Plain Talk: Mentoring New Beekeepers (210)

Episode 210 – Plain Talk: Mentoring New Beekeepers

Jim Tew: Hi, Honeybee Obscura podcast listeners, it's Jim here with another off-the-wall discussion topic that just fell on me. Have any of you ever mentored another in beekeeping, a beginner for the most part? One of those brand new, right, rookies? We all were at one time. At one time, every one of us were beginners, nobody gets to skip that phase. We know the basics. I was caught off guard when I began to explore the web. The web knows everything, you just have to come up with the questions, it has all the answers. What a fossil I had become, not just in this way, but in several other ways in beekeeping.

I'd like to talk with you a few minutes about some of the updates and upgrades, or maybe just changes, that the web suggested to me when I ask about mentoring new beekeepers and see how far off base we are. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you about once a week here at Honeybee Obscura, where I try to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping.

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Introduction: Welcome to Honeybee 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: Many, many years ago, an established, confident, proven beekeeper made a comment to me that just stuck with me from then until this very minute. He said that experienced, knowledgeable beekeepers with many years' time and grade don't always make the best teachers, the best mentors, because they leave too much out. They assume too much. The best mentors, he thought, were those beekeepers who had been doing it for four to five, maybe six years. That they themselves were still learning. They knew what it felt like. They knew the questions. They knew the issues. That as he was searching for speakers for various beginning classes, those were the kinds of teachers that he looked for.

Honestly, I've never actually one-on-one mentored someone since I've worked in this line of study. In the university setting, I always had classes and groups and systems and videos and whatever. It was rare for me to be able-- I don't even think of a single instance, for me to have the opportunity to go out with just me and one other person. Now, I did do that with my grandson on those presentations that we had here. I did admit in those episodes when I was teaching my grandson bees that this was a novel thing for me. We all know the drill. You put the smoker on, you show them how to light a smoker, you show them everything.

You show them where to put the hive tool in so you don't break the top lug off, the super by prying the wrong way. You show them how to pull the outside frames out. This is drones. These are queens. This is a queen. This is worker brood. This is pollen they've collected. See the bees scenting. You just point out everything you can to them as quickly as you can if this is one-on-one mentoring. That has always worked for me. If I had to do some kind of training program, particularly on video, those are the kind of things I would try to show.

These are the things you look for. This is what it's supposed to look like. I'd comment then, and I'll comment now, that what I always lost in that procedure, and still today there's no way to make up for it, is the odors of beekeeping. What does the alarm pheromone smell like? What does American fowl brood smell like? What does a nectar flow in the bee yard smell like? You can't transmit smells, odors, without actually being in the bee yard. Sooner or later, you can do all the things that I've already discussed and that I'm preparing to discuss, but sooner or later, you've got to be in the bee yard.

All the teaching, all the preparation will not take the beauty off that moment when you are really in the bee yard. I mentioned Will, my grandson, a bit ago, because he caught me off guard back there when he said, "Grandpa, I've never seen this many bees in my life." I realized that I had put him in the deep end of the pool too quickly. To my defense, I didn't realize there were that many bees in the colony when we began to try to rearrange the deeps that were on them. More often than not, you cannot imitate or simulate the actual sound of all those bees buzzing around you as you mentor these people.

Having gone through talks and discussions like this, I thought, "I think I'll just search the web and see if they have a structured way, if someone has really put this to pen and ink, do this first, do this last, do whatever." How many times has this happened to you? It's happened to me a lot. You just walk into an arena that you did not even know was an arena. Lo and behold, when you ask the web for teaching techniques for beekeeping, and you put some parameters in the search browser of what you're looking for, I came up with a list, or the computer came up with a list, that I was completely not expecting.

At that 'oh, my' moment, I realized that all of my mentoring discussions, all of my previous experiences had been dated and that there's actually a lot of changes. That modern-day mentors may teach in a completely different way, using significantly different tools than what I've always used. I want to tell you about some of these, and some I'm not qualified to use, so just stand by while we hear from our sponsor and come back, and I'll guide you through the surprising list that I unintentionally developed.

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Jim: Expecting to see the first thing, show how to light the smoker, forget all of that. The first thing on the list that came up that surprised me was, I almost want to drum roll, because the first was pretty much the most shocking, gamification. What did you just say? A word I've never heard before, if it's even a word, gamification. Search the web for games about beekeeping or design a game yourself that teaches beekeeping. I don't wish to offend anyone out there, but I don't have a gaming mentality. Angry Birds is about as complex as I ever got in trying to play games, but I see all of my other younger family on a computer all the time doing something with games.

I'd never thought to use a game to teach beekeeping. Yes, before you ask, and no, I am not qualified to send you to one of them. Such games are out there. Most of them are computer-generated images. I didn't think I remember seeing one that was actually a live bee doing something flying around. In the past, there were games, there were board games that you could get where you'd roll a dice and then move, do around, a takeoff on Monopoly. This thing is different. This is a game with some sound effects and with yes and no situations for when you use it.

I had never considered using electronic streaming games of the genre of the gaming industry today as being a tool for teaching beekeeping. This is as good a time as any to say if any of you have used some of these things that are foreign to me, I wish that you would let me know how these things are working out for you. Another category that turned up that I had not thought of that I guess I should have, I didn't mean to, but sometimes I do tell you stories. They're usually about don't ever do these kind of things, but storytelling.

That some people learn better if you will tell a story about a particular aspect of beekeeping and then embedded in that story are beekeeping components and tenants that should be learned to become a better beekeeper. I've never considered storytelling as a viable alternative, as a teaching tool. Have I? Sometimes when I can tell that you're bored and I'm giving a live presentation and you can see that you've lost too much of the audience, it might be a good time to take a break and then just tell a story. I'm not telling a story about how to keep bees. I'm usually telling a story about what happened to me while I was keeping bees. That's not what they're talking about here.

They're primarily telling a story about a queen that came in the mail and that you took the cork out and exposed the candy plug and you make a story out of the lecture instead of coming in from the other particular way where they're supposed to take notes and do whatever. There was a possibility of something called a multi-sensory workshop. Now I've already said that odors don't transmit. Odors don't carry over. This was to directly address that. You would set up as many of the odors of beekeeping as you could. A jar of freshly extracted honey and the ambiance that comes from that.

Even the smell of a queen pheromone that you would use in a bait hive to try to lure swarms in, or I guess you'd call it a swarm lure. That odor, the odor of the alarm pheromone, all of the smells of beekeeping that you don't get. Then don't stop there. You would also go to the feel of beekeeping. Whatever you could handle there, the feel of beeswax on your hand. In every way possible, expose and introduce the novice to the senses of beekeeping that you and I basically take for granted. The odor of new pine boxes that you're assembling mixed with the odor of beeswax foundation used to be the odor of my bee life. Now more and more, that's no longer really relevant.

So much of it's plastic, so much of it's chain, so much of it's preassemble, but those old odors are still out there. I really liked this one, and it just sent me scurrying to study more, and that would be virtual reality experiences. Putting on those goggles and experiencing as much as you can firsthand what the real bee world would look like. Confession here. I've only had those goggles on for any reason, maybe twice in my life. Second confession, I spent 45 minutes looking at those goggles. The prices, some of them are dirt cheap. They're readily affordable. I didn't buy one, but I'm certainly considering it.

Yes, and I'm not going to tell you where because I'm not qualified to rank these and choose and pick one. There are some bee virtual reality sources on the web. I've never looked at them. It'd be nice to hear from you if you have used virtual reality imaging and have done something with bees. I could maybe tell me or others exactly what formats you use to convert this to a virtual reality format. Let me just stop for a second and remind you these are things that I would never have considered incorporating into any instructional class that I was using. Yet there are people out there, certainly, there are who are perfectly qualified to teach, to use, to explain, to use in this format.

Importantly, they're using this for new beekeepers, probably, younger than I am, who are familiar with these kinds of technologies. That continues to be the surprise at how dated my techniques were. Cross-disciplinary insights. Don't know if that comes up early or later, but what does that mean? That means you teach concepts of agriculture, of food production, ecological concerns, and how bees fit in with all of that, and what their purpose is. If I had to use that, that would be farther down the list. We probably cover that now when you get to the significance of honeybees providing commercial pollination.

We've also given lip service to what bees and certainly wild bees do to pollinate everything else that's out there and how it is so significant that that goes on. Apparently, we need a particular chapter segment on this cross-disciplinary insight on the depths and breadth of what goes on there. It was suggested that nutritional, what would it be called? On my list, it was nutritional beekeeping. What bees are using this food for and how they use it and why it's important to them, both pollen and nectar. Then don't get stopped there. Of course, you got to get bogged down even further into trace elements and minerals and certainly water of various tastes and insights. There was the possibility of using that kind of thing.

Community-based learning. They suggested that this novice group, this pair of teacher and student become as engrossed as much as possible in things like community garden projects. I live in a small town. You can have a garden right here in your backyard. I don't have to go to a vacant lot off some main thoroughfare because there are city gardens there. Then off to one side, someone wants to have some beehives there. That would never cross my mind. Yet there are people right now who are in some high-rise apartment building and whose bee operation if they had one would be out on the balcony or down in that community garden.

I've never really considered discussing that. I'm supposed to also include a digital resource hub. My student and I should choose some electronic platform. What would it be? Snapchat? Some electronic platform that we would routinely communicate on, share information, possibly include others in it. Since we're using all of these media sources now, there should be one hypothetically dedicated to this small beekeeping project that you could routinely communicate with. We all use text messaging and maybe that's all you're going to do. If you had a hub where you could store the messages, where you could put references for the student to follow up on, that is supposed to be a useful thing too.

This whole thing, in theory, would be ended by a creative action plan, clearly not my wording. That creative action plan is to help the student as they start and give them an insight of where this is headed in the long run. What are you trying to get to? Are you going to have 15 colonies? Do you know how many colonies do you want or is this strictly for pollination, strictly for honey production, strictly for photographic work? What is the project's ultimate goal? It was suggested that we have a creative action plan that goes with this.

As I began to put this list together and to find all these loose ends everywhere, I realized that not gone are the days when you just stood by a beehive with a person wearing a bright white clean new suit and holding the hive tool incorrectly and then showing them the right way. That was my way for learning and teaching beekeeping, but there are a multitude of tools now that greatly subsidize that old tried, and proven procedure. I only talked to you about this now for 20 minutes because I just never thought to use these various components in any way other than maybe some structured class, some future project, or whatever. I'm confessing to you that I felt old.

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I felt antiquated when I read about all of these new tools that I could find. I don't know how many I've missed and what a different look a mentoring relationship would have now when using those tools. It's just me trying to learn. It's just me trying to keep up as best I can. Can we talk again next week? Just exactly a week from now. I'll look forward to it. Thank you. This is Jim telling you bye.

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