Plain Talk: Tew Bee Tales (223)

Episode 223 – Plain Talk: Tew Bee Tales

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Jim Tew: Hi, listeners, here at Honey Bee Obscura Podcast, for those of you who are old enough, do you remember when you used to go to the drive-in theater and there would be a cartoon after the movie, or a cartoon before the movie, and announcements of the upcoming shows and whatever? Then on occasion, let's push it, let's push it harder. To all you people who are old enough, remember that on special occasions, there was just an entire show of cartoons, Tom and Jerry and Donald Duck, just one after the other, one after the other, one after the other for an hour and a half or two hours. Oh, my stars, I did love that. It was just like eating straight sugar.

To an extent, listeners, that's what I'm doing today. I'm just eating sugar and I'm offering to let you eat sugar with me. I have told these stories over and over again. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I guess I could say they're Jim Tew classics, because I'm just not young enough to go out and generate new episodes like this anymore, I don't think. Here they are, some of my beekeeping event classics that I have told time and time again. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura where I normally try to talk about all things plain-talk beekeeping, but honestly, today I'm taking a break and I'm doing it primarily for me, and I'm inviting you to go along.

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.

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Jim: How many times have I and others said that at its core value, beekeeping is supposed to be enjoyable, rewarding, fulfilling? Then how many times have I presented segments to you and written articles about the things that blow up? I had a good friend one time tell me, "Jim, you really spend a lot of time writing about dark and depressing subjects, and why do you do that?" Then says, "I do it because I tend to talk and write about things that don't work so we can make them work, or we can improve our procedures and get things done better."

I also feel like to say, look at me, look at me, I've made all this honey, or I've stopped all these swarms. That's kind of pompous. It's just more my style to try to fix things and keep things working than it is to enjoy and reflect on the things that are perking along nicely. These stories that I'm about to give you, these episodes, these beekeeping life's events, were not planned. I didn't see them coming. They just happened. They pertain to bees, and they were out of my control.

Now here's a caveat. A lot of you have heard these over and over again, because these stories are long in the tooth. They have some age on them. I know there's some of you who are new to beekeeping and are new to me who've never heard these things, and they're not anything great. They're just my experiences, my admissions, my confessions. If you've heard them before, compare them to this version and see if my recitation of the event is the way you remember it, because I've been told that each time you pull a memory out and use it and put it back, you put it back slightly changed, and then the next time you pull that memory out, you pull out the changed version, and over time, your story changes, so check me out on this, listeners.

All right, checking the winterkill bees. Let's start all those years ago. You had to be there. That always helps, but at least you're all beekeepers. I just moved to Ohio hardly six to nine months before, and I was honored to be asked to participate in the Ohio State Beekeepers Association annual meeting somewhere over in Ashland, Ohio, about 45 to 50 miles from here. They asked me, because I was young and could work, to bring three beehives along so they could have an open hive demonstration. On that cold, brisk morning, I had a few students with me, I had a university van, and I had an open trailer behind that van.

I'm from the Deep South. Every week, somebody asks about my accent. Being from the Deep South, I'm not familiar with deep cold. On that morning, it was really brisk. It was something like 24, 25 degrees. I might add that in the past, I'd screwed up checking to see the weight of colonies, only to find out later that they were frozen down, and they weren't nearly as heavy as I thought. That morning is frigid, cold, where your breath vapor hangs in the air. I had those students pick out three fairly nice colonies in two deeps in a super that had wintered well. I got to tell you, this story is so old, it's pre-Varroa. They wintered well. They looked good.

Now with me being an authority and knower of all things beekeeping, I had them just quietly pick those colonies up and put them on that open trailer. Then with an old style ratchet strap that didn't really ratchet at all, we lashed them down as best we could on the front of that trailer, and then off we did go. The entire way over there, I fretted, wondering if I was going to freeze those bees to death on that open trailer on that cold morning with that horrific wind chill.

I got to the meeting, and my friend met me there. I'll use his name. It was Malcolm Sanford. He was, at the time, the extension specialist here at Ohio State. He later spent most of his career down at the University of Florida. All the others of us now, he's long retired, but he's still here talking about bees occasionally. He came out to help me. Beekeepers, you know the drill. You lean over, and you snatch out that grass that we used to close that entrance, and you get back because the bees are going to come boiling out. That was my expectation. I leaned over, and I snatched out the grass with Malcolm standing close by. Nothing happened. Not a bee came out.

I thought, they stayed in a hard cluster, I hope they warm up. At that point, you have something in your brain that's not yet an idea, but it's an embryonic notion that maybe it's going to grow into an idea. That's strange. I went to the second one with everybody standing around and snatched out the second wad of grass clipping coverings, and nothing happened. No bees there. By then, the idea is really forming itself. I killed them from freezing them. By then, I just whimsically went over to the third one, now knowing what to expect, and opened that one up, and too there, nothing came out.

As I recall, that was the one that I said, something's not right. If they're in a cluster, maybe they'll come roaring out from the top. I opened them up to find a mass of soaking wet, overheated bees that were dead. I was 180 degrees wrong. I didn't freeze them to death. I took those nice, full, pre-Varroa, big bee colonies, stuffed grass in the entrance, closed them up, bounced them on a trailer for about 30 miles, set them off, and that was enough for me to kill them hammer dead from overheating suffocation, from the excitation of it.

In my mind, as I remember this, because it was soon there was going to be an open hive demonstration in the morning, coming across the field there like beekeeping zombies, there came those people who were going to come out to see an open hive demonstration and check out the right way to do it, as being shown by Ohio State University beekeeping specialist. We've got about a minute and a half before those people are here and gather around us. I looked at Malcolm. He looked at me. These bees are dead. There will be no open hive demonstration of these bees.

We put our heads together and on the spot, on the spur, decided that we would discuss winterkill bees. Those people came up and looked at them. We discussed winterkill bees. The honey positioning was not quite right. Maybe, I don't know. This is a real misfortune. It was made up on the spot. The only thing that I would point out as I end this story was that there were accomplished beekeepers standing around the periphery looking and then looking at each other, and then talking amongst themselves, and then looking again, and I thought, they're going to say something. They're going to say something. They didn't.

Listeners, the first time I took bees to an Ohio State beekeepers meeting, I killed every one of them accidentally. Then we had to scramble to come up with some on-the-spot outdoor demonstration with three hives of dead bees. I hope you see something in that. Is there humor in it or sadness? At times, it's humorous. At times, it's frightening. Every time since then, when I've closed up bees, even for a short distance, I have panicked. I give abundant ventilation. I will whimsically take a water hose and hose them down along the way because I know how fast they can die.

Episode number two, the bee up my nose. I have told this story time and time again. It happened accidentally. It happened whimsically. I was still at the University of Maryland as a young graduate student training under Dr. Dewey Caron. I was in the heyday of my educational life. Everything that I did related to bees. Every day, I knew something more and different about bees. I became full of myself. I was a bee guy.

On a Friday afternoon, right there in University of Maryland, right off of Route 1, heavy traffic, heavy traffic all the time. I can't imagine what it's like now. I left the apiary building there on the campus at the University of Maryland to head home to start my big weekend, whatever it was. I ran right headlong into a young woman with a little curly-headed girl in tow. She says, "Oh, great. Oh, great. We caught you here in time. I'd like for little Susie to look at the bees so she understands how good bees are."

I said, "Oh, wow. Friday afternoon, 5:30, headed home. Got a lot of smoker. Got to get out veils. This is going to take 35, 40 minutes. Why don't we do this next week when we got more time?" The mother was immediately crestfallen. She doesn't have much time off work. It was a difficult situation to get the little kid and herself there, really hoping that we could do something just to justify the trip. I'm a softy. Just like before, when I was standing by three dead beehives, my brain scrambled, and I came up with a plan. After we hear from our sponsor, I will tell you what this cockamamie plan was.

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Jim: Listeners, my harebrained plan was to use a-- I suspect it was a five-frame nuc. Could have been a four-frame. It was deep. That's irrelevant. It was either a four or a five-frame deep nuc that I had sitting right by the apiary step door that I'd been using to raise queens, and it had a new queen in it. I thought, here's my plan. I will just reach back into the bee lab. Right there is my smoker and my veil. I will put my veil on this little girl, and I can very nearly tie my veil strings around that little girl's ankles. Then I'll admonish the mom to step back.

Then I, with no smoke, I will be calm. I'll be gentle. I will move slowly. I won't breathe on the bees. There's a bit of a nectar flow on. I can get in and out without smoke. I can show this little girl bees, and I can send this couple on their way. I did all of that. Flatboard cover. I snapped it off. I pried gently. Propolis was not really brittle, it was still sticky and pliable. I fairly easily pulled out a frame.

I held it before the highly impressed little girl. The mother was just reveling in this educational moment. I showed her drones. This is a boy bee. Most of these are girl bees. They're all sisters. I know you probably want to see the mom bee. As I recall, she has a red dot on her. Let's look for her. She's not on this frame. This is a honeycomb. She's not on this frame. Let's look on the next one.

Using exactly the same procedure that I've just used here, I pried the second frame out, and I gently pulled it out. As I recall, because from here things become a blur, as I lifted that frame up to look for the queen, without any notice, I suddenly had a bee right up, my right nostril, inside my nose. Do I need to tell you that I knew her intent was to sting me? Got a little girl in front of me with nothing but a veil on for protective gear. I'm holding a frame full of bees. I've got the mother behind me checking everything out, and I've got a bee up my nose.

You have to prioritize the bee. I didn't drop the frame. I got it back in the box expeditiously. I didn't know, listeners, that when you are stung up the nose, somehow it knocks your knees out of gear, because I've dropped to my knees beside that nuc to get that bee out of my nose. It was just excruciatingly, blindfully painful. I was crying. As I pulled that bee out of my nose, I looked up and I was at eye level with that little girl, and we made eye contact. She had to watch me pull that huge thing out of my nose while I cried. I could not stop crying.

Now, is there another chapter to this? Yes, there is. With what minuscule brain power I had left, I could hear that mother in the background saying, "Are you okay? Are you okay? Is my little daughter okay?" Whatever her name was. I wanted to shout back, "No, I'm not okay."

I'm just on the cusp of being out of control here. I reassured her at some point that I was okay. I explained that the demonstration was over. With a bright red puffy nose and tear-filled eyes, I explained to them that that was it for the day, that I'd taken a sting near my nose, and it was-- yes, it's true. Some stings can be painful. Other stings, not so much so. It took maybe 5, 10 years, maybe longer before one day I had the clear thought that that woman was near my age. Wherever she is now, she's near my age, and that little girl is in her 50s. I'm comfortable surmising that wherever those two people are, due to my exhibit that day, they are not beekeepers. I learned a lot from that. Go into a colony prepared, or don't go into it.

An episode long ago, I had a lot of international students for a while. They came from all over the world. I had a unique program for a while where I trained Burman, or Myanmar, military officers, the beauty and the fundamentals of beekeeping. It's a long story that I don't have the time to go into now, but I thought it was a very interesting part of my life. These guys are all combat veterans. Many of them have been wounded. They had seen the worst of the worst. Being around bees, piece of cake. As it would happen, I saw this unfold and really had no idea what to do.

If you're so inclined and you got nothing else to do, tell me what you would have done. I happened to turn toward one of these highly skilled, trained, stoic officers at the moment that a bee landed on his ear and then ran right inside that man's head. Just poof. The bee's gone. She went right in his head. Have any of you ever seen when a dog gets a bee stuck in its fur somewhere on the nape of its neck and how the dog can just go into gyrations to get that bee to do what it takes, running, jumping, biting, snapping, twisting? That's exactly what that man did.

Every sense of decorum, every sense of stoicness is out the window. That guy went crazy. He was shaking his head, banging his head from side to side, yelling in his native language. Who only knows what the man was saying other than his friends there. We were all stunned that this guy was having to go through it. I was supposed to have a suggestion for what would happen. Short of having forceps, which I didn't have, to pull that bee somewhere in the man's head, I was thinking this may require a trip to a medically trained person to get this thing out.

This is what I did. I put him in the back of my truck that had a camper cap on it. It was reasonably dark, not pitch, but reasonably dark, and I had him put his ear against the window, more or less, back window of my truck cap while he was just beside himself. I did that, and listeners, don't you know that suddenly that bee appeared, came out and sat on his ear for just a second, and then stung him right there at the opening of his ear canal.

At least the bee was out. What a moment that was. What a quick scan of all of my beekeeping experience, what to do if suddenly a friend I'm with has a bee deep inside their head, what am I going to do? That worked that time. I've never had it happen since. I really hope I never do. Those are, can I say, interesting memories? I don't think I can say they're pleasant memories, but it personally helps me just to reflect and to look back on all the ups and the downs, and then to review what happened, what I did, what I should have done, what I would do now, if anything, differently.

I hope this wasn't a waste of your time. I've enjoyed the reminiscing of it. I know I've told these stories before, but I'm just trying to re-farm the group for any of you there who have not heard these things before, and be forewarned, this is not all of them. Maybe some other time later, we'll have another cartoon feature segment of beekeeping events that blew up. I deeply appreciate you listening to me. I'm Jim, telling you bye. I'll talk to you again sometime next week. Bye-bye.

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