Plain Talk: Seeing The Light (278)

Episode 278 – Plain Talk: Seeing The Light

Jim Tew

Hey listeners, Jim here again, muddy. Welcome back to the bee yard. Listeners, I probably shouldn't do this, but I am.

I am going to do it. Honestly, I need somebody to talk to. But today would have been my wife's 78th birthday.

So she's been gone now over a year and I've evolved. The podcast and the B articles have really helped me stay focused. The Bs have just been irreplaceable.

So today I went up to the Western Reserve National Cemetery and Visit my wife and it was an absolutely glorious day. Gotta go through the barn here. So I decided while I was there, I would just go for a nice walk.

And it was a nice walk, even though I was walking in a beautifully manicured cemetery. It was still a nice walk on a beautiful day. I'm in the bee yard.

I opened the door and Six bees crashed into me. I don't know what that was all about. So I had a nice walk and it I feel pretty good.

And I just wanted to come out and do what I used to do, just sit and look at my bees. And think about things. Anything that comes to mind.

Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you here once a week where I try to talk about something conversationally to do with plain. Talk beekeeping.

Introduction

Welcome to Honey Be Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim 2, your guide through The complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees.

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

Jim Tew

It kind of dates this segment, if I tell you the exact truth, but it's actually the day just before Easter. So everybody's in a good mood. Spring is here.

Pears are in bloom. Goldenrods coming on Multiflora rose is getting ready for another season here of making brambles. So even though I'm going through this change in life Spring is always such a reflective period.

And it just really helpful to go through that and know how that works. Up at the cemetery, I'm afraid it's Bradford pears. There were pears that were in full bloom.

So while everybody else is visiting lost loved ones, I was out there looking at the blooms on some kind of pear. A lot of surfing flies, a lot of native bees. I didn't couldn't tell that I saw any honey bees to speak of But I just made it a nice walk.

I hope you don't mind me rambling on and on here about this because it's it's on my mind and I try to suppress it and as usual I'm using the bees. to enlighten my spirits. Of course he can look at them over here and tell they don't have a clue and they don't care about my unenlightened or enlightened spirits.

They're bringing back all kind of yellow and orange pollen. I don't know for what. Been told that each one of those pollen grains represents one new bee.

So basically I had a even though it was a special day for me It was a good day. It's the day of rebirth, of renewal, of recovery So I I will count that as a good day. So thank you for letting me tell you that this is a ceremonial day for me.

One night I was lying there in bed and I was thinking this is how dark it is. Inside a beehive. And I've always been mystified by how any one of those bees that's coming out And any one of those bees carrying pollen going back in can go from an environment of bright light to an environment of deep crowded darkness.

And you know, I try to give myself some insight, some understanding I saw, you know, we always say, well, they use our antennae and they have this touch and feel and you know we have all these explanations for how they function inside this dark hive. But you know, I don't see how we can ever be there unless there's some kind of infrared camera that someone with far more sophistication than I have could look at because if you put them in an observation hive then it's not dark anymore. But I always try to figure out the depth of requirement Everything is in blackness.

Even the larvae in the cell. So I'm not trying to make this a lecture. Please, please.

I want to keep this a conversation And if you have any comments or reflections, post them and we'll try to get back to you. But it's just darkness. And I suppose we could ask questions or explore blindness in humans, maybe there's some similarity, but then while I was lying there thinking That we give this darkness in beehives so much credit.

Bear with me, I gotta pull my hood down. The bees are finding me. Why do they want to get right in your face?

But they do. So we give these bees credit for living in this dark world, but I realized that The last time the inside of my own personal body saw light was when I was having some colon surgery done So inside my dark body, it's pitch black. I would like for any physician out there to tell me, is there any translucence?

How does light permeate and how deep does light permeate the endothermal epidermal layers? I mean, I know we synthesize vitamin D with light, but is my heart functioning in perfect darkness? Is my lungs functioning in perfect darkness?

So when you see all those charts and grids in the biology book that had all those overlays and you could turn one page and Turn another page and keep adding organs and they're all brightly colored and red and yellow and whatever. In reality, it's nothing like that. Inside that hive is 100 totally percent dark.

Inside my body, I think it's mostly dark. And the oddity is Even if a little bit of light came in and cracks and crevices, they caught that up. And I wonder if they're attracted to those lights coming from cracks and crevices because if they can see it Then wax moths and other pests could come in at that point.

So even if they do see light, they caulk it, closed. I wish I knew more about it. How beautifully they live in alternate worlds.

A bright sunshine day they can use the sun's azimuth. and lay down a perfect grid along that azimuth to find food they're working and then they can come back and go inside a dark hive and shut down apparently shut down all visible light and then convert to this dark world. I don't know how to add any more to that.

To me that's just an anomaly. It's just an oddity. Let's take a break.

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Jim Tew

You know I ask you to wait. While we had the message from our sponsor, while I got my thoughts about me, as though I had that ability to ever do that, I don't know where these thoughts come from I want to keep going on it though because it's not just the bees. I'd like to ask a question.

When we open a hive. We destroy that vividly dark environment. Is there anything there that happens that I'm not thinking of?

That I would not know to think of. So there's let's just say there's some developing pupae and they're not yet kept and they go from pitch blackness to bright sunlight while we hold the sun coming in over our shoulder into the cell bottom so we can see eggs. At that moment are we overloading the uh eye systems of those developing pupae with light so bright they've never seen it before The only reason I bring this up is that years ago, a colorful, competent scientist with USDA in Arizona, Steve Tabor, admonished me not to hold my grafting frame in direct sunlight, especially in Arizona.

He said because those one-day old larvae, exposed to that much direct sunlight, would essentially sunburn almost immediately. So he wanted me to hold it obliquely so the light wouldn't come in directly and hit those tiny larvae with a good solid blast of radiant sunlight Like they had never seen in their four-hour old life. Is there anything else that we're not thinking of that light would do inside a hive?

Does it hurt? I mean since work workers routinely fly out, drones fly, Queens fly. So if there is damage, where would it be to the developing bees that have not yet?

gained their chitinous hardness. I really have no idea. I just know that I marvel at how they must function inside the dark Seeing that this is an egg in the wrong place, seeing there's two eggs in this cell, I should eat one to get the other one out.

Seeing that a larvae is hungry, seeing that a cell needs building, that's all done by tactile Abilities, I suppose. Senses of feel. I know pheromones are intensively at play.

I've never heard that bees have any kind of special X-ray vision that allows them to see in the dark, but I don't know what questions to ask because I can never see what the bees see in the dark. Like I said early on about someone having special infrared technology, I don't have that, so I don't know if there's a camera that could be used to get an idea of what the bees look like they're doing You know, we t we s we boldly say that bees come back as water foragers and they give their drop of water to a house bee that serves as a as a buffalo bee or a water tanker and that they sit quietly holding water. Well let me just point black ask.

How do we know that? Because we saw a bee sitting quietly on the frame when we pulled it out. So I Skeeps I gotta stop saying so much.

Every time I say so, somebody write me and tell me to stop saying so much Then I just guess we I just guess was that's all we can do is draw conclusions because there's no other way to do it. That must be a tanker bee because she has a bloated abdomen and this bee over here is still feeding larvae. even though she's now in bright light, or is she trying to do something to protect that larvae?

Or am I just making something out of absolutely nothing here? So my rhetorical question that I was thinking about late at night was darkness and how it must be unique inside a beehive. And then I realized, nope, right across the way there is a groundhog tunnel.

And underneath, those animals live in total darkness. Apparently my internal body viscera is in total darkness. Total darkness occurs in a lot of places, not just beehives.

But it's bees that I have the interest in. It's bees that I'd like to know more about what they're doing. I always ache at something being right in front of me, a question and a concurrent answer being in front of me And me just not having the insight to see it because I see things the way I've always seen them.

What do you think? The bees live in two bizarrely different worlds with two totally different systems or antennae. Really critical Without them, can you can you what?

I don't know. I'm not a researcher. I have no interest in being a researcher.

I just love sitting around outside a beehive wondering. on a completely disassociated topic. Right now in Hulu, National Geographic has got a series going that my daughters told me I had to watch.

So I finally got it tuned in. I think it's the world of the honey bee. It's something that really shows the honey bee And of course, it's got that spectacular National Geographic photographic work.

The guy's kind of campy who does the work. He's He's a gog, but then again I'm a gog right now sitting here all campy myself so why am I criticizing him? But I've started watching that and just the photography is so breathtaking and if you like bees you don't have to smell like smoke You don't go out have to go out and pick up heavy boxes.

You can see you can see things I would never see, even if I did those kind of things with the microphotography they're using You might want to have a look at that. It's just so easy to do if you can still get Hulu or what's left of Hulu. I don't know how that works.

I was completely intrigued this morning also to just to be thumbing through my electronic daily newspaper. And see that the King of England has had an interest in bees since he was a young man and has always supported nature and was shown looking at beehives and being concerned about beehives and having a few on some of the estates that they have there. How intriguing is that the King of England has an interest in bees.

I mean that's just, that must be so typical. I've always liked, I have no idea if I've got any British listeners, but I've always enjoyed the British style of beekeeping with the cottage gardens and the hominess and the Everything looking so neat and tidy. Well I sit here looking in my yard like a bomb went off.

That it's not at all what happens here, even though those wildflowers will come back. I've always enjoyed the neatness and the dedicatedness, so it would probably only be appropriate that the King of England apparently has more than a passing interest in honey bees. Occasionally there's other people.

There's you know there's famous actors in the U. S. I don't want to try to call their names, that blotch it, that have dedicated entire farms.

to bee areas and bee foraging areas. It must be great to have that kind of resource and to have that kind of ability to really give to the bees. What they actually need instead of me planting a little flower garden here 8 by 8 by 8 of having 60 acres that you can just let run fallow and give all that to not just honey bees, but to all foraging insects, butterflies, everything else along that way.

This has been a casual conversation. I'm telling you the truth. It was a special day for me.

It's an absolutely beautiful day. The bees are in a great mood, except for the two who came over to check out my dark microphone. Birds are out, life is happy, flowers are coming in.

It looks like another year is going to start up. It's just a pleasant time to be out. I wanted to talk with you a few minutes just to talk to somebody.

So thanks for letting me leave my quiet life just for a while and talk to you. I look forward to talking again next week if you don't mind. I am really, truly enjoyed just talking to you.

I'm Jim telling you bye until next week.