Mentoring

My bees are not drawing comb as fast as I thought they should.  Is it just the nectar flow in my neighborhood, or is something wrong? That's not unusual, Kip told me. You might want to put an empty frame between two brood frames.  They HATE having an empty frame there, and will fill it up with wax, and the queen will lay as soon as they get any of it built.  They might also need some help, if you don't have good nectar sources nearby; give them some sugar water in an inverted bucket.

Kip is a lifesaver.

At the workshop back in March, I started talking to this guy in the back of the room while we were going through the lessons.  He was one of the instructors, but also just a guy with a tangle of curly hair under a ballcap.  Just a guy.

I befriended him on facebook, and watched his business with admiration and a little bit of envy.  His beekeeping is not just a side hustle.  It is a lot of work, and a pretty intense business. He just dropped $12k just on new frames to put in new boxes. (Not the boxes.  $12k for just the frames.)  And kinda shrugs about the expense.

Twice now, I have sent him a message asking for help.  His response was immediate.  Both times.

"Call me."

The conversations that ensue always last longer than I expected, and cover ground that I had not thought of.  Mostly, I want him to reassure me that I am doing what I need to do; that my bees will not die of neglect; that what I am seeing is kinda normal.  And he does.

This time, I called him, and left a message.

Ten minutes later, he called me back, coming out of his Honey House to do it.  He was working on extracting amber liquid, and couldn't get reception with bees all over him.  Then he took 20 minutes to talk me down off one cliff after another, suggesting solutions to problems I had observed, reassuring me that other things weren't problems, or, if they were, that there were simple solutions I should enact.

The ladies aren't doing housekeeping like I think they should.  There is a lot of debris on the entrance, including the bodies of dead bees.  Is this normal or should I be worried?  That's not unusual.  You might want to include a check of your bottom board when you do your next inspection.  Hive beetles love that bottom board - sometimes there just collects stuff down there.  It might just need a cleanout.

I really thought that I was going to need more boxes and more frames, but they aren't expanding to fill the area they already have.  Is there something that I should be doing?  That's not unusual.  I have one hive where I saw they needed more room, and I put another super on top, and in less than a week, they had filled that up.  The next one over has just been reluctant.  Sometimes you get bees that are not as productive. 

The whole conversation was held in a reassuring tone.

"That's not unusual".  Somehow, those three words had the much-needed effect on me. Much the same way as I do when I open my hives, I became calmer.  I breathed more deeply.  My stress abated.  My heart rate slowed.  My blood pressure went down.

I might have described Kip as 'just a guy'.  But when he takes the stress off of me, he becomes something more.  When he takes a few minutes out of a busy day to talk to me about the bigger picture of what I am trying to do, he becomes a mentor.

Mentorship is an amazing gift.  It is the voice of experience that helps guide the inexperienced.  It gives a novice a chance to talk out the tough problems with someone who sees a bigger picture.  It provides someone with a small, overwhelming investment, with the chance to put that investment in a much larger perspective.

I will almost certainly never own 500 hives like Kip does.  But because he does, and because he talks to me, I get to put my hive problems into the context of 501 hives.  And in the context of 501 hives, my case is not unusual.  And if a hive presents these problems, there are ways of encouraging the ladies to thrive.

But it does make me think about those areas where I am hoarding my own information.  Where my perspective on my specialty - even when I don't see it as special - might help someone else while they are struggling with their own.  If I open up to others about my insecurities, and talk about what I did, would it help?

Would there be a chance for me to help a friend going through a tough transition to the new job? Would my mentorship potentially help someone looking at moving from the academic sector into public service?  What about my perspective on academia?  Or my experience floundering while looking for a career path after college? About my struggles with wild mood swings and suicidal thoughts when I was a teenager?

I think I need to start looking around me for situations where my presence and experience might be reassuring.  Where maybe I can start the process of mentoring someone, with three simple words:

"That's not unusual."