Plain Talk: Long Forgotten Equipment (202)

Episode 202 – Plain Talk: Long Forgotten Equipment

[music]

Jim Tew: Listeners, who of you out there have not had a look at a bee supply catalog in the last few weeks, few months? They're everywhere. They lay on the desk, they lay beside the bed, they're out in the shop. There's bee supply catalogs everywhere. Oddly, in a strange way, those supply catalogs are snapshots. When you thumb through them, I know I always had the idea that somehow the products listed here would be there forever. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been in a bee supply catalog. It's really, really surprising what comes and what goes.

If you're okay, I'd like to talk with you about some items that have gone. They're really gone. There's no record on the web. There's nothing that shows that they were ever once prominently listed in a bee supply catalog. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I try to talk about something directly to do with 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 distinctly remember that in those early days, you'd see those products in a bee supply magazine and you would think they had always been there, they would always be there. Those old catalogs are just a shadow of what they were then that they are now. They're beautiful publications now. They're really shameful to throw them away. Nice pictures, educational information.

One of the things that always amazed, amused, stunned, surprised me, that at the time I thought was normal, was that you could buy calcium cyanide from some of the bee supply companies because at the time, it was common to use that to kill bees. It had a disclaimer that you needed to be careful because this was dangerous stuff and it could kill you too. With that, you could order it and they would ship it to you and you would get it and you could use it to sacrifice bees if you were killing off bees in northern climates rather than wintering them over.

Strange products that were available, and of course, antibiotics. That was a routine way of life. Classes were given on how to mix antibiotics with powdered sugar, at what rates, how to put it on, and when to put it on. It was completely normal to be using Terramycin, erythromycin, and several other mycins, not to eradicate American foulbrood, but just to keep it suppressed. It's probably not a bad thing that those days are gone.

The bee supply catalogs represent what's there for the moment. I don't have a huge collection of old catalogs. I have a few. Thankfully, the web has begun to offer more and more back look at what used to be, if you can find these occasional catalogs listed here and there on some archival page. It's intriguing to see what was okay then and what was common then, what was normal then. Then these decades later, it's completely abnormal.

Let's play this silly game. Who amongst you is old enough and been keeping bees long enough to remember a beehive feeder system called the hive fountain feeder? I'm waiting. I don't see any hands up. The hive fountain feeder was a small plastic contraption that went inside a frame. You cut out some of the comb, usually along the top, and you mounted it. Then it had a styrofoam float inside this small rectangular container, and it had a hose attached to it.

The hose went out the front of the hive, across the apiary to a feeder drum, a central feeder drum, where you would put either 5 gallons or 55 gallons of syrup. Then if you had these high fountains, say, in nukes, as you were raising queens, which is exactly what I tried to use them for, then you could just go out there and fill that one five gallon bucket or that one drum with 25 or 30 gallons of syrup, and it would pressurize-- let's say we had 15 tubed feeders set up, and then it would pressurize those feeders with sugar syrup and run the syrup out to them.

Exactly like the float system and the back of the common toilet, when the syrup reached a certain level, the styrofoam float would click up and shut the flow off. The flow would only open back up when the bees had eaten from the feeder container enough to let the float open again. In theory, it was a beautiful system. Once you got it plumbed up, and once you got it set up, everything was great. It worked well.

There was probably some procedure that I should have done that I didn't know about. The problem I ran into was that mold and mildew over time would grow in those tubes, and even in the feeders. As pieces of that mold and mildew broke off and then passed along through the volume of syrup, and it got to that float valve, after a while, it would accumulate there and then over time would prevent the float valve from closing.

I pretty clearly remember the first day I went out and was shocked to see that overnight those 10 or 15 nucleus colonies had gone through 35 or 40 gallons of syrup. Then as you walk around to admire the beauty of this feeder, you realize that the ground is soggy in one of the colonies where that float stayed open and then effectively emptied the feeder can overnight.

I had a look on the web, but I couldn't find any reference to hive fountain feeder systems in the bee literature. I only have one ticky-tacky picture of one of these feeder containers. Nothing else remains. I can't find that on the web. There must be something in the old bee magazines, but I didn't want to spend that much time. There it is. Has any of you out there, have any of you out there, used the hive fountain feeder system? It really looked nice for a while.

Let's do another one. Bee-off blower system. Hands up, anybody use the bee-off blower system? It had two 12-inch pneumatic tires on a frame that housed about a 32 to 34-inch teakwood propeller made by some airplane company somewhere. It was a beautiful piece of wooden equipment. That propeller was attached to a 5-horsepower engine, and you know how it would work.

If you're trying to take bees off the system, you would fire off that 5-horsepower airplane propeller-equipped device and aim it down the row of beehives, and then you would work bees in a torrent, gale-force wind of air. Can you envision that in your mind, a shielded inside a protective cage airplane propeller running off a 5-horse engine, full throttle, blowing out a blast of air down the row of equipment that you're working on? No bee in the world is going to survive or going to be able to attack you in that wind force. Take a break while you think about this and try to envision what I'm describing. I'll be right back.

Betterbee: With the honey supers off, it's time to focus on your colony's health. Keep those pesky mites in check with Apilife Var, an all-natural Varroa treatment. Powered by thymol and infused with eucalyptus, menthol, and camphor, this formula packs a punch, boasting 94% effectiveness against Varroa mites. Ready to protect your hive? Head to betterbee.com/alv and get Apilife Var from Better Bee today. Your bees will thank you.

Jim: Do you have the picture? Should I review it again? It was on wheels, it was on pneumatic wheels, and you would steer this cage contraption around and you'd get it so that the blower was aimed right down the row of colonies. Are you picking up what I'm saying? Number one, you got to have a flat bee yard. Number two, you got to have your colonies pretty much all in a row. Then number three, this thing is heavy. It took a third of the truck, took a half of the pickup just to get the rig out there.

I like the system because, oddly, clumsy that it was, it worked. You get the system going, you would fire off the big blower, run it up to full speed, literally a gale-force wind, and then you didn't have to have smoke. You didn't really have to have really protective gear. Then you could work the bees and that strong wind flow, but this is important to add this now, it also had an early, early small leaf blower that you used to stand the super up, blow the bees out with the small leaf blower, and then the big blower blew them completely away.

The beauty was all these bees couldn't get to you because you were in that slip stream of air, and that the small blower did the small work that the big blower couldn't get from afar of actually removing bees from between the frames. It was cool in more ways than one, but temperature-wise it was cool. While you're doing this heavy work, you're working in this strong breeze.

This is where it begins to go south. When you stepped out of that breeze, when you moved out of that slip stream to take a super to the truck, there were irate bees attacking anything in the neighborhood. There was that. You could only survive and be happy and wholesome in the stream. Secondly, and this was the thing I did not see coming, the back cage around the propeller was shielded with 8-mesh hardware cloth.

All those tens of thousands of bees flying around that big propeller would be sucked into the back stream and then pulled against that screen cloth until, effectively, if you ran it long enough, these thousands and thousands of bees stuck on the backside of that fan would actually begin to affect airflow. They weren't always killed, but they weren't in good shape for having been through this process.

Here's the oddity, it worked. Here's the disadvantage, the weight of the system, the complexity of it, the size of it, the requirements that it made on the bee yard, and the fact that when you stepped out of the airstream, the bees were there waiting for you. You still had to have protective gear. I really doubt that many of you have heard of the bee-off blower system. I'd be happy to show you one. Mine was in the bee barn that the tornado destroyed, and the bee-off blower was destroyed along with it. I have no idea what happened to it, but it's gone.

Brushy Mountain, for a while, made a collapsible wheelbarrow. Ohio State had one of these things that they had made from wheelbarrow handles, and a wooden frame, and a heavy front wheelbarrow tire. Superficially, it looked like some freight-type wheelbarrow, like you would use at an old feed mill, except the handles would separate. What do you mean? I mean you could unhook one of the handles and walk it to the left side, as I recall, separate the two handles widely, and then you could catch a beehive with clips in the middle of that and then use the wheelbarrow frame to pick up the hive and move it around.

I only saw one of these that was made by the original specs. I have no idea where to find them, and it worked okay. If what? If you had level ground, and you had beehives already set up with the right depth that the clips would fit into, and you just wanted to move it from here to there, because you couldn't roll this thing up the ramp on a truck, but there it was, and I was keen to get it.

Before I could make the trip all those years ago to Columbus, the old bee lab was razed, and so far as I know, that equipment and other old beekeeping equipment is somewhere around second or third base on the Ohio State baseball field now. That's where the original bee lab used to be. Brushy Mountain made a version of this, and I bought one. No offense to Brushy Mountain, I just really had a hard time making it work. It was the same concept.

Once you backed around and hooked onto the beehive and picked it up, where are you going to go? Just a few hives down or what? Because unless you had a low trailer with a low ramp, you really couldn't push it up on a trailer. I had a Tommy liftgate, and I could lift the equipment with the wheelbarrow and the hive on it, and then once you got up, you just had a fraction of an inch, enough space to turn that rig and get it onto the truck.

Then once you're up there, the truck's overloaded already with the size of the wheelbarrow. After struggling with this thing four or five times, I realized that the easiest thing to do, once you had the colony loaded, was just to unhook it from the collapsible wheelbarrow, and then throw the wheelbarrow over the side of the truck, and lower the Tommy liftgate, and then go get your wheelbarrow and start all over again.

Who of you has one of these open-ended collapsible-type wheelbarrows with the heavy metal hooks for clipping into the handhold on a beehive? Can you see how it would work? Good idea, bad implementation, just too clumsy. Maybe specialty work somewhere, but nothing really useful came from it. It's not available anymore. There was a time when the USDA was at Madison, Wisconsin, and they actually did research work and developmental work on practical bee equipment.

A scientist named Detroit, I think, developed a platform system where bee colonies sat on a large platform with a leg on all four corners, and then you'd back a trailer frame underneath that platform, and then lower the platform onto the frame, attach it with pins, the colonies were attached to the platform, take out the jacks from under the corners, and then away you did go with bees on a trailer.

This didn't go anywhere because too often, when people were trying to back that frame under that platform at night, they would knock out one of the back jack legs, and then the platform, of course, would tilt on that corner and dump all the beehives. Great idea, didn't really work very well. You never know who you're talking to when you talk to beekeepers. I gave this description and showed some pictures years ago at a meeting, and two professional welders went home and made a beautiful miniaturized version of this system.

They had it in their mind, they had the picture, they used two industrial commercial-type bee pallets that held four colonies each. The colony, the trailer would move eight hives at the time. Had a pipe jack on each corner, had a tongue that could be disconnected, and it had the two trailer wheels were off an old Riviera front wheel drive car. They were the back wheels, and they just bolted onto the trailer.

In your mind, I want you to know that trailer frame, once it was listed up and on the jacks, you'd take off both tires and the tongue, put those in the back of the truck, and then you would go and pick up another frame you had somewhere else with eight more colonies, and so you were always moving these platform frames with these two trailer tires and the removable tongue. I only had two of the frames.

Can you imagine why this system didn't work? There were no springs on the wheels. There was nothing, no shock absorber. When you're ripping down the road with that little trailer behind you, it was off the ground more than it was on the ground. I tried to run the tires two-thirds empty. I tried anything I knew to get some sponge effect on that trailer, but it was one rough ride.

Consequently, it made a beautiful trailer frame, a great small B yard once you got it set up, but it never really came to fruition in being a useful, improvised trailer that you could attach and go. Still got it. I have no idea what happened to the welders, but it was a beautiful job. It was really nicely made, but it's long gone now. We could go on and on. I haven't had a chance to mention the bottom-high ventilator and the EMT refrigerated vest. These are all things you want to know more about, maybe sometime in the future.

I like talking about this. At the time, they were beautiful pieces of equipment, readily available, discussed everywhere. Now long gone, and for the most part, not even available on the web. Hey, thanks for listening. Until we can talk again, Jim Tew, telling you bye.

[00:20:57] [END OF AUDIO]