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Recently a friend told me about a wonderful bee colony that she saw when hiking. She told me the general area so Ted and I went out in search of it. After consulting with more experienced beekeepers and observing the hive for several days, I was concerned that the bees might not survive the winter without help.
There were two places in the comb that had been disturbed by an opossum or perhaps a raccoon, luckily no signs of a visiting bear. Since all of the honeycomb was exposed to winter elements: freezing conditions with high winds could have meant the hive would shatter or the bees could possibly freeze. We felt it would be a good thing to help them. Knowing that in the winter the bees would have a difficult time building or repairing comb, we needed to come up with a way to keep the hive intact but to move it to a safe area.
Carl came up with the perfect solution: to envelop the hive with flexible mesh, add support crossbars and to provide legs for it to rest on, but we knew we needed to keep the hive positioned as built (center of gravity and
honeycomb cells level.) Carl and Joan helped us the day we moved the bee colony.
It was cold and the bees were in a tight cluster. Shortly after wrapping them in mesh the queen appeared. How remarkable for us to spot her. Within 30 minutes we had them loaded and on the way to the bee yard. For the time being they will remain in their “natural” state, but with
shelter and windbreaks from the elements. This spring will bring another adventure for them.
The Bee Pavillion!
The new educational display at Green Goddess Farm's beeyard
Quite an interesting display!
I’ve had problems training Wild Thing. With doors to the Pavilion closed they have difficulty finding their way in or out – just clinging to the screen, which is fatal if they are outside when the temps drop. Leaving the doors open on warm days – I’ve seen robbing and bees grappling. So I added a 2x 4 with a 2” hole and inserted a PVC pipe at the level of the cluster. – No good – bees didn’t enjoy walking on the curved (slick?) surface, and still couldn’t grasp why there was no way thru the screen everywhere else.
So now I’ve stapled black trash bags to the doors, making the two exits “points of light”. That seems to have done the trick. I’m hoping after a few generations of foragers get used to coming/going I’ll be able to remove the bags. Yesterday, guard bees seemed to be patrolling the two gates.
Congratulations to Shawn McCallister of Morganton who won the drawing for the bee school fund raiser playhouse!
Shawn purchased his winning ticket at a display BCBC had at the NC Arboretum.
Honey makes a comeback as nature's antibiotic
From www.thatsfit.com
Posted: Dec 28th 2007 8:00AM by Adams Briscoe
Filed under: General Health, Health in the Media, Healthy Products
Before too long, we may be able to go to our local drug store and pick up honey adhesive strips. It worked for the Egyptians, why not now? That's the thinking behind Medihoney, a new product based on manuka honey which has been known to kill germs and heal wounds where traditional antibiotics fail.
Dressing wounds has been an issue for diabetes patients when drug-resistant germs keep some abrasions from healing. This is where honey comes in. Using a material based on seaweed, they soak the dressing in leptospermum honey. It will not only kill microbes, but soak up fluids and get rid of the bad smell of wounds.
Honey being used in this way has picked up in other parts of the world already. Even when the concentration is diluted ten times, this stuff can kill bacteria. Let's hope honey-based medical products hit the open market soon -- some hospitals are already using it! People with weak immune systems or persistent trauma will be able to get a lot out of this.
Thanks to Carl Chesick for linking us to this interesting YouTube Video about the lesser wax moth. Carl is wondering if anyone has ever seen anything like this before?
You could call me an optimist, after all I am fairly confident that I will win the power ball lottery jackpot someday. I am so confident that I headed out in a moments notice to purchase a $1 ticket for the $300 million jackpot. Even if I am basically optimistic, don't discount my belief that even with all the bad news facing Honeybees, they are not going to disappear. NOT If beekeepers do their part to keep bees that is! I am so confident in honeybees sticking around that I am planning a major part of my retirement around honeybees and beekeeping.
I know that not all, or even any, of the news about honeybees we have been hearing lately has been positive. I have noticed some trends in the news about beekeeping though. It is obvious that most if not all the chemical treatments to help bees survive mites has been a failure in preventing mite problems and may have even caused the bees to become week and stressed to boot. I have also noticed that many of the more serious beekeeping problems have manifested themselves in the commercial pollination realm, where bees are highly stressed and put into situations where they come into contact with pesticides used on crops more often than the usual. Even with all the trouble our commercial pollinators are having, I have seen some equally dramatic positive, but less reported, news involving small beekeepers that are staying away from chemical treatments, not stressing their bees and staying away from purchasing from large commercial breeders who use chemicals in their hives for mite control.
I believe beekeeping chapters and clubs need to be educating the public about the need for new beekeepers, and recruiting young beekeepers. We also need to be encouraging these new recruits with challenging and innovative intermediate and advanced schools with follow up field days. Mentoring programs are a must and EACH of us needs to do our part. It seems lots of long time beekeepers are beginning to give up and stop the craft they love because of all the difficulties. It is hard to replace a beekeeper with 200 hives when he goes out of business, as that takes a little capital and most beginners are not adequate for that challenge. We can encourage 100 people to get 2 hives a lot easier. The Buncombe County Beekeeper's Chapter had 250 participants in the last free bee school we hosted. We also gave away 12 hives of bees to encourage people to participate.(The 2008 School looks to surpass this by quite a bit) It is easy to see that a person with 2 hives can pay more attention to and provide better individual care for those hives than a person with 200 or 2000 hives possibly can. 200 hives spread out with 100 beekeepers instead of one beekeeper means there is a greater possibility for survival due to shear attention paid to the hives. A person with two hives will fret over the loss of one hive more than a person with 200 or more. The money and effort it may take to keep hives alive are much more likely to be available when one person is caring for 2 hives than when on person has 200. Observation, innovation, and experimentation are much more likely with a hobbyist than with someone who is having to meet a bottom line. Commercial beekeepers tend to clump large numbers of hives together, but small beekeepers have them spread out. This means the small beekeeper is covering the area better for incidental pollination not to mention putting distance between hives for prevention of spread of disease and mites. A person with two hives is much more likely to risk losing half or all of his hives on an important experiment than a commercial person who has to keep bees to pay his bills. Potentially we can learn a lot about how to save our bees with lots of small beekeepers out there who are willing to talk to each other, share experiences and offer lessons learned. The whole world of beekeeping, including the commercial guys, is going to benefit in the long run from the interest in beekeeping as a hobby by large numbers of people.
In this light, I am sharing my personal observations from my own apiary over the past four years. I admit, I was a bit discouraged when I first took the beekeeping course put on by the Buncombe and Henderson County clubs at the crop experiment station. I was discouraged because people were telling me, with body language and facial expressions as well as with words, that beekeeping was almost a futile effort. If I had not had so much fun learning about bees over the course, I would have quit when I heard the session on disease and pests. However, I did hear a few voices of encouragement and perseverance in the instruction and I decided to give it a try. One positive thing I had going for me, is I never knew what it was like to keep bees without all these problems so my beekeeping expectations were calibrated at a different level than those that were teaching the course. This fact should not be discounted in seeking new beekeepers and looking for them to be successful in today's world of beekeeping. I have noticed that the status quo for beekeeping practices over the past 10 years is questionable at best, with a few significant changes such as screened bottom boards. When professional beekeepers are loosing 50 to 80% of their hives over winter, we have nothing to loose in experimenting and trying new things. I see our current beekeeping problems as a mandate to do just that. If we stay with the status quo as it has been over the last 10 years, we could loose the European Honeybee. It is time to step out of the box so to speak and pull out all stops in research and study so that we will be able to save the bees. In fact, before the CCD disaster came along, we were doing poorly in winter survival as a whole already. Many beekeepers did not experience CCD, but still had devastating losses. In fact CCD or not, the picture for beekeeping was looking pretty grim from the view of the average beekeeper for some time. I believe that CCD was actually somewhat of a blessing in disguise. In fact, the average beekeeper had about the same percent of losses prior to CCD as since. Only a few beekeepers were devastated by CCD. What CCD has brought us is media attention for an ongoing problem of honeybee demise. (Have you seen the Burt's Bees Commercial on TV?) We need to ride this wave of concern and education for the public to the bank to fund research and education programs. The money that a concerned public can unleash is unimaginable if they really are aware of the seriousness of the situation. Just ask any average person and chances are, they have knowledge and concern about the honeybee crisis. It is time the big companies that benefit from the pollination of fruits and vegetables step up and do their part to organize and fund projects to benefit the honeybee. Politicians need to be educated and convinced to support programs to benefit the honeybee. Beekeepers need to organize and work hard to find new means to assist honeybees in the uphill battle they are facing. Beekeeping organizations need to be funding, seeking sponsors and organizing field trials and research on promising practices.
Some personal beekeeping success I wish to share has to do with going against the status quo and using no chemicals to treat my bees. I do not do nothing to assist my bees however. I sometimes think people listen to me say that I do not treat my bees chemically for mites and think, A. I am crazy, B. I am a liar, C. Doing nothing can work. Actually the answer is D. None of the above. Not treating with chemicals does not equate to doing nothing in any way shape or form. One of the first things I noticed during the first bee school I went to is that a pesticide license was needed to handle some of the preferred treatments and much caution was expressed about how to use these chemicals. This was just not an option for me when I learned that the mites were being selected for a super mite while the pesticides were getting stronger and scarier in order to keep up with the mites. I wondered how long it would be before a noticeable chemical impact started showing on the bees themselves. I now believe we were already seeing adverse chemical impacts then and they have only gotten worse. I listened as I heard that the Russian bee was promising. After study, I became convinced a big part of the Russian success was the brood-less periods they tend to have. Mites have to have brood to reproduce. I also noticed the African bees seemed to be very mite resistant and they tended to swarm frequently, which in itself tended to cause a break in brood production. I put these two observations together and decided to do a lot of splits which would simulate a swarm. I figured it would cost me some honey production, but if I split at the right times, it would be minimal. In fact, I really have noticed no adverse impact from most of my splits. If I split early, it is a strong hive and I build back with feed. If the early hive is weak, I may only take one frame and combine it with frames from other weak hives to make one split from 3 hives. This seems to knock down the mites proportionally as a weak hive has less mites anyway. I decided, in part because I was on a shoe string, and in part because my first queen purchased from a breeder failed in only 2 weeks, to raise my own queens. Raising a queen from an egg in a split will extend the brood-less period and cause both the split and the parent hive to benefit from the split by hurting mite reproduction. All of this fit right into my situation well, as I wanted more hives anyway. I also live next to the pisgah national forest and feel I may be gaining some resistance from breeding with any survivor stock that may be left up in the mountains above my house. I have had some people say, splitting is fine if you want more hives, but I don't want more. I can not manage that way. My answer is yes you can, because we always have people looking for bees. You can provide that and help your mite loads by splitting. Even if you do not want the splits and can not sell the splits, you can take the capped brood from the hives and just freeze them.(If you do not have Drone foundation in, select frames with the most capped Drone brood.) This will kill the mites in them and the bees can quickly start raising new bees. This should not adversely impact a strong hive at all. My must split time is just after the end of the Sourwood flow. At this time, you will not hurt honey production and you still have time to raise your own queen from an egg and get the split built up for winter. Doing these things has allowed me to go 4 years without chemical treatments. I had one winter with no losses and last year I had my worst year of 10 % losses(from my own error in allowing starvation). Tell me why this not the way to go if people using chemicals loose 50 to 80 %?
I have noticed that raising my own queens has been so pleasant that I purchased queen rearing equipment. I have better results raising my own than I did purchasing queens from other states. My queens are lasting more than a year as opposed to a couple of weeks or months. I am convinced one reason for my queen success is not using chemicals and not using foundation. I figured if the wax builds up chemical residue, and we are supposed to remove the wax in our hive every two years if we are using chemicals, then at least some people are probably selling the wax for use in making foundation. I know at least a few people have done this and as a result I want nothing to do with commercial wax or wax products. I found there are several ways to get the bees to build their own comb in the frames. You can put a small bead of wax on the top bar, use a top bar with a 45% angle pointed straight down, or cut a thin strip of cut comb foundation and place it in the top of the frames. Carl Chesick, a progressive beekeeper in Asheville NC, goes one step farther and puts wire in his frames and gets the bees to build comb around the wire. I have extracted wireless comb, but I have to be very careful. It seems my bees have done well without the stress of chemicals and the mites have been kept at a level that the bees can tolerate. Carl Chesick and I have had really good success doing this and now we are selecting queens from our best stock to try and find the more mite resistant stock. Having our own breeding programs will round out our efforts to help the bees with hive manipulation. I invite any who have questions to ask Carl and I or just jump in and do what we are doing. This is the kind of thing that will make a difference in our bee survival. Everyone needs to be using their own mind to think of ways they too can help the bees with non chemical methods. Try those methods and share the results good or bad. It could be bad results are not due to a bad idea, but a flawed plan. Sharing ideas may alter a plan to make good results that all will benefit from. This requires communication and sharing from people committed to researching every way to help save our bees.
Calvin
For a link to a work in progress by Calvin Robinson, click below to access the Honeybee Education web page Calvin is working on.
Nobody Home
Everyone Has a Theory Why the Honeybees Died this Winter. Try Malnutrition.
by Gina Covina
(Here is an interesting paragraph in the link from above)
UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding—in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.
I love beekeeping! In fact, I felt a little strange when I first got the urge to keep bees because not many people besides me seemed interested in beekeeping. I guess you could say it reminded me a little of a county song I had heard before and I will just say I was a beekeeper when beekeeping wasn't cool. Beekeeping is suddenly in the news and very cool. I am singing a new song these days. I just heard a recent popular song with the lyrics, "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" Of course being the obsessed beekeeper that I am, I changed the words to "Don't you wish your hobby was hot like mine?"
It is true, beekeeping is hot at the moment. It seems everything with a bee theme is instantly hot. Don't believe me? Just ask anyone if they have heard or read anything about bees in the last week and I bet you almost all of them have. There is currently a keen awareness and interest in our beloved ladies. This really dawned on me in a big way one recent evening when I saw a movie advertised from Jerry Seinfeld, one of my favorites, called "Bee Movie". Of course there is nothing funny or light about the plight of our bees, but all the attention and interest is great. We can benefit from a bit of fad, if we will help direct the interested people to the real bees when the fad grabs their interest.
I guess you could say beekeeping is riding a wave at the moment. It is an exciting time to be in beekeeping, partially because the stakes are so high. As Winston Churchill said during the darkest days of World War II, "This will be our finest hour". I believe how we react to the honeybee crisis can become our finest hour. When the stakes are high, the risks we take to experiment, and innovate are magnified in our successes. I am happy so many people are interested in becoming hobbiest beekeepers because the more minds that are studying and experimenting, the more great discoveries we will benefit from.
I recall this past summer, which went way too fast, that one central theme surfaced in every event I worked for the Buncombe County Beekeepers Chapter, from Nectar Collector Day at the Western North Carolina Nature Center, to The recent Heritage Garden Craft Weekend at the North Carolina Arboretum. People were excited about BEES and they were very interested in helping them. I found the superficial conversations were out the door and most people engaged me in interesting intellectual conversations that were both stimulating and thought provoking. I had several very intense conversations that pushed an hour in length with interested individuals. Many of those signed up for the annual free bee school.
The surf is up, and I challenge each of you to wax up your bottom boards and hang ten with me! Let's ride this wave of interest to get funding and inspire great minds to study our bees. Even minds like mine can add to beekeeping, so you have no excuse not to contribute your part also. Don't be afraid of wiping out, because every great discovery has been in the shadow of a certain risk. One thing is sure if you take no risks the great successes will elude you. Take the occasional failure as part of the road to success and keep on keeping on. It has been said that "to whom much is given, much is required" This being true, North Carolina beekeepers need to be playing a lead role in our nation and the in world of beekeeping.
Buncombe County Beekeeper President, Janet Shisler, recently visited England and, being the beekeeper she is, sought out British beekeepers by attending a London beekeepers meeting. She told me they are a bit dismayed at the loss of bees and feel their government is doing little to help. They are sort of looking to the U.S. for answers. I say lets help find those answers. One of my favorite lines from a movie is from, "The Right Stuff". When the astronauts walked out in front of the crowd, one of them said something to the effect of, "They are want to see Buck Rogers and that's us". I find that inspiring. If others are looking to us for answers we need to be about finding them. When someone needs a hero, why not try the cape on for size. L.L. Langstroth, who invented modern beekeeping, just took an observation and studied it. His discovery has had a profound impact on our beekeeping even today. We all have that potential too. Only if we rise up to meet the challenge can we meet our potential.
Join us at the free Western North Carolina bee school this February at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville North Carolina. Join, or renew your membership in your local bee club. Participate in club meetings fund raisers, schools and field days. Give back some of what you were given so that others may enjoy what you have. Help us to pull off another wonderful FREE bee school to further promote our beloved art, craft, occupation and passion.
Calvin
Effective January 7th, with one month to go, here is how bee school registration stands.
392 Registered, 360 with emails, 328 first-timers, 79 with bees
NC Counties represented: 21 out of the 100 counties:
Buncombe
Burke
Caldwell
Cherokee
Cumberland
Davidson
Davie
Forsyth
Gaston
Guilford
Haywood
Henderson
Jackson
Madison
McDowell
Polk
Rutherford
Swain
Transylvania
Wake
Yancey
States other than NC represented: 6
Georgia II
Pennsylvania I
South Carolina VII
Tennessee I
Texas II
Virginia II
