Plain Talk: Hidden Hives (240)

Episode 240 – Plain Talk: Hidden Hives 

Jim Tew: Hey, podcast listeners. It's Jim. I'm back in my usual place here in the bee yard. No doubt I'll be doing my usual thing, which is complaining to you about something, whatever it might be that weighs on me. July, for those of you who are listening at some other time, I got to go tell you, it's just hot as blazes. It's in its low 90s right now. Everything is lush and green and humid and hot.

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Under these conditions, I just want to sit here and talk to you about beekeeping, without having to get that smelly smoker out and put those hot clothes on and go over here and do something dramatic. Beekeepers, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you here at Honey Bee Obscura once a week, where, in general, I try to talk about some aspect of clean 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 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 or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim Tew: I don't know how much detail you want, I don't know what to say to you, I don't know when you're sounding gloomy, I don't know when you're sounding factual and realistic, but I just did a road trip. I got back from the trip, and actually, it was a long ride. Precisely, it was 2,014 miles. I didn't know if I could do this or not. I made that drive to South Alabama up in North Florida, I don't know how many 60, 70, 80 times in the length of time that my parents were alive, and making the trip with kids in the back seat, racing down to South Alabama, North Florida, different world, different everything, just to visit parents and look at bees and whatever.

Everything's changed now, listeners. This is me saying I don't know how much of this you want. Everything's changed, and I made the trip by myself. Kids have grown up, wife's moved on somewhere else, and I'm alone now. That's just what it is. That's just what it is. I made the trip fine. I hung out with my brothers. I've got two younger brothers. For those who care, I don't have any sisters. I'm the oldest of everything. I'm the oldest grandson, the oldest son, the oldest everything. I had a nice trip.

The great thing about having bees is that you just leave. My daughters have dogs and cats, and they just went on a trip to Europe, my whole family. I stayed home and didn't want to try to keep up with them. They were gone 15 days. They're straggling back home now in small groups. They were gone, so everything was just me. Everything was just quiet. I did this trip. I had a nice time.

My brothers used to be beekeepers. They're not now. My dad's passed. He too was a beekeeper. I'm the only one still carrying the banner, but my brothers still talk the talk as though, just any day, they're going to get right back in it, but they're not. I don't know why not, but they're just not. I did that thing that I so often do. As I drove and drove and drove, you think, "Why do I never see a beehive?" You see all these nice plants that are growing alongside the road, you see distant fields of occasional flowers and things in bloom, and I don't see beehives.

In fact, when my daughters-- I have three daughters, all married, kids, and families, and whatever. I never had any sons. Ironic, isn't it? That I had all brothers and grew up to have all daughters. I guess all aspects of life one way or the other. We would play a game. We didn't count cows and do all that thing. We had a beehive game. If one of my daughters saw a beehive, then they had to proclaim that they saw a hive, and then some other daughter or parent had to see the same hive and confirm it. An unconfirmed colony, an unconfirmed bee yard did not count.

When you stand just to one, I played the game by myself. I drove 2,014 miles. I primarily kept my eyes on the road and the car directly in front of me, or usually the semi directly in front of me. Listeners, I saw nary a hive, not one, not a single hive. Since I got nothing else to do other than drive and think, I wondered again, as I've wondered so many times, why are beehives never in view of the public? Now, never is too strong a word. Can I say rarely in view of the public?

Then I thought about myself, sitting in this bee yard, and I paid money to have stockade fencing put up around my yard. While on one hand, I'm saying, why don't you folks, as beekeepers, put your bees in plain sight, when I, as a beekeeper here at home, personally put my bees behind stockade fencing?

The reason for it was simple, because I'm close to neighbors. They have affected my bee life, they've affected my personality, they've affected my outlook on beekeeping. Because any decision I made with these bees back here, I had to assume that it was going to have some unintended effect on my near neighbors here. Now near being 75 yards from where I'm sitting, to the closest neighbor, and 100 yards to the second neighbor. None behind me. Not yet.

Apparently, there's going to be a building project going in. They're going to put an assisted living project right behind that tree line there. I don't think those old people are going to come out and bother my bees, so if they've got to put something behind me, I guess an assisted living project would be as good as anything. That's my life, that's my yard. I hide it.

I hide it because, and in years past, I had a more distant neighbor, who one day just categorically announced that she wasn't just allergic to bees, she was allergic to all stinging insects. Any time that she was stung, she would collapse, and she would have to have her surrounding, usually lady friends with her, talk her through it, and get her back on her feet.

Everything about that just screamed weird, weird, but as a university employee, I had to learn early on whatever somebody says at that moment, I take as true. In fact, the university lawyers instructed me early on, when it came to bee stings, and what to do with bee stings, and people coming to classes, and whatever, that I was to have employed the most practical, reasonable, safety precautions possible, and then when the lawsuit arose, they would deal with the specifics then. One of the lawyers specifically said, "We could sit here the rest of the day doing what ifs, and never hit the exact situation that affects people on a particular day that someone had a sting reaction."

I'm really off the subject. In my 35, 40-year career, I did have three to four people who had serious sting reactions within a class or an activity that I was teaching. I did make the trips to the emergency room. Never had anyone go into hard anaphylaxis. I just had them have the superficial, topical reactions of swelling, and fevering, and whatever.

That one neighbor had an effect on me too, because you basically can't win, and her way of thinking, that she can't be around anything, bumblebees, yellow jackets, wasps, hornets, honeybees, solitary bees, she's going to go through this ritual that she goes through. She's moved. Just between you and me, and no one else, I always doubted her complaint, but I had to take the complaint seriously.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I hide my bees. I don't want my neighbors to be always thinking that any insect that's around their bird water device, their landscape pool, their kid's pool, whatever, that that's coming straight from my bees over here. Something else I'll tell you, if it's honeybees, they probably are my bees going straight to those areas I just described to you.

As I sat there driving in the car, looking for beehives, not seeing them, thinking, "Is that the normal way to beekeepers in general? Put their bees out of sight?" I've had yards vandalized. I've had beehives stolen. The sad thing is usually it takes a beekeeper to steal a beehive. One could say, well, I hide yards just for some degree of protection. There have been beekeepers in years past who actually did the camo design for their paint finish on their hives to try to make them fit in better.

The question is, what do you think? Would the public look at a bee yard and say, "Oh, my stars, look at those beehives. I've always wanted to do that"? Would they not even notice them? Would those people practicing some malfeasance look at that yard and think, "I'm coming back tonight and I'm going to take some of those frames out, take some of those beehives, take whatever parts." I say that with a mental thought that there was one specific case where full honey frames were stolen. That's what the person took. They opened the colony and took out full frames of honey, and then left everything else there.

I had this lecture as I drove along, just wondering what in the world we should be doing. Do we all tend to put our hives out of sight for a host of reasons, or do we put our hives out of sight just because that's how it works out? Most farmers would have us put hives on their property at some area where they couldn't do anything else with that bit of ground. If they could, they would be doing it. More often than not, that was in some out-of-the-way place.

I didn't see any beehives at all. I had a hard time making the trip that I just took be anything other than a visit to my brothers and their place and eating out and having a nice time, and telling old war stories, and then back in the car, and off we do go again. Now that I'm in my yard back here, it's on a hot Saturday afternoon. It's hot. I'm in that season of the year. I've talked in the past about the personality of the yard, the spirit, the concept, the personality again of individual colonies.

I can tell you that those two packages that I kept you informed with as I installed them, that by now they've undergone a personality change and they would not be happy to see me. They are not the gentle kitten-type hives that they were a few months ago. They're going to be testy and cranky, and they're going to be in a very defensive phase now because the season has moved on.

Up to this point in my rambling, what is your point discussion, don't most of us tend to put our hives out of sight, out of mind so we don't have to explain to other people what we're doing and that it's not my bees that attacked you, or in some cases, maybe it was? I don't know. You can't discuss every specific event.

Before I leave the topic, one of the reasons I'm sitting here unprotected, no veil, no smoker, no nothing, five feet away from these hot colonies is that I don't want to open them up. If I did open them up, I don't want to make a spectacle of myself back here. If I should be suddenly getting stung, losing control, and have all the neighbors see that happen and then I would become part of the reason that these people are so frightened of stinging insects. It's okay to be frightened of stinging insects, I think. It's common sense. It's exactly the right thing to do from a common-sense standpoint. That's why insects sting, so you won't do whatever it is you're doing.

I basically hide my hives. When we come back after the break, I'll tell you the truth. Right now, my hives are really hidden. They are really hidden because for the last three weeks, there has not been a mower or a weed trimmer in sight. Let me take a break and see if I have any other thoughts I'd like to talk to you about while you listen to a word from our sponsor.

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Jim Tew: Years ago, a good friend of mine who felt comfortable with me to be this honest said, "You write very negative articles. You're always telling some gloom and doom, sting, whatever." I thought about that and I do that. He was exactly right. I tend to write about things that don't work because the things that do work don't need writing about. The other thing is when you write about things that work, it's a look at me, look at me, attitude that you seem to take. If you could just do what I do, then you, too, could be a crackerjack beekeeper. I have never tried to put myself in that role.

One thing bees have always done for me is keep me humble. Right when you think you've got a plan, right when you think what they're doing and what the situation's going to be, you find out that, boy, I was wrong about that. In that drone layer, I couldn't even find the queen to this day. I was so relieved to have another authority who works a lot more bees than I do tell me that she, too, had trouble finding drone-laying queens. Said she didn't know if they'd already been killed off or if they were small or what, but that they were remarkably hard to find. I wanted to write her back immediately and tell her thank you for subsidizing that and not making me think that it's just my failing vision.

The thing that's happened while I was gone is that the weeds and the grass did not lose a minute's effort growing and filling the bee yard with waist-deep weeds that I've got to figure out how to take out now. Part of me wants to justify this mess in saying, well, it's natural. It's what the bees will be dealing with in their natural environment. They wouldn't be dealing with nice-cut lawns and manicured yards.

I do want to tell you that most of the manicuring is for me, just so I can walk here carrying a super and not go flat down on my face on top of that box as I stumble through heavy weeds. A lot of that mowing and neatness is for me because, we're not wrong, the bees don't really mind it all that much. They do seem to appreciate having the grass taken out of the entrance.

I'll get back here with my walk-behind string trimmer. I thought that thing was just going to be the end-all. As it works out, it's mostly end-all. I got to tell you, listeners, that even though those walk-behind trimmers do a great job of tall, aggressive weeds, you've still got to push that machine through those tall, well-developed weeds. You will break out the sweat doing that. I let the weeds get particularly bad before I get that machine out and do my thing. I guess one of the things I can tell you in all honesty, the things I rarely do, is give a tour of my bee yard because you would not be impressed.

The thing I was going to say is that these bees managed themselves well while I was away. I didn't have to get a sitter. I didn't have to say, "Would you stop by and check? Would you do whatever?" The bees are perfectly happy doing their thing without me being involved in it. Now next week, I've got to get back here with every trimmer I've got and knock these weeds down and get back to a smaller, lower level of grass just so I can move around through here. Then, as an aside, I want to quickly say, you know what that'll do? It'll encourage groundhogs to move in. Am I the only one who perpetually deals with groundhogs and raccoons and the occasional skunk? Because those animals will be appreciative when I make this whole area more traversable.

I got off on this mental subject when I was driving that I get off on all the time. I'm looking at a barn. A barn's a loose word. It's just a real large storage building. It's got a gambrel roof on it, so it looks like a small barn. Listeners, I put that barn right where it is with every intention of putting beehives inside that barn. My notion was that I would open the double doors on both ends, and I would form a venturi, and then I could work my bees in the shade without weeds. They would be protected from the vicious elements of both heat and cold. Neighbors wouldn't know what I was doing, and everything about this was a win-win-win situation.

I wrote about this in September Bee Culture. It'll be coming out in September 2025. What happened was that nothing happened. About the time I had the barn put up, got it painted, got it ready. You got to go cut holes in the wall to allow for the bees to have an entrance in and out of the barn. You have to really make a commitment to it. I made a fatal mistake. I bought a small subcompact tractor. Those things are not cheap. While it was new to me, I thought I'll just put that in that bee barn and it'll be happy until I find other places for it and get that taken. 15 years later, that tractor is sitting right where it was 15 years ago, and the bee barn never worked out.

Is that a good idea or not? One of the things I want to ask is do any of you keep bees inside a building? Do any of you have any shed or shack? Do any of you put bees under some portico while you're working them? The reason this weighs on me is that we used to do this historically. We had a strong presence of bee houses and bee buildings, and they're in all the old 1800s and early 1900 books, these bee houses.

Apparently, mice were a problem because of the dead bees on the floor. It was a constant food supply for mice. There's all these other issues, the expense and the limited space of putting them up. Yes, they were out of the weather. The Europeans still do this. I saw bee houses in Uganda. It's done in other places in the world. I'm going to leave you with this note. Do any of you still keep bees inside a building of some sort or in some covering that protects both you and the bees, most likely?

I'm back home. I had a nice trip. It's time to try to catch up, and I do want to come out early morning before the heat gets up in the day and open these bees up, and see how crowded they are and if they requeen themselves. I know they swarmed. To see if they requeen themselves all right and to see if we're headed okay for winter. Because, as hot as it is today, the stores that they're putting aside here and a little bit that will come up later in the fall flow, will be critical to their survival in the upcoming winter months.

In retrospect, I think we hide our hives because we have to. In retrospect, my bee building didn't work out. I wonder if yours did, and in retrospect, no matter what, the grass continues to grow, and I will cut it because I need to be able to walk, not because the bees are unable to fly. I always enjoy talking with you. I look forward to sitting here quietly about a week from now and talking about something else just as vital and critical as it can be. I enjoy this more than you can imagine. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you. That's all I got. I'm Jim, telling you bye.

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