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Plain Talk: Tri-County (274) · Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

0:01
Jim Tew: Well, I had a great plan to talk to you with today, and it just totally blew up.
0:09
Jim Tew: Yesterday, I went out to the local bee meeting that beekeepers have once a year at the research
0:16
Jim Tew: center where I worked, and for years, I cooperated with a local group to put that meeting on.
0:24
Jim Tew: So I thought, what a great time to walk around with a microphone and just talk to people
0:28
Jim Tew: and get inside.
0:30
Jim Tew: Well, the place was packed out,
0:32
Jim Tew: and it was noisy,
0:33
Jim Tew: and there was a windstorm going on,
0:36
Jim Tew: and I couldn't get people
0:37
Jim Tew: to let me have a quiet conversation
0:39
Jim Tew: with other people,
0:40
Jim Tew: and I gave up on it,
0:44
Jim Tew: came home empty-handed.
0:46
Jim Tew: But I still,
0:48
Jim Tew: I'm in the barn, of course,
0:50
Jim Tew: still want to talk about it
0:52
Jim Tew: because it was just good.
0:54
Jim Tew: So much of my life now is just memories,
0:56
Jim Tew: and I really cherish the good memories more and more.
1:03
Jim Tew: Back here in the bee yard, it's about 50 degrees.
1:08
Jim Tew: Here's my usual weather check for you.
1:11
Jim Tew: It's about 50 degrees or so.
1:14
Jim Tew: Crystal blue skies, one of those early days.
1:19
Jim Tew: Maples in bloom.
1:21
Jim Tew: For all of you people who are already well ahead of the bloom season
1:25
Jim Tew: that are not even in the U.S.
1:28
Jim Tew: That's a common early source of pollen
1:31
Jim Tew: that the bees really build up on.
1:37
Jim Tew: Hey, listeners, I'm Jim Tew.
1:39
Jim Tew: And I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura
1:43
Jim Tew: where I try to talk about something to do with
1:46
Jim Tew: this conversational, plain-talking.
1:49
Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura,
1:51
Introduction: brought to you by Growing Planet Media,
1:54
Introduction: the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast.
1:58
Introduction: Join Jim too, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun,
2:04
Introduction: and the challenges of managing honeybees.
2:07
Introduction: Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees.
2:14
Introduction: Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started,
2:18
Introduction: get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.
2:22
Jim Tew: Listeners, I've got a windscreen on the microphone, but it's still really windy out here.
2:29
Jim Tew: And I've often wondered how bees maintain their body temperature when they're flying on days like this.
2:38
Jim Tew: It's a bright, clear day, but it's still kind of cool out here.
2:40
Jim Tew: I wish I had a heavier jacket on.
2:44
Jim Tew: I don't have a veil on. They may come for me here in a bit, kind of close to the hive.
2:50
Jim Tew: Listeners, there's some black flies.
2:52
Jim Tew: There's one, two, three black flies.
2:55
Jim Tew: I don't know what they are, and I'm an entomologist.
2:57
Jim Tew: They're out here pretty much all the time.
3:01
Jim Tew: And I'll try to figure out what those are and what they're doing here.
3:04
Jim Tew: Are they degraders?
3:06
Jim Tew: They walk right up to the entrance, but I don't ever see them go in.
3:10
Jim Tew: Anyway, that's interesting.
3:12
Jim Tew: I've told you in the past talks that these flies are essentially part of a community here
3:17
Jim Tew: of beetles and earwigs and cockroaches and mice. In a way, honeybees to me seem to be like little
3:25
Jim Tew: beavers. They build an ecosystem that other animals come here eagerly to participate in.
3:32
Jim Tew: Yesterday, I went to that meeting, and I don't know how to describe it to you.
3:37
Jim Tew: It was just like I was going back in time. It's in the same building where it's always been,
3:43
Jim Tew: And even though within the next five or six years, that building is slated for massive rebuilding and redirecting.
3:50
Jim Tew: I don't know what will happen then, but it's not my problem.
3:54
Jim Tew: And it was just so nice to walk back in and see old friends and to see new friends.
4:00
Jim Tew: And a lot of times, listeners, you're the new friends.
4:03
Jim Tew: Every time you tell me that you listen to my little podcast here, I just want to give you a big hug because it's good to know that you're out there.
4:11
Jim Tew: I just want to talk to one or two.
4:13
Jim Tew: you. I don't want to talk to thousands of you because that's intimidating. But I talked to
4:18
Jim Tew: several, maybe 10, 15 podcast listeners yesterday, and they say little complimentary things that
4:27
Jim Tew: made me want to come home and do another podcast. And those, I guess, who don't like me have
4:31
Jim Tew: just not said anything, and I kind of appreciate that. I roamed around. I saw people, and you know,
4:39
Jim Tew: the interesting thing is everybody's gotten older. Amazingly, I think I'm just the same,
4:44
Jim Tew: but every year they're older. But I saw people in their place. They are, interestingly, are in
4:52
Jim Tew: some of the same places that I and my small staff assigned them 10, 12, 15 years ago. So it's almost
4:59
Jim Tew: like you can go to the very table where bee culture is going to be, or you can go out to
5:05
Jim Tew: to the Man Lake table that used to be the Kelly table, and there's Earl. He's been there for,
5:10
Jim Tew: I don't know how many times. Earl King has been there over and over again.
5:15
Jim Tew: It's like a family reunion. You know, I've never thought that before until right then,
5:20
Jim Tew: that those be meetings that you've been going to for years. You go out there, and you talk about
5:24
Jim Tew: the people who have health issues, and you talk about the people who've crossed over, and
5:29
Jim Tew: You hang in there with the people that are still viable and productive,
5:35
Jim Tew: and then you welcome the new people.
5:37
Jim Tew: That will be the newborns and the family reunion.
5:39
Jim Tew: I got to move, beekeepers.
5:41
Jim Tew: The wind is just howling here.
5:43
Jim Tew: I'm going to go stand in the barn.
5:46
Jim Tew: It's a beautiful blue day.
5:47
Jim Tew: The bees are flying nicely, but I don't think you could hear me if I keep doing this.
5:53
Jim Tew: Blowing all the barn doors open.
5:57
Jim Tew: All right, can you hear me better?
5:59
Jim Tew: looking out the window at the hives. So we got these new people at the family reunion,
6:05
Jim Tew: and those are the ones that I enjoy meeting, and they're the ones who sometimes tell me they're
6:09
Jim Tew: listening to this podcast. Every dealer was there, and I need to apologize publicly. I
6:15
Jim Tew: neglected to go by Betterby and speak to them, but they were there too, all the way down here
6:20
Jim Tew: from New York. When I was walking along there, I thought about some of the history
6:26
Jim Tew: that we've been through with those big meetings
6:30
Jim Tew: and the surprising things
6:34
Jim Tew: that could just about bring you to your knees.
6:38
Jim Tew: And I thought I'd give you some of those just now
6:41
Jim Tew: since I'm safely retired and no longer responsible for it
6:44
Jim Tew: and the truth can be told more or less.
6:48
Jim Tew: One of the many stories that comes to mind
6:51
Jim Tew: as I was troubleshooting and starting and stopping programs
6:56
Jim Tew: and timekeeping and making sure that the food was there,
7:01
Jim Tew: someone came running up and said,
7:02
Jim Tew: Dr. Tu, Dr. Tu, Jim, ironically his name was also Jim,
7:08
Jim Tew: who was a featured speaker in the main auditorium,
7:12
Jim Tew: just fainted behind the podium.
7:16
Jim Tew: So I didn't know if, I knew the man had a heart condition,
7:20
Jim Tew: so I went rushing into this auditorium with hundreds of people sitting there and my friend
7:26
Jim Tew: a longtime friend standing back up and kind of leaning on the podium
7:31
Jim Tew: I said Jim are you all right he responded that he was he said I just got lightheaded and I
7:37
Jim Tew: suddenly just dropped to the floor and I said is it your heart he said no I feel fine well
7:46
Jim Tew: listeners, you need to know that the microphone was on. So this private conversation was anything
7:54
Jim Tew: but private. Everyone was hearing it. And I asked the speaker if he wanted me to fill in for him,
8:01
Jim Tew: if he wanted to take a break. And he said, no, he wanted to continue to do it.
8:07
Jim Tew: And I was just as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
8:13
Jim Tew: My grandfather would have said, I stayed on the front row and listened to every word that Jim said
8:21
Jim Tew: to be certain that guy didn't do something dramatic again in front of that group.
8:27
Jim Tew: We got through it.
8:28
Jim Tew: Jim lived a long life.
8:30
Jim Tew: I don't know why he fainted that day, but he did.
8:34
Jim Tew: And it scared me to death.
8:35
Jim Tew: And that made that particular meeting one that I will never forget.
8:41
Jim Tew: Why don't we take a break and hear from our sponsor?
8:43
Jim Tew: and give me a chance to come up with some more of these things
8:46
Jim Tew: and see if we can just have a nice time here on this afternoon.
8:50
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8:55
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8:58
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9:01
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9:04
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9:08
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9:11
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9:15
Betterbee: Whether you're just getting started or a seasoned pro,
9:20
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9:26
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9:34
Betterbee: Better Bee, your partners in better beekeeping.
9:38
Jim Tew: Feeding about a thousand people a hot lunch, a full-blown Amish hot lunch, is an amazing undertaking.
9:49
Jim Tew: It's almost a biblical event to feed that many people, to organize them, who paid, who didn't pay, who wants to buy a meal there.
10:00
Jim Tew: So through the years, we found a group of Amish people who had a restaurant of sorts,
10:07
Jim Tew: and they would bring in some of the best food, pies and all that kind of thing.
10:12
Jim Tew: But before we found them, every year, we were just all over the kind of small to medium-sized town of Worcester.
10:21
Jim Tew: There may be 30,000 people here.
10:23
Jim Tew: We would try to find someone to make that lunch for us that day,
10:28
Jim Tew: And one year we contracted with a local fast food provider at a quick store to provide enough fried chicken for about 800 people.
10:40
Jim Tew: And it came time to eat.
10:42
Jim Tew: And we began to get frantic calls that the guy had really overestimated how fast he could fry chicken in his two cookers.
10:51
Jim Tew: And he was pushing them as hard as he can.
10:55
Jim Tew: And we were getting the word that he was running seriously late.
10:59
Jim Tew: And then we got the word that one of his deep cookers quit due to being overheated and overworked.
11:06
Jim Tew: He was down to one cooker.
11:09
Jim Tew: And we finally got the first load of chicken.
11:12
Jim Tew: And it tastes like it had been cooked and paint thinner because the oil had just been burned up from the heat and the press of pushing it.
11:22
Jim Tew: It was just absolutely horrible.
11:24
Jim Tew: What an absolute headache.
11:26
Jim Tew: We had all those people who had prepaid for a lunch.
11:31
Jim Tew: We had them out at a B meeting, and there's nothing around this research facility for 800 people to rush out to get something to eat.
11:41
Jim Tew: We were just stuck.
11:42
Jim Tew: We had to stand before the group and tell them that the guy did his absolute best.
11:46
Jim Tew: He didn't charge us a cent.
11:47
Jim Tew: I'm glad he didn't because we just about couldn't have paid him because of the results.
11:54
Jim Tew: but he bit off more than he can chew literally and that day we had a meeting where the coffee
12:01
Jim Tew: breaks and all the snacks from breakfast were in high demand because that's all the food we had
12:07
Jim Tew: at that particular point one of the ones i specifically remember was in the main auditorium
12:15
Jim Tew: someone came to me after just after a talk was finishing and said there's a man in the back of
12:21
Jim Tew: the room who's having chest pains. So I went back and talked to the guy and there was a guy clutching
12:27
Jim Tew: his chest. So we immediately called the squad. He said, don't call the squad. He's not going.
12:34
Jim Tew: He's going to go home. And I asked him, where did he live? And it was somewhere in central Michigan.
12:40
Jim Tew: Well, that's 200 miles, 250 miles. I don't know where he was going, but it's hundreds of miles
12:47
Jim Tew: and he's having a heart condition.
12:49
Jim Tew: And I suddenly didn't know what responsibility I had.
12:54
Jim Tew: This man had a heart attack on a university campus
12:58
Jim Tew: and now he's waiting to find his friend
13:01
Jim Tew: so they can leave the meeting and he can go home.
13:03
Jim Tew: And by then the squad was there
13:05
Jim Tew: and they came in with all the fanfare.
13:08
Jim Tew: We're having to hold the meeting up.
13:10
Jim Tew: So everybody's sitting there kind of watching
13:12
Jim Tew: in the back of the room, this guy being dealt with.
13:16
Jim Tew: and as try as we might, he wouldn't go.
13:21
Jim Tew: So the squad looked at me and said,
13:22
Jim Tew: well, if he won't go, I guess we serve no purpose.
13:27
Jim Tew: And that's how that story ends, listeners.
13:31
Jim Tew: That man and his friend got in the car and left.
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Jim Tew: I didn't know his name.
13:36
Jim Tew: We couldn't refund his money.
13:38
Jim Tew: I never heard from him again or his friend.
13:42
Jim Tew: I don't know what happened,
13:44
Jim Tew: But that's a meeting that I'll never forget when someone apparently had a survivable heart attack during the meeting and kept going along quite well with everything.
13:58
Jim Tew: I don't know how to deal with that.
14:00
Jim Tew: And the audience, as they had had no other choice, was very patient.
14:04
Jim Tew: And then the speaker who was up had already missed about 35 minutes of his 45-minute talk.
14:11
Jim Tew: He had to really jump through hoops and condense everything to remotely stay on time because audiences really liked the meeting to stay on time.
14:20
Jim Tew: That was a third meeting I'll never forget.
14:24
Jim Tew: A fourth meeting.
14:26
Jim Tew: This one was a long time ago, maybe 25, 30 years ago.
14:30
Jim Tew: We got the snow.
14:32
Jim Tew: And when we found out it was coming, we had a full-blown meeting plan.
14:36
Jim Tew: We had a lot of people to show up.
14:38
Jim Tew: It was always 800 to 1,200 people.
14:43
Jim Tew: And we got the word that snow was coming and what to do because we didn't have a way at that time with email or anything to communicate with everyone.
14:53
Jim Tew: So one way or the other, we've got to hold a meeting.
14:58
Jim Tew: And what happened was a meeting that showed up with about a fourth of the participants.
15:06
Jim Tew: And probably about a fourth of the speakers, most of the vendors couldn't get there.
15:12
Jim Tew: So we just had to make do with what we could do.
15:16
Jim Tew: We offered to give them their money back if they wanted money back.
15:20
Jim Tew: I would say that thankfully, most people just made a contribution to the B program who can do anything about a snowstorm.
15:27
Jim Tew: So we struggle through that.
15:29
Jim Tew: And from that experience, we realized that we needed to economize at least one or two years and generate enough money that we could pay for the entire meeting, all the expenses, all the food that was prepared, that we tried to cancel, could cancel some of it, but they had bought food to prepare for the meal.
15:50
Jim Tew: So there's all these preconditioned expenses.
15:53
Jim Tew: We learn to store enough money to pay for a complete meeting and still survive financially.
16:01
Jim Tew: Now, I've been long gone.
16:03
Jim Tew: So far as I know, that still happens there.
16:07
Jim Tew: They still have enough money backed up.
16:10
Jim Tew: Those are enough memories.
16:11
Jim Tew: When I walked into the building yesterday, you just have these flashbacks.
16:17
Jim Tew: And then there's the empty spots where new people are, where old people used to be who are now gone.
16:25
Jim Tew: And you have to just really remember to check them off the list.
16:30
Jim Tew: They asked me to give a talk the night before.
16:32
Jim Tew: It was to the people who used to come early.
16:35
Jim Tew: They would get there the night before, had nothing to do but sit in their hotel room most of the time.
16:40
Jim Tew: So we began to have a little program on Friday night.
16:43
Jim Tew: And I gave a talk there to about, I don't know, 300 people or so.
16:49
Jim Tew: My daughters were all there, right on the front row,
16:53
Jim Tew: which made it kind of an interesting presentation.
16:56
Jim Tew: It's like I was being evaluated.
16:57
Jim Tew: Is this man wholesome and mentally hardy enough to live by himself?
17:01
Jim Tew: I feel like I'm being judged all the time
17:03
Jim Tew: while I go through this re-changing process.
17:09
Jim Tew: But I gave a decent enough talk.
17:11
Jim Tew: My timing was off some, but I maintained the flow.
17:15
Jim Tew: Of course, I talked about robbing because I've had other insights about robbing.
17:20
Jim Tew: Jim, don't get off the subject here.
17:23
Jim Tew: Talk about it later.
17:24
Jim Tew: But I'll quickly say that I came out on one of the first warm days when the bees could fly,
17:29
Jim Tew: and the first thing they were doing was going to the empty hives, checking them out.
17:33
Jim Tew: So I'll tell you more about that later.
17:36
Jim Tew: But I talked about that that night.
17:39
Jim Tew: People were really congenial.
17:40
Jim Tew: I had a nice time.
17:42
Jim Tew: I'd like to apologize to the beekeepers of Indiana
17:45
Jim Tew: because I was going to their meeting in Carmel, Indiana,
17:49
Jim Tew: and my transmission blew up on me halfway there.
17:53
Jim Tew: And by the time I got my cart on a rollback and hauled back to Worcester,
17:58
Jim Tew: I couldn't get to the meeting, so I had to cancel that.
18:02
Jim Tew: So I was really anxious to get through one meeting, even if just a local one.
18:06
Jim Tew: So apologies to everybody that I've abused.
18:10
Jim Tew: to the people here in Ohio that I had to cancel because of the snowstorm we had a few months ago.
18:16
Jim Tew: So I'm trying to get back in the scheme of things. I went to the meeting last night before last. We
18:22
Jim Tew: talked, had a nice time. My daughters are here visiting. My grandson's having his 11th birthday.
18:28
Jim Tew: The bees are flying. They're bringing in pollen. I thought all my bees would be dead. I'm shocked
18:33
Jim Tew: to tell you that about seven of the eight are alive that I had.
18:38
Jim Tew: The two packages died.
18:40
Jim Tew: So I've got five packages ordered that I really don't need.
18:44
Jim Tew: If I can, I think I'm going to cancel them.
18:46
Jim Tew: And a final note, for those who listen regularly,
18:51
Jim Tew: do you remember that duct tape thing I did last winter
18:54
Jim Tew: to close off some of the entrances?
18:56
Jim Tew: That duct tape stayed on the column.
18:59
Jim Tew: So I called that episode, I think, Slipshod Beekeeping.
19:03
Jim Tew: so keep in mind that duct tape can be used to quickly close down entrances or close up holes
19:11
Jim Tew: hey i sense that my time is up i don't have a clock but i'm going to stop here i always enjoy
19:16
Jim Tew: talking to you thanks for letting me have this nice walk about here have some old memories
19:21
Jim Tew: and look at my bees i'll talk to you next week bye