The Impossible Task of Putting on Gloves with Sweaty Hands

I often wear nitrile gloves in the bee yard. I prefer these over the thicker lambskin gloves worn by many new beekeepers, because nitrile gives you infinitely more dexterity and “hive feel” by comparison. Sure, the bees can sting through the nitrile, but they don’t too often and the occasional sting is worth the upside, at least for me. The biggest problem I run into with the nitrile (or vinyl or rubber) gloves is that they can tear, and when that happens good luck putting on a new glove if it’s hot outside. Nitrile gloves are nearly impossible to pull onto a sweaty hand. Or even a slightly moist hand. Sometimes humidity alone can make it difficult to cinch a glove up without the rubber digits hanging halfway off my fingers.

I use baby powder to easily slip on nitrile gloves in the bee yard

But there’s an easy and cheap fix for this. Just keep a bottle of baby powder in your bee kit. When you need to put on a glove, douse your hand in the powder and rub it around, being sure to get between the fingers. Then the glove will slide up your hand nearly effortlessly. Plus this helps keep your hands dry and delays the onset “bathtub fingers.” Some gloves come pre-coated in powder, but I’ve found those are made more for doctors in air conditioned hospitals than for beekeepers dripping with sweat. There’s just not enough powder to overcome the amount of moisture we’re dealing with.

A travel-size bottle of baby powder goes a long way, and they’re so cheap and small that I keep them stashed wherever I have nitrile gloves—the bee kit, the garage, and the workshop. Just in case I need to glove up on a warm day.

Habitat, Habitat, Habitat

It all comes down to habitat. Or at least mostly. As I pile on years of experience, it’s become clearer that beekeeping is as much botany as it is entomology. I scout nearby parks and ditches all spring and summer to gauge which blooms are available to my bees. In concert with recurring inspections, understanding what’s happening in the local environment drives my decisions as a beekeeper.

We beekeepers have a short list of villains we tend to blame for the struggles of pollinators—varroa and pesticides usually top our lists. But these stressors pale in comparison to the existential threat posed by the loss of habitat. Most new beekeepers fail and quit before they begin to understand the interconnectedness of plants and bees, but successful beekeepers pay at least as much attention to habitat as they do to their hives. Imagine a human population without farms to feed us. Wild spaces with quality forage are just as important to pollinators.

A metric paper wasp foraging wild-growing fragrant sumac

Unfortunately, preserving habitat is mostly out of our control. I see so many wild or scrub spaces around me being converted to housing developments or—worse—storage units. These will be pollinator deserts, pushing animals and plants into increasingly smaller wild areas. As individuals, and even as a loosely organized beekeeping community, there’s little we can do to stop this “progress.” What we can do is manage the space within our control in a way that benefits our honey bees and other wildlife. Got a yard? Tear out the fescue and opt for something more natural and native to your local area. Remove invasive plants while you’re at it, because these tend to choke out the good stuff. Condo or apartment dweller? Get involved in your association and advocate for pollinator-friendly plantings in common areas. Can’t do either of these things? Volunteer or support a conservation group. The list is long, but organizations like Monarch Watch, Pheasants Forever, Audubon Society, and countless others work to restore and protect habitat.

Once you’ve established a habitat, collecting and sharing seeds can be a good way to positively impact a larger area

Our efforts and our support to conservation groups help secure a future in which our grandkids and their grandkids will be able to keep bees without having to feed sugar syrup year-round. They’ll be able to see butterflies and bluebirds without traveling to a National Park. The prospect of a bleak future is a real possibility if we continue to bulldoze wild spaces. The least we plebeians can do right now is convert our own habitat to be pollinator-friendly, and give of our time and resources to groups that help protect shrinking islands of habitat on behalf of the insects, birds, and other animals that depend upon them.