Plain Talk: Plastic in Beekeeping (216)

Episode 216 – Plain Talk: Plastic in Beekeeping

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners ere at Honey Bee Obscura Podcast, it's Jim back for a weekly discussion of something pertaining pretty much to plain talk beekeeping. I'm doing a dangerous thing this week. I'm just talking to you. I got some notes. I got some thoughts. What I don't have is a lot of organized ideas because there really is no answer to my interest today in talking to you about plastics and beekeeping.

Not exactly a hot topic because so much of beekeeping equipment and devices are now made from plastic. I don't want to live in the past so much, but I want to tell you that I knew beekeeping when there was almost nothing plastic in it. I've seen the transition. I want to spend my time today talking to you about that transition and not that I have any deep thoughts on it, but just my perceptions of where we were and where we are.

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Intro: 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: Listeners, I got a note, an email note last week. I need to respond to it. It's just one of those things that I have not gotten to. The writer said that in my articles, I refer to my age quite often. He's right. I do. Actually, I'm 77 in July. He was 81. I guess I talk about my age because your age directly determines the type of beekeeping and beekeeper you will be. At the hobby and satellite level, commercial world's totally different. My age comes up now because when I began beekeeping in 1971, '72, I don't really remember now, there was nothing plastic.

There was nothing plastic at all. I realized, looking back on it, that I began to keep bees just at the birth of the plasticization - is that a word? - of the bee industry, of bee equipment, of the bee catalogs. The first thing that happened, one of the first things that happened was a Walter T. Kelly company manufactured an entire line of dense, heavy plastic equipment, everything except for the frames. Frames were always tough during my idea of the transition. There were all kinds of plastic frames that came and went. The reason is always the same, the bees just did not like that plastic equipment.

That's been rectified now. The bees seem to be, without any science to back it up, about as tolerant now of plastic as long as it's wax coated, as they are of just any other foundational material. I say that, I choke for words because most foundation now has some plastic component. Plastic foundation inserts are of course a thick, heavy plastic, but we went through a phase there with DuraGilt and DuraComb at the Dadant company that had plastic center sheets in the middle, and then they embossed a laminated window. They embossed beeswax films on both sides of that plastic.

It was plastic at its heart with that product. I don't think they manufacture that now. I should have checked the catalog before I started up, but be that as it may, plastic didn't just come storming in to beekeeping and just take over everything, but it came in on multiple fronts. For instance, I mentioned the Kelly company manufacturing a complete line of plastic to modify the frames, and then I got off the subject on the frames. It was heavy, dense plastic. One of the interesting things about the heavy, dense plastic of that day, and something that's a little bit comparable today, the plastic frames that we so commonly use, that does seem to thwart wax moths.

I don't mind any way that I can thwarting wax moths. They can destroy the comb, but once they get down to that hard plastic center, they seem to give up on it. They seem to back off. They can score and notch some and the old plastic equipment, but by and large, they just give up, and you've left with then a frame that's destroyed. Most of you, many of you, some of you try to reclaim that frame, re-coat it, reuse it again. That's something that Kim and I've talked about. I've talked about it, and I may talk about it again because if you like to recover, reclaim, and reuse, there are ways to do it, but now I'm off the subject.

That plastic equipment came in on multiple fronts. It didn't just come in with, here's an entire plastic line. What do you mean, Jim? This. I mean this. If you are a person who has dropped a 5-pound glass honey jar on a cement floor, then you know the pain of hearing that jar hit the floor. If you spill honey today, and spill it, runs over a 5-gallon plastic can, you can probably get that honey off the floor and at least feed it back to the bees. When that accident happened that I've just described where those glass containers hit the floor full of honey, then you've got that sticky mess that's permeated with glass shards.

You had to be particularly careful picking it up. You had to really clean the floor, because the glass shard would stick in the honey and stick to the floor. Then if it's in your house and you walk over it barefoot, there's a good chance you're going to get a nip from that. It was a pain and it happened all the time. Honey wasn't the only thing in glass jars. Everything else was in glass jars. Cooking oil, Clorox, bleach was in glass jars. I want to say that I can remember shampoo being in glass jars in the shower, in the bath area, but I'm not going to say put that out there.

I think that glass was used for head shampoo, but I can't give you an example. It wasn't just bees and honey. Everything was in glass. Plastic just didn't invade beekeeping. It invaded our lives. Those metal tins, I have talked about them and talked about them and talked about them, but there were 60-pound square tins that must have been about 20 inches tall that would hold 5 gallons of honey, and it had a almost inconsequential handle soldered to the top. It has special valves and gadgets that you could buy still, up until about 15 years ago for cans that no longer existed.

The advantage to these cans was that they really stacked tightly and neatly. When you used the round 5-gallon buckets that we're using now, you've always got that space in the middle, but they stacked better than the tins did. Those tins, listeners, if you just dozed off for a couple of months, boom, they were gone. No one ever thought about, no one ever wrote about, that I know of, no one ever discussed the demise of something that was as common as a 60-pound honey tin and how fast we all converted to plastic 5-gallon buckets. See, you couldn't get the top off those tins.

You just had about a 3-inch opening. Once the honey was crystallized or granulated inside there, it was basically done. You could heat the tins and get it out as best you could, but then any honey you put back in was going to be reinvigorated with condensation nuclei and things to go back in there. Once we saw a better idea, I suppose, we wildly embraced it. While I'm thinking about that, let's hear from someone who is in fact responsible for beekeeping supplies, both wooden and plastic.

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Jim: The plastic can takeover, 5-gallon bucket, was not surprising. I could see why that happened. Much better handle, much more comfortable handle, top having come off, easier to clean, reusable. There's no solder, none of that kind of thing from leaking tins. I can see why that went away. Listeners, one area of plastic invading beekeeping that was surprising to me was in the queen production area. If you go out now and you buy some of those plastic gadgets, you're buying third and fourth and fifth generation of plastic evolution. It was just common knowledge that those first plastic cell cups were not attractive to the north bees trying to initiate queen cells there.

I don't know anyone. In fact, that tornado that took out the building that I had there at Ohio State, I had the whole AI Root Company's original queen cup manufacturing device. It was a simple boring machine, boring meaning mind dead, boring not meaning drilling, that made about four or five queen cups at the time out of beeswax. The storm, of course, destroyed that and everything else. That was poetic. That machine was destroyed because you could still get beeswax, I think. I didn't check because the few queens I raise, I tend to use plastic now along with everyone else.

The plastic grafting needles, the plastic cages. I cut my teeth on the Benton three-hole wooden cage. Then there was the wood cage model from California. Those plastic cages now have just come in like gangbusters and taken over everything. For all those years, we all knew what the Benton three-hole cage was. It was common wooden queen cages. I don't know that a queen cage has summarily assumed supreme positioning now in this kind of thing. That was an area that I wasn't expecting to see so much plastic use.

Some of those earlier things that those devices that came along that you would confine the queen to the cage, and she would only lay on the cell basis that you could then subsequently convert to a cup that in theory the bees would work on. They did. Those devices now become really routine. I do feel fossil-esque, if that's a word. I feel like a fossil when I sit here and tell you that I can give you simple techniques for making a grafting bar for you dipping your own wax cell cups, because that's what we all used to do. Then when those cages and cups came out, there were all these speakers like me giving you the pros and cons.

The top edge on a natural wax cup is a lot thinner than the very thick edge on a plastic cup. The bees like that thin bees wax cup better. It took about two, six, seven minutes of dipping, dipping, dipping, dipping, dipping to make the wax cup. Otherwise you just pick up a handful of the plastic cups and go ahead. If you're raising hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of queens, you really like those plastic cups. I visited a queen production area up in the deep South in Alabama, I always say 100 years ago. Those guys had a stick, S-T-I-C-K they essentially built their empire around because that molding stick was the one they used to make all their queen cups.

Something about the cups that it made was the sweet spot. They signed that stick out almost like a piece of sacred equipment to do the wax dipping. Now I'm off the subject again. Who even knows where that company is or where that stick is. It was just about the size of your finger. That is what we used to use to make these queen cell cups. Most of you now would say, the plastic's a lot better. I really can't argue that it's not, the Benton three-hole cages. I've used plastic queen cages all the time of different models. Sometimes they're part of a unit, they're part of a contraption.

Honey harvesting? Oh, my stars. I never ever dreamed that there would be anything but stainless steel equipment. Again, in the dark ages before we almost had electricity when I was a young man, most of that old bee equipment you bought was galvanized. We'd only recently figured out that if it had lead solder as a welding agent to put those devices together, that lead solder was not really good stuff to have around honey. For the longest time, there was an epoxy product. If you wanted to buy one of those old extractors or old settling tanks, and you put this clear-coat epoxy on to trap that lead solder, if that's what it was, in fact, and could safely use that device.

Those old machines made in the '20s and '30s, if you had one right now, it would run just as good as it ever did. They were industrial age revolution-type equipment, bone-crushing heavy, motor sat on the floor. These were big units. To see all of that system made lightweight, easier to clean, profoundly easier to manufacture and maintain, to use more and more and more of that in a plastic format. I've written about and talked about an extractor I used for years that belonged to someone else, I found out late in life, but it was a galvanized tank extractor that we had coated, made by the Wapakoneta churn company in Wapakoneta, Ohio.

That thing, wherever it is, it's still cranking out honey right now with a metal gear drive on it. Guy o asked for it back after us using it, for 25 years, we had to give it back. I didn't see plastic barrels coming and the lightweight plastic extracting equipment. It's perfect. Because in the old days, when you had to buy something manufactured in a tin shop, it had to be more expensive because you almost had an artisan who was making this stuff. While on one hand, it may be cheaper, lighter, doesn't have the sense of forever in a day that other equipment had, it really allows more people not to have to invest so much money in buying the equipment.

In my youth, someone had an extractor, a club had a small extractor. Someone had it, three people would buy one together and keep it at one house. Those extractors were so demanding, so much a factor of cost. You may not own it outright, you may share it with someone else. Now most of us can go buy a plastic extractor that gets the job done for us well enough without having to go through all these hoops that we went through all those years ago. Another door, another area of invasion, another aspect of the plastic invasion was in the protected gear that we wear.

Now, hive 2s are still there. Yes, they are. Am I forgetting something? Has anyone manufactured a plastic hive 2? I don't think so. I'm old enough, again, to remember when window screening was used in the veil material. When you folded your veil up or when you sat on your veil on the car or something happened to it became crimped, that wire mesh bent in a permanent crimp. That's not the biggest deal. The biggest deal was that when you leaned over, working, working, working, perspiring, and you would sweat through that metal mesh, you just did it one time.

After three times of that, mesh would rust. Then the next time you handled it roughly, it would break out, it would dissolve, it would go away due to that small metal rusting. You never saw it, but I've seen this. People routinely running around with tape on their veils where they had to look around the tape spot to get just a few more hours, a few more trips out of that veil. Having that fiberglass netting and those veils is just straight from heaven. I sound like I'm selling veils. I'm not. That was a clear improvement, was having a plastic veil netting and probably having a plastic coarse zipper, and having Velcro, which is plastic, instead of trying to button or snap something.

All of those things are different. It seems like the plastic invasion has been now steady state for a while. This is just you and me. At this moment, you can totally disagree with me if you want to, and I would not be offended. It seems like that the plastic invasion has reached a steady state. There was a time when I thought we'd all be buying plastic hives, would it be gone? No, it seems like now that a plastic hive, either the expanded polystyrene or the other styles are just yet another type of equipment that you can get, 8 frame, 10 frame, or plastic hive bodies. It just seems to be an option that some people choose.

I have both. Some of the insulatory effects I like from the plastic equipment. Sometimes I don't care for the plastic. The follower boards gave me trouble, warping up and bending too much, but I'd probably figure out some way to make that work. Plastic's here, it's here in our lives. For the foreseeable future, it's here to stay. I'm just reminiscing, referring, storytelling about the days when we use metal and glass and cloth to get our bee work done. I'm happy telling you that plastic in many ways has made an improvement. I hope we can keep it environmentally sound and use it with respect. Thanks for letting me talk to you again. I enjoyed doing it. This is Jim telling you bye.

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