Talking With Kids About Bees (168)

Episode 168 – Talking With Kids About Bees

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Jim Tew: Hi, beekeepers. Jim here. Say, one of the more enjoyable but frightening events I used to do was take bees, for instance, and bee equipment to a school class, maybe. Easy task and a difficult task at the same time. In many ways, it was the same as talking to adults. Eugene Makovec is here with me. In fact, discussing this topic, Eugene, that's all on you, buddy. This was your idea. I think it was a good one. Hi, Eugene.

Eugene Makovec: This is all my fault if it goes wrong then.

Jim: This is going to be all your fault. [chuckles] Let's formalize this, Eugene. I'm Jim Tew here at Honey Bee Obscura where once a week we talk about something to do with beekeeping.

Eugene: I'm Eugene Makovec with  American Bee Journal and I'm honored to be made part of this.

Jim: Honored? I'm glad to hear that. Thank you for saying that. I look forward to talking with you about this.

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 honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that will delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: It's hard to put into words, it's hard to get up my arms around it. Talking to different groups requires a different mindset. I want to start first by talking to grade school, my grandkids, and taking things to their schools, and then we'll move on up through junior high, and then finally, end up with adult somewhere and evolve throughout this whole thing. On one hand, I wanted to do it. On one hand, I was honored to do it when a grandkid would ask me to take an observation hive to class.

The funny thing is, the kids wouldn't have anything to do with me or the bees. They were afraid of them, didn't want to get involved in it, but on that day, they were bee experts. There are peers would have thought that they've done this forever. You have any experience like that with these early kids, second, third-grade experiences?

Eugene: I do, yes. My first experience was right after I started keeping bees. My youngest daughter was in the first grade at the time and she must have said something in school after I got that package of bees and I got a call from her teacher saying, "I heard you are a beekeeper. Would you like to come in and talk to us about honeybees?" I couldn't say no, it was my daughter's class. I got to tell you, I was scared to death.

At the time, I had a full-color darkroom in the basement, so I went down there and I blew up some 11x14s of photos of bees in the hive and on flowers and things and I packed up some equipment and paraphernalia. I took a bee suit that I had the teacher put on which the kids got a kick out of and about 10 minutes into it, I was completely comfortable and those kids had more questions.

They knew more than I would have imagined that they would have known and I had a blast. Afterwards, the kids were fighting to be in line to help me carry my stuff out to the car and everything and it was fun. Before I knew it, I was doing this on a fairly regular basis. There are a lot of schools, teachers that are almost desperate to have experts come in and talk to people about whatever their subject is. Of course, an expert is really somebody who knows more than you do. You have to be smarter than a fifth grader so to speak.

Jim: This has nothing to do with our discussion here, but for a while, we encouraged, invited, allowed people to come to my lab and visit the lab, tour the lab, talk about bees, see an observation hive do whatever, and then after just a year or so, we had to stop that. Every day, how many school groups can there be in Northwest Ohio? School buses unloading to come in. It was turning into a full-time job and I had to kill a good thing. I can see where this would grow on itself like one teacher tells another teacher and classes talk. I can see why you'd be popular. I felt that same pressure to though. As my grandkid, I've been doing other podcast about my oldest grandson who may or may not become a beekeeper, he's thinking.

I was telling the listeners how that's different from just talking to somebody on the phone or an email message about keeping bees or talking to a stranger at the grocery store. It's not the same pressure as it is when it's family and you got to live with these people for the rest of my natural life and theirs. I felt a lot of pressure, but see if you can follow me on this for a point or two. It was sometimes difficult to dumb it down. Can I say dumb it down? To make the message fit the audience, so there's no reason to talk about hypopharyngeal glands or corbicula on the back. Just forget everything remotely like that. We got to talk about mom bees and dad bees and sister bees and whatever.

One of the things I wanted to tell you. I was discussing one day and I said, "These are the girl bees. I'm sorry, girls. They do most of the work. Here is a boy bee. I'm sorry, boys. They don't do much." I didn't want to go into what boy bees do do. "Here's the mom. I put that red dot on her," and out of the blue, completely unexpected, one little girl said, "Are those bees in the bottom of this hive dead?" I said, "Yes, they are. Bees don't live very long. They just live a few weeks and sometimes they get hurt when I'm making the observation hive up."

Then the little girl said in that little voice from a second grader, "Is the mommy bee crying because her babies are dead?" I said, "You know, I really don't know, but here's your teacher. Let's ask her that question." [chuckles] I gave that right off to the teacher. I had no earthly idea how to deal with that in that regard when a bee was crushed there or dead or whatever. It was immediately issues beyond my psychological ability.

Eugene: I'm with you. There's definitely a difference in the age groups. The kindergarten, first grader, and also the questions that they ask. When you're talking to first graders that age range, so many of the questions are more along the lines of, "My dad got stung by a bee," or "We saw a bee out," or "A wasp in the garden," or something like that. I found that when school kids are involved, my favorite age is about the fifth or the sixth grade because they're old enough to understand a little bit more about that biology. They're still young enough that they care, [chuckles] that they're not distracted by their hormones and things and it's a very good age to talk to.

Jim: I'm not just saying this because you were kind enough to be a guest here today, but I completely agree with you. At first, the second, and third grade group, those can really be tricky, hard to handle. The groups you're talking about were better prepared, and then when you got into junior high, they became distant, aloof, standoffish, above this. This is boring, you're an old man. I don't know what they were thinking, but that was the impressions that I was getting.

Then by the time they got to the college classes, "Oh, this was required. How long is this class? Oh, this is a 45-minute class," and they were going to be business majors or whatever. I could not have stood there and discussed beekeeping in any way to most of those students. That was a sweet spot back in that fourth, fifth, and sixth grade where they were more pliable. All through those situations I just described, there were students mixed in who were fine, but there were other students who just made it crystal clear they did not want to be there, they were required to be there. As soon as this was over, they were gone.

Eugene: The cool thing about this too is that you start with those little kids and you become comfortable talking to people even though they're small people. Before long, you feel comfortable like when you get a call from that garden club or Kiwanis Club that's looking for a lunchtime speaker. I say, "Okay, I can do that," and it's another level there where you feel like the audience might be a little bit more critical. Again, you just have to know more than they do and it forces you to up your game, but you become more comfortable with it.

When I was a kid and well into adulthood, I could never imagine myself standing up in front of a group of people and talking about anything. When it's something that's your passion like bees, it's a lot different. I'm still nervous if I get up and talk to a group when I start, but five minutes in I'm fine. Once you get into it, it's something you just like to talk about. Beekeepers, they'll talk to anybody about bees and once you run out of your neighbors and friends that don't want to hear it anymore, you got to find somebody else to talk to.

[chuckling]

Jim: Your relatives, right? Eugene and listeners, let's take a short break and hear from our sponsor. Then, when we come back, we will promote ourselves to adults.

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Jim: Eugene, you were talking about, before the break, the difference in young kids and adults. Each audience has its personality. Each audience has its own demeanor. When I go there as a speaker, I don't know, like I'm going to a rotary club or even to a bee group. You read the audience as best you can. Now, you may not know that there's been a very ugly battle between maybe some of the officers trying to be elected for post. There's an undercurrent that's already there that's affecting the group and you're just the speaker for the day. As soon as you're finished, we need to get on with this and get this resolved.

When you're trying to talk and be informational and exciting, you can't move the group. Then, other times, you can't calm the group down. They flood you with questions. They laugh at things that weren't even supposed to be funny and you lose control the other way. How have you found talking to adults in both non-beekeeping and beekeeping situations? Any thoughts come to mind?

Eugene: That's another leap in itself, just to go from non-beekeepers to beekeepers. Beekeepers tend to be more critical. I'm just thinking as a beekeeper myself. When you sit in that audience, you just feel like every speaker that comes up, "I've heard all this before," or, "No, he's wrong about that." When you get up in front of beekeepers, at least when I first started talking to beekeepers, I thought, "These people, they're going to call me out if I get something wrong."

Again, once you get into it, it's different. The first joke that they laugh at, it brings you that comfort level. Of course, if that joke falls flat, then it sets you back for a couple of minutes, and you got to try and get your comfort level back. It can be a challenge.

Jim: Everything you're saying is spot on.

Eugene: Especially depending on what you're talking about. If you're talking to beginning beekeepers about basic beekeeping, that's a more simple thing. If you're talking about anything more advanced, and certainly whenever you start touching on subjects like pesticides or treatment-free or anything like that, that's a whole new issue there with the politics involved.

Jim: I may do a podcast at some other time on what is a beekeeper. If you walk out your front door right now and stop the first car going by, I'm almost sure they're not going to be a beekeeper. If you ask that driver, what is a beekeeper? I'm thinking they'd tell you that it's somebody who wears that suit and goes out with a smoker and works bees and provides bees for pollination and makes honey. Then, that's their concept of a beekeeper.

If you go to a bee meeting, that concept of a beekeeper is totally broadened from a, "I'm a one-year beekeeper. I've been keeping bees for two years. I got 200 hives. I got 5 hives." You can see all these designations of beekeepers and themselves. When you're standing before that group, the way you're describing in many cases, you're discussing whatever discussion you're making to an assortment of bee-experienced people. You got to be right or you got to know when to back down on some topics.

You're exactly right. You need to know this, some of those topics are really passionate by people on top-bar hives or treatment-free or whatever. All of those things have great places in beekeeping. You need to know how to dance around those things and avoid the arguments. Of course, the classic is, and it happened just this past weekend, "Do you use queen excluders?" You think, "God, will people ever get tired of asking that? No, they won't. They want to argue about that as long as they can.

Eugene: It depends.

Jim: [chuckles] Right, sometimes. More often than not though, when you're talking to people, they're eager when I talk to non-beekeepers. What's your approach, Eugene? Are you trying to sell non-beekeepers? If you're at the Lions Club or you're at the Rotary Club, are you trying to sell them beekeepers? Are you looking for beekeepers? More often than not, what I'm trying to do is to make them feel good about those of us who keep bees, not necessarily themselves become beekeepers, "Don't vote against us. Don't enact city ordinances. This is what we do. This is who we are. You're welcome to come be one if you want, but more likely, you're going to keep being a golfer or whatever it is you're doing."

Eugene: Yes, I'm with you there. I'm not really out there trying to sell beekeeping. I'm usually at a group like that because they're looking for a speaker, an interesting topic, and they just want to hear more about bees and beekeeping. In recent years, of course, they're wanting to know how we can help the bees because they've heard that bees are dying and and whatnot. I'm there like what you're saying, "Don't enact ordinances against it," or, "If there are ordinances against it, be open to changing that. Don't kill all the dandelions in your yard. The bees need those things, not just the honeybees, but all the other pollinators too."

I just teach them that fascinating story about the bee colony and how it works and how they interact with the environment and with the human race. It always goes well. The other thing is, when you talk to groups like that as opposed to schools, they'll actually pay you something too. Schools, that's something you're giving your time. These other garden clubs and whatnot, they'll usually offer you money. You're not going to get rich doing it, but they'll pay you $100 maybe. A lot of them will allow you to sell honey, which will probably net you more than that speaking fee is.

Jim: That's true. I hadn't thought about that. Through the years, you get a T-shirt, you get a free plant, you get some lavender plants, or whatever. The first talk I ever gave in Ohio, decades and decades ago, I drove for two or three hours to get there and the guy said the club had no money, but he was a chicken farmer and he gave me 10 dozen eggs. I came home with enough eggs to start my own egg business for a short time. You never know what the reward, if there is one, is going to be. It's all over the page. It's completely all over the page.

People have a nice time. Eugene, help me with this. One of the main things that I try to do with any group, but especially non-beekeeping groups, is, and I want to say this correctly, to look normal, to look sane because, "Don't you ever get stung?", "Yes, I get stung all the time." When I get stung, it really hurts. You must be different.", "No, it hurts like blazes when I get stung." Then, if you're not careful, you're going to come across somebody as somebody who has some kind of psychological issue up there who likes pain or whatever. My intent is to look like a mere mortal. "I enjoy doing this. You too could enjoy doing this." It's not what you think attitude. Can you fine-tune that for me?

Eugene: Yes, I agree with that. I think I'm one of those people that is maybe a challenge to be normal to begin with. The beekeeping thing, yes, people used to think of that as being that oddball guy down the road who kept bees. That's one area where all the media attention over Colony Collapse and everything has done us a lot of good because we're considered more normal than we used to be. It used to be just that oddball guy down the road and now you're one of us.

When you talk to people, everybody knows somebody or knew somebody, a grandfather or somebody that they knew growing up that kept bees. Now more than ever, you actually know somebody down the road who does it, or a neighbor or a friend. More and more people, especially in the cities and suburbs are involved in beekeeping. It's not that much of a stretch to say, "I know a beekeeper."

Jim: It's even more legitimate now. I was just watching some show just a couple of nights ago and the bad guy hid a very needed and incriminating CD inside his beehive. When they started making this guy a beekeeper and showing his bees and showing him out there, I thought, "They're really making this a part of the show." Then it ended up that that's where he was hiding the evidence that the police was tearing the house support for and the police found it. I thought that's just an indication of how bees are accepted more and more. We can talk about talking about bees for hours on end because there are just stories I'd love to tell when things went right and things went wrong.

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Jim: For that moment, Eugene, the speaker is an ambassador. They are the representative of the beekeeping industry at every level across the country. Be as prepared as you can, be civil, be friendly, be all the right things, and then be gone. Eugene, I've enjoyed talking with you. Eugene Makovec from the  American Bee Journal. He's at one of the pivotal crossroads of information transfer and he had other things he could be doing this morning than talking to us.

Eugene: Yes. Thanks for having me.

Jim: I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.

Eugene: Thank you.

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