Plain Talk: Beekeeping Oddities (262)

Episode 262 – Plain Talk:  Beekeeping Oddities

[music]

Dr. Jim Tew: Hello, Honey Bee Obscura Podcast listeners, Jim here yet again. As is so typical of me, the weather report is that it's wintry and cold, and there would not be much to be gained by walking back to the snowy bee yard. I'm sitting here all nice and warm in my shop, and what I was thinking about was because some just passing comments that have been made recently by friends and acquaintances, "Do you still do that beef thing?" It's something that people see from a position of oddness, and those of us who are committed to it and have been doing this for years, it just all seems to be typical.

I want to spend a few minutes discussing some of the oddities of beekeeping that someone outside of beekeeping might be curious about.

[music]

It's just a conversation; you can add your own points on things that you think are odd or are out of kilter. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you pretty much once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I just try to talk about something to do with plain talk conversational 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: Is beekeeping agricultural? Is beekeeping animal husbandry? Is it folk tradition? It's just hard to put it into a category. We've done this for so long as humans' relationship with bees till-- I don't know if we're the oldest animal husbandry group or not. I don't know how far back dairy animals go or other kinds of breeding programs like that. I'd have to say right off the bat that what most people are surprised about beekeeping is that you get stung. It's an odd fact that if you keep bees, you're going to get stung. Most people right up front, that's a deal breaker.

Why wouldn't it be a deal breaker? That's the very reason bees sting, and we've talked about this over and over again. The intriguing thing is that beekeepers, and I'm as bad as anybody, we try to normalize the fact that we get stung. It's just typical beekeeping, and if you do this long enough, you're going to get popped. This was a good, this was a nuke, this thing didn't hurt, that thing really hurt. We normalize it. We get stung a lot. No, not a lot. We get stung more often than other people, but we normalize it. Then, a secondary oddity is that in the present state of beekeeping, we have beautiful protective gear. It hasn't always been that way.

Another oddity of beekeeping is that we wear protective gear, but then we readily admit that one way or the other, bees are going to get through that protective gear. The sting thing has a second level to it that is odd. If you were trying to explain to someone else, "You can wear all this gear." It's really hot when you get it on, and so we don't always put it there. We have it in the truck if we need gloves or whatever, but we always normalize the fact that there's a degree of pain to this whole bee thing. That has to be odd. Years ago, I struggled when I was lecturing to the populace of general people. Why don't we do this? I came up with examples.

Why in the world would anyone play professional football? Why would anyone be an electrician? How often do they take an electrical jolt? There's other things that pain comes with, but the sting thing, that's a deal breaker and an oddity for most people. I'm belaboring it too much. A strange thing to other people outside of beekeeping is they sometimes see us as breaking and entering. That's the bee's home. That's the bees' nest, but with impunity, we fake a fire with a smoker, subdue the bees' communication system, and then we just invade that hive, and then we rearrange things, we bother things, we do whatever.

I had a person years ago who said, "If you did that to a house, look how weird it would be. You rip the roof off, you rearrange all the furniture, you take some of the babies, and you raid the pantry." That's not a fair analogy, is it? That's silly. Others see the whole thing of taking honey as pilfering honey that's not really ours, that, in a sense, we are stealing from the bees. I don't know what to say about that. We do the same thing with milk and eggs and apple trees and whatever.

To some, it seems to be an oddity that we pillage a hive, rob from it. In fact, we used to call it robbing the bees. I think as an industry, we tried to stop using that terminology and say that we were taking the excess honey. We try to insist that what we're doing is ethical. Others have said, "We don't freak out over taking eggs from a hen," but when you take the honey, you're taking their food supply. We're not really-- I don't know. Is taking eggs from a hen the same thing as taking honey from the bees? Anyway, it's an oddity that gets counted. One of the things about beekeeping and beekeepers is that we obsess over queens.

To other people, is the queen in there now? Is she laying eggs? Is this the mama bee? All those things are really interesting to the public and odd. We do obsess over the queen. She's a good queen. She's a failing queen. I don't know, maybe she's a lazy queen. She's not doing enough. She's mean, she's got mean bees. The queen is a monarch and a scapegoat, and a hive symbol all at one time. We obsess over the queen. I need to say, even though that may be an oddity as well, we should because that is the absolute sport plug of the colony. It's odd.

When you're talking to someone sitting in a plane seat beside you on an airline trip, you may struggle to keep the whole concept of the queen and what she does and why we worry about her in perspective. Why don't we take a short break here and hear from our sponsor?

[music]

Betterbee: From all of us at Betterbee, thank you for another great year. To show our appreciation, we're gifting Beekeeping Today podcast listeners with an exclusive 10% off orders up to $150 in savings this holiday season. Shop at betterbee.com and use discount SNOW. That's S-N-O-W at checkout. This deal is good through 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time on December 31st, 2025. From the team at Betteree, we wish you a happy holiday season.

Jim: Another oddity is that beekeeping attracts a bit of a philosophical crowd. Oh, heaven knows that I've got to put me in that category now. Sometimes it takes years to become a beekeeping philosopher. You've got to pay your dues to work your way through gathering pollen and raising queens, and moving bees to pollination and all the typical things that you go through. Then, as you pass through life, then you become more and more of a beekeeping philosopher. It's not just beekeepers, though. You routinely hear honey and the sweetness of honey and poultry. This whole thing with bees and beekeeping sometimes draws people who are inclined to metaphors and reflection Beekeepers will become not just beekeepers, but poets, and writers, authors about what, cooperation in the hive, the balance, the resiliency, I don't know, the wisdom of nature. There's just so many different ways you can go. Hives are symbols of insect societies that are highly efficient, very organized. In many ways, bees become our teachers on how to run a different type of society. They are fascinating, but it's really notable how often beekeeping discussions drift into philosophy and a simple question about mic control and the viruses the vector can drift into humanity's relationship with nature or the fragility of ecosystems.

That was just the oddity I'm trying to discuss, is how bees and their behavior can so often be a sounding board, a springboard to other topics and other interesting concerns. While you're trying to talk to people, another oddity is that since we are so ancient, so antiquey, another oddity is that we basically speak a language that in some cases is almost medieval. It goes back so far. If you're an outsider and you're trying to understand this jargon of broods, supers, drones, nukes, and propolis, and queen cells, you can say, for instance, you got to add a super when 80% of the frames are drawn or requeen after three days, but before the workers begin to lay.

We've got this jargon that's odd, but I want to jump right in there and say, try to understand a quarterback calling plays on the football field or an electrician discussing everybody. Every industry, every organization has its jargon, but one of the oddities about our bee jargon is that it goes back so far. There are some words that are trapped. I've written some articles and tried to explain as best I could about the word super. Why don't we super something? Why don't we use that word as a noun instead of the word is normally used for? It's because of the way it was trapped.

We used to super things. We used to nadir things. There were other words that went along with it, and now that word is trapped. It's basically if you superimpose something, you put something on top of something else. We use this arcane old language. Even within beekeeping, we use medium brood foundation. I don't know if it's still available or not, but for many, many years, when you ordered your foundation, you ordered medium brood foundation, and that stuck, and it was even odd inside of beekeeping because light brood foundation and heavy brood foundation was essentially no longer manufactured. All that was left was medium brood, and it became entrenched in the catalogs.

I don't know if that kind of foundation is still even available or not. We speak an odd language, we speak an old language because our craft and our passion goes back so long that we've got some old characteristics that are embedded, and so far as I can tell, will be around forever. Another odd thing is that we add control and management. It's something that's normally chaotic. A colony is never truly under our control. We just keep it in balance.

There's weather changes. The nectar flows come and go, fluctuate. Of course, there's all the pests we all know about. They invade. The queens fail. Beekeepers learn to accept a level of unpredictability that would weigh on a lot of other people. You're never finished. Years ago, there was those TV shows where a guy could balance spinning dinner plates on pool cues, and he had seven or eight of those things all spinning at one time. It was amazing. I don't know what he did. It was black and white TV days. I always have this mental analogy that we as beekeepers we're trying to keep those spinning dinner plates all in the air and balanced at one time because now it's winter.

Everything we did, everything I did, the things I should have done that I didn't do, those things come to play now. Basically, an oddity of beekeeping is that we accept a degree of chaos and uncertainty as something that is normal. It's the way it should be. The casualness, which put up with this is unusual to some people. It's odd, but I think it's just beekeeping. I'm certain if you're any other-- I'm always defensive of beekeeping. If you're in any other agricultural field, there must be some oddities there. There must be some oddities in that whole thing. Beekeeping changes basically how we see the world.

Many beekeepers report that taking up the practice, one of the odd things that happen is you become a beekeeper, maybe you begin to notice flower blooming periods more, and you track the seasons differently, and you become hyper-aware of weather patterns. In a strange way, a beekeeper's sense of time and mental calendars aligns with nectar flows and with producing seasons and dormant seasons more than holidays and birthdays. The shift is subtle, kind of strange. A hobby centered on this insect, honeybees, ends up shaping how we experience the seasonal passing time and space. I have to say that there's not many things that have done that before.

I don't know exactly how to say that beekeeping modifies who we are and our sense of time, but it does seem to do that. I'm winding down. I've basically punched this. Beekeeping has some oddities. The ones that always catch me off guard is how I see bees and hexagonal shapes and those kind of things related all the time to maybe aircraft wing design, the honeybee structure, and an aircraft wing design, honeybee comb. Of course, then there's YouTube videos on the values of honey and all the things that honey does for you, but probably taking a spoonful of honey is better than taking a throat lozenge for a sore throat.

There's so many ways that honey and bees enter into our civilian life, if that should be a word.

[music]

At any rate, I think my time is about up. There are some odd things about beekeeping. There are some odd things about everything. This comes to mind because so often I've had to explain as a view to other people of why we do this unusual old crap that they see as eccentric, and I see it as valuable. Thanks for letting me talk to you. I hope to see you again. I'll talk to you again this time next week. I'm Jim, telling you bye.

[00:18:43] [END OF AUDIO]