Plain Talk: Not My Bees (182)

Episode 182 – Plain Talk: Not My Bees

Jim Tew: I didn't see it coming, listeners. It was quick, I should have predicted it, but day before yesterday, a neighbor came over to me and asked if I could help her with a bee problem she had. Of course, it's not honey bees. I wanted to tell her, "These are not my bees," but that's not what she wanted to hear. I want to talk about that for a few minutes this week. I'm Jim Tew. I'm here at  Honey Bee Obscura, where once a week I try to talk about something relating to beekeeping in one way or the other.

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: Can I be truthful with you and tell you that I'm not really wowed about this topic because I'm not really wowed about the job when I'm asked to do it, and I have been asked to do it, as have many of you who are longtime beekeepers. I've been asked all through the years, sometimes expected to come help people with their non-honey bee bee problems. Just for a moment, every one of us who are listening and me talking right now needs to remember what it was like when somehow all stinging insects were mostly the same. That was the central core, they would sting.

That was what was important. It did not matter to me if it was a wasp or a yellowjacket, it was just a bee, and they would sting. That's the attitude that non-beekeepers bring to you when they think that somehow you have a pied piper ability to do things with these bees that they can't do. She asked me to help with a carpenter bee problem and some new cedar siding that she's just had put up. Some of the trim boards is what's being attacked.

It's just so painful because there's no way to repel those bees, and they seem to be always searching, looking, trying to find a particular type of board or lumber that they want, and once they find it, they'll just go berserk. They may ignore everything else around it, but that one board meets their need and they really want to go for it. It's not my agenda here today to try to tell you what to do about these bees. What my agenda is, is the job that you're asked to do and how it's like slowly, slowly walking into quick sad because once you go over and then you commit to killing these insects, what if you don't kill them? How many times do you go over?

I just cringe because this is not go spray up one time, take your thanks, and go home. Those bees, those wasps have been doing this for a long time and they probably have faced challenges like this before, so they don't just roll over and say, "Oh my heavens, this guy came over and sprayed something. Let's all die." No, they're remarkably resilient. The thing that always frustrates me is how much time is this going to take.

I'm talking about carpenter bees, could be yellowjackets. A neighbor called me years ago and said, "Jim, your bees are out," like some of my bees had escaped from my hive and gone two houses down to her house. She said, "They're coming out of the ground by a landscape timber here around my flowers." I was almost relieved. "Oh, those are yellowjackets. Those are not honey bees. I have nothing to do with those." She said, "My father was a forester and I'm pretty good with insects, and I'm telling you, these are honey bees." I got the impression that somehow this was my responsibility because she was certain that my bees were down there coming out of the ground.

Part of me thought, "Well, Africanized bees all those years ago would sometimes nest in the ground, would take burrow, mouse nest in the ground." Maybe, just maybe this is a weird-- I went up there. No, no, no. Listeners, it's not a weird situation. It was yellowjackets coming out of the ground. I elected not to tell her. I tried to kill them, and then that's a headache.

Sometimes those nests can be 2, 3 feet down. You spray, spray, spray. Right now some of you're cringing because I'm not a licensed applicator. I'm a good samaritan, so you do the best you can with stuff you buy from the big box stores and then you really hope it goes away. Then she calls up and says, "They're back." You know they never really went away. The thing that's frightening to me is how much of a work responsibility I take on to help neighbor, family, friends with bees that are not my bees. That's the headache. That's what goes wrong.

I need to tell you that sometimes you're out of your element because a neighbor asked me to come take down a hornet's nest. Those things are always absolutely amazing. Our neighbors had cut grass the entire summer, and then just about the time that leaves were getting to fall, they realized that they had been going under a really large, pretty hornet's nest. Of course, "Call Jim. He's a beekeeper."

I need to tell you truthfully, listeners, I know almost nothing about hornets. I went up there, went up a ladder at night. I had my wife hold a light, my long-suffering wife, who's always my indentured associate, and then when I got up to the nest, I had her turn the light off, and my goal was to put a heavy black garbage bag around the nest and firmly hold it, and then with a twig clipper clip the limb.

I did that, and I am a beekeeper, and I've kept bees for years and years and years, and I did have on my bee gear, and I had on bee gloves, and I don't want to sound sappy, but when you've got a limb with a hornet's nest the size of a basketball at night in the dark and that whole limb is vibrating with a sense of electrical charge with all those insects in there ready to come for you, that's not beekeeping that I'm readily familiar with. I'm thinking, "I feel like a brand new beekeeper. This is very frightening."

While I was holding onto that limb and having these thoughts in the dark, I missed the bottom step and I fell right flat off my back. As I was falling and smashing and making animal sounds and grunts, when I hit the ground my foremost thought was, "Do not release that hand around that limb," because I did know that there would be several thousand irate hornets the next day all around that site where the nest was if they got out of that bag.

I held onto it, I got up, put the bag in the freezer, I killed those insects for no other reason than my neighbors were fearful. They had coexisted with them all summer. I'm not a rational fellow. I would've cut the grass quickly, maybe after dark or something, but I would've just tried to coexist with them. How many of these stories you want? They go on and on and on. They take a lot of time. They do cause you to grow in areas that you would not otherwise have grown into, but they're just not my bees, listeners.

I respect yellowjackets. I respect hornets and wasps. I don't really know how to answer the neighbors when they say, "What good are yellowjackets?" See, they're always asking that. From a human perspective, they're actually saying, "What good are yellowjackets to me?" They need to hear their pollinators or they need to hear something, but in reality, yellowjackets have no obligation to humans. Yellowjackets are responsible for their own species.

The fact that they eat other insects as a protein source, you can put that in the positive column, but most of the time, regular people, normal people who don't particularly like being around bees and being stung don't see these stinging insects as a positive thing, and it is okay to kill them. No sense of pollination, no sense of ecological balance, nothing. They just don't want them. I have an allergy. If I get stung, I have to take Benadryl and go straight to the doctor. Maybe there's all that too. I don't know. There's that.

It's going to come your way. If you keep honey bees long enough, you will have to address issues about bees that are not your bees. You probably wouldn't enjoy doing it, but acquaint yourself a little bit with each other bee species so you can explain, talk, communicate, maybe get out of the job, but on those occasions, you can't, do the best job you can, is all for a good neighborhood cause. Let's take a break and hear from our sponsors. When we come back, I'm going to change the subject. I'm going to wait and leave you in suspense.

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Jim: Occasionally you guys write me. I just did a presentation, a segment a few weeks ago on irate bees and I appreciate the caller checking in with a long, nice message that they had exactly the same thing. They had bees that they couldn't control, they were concerned about it. Was this something they were doing wrong? It was helpful, they said, and it's helpful to me too to hear from someone that this particular topic was meaningful.

Just as I had to, there's nothing that you can really do. I've had some health issues in my family and while I was dealing with it, a neighbor came over and cut all my grass. On one hand, I deeply appreciated that. On the other hand, I just cringed because I got the bee veils, I know where the bee veils are and all that separates him on that mower from my beehives is just a 6-foot stockade fence. I was just cringing when he did that, but apparently nothing happened. I got out of that all right.

To the listener who wrote me saying they had a similar problem with your unreasonable honey bees, thank you for doing that. We could commiserate with each other. I've got ugly bees, you've got ugly bees, we're not doing anything wrong, it's just bees that are not suited for human temperament. Thank you for writing. Mark wrote quite a while ago and said he had a half a jam jar filled with propolis, raw propolis. What should he do with it? What could he do with it? Had no idea.

This is a little bit like my discussion in the first segment. By saying this like this to a diverse number of people, I'll probably offend someone who has a different attitude toward propolis, but it's my sense that try as it might, propolis has just never been able to make the big time. The big time in beekeeping is pollination and honey production, and then an afterthought on pollination and honey production is stinging and defense against stings.

Somewhere down the list is propolis. I don't want to be sappy and I don't want to be silly, but propolis has never gotten its due. If we could have figured out something that was really beneficial, really positive for humans, or maybe our livestock, that propolis did, we would just be making this stuff by the bucketfuls now. It's just never come into its own. I think that that's shortsighted on our part. Bees clearly need and want propolis.

I need to tell you, and I probably said it in previous segments, bees don't collect propolis. They collect the resins from plant gums that they try to comprise back in their hives, so propolis in my area may not be the same exact configuration as propolis in your area. Mark, can I just cut right to the chase? I don't know what you can do with that propolis because I have my own collection of propolis. I call mine propolis balls.

When I scrape colonies and clean colonies up in the spring of the year and there's that nice, pretty, fresh propolis that's already coming out, I wad that stuff up and squeeze it into a ball with every intention of doing something with that at some other time. It always has that pleasant odor about it. I'm back to my sappy silly combat I made a bit ago, this product is underrated.

There's all kind of folklore and home remedies for tinctures and processes that can be made with propolis. Years and years ago from New Zealand, I had toothpaste that was made with propolis. I don't know what happened to it. I think I brushed my teeth one time with it. It was all right, but didn't catch on because who out there amongst you now has propolis toothpaste? It just keeps being there.

The bees really need it. The bees profit from having it. The bees are protected by it, it has multiple uses, maybe helps repel ants. Maybe it has some kind of antibiotic control mechanisms that keeps the colony healthy, it keeps the hive caulked up, it reinforces the hive, keeps out other pathological issues. It's very beneficial to the bees but we've just never really come with a use for it.

For many, many years-- I guess I'm still a woodworker, I just don't do it much anymore, but I've got it in my head still-- but when I was keen to do this years ago, I made a wood finish from propolis and from acetone, I think. I can't recall what carrier I used. Maybe it was just alcohol. I made a thin natural-colored varnish and I built a simple project. I don't remember what it was. It was just a simple quick project, sanded it down, made it ready to receive a finish, and then I coated that with my propolis resin finish.

As long as I can remember the finish stayed tacky. It was always sticky. I did something wrong. It needed a product I wasn't familiar with, maybe something like a Japan Drier, but I was amused that I made this simple project, made a finish for it. At the time I was also using milk paint and other things that made sense at the time, but I did not make the natural varnish thing work out. There's that. I tried that.

I've noticed that bees will repurpose propolis. I've got some tops out there, some hive tops that just have big splotches of propolis on them. It's a perfect time when the bees are collecting that to photograph them because they're right there and you can see these poor bees who been assigned one of the worst jobs in the hive other than stinging me because this stuff is sticky, it's hard to handle, when they get back to the colony with this load of resin, if the day is cooled down, maybe the house bees can't unload them, so they have to wait till the next day, warm up in the sun, and let that resin load soften up before they can be unloaded. Then right away is put somewhere in the hive.

I need to stop. I didn't mean to talk the entire time on this propolis thing. When you crack that colony open, the bees had worked so hard to seal that up and then we come along and just crack it open with our hive tools and whatever, and you scrape it down, and then all that work, all that tugging and pulling, all that resin collecting, all that blending and mixing is to be done again if the bees can do it because once the season passes, they don't always have the resources that they need to make propolis back in the hive.

All this to say, Mark, I would just keep saving it. One day some urge will come across you, you'll come up with some reason for it. I've often thought that it could be some kind of odorant. It just has a pleasant smell. After all this discussion, I can't really tell you a good use that I have for propolis. The bees have multiple uses for it. As much as possible, I'll leave it for them.

I had a fellow who wrote me and said that regarding my deep super weight concerns-- I have complained and complained and complained about how I've aged and how heavy a deep full of honey has become. Why don't you use lesser boxes? Because I have the deeps, listeners. I've got hundreds and hundreds of deeps that I inherited from my dad's bee supply inventory. Being a frugal fellow, I just keep using deeps.

Why don't you cut them down? I could cut them down, and I have cut them down. It makes the handholds not quite in the right place. It's all right. It works okay. It's just one more thing to do to cut them down and I've got to tell you that they're still heavy. Even cut down to Illinois depth or six and five, whatever you call it, that's still a heavy box to pick up for a man my age. I just never cut them down all that much.

He was saying, "Cut them down. Cut them down to a medium, just like I said." Kim and I had talked in the old days, and Kim was a big eight-frame guy. Kim talked about the light weight of eight-frame supers for hours and I never picked up that he was talking about medium depth. That he wasn't talking about deep frames. That really was a small beehive and a lighter beehive. Cutting them down, I've just never done that. I have been in classes. I've seen it done. I've seen deeps cut down after they were assembled using carbide-tipped blades and boy, you had shrapnel flying all over when that saw would hit one of those nails and rip it out.

He was also saying, this friend, he was writing to me, he said, "Just leave the frames out and add partitions inside. Maybe fill it with insulation and then put a plywood veneer over it." All those things would work and they would lighten the deeps. I need to lower my voice almost. You know what I've worked out? I'll just get my grandson who thinks he wants to be a beekeeper. He's a 17, 18-year-old young buck, football player, strong guy. It's just easier to get him to come help me.

That whole business about taking out individual frames, that really sells good and reads good in the books, but in reality, when you've got a huge box of bees and you've got a colony that's five deeps tall and you've taken out one frame at the time, that's going to be miserable. That's going to be miserable. Hey, I enjoy talking with you when you write me. I want to tell you that I don't always answer. I'm a one-man band. If I've not answered a question you've had, if I didn't respond, I deeply apologize.

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I will always try, but I know that I've missed some of you. Some of you have taken master beekeeper exams and had questions. Please know I'm not ignoring you. I'm not dissing you. I just can't get to everything that needs to be done. Write me. I'll try to write you back. We do the best we can. I really enjoy interacting with you. I'll be here again next week with something else about beekeeping. Thank you and bye-bye.

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