Tag: bees

Save Yourself, not the Bees

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

Beekeeping is not for the faint of heart–or faint or mind either. A beekeeper who is “keeping bees to help save the bees” is a beekeeper who has yet to wrestle with the harsh reality that most beginning beekeepers will kill more bees than they will ever help save. The beekeepers who reload and return to the beeyard, despite the despair of dead outs, may eventually tilt their cosmic scales back toward bee savior, but, on average, I wonder how many hives die before a beginning beekeeper actually becomes proficient enough to save bees–that is to keep bees from drowning under the virus load of varroa. It probably took me thirty dead outs over five years before something finally clicked and I started overwintering hives successfully and my hive numbers started multiplying

Now I’m in my tenth year of beekeeping, at least if you count the first five years which were mostly me killing bees. Sure, I could say it was varroa that killed them or pesticides or small hive beetles or poor nutrition or extraterrestrial bee snatchers or whatever the excuse de vogue at the time was (at the time, I, like many others, just lumped all these excuses into a singular catch-all excuse called Colony Collapse Disorder). But the truth is my hives died because, first and foremost, I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen to the advice of seasoned beekeepers because I thought I knew more than they did. I didn’t listen until, finally, enough cognitive dissonance erupted between my bee savior desire and my bee killer despair that I finally asked the great existential beekeeping question–“To beekeep, or not to beekeep?”

I chose to continue to beekeep–that is, to get serious about beekeeping, which is really the only way to keep bees now.

I hate to say this, but the term hobby beekeeping is now an oxymoron. Think about it this way: suppose you took up some other hobby for pleasure and relaxation. Let’s say fishing. You could just dig a few worms, buy a cheap Zebco and basic tackle, and then go catch bream or sunfish to your heart’s delight. And if by chance you don’t catch any, well, a bad day’s fishing is still better than a good day’s work. 

To fish, you don’t have to buy high-priced fishing gear, subscribe to Field and Stream, and join BassResource, the most popular bass fishing forum on the web. Of course, you could and many fishermen do. But even if you did–and this is the point–you still wouldn’t have to build your own farm pond and become an expert in farm pond management and ichthyological parasites to keep your bass from going belly up every winter. 

Or, put it another way: a fisherman just needs a hook, line, and sinker. A beekeeper needs a hive, veil, and standing appointment with a shrink.

So, You Want to Be a Beekeeper

~ sanebishop ~ 13 Comments

This past weekend, the leadership of my local bee club unleashed me onto our newest crop of initaties. I’m proud to say I quickly winnowed the proverbial wheat from the chaff. In fact, only a few of those thirty-three bright and shining faces, who hours earlier were eager to learn the mysteries of the hive and do their own little part to help save the bees, withstood the thoroughness of my after lunch presentation. The strongest of the bunch were able to hold their eyelids open for a good 45 minutes without yawning. The weakest quickly dropped into slumber five minutes in. 

Alas, these days you have to teach to the test–and the test, in this case, was a multiple choice examination of the human brain’s ability to memorize a bevy of beekeeping facts. But as we all know, beekeeping is more than rote memorization. It’s a journey into some of the deepest moral quandaries of human existence–for instance, when faced with an overzealous guard bee that is determined to implant its stinger in your forehead, is it better to swat and flail or to never have swatted at all? It’s conundrums like this that really encapsulate what it means to keep bees, so the sooner we start teaching the advanced problem solving needed to face such dilemmas, the better off our fledgling beekeepers will fare. 

So, if any beginning beekeepers happen to be reading this and would like a true test of what it means to be a beekeeper, you can practice your problem solving skills on the following questions. 

Question 1: Ye Gads! A runaway grizzly bear is barreling toward your apiary. Because of your poor fence-building abilities, your electric fence is somehow cross wired and only has a enough voltage to protect one section of the apiary. In section one are fifteen hives–fifteen swarmy hives that have produced a pitiful pittance of honey. In section two are five hives–your crowning achievements, stacked high with honey supers. These five hives produce more honey than the other fifteen combined. Which section of fence do you electrify? Do you save the five or fifteen? 

Question 2: At 1:30 P.M. on March 25th, you are required to attend a mandatory meeting at your soul-crushing workplace. However, at 1:10 P.M. on March 25th, you get a text message from your neighbor who informs you that one of your hives has swarmed. The swarm is currently hanging on a little cherry tree, about chest high, and is bigger than a July watermelon. What do you do? 

Question 3: As an up-and-coming wealthy beekeeping bachelorette, you have attracted the attention of many suitors. However, two stand out from the crowd. One is charming and handsome, with an infectious smile that brightens even the darkest bee veil. The other is kind of annoying, though handsome enough, and comes from a wealthy family that owns large tracts of land, specifically forestland filled with gnarly old sourwood trees. You are currently trying to expand your beekeeping empire and need new apiary sites. Whose proposal do you accept?

Question 4: A varroa mite, wax moth, and small hive beetle walk into a bar. You, as a barkeeper and owner of the establishment, have the power to treat them to a free round on the house. Do you treat? If so, what do you treat them with? What are the label requirements for said treatment? What are the repercussions for not treating?

If you answer one out of four questions correctly, you are likely a master beekeeper. If you answer all four correctly, you are wise beyond all comprehension and well on your way to founding a cult. 

Beekeeping YouTubers You Might Like

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

It used to be if you wanted to get into hobby beekeeping, first you planted a little garden, then you got chickens, then you started a blog, then you got bees. Tomatoes, chickens, blog, bees–that was the natural progression of the homesteader’s journey to beekeeping. But this is 2021, and, let’s face it, blogs are dead. I mean, if your blog is like mine, it likely gets as much traffic as a dead-end road in the middle of the Sahara. 

Today blogs have largely been replaced by other social media platforms, and none is more popular among beekeepers than YouTube, which is not surprising. If we’re being honest, most beekeepers are a little bonkers, or at least they appear that way. In fact, the only people I know who wear white jackets and talk to themselves are beekeepers and the certifiably insane. Sometimes while I’m working hives, people will sneak up on me while I’m conversing with myself. It’s pretty easy to do because usually I’m in the beekeeping zone, focused on the inner-workings of the hives, and thus I lose awareness of most things in my immediate vicinity, like the location of my hive tool, the dwindling fire in my smoker, and the neighbor who just snuck up and listened to me mutter to myself for minutes before finally asking if I have any honey for sale. It’s a little embarrassing, but I guess it’s only fitting–add a few straps here and there and our modern beekeeping garbs would bear a striking resemblance to the early 1900s fashion trends at the looney bin. 

Anyway, the point here is that it’s not a big leap to go from talking to yourself to talking to a camera. Enter YouTube.  

Nearly all the YouTube channels I follow are beekeeping-related. There’s a couple of Star Wars channels and sports channels thrown in, but my video history is heavily-dominated by people jabbering to their cell phones or GoPros about Apis mellifera. So in an effort to share my YouTube addiction with others, here are some of my favorites beekeeping YouTubers:

Ian Steppler: Ian lives in Canada, but don’t hold that against him. His videos provide a great source of insight on the hard work it takes to be a full-time professional beekeeper. He may have an EZ-loader, but commercial beekeeping isn’t easy, and his videos prove it. 

Kaylee Richardson: Kaylee is an up-and-coming beekeeper, and bees are a major part of her small-scale homestead operation. If you’re wanting to get into homesteading, her videos would be a great place to start.

Bob Binnie: Bob is the Mr. Rogers of beekeeping YouTubers. Much beekeeping wisdom flows through his calm and soft-spoken voice. Bob is a full-time commercial beekeeper and owner of Blue Ridge Mountain Honey Company. 

Kamon Reynolds: Kamon is a commercial beekeeper in Tennessee. His videos are very informative, but I also appreciate the fact he’s willing to video himself doing stupid stuff, like standing on an empty bee box atop the roof or his car to catch a swarm in a tree branch overhead. It makes feel good knowing I’m not the only who does dumb things.

Mr. Ed: Mr. Ed is the beekeeper for a monastery in Louisiana. He is quite possibly the world’s most positive and happy person, even when he’s extracting mean bees from walls. He is a master of cut-outs and removals. 

The Dirt Rooster: Another master of the cut-out, occasionally the Dirt Rooster and Mr. Ed will team up for a cut-out and appear in each other’s videos, at which point it’s like watching a major superhero crossover movie. YouTubers, assemble!

Some Serious Beekeeping Advice

~ sanebishop ~ 19 Comments

There’s a certain cruelty to beekeeping: By the time you finally figure out what you’re doing, you’ll likely lack the drive to do it. And by drive, I mean the DMV will have revoked your license because you’ll be old and decrepit and generally untrustworthy to operate a motor vehicle. The learning curve for beekeeping is that long and arduous. 

This is my tenth year keeping bees, at least if you count the first five years which were mostly me killing bees. So in commemoration of ten years of beekeeping, I thought for once I’d actually try to give some practical advice on this blog, so here it goes: 

For bees, the next three months are incredibly important. Hives aren’t lost during winter. They’re lost during July, August, and September. Usually what happens is beekeepers (myself included) get really excited about bees in the spring. As spring progresses toward summer, some of that excitement fades because, let’s face it, working hives is hard work. Harvesting honey during the middle of July is even harder work. Once your honey is in jars or buckets or barrels, you feel like you’ve accomplished your goal and take a well-deserved rest. Wrong. At least here in NC, July, August, and September are the most crucial months in beekeeping. Often there is a severe summer dearth of nectar and pollen. Couple this with exploding varroa levels, and you’ve got a recipe for a dwindling hive. So by the time October rolls around, you may only have a few frames of bees, which is not what you want going into winter. Though that hive will likely die during a February arctic freeze, it was really lost in late summer.  

So my advice is this: steel yourself for the upcoming dog days of summer and invest in a bee jacket with good wicking technology. It’s a lot cheaper than buying new bees each year.

Happy July 4th!

How to Make Money Farming

~ sanebishop ~ 21 Comments

Life is full of little ironies. A few months ago I was on a podcast–and get this, the name of the podcast was Farm4Profit. They needed someone to do a segment on beekeeping, and somehow they found me. Apparently, they didn’t know I have a blog called The Misfit Farmer, where I dispense questionable farming advice and mostly enumerate the many ways I’ve lost money farming, beekeeping being one of them. Instead, because I write for a beekeeping magazine, they thought I was a beekeeping expert, obviously having never read any of my articles, which would have quickly dispelled them of that belief.  The point here, though, is I feel like I short-changed the nice guys at Farm4Profit. Admittedly, I was very nervous, having never been on a podcast before, so I’d like to make it up to them by providing some surefire ways to make money farming and beekeeping. 

The great news is I’m often too busy chasing swarms over the horizon to fool with paperwork, so I haven’t filed for patents on any of these lucrative ideas yet. That means you’re free to make millions off them without worrying about patent infringement. In fact, just a nice hand-written note and 10% royalty on sales for perpetuity is all I ask. So without further ado, I present your path to future fame and fortune (don’t everyone rush to apply for Shark Tank all at once). 

Biodegradable diapers with a built-in wildflower mix. Just let your baby add fertilizer, then plant, water, and wala! In a few months you’ll have a little tuft of wildflowers for your favorite vase.

Organic Clay-Doh. Put red clay in a little plastic cup-like container, market it as Organic Clay-Doh, an all-natural alternative to Play-Doh.

Stingers Home Security Company. Place mean bee hives at strategically-placed positions around houses to deter home invaders.  

Whirlpool Washer/Extractor Combo. For a piece of equipment that only gets used a couple of times a year, honey extractors are big and take up a lot of space. A honey extractor that doubles as a washing machine the rest of the year would sell like hotcakes to hobby beekeepers. 

Beemorang. A hive tool shaped like a boomerang. When you accidentally sling your hive tool into the atmosphere because a bee just performed a torture technique by inserting its stinger under your fingernail, the hive tool will come back to you.  

The Lil’ Loader Seat. If you’re tired of toting your offspring around the farm or pushing them in the stroller, the Lil’ Loader Seat,  a baby car seat for your tractor’s front-end-loader, is for you. 

Kudzu Cologne. Ever traipsed through a Kudzu patch beside a pond while searching for a jon boat now hidden by vegetation? Well, I have. And I can tell you that Kudzu has a quite pleasant aroma. Kudzu would be a very easy crop to grow. 

Cow Obedience College. Tired of having to reimburse your neighbors for the shrubbery your fugitive cows ate? That’s not a problem when your cows have graduated from Cow Obedience College. 

If anybody else has some ideas they’d like to add to the list, let me know. I’m all about sharing the wealth.