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Reflections on the 300th Episode · Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

0:01
Hi listeners, I'm walking back to my scruffy bee yard.
0:07
It's pretty close to September 10th or so.
0:11
Summer is well underway.
0:14
Goldenrod has maxed out.
0:17
Beginning to wane some.
0:21
This, uh, segment today is selfishly
0:27
from me.
0:28
I've been told that I talk too much about age, but I'm always shocked.
0:35
To suddenly be officially an old man and young people hold doors for you and they let you step up in line and they help you at the airport gate.
0:46
That was always for somebody else.
0:48
That was never going to be me, but here it is, me.
0:54
I gotta get through the barn shed, you know that.
1:00
Listeners, today is my 300th.
1:04
My 300th segment.
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300 times I've said hello here.
1:10
It's Jim Tew
1:13
Coming to you from the bee yard.
1:19
I just can't believe it.
1:21
I'd like to reflect some on that.
1:25
Since January the 10th.
1:28
2021.
1:32
Started then.
1:35
Beekeepers on Jim Tew and 300 times.
1:39
I've come to you once a week.
1:43
trying to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping.
1:47
Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast.
1:57
Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees.
2:06
Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees.
2:13
Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.
2:21
Listeners, uh, I had a web channel, I had a YouTube channel.
2:28
And I made the, uh, decision to really go under that.
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So I spent oh, I don't know, four thousand three thousand five hundred dollars on a on a video camera a Canon high resolution video camera and
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I did the best I could to produce videos.
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I used the Apple system for editing and I really was putting my heart into it.
3:01
I had a few followers.
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I was never doing anything other than just playing.
3:05
I wasn't trying to be
3:07
the end-all, be-all video channel.
3:12
And Kim, Kim Flottum, kept coming to me
3:18
saying he wanted to do a podcast with me.
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And I immediately turned him down.
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Because why would I give up video casting which had pictures and sound?
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Just to do something conversational.
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It seemed like I could have been going backwards.
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Kim was the most persistent fellow that you've ever seen.
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And after a week or two, he came back to me and he pushed me again.
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That this would be fun.
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And you have to, for those of you who knew Kim, you just have to love him.
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That guy
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That guy could sell you anything.
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He kept saying it won't take it won't take 15 minutes a month.
4:00
Let's just do it and see if you like it.
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I still turned him down.
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On the third time, I don't know why I relinquished.
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Maybe I realized that if Kim was right, I did have 15, 20 minutes a month to make two
4:16
Ten minute segments.
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How bad could it be?
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We could talk about anything.
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It was just going to be conversational.
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It was not going to be analytical.
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Sitting at a table during the break at a bee meeting.
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And he wanted that to be that kind of conversation.
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All right, Kim, alright.
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I'll do that
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And I agreed to it.
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And we didn't do two to four ten minute segments before we realized that you could barely get through the introduction and the sponsor announcement
4:55
Before three and a half minutes was already gone, then you had to talk at the speed of light to get any point across.
5:03
So just within a few segments, Kim and I settled comfortably on about a 20 to 25 minutes segment.
5:13
My daughter takes about 20 minutes to drive to work every morning.
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She calls me every morning and she talks while she drives to work and somehow that 20-minute segment seemed to work
5:26
With you people.
5:28
Now when I watch a YouTube channel on a guy getting a truck out of a stump mire or
5:35
A guy finding arrow points along the Ohio River.
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I specifically looked for something around 20 to 25 minutes long.
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It's almost like my attention span has been altered.
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And I have to admit that I had a good time with Kim.
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So most of the time it was a good time.
5:56
Sometimes it was challenging.
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Kim and I were the old Siskel and Ebert kind of relationship.
6:03
We could disagree on things.
6:04
Kim kept saying that eight-frame equipment was the way to go.
6:08
Well I never saw eight-frame equipment.
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I don't mind if you use it.
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I don't have any.
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I like it.
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It's kind of quaint looking
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It's still around, but it's not as popular as the 10-frame, but he never missed a chance to sell eight-frame equipment, saying that as he aged, we needed the lighter weight
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Well as I aged I couldn't tell the weight was that much less.
6:30
It was still too heavy for him and still made me cry and creak when I picked it up, but he loved it.
6:35
So I let it go, but we argued back and forth.
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He wanted to leave Queens in longer and longer and longer to be sure these expensive queens worked
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Released correctly. Longer and longer and longer made me uncomfortable because I didn't know how long the queen had been in the cage when I got her.
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And I didn't want that valuable bug to stay in that cage for something like what, couple of months?
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I didn't know how long she had been banked before I bought her, so we disagreed on things like that.
7:05
But we agreed on a lot of things too
7:07
Kim loved to say, what's your time worth?
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And I never said it on the air, I guess I'm saying it now, but would every time Kim would say it about every other to every third segment, what's your time worth?
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You want to repair frames
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What's your time worth?
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You wanna cut grass in the bee yard every week?
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What's your time worth?
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Well every time he would say it, something on the back of my neck would stand up because I wanna know what else you were going to be doing with that time.
7:36
Were you going to be taking a nap?
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Well, I guess that's valuable to some of us, but if you're not doing anything else, then your time is just worth the life's time you've been allocated.
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So we cut and sparred back and forth, back and forth, and Kim's health began to go downhill.
7:55
He kept failing medical tests.
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He had heart issues.
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He had
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He had joint issues and so we would have to work segments around Kim's medical appointments and then Kim
8:07
Got worse and there's no reason to be sappy and sad here.
8:10
Most of you know the story on that.
8:12
Kim was the editor of the Bee Culture magazine forever
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By far the longest editor that Bee Culture has ever had in tenure.
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His health declined and declined, and Kim was always optimistic.
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He's going to be taking this radiation therapy and it's going to bring him right back and he'll be good to go again.
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He was optimistic till the day he wasn't here
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So Jeff, the executive director of this podcast, who makes everything sound good, and I did everything we could to work with Kim.
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While he went through all that.
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It really had an effect on me.
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Just after Kim was gone, as he was leaving, my wife got sick.
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I've told you about that through the years.
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It's been today
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It's a year and a half that I've not had my wife.
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And I want to tell you, listener, that you, my friend
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We're right there with me during the darkest times of my life.
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This podcast began to mean ever so much to me.
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It was reality.
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It was an opportunity to come back to the bee yard, sit here and talk to you for a while and things be normal.
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And when I went back in the house, things would be horrifically abnormal.
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I can't tell you how much you meant to me as a listener, giving me focus and direction.
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This is all very selfish because some of you
9:44
who are listening to this were going through or are going through now issues of your own.
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Guess I'm being selfish.
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It was very, very helpful to me to come back to my bee yard.
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I didn't have to do anything.
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Just come back here and let the Duke Bees do their thing like they had always done, like time was endless.
10:05
It wasn't endless.
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I'm trying to tell you straight up, plain talk, that I didn't initially think that this was for me
10:15
And then as time passed and since 2021, so many major changes have occurred in my life and the life of the podcast that it has become
10:28
significantly meaningful to me on this 300th podcast.
10:34
Let's take a break and hear from our sponsor while you try to figure out where is he going with all of this
10:42
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10:53
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10:55
themselves, and sharing education to help beekeepers succeed.
11:01
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11:08
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11:10
Or a seasoned pro, Betterbee has the products and experience to help you and your bees succeed.
11:18
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11:20
com or call 1-800-632-3363.
11:26
Seven nine.
11:27
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11:34
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11:38
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11:49
healthier colonies.
11:51
After Kim was no longer available, it fell to me to do something.
11:57
Kim and I talked about anything
12:00
We talked about the last meeting we were at.
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We talked about how to have a good meeting.
12:05
We just talked about anything
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But after Kim was gone, that be kind of became a one-sided conversation, with me having a one-sided conversation.
12:15
I
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I began to go back to the bee yard.
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I began to follow my bees more closely, but I didn't really want it to be a how-to segment that you and I were having.
12:24
I wanted it to be that discussion at a bee meeting where we both had seen something in our colonies.
12:30
And we were curious to know if that's appropriate this time of the year, if that's abnormal, whatever it might be.
12:36
I went through that.
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for quite a while.
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Try as I might, I've gotten older and older, and so picking up equipment and lighting smokers and
12:46
ripping into the hives just to see something that I could talk with you about has become more and more of a non-option.
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The bees seem perfectly fine with me not doing that much with them.
12:58
A little mic control and then everything else is on their own.
13:02
I lose some bees in the winter and I talk about that.
13:05
Some of my bees survive the winter and I talk about that
13:09
I don't cut grass as much as I used to.
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Right now I'm in a weedy bee yard with all these plants that are blooming and are there are just foraging insects.
13:19
everywhere.
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There's metallic bees on these blooms.
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So I tried to talk about planting bee plants and bee gardens and whatever, and you know if I just do nothing
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I mean there are bumblebees, there's honey bees, there's metallic solitary bees.
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I just enjoy
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Coming back so much.
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So I've come up with all these sloppy names and I have offended beekeepers en masse who are not where I am on this beekeeping journey
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I love beekeeping, but I really don't love hard, hard, hot, sweaty work.
14:02
I live alone.
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I have three supportive daughters who know where I am all the time.
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They monitor my phone.
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They monitor me if I don't answer the phone on the second call.
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And my closest daughter, I've named that the curse of the closest.
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The one who's the closest is the one who bears the brunt.
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Unfortunately, it seems like I'm just surrounded by death and destruction, but my neighbor of 46 years, her husband died five years ago
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and over the weekend a month ago then she passed.
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So I'm surrounded by these things and they were such good neighbors.
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The man before he passed never complained about the bees being around his watering devices.
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He seemed to like having them there.
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He said they were good for his garden.
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I talked to all these people.
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I talked about the neighbors and what we went through and how close I am.
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I have a long narrow acre
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I put my bees all the way back at the back to get as far away as I can.
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And I've talked about the relationship with neighbors who are not beekeepers.
15:09
I stopped to buy some wood
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for my solo outdoor fire kit from the neighbor down the street who had a giant pile of wood and he didn't know me and I didn't know him.
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As it works out his name is Josh and my name is Jim.
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And I said I live down the street.
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He said, yeah, there's some guy down there who has bees down the street.
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I said, well that that would be me.
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He's a new guy on the street.
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I don't know how he knew that already
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But I'm that guy on the street who has bees and this jungle of a bee yard back here
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Kim and I would come up with different topics to discuss off the cuff.
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It would be something somebody asked about, a suggestion that you made, or something you wanted to hear about that we felt like we could discuss for 20 minutes.
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Topics were always as valuable as gold.
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After Kim was gone and I was trying to pick up the slack and be a one-man band,
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For me, even, it became tedious.
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And I could tell if it's tedious for me, it has to be tedious for you
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And I found Anne Fry, who's a really proficient beekeeper.
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She works for Betterbee.
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And she's become a fairly constant, frequent
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discussion factor here.
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She's gone a long way toward giving you good bee information that I'm just not qualified to give anymore
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I can give you anecdotal information, I can give you historical information, I can give you psychological information, but exactly what you should be doing and what the latest, greatest is.
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I'm far more dated than that.
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This three hundredth episode is, you know nothing special.
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It would it be more special if I make it to four hundred or well, I guess five hundred will be a significant day
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On the 200th episode, I just made a comment that it was my 200th episode and then moved right on.
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But I'm in a different place now, physiologically and psychologically.
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I just wanted you to know how much I've enjoyed doing this for you, how much it's made me think about what bees are doing and why they're doing it.
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It's made me grow.
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It's made me into my probably my last stage of beekeeping.
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My daughters have told me to stop cutting my own grass.
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I've got a
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I'm not, it's an old Kubota tractor, diesel, mower deck on it.
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I've cut my own grass and cut other people's grass since I was 12 years old.
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And my daughters told me, Dad, you got to stop doing that because we don't want you on a tractor by yourself down there since you live alone
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I've often thought that when I come back to the bee yard, I need to have every communication device known to man because nobody comes back here but me.
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This is my little spot in the world.
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And my bees, little spot in the world, if I could say that they're mine.
18:12
Where's all this going?
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I just wanted to tell you, on the 300th episode.
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How much I appreciate you for staying with me during the moody times, the blue times.
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During the bad segments, you know you gotta have bad segments so you can have good segments every now and then.
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You can't tell good if they're all good.
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So every once in a while you just come across the dud that nobody really cares for, and the other times you come across one that really matters
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I'm always looking for unique discussions.
18:44
I've just come across the fact that something that was injected into my knee has a chemical name very close to some of the chemical components.
18:51
of honey bee stings.
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I'm trying to go back to chemistry I cannot understand to see if there's something there that I could talk about.
19:00
It was a discussion this morning that Lyme disease seemingly has miraculously cured a woman who was massively stung by Africanized bees.
19:10
Those kind of things interest me and those kind of things become a discussion topic.
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I don't want to be an authority.
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I want to be a conversationalist with you and you and I talk and you interact and add and
19:24
have your input too on topics that are really right at the cusp of my ability and sometimes easily within my ability.
19:35
Is that enough?
19:36
I hope to be here a hundred episodes from now, five hundred episodes from now, if Jeff can tolerate me and my lateness and my tardiness.
19:45
And my impromptu thing will continue to evolve.
19:49
Dr.
19:49
Masterman has sometimes been involved and has good suggestions.
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I'm going to follow up on some of those.
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As I depart here, I'd like for you just to have a nice segment.
20:00
Think about yourself.
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Think about your own bees.
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Think about this flower field that I'm looking at that has all this activity on these fall flowers on a beautiful day.
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With the gentle breeze blowing on our 300th segment.
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We've come a long way together.
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And I really want to say thank you for it.
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And I hope you stay here for a lot longer.
20:24
On a fairly short episode,
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I'm Jim telling you thank you, and I'll talk to you next week.
20:30
Bye-bye.