Plain Talk: Learning Points (199)

Episode 199 – Plain Talk: Learning Points

Jim Tew: Listeners, it's that time of the week, it's time to do something. What now, Jim? What are you going to do? I wish you could be here, just I wish you could know what I'm feeling and seeing. It's a rainy, dark, cloudy day. It's mellow and quiet. There's nothing to do with bees. In fact, I'm in between bee jobs for fall management. When I sit here on this cool, rainy morning with the rain pattering on the roof, that's where I am, that's what I'm sensing, I just become reflective, and I think about things all down through the years where you learned some things, where you didn't learn some things, where you should have employed some things that you've already learned, but you didn't employ them. Just life's stuff.

I don't know that you'll be any better beekeeper for having sat through this session, but let me just talk about it for a few minutes, just to clear my head. For those of you who don't know, I'm Jim Tew. Once a week, I come to you here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I talk about something to do with pretty much 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 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 honey bees.

Jim: During life, there are events and occasions that you just don't forget. There's always the things that go right. In my situation, it's always been the things that go wrong or even horribly wrong are the things that I remember. The things that go right are quickly forgotten. I had the opportunity way back when I was in Maryland, this would have been 1979, to buy some bees. I'd been working University of Maryland bees with Dr. Dewey Caron my entire three years that I was there.

Now, I was moving to Ohio and I wanted some bees. I really wanted to get involved in this. I heard of a beekeeper in Western Maryland who had recently died. His widow was selling this man's bee operation because there were big, nice colonies and approaching swarming. Off I did go on a new 1978 Ford 3/4-ton pickup with a straight six engine that I had just bought. No GPS, just following roadmaps and suggestions and people thinking they knew where the house was, and I found the house.

Listeners, in no way, in no way do I want to be insensitive or uncaring at this point, but I kind of made a pact with myself after meeting this woman never to do this again. My thought was never buy bees from a still grieving widow. The poor woman cried the whole time. She showed me the bees. She showed me his extra equipment. She took me out to the bee yard. She showed me where he kept careful notes written on cards tacked to his inner cover. She wept while she touched his handwriting and said that these bees meant everything to him, but she knew enough about bees that they needed a beekeeper.

It was it was horrible, so there's no way to haggle. I didn't even try to haggle. I paid premium price. Number one, I had bee fever. I wanted the bees. Number two, it was extremely insensitive to try to negotiate and downplay this and point out the defects of these bees, so I bought them. I loaded them by myself, it was a brand new truck. This is not part of the story, but I'll give it to you. The bed was brand new, a little light coat of dew and film on it. I was trying to push a colony right up on it. I fell right flat on my face, smashed my chin into the deck of that new truck and just about knocked some teeth out, but I didn't.

I got through that all right. I got the colonies all loaded up. Went through the guy's house. He had an extracting room downstairs. It was set up nicely. I was just buying bees, I wasn't buying extractors. Just as an aside, it had that ambience. That extracting room had that smell that I have tried to talk to you about. I've tried to write about it. Kim and I tried to talk about the smells of beekeeping. It had that smell in this house.

As another aside, the deceased beekeeper built his own equipment with really tight box joints along the edge. It was not the typical cut corners and used rabbet joints. He built them correctly. It was solid, heavy equipment. I got it all on the truck. I thanked the woman. I wrote her a check, probably for nearly all the money I had in the world at the time. Off I did go.

My thought was, these bees have not been open now in six months. I don't know how long. It had been months. I loaded the bees, they stayed stuck together. At the time, I was Jim Tew, I knew everything about beekeeping, I thought, so these bees will be fine. I want to get out of here. I've got a long drive back over to the district, Washington, DC district area where I was living. I needed to go, go, go.

I got them on the truck and I took off. The truck's running good. Drive was smoothed out. Everything seemed all right. Somewhere on probably Interstate 70 going across Maryland, in my rearview mirror, I saw one of those heavy-duty galvanized metal tops fly off. Listeners, it must have weighed 18 pounds. I watched in that rearview mirror as that top hit the ground and bounced up underneath the car. It's one of those hotshot Audi cars that was just beginning to pass me. The lid caught up under the box and was pushing down the road. As the guy went by me, there was a shower of sparks coming out from under that car, coming off that lid. That guy was motioning to me as he passed to pull over.

Oh, my stars. What am I about to have to face? Not only did I pay premium price for these bees, not only am I trying to get back with a one-man job to get these things back, get them unloaded before the night's over, now I've got to pay how many thousands or what, lawsuits? The guy was stunningly agreeable for what I had just put him through. He and I pulled the wedge top out from under his really nice high dollar car. He had a good look at everything, and he quickly said that the car seemed all right. He didn't ask for my name, or my number, or anything, and he was gone.

It was easier than any wild expectation that I could ever have had for such a frightening event. I promise you, in my mind right now, I could see that top, something like a Frisbee, but not spinning, just floating in the air before it crashed to the ground. Because see, my thought was everything's propolised down. These tops are heavy. Everything is all right here. That was my learning point. Don't ever trust propolis or propolis, whichever way you want to pronounce it, to be the end all sticking agent for putting beehives together.

I got back home. I got them unloaded. The story ultimately, way over in the future, did not really have a happy ending. I won't go into that now. There were problems when I got to Ohio with American foulbrood from a neighboring beekeeper, and all that nice equipment that I bought a few years later, most of it had to be destroyed, but why go into that? This is a cheerful enough story as it is, but I'll end this story on this note. I used that top for years, and along one end of the short edge, that heavy gauge metal that guy had used to make his tops out of, had worn through down to the wood, and every time I saw that top, I knew that was the one that went flying that day, and gave me a really close call with a serious injury that I managed to skate on. Don't trust Propolis as a sticking agent. Let's hear from our sponsors, and then I've got some more sage advice for you.

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Jim: Ironically, just a few years earlier, I'd moved bees from Alabama up to Maryland. When I was thinking about this story, I don't know how I found a commercial beekeeper. Some way, I found a commercial beekeeper who would haul bees for me, and he came to my grandfather's farm where I had bees set up, and I had two deeps and a few supers, and I explained to him, being the advanced, sophisticated beekeeper that I was, that these colonies are all stuck together. I haven't opened them in three months, so you can pick them up and go. They're really good to go.

He did not even bat an eye. He said, "No, we're going to staple these." In those days, you used those damnable staples where you angled the staples on the side and pounded on the side of the boxes and drove them in. It took him almost 45 minutes, maybe a short hour to do it. He didn't criticize me. He didn't say anything. He didn't judge me, but he didn't tell me what his judgment was, and he stapled those things up.

You see, as an experienced commercial beekeeper, he didn't trust propolis. He knew not to. That was the fact that I had to learn sometime later on my own. Secondly, thirdly, fourthly, I don't know where I am in these points. After I got to Ohio in 1978, probably in 1979 or so, I was formally invited to the Ohio State Beekeepers Association to present a talk, and they asked me to bring three colonies of university bees to do an open hive outdoor demonstration. It was a spring workshop. The spring workshop means it's still probably cold weather.

I, at the time, was still fresh from Maryland and Alabama and really had no experience with anything approaching cold, and heaven knows, there's colder places than Ohio. On that early morning, driving about 50 miles to the meeting, I took a university van and a few students that I had at the time, and on an open, single-axle trailer behind that van, I put three colonies of bees, two deeps and a super. I knew they were good colonies. I had checked several days before, these were really nice, well-suited colonies for this demonstration day, and I put them on the front of the trailer.

I don't even want to go into it, it was the earliest days of ratchet straps, but they weren't yet ratchets. You pull the strap through a connecting device, and then it locked down onto the strap, and then you tie the strap off, but there was no ratchet. I used those things. Then we just stuffed grass in the entrance because there was frost on everything. It was, what, 26, 27 degrees that day, and we just stuffed grass in the entrance. I explained to the students that we're just going about 40 or 50 miles, it's freezing cold, they're going to be on an open trailer. For all I know, they're going to freeze to death.

Off we did go to this meeting over in Ashland, Ohio, at Ashland University, as I recall. I set the colonies off with the students, and got things ready along the tree-lined edge there, and I pulled the grass out. I was expecting some bees to come out and some activity, but there was none. I thought, "I guess they're clustered up pretty tight. That was certainly a breezy ride back there on that trailer."

I pulled the second tuff of grass out, and I remember that I didn't have a word for what is a thought before it's formed as a thought? You're about to have a thought, but you haven't had it yet. When I pulled the second tuffs of grass out, and no bees came out, thinking, "That first one didn't surprise me, the second one does surprise me. This doesn't taste right." I quickly pulled the third tuff out, and there's nothing there either. I chose one, I got the strap off, and I opened it up. I'm going to give you just a moment to think what I saw inside. Did I see a frozen cluster of bees, or scattered? What did I see?

What I saw was absolute, total death and destruction. Those bees on that cold morning, to me cold, 26, 27 degrees, on an open trailer behind our vehicle, had become so agitated by the jostling and the bouncing riding on the trailer that they had generated heat, broken cluster, and if you can believe this, I promise you it's true, I know people who could validate this story, they had overheated and died. They were a wet, soggy, dead, and dying mass of bees.

It seemed like almost at that moment, like zombies, ambling out from the meeting, coming out to see an open hive demonstration, was 30 or 40, 50 beekeepers coming my way to see what a spring hive would look like. Beekeepers, you've got literally 60 seconds to come up with a game plan. Seems like I've told you this story before because it traumatized me so much.

My plan immediately was to discuss winter kills. These didn't look anything like winter kills. My associate working with me, he and I had to explain and say that the ride over busted the clusters up and all that kind of thing. We didn't outright lie, but we came right up against lying. We explained to all these people what caused winter kills, how winter kills happened, and how sad it was, and how we would clean this up. There was always the two or three experienced beekeepers standing back behind the crowd. I knew what they were doing. They were looking and pointing and discussing. There were those there who knew that something was amiss, but they didn't say what it was.

My learning point that day for this was you cannot believe how much heat that bees can generate, regardless of the outside temperature. If you think you can close them up just for a few minutes because there's going to be an aerial applicator somewhere in the vicinity and you've got to go to work, so I'll just close them up. If you don't leave some kind of air distribution on those bees, there's going to be some serious issue with overheating. That's a different subject for a different time, water hose, top screens, whatever. Don't just go to a bee colony and close that front entrance off and think that somehow everything's going to be all right there.

My two points for today, don't trust propolis, don't close bees up without ventilation. I must have 40 more stories on things I should not do because Jim tried it and it didn't work. I always appreciate you listening to me. I absolutely enjoy talking to you. It's been so pleasant on this rainy day to have a pleasant conversation with other beekeepers. Thank you for listening in, and I look forward to seeing you and talking to you next week. Goodbye.

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