Plain Talk: About Honey Bee Feeders (241)

Episode 241 – Plain Talk: About Honey Bee Feeders 

Jim Tew: Hi, beekeepers. This Thursday, again, I'm Jim Tew here, sitting in my weedy bee yard. I really enjoy coming back here. It just clears my head. On one hand, I feel guilty because so much needs to be done, but on the other hand, I'd rather be sitting here than sitting in my shop or in the house or something.

I'm out here watching insects fly around, and watching bees fly, and listening to birds, and thinking about bees. I'm in a troublesome situation this morning because I've got two mixed topics that, to me, blend, but I'm not sure they'll blend to you.

Let me see if I can put this into a concept that I've enjoyed tinkering with for the next 20 minutes. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I make an honest effort to talk about something to do with just plain talk 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 Tew: Listeners, I'm not boasting, I'm just old. I don't actually know when I submitted my first article. It was decades and decades ago, my first article to beekeeping publications. I do remember just being beside myself with eagerness that I had an article accepted.

My payment for that first article was to be allowed to go to the book section and choose any book I wanted. I chose Crops and Crop Pollination, I think, by John Free, still in my bookcase even now.

When I write these articles, just like doing a podcast and just like doing a PowerPoint presentation, the presenter always learns more than he's able to present. Strange information just pops up that you didn't know. A rabbit comes out of a hole that you're inclined to chase because you didn't know that this would work this way and you didn't understand the concept.

All of a sudden, almost painfully, you grow. What happened here was I found a publication. You could put it in your shirt pocket, Feeds and Feeding. Ironically, there's also an animal management book with the same name that has been historically popular.

Our beekeeping version of Feeds and Feeding was by E.E. Root, one of the sons of A.I. Root. 102 years ago, he wrote this short, small, really no-nonsense pamphlet on feeding bees. I got into it, and I'm going to talk to you more about that.

What's caught me off guard, again, was some of the backstory on these old masters of beekeeping that are now long, long gone from a beekeeping world that is long, long gone. Mr. Root was telling me different ways to feed bees and what the mixing concoction should be and why I'm feeding and, like I said, more about that later.

Of course, listeners, he mentioned the Boardman feeder. Is there a single one of you who doesn't have a Boardman feeder? For years and years and maybe even now, I don't know, they would come with a beginner's kit because they were so simple to use.

Mr. Root said they use the atmospheric principle, and that means it just forms a vacuum and a drop hangs up. Should I be embarrassed to tell you that I thought that a Boardman feeder somehow had that name because it went on the bottom board? No, I was wrong.

When you look at it, a Boardman feeder, B-O-R-D-M-A-N, why would that have any reference to the bottom board? Really, that never held water, but it was just the best idea that I could come up with. Actually, Boardman, of course, was a man. Hiram R. Boardman quietly made a simple gadget that most of us, 125 years later, still have in our beekeeping repertoire.

There's only, I bet you, just a handful of things that have survived that long. Things like Excelsior covers, all kinds of things have come and gone, but that Boardman feeder, now cheaply made of plastic, is still available right now in essentially every beekeeping catalog.

Listeners, what I didn't know is that Hiram was from East Townsend, Ohio. Alabama was not a ground zero type area for beekeeping innovation. They did a lot in the early days with queens and packages, but I don't know of any real significant advances that were made in beekeeping, but that was not Ohio.

It just seems like everybody in the world who did anything, one way or the other, had some affiliation with someone in Ohio, probably because of Gleanings in Bee Culture. At the time, it was called Gleanings in BeeCulture.

A little bit of backstory on that, Root decided to drop the name, the word gleaning, because they felt like so many people wouldn't know what that meant, when you go out and glean a crop, and nobody gleaned their crops anymore. Most of them worked in offices or did jobs that had nothing to do with agricultures. The name was dropped from Gleanings in Bee Culture to Bee Culture.

Ohio had a strong history, and Boardman was from East Townsend, Ohio. I didn't know that. I did the typical web search, the same thing you would do, and quickly found his grave in East Townsend, and a picture of him and his stone.

Even though I've already seen a picture of his stone, his headstone, and even though I've seen a photo of him, East Townsend is on the way between where I live and where my daughter lives in Michigan. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stop by there sometime.

That sounds macabre, maybe even morbid, but I'm sometimes drawn to the project of finding great master beekeepers' final resting place. I've been to Mr. Kelley's from the Kelley Bee Supply Company in Kentucky. Maybe at some point I'll make it to Medina and go to the city cemetery and find A.I. Root and all his sons.

Now I'm really off the subject. That's that rabbit I was telling you about, where something comes up and you go chase a rabbit. I did not know that Mr. Boardman was from Ohio and that his final resting place was so near me. Just about a short hour away from where I'm sitting right now in my bee yard is his final resting place.

There it is. His name was Hiram R. Boardman. He was from East Townsend, Ohio, and I could find out nothing about how he came up with the idea, when he came up with it. The first Boardman theater was a small box that he built. Then from then on, it became all these variations on a theme.

I didn't mean to get this far down this rabbit hole, but here I am. When I was a young man, there were three books to have in beekeeping. If you had those three books, then you essentially had a complete US beekeeping library. The Hive and the Honeybee, ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping, and a book simply called Beekeeping. It had first been published by E.F. Phillips and had been through many variations.

You can find a copy of this book at used bookstores frequently. There's a million copies of it around. Then later in life, two other authors, Eckert and Shaw, republished that book. I always really liked it because it had a completely different flavor from the other two books and frequently had those West Coast hive changes with handles across the front of the hive instead of just the groove.

It was just West Coast beekeeping. It wasn't quite the same as East Coast beekeeping, but very similar. I was completely blown away to find out that Eckert, this man that I had revered and whose book I had treasured, get ready for it, was from Wooster, Ohio, where I'm sitting right now.

He went to Wooster High School. In Wooster, there is the Eckert House. An old Eckert, much earlier than my beekeeping Eckert, had some job over in Washington, and he had a national position, so his house is a modest historical spot. I know that has to be the same Eckerts that are here.

When you see these names like Boardman, and, Miller, and Doolittle, those were real people. They were not devices or procedures. They were people who worked those things out. There must have been a reason for beekeepers having such a prominent role in the early history of beekeeping. I'm going to give you my best guess right after we hear from our sponsor.

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Jim Tew: How many people could we list? Of course, Dadant, Root, Quinby, Doolittle, Miller. These names just go on and on and on. Why did they have such a prominent role? Let me challenge you right now to give me the name of a beekeeper that's working and living and producing right now who we will be quoting and citing 100 years from now.

Now, I'm on a slippery slope. Let me quickly say, I don't mean to disparage anyone who's a current expert, but the concepts of expertness have changed. I think that now that we have university systems, now that we have a lot more of an information base, very technical, requiring specialized equipment to do a lot of the advanced concepts that we work on and selection for various miticides and whatever, that's not something that can really be readily done in your backyard.

Now we have prominent scientists for the moment, but then they quickly pass, too. The days I think have passed when an individual in his home apiary could make such influential changes as to be noted for it historically.

There was a beekeeper named Alexander who was a prominent writer and published extensively in the bee magazines. He actually wrote a book called Alexander's Writing on Practical Bee Culture and KindredSubjects. It's nothing more than an amalgamation of his writings.

He at the time was the largest beekeeper in this country with 1,000 colonies. Where I was going with this and this Feeds and Feeding book is that Roots cited him heavily. I didn't know much about him. Now, he's not from Ohio, he's from New York. He developed the Alexander feeder that was just as common as the Boardman feeder in its day, but it waned. It didn't make the long historical cut.

The Alexander feeder was essentially a two by four that he used the wobble blade on a table saw to cut wide grooves in. It was about four inches wide by the actual measurements of old timber framing. He made it four inches wider than the colony, so those grooves would stick out from under the hive.

You push the bottom board forward four inches and then that feeder went underneath the colony on the back. Then when you filled it, you filled it from the outside. Then when you were finished filling it, you just laid a four-by-four-inch wood block on it and the feeder was covered.

I hope I drew that in your mind well enough because it's really a simple device. Through the years, all kinds of variations came out. Most of them took the grooves out and used an open container. This guy was just a bee guy.

I'm fairly comfortable, without clear documentation, telling you that that round veil that you can roll up and put in your luggage, I should have checked before I came back to the yard to see that it's still available, that was called an Alexander veil. It can't just be an oddity that that has the same name as that man's name.

I suspect that not only did he develop a feeder, but he also probably developed that veil. Now here I am in my bee yard talking about Alexander. My point up till this point has been the profound effect that individuals could have on the future direction of beekeeping by doing nothing more than observing and thinking in their bee yard.

That's much more difficult to do now. We seem to be tinkerers. We keep tweaking old ideas. Occasionally a new idea comes along like electronic hive measuring devices and apps for my phone. There are latter day things with new technology, but most of what we do with this device and that device, it's just a modification of what someone's always done.

Root didn't like the Alexander feeder. He said that it didn't hold enough syrup and the bees took it too quickly. That it only worked if the hive set dead level flat. This brings up another arena here that I need to discuss, I want to discuss, and that's the internecine warfare between these authorities.

See, there was no scientific community to review an idea. The idea could only be reviewed in the world of beekeeper use and beekeeper opinion. When I say that Root didn't like this device, he didn't mention the fact that the Boardman feeder is frequently accused of inciting robbing because of its nearness to the front entrance and it would lure robbing bees right to the front entrance.

I sometimes read these concerns and complaints with a jaundiced eye because there was no neutral site to once and for all say you're right and you're wrong. Those days too are gone.

We have now a solid analytically-based scientific community that can look at most things, many things, depending on whether or not money is there for research, but more often than not, these people just slugged it out in the literature and the one that survived is the one who was able to sell the most equipment.

Even Langstroth never made the money off his beehive patent. He tried to fight it. He tried to insist that people had to buy the rights to manufacture his hive and he wasn't able to do it. Even though his name will live forever in US beekeeping, he was not a wealthy man because of it.

Root had some very practical admonishments in his little publication that I'd never heard before. He wanted you to feed for stimulative feeding to wake the bees up in the spring. He wanted you to feed only the smallest amount and to feed it as slowly as you could.

He said that the argument was to wake the bees up from the winter sleep and it was not to provide supplemental feeding. When he was writing this publication 102 years ago, forget corn syrup, forget artificial sweeteners, forget all those things, they're not an option. This was a very simple book.

You used table grade cane sugar or beet sugar, and you made feed. I've come to the same point. After all these years of keeping bees, I just about don't feed anything other than honey in the comb. Those feeders, if you're having to feed, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound. You needed something besides a Band-Aid.

Feeding is still very common to do. It's in all the books that you should stimulative feed and you should feed for winter stores. I have to say that if you're having to feed for winter stores, your bees are in dire straits.

I've recently written an article that's not published yet, and I boldly said that if there's a colony in early winter that needs feeding, its destiny is cast. It's not a rewarding destiny for that colony. What I brutally found through the years is to invest time and product, sugar, and energy. All I'm doing is just extending that colony's suffering until it dies during the winter.

My feeling has become, as was supported in this book, that stimulative feeding, supplemental feeding, is messy. You risk inciting robbing from the stronger colonies to the weaker colonies. It's hard to do, you've got to do it with regularity, you've got to know when to stop and when to start.

I just try to hold back some honey, or I pilfer a frame here and a frame there from other colonies to subsidize what my bees need. Beekeepers, that's just me. You see, when I was half my age, I would have been out with feeders and mixing syrup and heating water and doing all of that. Now, more and more, I stand by.

I respect the intelligence and the experience of all these people, long gone, whose legacy lives in the literature and in the writings they may have left. Even though they lived a long time ago, we should make no mistake, a lot of those explorers and experimenters were very clever people.

We stand on their shoulders all because of a little publication written by one of the Roots 102 years ago. Thanks for listening to me. You know, I hope, how much I enjoy talking to you. Bye-bye.

[00:23:03] [END OF AUDIO]