Beekeeper and Congressman - Rep. Jim Himes, CT (334)

334 - Beekeeper and Congressman - Rep. Jim Himes, CT

Jonas: I am Jonas Stinchcomb. I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio, and I have four hives. Welcome to BeekeepingToday Podcast.

Jeff Ott: Perfect. Thank you. You're a pro.

[music]

Jeff: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey. A quick shout out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episodes transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Hey, Jonas. Thanks for that great opening from the North American Honeybee Expo. Becky, he's probably about 6 inches taller now.

Becky: Not only that, but he could be four hives stronger in his apiary if he divided those colonies, if they all made it through the winter, right?

Jeff: That's right.

[laughter]

Jeff: That's fantastic.

Becky: He's a bigger beekeeper for sure.

Jeff: He'll appreciate the height and the strength as he keeps going. Jonas, thanks, and hope your season is going really well.

Becky: Oh, nice to hear from him.

Jeff: The continuing saga of the move is non-ending, it seems. We're in a temporary location, so there may be incidental noises in the background that will bleed through. I apologize to you and the listeners.

Becky: Can I say it? It's your bird who's talking and it's pretty much the coolest thing ever, Jeff. [laughs]

Jeff: He likes to help me on phone calls, and you can hear him in the background now. Every once in a while, if you hear someone say, "Oh, cool," and you don't see my lips moving, it's probably Frisco. If you hear someone laughing, it's probably Frisco.

Becky: I love that so much. I think it could be Jeff, Becky, and Frisco. Just for a little while here. I think our listeners would love it.

Jeff: That's right. Along with the move, I told you about having to move the bees.

Becky: Did they learn their new address?

Jeff: Yes, they have. That's the fun part. Of course, we moved them far enough. That wasn't a big issue from my original yard. Then after I moved them, the landowner came, and it's a big pumpkin patch and they have goats and stuff, and people come there and visit all the animals and get pumpkins. My buddy, Paul, and I, we just got done placing the bees in the location and set up all the stands and all the bees are there and they're flying and feeling successful as beekeepers.

She comes up and I said, "Hey. How are you doing?" She looked at me and she goes, "Not so well." I thought, "Oh," and I said a bad word internally. I just, "Oh, heck." I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "You're going to have to move them. They can't be that close to the fence." After that weekend, a moving house and bee. I just wanted--

Becky: That would have been-

Jeff: -to sit down and cry.

Becky: -such good information to hear before they were moved.

Jeff: Yes. We had to move them about maybe 10 feet, 15 feet forward from their present locations. Everyone says 2 inches or 2 miles. That's pretty much the standard. I moved them forward the required amount of distance and opened them up the next morning. I had put pine bows or fir branches in front of the hives, so it disrupted the flight and everything turned out well. No piles of bees in the ground. They all seemed to find their way home and they're really doing well now.

Becky: I don't know that there's been a ton of follow-up research as far as we know how the bees orient. Maybe if you move the whole block, it confuses them less because everything has changed and so it's not that one colony. Once they circled around and found all of your hives all in a row, they were like, "Oh, well, we don't know how it happened, but I used to be third in from the left. I'm going to try third in from the left. It looks like home. I'm going to get there." I wonder if that helps.

Jeff: That's a good thought because all the visual cues are there.

Becky: Except for those fir branches you put in front of them. [laughs]

Jeff: Hopefully they--

Becky: I'm teasing.

Jeff: Hopefully they recognized or saw those as they flew out. They had to stop and navigate around. It worked out well. I was really pleased. A happy ending to a shaky start, but part of the joy of moving bees and moving yards. Glad I don't have to do that often. If I did, I definitely would have a forklift, a hummer or something.

Becky: We're so grateful to those landowners who let us put their bees in their locations, but every once in a while, things come up like they're in the wrong place slightly, or bee poop on cars, or just why is there a swarm in the tree? Every once in a while those things come up, and so we just have to do our best to navigate them. Congratulations to you for doing it so well, and to your bees. I hope it's a great season for them.

Jeff: I sure do, too. I think they're in a great location. Becky, today's guest is Representative Jim Himes. He's a congressman from the state of Connecticut. I'm looking forward to talking to him about beekeeping and how he enjoys beekeeping as part of a stress reliever for his day-to-day activities in Congress, because you know, the House of Representatives is a quiet place.

Becky: I was thinking about this. What if it was a requirement that every representative had to manage bees? Can you imagine the camaraderie they would feel amongst each other? They would argue about how best to divide a hive or if you should do a walkaway split or not, or who made more honey instead of maybe some of these other things. I don't know. I'm thinking these bees could be a way in to maybe--

Jeff: Slatted rack or no slatted racks.

Becky: Right.

Jeff: IPM boards or solid bottom boards.

Becky: I would love to have our nation's elected officials debating these important ideas. "Wait. We need more habitat. Hey, we have some ideas. We're making the laws. Let's get some more habitat on the ground." I don't know if we can get that to happen, but I'm really dreaming about it right now.

Jeff: Tell you what, he's out there in the green room. Let's invite him in right after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting around this great big coast-to-coast virtual Beekeeping TodayPodcast table is Representative Jim Himes from Connecticut's fourth congressional district, located in the southwest corner of the state. Congressman Himes, Jim, thank you for joining us today. We're excited to talk not about legislation, but about something we know is close to your heart, your bees. Welcome to the podcast.

Representative Jim Himes: Thanks for having me.

Becky: Thanks for joining us.

Jim: I'm thrilled to be talking about bees. I don't get to do that enough.

Jeff: That was one of my questions I was going to save for later on, but I have to ask you since you opened it up. Are there any other beekeepers in Congress, anybody you talk with in the hallways about bees?

Jim: It's a strange enough thing that it doesn't naturally come up, but I know of one or two other farmers. These are Midwestern guys that I think may have some hives on their farms. I'll tell you a funny story though. Six, seven years ago when I decided to get into this, I, like so many people, I got myself a local mentor, Pete, and he grew up in Washington. His father was a beekeeper and actually tended to some bees that were, believe it or not, on the roof of the Capitol. That's a funny small world story.

Becky: Holy cow, I want pictures. That sounds cool. Your mentor is in Washington, but your bees are not in Washington, correct?

Jim: No, he's up here now. He grew up in Washington. He lives in Connecticut now. He's actually a retired guy. He just loves it so much that he-- I think he makes a little money by replenishing people's colonies in the springtime right now. He's just a retired guy and he just loves it. He loves to teach other people and get them started on beekeeping.

Jeff: Jim, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? I did a quick blurb of an introduction, but tell us about yourself and how you got interested in bees. Let's start there.

Jim: Sure. The resume is pretty straightforward. I'm a Northeasterner and did a graduate degree abroad at Oxford in the UK. I've always been interested in public policy, which is why I landed late in life in the Congress of the United States. Before I went to the Congress, I worked in business for about 12 years in New York. Then I decided to try a little nonprofit work. I worked in affordable housing, helping to try to build affordable housing and some really housing challenges, part of the country. Then I got this crazy idea in 2007 to run for Congress. I'd always been interested in public policy, but it was a funny moment.

I was angry about the Iraq War at the time. You may remember the economy was melting down and I thought, these guys aren't getting it done, so I'm going to run. I certainly did not expect to win, but you know the political term, "coattails". In this part of Connecticut, Barack Obama was hugely popular. He was running for president. I grabbed those coattails and holy smokes, here I am.

I got into beekeeping. I'll tell you, I'm in my late 50s and I realized about five years ago that one of the things you got to do when you're not young anymore is to keep learning new things. I had a buddy who was a beekeeper and it always fascinated me. I just thought, sounds like the perfect hobby in the sense that there's always more to learn, but it doesn't require four hours a day. It requires a little bit of attention and you learn a lot. I just love the idea of A, mastering it over time, and B, being able to go to a dinner party and not bring a bottle of wine, but bring a bottle of honey.

Becky: Nice. Also, do you notice at those dinner parties, that if you bring that honey, then you get to talk about bees maybe instead of politics?

Jim: It's funny, I always have to warn people. I come with a warning label, which is if you ask me a question, it could go on for a long time. [laughter] Somebody will say, "Wait a minute, you mean every one of the bees in the box is a female?" I'll say, "Not everyone. There's these drones that are males and they don't do any work." When I say that, of course, all the guys at the table, their eyes perk up. They're, "Really?" I say, "All they do is reproduce with the females." Now the guys at the table are really interested. Then I need to say, "You know what? In the fall, they get kicked out." Anyway. I have to warn people that if you start asking me questions at a dinner party, you can go on for quite a while.

Jeff: You said you're in southwestern Connecticut. How many hives do you have?

Jim: I started with one just to learn. For a couple years I had one, and then I expanded to two. I just thought it would be more fun to make a little more honey and learn a little more. Then actually these last two years, I've had one hive. It's actually the same, I think, genetics that has just rock and rolled over the winter. The population has stayed high. They seem to be a little Varroa resistant. I've split that colony twice now. Now I'm up to three hives.

Jeff: That's great. Just out of curiosity, are they Carniolans?

Jim: I think they are. That's exactly right.

Jeff: Are you doing extracted honey?

Jim: Yes. Gosh, any 60, 70, 80 pounds, this is hobbyist stuff. We're not selling or anything, but as you know, that's a wonderful moment in the beekeeping cycle. Last summer, I actually had two hives, I didn't pull any honey out of the newly split hive, the new colony, but the other two hives produced a total of about 90 pounds.

Jeff: When you get an opportunity to be home and go work your bees, what is that like?

Becky: My job means that when I'm home in Connecticut, I'm a representative. That's my job title and my job description. I'm out there dealing with, like any other member of Congress, every variety of person you can imagine, some of whom like me, some of whom don't. It's a human-intensive job. I'll tell you, I love coming home in the summertime. Sometimes I'll just sit and watch the bees. Most beekeepers get that.

I love having a hobby where honestly you do it well when you get into a zen frame of mind where you're devoting your full attention to it. Maybe you're a little calm. I can never really predict when a hive's going to be super angry or not, but I do think that it helps to be calm and real gentle as you move through a hive. I think it works pretty well with a crazy human intensive-career to have a hobby like that.

Jeff: I always thought it was very mind cleansing to work a colony because if you weren't paying attention to bees, they would remind you really quickly, and they had a way of doing that.

Jim: That's for sure. As any beekeeper will tell you, if you get distracted and crush a couple of them, you can change the mood in a hive really quickly.

Jeff: You mentioned bringing a bottle of honey to a party as opposed to a bottle of wine. Have you ever taken a bottle of honey into Congress as maybe a peace offering?

Jim: I have done that. It's a good icebreaker. It's a good human moment. In any profession, you're going to know each other professionally, and then you come out of the blue and say, "Hey, I made this honey. It's for you." That changes the weather in that relationship a little.

Jeff: It does, no matter what you're doing. I think all beekeepers can pretty much relate to that.

Jim: It's funny. I don't know your experience, but typically when somebody learns I'm a beekeeper, the first thing they do is look a little bit aghast. Like, "Oh my God. You hang out with lots of stinging insects?" It always catches me. As you know, as a beekeeper, yes, you got to be a little careful about that, but it's so much more about, Jeff, as you were saying, managing the health of the hive and the real challenges that beehives have in this country.

Jeff: Are you a member of any local groups?

Jim: Yes. There's a couple informal groups here. There's a Backyard Beekeepers Association, but mostly we're a very informal network. We've got a Signal chat going with a dozen or so beekeepers within about a 10-mile radius. We share photographs and ask questions. We don't have a very formalized club or anything. This is not an agricultural area so it's not like we have experts at hand or whatever. This is one of the fun things. People from all walks of life. I got a buddy who's a chimney cleaner who's a devoted beekeeper. Again, folks that you might not ordinarily meet, you get to know this way.

Becky: I bet he's a really good swarm catcher if he's used to doing some chimney cleaning.

Jim: You'd think so. Used to ladders.

Jeff: I bet that chat group would come in real handy at swarming season.

Jim: In fact, the bee mentor I was telling you about, Pete, he's been doing this long enough that he gets the phone calls. Whenever he gets the phone call, he'll call a couple other people up just to see if they want to tag along to watch him handle a swarm.

Becky: Part of your season, you're going to be in Washington, DC, and there's maybe some important work that needs to be done. Do you have somebody to step in? Does your mentor step in if you need them to?

Jim: No. The way it works today for most members of Congress, certainly for me, because I'm a four-hour train ride from Washington or a one-hour flight, for me, I'll fly down Monday morning or take the train down and I'll be home by Thursday night, generally. Most members of Congress will go back and forth. That's probably not true of people who live in Hawaii or in rural areas of the West Coast, but most of us would be home for the weekend.

Becky: I didn't know that. Why did I think everybody was there working on the weekend?

[laughter]

Jim: No. Back in the old days, that used to happen. Well before my time, apparently members of Congress would move to DC and they'd move their families. The story is that in the '90s, Newt Gingrich, when he was Speaker of the House, he said, "No, we're not going to do it that way. You're going to go back to your district and be closer to the people you represent." Some people wonder whether that doesn't erode some of the personal relationships that might otherwise exist.

Jeff: Are you using the standard 10-frame Langstroth? Are you working eight?

Jim: I'm using your standard Langstroth. It's an embarrassing answer, Jeff, because for years I did the standard 10-frame. Like I said, I'm getting no younger over time. I discovered the pleasure of taking off an 8-frame super relative to a 10-frame. I now have one 10-frame and two 8-frames, just because like I said, I'm not getting any younger.

Jeff: Oh, the 10-frame heavy 90 pounds is way too much for me to mess around with and still call it fun. Then it becomes work.

Jim: I had one 10-frame. Believe this or not. I was telling you about the genetics on this colony that I have. It produced a 10-frame-deep super full of honey. As you said, I could barely lift the darn thing.

Becky: Do you know what your main nectar flows are? When you're bottling that honey up, what's the primary flower?

Jim: That's a great question. We're pretty standard northeast here, so I think-- by the way, as I look out the window right now, there's no leaves on the trees here yet, but my bees are putting in nectar and they're putting in lots of pollen. We get everything from spring flowers, the snowdrops, to skunk cabbage. We have a lot of skunk cabbage in the wetter areas around our rivers and streams, and stuff. Obviously some trees that I just don't know about. Then of course, I think in the summertime I see an awful lot of clover around. I imagine that summer is probably primarily clover. we have a nice array starting in September into October. We have a nice array of asters and goldenrod. We have a ton of goldenrod around here.

Jeff: You can definitely smell that in hive in the fall. Let's take this opportunity for a quick break, and we'll be right back with Representative Jim Himes right after these words from our sponsors.

[music]

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Jim, you said you like to learn. Could you share your favorite bee book with me?

Jim: Probably my Bible in the first couple of years was The Backyard Beekeeper, Kim Flottum. I just found it super easy to use, really well illustrated, very straightforward for the non-expert. I still use that one a lot. I've got a couple others I look at. The other thing I do, and this is a lot of fun, is if I've got something strange, if I need to remind myself on how to do a split or how to think about Varroa management, I'll often go to YouTube. That's a lot of fun because you'll get some guy out of rural North Carolina with ideas. I enjoy that as well.

Jeff: You can see perspectives from all over the country for sure. Just back to Kim real quick. Kim spent a lot of time in Connecticut.

Jim: I didn't realize that.

Jeff: Yes, he did, and was working with the EAS while he was in Connecticut as well.

Becky: Eastern Apicultural Society.

Jim: Oh, all right. That's interesting. In the eastern half of the state where I don't live, we actually do have a lot of agriculture. Not too much pollinated agriculture. There's a lot of dairy out there. Needless to say, a lot of shellfishing that doesn't require pollination either. It wouldn't surprise me, because we do have some agriculture in the state.

Becky: Jim, do you have an apiary inspector in Connecticut?

Jim: No. Our regulations simply require that we record the number and locations of our hives with the State Department of Agriculture. I suppose in theory that if you had an outbreak of disease, there's probably people who would come around and do some inspections, but that's not standard here at all.

Jeff: As you think about the cutbacks to maybe USDA ARS, and you're thinking about things that need more research, such as the Varroa resistance and maybe the Tropilaelaps, and the yellow-legged hornet, and deformed wing virus, as a beekeeper, when you hear about the cutbacks to the USDA and everything, what comes to your mind?

Jim: It's very concerning, obviously. I'd be the first to say the federal government can always use somebody making it more efficient. It's not like a private company where customers will speak and you'll either stay efficient or you'll go away. I would've been very happy to see an effort that was careful about making the government more efficient. I don't see that right now. I can't help but think about that image of Elon Musk with his chainsaw. That feels like what might be happening to a lot of things, including research.

I'm not sure I'm super qualified to answer your question, Jeff, because I have a very unagricultural district other than, like I said, we've got major shellfishing in Norwalk, Connecticut, but that's not what most people think about as agriculture. As a beekeeper, I'm very well aware of the challenges. I don't put my bees on trucks to go pollinate almonds in California. As you know, that's a big part of it, and that's a deeply unnatural act.

I always think that we ought to be doing more to think about innovations in our agricultural sector generally, whether it's fruit trees that are more easily pollinated by native species or whatever it may be, ways of harvesting almonds. I understand that almonds need to be pollinated by bees that come from 1,000 miles away because the way they harvest them. They shake those trees, and the almonds fall down, and they vacuum them up, which is why you can't have ground cover near them.

It just feels to me like there's all kinds of areas, things like that. Things like, can you grow a Varroa-resistant bee? My understanding is that Varroa came from Asia, where a lot of the honeybees there have some resistance to it. Some basic research could really, I imagine, make for a safer, better experience for agriculture in general, and maybe for hobbyists. I'm sure this is true of you guys too, I can't tell you how many hobbyists I know lose a hive over the winter two or three times in a row, and then they just give up.

Jeff: That happens quite a bit, for sure.

Becky: I think some of those agricultural innovations have to happen though with pesticide use because that's one of the reasons why you can't have native bees pollinating, because you could pack up those honeybees and get them out before things are sprayed. Pesticide use is also something that really needs to be changed if we didn't want to depend upon our honeybees as much, because our honeybees are a little bit more resilient. They're not immune, but they're a little bit more resilient in the face of using pesticides in agriculture.

Jim: That's a really good point. People who really know bees tell me about the neonicotinoids. They say it's like the word that shall not be spoken because of the damage that they say it does to the ecosystems and to bees in particular. God only knows what it does to people too, in concentration or whatever. I worry sometimes, like I keep saying, I don't live in an agricultural environment. Where I live, it's suburban. Then we have a fair amount of open space. The suburban part of it, I'll see people with the signs on the lawn that says it's been treated every three weeks. I start to wonder, oh man, how much of whatever godawful chemical are my bees are picking up in the clover patch there and bringing back to the hive?

Becky: The data show that your bees are picking up multiple pesticides in their pollen regardless if they're in urban, suburban, or rural areas. It's something that threatens all beekeepers' hives, or colonies.

Jim: We're seeing some progress here, by the way. Again, this is a suburban area. Where I live, it's affluent suburban area. We're starting to see people come to understand that that emerald green lawn that our parents wanted back in the day, that that's not a natural thing. It may look good, but I see more and more people being willing to let lawns go to meadow or at least go well into the summer before they mow down all the wildflowers and stuff. I'm encouraged by that.

Jeff: In Washington state, they started doing the hillsides along the interstate with big areas of native flowers. It's both attractive and it serves a purpose as well. It's nice to see.

Jim: One big issue where I live, I live on the Long Island Sound, which is a huge resource. I keep talking about shellfishing. Norwalk, which is just up the road here, has a huge shellfish industry, clams and oysters. We used to have lobsters, and there's speculation the lobsters have moved north. We used to have really vibrant lobster populations, but two things happened.

The water got warmer because of climate change. Number two, some scientists are saying that pesticides, and in particular the stuff they spray on Long Island, which is just 9 miles across the water here, and here for some of the, gosh, what was it, West Nile virus that I guess traveled-- anyway, the mosquitoes that transmit West Nile. They're dumping all this pesticide on which flows into the Long Island Sound. There's a speculation that that did a number on the lobster population because, of course, genetically, lobsters are not terribly distant from bees and other bugs.

Becky: Way to bring the conversation down, everybody.

[laughter]

Jeff: Let's take this to the next step, though. People who are hesitant to speak about things politically, what can they do to help protect all pollinators, including the honeybee?

Jim: That's a great question. It's not one that I'm super well versed in. Like I said, I don't have much ag around here, but I do know that there's all sorts of efforts to try to migrate our industrial agriculture system to a much more sustainable way of thinking about things. That has everything to do with minimizing pesticides and herbicides to thinking about crop rotation and diversity of crops in areas. I do think that a lot of the communities that are a lot more agricultural than I am, they see the devastation.

If you have irresponsible agriculture, what can happen to land over time can really ruin the economic sustainability. I think there's all kinds of people in Congress who are thinking hard about that, including people-- one of the interesting things about our politics is that a lot of the agriculture are in redder areas. You would say, "Oh, Republicans don't really want regulation and government mandates," but if ugly industrial agriculture is going to ruin the livelihoods of farmers, I think people are open-minded about doing things more sustainably and better.

Becky: I write an article for Bee Culture, and I often tell people, write your representatives. Write your local, state, federal representatives. Tell them that you're a beekeeper, and tell them the top three things you're worried about as far as protecting your either hobby or small business or major way to earn a living. Jim, if you get an email or a phone call and a random beekeeper tells you, "Here's what I do, here's what I'm passionate about, here's what I'm worried about." You said you're not in an agricultural area and it's not your expertise, but does that do anything?

Jim: Yes, it really does. Sometimes it surprises people to hear that, but members of Congress keep track of who's telling them what. I would even say that look, an email is better than not doing anything, but show up in somebody's office. Most people can get an appointment to see at least the staff of the member of Congress. It always helps to have more than one person. One person, a member of Congress, you can say, "Oh, that's just one person."

I'll give you an example. There's a garden club in the town that I live in here. They really care about not just gardens, they care about pollinators, they care about climate change. They have a lot of things they care about, and they show up in my office every-- with about 10 of them every single year. Man, I get an earful on climate change and pesticides. It's a big deal. It's really a big deal. I would encourage you to do more than simply write or call. Get a bunch of people together and go make an appointment. It'll make an impression. Absolutely.

Jeff: Have them meet you out at your bee yard next time, and they would understand you have a position in the discussion for sure.

Becky: That's actually great to hear because I like to think that it makes a difference. I know that we've had good conversations with a senator from Minnesota who's been very supportive of the honey producers' concerns. I just think there are so many beekeepers in this country. What if we all just contacted our representatives and then you showed up in session and everybody's talking about beekeeping?

[laughter]

Jim: That's an important idea. I think most people out there, my impression from talking to people is that I don't think beekeeping's going to be for everybody. Like my wife, she just doesn't want to hear about it. I've invited her to check it out. She loves the fact that I've got something to do, but at the end of the day, she just does not like insects all that much. She totally understands the absolute imperative of having a sustainable ecosystem.

She gets it. Without pollinators, there's no fruit. I think a lot of people can be brought into it. It's like anything else in nature. I always think about how, so bees are not everybody's cup of tea. Same thing with sharks. Everybody's like, "Sharks, oh my God, can't go in the water. They're terrible and stuff." They're a critical part of the ecosystem. Once people learn that, they change their way of thinking about stuff in a way that I think is really constructive.

Jeff: We're all connected. I think we're learning that slowly but surely. Let's get away from policy as we wrap this up. I know every beekeeper has their own favorite beekeeping story. What is yours? Whether it be at harvest time or working with bees? It can be funny, it can be a learning moment. What really strikes you when someone says, "What's your favorite thing about beekeeping?"

Jim: Those are two different things because I do have a good story, it's just not a favorite. It's a moment of crisis rather than-- relates back to what I was telling you about my wife.

Jeff: Let's hear that one. That sounds fun.

Jim: As you know, one of the things I love about beekeeping, it's a little like home brew beer people. Everybody's got their own theory and probably nobody's ever entirely wrong or entirely right. There was one point where I read this thing, and I'm sure you've heard about it, that you can help control Varroa by sprinkling confectionery sugar on your bees. Maybe this is a silly rumor that they tell beginning beekeepers, but okay, I read about it. If you sprinkle enough confectionery sugar on your bees, they lick it off and when licking it off, they'll pull the Varroa off the bees. I decided to try that. Foolishly, that's when I invited my wife to join me.

I gave her the gear, and man, it turns out that nothing pisses off a bee quite so much as having confectionery sugar dropped on it. This hive was just, I swear to God, it was like it was swarming. There were just thousands of these things in the air. You know how they are when they're angry. When they're angry, they get really smart about finding the chinks in your armor. Wouldn't you know it, one of them found a little passage into my wife's face gear. That's probably the story about why she's not-- whenever I say, "Hey, you want to come up to the hive with me?" It's a pretty quick no. Anyway, I don't know what the scientists will tell you about confectionery sugar on your bees as a way to control--

Becky: Not effective. [laughs] Sorry.

Jim: You guys know a lot more than I do. I certainly don't recommend it for marital harmony.

[laughter]

Jeff: I'll make a note of that. You did what with my confectionery sugar? Everyone has a story of the lessons learned. Not heard that one, though.

Becky: That's a really good story, actually. [laughs]

Jeff: You said something and that reminded me that I had read that you like to make mead.

Jim: Yes, I did that one year. In fact, I used some of my own honey. I augmented it. Again, this isn't where I get boring at dinner parties. You get me talking about mead. It's like, as you probably know, it's the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man by thousands of years because the stuff that we use to make wine, grapes, or beer, other fermented beverages comes from cultivated crops, grapes or grains.

Whereas apparently our Neanderthal or whatever they were ancestors would pick some unlucky member of the tribe to go shake some honey out of a beehive as a food source. They'd put it in stoneware and whatever, and water would get in there and it would ferment. 7,000 years ago, our predecessors were having a pretty good old time on fermented honey. I made it once. Look, it's like anything else. Like wine or beer, you can make it really sweet or you can make it really light. Yes, it's nice. It's funny, I sometimes wonder why, considering we've been drinking it for thousands of years, I wonder why it's not more popular to the modern taste.

Jeff: In every show that I've been at lately, there seems to me, or show or conference, a mead-tasting experience. I think there's a bit of a resurgence. There's the American Mead Association, and there is a dedicated public to mead. Actually, you can buy it here in Washington state in the beer section. There is a market for it. You can fire up that gear again for the mead. As we come to the end here, is there anything you'd like to tell us that we haven't asked you about, about your beekeeping, about your thoughts on bees? Anything on the topic that you'd like to let our listeners know?

Jim: I'll tell you, I've become an evangelist on the topic because it's come to mean a lot to me. As you know, you can learn so much biology, you learn about flowers. I'll tell you, one of the many things it did for me, I noticed in year two or three of beekeeping that I would walk through even my backyard, but I would walk anywhere outside, and for the first time in my life, I really started to notice blooming flowers. I started noticing the pollinators or other insects that were looking at them. I even noticed that I started to smell them out there.

I'm not sure that prior to being a beekeeper, unless I stuck my face right in a flower, I would know about it. It's made me super conscious of what's flowering. I even smell it and I noticed that, gosh, here we probably have dozens of different species of pollinators. Totally, it awakened a whole new sense for me, because until I became a beekeeper, I didn't really pay that much close attention to all this stuff. Now I can't help but notice it. I think that's a wonderful thing. I guess you would say getting in touch with nature.

Jeff: Getting in touch with nature or just your environment does awaken you to everything we always just blow by at 60 miles an hour or walk by as we go about our daily business. It helps us slow down both physically and mentally sometimes.

Becky: It's always a great question to ask your beekeeper friends, what's blooming? What are your bees on? Marla Spivak once told me, and I believe it, that beekeepers are botanists. There's a lot of floral information, and especially in some beekeepers who've been doing it for decades, they know what the season holds and what to expect. It's great to become a part of that journey as early on as possible because you're just a better beekeeper if you're paying attention to that.

Jim: That sounds right.

Jeff: Jim, it's been our pleasure to have you on the podcast today to talk to us about your beekeeping and beekeeping in Southwest Connecticut. We look forward to having you back to learn more as you expand from three to six to nine. As you expand your apiary experience, we look forward to hearing about it.

Jim: Thank you. When I have 9 or 18 hives, that's when I've lost an election.

[laughter]

Jim: I've a little free time on my hands.

Jeff: There you go.

Jim: Thank you so much for having me.

Jeff: You bet, we enjoyed having you here.

Becky: Thanks, Jim.

[music]

Jeff: That was really fun. We've not had a member of Congress on the podcast ever in all of our years of podcasting.

Becky: Cool. He was so well dressed too. I want to know if he works his bees in a suit. We might have to do a follow-up. It was really nice. I love talking to beekeepers. It's just so much fun to learn what they like to do, why they love it. There's that commonality, but then there's that - everybody has their special little story.

Jeff: In today's political environment, it's easy to, regardless of your political flavor, almost, I don't want to say demonize, but just think poorly of anybody in Congress. Anybody pro or against, or whatever, but to sit there and talk to him as a beekeeper and it's just like, yes, man, let's talk bees and let's enjoy the conversation.

Becky: The commonality. I'll tell you, I have a lot of beekeeper friends and we all do not vote the same. I still like these people and I love talking bees with them. It's a good lesson, I think.

Jeff: I look forward to talking to Jim again and wish him luck this season with his bees. That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any web page.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular long-time sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books, for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:44:23] [END OF AUDIO]