Plain Talk: The Evolution of Beekeeping (227)

Episode 227 – Plain Talk: The Evolution of Beekeeping

Jim Tew: Hey, Honey Bee Obscura podcast listeners, it's that time of the week. I'm Jim, and I'm here to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping, and what's on my mind today is traditional beekeeping. I've got a reason for this. Just give me a minute to get to it. I'm rambling some, but I'm trying to get to a point.

In the eighth grade, and what was then called junior high school, I took a shop class. Most of the other fellows in the class made ashtrays, but I was one of those guys who actually tried to build something, and I was completely enamored with the class. I had had an interest in woodworking before that, and indeed, when Dad bought a single speed craftsman saber saw, I thought we had just been elevated to a fully equipped shop because everything else was just simple hand tools.

I just loved that class. I built bookcases. I built nightside stands. I really knocked things out, and I pursued that in high school, took other more advanced shop classes, and then as my life progressed, I built a wood shop. I've got it right now, fully equipped, nice shop, ready to go. Problem is, like beekeeping, no one, not a single soul, no one in my family has any interest in woodworking, and here I am with a lifelong collection of tools that I'll just have to disperse here in the next few years.

Would you have called me a traditional woodworker? I built nightside stands. I built everything I could, birdhouses. I repaired things, and I did most of it with old-fashioned Stanley hand tools and hand planes from years ago. Why would it not surprise you that I've got traditional beekeeping on my mind? I'd love to talk to you about that just for a few minutes. I'm Jim Tew. I'm here at Honey Bee Obscura where we come to you once a week to talk about something to do directly or indirectly 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: Now, listeners, I need to clear something up right away. I was a good woodworker, and I built furniture, but I never built sophisticated furniture. I built arts and crafts and shaker style and early American, but I didn't do French Provincial and some of the other more ornate pieces. I was not qualified to do that. I really had a great time doing it.

For a while, I was just a woodworking nut guy. Somewhere in those years, back at Auburn University, I stumbled into a bee class. I literally stumbled into the class. Maybe I'll tell that story again some other time. I remember thinking immediately as I was introduced over the period of the first class, "Hey, I can build all this stuff."

I had an uncle who was in bees already, and he was "a traditional beekeeper". He was helping me get started. I was deciding that I can build all this stuff, and indeed, I could. Even at the time, I thought, "This is going to be tedious stuff to build." I calculated one time, I forget now, there's 14 or 15 cuts that you have to make to build a common wood frame. It was just mind-numbingly tedious.

My early genesis for having an interest in bees was that I could build so much of the equipment myself. Now I need to really rush up the years because the years passed and I built up a lot of equipment. Listeners, do you know that not a single piece of my old equipment remains? It has about a seven-year lifespan, and that equipment did what equipment does. It went away. Out of all the boxes and lids and frames that I built, not a single piece survives to this day.

I built those pieces according to what I am temporarily calling traditional beekeeping. There were wood frames, standard boxes, improvised hand holes on the sides, and the bees were fine in that box. I got such personal satisfaction from actually building the box that the bees were living in. Then later on, when I began to raise queens, there was just no more fulfillment to be had. Not only had I built the domicile the bees were living in, I had a direct hand in producing the queen that was heading this colony. You could not have been any more of a bee herdsman than what I was.

It still excites me a bit to think about the pleasure, the fulfillment, the satisfaction that I had in being a traditional beekeeper. I'll talk more about it in a minute, but we wired our frames. I'll talk about this in a minute too. We put in eyelets before we wired those frames. It was something you did in the off months. It was a routine lecture topic that that's what you should be doing all winter long is assembling your equipment and wiring your frames and embedding the foundation and get all this done. That was the correct, accepted way to do it.

Then more and more, I watched other kinds of foundation come in. A company named ADAT manufactured a plastic center foundation. Other companies manufactured support pins. Instead of wiring, you clipped the support pins through the end bar holes and it held the foundation in place. What had been the only way that was wiring and embedding foundation began to drift toward alternatives. One of the first, as I said, was this plastic center foundation.

Then 40, 35 years ago, people went crazy trying to make artificial combs. All you do is just open this box, put the frame in, it's all plastic and the bees fill it. Somewhere along the way, there began to be these foundation inserts. I don't remember the first ones, but those foundation inserts were so simple to do. All you had to do was just pop it into place, clip, clip snap, snap, and it was in. For those of us who had wired frames by the thousands, this was really something neat to do. What happened? Let's hear from our sponsor. When we come back, I'll tell you how this evolved.

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Jim: Be patient with me. After you've gone through the repetitious wiring, working, nailing, gluing, doing all that kind of thing, for hours on end, you have to realize, beekeepers, that that is not beekeeping. That's a kind of equipment assembly. It's a woodworking project. You need hammers, and you need a dimension a quarter of nails, and you needed to nail through the end bar into the top bar so that the top bar wouldn't snap off when you pulled it out. You needed to wire it just right. It was a lot of work. These foundation inserts, as they evolved, really became the way to go.

What happened to traditional beekeeping, listeners? Is traditional beekeeping, wiring frames, and installing eyelets, and embedding the foundation, or is traditional beekeeping a moving target? Is traditional beekeeping now primarily using single-component plastic frames, or at the very least, buying your frames already assembled and then popping in a foundation insert and dropping it in the beehives?

When I talk to you now, there's more than one of me here talking. One of me is thinking, "I got a swarm. I got a swarm. I got to go. I got to get it. I don't have equipment ready. I'll just pop in these inserts and I'll get these six frames ready and put it in that nuke and I'll have that swarm." In the old days, I would have said, "Oh my stars, I've got to go assemble frames. Nail, nail, nail. I've got to wire these frames. I got to put eyelets."It would take so much longer.

One of me says the convenience was worth something. The other one of me says, "Nobody asked the bees. The bees have never been crazy about this plastic foundation and this plastic frames that we're using. They will use them. We do know ways to coerce the bees into building combs on there and keeping combs looking the way we want them to look."

Is that now traditional beekeeping? Was traditional beekeeping when we just used a foundation strip and the top bar to give the bees a guide to build on? Our listeners, was traditional beekeeping when we didn't use foundation at all? We just used a bevel top bar so that when you looked up at the 10 frames inside the colony, all you saw were leading edges, and it was just easier for the bees to attach to those leading edges? Why did we get away from that? It was natural comb.

We got away from that because those frames would blow up in an extractor, and we didn't want that to happen. We began to work those traditional beekeepers who just used leading edge frames with no foundations begin to evolve to beekeepers who would use a hand mold and in their own shop with equipment they bought from bee supply companies, make their own sheet foundation, and then they would cut strips of that about an inch and a half, two inches wide, and then use these starter strips for the bees to build on, and then someone said, "Let's just use a full sheet. That way, you get no drone brood and you don't get distorted comb down lower, so let's use an entire sheet of foundation."

Then other beekeepers must have thought, "Well, that won't go through the extractor. What if we put wires in it?" I wonder what else was tried. I don't know any other thing that was ever tried other than wires, but they put the wires in and then you would electrically embed those wires or you would use a spur wire embedder to press the wire into the wax real quickly, real quickly. If there's not a good nectar flow on, strange things could happen at that point. The bees would just eat that foundation up.

Some beekeepers thought that they were trying to get that wire out. Other beekeepers thought, and I lean more toward them, that the bees were using the wax somewhere else on the comb, that they needed beeswax to finish cappings or to bell cell somewhere else, so they tore down my wax foundation. Enough of that, there were quirks about this stage of what I'm calling now traditional beekeeping, where we embedded and used the wires.

Where all this is going is that I recently wrote an article in the American Bee Journal, and I was lamenting the passing of wired foundation with beeswax combs. I have received enough responses to say that I touched a nerve. There's a lot of you out there who are still practicing, and may I quote, "traditional beekeeping". There's a lot of you out there who are still going through the process of installing eyelets.

Again, real quickly, listeners, when I first started keeping bees, the eyelets were made of brass. Now they're made of aluminum. After you pushed in thousands of eyelets, the palm of your right hand, in my case, was so sore from using this ice pick eyelet inserter or eyelet punch, that you could cause your hands to begin to hurt. Then you had to wire it.

Then there were beekeepers who thought that you had to almost bow the end bars in and have these wires violin tight. No, you didn't. You just wanted them taunt, but not particularly tight. There were ways to pull the wire through to tense it and then to nail it off so that it maintained its tension. Then you dropped in the sheet of foundation that probably by then had factory-installed vertical wires.

Listeners, this stuff is all over the web. If you want to go backwards and to the way beekeeping was done in 1957, you can still do it. You can go backwards. It's still here. Now, when I say backwards, I don't mean that to be a derogatory thing. There are those of you, and I'm not in the group, but I'm barely nearly in the group who thinks, how much more plastic can we put in a beehive? I guess it's endless. There are beehives now that are almost all plastic. Plastic just consumes beekeeping now. So much of our parts are made of plastic, right down to our extractor tanks, in many cases.

The whole point is I used to be a traditional woodworker. I don't know that I am now. I'm not really much of a woodworker at all, but with all the laser devices that are out and the gadgetry and the tools, my woodshop is definitely dated. It basically sputtered to a halt somewhere around 1990. I can't say that I'm a modern woodworker, but I know a lot of the old ways.

Secondly, I used to be, and I trained to be, and I learned traditional beekeeping that was traditional at the moment. It wasn't the earlier version of traditional beekeeping where you made your own foundation or even the earlier traditional beekeeping procedure of not using foundation at all. Now I am a "modern beekeeper" because for the last 10 years, I've been using these foundation inserts.

As I snap those things in, I wonder, how much does it matter that that foundation insert is something 10 to 12 times thicker than a natural comb midrib? What does that mean for wintering behavior? When the bees are all trying to cluster up head first in the cells and generate heat, does that real thick central midrib matter when the natural comb would have had just a click away from having no midrib at all, it would have been so thin?

Then there's all the concept of microplastics and what's going on and how much plastic we are unintentionally consuming. I don't know what it means to have that in there, but know this, there's a meaningful group of you who are still doing it in the most recent traditional way. You're going through the whole process of wiring and embedding. I must have received 20 letters. I had people asking me not to give up on wired embedded foundation, that it was still what the bees like the best, and it still gave a comb that would withstand the rigors of the extractor. For this moment, all the components are still there.

One of the oddest things, Walmart seemingly has a wire embedder for beekeeping that's cheap. Most of the embedders made by the traditional bee companies are the same model that have been manufactured for decades, and they're $75 to $80. I have no idea why Walmart has a wire embedders. Check it out. See if I'm wrong on that. Maybe it's for something else. I was tempted to buy it just to see what it looked like.

There's a whole group of you that absolutely loves the most recent traditional way. You have not readily, eagerly embraced the modern uses of plastic foundation and whatever. I bring all this up because if you slept through comb honey production using basswood boxes, you missed your window. That whole technology is now essentially gone. There may be one company still manufacturing scalloped, beeway, basswood boxes.

I know, listeners, I know that these things, these products can drop from the catalog and be gone forever. I saw it happen with comb honey techniques as we all went to plastic devices and clamshell packs and whatever, and we stopped using the traditional basswood boxes. I know that if enough of you don't buy the old style foundation, it too will pass into oblivion. This is what I've told you. There have always been evolving techniques for putting in some comb guide and our frames all the way from using nothing up to the modern-day procedure for using a single-component frame. Everything in the middle is still possible at this time.

If you want the nostalgia, if you want the sense of everything in your hive being natural, then use beeswax foundation with wire supports to give the comb strength when it's being processed. If you are concerned about speed, knocking things out, getting things done, moving on to the next beekeeping issue, then go the fast way. Use foundation inserts. Each one, each technique will push you down a slightly different beekeeping path. All of those paths end up towards successful beekeeping. Do what you think is best for you.

Right now, the products are available and you can explore. It just makes beekeeping more diverse and enjoyable. I always enjoy talking to you. The time goes by so fast. Thanks for listening to me. This is Jim. Until we can talk again next week. Bye-bye.

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