Plain Talk: The Sting of Fall Honey (249)

Episode 249 – Plain Talk: The Sting of Fall Honey 

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Dr. Jim Tew: Listeners, it's Jim here. Taking a walk back to the bees. I'll tell you a short, unexciting story, but I don't know what's going on as usual. As I so often do, it's really a nice fall day. [instrumental music] Crispy, goldenrods in bloom. It's kind of what I want to talk about. I'm going to move back here into position and ask you to come along with me. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura,where I do the best I can to talk about something to do with queen 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: Listeners, I came back here yesterday to practice this. I haven't tried this format before. As I walked by the back of my stockade fencing, that part of the apiary is open to the back. Do you remember that hive I talked about that had the strange swarm with the queen outside? I got all excited and tried to put a queen and drone trap on it. That same hive on the same side had about 300 bees outside just under the lip of the outer cover. They were acting peculiar, of course. Today, they are 100% and totally gone. I walked over to see what they were doing, thinking this is that colony that had the queen outside, and there's another bunch of bees looking strange.

I'm going to start right about here because this time yesterday, as I stood here, I suddenly had [chuckles] a bee right in my right ear. Not inside it, but on my earlobe. Of course, I got stung, and I was trying to get the bee off my ear, locked out my hearing aid. I had to take a minute to find that. While I was looking for that, two other bees came for me. I had not even done anything. I must be, oh, I don't know, 20 feet away. I still don't know what that was all about. Was it a little late swarm, or what was that? Everything is 100% docile. Excuse me, I [bees buzzing] need to take that back. These bees are not docile. Nope, nope, they are not docile. It is time to either get a veil on or stop coming back here.

[bees buzzing] Excuse me, just a minute. I have made a significant mistake. I'm going to get killed. If I keep talking to you, I'm going to swallow a bee. Okay. If it's like yesterday, she's not going to leave me alone. She's not. Because yesterday, as I left the yard, I got stung twice. I walked back down toward the house, and that bee followed me for 40 yards. I actually had the thought that I hadn't had bees do that since the old Africanized bee days. Okay. Listeners, what's going on?

I, Jim Tew, have always told you that the personality of a hive changes and you don't always know what's going on, but I guess I need to listen to my own lecture because all too often when this happens, it just seems truly odd, truly weird. Those bees are unreasonable. Then I always have the same issues, the same concerns that I've talked with you so many times before, what I'm going to do about my neighbors. My neighbor closest to me has health is not good, and so she's never outside very much. I don't think she's going to be a problem. But my other neighbor has two young sons who are outside all the time, but they're quite a distance from my colony.

I don't know what that's about. I can turn around and look at the hive now from 75 feet. Just a bit ago, I was stung once in the back of my head, but it's got a hard head. It doesn't hurt. I don't know what to say. I don't know why I'm even telling you this. I don't know what it means for that hive to have had so many bees outside. It looked like a poorly formed swarm, or it looked like a mass of robbers that weren't robbing, and they were immediately defensive. I'm remembering all the times that I've said how much a hive personality can change, and then when you see it, it's still surprising.

I don't know what it is. I was going to go back and check again to see if there was a appearance of a late-season swarm leaving or whatever, and all I had was a reenactment of the bees attacking me and me having to get out of there and either get safety gear or let it go. My thought all along was not even to talk about that. My thought was just to walk back to the bee yard and then come out here in what used to be a soybean field. I think it's about 40 acres that I'm standing in that is just abandoned from agricultural endeavors. There have been four different housing projects that were going to be built here.

I have beautifully talked about the anxiety and the angst of people back here in this lane that I'm standing in, becoming a public access road. There's my bees now right in the middle of this. You saw what just happened. For four different times, something has gone wrong, and the housing project has not shown up here. The most recent one, and I don't want to get off the subject on this, was that it's going to be a full-service retirement home facility with management for dementia facilities and walk paths and whatever. I've gotten to a position in life where I no longer fight it. This has been farmland as long as I've lived here, now for close to 48 years.

Why I'm telling you that is because what would come up in most of your houses, goldenrod and fall aster. I'm going to be in a sea of goldenrod here in just a bit. Goldenrod ranks as one of those plants that seems to promise a lot and never deliver it. I remember Kim and I talked about the same subject. [bees buzzing] That bee is back. What is going on? I don't want to have to walk too far out in this field. If I were in Alabama, I'd be worried about being snake bitten, but I'm not in Alabama. She's back. She's not going to let it go. Listeners, there's two bees, and I'm 75 yards away. All right, back off the subject. I want to stay on the goldenrod subject. Now I thought I'd finish with the bee-attacking-me story. Let's just take a break. Let me gather my wits and see if I can send this bee to heaven. Let's take a break and hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: I've lived my entire life with goldenrod and fall asters. It's the last hurrah of summer. So have you. By now, the honey season is what it is. The bees have done what they've done. You've made your increase in splits, and now it's time to give it all up and let it go. Before the break, I was telling you that Kim and I have talked on some occasions about goldenrod and why, for me, it is usually an unexciting plant because it just never lives up to its availability. I mean, as I stand here on what's going to be 40 acres of goldenrod in fall aster, you'd think, "Oh, my heavens. If I were an active, energetic beekeeper, I'd be supering up and getting ready and getting that honey crop put together." As I stand here and look around me, there's a monarch butterfly, there's a bumblebee, there's a honeybee, and there's a paper wasp, a red paper wasp, but there's nothing here. When I go down to that Japanese zelkova, that beebee tree that's in my front yard, there will be thousands of bees on that scrub-sized tree, and they're just not the same numbers. Then I think, well, you have the thought, well, this plant is allocating how much nectar resource and pollen resource it wants to give, and it's not going to give more than it has to because it's expensive. All I'm seeing is frugality. There's another monarch.

All those plants are trying to do is just to be as economical with their energy expenditure as they can. By now, in years past, you'd just be swamped with that waft of that, what's a word besides stink, listeners, with that sweet stink of goldenrod honey. I made the mistake several years ago of putting a nine-frame observation hive on the side enclosed porch of my shop, and I just about couldn't stay in the shop because of the overpowering smell of goldenrod honey coming through the eaves, I guess, and then coming into the shop. I don't know how the odor was getting in.

I don't see any bee activity here. Kim would have said it's because of the drought. We have been in a drought now for about two and a half, maybe starting three weeks, and that goldenrod only produces when there's abundant water supply. There certainly is not water supply. Another bumblebee. There's a whole ecosystem here. There's a large insect over there that's quite a distance from me that I think must be a ball-faced hornet. Goldenrod does provide a diverse ecosystem for all these other insects, and it's a beautiful day, and it's a nice-looking plant.

For many years, goldenrod was the state flower of Alabama, and then they, to me, inconceivably changed the state flower from goldenrod to the camellia, which was an import from China. I don't know what the flower is now, but it's not goldenrod anymore, to my knowledge. The goldenrod has a long, long history. What I'd like to add to this whole thing is that I usually see more on fall asters, and they are just beginning the very earliest stages. I sometimes wonder, is it the goldenrod or the fall aster that's putting out that familiar, familiar stinky smell?

Most of the time, beekeepers say, well, that autumn honey is for the bees, and they just leave that on for them to enjoy and have something to do with. I hate to sound like a frightful beekeeper, but I was going to stand in my bee yard to finish this, but I didn't mean to die on a live recording standing in my bee yard. It's just so much trouble to put the gear on and get the microphone inside the gear and everything. Would you bear with me? I'm going to walk back by the bee yard, and I feel like a child, mainly because I don't want to be attacked while I've got the audio gear here. I'm back down by the fence.

There's the groundhog burrow. I've always had an abundant supply of groundhogs. I wanted to ask you to come with me. I'm going to cut through the barn and sneak into my yard. That way, if they come for me, I can go stand in the barn and not be as exposed as I was. The back of my head has stopped hurting. It never was very painful. All right, sorry here. There's the barn, squeezed by the little tractor. Here's my nucleus colony that I've used. Here's the back door. [door opens] There it is. There's the smell. It is definitely fall. Listeners, I don't want to justify this. I've talked to you as much as I could talk to you in the past about my recent situation of this past year or so.

One of the things that I stopped doing was that I just quit mowing. I couldn't ask somebody to come back here and mow. You just saw the reasons why. I just let it go. Then I needed pictures for an article or something. I would just use an older picture that showed the yard all nicely manicured. Can I tell you what happened? That yard turned into, of course, a jungle. It just filled itself with giant ironweed and other flowers that had all kinds of a diverse insect population on them. I don't want to criticize anybody for maintaining a yard. You've got to be able to walk, and to get away from the bees, and you've got to be able to carry equipment. Just don't go crazy.

I was really surprised because I had tried to plant a wildflower garden, and it was a 100% failure. What's more than 100%? My wildflower garden, I mow it now every 10 days or so. I haven't had to mow in a while. That was how far the flower garden went. I sat here one day and realized that just behind the fence where I put the wildflower garden, I now have what, listeners? A wildflower garden full of native-selected wildflower plants. Now I've got a conundrum. If I tell you-- okay, there she's coming again. I sound like I'm afraid of bees. I'm not. I just don't like to be on a microphone talking to you when I'm attacked. Let me close the door a little bit. They are particularly testy.

When I was talking to you a bit ago, I wondered, is there something about the fall flow that makes them testy? I'm not great at responding to the messages you send me. I hate to give you a home assignment, and then people respond and may not respond back. "Is this the last hurrah? Why are those bees doing this? They've got a decent nectar source." I don't think it's producing very much yet. I think it's going to get better if it ever rained. They've got honey reserves. I've not opened anything. Because of the weeds, I can tell you there's been no bears, no skunks. Nothing's been bothering these bees because there's weeds in front of most hives.

If you've got any ideas, is there anything about this fall nectar source make the bees testy, the way they get testy on buckwheat? I don't know. Where I was going was that the fall flower garden has really turned out nicely, and I enjoyed it. Let's see if I can go back out. I've got the conundrum of telling people that just doing nothing and letting your yard go wild and turn into a native flower garden is somehow the thing to do. It's the thing to do for me, but I really don't think it's the thing to do for most people. I do plan on this next year to do a better job. I'm going to get my walk-behind cutter, and I'm going to keep pathways opened up.

I guess the rest of the yard can just turn back into this lovely bee yard that I've enjoyed being around so long. Okay, she's back again. My time is up anyway. Can I review? I don't know why these bees are so testy. I just about made a scene live on tape with the bees coming for me. They came for me yesterday, too. It's the fall of the year. I love the insect population, the bird population, the blue sky. I have enjoyed my unintended native bee yard flower garden, but by doing so, I have the most unkept apiary that I know of.

[music] I'll see how it works out next year. Winter will tamp everything down, and I'll decide next year if I want to start cutting more. I was going to tell you I'm going to cut paths to keep the entrances of the colonies open better. I'm not going to do it now without protective gear. Until we can talk again next week, I'm Jim telling you bye. I'm going to go inside now and get away from these ugly bees. Bye-bye.

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