Click Here if you listened. We’d love to know what you think. There is even a spot for feedback!
Read along below!
A Man of Fashion
By: Stephen Bishop
As a man whose wardrobe consists mostly of T-shirts and dress T-shirts, I may not be your typical expert in high fashion. But if there is one thing I know something about, it’s what’s fashionable in beekeeping at any given moment. The beekeeping helmet with a veil, out. What’s fashionable now is the hooded veil with gleaming zippers in every seam. The zippers allow you to conveniently take a drink of water without taking off the hood or conveniently gulp a bee if you forget to zip it back up.
Wearing plain old goat skin gloves? You might as well date yourself as a dinosaur. What’s in now is tactical, heavy-duty sting stoppers. They are basically the same design as Boba Fett’s gauntlets, minus the flame thrower and rocket launchers. If you don’t know who Boba Fett is (really? Star Wars is nearly 50 years old at this point!), just imagine the Mandalorian. And if you don’t know the Mandalorian, you might as well be frozen in carbonite. The point here is that beekeeping is now taking a page or two from the fashion of sci-fi bounty hunters and modern SWAT teams, so you best not take goat skin gloves to a tactical, heavy-duty gauntlet fight.
And fashion in beekeeping goes beyond what clothes you’re wearing to what gear you’re running. Running is a trendy term that we beekeepers use to sound cool and to stay hip. For instance, you might say in a sentence, “All the cool kids are now running solid bottom boards and wearing baggy pants.” Screened bottom boards and skinny jeans are out. Also, if you don’t want to sound cringe (cringe is the term youngsters now say for uncool), you best not run slatted racks. Slatted racks and screen bottom boards were popular in the late aughts when powdered sugar dusting was all the rage.
Alas, poor Honey-B-Healthy. It was once the coolest kid on the block in the dubious feed supplements department, but now it has a bevy of cooler competition like HiveAlive and Apis Biologix Rocket Fuel. Apparently, I am one of many beekeepers who are prone to handing over hard-earned money for miracle feed supplements. Who knows if they really work, but isn’t that what high fashion is about — wearing clothes or using products with no practical purpose? Personally, I still have a big jug of Honey-B-Healthy that I use when nobody else is looking.
How your hives look is also a matter of trends. Paint is no longer en vogue. What is fire (fire is what youngsters now say for cool) is natural wax-dipped hives. Some manufacturers have branded their wax-dipped hives with trendy names like Endurahive. I’m ashamed to say most of my hives are painted white. Despite the fact that they weren’t wax dipped, they have endured for fifteen years, so maybe they will endure for another fifteen, at which point white paint might be fire again.
Although I have fallen for most fads in beekeeping, one I have somehow managed to avoid so far is probiotics. I’d like to say I have science as my rationale for not using them, but mostly I just despise yogurt, which claims probiotic properties, so I can’t bring myself to feed probiotics to my bees. I also didn’t fall for the Flow Hive, likely because I couldn’t afford a Flow Hive, having spent all my money on other beekeeping fads in years prior.
All this is to say: beekeeping fads come and go — but most are just meant to separate you from your money. I have fallen for most, but not all.
