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Georgia Winter Visit with Anne Frey (272) · Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

• 0:01
  Jim Tew: Hey, Honey Bee Obscura podcast listeners.
• 0:04
  Jim Tew: It's Jim here with Ann Frey from Better Bee.
• 0:07
  Jim Tew: Hi, folks.
• 0:08
  Jim Tew: We've got a morning plan for you, or an afternoon, or whatever time it is for you.
• 0:13
  Jim Tew: Ann had the good luck to be able to go down to Georgia and hang out for a while.
• 0:19
  Jim Tew: I don't think it's been warm anywhere, has it, Ann?
• 0:21
  Jim Tew: But it was warmer than here.
• 0:24
  Anne Frey: Well, yeah, it was warmer than here a little bit.
• 0:26
  Anne Frey: It was still down to like 10 at night, and they had some snow too while I was there.
• 0:31
  Anne Frey: But in the day, it was nice.
• 0:32
  Anne Frey: It was like 40 or 50.
• 0:35
  Jim Tew: Well, at least that was a break.
• 0:36
  Jim Tew: Listeners, I know I've talked about it a lot, but this has really been a winter.
• 0:41
  Jim Tew: I think Ann will support me in that.
• 0:43
  Jim Tew: I always know that there's other states that have it this cold all the time,
• 0:48
  Jim Tew: and then there's Canada that's up above us here.
• 0:51
  Jim Tew: It's cold.
• 0:52
  Jim Tew: But I'm just not used to this, Ann, this persistent cold.
• 0:56
  Anne Frey: for so long. I think this is the coldest winter I can remember, but it started out just seeming
• 1:02
  Anne Frey: like a normal winter with lots of good snow, like as winter should be. Listeners, we're going to
• 1:07
  Jim Tew: take a trip to Georgia and let Ann describe some of the experiences she had there and some of the
• 1:13
  Jim Tew: things that the Georgia beekeepers have talked to her about. I think it'll be very entertaining for
• 1:18
  Jim Tew: all of us just to take a break from our complaining about the weather. Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura.
• 1:26
  Introduction: Brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast.
• 1:33
  Introduction: Join Jim Tu, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees.
• 1:41
  Introduction: Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees.
• 1:48
  Introduction: Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started,
• 1:52
  Introduction: Get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.
• 1:57
  Jim Tew: And just so people in Georgia will know, and everybody else too,
• 2:01
  Jim Tew: where were you in Georgia, and where did you start from?
• 2:05
  Anne Frey: Well, I took a vacation and visited some friends in Florida,
• 2:08
  Anne Frey: and then I came up and visited some friends in Georgia
• 2:11
  Anne Frey: at about the same latitude as Atlanta out in the country.
• 2:15
  Anne Frey: They're beekeepers too.
• 2:17
  Anne Frey: And visited my friends Mary and Jeff for about seven or eight days.
• 2:23
  Anne Frey: Also gave two presentations to Georgia groups while I was down there.
• 2:28
  Jim Tew: What were some of the points that you picked up?
• 2:30
  Jim Tew: What was the differences?
• 2:31
  Jim Tew: I ask, you started from Betterby in New York, right?
• 2:35
  Jim Tew: I mean, it's dead cold.
• 2:36
  Jim Tew: You're not doing any bee work.
• 2:37
  Jim Tew: So what were some of the primary differences?
• 2:40
  Jim Tew: What were some of the seasonal differences?
• 2:43
  Jim Tew: So 40 degrees during the day, 10 degrees at night, they have to re-cluster.
• 2:48
  Jim Tew: Any pollen?
• 2:49
  Jim Tew: What did you see going on?
• 2:51
  Anne Frey: There was no nectar or pollen coming in on the one day that I saw a few bees flying.
• 2:57
  Anne Frey: And my friend Mary told me that they don't usually have a whole week of no flight.
• 3:02
  Anne Frey: They get some cold nights, but it's pretty frequent that there's flight days every few
• 3:08
  Anne Frey: days.
• 3:09
  Anne Frey: And so this was very unusual for them too.
• 3:12
  Anne Frey: Since they don't have a lot of days with no flight, if they need to feed, they always
• 3:19
  Anne Frey: use syrup.
• 3:20
  Anne Frey: They never use solid feed like we might up here.
• 3:23
  Anne Frey: So that was one big difference.
• 3:26
  Anne Frey: There's a lot more syrup feeding necessary down there because their nectar flows aren't
• 3:32
  Anne Frey: as wonderful as in the northern parts of the United States.
• 3:36
  Anne Frey: They might just have nectar flow from April through June and then never again.
• 3:43
  Anne Frey: You know, just maybe some bits here and there like to subsist on and they need constant syrup feeding.
• 3:50
  Jim Tew: I would agree with that.
• 3:52
  Jim Tew: You know, with what's left of my accent and most people know I grew up and started keeping bees in South Alabama.
• 4:00
  Jim Tew: And the nectar flow was more dilute.
• 4:03
  Jim Tew: It was more spread out.
• 4:04
  Jim Tew: It wasn't intensive.
• 4:05
  Jim Tew: and the farther north I've lived,
• 4:09
  Jim Tew: the shorter and the more intensive
• 4:11
  Jim Tew: the nectar flow seems to be.
• 4:12
  Jim Tew: In Alabama, it was just this long, lazy flow
• 4:17
  Jim Tew: that never really, you know,
• 4:18
  Jim Tew: was just never crazy productive
• 4:21
  Jim Tew: and then when it was done, it was done.
• 4:23
  Jim Tew: Was there an odor?
• 4:25
  Jim Tew: Well, there was no honey coming in.
• 4:27
  Jim Tew: I was about to ask if there was an odor
• 4:29
  Jim Tew: because some of the honey in Alabama
• 4:31
  Jim Tew: had a very distinctive odor from tie-tie.
• 4:34
  Anne Frey: You mean like ours with the goldenrod?
• 4:36
  Jim Tew: Right.
• 4:36
  Jim Tew: It had an odor like goldenrod, but it was a very specific odor from this holly plant,
• 4:42
  Jim Tew: this wild holly plant, tie-tie.
• 4:46
  Jim Tew: It's like a tree?
• 4:47
  Jim Tew: No, it's like a shrub, a big shrub.
• 4:49
  Anne Frey: No, no smell, nothing like that.
• 4:51
  Anne Frey: The most we ever did during that week was stand next to each hive and lift up one side
• 4:58
  Anne Frey: of it to get a feel of the weight.
• 5:00
  Anne Frey: And we did discover a few that were definitely going to need to be fed.
• 5:04
  Anne Frey: And she went and fed them as soon as she could.
• 5:07
  Anne Frey: Right after I left, they actually got a 65-degree day.
• 5:11
  Anne Frey: And it was, you know, hefting is something I talked about in the two presentations I gave
• 5:18
  Anne Frey: as an easy way to gauge if the hive is in desperate straits and is running out of their food.
• 5:25
  Jim Tew: Go with the hefting thing for those people who might be somewhat new to beekeeping.
• 5:29
  Jim Tew: Describe hefting.
• 5:30
  Anne Frey: If the hive is on a stand with other hives, like long sets of 4x4s maybe, which is what they had there, I would say heft it from the side so that you're always getting the same style of tip.
• 5:47
  Anne Frey: because it might be placed differently on the 4x4s.
• 5:52
  Anne Frey: And if you tip from the back, you would get like a wrongly lightweight feel,
• 5:57
  Anne Frey: depending on how much was sticking out past the front 4x4.
• 6:01
  Anne Frey: Does that make sense?
• 6:02
  Jim Tew: It does.
• 6:03
  Jim Tew: I think you're describing a fulcrum.
• 6:04
  Jim Tew: Yes, exactly.
• 6:05
  Jim Tew: You're describing a fulcrum.
• 6:07
  Jim Tew: So you need to know where the fulcrum is.
• 6:09
  Jim Tew: Is it going to be easy to pick up or is it going to be far back?
• 6:13
  Jim Tew: It's a relative thing.
• 6:15
  Jim Tew: The one thing I used to understand was that if you couldn't move it at all, that's good.
• 6:20
  Jim Tew: I mean, I don't care about the fulcrum.
• 6:21
  Jim Tew: If it won't move, that's good.
• 6:24
  Jim Tew: Or, this is important, Ann, it's frozen down.
• 6:28
  Jim Tew: Because when I first moved here, I was not prepared for colonies to be frozen down.
• 6:32
  Jim Tew: And so I made a few silly mistakes at first.
• 6:36
  Jim Tew: But you just tilt the colony, like you said, from the side or from the back.
• 6:40
  Anne Frey: Yeah, grabbing the bottom.
• 6:41
  Jim Tew: And if you do it long enough, if you do it, you know, for a while, for years, for seasons, and you know your own strength and you know your own bees and you know your own hive stands, you can get an estimate of what's in that bee box.
• 6:55
  Anne Frey: Yeah, that's all I mean by hefting.
• 6:57
  Anne Frey: This has all gotten a little bit technical about a simple procedure.
• 7:01
  Anne Frey: You're just lifting it up, lifting it up maybe one inch and setting it down gently.
• 7:07
  Anne Frey: And if you do that kind of thing throughout the year, you know, you get a sense of what each feel means.
• 7:16
  Anne Frey: Because you might in the summer be looking inside the hive after you heft it and say, oh, yeah, they have lots of honey.
• 7:22
  Anne Frey: That's what that heft meant.
• 7:24
  Anne Frey: And things like that give you a kind of muscle memory.
• 7:28
  Jim Tew: The reason I went into this so much was because I had an incident many, many, many, many years ago.
• 7:35
  Jim Tew: And maybe you don't know this, but beekeepers are highly opinionated.
• 7:39
  Jim Tew: What?
• 7:39
  Jim Tew: Breaking news, isn't it?
• 7:40
  Jim Tew: And they don't always have the same opinion.
• 7:43
  Jim Tew: Well, I'm not sure if I agree with that.
• 7:45
  Jim Tew: So I was describing this.
• 7:48
  Jim Tew: No, don't go into that like that.
• 7:52
  Jim Tew: I was describing this event to some beekeepers here.
• 7:55
  Jim Tew: They were in Medina, just up the road from me.
• 7:58
  Jim Tew: And two beekeepers tied up.
• 8:00
  Jim Tew: One guy said hefting was the wrong thing to tell new beekeepers.
• 8:04
  Jim Tew: They needed to open the hive and look.
• 8:06
  Jim Tew: And another guy said that he tilted colonies all the time.
• 8:10
  Jim Tew: And they just went fist to cuffs.
• 8:13
  Jim Tew: So I've always been sensitized now when I talk about tilting colonies
• 8:18
  Jim Tew: because I know that that particular night, as a young apiculture professor,
• 8:23
  Jim Tew: I had to monitor and separate these two guys who had diverse opinions on this simple process.
• 8:30
  Jim Tew: So that's why I went into it so much.
• 8:32
  Jim Tew: I know people agree or disagree, and that's why I was explaining in so much detail.
• 8:38
  Anne Frey: Well, I think that beginners also don't understand that there's other ways to detect what's going on inside a hive besides looking at frames.
• 8:49
  Anne Frey: You know, in the winter, besides lifting the frames, I mean, you could stare between the frames and see which ones have capped honey puffing out from the sides.
• 8:59
  Anne Frey: but that still only tells you what's going on at the top of the frames.
• 9:03
  Anne Frey: So I really do trust hefting if it's practiced through the year and through the years.
• 9:09
  Jim Tew: In a perfect world, I'd have on one of those electronic hive monitors of some kind,
• 9:14
  Jim Tew: and I'd be sitting inside watching the colony game, wait, lose weight, or whatever.
• 9:20
  Jim Tew: But that's part of my spring plan.
• 9:22
  Jim Tew: I don't know that I have them on every colony.
• 9:24
  Jim Tew: I just have some in the yard to be an indicator of what was going on.
• 9:28
  Jim Tew: We need to take a break and hear from our sponsor.
• 9:30
  Jim Tew: And when we come back, I want you to tell me about what they were doing about small high beetles and varroa in central Georgia.
• 9:39
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• 9:48
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• 9:54
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• 9:57
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• 10:05
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• 10:16
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• 10:24
  Betterbee: Better Bee, your partners in better beekeeping.
• 10:28
  Jim Tew: How were they handling Varroa, or how were they suppressing Varroa populations and small hive beetles?
• 10:34
  Jim Tew: And what were their issues like that, or did they discuss it with you?
• 10:38
  Jim Tew: Not necessarily in the winter, but just in general.
• 10:41
  Anne Frey: Oh, in general.
• 10:42
  Anne Frey: Well, speaking of your two guys fighting in your class and had to be taken outside,
• 10:47
  Anne Frey: my friend did warn me that some people felt that small hive beetles might be more of a problem than Varroa,
• 10:54
  Anne Frey: And some people insisted that Varroa was the biggest problem.
• 10:58
  Anne Frey: So I was ready for something like that, that kind of tussle to start.
• 11:03
  Anne Frey: So small hive beetles are much more of a concern to them.
• 11:07
  Anne Frey: And they see more of them on an average inspection.
• 11:12
  Anne Frey: They might see the adults walking around on the combs in a strong hive, whereas we only
• 11:19
  Anne Frey: ever see the adults hanging out on the top of the inner cover hiding. And, you know, it's really
• 11:26
  Anne Frey: different. They still don't ever want to see any larvae in the hive because that means things are
• 11:32
  Anne Frey: out of control. But many more adults are seen and they use a lot more hive beetle traps than we do
• 11:40
  Anne Frey: up north. Seems to be that it has to do with the fact that they don't usually get extended hard
• 11:47
  Anne Frey: freezes of the soil down there and they don't get, well, we don't get such a constant influx of
• 11:55
  Anne Frey: hive beetles because our hard freeze kills a lot of the pupae that were in the soil.
• 12:01
  Anne Frey: Would you agree that that's the reason that it's worse in the south is the
• 12:05
  Anne Frey: middle phase of their development when they're down in the dirt?
• 12:09
  Jim Tew: Yes, I would agree that that's certainly one reason, but I'm not affluent enough
• 12:15
  Jim Tew: and small hive beetle, serious populations of small hive beetles,
• 12:19
  Jim Tew: to know if that's the only reason.
• 12:21
  Jim Tew: I don't know if heavy rain or no rain or other factors,
• 12:24
  Jim Tew: but certainly this cold, this has to be meaningful.
• 12:28
  Jim Tew: This has been minus, you know, at 16 degrees below zero here,
• 12:32
  Jim Tew: which is cold for this area.
• 12:34
  Anne Frey: I hope that it helps my friends down in Georgia
• 12:37
  Anne Frey: to have less hive beetles this spring.
• 12:39
  Anne Frey: And they do worry about Varroa, of course.
• 12:43
  Anne Frey: Everybody's concerned with Varroa too.
• 12:46
  Anne Frey: Their go-to miticide is not Formic Pro, which ours is up here.
• 12:52
  Anne Frey: They can only use Formic Pro like in the earliest part of the spring.
• 12:56
  Anne Frey: And by the time we're just coming out of waiting for dandelions to appear in April,
• 13:02
  Anne Frey: they're already too warm to use Formic Pro.
• 13:05
  Anne Frey: So they're using different things like Veroxan or repeated oxalic acid dribbles, things like that.
• 13:13
  Anne Frey: And repeated oxalic acid was way more common in discussions with people down there.
• 13:20
  Anne Frey: We only do like one in the wintertime and a vape or a dribble, just a single shot.
• 13:27
  Jim Tew: When I see small hive beetles here, I'm not gloating, but I'll stop everything and try to get my phone out with my camera or run back to the shop and get my camera.
• 13:36
  Jim Tew: And then by the time I get back out, the two or three that I saw are gone.
• 13:42
  Jim Tew: So I'm not gloating, but I've just never seen small high beetles.
• 13:47
  Jim Tew: I can tell you how to make an easy mistake, though, here in northeast Ohio with small high beetles,
• 13:54
  Jim Tew: and that's to bring in five or six supers of honey and don't extract them right away.
• 14:00
  Jim Tew: Let them sit for three or four days, and under those conditions,
• 14:04
  Jim Tew: you can get rampant small high beetles taking over that unprotected honey.
• 14:10
  Anne Frey: There might be, I mean, certainly there probably are eggs and the teeniest little larvae already in those combs.
• 14:17
  Anne Frey: And with no bees to chomp on those baby beetle larvae, they're just going to grow and grow.
• 14:23
  Anne Frey: It takes three days for the eggs to hatch, but there's probably already some teeny weeny larvae in there when you carry them in.
• 14:30
  Jim Tew: Yep. Without those bees to maintain the hygienic procedures and keep them under control, they will explode in populations.
• 14:38
  Jim Tew: So that's been my experience was just being a poor beekeeper and letting honey sit too long one time.
• 14:45
  Anne Frey: Yeah, people learn from mistakes.
• 14:48
  Anne Frey: I visited somebody one time and helped him get his supers off his hive.
• 14:52
  Anne Frey: I said, so are we bringing these in the kitchen?
• 14:54
  Anne Frey: And he's like, no, no, put them right here in this shed and I'm going to cover them up.
• 14:59
  Anne Frey: I said, oh, well, you know, I could carry them in.
• 15:02
  Anne Frey: You're going to extract them tomorrow.
• 15:04
  Anne Frey: Why should you have to move them again?
• 15:06
  Anne Frey: And he goes, no, no, I'm not going to extract them tomorrow.
• 15:08
  Anne Frey: I'm going on vacation tomorrow.
• 15:10
  Anne Frey: Oh, no.
• 15:10
  Anne Frey: And I'll extract them when I get back in two weeks.
• 15:13
  Anne Frey: And I said, no, no, no, no, no.
• 15:15
  Anne Frey: You can't do that.
• 15:17
  Anne Frey: You know, we've got to put these back on the hive.
• 15:19
  Anne Frey: He was, you know, he was new.
• 15:21
  Anne Frey: He didn't realize that.
• 15:22
  Jim Tew: Well, I'm glad you were there to shut that down.
• 15:24
  Jim Tew: That would have been a huge mess.
• 15:25
  Jim Tew: I promise you.
• 15:26
  Anne Frey: Oh, yeah.
• 15:27
  Jim Tew: That would have been a huge mess.
• 15:29
  Jim Tew: This is not accusatory.
• 15:30
  Jim Tew: You know, people make their best guesses in the autumn.
• 15:33
  Jim Tew: How did your friends underestimate the necessary winter stores that would require winter feed?
• 15:40
  Jim Tew: Is this just something you do?
• 15:41
  Jim Tew: There was not much of a honey crop or they took too much honey off or what?
• 15:45
  Anne Frey: Yeah, it's more like it is their habit.
• 15:52
  Anne Frey: They see it as a necessity to feed after harvesting in late June.
• 15:58
  Anne Frey: Because if they didn't feed, they would have to leave the entire harvest on and they would never get any honey to sell.
• 16:07
  Anne Frey: So it's not that they underestimated or anything like that.
• 16:12
  Anne Frey: It's just the way things are done.
• 16:14
  Anne Frey: So the harvest is in June.
• 16:17
  Anne Frey: That's that.
• 16:18
  Anne Frey: And from then on, feeding if they are running out.
• 16:23
  Anne Frey: Or just sort of constant feeding and constant checking.
• 16:26
  Anne Frey: I think it's probably really hard for someone whose harvest is in June to figure out how much to leave to get them all the way through to late February.
• 16:39
  Jim Tew: Well, I was giving your beekeeper friends a lot of leeway.
• 16:41
  Jim Tew: I mean, I've probably got dead, I'm sure I do, got dead colonies right now.
• 16:46
  Jim Tew: And they have 50 or 60 pounds of honey on, but sometimes other factors supersede.
• 16:52
  Anne Frey: Yeah, in a way, it's the same length of time.
• 16:54
  Anne Frey: For us, you know, we might harvest in early September and we won't really see them coming out of winter until mid-March.
• 17:05
  Anne Frey: And that's the same like seven-month length of time that they had to wait before they can get into them for, you know, the increase of the population coming in their spring.
• 17:16
  Jim Tew: One person's vanilla, someone else's chocolate, because even as we speak right now in early February,
• 17:24
  Jim Tew: I've already seen pictures coming in from northern Florida of plants already in bloom.
• 17:32
  Jim Tew: There won't be anything in bloom here for weeks and weeks and weeks.
• 17:36
  Jim Tew: So while your Georgia friends don't have anything from June on, we don't have anything really from, what, October, November?
• 17:46
  Jim Tew: when goldenrod and astrophase is out,
• 17:48
  Jim Tew: we don't have anything until, what, March?
• 17:53
  Jim Tew: April, March?
• 17:54
  Anne Frey: It might be five and a half, six and a half months
• 17:57
  Anne Frey: for maybe even seven for people in Georgia
• 18:02
  Anne Frey: or up north here.
• 18:04
  Jim Tew: Yep, I've never really thought about
• 18:05
  Jim Tew: what a long dearth that is.
• 18:07
  Jim Tew: I've called that the big dearth,
• 18:09
  Jim Tew: but I've never really put a number on it,
• 18:11
  Jim Tew: but it's more than half the year, isn't it,
• 18:13
  Jim Tew: that the bees are quiescent without any problems?
• 18:15
  Jim Tew: Any stores coming in?
• 18:18
  Anne Frey: Another big difference down there was that a single deep is the norm.
• 18:22
  Anne Frey: For us, quite often a double deep is the norm, especially for beginners, because then they have a big buffer of honey and they don't have to worry so much as long as those are both full when fall is halfway through and winter is going to start.
• 18:39
  Anne Frey: Down there, it's a single.
• 18:41
  Anne Frey: And it's just that got a little hard to think about and adjust my talking when I was giving presentations.
• 18:48
  Jim Tew: Just thinking doubles.
• 18:50
  Anne Frey: Yeah.
• 18:50
  Anne Frey: I think I'm going to try this summer doing some singles or a single and a medium, which strangely some people call a deep and a half, which is let's not get into it.
• 19:02
  Jim Tew: Well, it's a deep and a big half.
• 19:05
  Anne Frey: Right.
• 19:06
  Anne Frey: I might try some more deep and medium as my brood chambers.
• 19:11
  Anne Frey: and kind of ease towards the single brood chamber.
• 19:15
  Jim Tew: Ann, we're out of time, but I'm glad you had a nice time,
• 19:18
  Jim Tew: and I'm glad you got a break.
• 19:20
  Jim Tew: I have not had a break.
• 19:21
  Jim Tew: I've been here.
• 19:22
  Jim Tew: You seem like you've come back exhilarated
• 19:25
  Jim Tew: and ready for our spring season, if it ever gets here.
• 19:29
  Anne Frey: Yeah, it was a really good vacation,
• 19:31
  Anne Frey: thanks to my friends Mary and Jeff in Georgia
• 19:35
  Anne Frey: and Vicki and Jay in Florida.
• 19:38
  Jim Tew: If any of you southern beekeepers want to point out things
• 19:40
  Jim Tew: that we didn't know to say, we're here and I will try to dutifully record your comments later on,
• 19:46
  Jim Tew: unless there's thousands of them. But if there's enough that we can manage, we will post your
• 19:51
  Jim Tew: comments. Hey listeners, we're Ann and I telling you bye. We'll talk to you again soon. See you later.