I know what I want to say, but my thoughts are tumbling over each other. Let me start like this, 'When is one an old beekeeper with vast experience or when is one an old beekeeper who lives in the past too much?' For instance, consider five-gallon pails. An experienced beekeeper could say, 'Yeah, I certainly remember those old 60# tins we used to put honey in. Remember those small, painful wire handles? Remember how the solder joint could break on those handles and drop a 60# can of honey on your foot? But having straight sides, they sure stacked nicely.' Or an old beekeeper could say, 'I remember those 60# honey tins, but I think these plastic five-gallon buckets are much better. Better handles and much easier to clean and pour honey from.' When is information from an experienced beekeeper really helping a new beekeeper and when is just a walk down memory lane?

I’m having these thoughts because everything changes and during the past two decades, things have really changed in beekeeping. Mites, small hive beetles and Africanized honey bees have amalgamated to completely restructure beekeeping. So much has changed in management, equipment, bee stocks, honey production and pollination services as to make many established recommendations uncertain. For instance, right now, I should be writing an article for beekeepers describing what they should be doing for spring management. Roy Hendrickson¹ discussed Spring management in an excellent recent article and I did a piece entitled, 'A fresh look at the principles of spring management of bee colonies', in April, 2007. In September of this year, Larry Connor² when referring to the 1960s beekeeping hauntingly said, '….That was a time before tracheal mites, Varroa mites, small hive beetles, CCD, neonicotinoids, and African bees…' Good grief! That’s pretty much what I said just a few sentences ago. We seemingly are stepping all over ourselves trying to advise new beekeepers when I sense that old beekeepers need help as well.

As a beekeeper trained in the ‘70s, I commonly made mistakes but the effects of my errors were rarely severe. Accidentally killing a queen was paramount to a bad day, but queens were readily available and not very costly. Not true for today’s new beekeeper. Colonies still died during the Winter, but only a few and so what – you could readily make up the difference by picking up swarms the next Spring. Not true for today’s new beekeeper. Mature colonies were hardy and could reach large populations with little to no intervention by the meddling beekeeper. Splits were easier to make. Today’s colonies are more delicate, more fragile. I don’t know why. Good colonies can suddenly fail.

It seems to me that the new beekeeper is more stressed to get things right more quickly and without errors. Increasingly, I have become huffy about new beekeepers trying to implement all of the old management recommendations – plus all the new ones. Reversing brood chambers, frequent requeening, mite treatments, pollen substitutes, feeding medications, tearing down swarm cells…. It’s a conundrum. The new beekeeper needs to learn to manage bees, but the new beekeeper is punished for making mistakes. (Just so you know, today’s experienced beekeepers are also penalized mightily for making mistakes.)

All of my penalty comments above assume the new beekeeper was even able to acquire bees. While I am not a fossil beekeeper, I have paid less than $2.00 for a new queen. Today’s new beekeeper can easily pay ten times that low price for a queen – if any are even available. Package bee producers were everywhere. The U.S. Postal System readily shipped them to me. Or, I could buy established colonies or splits. They were advertised in farm papers, bee club newsletters, or by word-of-mouth. Now, a swarm call is a rare thing. Bees are difficult to get. Today’s new beekeeper must make careful plans to order packages and arrange to get them, probably through a club or through a bulk order. Heaven forbid that anything go wrong with the package installation process. Oh, your package queen died? Hope you can find another one because the package producer is probably not sending extras the way they once did. So here we are again….making errors in installing packages today has greater penalties than it did a few decades ago.

When computers and computer systems were young, I could contact my 'university IT people' and they would come troubleshoot my 8088 chip, dual floppy drive computer. Invariably they had to reset some of my dip switches or some such. Does anyone think that I have that kind of support today? Only catastrophic issues are addressed (for pay) but for software or general hardware questions – go on-line and search for answers. Today, I am on my own if my computer system hiccups. Years ago, honey bee queens were kinda guaranteed by the producer. Something went wrong – call them up. This past season, I had about 20% of the queens in my packages die. A couple were dead in the cage before I even released the package. It was not my fault, but I got no free queen replacements. That guaranteed queen thing has nearly passed. I ended up with several six-pound packages when I had to combine queenless three-pound packages with queen-right packages. Let the new beekeeper beware.

The old system of information dispersal is still alive and somewhat well. Bee education classes are still offered, scores of bee books are available and it seems there is a bee meeting somewhere nearly every night. Interested people talking, looking at pictures, and people reading – all about bees – that hasn’t changed, but other things have changed. There was a time when I was confident that I knew more about bees than most people in the room but not anymore. The new beekeeper can go to the web for literally anything concerning beekeeping (or anything else). I simply cannot read the thousands of bee-related web pages. But here’s the new responsibility for the new beekeeper – not all web-based information is accurate. For instance, it is not a viable procedure to move a colony having laying workers a few yards away, shake the bees from the colony and replace the hive on the original stand. The idea is that the laying workers will not be able to find their way home, but that is not true. Laying workers can find their way home very well. Yet, if you Google the descriptor 'shaking bees for laying worker control' many hits are presented that give instructions for this process. Let the new beekeeper beware.

The beekeeping industry has always been an assemblage of subgroups that came together on bee meeting days. Hobby beekeepers, sideline beekeepers, commercial beekeepers, equipment vendors, regulatory people and university/USDA bee professors were some of the typical sub-groups that comprised the audience. Today’s new beekeeper will still be exposed to a segmented industry, but different segments than from a few decades ago. Hobby and sideline beekeepers seem to have been combined. Commercial beekeepers are now rare at most meetings. In many states, it is common to have no commercial beekeepers at all present in the sessions. Their numbers are smaller and they have become so specialized as to nearly be in a different industry than the new beekeeper.

Several years ago, when Colony Collapse Disorder was in its most recent infancy, I was in a meeting with an Ohio legislative representative when, in reference to hobby beekeepers, he abruptly said, 'Don’t ever use the term, hobby beekeeper, again.' He continued that either you are beekeeper or you are not. No government funding agency is going to fund hobbies. I was completely stunned. This one individual had abruptly made a term commonly found in hundreds of bee books obsolete. My very first reaction was to think that the 'hobby' term simply could not die but after considering the thought for a few minutes and seeing the opinioned firmness of the representative, I realized that, in Ohio at least, I had probably just witnessed the death of a time-honored term. Since that time, I have been in attendance at two state meetings far removed from Ohio where the presenting speaker admonished the group to delete the hobby word. Whether or not that Ohio meeting actually started something or not, today’s new hobby beekeeper is just a beekeeper. The term 'sideline' beekeeper was always a forced fit. So today, within the bee industry, there are essentially beekeepers and commercial beekeepers. Now I sense that the population of beekeepers has been loosely divided into pre-Varroa (old) and post-Varroa beekeepers (new). However, even if this is a designation, as old beekeepers pass, the post- group will take over.

Bee professors past were as much a beekeeper as they were a scientist. They commonly attended bee meetings even if they were not speakers on the program. Dr. Walter Rothenbuhler and Basil Furgala are examples of scientists from this era. USDA scientists were governmentally funded and not encumbered with the obligation to get funded grants. They were encouraged to work on problems that had immediate and direct effects on the industry. B.F. Detroy was a USDA beekeeping engineer who worked on projects like developing steam-heated uncapping knives, insulating beehives and pollen traps designs. For many legitimate reasons, academic beekeeping today is nearly completely removed from the practical bee industry. Rarely are these individuals at bee meetings other than as speakers – if you can even get them to speak. The studies they implement are specialized and conclusions drawn are complicated. In eras past, academic beekeepers were simply doing their jobs when working with the bee industry. Today’s academic beekeeper is stressed to get outside funding and to succeed inside the scientific community. That internal success can have little to do with the day-to-day life of the typical beekeeper. This is not a good or bad thing, but it is a different thing from way beekeeping was way back when.

My thoughts are still muddled, but I know what I was feeling as I stood before the group at a county bee meeting last week. It was a modern group made up of new and old beekeepers (the new grouping). Those of us in the old group have paternal feelings and want to help these new people at every turn. Even this magazine recently had articles on how to nurture new beekeepers. That sounds like current recommendations for helping bee colonies. We have the best intentions but our aid programs frequently harm our colonies more than they help.

True, old beekeepers can help with the mechanics of beekeeping, but today’s bright-eyed, eager new beekeeper never knew bees without mites, CCD, poor queens, and imported honey. They don’t expect bee professors to grace their meetings. Instead, they will keep bees in town more often than the countryside and when they need information, they will search the web, or blog and twitter. In a pinch, they will use old-fashioned email. When requesting information, they will rarely use a land-line phone and will never, never write an actual letter. (Well, almost never, but we still get handwritten letters – daily in fact, but far fewer than five, and certainly 10 years ago – Ed.)

Due to mites, insecticides, African bees, beetles, bee diseases and imported honey, we are ALL new beekeepers. Old beekeepers know more about the mechanics and fundamentals of beekeeping but the new group knows more about today’s way of communicating and implementing modern beekeeping principles. They’re not living in the past. To survive and thrive in this changing bee world, old beekeepers probably need new beekeepers as much as the new needs the old. We are all in the same boat and it’s a very new boat.