Locust Tree Nectar Flows with Anne Frey (237)

Episode 237 – Locust Tree Nectar Flows with Anne Frey 

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Jim Tew: Hey, listeners. Jim. I'm here to tell you that we had a spectacular locust season. They just drooped everywhere. I was visiting my daughter in Michigan and it was just spectacular. The whole world just smelled like great Kool-Aid. Once again, I can't tell that my bees got any honey crop from it. I'm here with Anne Frey from Betterbee. Anne, you have locusts and those kind of things in your part of New York?

Anne Frey: Yes, Jim. I think we're pretty much the same sort of landscape here. We also had some beautiful locust bloom, which is still going on right now. It just smells great when you go outside.

Jim: It's really a nice experience.

Anne: Like you said, spectacular. It's a spectacle, but it doesn't always do much for the bees. It may just be maybe the heat. I'm not sure why.

Jim: I don't know what.

Anne: The flowers are pretty, they smell great, but maybe not so much nectar to attract the bees.

Jim: Yes. I don't know what.

Anne: Seems to be really great every maybe six years. I was surprised to see them blooming so much this year, because we had a great one two years ago that did fill up all the supers.

Jim: If you don't mind, I'd like to talk with you about that. I need to be sure that everybody knows that I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you here once a week, at Honey Bee Obscura, where I try to talk about something you do with basic and plain talk beekeeping. Today, I've got a treat for us, because Anne Frey from Betterbee is here to help us discuss this and clear up these mysterious issues.

Anne: That's quite the introduction. I don't know if I can live up to that.

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 will delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Well, I've already complained to you about it, that every year I get these nice locust blooms and it just comes in quiet with so much flash and fanfare. I've stopped twice this year. No exaggeration, Anne, or to the listeners. I've stopped twice and just stood there trying to see what is on all those balloons. I just don't see much activity of any kind. I don't see anything there. Why do those trees bother doing that if it's not working? Or, Anne, is it working?

Anne: I don't know. I think it's working. I think it's probably just like a mass quantity, a mass attempt for them. We also had the same thing with honeysuckle bushes. What we might be calling them honeysuckle. I know people in the south call something else honeysuckle. We've got these woody bushes that got-- they have like a yellow or whitish four-petal flower. They smell great, and you don't see bees on them, but nectar does come in.

My friend, Joe Kelly, said that he thought it was just because there's so many of them around, the likelihood of seeing a bee on any bush that I'm standing by is a low likelihood. Maybe it's like that with the locust, too. There's just too many flowers for us to spot the bees. They're so tall, too.

Jim: They are. Some of those trees are just spectacularly tall and slender. Being an old chainsaw guy, some of that wood's really hard to cut. Those are tough trees. I never have known what the locust tree, in this case, locust, what it's strategy is. Are a lot of those flowers go unpollinated, or are they self-fruitful? I don't know the answer to any of these things.

Anne: I don't know that either. I was wondering if the listeners know what we're talking about. Even if they're new beekeepers, they might not know what a locust tree is. I chatted with someone who's been beekeeping for about eight years, and she lives in this town and didn't know about locust trees. Hadn't even looked up and seen that these trees are covered with white flowers. They're like little bundles of grapes, basically. Little drooping clusters about as big as-

Jim: It does look like great.

Anne: -a big man's fist hanging down and there's a zillion of these clusters. You could see the trees from a mile away. You'll say, "Look at that across that scenery. There's some locust trees way over there," because they're just white. Those are locust trees. Their bark is really ridgy, really deep grooves in it. Sometimes they have thorns on them. We have another kind of tree that's a pink-flowered locust, but they don't seem to be as numerous or as tall. I don't know what this-

Jim: I don't know that. I don't know that variety.

Anne: They are always short. Like only maybe 12 or 13 feet tall. Yes, that's locust trees. An unfortunate name. You could call it acacia. I think it's related to the acacia trees in Africa, because they have thorns and they look very much like this. Their name is acacia here in the United States, for the Latin name.

Jim: I know there's black locust and honey locust, but I don't know the difference. The thing is, that I'm complaining about, is that I just don't see any significant scale change on the weighing device and the collar on my hives.

Anne: Yes. Let's get down to the nitty gritty. We want nectar.

Jim: I want nectar. When I see these flowers-- in an earlier podcast, you said that spring basically waits for no beekeeper. It moves right along.

Anne: Yes.

Jim: When you come out of the restaurant or whatever, and there's a locust tree and you see those blossom petals already on the ground and you think, "Well, locust bloom for the season is passing and it seems like it just started here a few days ago and already another year, and another crop disappointment."

Anne: Yes. It goes by quickly. Maybe one week. Maybe 10 days. Sometimes it just doesn't work out, but some years the nectar pours in. I think it must be related to the weather or the soil conditions. They probably have really incredibly deep roots that might relate to how much nectar is produced. What was the water down in the soil last fall, possibly. Don't know how that all works, but we are just powerless, Jim. We got to put our supers on and just wait. We can't make any changes with what Mother Nature is doing. We just got to be ready. Get those supers on and be ready to accept that nectar if it comes in.

Jim: You do have one other option that I frequently use. That's to be tardy and not get the supers on and just let everything swarm.

Anne: That's a second choice. That's a choice.

Jim: I'm saying that kind of to be funny, but kind of to be truthful at the same time, because if you miss the window, the world does not stop to wait for you. It moves right along.

Anne: Yes, I said that to some people who were picking up their bees. It better be this spring. They were like, "How long will it take for these to need another box?" I said, "You got to pay attention and see when they're filling about 80% of this box and then put the second box of frames on." They said, "Well, when do you think that'll be?"

I'm like, "I don't know, but if you're going to go away, or you have a wedding, or if you're going to have a graduation or something taking up all your time, Mother Nature doesn't care about you. She's not going to wait. The bees are going to grow, the nectar's going to come in, and they don't care what your schedule says."

Jim: Whether you're there or not. You really said that nicely. Nature does not wait on you.

Anne: No. We're not that important.

Jim: With all this discussion about nectar flows and nectar coming and nectar not coming, how do you monitor that? You and your operation, do you have any kind of scale hive, or any kind of measuring device, or you just look by eye?

Anne: We don't have measuring devices. I know there's different options out there like, HiveTracks, or BroodMinder, or Farming Scale. We just look, and we know that we're going to harvest towards the end of August. We're not checking to be able to do an early harvest or anything like that. We have our needs throughout the summer, and we know we need to just save harvesting for the end of August. What do you see? What do you use?

Jim: I'm just a hobby guy now, so I don't have a lot of hives, but I've got two of the BroodMinders. I've got one on. I like gadgetry, Anne, so I just like tinkering. I don't really like hard work anymore, so I enjoy pulling out the phone app and having a look at it. I think one reason I enjoy that so much is because of the difficulty in using those old feed mill platform scales that weighed 300 pounds and you had to keep up with the weights and go out and weigh your colonies periodically. This is so much easier until I just want to hug it. Compared to what it used to be to find the old scales at antique shops or in abandoned feed mills and buy them and-

Anne: Then they're missing that little weight.

Jim: -then wonder if they're calibrated. That's what I'm doing. Mostly, I'm doing exactly what you're doing. If you can't get the inner cover off, and it's really stuck down with burr comb, you're missing a flow there and you need to get some supers on.

Anne: Yes. When we crack a hive open and the inner cover comes off easily, or the supers come off easily, we're just like, "Oh, no. This is nothing." It's either swarmed or the hive is queenless. You want it to be all stuck together, but not too stuck together because that means you should have had more supers on. They're just making wax.

Jim: Yes.

Anne: Did I hear you say that you wanted to hug your app?

Jim: Yes. Well, I was just being figurative there, don't be taking that to heart, because it's hard to hug an app. How do you assure appreciation for an app? Let's get off this subject, [laughs] before I get far down this path. In fact, Anne, this is a good place just to stop and take a break and hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: Well, we're back and we've decided we're not going to hug our app. When you do get a honey crop in August, what's your extracting setup? Do you use a blower? Just give a quick rundown because we'll talk about this again closer to August. For right now, for those of you who don't know what to go buy and what to look at, what kind of a setup do you have where you go take the honey off that you decide can come off?

Anne: Our operation is scaled. I guess you'd probably say like a sideliner, it might be 150 or so hives that we're harvesting from. We did use the blower. We like to use the blower. We're way past using a triangle escape board for each hive as great as that device is. It's too slow for us. We might do fume boards, we might do the blower. The blower we're talking about is just a leaf blower. Someone explained it to me, it's not hurting the bees. They're used to dealing with wind. You're using the least blowing possible to get them to shoot out from between those frames.

We just take the supers off and stand them up on top of other nucs or hives that are in the yard, too. Then the person with the blower just travels from one to another blowing into the side of this standing up box that is the bottom, because the frames are narrower at the bottom.

Jim: Right.

Anne: The way that the comb is slanted, it also seems to make them lose their grip on the comb if it's not quite capped.

Jim: I agree completely.

Anne: We blow them out the tops and then another person picks that super up and walks to the trailer, and the person using the blower moves to the next standing up super, and it just moves along like that. We got to put covers on them on the trailer so that no bees flying in the air get back into them, and we just have duct tape over the inner cover hole of lots of extra inner covers and whop that on the top of a stack.

Jim: You make it sound so easy. As though standing in that full deep on its end and handling it and burr comb and probably got gloves on because the bees can be stingy this time of the year and-

Anne: Stingy.

Jim: -it's a lot of work. The one thing about that bee blower you didn't mention, I waited, was how pleasurable it is to stick that bee blower nozzle in your pocket.

Anne: [chuckles] What?

Jim: Blow yourself up like the Pillsbury Doughboy. It is so cooling inside that hot suit to have that air circulation. I was going to put that in the positive column.

Anne: I have never done that.

Jim: Well, give it a shot sometime. This is--

Anne: I'm picturing that [crosstalk].

Jim: I'm sorry, I've gotten us off the subject. Basically, you mentioned those triangular bee escapes, and there's the porter style bee escape. There's all these devices. You can even use a brush. It's not the purpose here in our discussion to really get down and dirty on the specifics. Just as this nectar turns into honey, at some point you go out and you take it off and you become something that's still called beekeeping. I would argue that it's not really beekeeping. That honey processing isn't beekeeping.

Anne: Yes, it's just annoyingly-- it's this product that comes along after all the beekeeping and you got to deal with it. Oh, man. Sometimes harvesting is so mind deadening [chuckles] and frustrating. You're in this hot room, you're extracting, it seems like everything you own is sticky. Everything on your body is sticky. Just like there's a mist of honey in the air because of the spinning extractors. Then it's all over, and you see the stacks of harvested honey and you're just glad that you did it.

Jim: Yes. I'm afraid you and I might be old beekeepers because as a young man, I used to just revel in that and see, I'm making all this honey, I'm going to get more bees, make more honey, make a lot of money. I don't want to downplay or frighten anyone out there, but that's a working time of the season, when you're processing the honey crop, but it's a working time of the season when you've got a garden and all the vegetables are coming in.

Anne: It's like that. Yes. Like when you've got too many tomatoes. That kind of thing. It's ready, you've got to harvest it and you got to deal with that product and take care of it.

Jim: Nothing makes it any better than having proper equipment. Having a motor on that extractor is so much better than cranking that thing by hand like an old ice cream freezer for hours. Some kind of device to help you uncap to get away from that sawing motion with a handheld knife.

Anne: I always liked the uncapping plane when I was a hobbyist. It's more of shaped like a safety razor, and you pull it straight towards yourself.

Jim: Yes.

Anne: That is something not many people use, but it just seems so much more logical than the knife and the sawing motion.

Jim: The old guys used to use two knives and a pot of boiling water. You pick up one knife and uncap one side and put the knife back in the boiling water and use the other knife to uncap the other side. That just added to the heat and the steam in the room and just added to the overall ambience.

Anne: That sounds very old timey. Was the boiling water on a fire made out of logs?

Jim: [laughs] No, it was on actually an electrical element, but it could have been a-- this was just the old things. I don't want people to think I'd go back to the 1800s. I just saw this in books, Anne.

Anne: Oh, it was from the books.

Jim: [chuckles] Yes.

Anne: We use a steam-heated uncapper that draws the frames down into itself. It's pretty nice. You do have to lift the frames up pretty high to begin with though. Then you've got the added fun of stepping up onto a box that's covered with drips of honey and slippery wax over and over again.

Jim: Can I add my own thing? That's you can't get all the bees out. I don't care what you're using, you never get all the bees out. They're in the extracting room and they go to the lights, or they're on the equipment you're trying to pick up. Invariably, there's a sting or two that you're surprised to pick up. We're just complaining. It's just processing.

Anne: It does sound like we're complaining. I could say about the bees in the room, that triangle escape boards are really good for that. If you can manage to darken all your windows, but have one triangle escape board somehow in a place where bees can exit the building through that escape board, because the little circle is the only light they'll see once you shut the doors, shut the lights off. They'll go out and become like a little clump on the outside of your building right on that outside triangle escape board. That's what we do. Then we collect them off of the escape board and bring them to a hive on the property.

They may have come from a whole different property when we brought the supers to this extracting room. It's kind of sad to have them just all up on the fluorescent lights or something. We try to get them collected and take them back to a hive.

Jim: Oh, that's another good way of wording it. It is sad because those bees have no future. They're completely lost. You probably hauled them from a distant yard someplace. They probably will never find their way back home. It's really a nice gesture that you take and give them an adopted home to finish out their careers in there. Anne, you got any closing notes? We're out of time.

Anne: I would like everyone to put their supers on and put on some more supers. Don't forget to kill your mites.

Jim: Well, that's a good admonishment. A lot of work to be done, but it's enjoyable. Listeners, thank you for tuning in and listening to us. We'll try to do some more of these things as the seasons come up, and we'll keep you informed.

Anne: Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Jim: Yes. Thank you for being here.

Anne: Bye, Jim.

Jim: Bye-bye.

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