Summer Management Tips with Jim Tew (336)

336 - Summer Management Tips with Jim Tew

Anna Schissel: Okay. Hello. This is Anna Schissel from Southwest Missouri. We're at the North American Honey Bee Expo. I'm excited to come meet everyone and see who I've been listening to for years, learning all the fun tidbits, and this-- Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast, presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast. Thank you, Anna Schissel, from Missouri, for that fantastic opening from the North American Honey Bee Expo way back in January. We're finally working our way through that list, Becky.

Becky: We have a few left, though, right?

Jeff: Oh gosh. We--

Becky: For those who are waiting.

Jeff: For those who are waiting, keep waiting. They're there. We're working through them. Thank you.

Becky: Hey, Jeff, can I do a quick update about the newsletter?

Jeff: Yes, please.

Becky: Because I got an email, somebody who said, "Okay, I'm not seeing it. It's not in my spam. I can't find it. I know I've signed up for it. Where is it?" All I did was I just gave him the email that it comes from, and he was able to find it. I just want to let everybody know who's signed up for that newsletter. It comes from questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. If you can't find it, look up the email address questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com, and you might just find that newsletter that we've been sending you, and we really desperately want you to open.

Jeff: The newsletter's great. Thank you, Becky, for putting that out every week. Sitting across this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table is our good friend and fellow podcaster, Dr. James Tew. Jim, welcome back to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jim Tew: Thank you so much for having me back. You should have known better by now, but here you are giving me another shot. Somehow, it'll be different this time when you roll that rock up the hill, it'll be different. I actually look forward to it all day. The weather's finally broken some. Even though, as I speak, it's raining, but at least I've been spending some quality time with my bees, and they are not very appreciative.

Jeff: I have been enjoying your podcast, where you go out in the yard and you explain what you're doing. You had some packages, you did. You did some queen releases. It's a fun journey to go with you.

Jim: Thank you.

Jeff: I feel like I'm back in Ohio with you.

Becky: You always show up in my feed when I'm in the bee yard. I'll play podcasts a lot when I'm in the bee yard. I'll just be out there talking to my bees, laughing at you, with you. Actually, laughing with you.

Jim: Yes. I think you're laughing at me.

Becky: I really enjoy. Sometimes I am, but I think you know that's going to happen. Sometimes I'm laughing with you, Jim, but anyway. It's such a pleasure to-

Jim: I really like the bees. They've been-

Becky: -have you back.

Jim: -a great help to me. One-sided relationship, but they've been a great help to me.

Jeff: For our listeners who don't know Dr. Jim Tew or Jim Tew, is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University.

Jim: Yes.

Jeff: You host the Honey Bee Obscura Podcast, which we happen to produce, but that's okay. Jim has been in bees forever and a day or two.

Jim: It was a cold day in 1833 when I started up. Started a bad time of the year, but it's just been uphill and downhill ever since. You wake up one day and you're old. You've done this for a long time and with a lot of continuity. I've said a bit ago, the bees have meant a lot to me all through the years for being steadfast friends of sorts.

Jeff: Since you brought it up, how was old Amos Root? Was he a good guy, AI, was he--

Jim: He was a good guy. He didn't like my sloppy beekeeping techniques. Don't push it too hard, Jeff. Don't push it too hard.

Jeff: Oh, that's good. Welcome to the show. I do enjoy [crosstalk]

Jim: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Jeff: You bet. The reason we invited you here is because you have a great perspective and fondness of managing bees. Since we're right in the beginning of the summertime experience, we're beginning of June, I thought it'd be good to have you on talk to our listeners about what kind of things they can expect as they open their bees, whether they're first-year beekeepers or they're in their 10th year of beekeeping. We can talk about the different management challenges or management joys, whatever they might find at different times at this time of the year. Willing to take that journey with us?

Jim: If you're talking to me, I'd be happy to do it. I think Becky would come along too. She's indentured. She doesn't have any choice.

Becky: I don't have a choice. He didn't ask me. [crosstalk]

Jim: I noticed that he's focusing on me, like somehow I could still hang up.

Becky: That sounds so serious, Jeff. I want to hear Jim tell stories for--

Jim: I'm full of it.

Jeff: I thought we'd give him a platform to speak from experience and set it up because we can be the straight men, straight people, and we can set him up and let him tee it off.

Jim: Right off the bat.

Jeff: Yes, sir.

Jim: One of the things that's just as common and just as routine as it can be, but just yesterday, I pondered it again. When I open my beehives, I always have an active, energetic carpenter ant nest between the undercover and the outer cover. I don't really see them in the hive. I always dump them on the ground. There's hundreds of them. Then the next day, they're all back up on the undercover against. I guess I'm wondering how do they physically do that? Are there ants running back up out of the grass? Did they go up the outside of the hive? Did they go through the inside of the hive? I don't see them getting back up there, but they're there. I bring this up because in my other life in Alabama, it was fire ants.

Becky: Oh boy.

Jim: They would always build incubation mounds up against the side of the hive, then you would be raised in new energetic heights when you realized you were standing in that mound while you were distracted with the bees. Then also, in Alabama was cockroaches. Instead of seeing ants run everywhere, I would see cockroaches run everywhere. The point I'm making is that bees are most of what's in the hive, but they're not all that's in the hive. There is a kind of an ecosystem community of other things, specifically in this case, insects that are there.

I don't know exactly if those ants are troublesome, if they've struck a deal or an agreement, and that they keep their lives separate, or if the bees are forcing them up there. I don't know how it works. I just dump them out and go about my business. Ants in the beehive is a common issue that I don't really know if it's even an issue or not.

Jeff: You said they nest, do they have eggs, do they have pupae, are they just 200 ants up on top, crawling around?

Jim: No, they have pupae. They have pupae. I assume they have eggs. I'm sure they're back there again. I'll take a minute before I dump them next time to see if there's actual eggs there too. There's all different casts. There's different sizes of them.

Becky: That's pretty cool, actually.

Jeff: Yes, it is.

Jim: Do either of you know if they have ants, do they cooperate, is there some symbiotic relationship that I wouldn't know about, or are they postiferous? I have no idea. They're always there. They're usually there. Earwigs, roaches, beetles.

Becky: Spiders. Don't forget spiders.

Jim: Spiders.

Becky: Spiders are eating the bees. Interestingly, I've actually caught the carpenter ants using actual comb to put their pupae and eggs in. I've seen that before, where they'll just take advantage of some open space. I don't have any data on it, but our regional beekeepers, two of them, mentioned that they thought it was a good thing when there was a cohabitating ant colony in their bee colony and they just let them be. I've got some that bite me. They're not carpenter ants, but they're small little ants. I've got some that don't bite me and some that do. I don't like the ones that bite me, but otherwise.

Jim: I don't want to belabor the point, but there are different species of ants. Other colonies have much smaller black ants and just little pupae everywhere. There's hundreds more of them. I didn't mean for this to be an exposé on ants, but right off the bat, when I've opened these packages the last three days, there's been carpenter ants up top and black ants in the others. I'm realizing that that's fairly common, and I don't know if anything can be done about it or if anything should be done about it.

Jeff: I'm trying to use old brain cells, but it seems to me that in an ant colony, they have different areas for eggs, different areas for pupae. I wonder if perhaps they've chosen the top of your colony as the place to incubate or to keep their pupae, and they transport them in between. That's not uncommon, I believe. I believe they do that, but yes, that's an interesting question. Take some pictures.

Jim: I'll leave it at that. I would like to say, I love telling this story. When I was in Alabama, if you had a wax moth infestation, I would just find the nearest local fire ant mound and grind that equipment into that incubation mound and then go back the next day and move it a few feet away and then leave it there for a day. The fire ants would have sterilized that thing of all stages of wax moths.

I would like to postulate, without a shred of data, that the wax moths didn't attack empty equipment nearly as quickly if a fire ant mound was nearby. I would speculate it's because the fire ants were marauding and raiding throughout that empty equipment, keeping it cleaned up. Enough about ants. There's ants back there. I'll shake them out again. I'll make pictures of them, and then I'll move on to something else.

Jeff: I will say that, here, we have the harvester ants, and they come in different sizes, and different ferocities. The lady I'm helping with her bees, really close to harvest her ant nest. They will crawl up your leg. They feel like a lighter bee sting.

Becky: Interesting.

Jeff: Because they'll bite and sting, and then it's like, "That's not a bee sting in my calf. That's something smaller but still stinging me." Ants are fun. I'd be curious, our listeners, their experience with ants in the bee yard.

Becky: Do either of you use anything to deter ants?

Jim: No. In the old books, you put the legs of the hive stand in oil basins and whatever, but I don't do anything.

Jeff: I, in the past, have used axle grease around the legs of a stand a couple of inches above the ground, and that does a pretty good job at keeping the ants from climbing because I'd get those little sugar ants they call them, and I'd use that to deter the ants.

Becky: Interesting.

Jim: Can I do another one, or am I talking too much?

Jeff: No.

Becky: Go for it, Jim.

Jim: I only bought two packages. I didn't need either one of them, but I didn't want to miss the season. Everybody's getting packages, but me, it was a bummer, so I bought two.

Becky: Don't want to be left out.

Jeff: What do they call it, FOMO, fear of missing out?

Jim: Yes, that's true. I guess that's right. They were weird little bees. They had a peculiar, flighty, robber-looking mentality for package bees that I haven't seen before. In fact, both of them, I thought, possibly they were absconding. The queens were still confined, but they weren't absconding at all. They were just flighty bees, and they were all around the cracks and crevices looking exactly like robbers.

Becky: Interesting.

Jim: I did some more pontificating. I do frequently. I thought this just a behavioral characteristic of the particular breed. The bees seem fine. They stayed in the colony. I've released the queens. I hope they're okay, but they have been particularly unhappy about being in Ohio, apparently. I can't get them to settle down and accept their fate that this is really it, and they're really here. Get on with things. They're flighty. They're not stingy. They're flighty.

They don't really acknowledge the primary entrance well, even though they're scenting going on. They're all around the back of the colony on innocuous back cracks and crevices, and they've been doing it consistently. Not amazingly, but just obviously. I don't know what that's all about. Comment, please.

Becky: First, we have to ask what kind of queen is it. Even though those are probably not her workers yet, they probably haven't turned over, I'm curious what kind of, and you might not know this, but what kind of workers they should packages with.

Jim: I don't have any idea. They're commercial packages, and I suspect they're just whatever queens they could-- I don't know of any queen stock that they're using on their own operation. That is a fundamental question. I just did what you're doing, but you're asking specifics. I assumed it was just from the stock that they were breeding from, that they were selecting from, that had these energetic, hyperactive bees.

Becky: It's interesting because when you talk to commercial package producers, they tell you they're shaking these young bees from a lot of different hives and a lot of different stocks. Even if you buy a carnival and queen package, you're getting a variety of different stocks, and then eventually it'll turn over. The equipment is the same. You're using two different sets of equipment, but nothing unique happened to the equipments?

Jim: It's really interesting you bring that up because I broke a lot of rules. I was energetically in a hurry myself. Am I the only one, I'm really antsy when those packages are confined. I lie there at 11:30 at night thinking, "Should I go miss those things one more time?" I paid $140 each for them. I don't want to be that guy who has to go back and say, "You got any packages left? I killed all of mine." I'm antsy till I get them out.

This is what happened, I went out there and I found some old comb, old being probably beyond the standard date now, about five years old, and all nicely drawn out, empty. I put a frame or two of honey in that, I parasitized some other colonies, and I got them out of those packages. I released them slowly. I didn't pour them out. I'd left the package inside a shell. The equipment is my old equipment, point taken, that there were no bees on it. They died for some reason. They're not building their own comb. They got a full frame, full 10 frames ready to go.

Becky: How's their brood pattern, Jim?

Jim: I just released the queens.

Becky: Oh, you just released them. Okay.

Jim: They're probably-

Becky: [crosstalk]

Jim: still in the process of being killed right now, but I did release them.

Becky: Oh, no.

Jim: I released them directly. I tried to talk on Honey Bee Obscura. Why do I do that? The answer is, I don't know. Through the years, I would release them slowly, as a smaller, more hobby-oriented beekeeper. I'd use a paper clip, and puncture the feeder plug, and do all those kinds of things. Then, as the price of queens got higher and higher and the replacement queens became more and more difficult, I didn't want to leave so much responsibility with the bees. I would release them directly. I pulled the screen back and let them run down inside the colony. That was my hope.

1 of 200 will suddenly have a torpedo-powered queen, and she will fly straight up to the sky. Then you'd run around like a crazy big guy, chasing your queen flying around. That hasn't happened that often, but I released them directly. Then I don't bother them for five days. I just hate these blackout periods in beekeeping. I'm not a patient person. If I release a queen, I want to see some eggs right here, right now. I don't want to go back in because of all the reasons you said, there's some mixed population. For all I know, they don't like each other. They got a queen they don't know, and they don't like her either, possibly. Just don't make it worse by me going in because they certainly don't like me.

Jeff: How well do you sleep, Jim?

Jim: Have I seen the brood pattern? I have not seen the brood pattern. No.

Jeff: How well do you sleep at night?

Jim: I don't sleep. I rarely sleep.

Becky: Jim, we have to back up to this releasing the queen. You know you can spray a little bit of one-to-one sugar water on her so she can't fly, right?

Jim: I don't do that. Why wouldn't I do that? Because it's one more thing to do.

Becky: For the excitement? [laughs]

Jim: I just told the beekeepers yesterday that if they ball her up, grab that golf ball size wad of bees and drop them in water. Then I thought, "Who goes to the bee yard with a pan of water?" In case that happens, you're ready for it. I should miss them. I did make the comment that years ago, the common procedure was to clip queens. I don't do that. I wonder if anyone else does.

I've boldly made global comments in the past, just to find out that a lot of people still do what I didn't know people still did. I don't clip. I just take my chances. It's really quick. Normally, she's gone. The only advice I gave on the podcast was be sure, before you toss that cage in the grass, that was the queen that ran down in the colony, that you just didn't see a nice worker run down.

Becky: Just make sure before you ever leave any bee yard, if you notice a clump of bees in the grass, you check them out. You find that queen that somehow was dropped into the grass, and the other bees found her, and try to figure out where she goes.

Jeff: That's the big problem is trying to figure out which colony she belongs in.

Becky: You got 30 workers and a queen, and you got to figure out which colony she belongs to.

Jim: I've actually had most of that happen. I'd only have one colony open. This is just the last instance. That was just about 12 or 13 bees, but they were acting odd. They were scenting and they were running around, staying in the general, little confined area. You go over there, and there's the queen in the middle of all of that. You'd think it's one of those acronyms that you were using a bit ago. You have a thought or two. "What are you over here? Why are you here?" Then you think, "Do you just put her back in the colony? Should I cage her and reintroduce her?" I just put her back in.

I'm sloppy because that can correct mistakes. If you're a beginning beekeeper and you've just got one or two hives and their own foundation, you're really limited in how you can recover from your sloppiness. If I went back out and that colony was queenless, I'll just subsidize this colony while it builds back up and the queen replaces herself. I could dash up and buy another queen, but that's not like me anymore. A beekeeper is kind of a moving target. There are different things at different times in their beekeeping journey. As a young guy, I would have raised queens, bought queens, made splits. As an old guy, I'll drop her back in the colony and wish her well. Same beekeeper, different place on my journey.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Jim Tew.

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Welcome back, everybody. Jim, I have a problem this time of year. I'm wondering if you could help me with some ideas, because I bet you've had some creative solutions to it.

Jim: All right.

Becky: I ran out of room, and I ran out of supers, and there's the expensive solution, which is buy more supers. What have you done? Because you've run out of equipment before, right?

Jim: I have. I had two trees go down in my apiary, and all of a sudden, I was short about a dozen deets that got busted up. They're still back there, I might add, looking all forlorn, busted up, like a storm went through. Oh, wait. That's exactly what happened. A storm went through. I got to tell you, the news is not good there, on my immediate thought. Either you really make the bee supply company's day, and you invest in new equipment-

Jeff: Paint it.

Jim: -which means that you've just got your weekend shattered because you've got to be assembling and painting equipment. Don't even mention wiring foundation. I mentioned that in an article, and I'm still trying to recover from that. A lot of people still wire frames and use eyelets in bed. I didn't realize that. You got to buy equipment or you've got to extract, and both of those are inconvenient.

Becky: That's what I did last summer was I extracted a lot, and I think that this is going to be that summer too.

Jeff: It's really convenient these days because you can pick up already assembled equipment. If you're really in a pinch, you can buy the already assembled honey supers with frames and just take it and plop it on if that flow or you're really in that need. You could even get those boxes already pre-painted if you really, really wanted to.

Becky: There's a budget problem.

Jim: I was just thinking. Jeff obviously has a lot more cash flow than I do.

Becky: I know. He really does.

Jeff: I'm not saying that it's a preferred option. I'm saying it is an option if you're in a pinch-

Jim: It is.

Jeff: -and you're able to do that.

Becky: That's nice.

Jeff: It is.

Becky: You can definitely get quick equipment. You can also slow down the bees a little bit. I don't know. Have you ever tried to have them draw their own foundation or draw their own comb instead of giving them foundation?

Jim: Yes. I do try to phase out frames. If a frame either gets damaged or it's just clearly old, a lot of drawn, then it gets retired, and then I put foundation in. This is just me. I'm no kind of authority. I'm just a desperation beekeeper, so don't do what I tell you to do.

Becky: I love that song, by the way, Desperation Beekeeper.

Jim: I don't want to put 10 frames of foundation on if I have to. I'd rather intersperse it with others. Sometimes you get mutilated comb construction when you do that, especially if it's on plastic foundation, because they'll go back and extend the other, the wax combs out, and then you get this aberrant frame thing going on top of these wax-coated plastic foundation. I can't help you very much. If you're out of space, I assume you mean in beehive step space, not storage space in your barn or wherever.

Becky: Right. Beehive space. Yes.

Jeff: What do you do, Becky?

Becky: I just keep sneaking equipment into the house and asking my husband to build it for me. I just keep ordering it. I can't put endless supers on all the colonies that I have because that would be so many thousands of dollars. I just don't have the revenue for it. I can't justify it. I keep adding equipment, and I keep hoping that I'll figure it out, but I haven't yet. It's a lot of extraction for me, but that's okay.

Jeff: I will offer another counterpoint for not going out and buying equipment, especially honey supers, because you have to store those anyways. I recently moved, or we downsized, and I had a nice barn that I was able to store my equipment in. Now, I have all my honey supers in a storage unit. You suddenly start thinking, do I really need all those supers when you have to go to a storage unit and go up an elevator?

Becky: Oh gosh.

Jeff: I feel like I'm walking into the Indiana Jones warehouse with a cart and clump down this hallway and go down to the locker and open that thing up, and they're all my supers, and I pull them out. They're on dollies that I used.

Becky: Oh boy.

Jeff: That becomes a pain in the butt at that point.

Jim: I have never heard of anything like that. That's got to be a vast amount of headache work. That's like taking bees up to the third floor of your house or something and storing equipment up there.

Jeff: It's not so much different if I had multiple out yards and one warehouse, and I had to go back to the warehouse. It's just a mindset thing.

Becky: Yes, it's a different one.

Jeff: That's what I tell myself, and you get over it. You start counting up and how many super you have, is my point.

Jim: That's a rental unit, isn't it?

Jeff: Yes, sir.

Jim: You're paying rent on the place?

Jeff: Yes.

Jim: That's money you could be using to buy more equipment, but you're paying rent.

[laughter]

Jim: I would just put them out in the bee yard, stack them up on a platform, put a telescoping top on them, and then go buy some more equipment, or you got rental money saved.

Jeff: I don't have those fire ant hillsides to plug the frames into to clean off the wax moths. Interesting [crosstalk]

Jim: Becky, you bring up interesting point that you didn't mean to bring up. How do you put a governor on beekeeping? Because Becky apparently is just going to keep slowly buying more and more and more equipment.

Becky: That's true.

Jim: I'll go out to my bees, and I'll have two deeps on, and those deeps will be full, and I say, "All my stars are going to swarm." Anytime they swarm, they go right to the neighbors and terrorize them. I'll add another deep. I didn't really want to do that. I've written that I'm going to stop doing that because I'm too old to handle those deeps. Then, a week, two weeks later, you go back, well, there it is, there's seven frames filled. I'll put another deep on. How do you just say, I want them in one deep and I want five hives and that's all I want?

I can't stop. Once you see those crowded bees and you know that everything's backing up, jamming up, and they're putting honey in the brood nest area, then I've always capitulate and put on more equipment. I don't know how to put a governor on beekeeping. I don't know. How do you get two rabbits, and that's all you're going to have?

Jeff: I think not to bring the conversation down, but there's a natural governor on the bees, and that's during the winter, the varroa might drop, or the losses due to varroa. Right now, I've had empty equipment. It's really easy to take care of running out of room in a beehive or doing my splits because I have plenty of empty equipment with drawn frames available. How to draw a line at whatever your number is, 5, 10, 15, 20, 10,000, where do you draw that line? How do you stop?

Jim: It's like a disease. One beekeeper can see it, and other beekeepers. You sit beside a guy-- I'm thinking of a man, so I'll say a guy, and he's just white hot. He is just white hot. This guy's intent is to own all the bees in Ohio. You want to throw water on him to calm him down because you're overheating. Just because you enjoy 15 hives this much, doesn't mean you're going to just love having 400. There's a law of some kind of return. I don't know what it is.

I was also listening to you guys talk about your equipment. You don't know what it's like to be as old as I am, for all your beekeeping equipment to be about that old, too. I've got some really vintage-- may I use that word here? Vintage instead of ratty equipment that was really nice stuff back in the '60s or some kind. Most of my equipment is so old. I've still got zinc queen excluders. I don't mean to sound like a living fossil, but when you get this stuff and you buy it, then it's yours and it just stays there. I just marvel at all these plastic queen cages because I used to build mine with Forstner bits and bore the boards out and make your own queen cages. Nobody does that now. You buy all these plastic devices.

I don't know how to control growth. I don't really know how to restrict so that I can keep these hives manageable. What I want to do is photograph. I really don't want 60,000 bees. That queen is programmed to go flat out until she's got 50,000 to 60,000 in there if it's a nice hive. I keep supering, and she keeps producing, and this thing keeps getting bigger and bigger, and I keep getting older and older, and this thing is not sustainable.

Becky: When I was at the university, we did have people who just wanted some bees in their yard, and we never did it. One of the things we thought of, Jim, was just we would let them get a nuc or just a single deep and raise a queen. Just literally have that colony, just raise a queen. Even at a certain point, that is going to be very productive. If you just keep selling your queens, keep selling your brood, keep selling your honey, your hive could be for sale all season long, and then you couldn't just enjoy where they're at. They might not winter very well.

Jim: Now, you just made a fatal mistake because I'm the buyer, I'm not the seller. I would buy the bees from you because, yes, my bees died in the winter because I bought a nuc, let it raise its own queen, didn't winter over. Now, I've got this empty equipment, I'll buy bees from Becky and stock this thing up.

Becky: How about you give them away? How about you contact your local group and say, "Hey, if anybody needs a frame of brood this year, I'm your guy. Just give me a brand new frame of foundation in return."

Jim: Have you ever given your own bees away?

Becky: I won't. No. I won't even sell my bees. I love them so much. There's no logic. This is all emotion.

Jim: Let's just move right onto the next question, then.

Becky: Are you still there?

Jim: If anybody wants my bees, they can come steal them or pay me for them, one or the other. Those are the only two options. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm not giving bees away.

Becky: You're not giving bees away, but you still just want a box of bees.

Jim: No, let me tell you why I wouldn't give bees away, because the first time something goes wrong with that hive, varroa infestation, heaven forbid, American foulbrood, then Jim Tew is responsible. "I got bees from that guy, he gave them to me, and now, I've got AFB or something."

Becky: Fair enough.

Jim: It's hard. I would honestly be reluctant to do that just because of the long-term implications of when something goes wrong. Something will go wrong with those bees at some point.

Becky: This is quickly becoming a small support group. Jeff, I'd like you to share now. We understand you have a minor storage problem.

Jeff: Minor storage problem.

Becky: What else do you have that's an issue, Jeff?

Jeff: We don't have that much time in the podcast. We did invite Jim here. What about you, Becky?

Becky: Did you see how he just deferred? [laughs] I already admitted, I want more bees. [laughs]

Jeff: I want more bees.

Jim: I know people like you, Becky. I know people like you. Never too many bees.

Becky: Right. My husband's getting really good at selling the honey.

Jim: That's good.

Becky: Last night, he sold maybe 10 pounds of honey to his softball friends. This is our outlet.

Jeff: Now, you have only 956 pounds to sell.

Jim: If you just had 300 more supers, oh, how much more money you could make selling honey.

Becky: Honey never goes bad, everybody.

Jim: I know. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole with you because I'll find some old honey from my dead out and think I'm going to use this on a package next spring because it doesn't really go bad. If it does, you'll know it, it gets all frothy and weird-looking. It's really plain. I did have a disappointment this year in my own little yard. For the last three years, I have done nothing except take dead-out equipment and position it around the yard.

I've picked up three swarms this last year, and before that, two swarms just doing nothing, but instead of stacking up my equipment and trying to keep wax moths out. I didn't even put it up in the tree, I just set it on a hive stand. This year, nothing. It's like you're fishing. I didn't get anything this year when I put that out. In the past, I was picking up bees, and I don't think they were mine because I checked right away the rest of my yard, there's no activity, and yet here's all this bee swarm settling over here. It looks like free bees. For every happy beekeeper about getting a swarm, there's a sad beekeeper somewhere for losing a swarm.

Jeff: Yes, that's the way I was.

Jim: It is. I'm off the subject now, but it is sobering. You got that swarm in the air, you're running around. If you want to bang on metal, have at it. If you want to spray with a water hose, have at it. Nothing really matters. It's just stunningly surprising and a real biological wonderment moment, on poof, they're gone. Just in literally inside of seven seconds. 60-- I don't know, 25,000, 30,000 bees, or gone. They have left the area. They are no longer your bees. There's somebody else that's happy beekeeper now.

Becky: My Bee Culture co-author, Bridget Mendel, wrote, "The cost of a swarm is usually half the bees, the queen, and most of your honey crop." It really does just takes it all away.

Jeff: It slows everything down for sure.

Jim: When I see that swarm in the air, I'm thinking, "There's my $38 queen or my $41 queen with the green mark on her or whatever I did up there buzzing around, forsaking me, leaving me here with nothing except these queen cells over here."

Jeff: Turn that frown upside down and make a smile because that's giving you a brood break for your varroa treatments.

Jim: Right. Oh, great point. That can be part of my varroa control program.

Jeff: Is letting them [crosstalk]

Jim: Let your colonies swarm to the neighbor's yard.

Becky: Colonies half full.

Jeff: Folks, we're not recommending that you do that. [laughs]

Becky: Thank you. No. Please don't. [laughs]

Jeff: Don't let your bees just swarm as a varroa management treatment.

Jim: No. When I do see a swarm, since it's already underway, I do think that that's a brood break, and that will give a little respite to the bees that decided to hang around and stay with me instead of fly away.

Becky: Hard to not take it personally.

Jim: I don't take it personally. I've conjectured in the past, again, when you get old and on how much to do, you can just let your mind wander, but I speculate that my bees know reasonably well where other bee colonies are in the area. I just can't help but believe that since they can find a nest site with their foragers, that those bees have an idea. If they can find two tablespoons of water at the end of a leaking hose, they can find their neighbors a half mile away.

Jeff: I have to agree with you on that. I was setting up my friend's colonies, and I had the equipment just sitting there, and it includes some frames of fresh foundation wax, just that good waxy smell. Within moments of me setting that equipment down, there were five or six honeybees flipping around, checking out the equipment. Later, I asked her, I said, "Is there any of your neighbors keeping bees?" She said, "I don't think so." There's something close enough by that immediately drew the attention of quite a lot more bees than I thought would be checking things out.

Jim: I'd like for you to go with that. How did they find it? Was it an odor field, or is it visual perception? A bee wouldn't recognize a 10-frame bead I have somewhere.

Jeff: Disassembled across the yard. No.

Jim: I guess it's an odor field.

Jeff: That's what I'm thinking is it was an odor field of the fresh wax and a fresh new equipment. It smelled wonderful. I like driving it to her yard because it smelled so good. I found it was really interesting. There was five or six bees just checking out all the equipment.

Jim: They're quick. It's like they were already in the general vicinity.

Jeff: That's what I was thinking.

Jim: The last thing before we wander from this, I wonder what the nectar flow situation was like. Why were they nosing around your equipment? Shouldn't they have been nosing around flowers somewhere? Do you know if there was any kind of a nectar flow on? I guess I'm trying to ask if you get more of this errant scouting activity when the nectar flow's not on because they're looking for something else.

Jeff: That's a good question. I have to believe that there's a nectar flow on because at that time of year, it was what, the end of April or so? Everything's in bloom right now, it seems. There's plenty of, at least, floral sources. I don't know if there's any nectar actually flowing. My personal colonies, which were probably seven miles away or so, they're gaining weight according to sensors. The last time I checked them, they were piling on honey. There's something flowing. I don't know.

Becky: It was pre-swarm season for you?

Jeff: Correct.

Jim: I really enjoyed living in the fringes of these whole things. Why do they do what they do? Why does it matter? Are you trying to be the end-all beekeeper? No, it's just a curiosity. I don't know how they find these nest sites. I spent some time last year, when I was picking up those swarms, I thought they were robbers, which then made me formulate the question, how do I tell the difference in robbers and scouts? It wasn't like massive robbing with bees festooning everywhere. It was 20s and 30s of bees.

I thought that I could tell the difference in the bees that were furtively flying in and out back and forth and bees that seemed to be more consecrated to the task, staying longer, roaming around, going back in, walking back out, looking around, and going back in. I've spent some time then toying with that. How, as a beekeeper, do I tell the difference in a robber bee and a scout bee? They're same bee, different job assignments for the day, more or less.

Jeff: The robber bees track honey and dirt everywhere. They have dirty footprints everywhere. Not that you can check it out, but it--

Becky: You can. You can see it in the entrance [crosstalk]

Jim: I can't tell if you're being funny or not. That's true.

Becky: It's very true. Yes.

Jim: Especially when they come back out with propolis and wax on the front of the hive, you can tell where all that residue is, where they've tracked it out with their dirty little feet.

Jeff: In a yard, you can tell which hive's being robbed out and which one's doing the robbing. The one that's doing the robbing, the front of their hive will be just as dirty with those robbers coming back in, which is interesting, but it's really-- I was serious but stated in a joke that it gets really messy if they really give [crosstalk]

Jim: The joke was accepted, but the trouble is the joke stepped on a nerve.

Jeff: If you have to explain a joke, it really is not a joke, is it? First rule of joke.

Jim: No, don't get so sad and sappy. It was a good joke. It was a good joke. All right, tell me if this is going to work. You know those gadgets that you use to go on your pressure washer that has wheels on it and you clean your driveway with it? You know what I'm talking about? Becky has a circular thing.

Jeff: Yes, the scrubbing-- concrete scrubber?

Jim: It's just got two or three different nozzles underneath that clean the driveway. Could I lay a frame down and run that over the frame and blow off the beeswax, blow off the residue, blow off whatever, and then recoat that foundation sheet and wax? Now, all of you who are listening right now who still use wire-embedded foundation, just put your fingers in your ears right now because I want to know if some of these foundation sheets can be repurposed, reloaded, and reused, or do you--

Becky: I've heard that's a possibility. Definitely.

Jeff: You make-

Becky: I've heard people do it.

Jeff: -a messy driveway.

Becky: It sounds like an awful mess. You'd have to do it on a tarp that would go into some other--

Jeff: It could be a mess.

Becky: The hard part would be the fallout from it. The easy part might be getting everything off of it. I literally, hours ago now, was just throwing away, popping out frames of foundation from some of my frames, just going through the entombed pollen that showed up, and getting those out of my operation. I would love to do something else, but I can't even melt that wax off because it's entombed pollen. I know, highly likely, there's a fungicide in there. I don't want to sell fungicide beeswax candles. There might be a market for it. Anyway, it's a good question, Jim. The mess of it, I wonder what that looks like.

Jim: What's my alternative? Just toss all these frames? These are the ones the trees fell on. They've been exposed.

Becky: Oh, okay.

Jim: They're busted up. I didn't know if I could--

Becky: Can you just reuse them?

Jim: I've got to scrape them down. They've got residual comb, and the comb has been weatherized, and it's not happy comb at all. It'd be a lot of work-

Jeff: I'd pop the frames.

Jim: -for the bees to take that on. We're told all the time. Kim would always say, "Every three years, replace that comb." I can't do that. Maybe I should do that, but I just can't do it. I try to do every five years. Even then, what am I doing? Taking a razor scraper and cutting that old comb off? A lot of work on this. Kim would always say, "Was your time worth?" By the time you scrape that foundation down, clean it up, and then re-coat it, you could have just bought new stuff.

Jeff: There are people I know who will scrape that off with a big old putty knife and then wash it down, like you said, do the final wash down, and then heat up some wax, and brush it on, and reuse it. The other option is to, of course, pop out that-- if you're using foundation insert, to pop out that foundation, and throw it away, or scrape it off, and melt it all down.

Jim: Or you could run it under your pressure washer.

Jeff: Or run it under your pressure washer.

Jim: The reason I wanted to use the driveway cleaner, how much truth can we stand here, is because I've tried the pressure washer, and it blows the foundation insert pretty much to the next county, and wets me from my waist down with wax residue and mess all over the place. There's got to be a better way to do it. There was a friend of mine in Alabama who said, "Before you do all that, you should let the wax moths do most of the work for you, so all you're doing is just knocking off the detritus that the wax moths left. At least, the comb is all gone."

Becky: Supporting the wax moth population?

Jim: Yes. I like to support ants, cockroaches, earwigs, and wax moths any chance I get because they are part-

Becky: They're part of the ecosystem.

Jim: -of an active bee community, too.

Jeff: Jim, one of the things that I had when I was a beekeeper in Ohio, it was a great thing, was the Better Way Wax Melter. There was a box-- It was Altoona, Iowa, I think it was.

Jim: I think it was Iowa. I was going to say PA, but I think it was Altoona-

Jeff: It was Iowa.

Jim: -Iowa.

Jeff: You'd put your frames in there, and just crank it on, and it'd heat up. The wax would melt out and also sterilize the frames, and you'd pull it out later, and you'd have your wax later, and that you could separate or whatever.

Jim: I had one of those gadgets in my lab in the barn.

Jeff: That was a nice thing. I wish someone would come up with that.

Jim: Things come, things go.

Becky: Sounds necessary.

Jim: I don't know of anything like that out there. I've tried to use a Milwaukee heat gun and-

Becky: Oh, boy.

Jim: -that just didn't go anywhere. I do recommend that every beekeeper have a Milwaukee heat gun. If you've got a beehive that you've let go too far too long and it's got that, oh, intensive propolization going on, I've used that heat gun to soften that propolis. I can get that first frame out with that heat gun softening that. Of course, there's no bees in it.

It's not your usual hive tool, "Somebody hand me the Milwaukee heat gun here. I need a hive tool." For those who are listening in who haven't seen that equipment, we save the got bee space. If it's a quarter to three-eighths of an inch, you can work the frames. That's only true if you keep that colony clean. If you walk away from that colony for five years, you just about can't get those frames out. They are so locked in and the undercovers stuck down, that's heat gun time. That is heat gun time.

Becky: Wear a respirator, please, somebody. I think we have to say that.

Jim: You keep saying things that really spur me. I wear a respirator-

Becky: I know.

Jim: -now all the time. I've decided breathing smoke isn't good for me and my allergy, so I'm out there with hearing aids on,-

Becky: You're good.

Jim: -a bee veil on, a respirator on. I got a Milwaukee heat gun strapped to my hip. I got my phone in my pocket. I am a modern beekeeper.

Jeff: How do you smoke your cigars with that respirator on?

Jim: I have to take a break. When you're 76 and a half, you take a lot of breaks.

Jeff: All right.

Becky: Oh, boy.

Jeff: It's going to be a fun summer, Jim, I can tell you.

Jim: I am so relieved. I'm saying that right now, and it's thundering, and booming, and lightning here, but it doesn't matter because it's not 18 degrees or something-

Jeff: There you go.

Jim: -with ice down there. There will be a brighter day, if not tomorrow, the day after. I do have bees going. I've got a nine-frame observation. I have three-on-three-on-three deep frames. I'm going to stock that thing up-

Jeff: Nice.

Jim: -so I can watch more swarm cells developing. That'll be enjoyable.

Jeff: You can put that on your kitchen table.

Jim: I'm going to buy some bees from Becky to stock that thing up since she's got so many bees. If I look sad enough, she might even give them to me.

Becky: Are you coming to Minnesota, Jim?

Jim: Yes. It'll be worth it for free bees.

Jeff: Jim, we want to thank you for joining us this afternoon and just sharing with us your stories and your approach to beekeeping.

Jim: Sharing? Go ahead. I want to hear how you're going to end that. I'm sharing something.

Jeff: I'm not sure how I can--

Jim: What is it that I'm sharing?

Becky: I'm just letting him go.

Jeff: I was going to come up with a pressure washer story, but I decided not to.

Becky: Jim, thank you. It's always such a pleasure.

Jim: Thank you for having me. I hope everyone understands that I am serious about bees, and I do love beekeeping to the depths of my soul. It is a long-term, tiring, rewarding, frustrating, pleasing job all at the same time. It's really meant a lot to me through the years.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast, or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular, longtime sponsors, Global Patties, StrongMicrobials, and Northern Bee Books, for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:58:45] [END OF AUDIO]