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Life in the Dark Bee Yard: A Halloween Encore (307) · Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

0:00
Hey
0:00
listeners, it's Jim here.
0:03
Must be time for another episode.
0:05
I've come up with a
0:06
with an idea that the producer Jeff Ott
0:08
agreed with
0:09
Several years ago we did a Halloween special, and it's Halloween now, and I'm in a Halloween frame of mind.
0:15
So we're kind of taking a look back at that episode, and I hope you enjoy re-listening to it.
0:22
Jeff.
0:23
Yeah Jim?
0:24
Jeff.
0:25
Yeah.
0:25
Are you the are you there?
0:27
Yeah, but
0:28
where
0:28
are we?
0:31
This was your idea.
0:32
Well I
0:33
you're the one who said let's do a show on Halloween.
0:36
Halloween night
0:37
from our bee yard
0:39
at midnight.
0:41
Now you're wanting to back out.
0:42
But this is the first time you've listened to an idea of mine.
0:45
Why did you choose this one?
0:46
This
0:47
I won't listen to another one.
0:48
Well
0:49
this is
0:49
really
0:50
this is scary, Jim.
0:51
I know it.
0:52
I told you in the setup
0:54
that one of the spookiest places in beekeeping for me
0:58
has been in my bee yard after midnight.
1:01
The bees are asleep, but everything else is awake here.
1:06
Listen.
1:07
What?
1:10
I don't know.
1:11
There's raccoons out here and there's coyotes, but the coyotes wouldn't come close would they?
1:15
Uh
1:16
I don't know.
1:17
If
1:17
I hope it was just a coyote.
1:19
Yeah, there is wolves here, aren't there?
1:21
Not in Ohio.
1:23
Oh well then
1:24
are there wolves where you were?
1:25
This is not all right.
1:26
This is
1:26
this really isn't very funny.
1:30
Alright, and up
1:31
plus
1:31
my screen is dark out here.
1:33
It's giving off light in the bee yard.
1:37
Hey, I'm Jim Tew.
1:39
And I'm Jeff Ott from Beekeeping Today
1:41
Podcast.
1:42
And we are trying something that we will probably never try again.
1:47
A presentation for you.
1:48
Enter a bee yard after midnight on
1:51
Halloween night.
1:53
What an
1:53
event.
1:56
Welcome to Honey the
1:58
Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today
2:04
podcast.
2:06
Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees.
2:15
Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees.
2:21
Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper
2:24
or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.
2:30
Jeff?
2:31
Yeah, Jeff.
2:32
Tell me
2:32
while we're sitting here.
2:34
Several thousand miles apart, but under similar situations.
2:38
Anything
2:39
ever happened to you that uh that you would call spooky or surreal in your beeyard
2:45
Or
2:46
in your bee life?
2:47
No, I have to say
2:49
not.
2:50
I mean, I've been scared of what I've found inside a colony once I've popped the lid.
2:56
Or sometimes what I haven't found when I popped a lid, but no.
3:00
What about yourself?
3:01
I've
3:03
had some instances that had never had any use.
3:09
Did you hear that bird?
3:11
I guess it's a bird.
3:13
Can you hear that on can you hear that on your end?
3:15
It was kind of screechy.
3:19
Alright, never mind.
3:20
Alright.
3:21
Never mind.
3:22
Alright.
3:22
I've forgotten where I was.
3:25
Uh
3:26
I do have several things.
3:27
Yeah.
3:27
A couple of things.
3:28
I've never had a use for them
3:31
in any presentation.
3:33
And so
3:34
since this is
3:35
this is a unique situation, here goes one of them.
3:39
All right.
3:40
When I was working for Ohio State, we
3:44
used
3:45
an abandoned
3:47
clean, well,
3:48
we cleaned, steam cleaned.
3:51
Swine
3:52
facility.
3:53
It was a long, low building, and above it was an attic.
3:59
A loft.
4:00
Oh no.
4:01
Where they where they would put bedding and then they would open trapdoors and drop bedding
4:05
down into the stalls below.
4:08
Oh it's
4:09
well
4:09
it took us
4:10
weeks to clean it to steam clean it but we got it cleaned
4:13
it always had a
4:14
f
4:14
old pig barn ambience
4:17
about it though in the older
4:18
area
4:20
and up
4:21
top
4:22
No electricity up there.
4:23
You had to have a flashlight when you got up there.
4:26
It's where we stored
4:28
a lot of our equipment.
4:31
And you know, you know what beekeeping equipment looks like.
4:34
I mean, even in the bright light of day, you know what it looks like.
4:38
So imagine that same old
4:40
unloved
4:42
Never going to be used again, but too good to throw away equipment in the dark
4:47
in that attic.
4:49
I got all the way to the end of the building
4:51
With flashlight.
4:52
And you know how the light is?
4:54
It's always on those
4:55
spooky shows, you know, where the light just lights up a small part of your
5:01
life.
5:01
And all the shadows come to life.
5:04
Yes.
5:05
And that's important because when
5:06
the far end of the building, I was very near it now, was
5:11
an odd shadow being thrown against the end
5:14
wall, and I couldn't make out what it was.
5:18
It looked like a huge cushion.
5:21
And I kept moving closer, and I just can't
5:24
I just can't make it out, Jeff.
5:26
I don't know what this is.
5:28
And the floor is squeaking underneath, and the air smells like it used to be a pig barn, and there's heavy dust everywhere.
5:36
And suddenly as I got right up
5:39
right
5:40
up
5:40
four feet from this
5:42
cushion
5:43
thing, I realized
5:46
it was a fully grown
5:49
raccoon looking at me straight.
5:52
And it had puffed itself up.
5:54
You know how can
5:55
animals can do that to make itself as big as possible.
5:59
And the animal had nowhere to go.
6:01
He was backed into a corner, and I was shining a light in its face
6:05
about five feet.
6:07
I don't want to tell you what I said.
6:11
And I don't want to tell you
6:13
how long it took me to turn around and to give the raccoon the whole loft of that barn
6:18
and get out of there.
6:19
Why was I even up there?
6:20
Because you always need to.
6:21
a bottom board or something.
6:23
The raccoon won that one
6:26
that night.
6:26
Oh my gosh.
6:27
And when I got back down to the lower level, I made the conscientious decision to do two things.
6:32
Get a better flashlight
6:34
or never go up there ever again.
6:36
It's kinda like that commercial where
6:38
the one character says to the other, You ever notice on in horror films
6:43
how
6:43
the characters always make poor decisions?
6:46
Why did you go up there in the first place in the dark
6:49
with a single flashlight?
6:53
I was just gonna be going
6:54
six minutes and I was just gonna get
6:56
whatever it was.
6:56
This happened thirty five, forty
6:58
years ago.
6:58
I was gonna be right back down.
7:00
You were using a real nice flashlight?
7:03
No, I ha
7:03
I had a
7:04
I had the classic flashlight.
7:07
You're talking about why was
7:08
I out there anyway?
7:09
Why do people always have flashlights that are defective?
7:12
That's right.
7:13
Why do flashlights
7:13
always need bumping?
7:15
And that just kills me.
7:16
Don't bump the light.
7:17
That's just going to break the filament
7:19
and those old flashlights.
7:21
Stop banging the light around to make it work.
7:26
So
7:27
that
7:27
that swine facility
7:30
Was on the abandoned campus
7:34
of
7:35
what
7:36
was at one time
7:37
a large
7:38
hospital.
7:40
Actually, I want to be very careful here, Jeff, and I don't want to offend anybody.
7:45
Hospital.
7:46
And Ohio had long since changed its protocol and its treatment mechanisms, and that facility was just abandoned and it had a farm that went with it and all these outbuildings.
7:57
When
7:57
those long, long
7:59
time
8:00
ago
8:01
facility from the turn of the
8:02
nineteen hundreds.
8:03
And and uh
8:04
it was given over to Ohio State to use for storage and to plow the f
8:09
till
8:09
the land for
8:10
teaching and growing crops and whatever.
8:12
But there those old buildings were sitting everywhere.
8:15
And yes, they looked
8:16
just like you think they would.
8:18
It was gonna cost millions of dollars to tear them down, so just let them sit there.
8:24
This is the second story.
8:26
On the several thousand-acre farm
8:29
That went with that, of course, we had bees.
8:33
And and I need to put a spoiler alert out that this story really has no ending.
8:39
You had to feel what I felt.
8:42
Working
8:43
alone.
8:44
Why would I be working alone, Jeff?
8:46
Well, let me give you a bee lecture.
8:48
You can't find anybody to help you.
8:51
You've got no friends.
8:52
Nobody wants to go out at midnight and work these bees.
8:56
So I had no one out there.
8:58
I was there alone and I was
8:59
doing something in preparation for moving bees to apple pollination, closing them down and strapping them up and being ready to go early the next morning.
9:10
And I was working and whistling and I had, you know, I
9:13
theoretically
9:14
Had that same useless flashlight.
9:17
If it wasn't that one, it was one just like it.
9:20
So you
9:20
got to point the light directly at the hive, directly at what you're doing.
9:25
The bees want no part of this, so every chance they get, they're up against the light.
9:29
Light.
9:30
You know the drill when you're
9:32
working
9:32
bees and being out there at night.
9:35
And I was just getting things done
9:38
You know, as an aside, y
9:40
you need a smoker that
9:42
has fluorescent paint on it
9:44
because if you lay it down, then you've got to shine that little flash of light directly on the smoker to find it again.
9:51
And heaven forbid that you lay down your hive tool.
9:55
I mean the hive tool is
9:57
just gone.
9:58
I mean,
9:58
you
9:59
probably won't even find it the next day
10:01
That's my situation.
10:02
I was out there late at night, very late at night, getting these colonies ready to go, trying to keep up with hive
10:08
tools and smokers, and then
10:11
and then
10:13
Let's take a break
10:14
while I get ready.
10:17
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11:28
And
11:29
then
11:31
a feeling came over me.
11:35
I
11:35
die, I'm not making this up.
11:37
Okay.
11:37
And I'm not normally a
11:39
I'm not a brave guy, but I'm not a skittish guy either.
11:43
I just had this
11:44
this
11:45
this bizarre sense
11:47
that I wasn't alone at the edge of that forest
11:52
bordering
11:52
on that apple orchard.
11:55
And so you keep working, you know, like you're whistling when you're walking past a cemetery.
12:01
I kept working
12:02
and that nagging feeling
12:05
kept growing and I had fifteen, twenty
12:08
more colonies to to get ready.
12:10
I took that light and you shine it
12:13
along the tree line.
12:14
Well that just makes everything worse, Jeff.
12:16
Don't ever do that.
12:18
If you're spooked a little bit already, don't be shining that light off
12:22
axis.
12:23
It is not going to help.
12:24
They put the
12:25
weak beam out there and just made everything look sinister.
12:30
I mean, how can an apple tree a few yards away
12:33
look like some kind of demon?
12:34
Well it does.
12:36
You stand there at midnight with the feeling that something's watching you and you.
12:39
you shine a light on that apple tree and it takes on a whole different persona.
12:44
I tried to keep working and I'm
12:45
gonna f really
12:46
feel like a
12:47
a
12:48
a weak guy here, but at some point I just broke.
12:51
I thought
12:52
I'm not doing this anymore.
12:54
I'm not doing this anymore.
12:57
And I I left the scene.
12:58
I left the smoker.
12:59
I had kept my hive
13:00
to.
13:01
And this is what was funny, the dew had fallen.
13:04
And when I got in my truck, it's just a two-wheel drive.
13:07
It began to slip on the grass.
13:09
And it wouldn't get out of there.
13:11
So then I'm in my truck.
13:13
I'm trying to run away from something unknown in the dark.
13:17
And my rear tires are slipping on the dew-covered grass.
13:21
You know, you rock it back and forth.
13:22
We all know how to do it.
13:24
I had the truck to move and I left everything.
13:26
I left the colony open.
13:29
Open?
13:29
I don't want to admit this, but I think the smoker was going.
13:32
It
13:32
probably gone out.
13:33
I don't want to say I left a
13:34
lighted smoker there.
13:35
Dew had fallen
13:36
anyway, there wasn't a fire hazard.
13:38
And I'm gone.
13:39
I spooked myself
13:42
and the next day I went out
13:43
fully expecting to find blood and guts and dead whatever and it was nothing.
13:48
There was never
13:50
anything.
13:51
I just got it in my mind that I'm on the campus.
13:54
of that abandoned facility
13:58
and all
13:58
the old stories about those kind of facilities must have haunted me.
14:03
And I was overcome with
14:06
silliness
14:07
and I left it.
14:09
Well let
14:10
me ask you though, how
14:12
how
14:12
do you know
14:13
the rear tires of your truck
14:15
was just slipping on the dew?
14:17
How do you
14:18
know
14:18
that the back of your truck wasn't being held
14:21
by
14:22
whatever?
14:23
Oh.
14:25
Now
14:25
that's a path I had never taken.
14:29
I saw myself being silly, but I saw myself in control.
14:33
You're saying that I wasn't even in control at all.
14:36
Well
14:36
,
14:37
there's people who
14:38
have not turned us off on
14:39
Already.
14:40
You had to be there.
14:41
I mean, you've just got to be in a bee yard at midnight by yourself
14:45
on the distant campus of an abandoned facility.
14:49
Uh, you've got to be there with a little dim
14:51
flashlight, trying to convince yourself that everything
14:56
I would've been uh
14:57
I would have been looking for footprints behind the truck
15:00
bes
15:00
that weren't mine.
15:01
You know what
15:02
you know what the one feature of all of my memories are about these
15:06
all my stars, you don't want to be there?
15:09
It was in a bee yard after dark.
15:12
I've just realized that when I was telling you these that that was the situation, that it was in a bee yard after dark.
15:18
Yeah.
15:20
Even now, when I walk out to my yard
15:22
right here
15:23
behind my house, to go back there.
15:24
at night and the bees are all clustered out front
15:27
and they're humming and the light hits them and the light hits them.
15:30
Just a package, you know, just a pile of junk equipment
15:33
takes on a totally different look than it does like a pile of junk equipment during the day.
15:39
When I was in the South, South Alabama, North Florida,
15:45
we used to move bees to watermelons for watermelon pollination.
15:51
And I want to tell you straight up that when we did that
15:54
job, we wore gloves and protective clothing, primarily
16:00
for the potential rattlesnake bite.
16:03
That never happened.
16:04
I did see rattlesnakes in my yard one time.
16:07
But I never
16:09
I never had a f a snake come for me
16:11
or
16:11
one beat under the colony when I picked it up, but I had you always assume
16:16
But it could happen.
16:17
So
16:17
rattlesnakes were the reason I wore gloves.
16:20
The second reason I wore gloves was because
16:23
of the extraordinary population of Black Widow spiders
16:27
that was there.
16:28
Every beehive underneath the cement blocks they were on
16:32
had a Blackwood
16:34
spider or two, which is a fitting animal
16:37
for my Halloween
16:38
story motif here
16:41
So the third reason you wore gloves
16:44
was to protect yourself from bee stings.
16:46
Yeah.
16:47
I always thought that was comical, that I wasn't wearing gloves.
16:51
to protect myself from bee stings.
16:53
I was worried about snake and spider bites.
16:56
So that was the attitude.
16:58
That was the atmosphere.
16:59
That was the air.
17:00
in those southern yards all that long ago, and this is not my story.
17:06
But it's my brother's story, and I will shamelessly tell it
17:10
and if anybody knows
17:12
my middle brother, I guess I won't give his name.
17:15
Then you accost him and tell him that his truth is known.
17:19
He had a friend helping him
17:22
move these bees to watermelons.
17:24
That part is exactly correct.
17:26
And it was a big flatbed truck and it was too high.
17:31
And if beekeepers have ever done it, you you know the drill.
17:34
You pick up two deeps in a super.
17:36
It's a big colony
17:37
because
17:38
watermelon
17:39
Producers want big fine bee colonies.
17:42
They don't want these small colonies sitting around.
17:44
So you'd pick up those two deeps
17:46
and probably a super,
17:47
strapped up and you hit
17:49
for that truck and you heave it up.
17:51
And you would always be low
17:53
about three to four inches.
17:56
And then to pick up the extra three to four inches, you had to reach inside your soul.
18:02
And take about 30 to 40 seconds off the top end of your life
18:06
and use
18:07
strength
18:08
you really didn't have
18:10
to get that hive
18:11
up on the truck.
18:12
It was that high.
18:13
It was that much work
18:15
But at the time my brother was a youngish man.
18:17
He had a youngish friend helping him.
18:19
It was dark.
18:21
They had the concerns that I've already described to you.
18:24
It's dark out here.
18:25
It's a hot night.
18:26
We know animals are out here.
18:28
We know it.
18:29
We know it.
18:31
As they were under
18:32
a dead
18:34
strain
18:35
lift
18:36
right
18:36
there, when they are at their absolute peak, maxed out
18:42
My brother's phone
18:44
attached to his belt, set to vibrate,
18:48
went off.
18:50
And under
18:51
a dead sweat
18:53
left
18:54
with that phone vibrating on his belt, my brother thought they had just picked up a rattlesnake
19:01
and in the dark
19:02
It had dropped off and was stuck on his belt.
19:07
Could this get any worse?
19:08
Oh yeah, it gets worse
19:10
because
19:12
The snake kept striking him
19:14
because
19:14
about
19:15
every ten
19:15
seconds it would strike again.
19:17
You know, as the phone was going through its cycle of vibrating.
19:22
Yeah.
19:22
Jeff, what's the worst thing?
19:24
What is the worst th
19:25
Thing you can say
19:26
right at that moment, in the dark, with what you think is a rattlesnake stuck on your belt.
19:32
What is the worst thing you can say?
19:34
Nothing I can repeat right now.
19:37
He
19:37
said
19:39
Snake!
19:42
Well do you know
19:43
the reaction that has on your work partner?
19:47
That guy was gone.
19:48
That colony crashed to the ground, broke all to pieces, flashlights
19:53
everywhere.
19:53
My brother thinking he had a snake stuck on his belt
19:57
It was a chaotic scene.
20:01
Later in life he became a minister.
20:05
And I know what I would say if I thought I had a snake stuck on my belt.
20:09
What did you say?
20:12
He told me he couldn't repeat it, that
20:13
was in the early years of his career, and that he was still new at being a minister.
20:17
He was okay.
20:18
You got
20:19
the whole thing.
20:20
All of these memories, they're all kind of goofy, none of them are truly
20:24
serious, but
20:26
it is
20:27
It's a
20:27
a different world.
20:28
Your bee yard is a completely different world at 2 30 in the morning
20:34
from anything you've ever seen.
20:36
And you're probably not out there very often unless you're doing pollination work and getting bees
20:41
better.
20:42
go or bringing bees back from pollination
20:44
or moving a yard
20:45
or whatever.
20:46
It is a side of the bee yard that you never see.
20:50
And here on Halloween
20:51
it just seemed like a decent time to use these stories that never have a chance to be used otherwise.
20:57
And never serve
20:58
any purpose.
20:59
We could call this episode Life in the Dark Yard.
21:03
On Halloween.
21:04
On
21:05
Halloween.
21:06
Well, Jim, I really appreciate you inviting me to the show this week,
21:10
sitting out here in the dark.
21:12
the
21:12
honey bee obscure bee yard.
21:15
It's
21:16
uh
21:16
it's a scary place.
21:18
It's only scary if you let yourself be scared.
21:20
So you have to be in the mood for it.
21:22
It is.
21:22
It's a it's a weird place.
21:25
I'm
21:25
not gonna do this again.
21:27
Probably not even next Halloween, but I didn't mind doing it this time.
21:30
I had a good time.
21:31
But I am going in and go to bed
21:32
now.
21:33
I'm I'm done with this and I'll lie there thinking about
21:36
my poor bees back there in this
21:38
in that spooky yard.
21:40
Yeah, and I'm gonna go back and and
21:42
Just
21:42
just double check myself next time you call me and ask me if I want to meet you in the bee yard
21:47
at night.
21:48
You
21:48
started it.
21:51
Hey
21:51
listeners, I want you to know he started it.
21:53
I just agreed to do it and I said
21:55
it out.
21:56
Anyway, good time.
21:57
Jeff.
21:57
Let me bump my flashlight and get it back on and I'll find my way to the house
22:02
now.
22:02
Thanks, Laddie.
22:03
Good night.
22:04
Happy Halloween, Jim.
22:05
Good night.
22:06
Good night.