in a pleasurable way and manage to get through the downs so you can enjoy the ups and one day have good memories too that you can tell people about. I need to tell you that I seriously enjoy doing this and I deeply appreciate you listening. This is just me trying to entertain me and hoping that you'll listen long enough that you'll come back next Thursday and I can do it again. This is Jim telling you bye until we can talk again.

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