Plain Talk: Bee Keeping vs Bee Tweaking (242)

Episode 242 – Plain Talk: Bee Keeping vs Bee Tweaking

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Jim Tew: Hey listeners, Jim here. I know that I probably shouldn't take a stab at this. When I talk to you, I just generally tend to talk about what's on my mind. I don't think we've hoodwinked you. I think you've always known that this is an off-the-cuff discussion series. This is not so much a how-to series. My thought today fits in that. Don't cut me right off now. Give me a chance to get into it and see what you think. I'd like to know how we actually became beekeepers. How did we get that name? How did we get that designation? That we keep bees.

When I take that apart, because I'm a beekeeper, I've been a beekeeper for a long time. I have a brother who keeps goats. Does that make him a goat keeper? Not at all. You people who've got chickens in your backyards and you raise them for eggs and maybe something else later on as the chicken ages, does that make you a chicken keeper? When I began to think about us being beekeepers, I didn't really come up with any other comparison in the natural world. There's no other keepers that I know of. I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura where I try to talk about something that's plain talk beekeeping. I hope it's in the realm of beekeeping.

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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.

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Jim: Part of my hesitancy here is that even though I don't mind you knowing, I'm not ready to talk about all that I've been through for the last three years or so. It's been a personal trip. Maybe sometime later I'll let you in, and the only reason I would let you in is because through it all, the bees were right there with me. They were never my friend, but they were always solid, expected, traditional, typical. They were not any of the other confusing issues I was having to deal with. Here's the oddity. They didn't all die. They were strictly on their own, and they didn't all die. In fact, one of the hives, I was talking about it last spring, was thriving.

Now, this is a slippery slope because I don't want to make you think that this abandonment of all bee management procedures and letting bees digress to their natural level is the way anyone should be going. I'm just telling you that it was the only way at the time, during that time, that I could really dependably go. As I look back, am I a beekeeper for those last three years, or what am I? I had bees.

Just look at it for a different way. If I go to my woodshop and I build a birdhouse, a bird box, and I put that out on a post and a bluebird moves in, I'm not a bluebird keeper. That's more of a comparison of what we're all doing with our bees. At the most fundamental level, bees are their own masters. They live in our boxes and they put up with our shenanigans, our combs and foundations, and interest ways, and whatever. They tolerate all of that. They're not ours. I don't really keep bluebirds. At the most basic level, I don't really keep bees. I'm just providing a domicile for them, and they're living in it.

The reason I'm talking to you at all is because of my experiences that I've been through and where I am now, trying to recover from everything and get back in the swing and the spirit of true beekeeping. It almost feels, we should help me here, it almost feels wrong. They've been on their own. They managed themselves. I picked up some swarms. I lost some swarms. Those colonies that were going to die died last winter. They're still dead. The colonies that lived seem to be doing fine. As I'm speaking to you, one of those packages that I've installed in the spring has got bees bearded on the front, that needs another deep.

Why don't I do that? I don't do it because it's hot and because you've got to get all the tools out, but I should do it. What's the bottom line? If I don't do it, they've got enough to survive the winter. They did a nice job building up. This is where I get confused. I think beekeepers are the common people who work with bees, who want surplus honey, they want pollination, and they probably at some point would like some beeswax to make some candles.

What if I just wanted monarch butterflies? I don't own them. I don't keep them. I just put out food sources for them, these plants that you put out. Or I put up birdhouses and I put out bird feeders. It's more in that genre. When my daughters take a trip, they just went to Europe for two weeks, they've all got dogs, all three of them have a dog, two of them have cats, well, it was a major ordeal to find someone to take care of those animals while they were gone. Not me. My bees take care of themselves.

Yes, you're thinking about Varroa, aren't you? You should be. Varroa is an unfair challenge that we have put upon our bees by introducing Varroa in the early '80s to our bee herd here in this country, so that is an unfair restriction that bees have to deal with. Aside from all of that, bees are still bees. I used to brag about keeping bees for 50 years. That's already two years ago. 52 years later of tinkering with these bees, they really are still a standard environmental entity.

They swarm in the spring. They sting you in the summer when you bother their honey reserves. They diligently work every day. They maintain a rigid schedule no matter what I'm confronted with, no matter what my excuses are. The bees are on bee time. They're not on my time. The thought that I was trying to have is at the most basic level, my relationship with bees is remarkably simple. I put them in a box or I put a box out, or I have a swarm, I offer them a house. They probably will accept it. Then from then on, they really don't need me. While you chew on that, let's take a break and hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: All these pieces I've discussed with you have come together. I didn't do a good job taking care of my bees, winterizing, controlling, swarming, monitoring queen behavior. They're on their own. You either live or die, and you do it on your own terms. I've got about 10 hives here. Two of them are packages from this spring. I got about eight hives here that have been their own lord and masters for several years.

Do I dare ask, when thinking about Varroa, do they have some mechanism that I wouldn't fully understand? Were my bees reasonably isolated here since I wasn't moving bees here and moving bees there and pollination work? Is the isolation a factor in bees being able to tolerate Varroa as well as they did? Why don't you go ahead and ask me, what's my Varroa count? I'm telling you, I don't know. The bees have been doing their own thing. I simply did not have enough life's energy to be a good beekeeper during this time I just went through. I don't know what the Varroa count is.

When I put those packages in, I actually took a moment to wonder if I was breaking up an unintentional ecosystem that I had evolved back here because the bees selected for themselves. They selected their own queens. They replaced queens as necessary. There was one of them that was particularly weak last winter, and it has built up nicely now. I've done minimal things to it. I don't know if it just barely got through the winter and then replaced its queen stock with something that they thought was more appropriate.

I, Jim Tew, have told audiences everywhere that bees don't always choose the best larval choices to raise queens from. We don't know what their decision-making choices are when they do it naturally. This not knowing, not understanding, doesn't inhibit me from charging right in with a queen that I just bought from a professional producer somewhere and jamming my own genetics into that system.

I need to review you on where we are. At its most basic level in this discussion, bees are their own masters. We manipulate, we tweak, we cajole, we direct, we suggest, but they never give us their psyche. They only tolerate us. In my greatest hour of need, my bees didn't love me any more, any less. They don't like me. I'm just yet another invader, another predator that they must design some defense against if they can. I'm quite the formidable predator, I'd have to admit that, with all my clothes and smokers and gloves. I'm a tough one now. Since I've been unable to prey on them the way I would normally have been, keep bees the way I normally would have, they've done their own thing.

The only thing I'm trying to get across, the only point I'm struggling with here, trying to discuss with you, is we have taken beekeeping and made it into our artifact. The bees are still as wild as they ever were. How many times have I said that in lectures, in discussions, in classes? That bees are not domesticated. They're just wild animals living in our artificial domiciles. Saying it and truly seeing it work that way has been an insightful period of time for me.

Am I poo-pooing honey production? Not a bit. Nothing wrong with commercial pollination. I don't know of anything we've done wrong. We've done it with apples. We've done it with Holstein cattle. We've done it with sweet corn. We do it as a way of life to feed more people quality food at an affordable price. We do it all the time. There's nothing wrong with beekeeping and managing bees in our favor. The curiosity is they've not changed in the process. We've tried to breed. We've tried to select. We've tried to develop bees that we like. They're disease resistant. They're docile. They've got a particular color or something.

Listeners, just the time you walk away from that breeding program, the bees take back over again and they do their own thing based on their own decisions. Given what? I gave them three years. They design their own ecosystem and they do their own thing. I've already told you the analogy I had of comparing it to the complexity of every other animal. Can you just abandon a small herd of cows for three years? Absolutely not. Don't feed your dog, you don't feed your cat for three years, all these things are actually criminal in many cases.

Couple of weeks ago, I popped in my car and took off for 2,000 miles. I didn't come back here and do anything special. I didn't put on extra food. I didn't leave some kind of automatic feeder out. It's bees. They can take care of themselves. I guess that we're beekeepers when we coerce bees to stay at our boxes so that they will do the things that we want them to do, as we oh so often do with other animals, other livestock, other plant varieties. We are unique in that regard because no other animal husbandry person, no other gardener is said to be a keeper.

Even though I'm not going to resist that age-old term, I don't really keep the bees. I just borrow them. I'm a landlord and they're a renter. That rent cost that they have to pay is that I need some honey every year to go on the biscuits that I've been trying to learn to make. It's a peculiar relationship. When you start in beekeeping, I would hold your hand and take you right down the traditional beekeeping path. Do this, do that, never do that. Your bees will survive the winter. They'll be more resistant to mites. You'll get a bigger honey crop, you'll control swarming, and all of those things are just tweaking the bees' natural behavior. Sometimes I think maybe bee tweaker might make more sense.

These are not really my bees. Those bees that swarm, I don't know what happened to them. The swarm that moved into my equipment that I talked to you about, I don't know where they came from. They didn't come from my bees. There is a natural rhythm of life in this bee thing that I wander into with all the background history that we've got, with all the modern science that we've got. I try to manipulate and manage and do whatever it takes to coerce the bees into doing what I want to do.

I have been forced for the last few years to let the bees do their natural thing. The only thing they dealt with unnatural was the frame layout, the comb layout inside the boxes that I put there. They decided when to swarm, they decided when to forage, they decided how much water to bring in. They decided what queen stock they wanted. They ran it all. Let me tell you, they're remarkably good at it. From a survival standpoint, they want to swarm.

Are some of you wondering how many swarms these colonies here in my backyard cast? I don't know. Those that swarmed, I tried to get back. Sometimes I did. I added a swarm to this package here that needed help because of a queen issue that it had. Right now they seem to be about half the size of the other package. Part of me says, let them see if they can figure out how to manage their problem and control it better than I.

That was the whole issue. Don't change anything you're doing. Don't change your philosophy. Don't change your expectations from what you want from the bees. At their most fundamental level, for the third time, I'm telling you, bees are their own masters. They have not given us absolute and complete control of their existence. They are still themselves. They have been since the day I started 50 years ago. I depended on them being self-supportive while I was away and not doing the things that I thought I should be doing.

It's become clear in retrospect that the things I really needed to do, super up on time, reverse deeps, re-queen every year with a good-stock queen, all those things, those are beekeeper management issues that I do because I'm the beekeeper. The bees never required that. They didn't require it at all. They would have much rather swarmed more often and put their genetic stock out in the surrounding ecosystem and had a better chance of surviving genetically rather than maintain 65,000 or 70,000 bees in one box, which is a huge beehive to find in nature. In fact, you won't find it. They won't choose a space that big and then turn into this monolithic beehive. They will swarm, swarm, swarm.

I love bees. I love thinking about them. I love trying to respect bees for being bees. I enjoy a good honey crop. It's just me thinking, listeners. I hope you can tolerate me as I ramble around here, exploring the dark corners of our bee life while you tag along. I always enjoy talking to you. Until we talk about something plain talk, rambling off the wall next week, I'm Jim telling you bye, till then.

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