Plain Talk: The Psychology of Beekeepers (198)

Episode 198 – Plain Talk: The Psychology of Beekeepers

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Jim Tew: Listeners, thanks for coming back again this week. I'm considering taking a step here into a segment that's sticky, so I may or may not go through with it, but tell me what you think. I need your opinion. Our subject today is you and me. Why do we do this? Why did we start it? Why have we done it so long? How do we convince others that we're on the right path? All of these things grow through the years to define us as beekeepers.

To many people, a beekeeper is somebody that wears strange clothes, has that smoker thing, and goes out and opens beehives and faces danger right in the eye. Yet, within the group of beekeepers, you and I both know there's different types and styles of beekeepers, new, old, equipment dealers, development of products and procedures. A beekeeper is not a standard thing. As it were, we're all on this path, but the path is not just a single lane that goes off in different directions. Let me take a shot at it, see what you think. I'm Jim Tew, I'm here at Honey Bee Obscura, where once a week I try to talk about something to do with just plain talk 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: I look back at some of these segments, listeners, and I realize I talk about my age too long and a length of time in beekeeping, but it's just where I am. You beekeepers get to do it. They get to say, "I've only been keeping bees for, this is my first year, my second year, I've got two hives." They get to do it. Why can't you say this is my umpteenth year and I've tried everything I can think of through the years?

It seems to be a topic that comes up often. Why do I keep bees? Why have I done this? What's up with this? It takes years and years to become what I've named an ancient apiculturist, where you've seen things come, you've seen things go. I saw work with bees before Varroa, I worked with bees before Tracheal, none of this makes me special. it just makes me old. The question I'm trying to explore is why am I still here?

I used to be absolutely rabid about water skiing. You can't get me behind a boat on water skis now for any amount of money. I would break into four or five big pieces and sink like stones. I've said time and again, I've done some talks on it here on these segments that I've committed gigantic amounts of my life's energy to woodworking. Just across the way here, I've got a woodshop fully set up with everything that most woodworkers could want in a lifetime. You'd have to move the spiderwebs to get through the things that faded out.

There's all of these issues that come and go. I don't know why beekeeping is still here. You can begin to see stages that we go through. This is the part that I said could be dangerous in the introduction because I'm not some kind of psychologically trained person who's qualified to evaluate your personalities, for sure, and really not even evaluate my personality. When I read some of these stages, I realize that yes, I was in the thick of it.

I had an eccentric uncle. He got polio while he was in World War II. After the war was over and he came home, the VA trained him to do something that wouldn't require being highly mobile. They trained him to be a watch and clock repairman. I've got his jeweler's lathe and some of his things over in that shop I just told you about. What an eccentric guy he was. I'd like to spend a whole 20 minutes discussing him, but we can't do that. He got me into this. I fell into it at Auburn University.

My first class, I've talked about it time and again, was an accidental class that I signed up for just to be able to get my schedule worked out and get my life started for that particular semester. I never had any intention of staying in beekeeping. I entered what loosely could be referred to as one of the early phases of beekeeping. It's called cognitive preoccupation if I can just read this to you because this is not my work. The individual is constantly thinking about their passion, even when engaged in unrelated activities. Their thoughts may be dominated by strategies, techniques, experiences related to that passion, like hunting, woodworking, beekeeping.

This preoccupation often intrudes into the daily life, making it difficult for them to focus on other tasks or responsibilities. You can rest assured my wife's eyes would be rolling right now because she lived through it. I was finishing a master's degree on pesticides, controlling aphids on pecans. That was exciting work. I had no idea I was going to be a beekeeper, and I stumbled into that class and I became cognitively preoccupied with beekeeping to the extent that my major professor at the time said, "James, why don't you just go get a PhD in this if you're so crazy about this bee thing?"

That was my first phase, that was my first intensity that I went through. This intense focus allows one to exhibit an extraordinary level of attention to their chosen activity. This is painful now because my work here says that this focus can border on obsession, where the person invests significant amounts of time, energy, and finally, money, into honing their skills, acquiring knowledge, or engaging in the activity itself. That beautifully describes me.

I didn't mean to do all this academic work. What I wanted to do was to learn about bees, learn more about bees, and then learn even more and then keep learning. To do that, you just got deeper and deeper, or I did, into the academic world. The emotional investment is significant that one makes. There are stages of euphoria and fulfillment. All those years ago-- I need to do this again because it was a long time ago, all those years ago, when I grafted my first queen, my first larvae-- actually you transfer the larvae, you don't graft it, but let's don't get involved with semantics here. That cell took-- I even made the wax cups. I was off the charts ecstatic.

This was where I wanted to be in life. This is what I wanted to be doing. I fully remember the euphoria and the fulfillment. In some macabre way, I felt that I was a proud father that this queen, I knew you when you were just a two-day-old larvae, and look at you now, all mated and running your own household here inside this bee nest. There was so much fulfillment and satisfaction, so much a sense of achievement. It was really a nice feeling that I'm enjoying right now. Give me just a minute to get through this pleasant memory while we hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: It's not all roses, though, listeners, there are stages of anxiety. Some of the most anxious moments I've ever lived through was during the arrival of the mites, and at the same time, Africanized bees. It was a cloudy, dark time during beekeeping, and I had been well down the path toward being committed to this for my entire career, only to wonder if this whole thing was going to blow sky high with these Varroa mites and hearing the agony of commercial beekeepers with almost no way to control these mites.

It's possible in our passion for what we love the most to still feel great anxiety or irritability. The swarm got away. The swarm didn't stay. That sick feeling you get when you realize you really blew that. When you accidentally crush a queen putting a frame back in, there's that moment that there's just no words. There's no description. This is not a positive feeling. There are clear moments of anxiousness and anxiety. Listeners, I can't tell you how many times that an individual has told me, "I quit keeping those bees because those mites came in. I'm just not going to put up with that."

There are many occasions where our path to perfected beekeeping is truncated. We don't make it. I've talked to other people whose pathways was interrupted. They were out of bees for 5, 10, some number of years for whatever reason. They came back to beekeeping. These pathways, when you go through this, sometimes this anxiety and irritability can crash and burn. Sometimes your life changes.

One of the things that beekeepers go through frequently is a move toward perfectionalism. In my mind, and still to some extent in my mind, there is a perfect bee world where all the colonies are beautiful, all the brood patterns are perfect, the grass is cut, the joints are all tight on the equipment, everything is where it should be. I just wrote an article for one of the magazines and I sent an honest picture of my bee yard and it just looks terrible. I have very fixed amounts of energy now, so I spend my time when I can on the bees. I do not spend my time scraping and painting and putting equipment back together. I have some of the ugliest equipment, but I'd like to think that I make up for it with the bees.

We tend to have a sense of perfectionalism, and don't we just often look down on those who don't take the best care of their bees, who have messy bee yards, or who just are not spending the amount of time, they're just not crazy enough? They actually have other interests like gardening, birdwashing, fishing, or hunting. No, those of us who are pure into beekeeping, we don't get distracted. We work toward perfectionalism. I don't know that that's wrong, but I can say that the energetic demands of being perfect are tricky, and can I just tell you the truth, probably impossible to achieve, but it doesn't mean you don't try.

By now, we're deep into this. Our friends all know it, our families know it. We're committed to it. We've signed up for classes. We might have already been an officer at a bee meeting. We are committed to it. Then the questions come, they've been coming all the time, "Don't you ever get stung?" Would be an innocent question asked by one who does not keep bees and cannot imagine why anyone would.

We grow to rationalize our energies and our commitment. We grow to try and explain why we do this, why we spend so much time, why on a Saturday afternoon when I should be with my family grilling hamburgers, am I over there putting equipment together because I'm going to have some swarms coming if I don't get it done. When you try to explain it, that rationalization really comes close to defensiveness. If you just understand, just see where my energy is, you too could have this passion, this feeling where you rationalize why I've spent so much time and energy on this.

"Will you ever make any money, Jim?" Oh sure, one day I'll be making so much honey, I'll be pollinating crops, really I'm working myself to death is what it amounts to, but it is a choice that I made. I didn't take up hunting or fishing, I didn't stay in water skiing, I didn't stay in woodworking, but for some reason, the beekeeping thing stuck. All right, I got you where I want you. In this poorly defined progression of experiences, growth, perseverance, you enter a phase that the paper I'm reading here has called Identity Fusion. The individual's personal identity may become intertwined with their passion.

For instance, you'd primarily see yourself as a beekeeper with their sense of self-worth and their personality identity heavily reliant on their success or their involvement in this activity. I got to tell you truly, I've seen you people at meetings for years who just get passionately angry. How many times have you heard, ask a bee question, there's five different answers. Every one of those answers will be from passionate people who are firmly convinced that theirs is the right way. There's this commitment, there's this need for respectability.

The master beekeeper programs may be an example of that, where people want to be acknowledged for the work and the commitment that they've done. They want it ranked and listed. I don't see anything wrong with that, with that passion, but it really becomes who we are. The reason I'm hammering on this is because as I've aged, as I've dropped all the other interests, not all of them, but as I have reduced many other interests in my life, the beekeeping thing has stayed.

It's not that I decided that I had undergone this identity fusion, it was that society decided that, "Oh yes, I know you, you're that bee guy. Yes, I've heard you work with bees all the time. You've done it for a long time out at the research center, right?" It becomes the things that comes up when you have a passing acquaintance with someone at the grocery store. You become that bee person.

Then there was some health changes in my family that required me to find different pathways, different agendas, different directions, and beekeeping became different while all the while being exactly the same. The bees didn't change anything. My attitude toward my commitment to the bees changed. I realized that even though I'm not a young man anymore, I just don't ever see a time when bee thoughts won't be on my mind.

There may be a time when I don't have bees. There may be a time when I'm sitting in a home somewhere, watching a bird feeder outside a window, but my mind will still be on bees, wondering what season of the year it is. If the goldenrods come into bloom yet. This identity fusion thing is something that I've personally experienced, and it's just one of the latter day stages that I think that beekeepers who commit long-term to the craft experience, you really become a beekeeper.

Keeping bees, it's not something that I do. It's who I am. It defines me. When you get to these rarefied moments, you can get to be outright weird. There can be some social isolation involved. That's why beekeepers, I think, love to go to meetings. Now I'm just guessing here. I told you, and I want to remind you, I didn't tell you, I didn't imply that I had the ability, and the training, to discuss these issues, but I have said a hundred times that beekeepers really have no friends because we have abused all of the moving bees, picking up colonies, putting colonies down, catching swarms, getting them stung.

The last stages-- not the last stage, but a stage that can turn up anytime is because of the intensity that it takes to be so single-mindedly committed, there's a high risk of burnout. I have seen that through the years over and over again. Someone gets two hives of bees. Within three years, they got 70 hives of bees. They bought a pickup truck and a trailer, and you want to say, "Hey, hey, hey, back it down, back it down." Then I'm ashamed to tell you that too often, after just some short number of years, from a person that you thought would be in this craft for 100 years, their equipment's for sale, and they're gone.

There's all the reasons for it. My health, it was too expensive. Varroa was too troubling. I wish that we could all learn to cope with the passion. I'm no longer on those rare occasions now when I fly. Do I sit by someone and say, "Yes, I'm a bee guy. I've been doing--" No, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to go into it. I'm not going to try to convert you to the craft of beekeeping. I would have at different stages in my life, but I'm not doing it now. My identity is fused into me being a beekeeper. If you can figure that out on your own, we may discuss bees. I'm not going to bring it up because I need to learn to direct my passion and to have others think that you're reasonably normal.

I know this has not been a typical discussion segment. I've spent on my mind. I've tried to write an article about it. I'm putting this podcast together because beekeeping has become so important to me at late stages of my life.

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I don't know what to say. It's so one-sided. It's just all for me. It's not for the bees. They don't care about me any more than they ever have. Here I am, caring about them to the bitter end. See what you think, see what you feel. It's my best effort at being some kind of psychological evaluator who probably should never have brought this topic up. You made it this far, you're tough. Thanks for listening. Until next week, I'm Jim telling you bye.

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