Urban Apiary

Urban Apiary has moved

2007-07-11T15:33:00.000-05:00

It's been quite a while since I last update the blog. I've been extremely busy with work. I've seen Detroit, Chicago, Charleston, Indianapolis, Memphis, Washington D.C., Dallas and a few other cities in recent weeks.

Due to my ever expanding "hobby" I moved the hives about 5 miles from the house. The hives are now located just outside the city limits. This is a beautiful piece of property and the bees are working it extremely well. I anticipate harvesting about 15 medium supers of honey. Brian will be working with me to extract the honey in the next 7-10 days.

We are now up to 9 hives at this location & I have 3 NUCS at Lazy Acres.

HoneyBee Removal - Lazy Acres

2007-05-06T13:28:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I placed an ad in the Georgia Farmers & Consumers Market Bulletin advertising bee removal services. I had intended only to remove low hanging swarms, etc... But I received a call from Lazy Acres Farm in Brooks, Georgia inquiring about removal of bees from a stucco driveway entrance wall. The bees had taken up residence inside the hollow 2x4 walls. I was a little hesitant at first but decided to give it a try. I arrived and immediately was able to pull the wire mesh, stucco & foam back to expose the hive. I wasn't concerned with getting the brood comb,etc... I just wanted to get enough brood for 1 frame, find the Queen and get several handfuls of worker bees. I was able to complete this job in less than 45 minutes. I left the nuc box in front of the area in hopes that most of the remaining bees would join the Queen. I will return tonight and remove the nuc.

I came to the conclusion that I need a "bee-vac" and some containers to save the comb, honey,etc.. I simply discarded everything. I had made a trip to Moultrie, Georgia earlier in the day to pick-up (2) 3# packages of Italian bees. Had I planned a little better and wasn't so tired I may have spent some aditional time and save more of the comb.

Additional pics:

Picture # 1

Picture #2

Picture #3

Picture #4

SlowGardening.com

2007-04-11T19:54:00.000-05:00

"Gardening the hard way has its rewards"

Anne Brennan has left several comments on my blog so I followed the link to her name and found that she has a pretty neat gardening blog. There's also a section on beekeeping & Anne appears to be a new "beek" herself. I highly recommend you spend a few minutes browsing her blog. It will be worth your time.

SlowGardening.com

Beekeeping Section

Queen shipment

2007-04-11T15:57:00.000-05:00

The 6 Italian Queens I ordered from Rossman Apiaries several weeks ago arrived today. The "little brown truck" was at my doorstep about 9:30a.m. I immediately opened the package and inspected each and every one of the cages. I had 6 live Queens!

I decided to wait until after lunch to begin installing the Queens. I wanted the temperature to get above 60 degrees and also to see if it was going to rain. I have 3 hives with Queens of unknown age/viability that I want to replace. I also want to split each hive. This would require 6 Queens total.

Hive #1

This hive has a lot of "bee traffic" in/out and the population has increased a good bit over the past 6-8 weeks. I was amazed to find no Queen, no eggs, larvae, pupae, open or sealed brood in this hive. NONE. ZIP. ZILCH! Not even any Queen cells. There isn't any evidence of a Queen for atleast several weeks! I was also surprised to see the both 9 5/8" deep brood boxes are 70-80% filled with nectar/capped honey & pollen. Did the recent cold weather coupled with a lack of space for eggs prevent the Queen from laying? I re-checked and did NOT find a Queen. Oh Well! I removed the cork from the candy end of the Queen cage and placed it in the hive.

Hive #2

Several weeks ago this hive was by far my weakest. I'm certain this hive was Queenless for several weeks and decided to leave it alone and see what happened. Today I found little evidence of a Queen. I did find a couple of frames with eggs. No larvae, pupae, capped brood. This hive looked just like Hive #1. I did find a Queen! She appeared to be a bright golden brown and moved very quickly across one of the frames. Was this a young Queen that just recently mated? Would that explain the lack of brood and just a few freshly laid eggs? What is going on with my hives? I removed her from the hive and placed her into a nuc box. I placed a new Queen in this hive and moved to the next.

Hive#3

Same damn thing! Hive booming with population & full of nectar, pollen & capped honey. No eggs, larvae, pupae, capped brood. Can't find the Queen either. At this point my lower back is killing me. I checked again and didn't find the Queen. What is going on here? I placed a caged Queen in the hive and closed it back up.

As you can tell, today isn't going very well. I intended to kill the 3 existing Queens in each hive, replace them with 3 new Queens, split each hive and use the remaining 3 Queens. This would have been perfect. I used 3 Queens, couldn't find 2 older Queens, found 1 older Queen, and I have 3 left over. I couldn't find ANY brood in ANY hive so I can't make a split. I did put the one Queen I found in hive #2 in to a nuc. She's suspect at best. I don't know if she's a young, recently mated Queen or one of the older Queens. I suspect she's a new Queen. I don't know how viable she is. I will take her & the 3 other new Queens to my other beeyard and hopefully make splits. I really don't want to split them because of the Spring nectar flow....but oh well. Heck, I may get down there and find they're in the same shape as these.

How can these hives get in this shape so quickly? What exactly happened? Did I overlook 2 Queens? If so, why aren't they laying? Where's all the brood? Where is the current population coming from? What will happen if I did overlook a couple of Queens and the new Queens get released in to that hive? Who will win out? The new Queen or the old???

This beekeeping thing isn't as easy as everyone makes it appear to be ! ! !

I would love some input from some of the blog readers!

Brrr...it's cold ! ! !

2007-04-09T15:38:00.000-05:00

Wow! The warm weather disappeared just as fast as it came. The past few days the overnight lows have been around 30 degrees. This comes after 3 weeks of very warm weather. I've planted several varieties of Butterfly Bushes as well as a small garden. I'm hopeful the cooler temperatures didn't kill what I've planted.

I have a shipment of 6 Queens coming from Rossman Apiaries, they should arrive on Wednesday, April 11th. The forecast for that day is wet, rainy & cold! GREAT!!! I was hoping to be able to do some splits but the recent colder weather has me concerned. I will most likely bank the Queens until the warmer weather returns & not split any of the colonies until Summer.

I recently acquired some bee hives through a little horse trading. Jeff rode the 3 hours with me to South Georgia to pickup the hives. There were 4 hives mounted to a pallet that we needed to get loaded onto the back of a trailer. We got a late start and instead of arriving just after dark, it was well after midnight. Has anyone ever mentioned how testy honeybees can get when they're disturbed late at night? Well...we found out. Before it was over I sustained 3 stings and Jeff was stung about 12-15 times!!! Remember what I said about Jeff in a previous post? "Somehow Jeff managed to escape sting free. If you knew Jeff you would understand how miraculous this is! Jeff is usually the 1st person to get hurt or get into trouble."

It was quite entertaining to say the least. About an hour or more after we headed back, Jeff was asleep in the passenger seat and got a nasty sting to the inside of his right thigh. This caused Jeff to breakout in an epileptic type fit, jumping and squirming all over the passenger side of the truck. What was even funnier was his attempts to kill the bee(s) by punching himself in the groin area. This little frantic display by Jeff was more than worth the 6 hour roundtrip drive that it took to pickup the bees. Jeff also learned a valuable lesson about properly securing your veil! Overall, he sustained most stings to the lower legs when the bees crawled up his pants legs. This occurred because he was standing in front of the hives while trying to properly fasten his veil. He hurredly put on his veil and initially ignored my warnings to re-do the veil. I believe he stated "it'll be alright, we're only going to be a minute". Well....about a minute into the move he began dancing around slapping himself in the face/veil trying to kill the 2 bees that were trying to sting him in the face!

I have a new nickname for Jeff - "The Epileptic, Dancing BeeKeeper"

Chris - 11
Brian -5
Ronnie - 1
Jeff - 12....atleast ! ! !

Cost of Beekeeping

2007-04-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

An Estimated Cost of Beekeeping for Your First Year.
from http://www.nebees.com/tipsandtricks.htm

One of the first questions to come up at Beekeeping classes is, “How much does it cost to keep Honeybees?” This is a very good question. Most hobby or back yard beekeepers will keep one or two hives their first year. I always suggest keeping two hives so you can compare the difference. You will gain more knowledge and experience with two hives. The following is a breakdown of cost for your first year based on purchasing all new equipment:

One Hive Setup ----------------------------------- $200
(Includes bottom board, 2 Deep supers,
20 Deep frames, 2 Honey supers, 20
Honey frames, queen excluder, Inner cover,
Outer cover, entrance reducer and feeder.)

Package of Bees----------------------------------- -$75
( 3lbs of bees with a queen)

Clothing and Tools --------------------------------$125
( Veil, gloves, smoker,2 hive tools, bee brush)

Medications and Feed---------------------------- $35
( Mite & Nosema medication, Sugar, and
Pollen Pattie)

Bee School------------------------------------------ $75
(School sometimes includes a text book)

Extraction ----------------------------------------- $15
(Some clubs rent extraction equipment)

Total First year with one hive------------------$525

Total First year with two hives----------------$835
(Additional hive setup, package of bees
And medication and feed)

Yard Work

2007-03-24T15:06:00.000-05:00

Today I got started on my yard work. I needed to cut the grass, pull some weeds, decide what to do with the Pompous Grass in the front beds and ultimately plant something different in the front beds. Last year I planted some Pompous Grass in the front beds and it grew too big. I dug up the Pompous Grass today and planted the following: (2) Queen's Robe Butterfly Bush, (2) Sungold Butterfly Bush & (2) White Profusion Butterfly Bush. The Queen's Robe needs partial Sun so I planted those around back and the other 4 are full Sun, so they went in the front where the Pompous Grass used to be.

Pollen Count

The pollen count is off the chart the last few days. I have a black Ford F-150 that is now bright yellow! Everything in town is coated in a light dusting of pollen. When it rains it will look like a yellow river running down the street. Let's just hope we get some rain soon. I have been watering the back yard most of the day, hopefully this will kickstart it to turn green. I have Emerald Zoysia grass planted in the back yard and it really looks great!

Watering

I have been watering the area around the bee hives a lot this week. Remember I planted some corn, giant sunflower, cantaloupe, watermelon & wildflowers this past Monday. I'm traveling out of town this coming week for a project and am trying to get a jump on my watering. Hopefully Katie will remember to water while I'm out of town.

Pictures

Click here to see the front beds planted with Sungold & White Profusion Butterfly Bushes, Queen's Robe planted around back, the Emerald Zoysia back yard & the area that will hopefully produce a garden!

The buzz business

2007-03-20T10:37:00.000-05:00

Printed in High Country News
6/24/2002
by Ray Ring

Some people try to make a killing on killer bees

TUCSON, Ariz. - Twelve years into the killer bee invasion of the United States, Tip Tisdale steers his pickup truck into the driveway of a custom home in the desert outskirts of this desert city. It’s a hot Monday morning in late April and this is the U.S. city where the invaders, also called Africanized bees, are most established

The bright yellow-and-black logo on Tisdale’s truck, repeated on his T-shirt, identifies which side he’s on - AAA Africanized Bee Removal.

With the bravado that characterizes the men on the front lines, Tisdale walks toward the buzzing sound without protective gear, his face, arms and hands exposed. Pausing on the porch steps, he scouts the enemy: a loose cloud hovering under the porch roof overhang, composed of maybe 30 to 40 bees.

Like the symbol for nuclear energy, electrons circling round and round, the bees occupy their air space and emit a feeling of contained energy that might explode any moment.
I’m hanging back a few feet behind Tisdale, here to research how the bees are succeeding in the city, how people are adapting, and why the great national media machine has forgotten this once-sensational topic. Knowing that killer bees can take up residence in any nook or cranny of civilization - in the eaves of buildings, in the cushions of sofas and chairs left outside, under storage sheds, in cardboard boxes, flower pots, light fixtures, old tires, utility boxes, bird houses, culverts, woodpiles, trash cans, towers and windmills, even in vehicles, including airplanes - I’m ready to run.

In a half whisper, trying not to trigger the bees, Tisdale explains what we’re seeing. These must be foragers for a colony that’s hidden inside the wall of the house. He points out that some are crawling into a hole gnawed through the wall. Inside the wall there must be a lot more bees carrying out a range of duties, and a queen. If the colony is only a week or two old, there are maybe 10,000 bees in the wall; if the colony is several months old, there could be 30,000

"The foragers are bringing water in - see?" Tisdale says. Squinting, concentrating on the tiny moving shapes, I can make out water droplets on the bees’ legs. If they were foraging for pollen, they’d have yellow sacks of it bulging on their legs. The water helps them survive the drought that has withered the desert for months; they haul the droplets from swimming pools, hot tubs and landscaping irrigation in this upscale neighborhood. They bring the water inside the wall and use their wings to fan and evaporate it, to keep the colony cooler than it would be otherwise. The insulation in the wall also helps.

"They like houses, because people provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter," Tisdale says. "They are a tremendously intelligent animal."

He glances around, alert for any patrol bees that might be coming at us. Fully established colonies have storehouses of honey and brood to defend, and it begins with a perimeter of patrol bees. "The patrol bees look for trouble," he says. "They’ll buzz in your face. If you don’t react right or if they get a signal from you they don’t like, they tag you." Meaning, they sting you.

He advises that we’d better stand still and hold our breath if any patrol bees check us out, because one thing the bees really don’t like is any mammal’s breath - mammals are predators who might be after the honey. We’re lumped in with badgers, skunks and bears. Above all, we’d better not swat a patrol bee or even try to brush one off. Just one sting or one smashed or ticked-off patrol bee would send a chemical pheromone signal to the rest of the colony, and in a split second the next level of defense, many thousands of guard bees, would come streaming out.

"Every female with a venom sack would dump on you," Tisdale says.

So far, it’s a Western thing. Since the bees invaded from Mexico, they’ve stung four people to death in Arizona (including one who was allergic to bee stings). As many as eight more people have been killed in New Mexico, Southern California and Texas. There is disagreement about how many deaths the killer bees can be blamed for: Do we count the bulldozer driver in Texas who jumped off to run from bees and got run over by his own machine?

As the bees continue to spread, several thousand people as far north as Las Vegas have been stung, many of them hundreds of times each, without dying. Tisdale, a lanky 53-year-old who has worked the front lines about five years, has been stung too many times to count, at times so severely that his arms swelled up painfully or his eyelids swelled shut for days.

At this house, where a family inside has called for help, only a few patrol bees come forward to check us. Tisdale says it indicates this colony has only been here a short time and doesn’t yet have much stored up to defend. Even so, before proceeding any closer, it’s time for us to suit up - thick cotton coveralls, canvas gloves to the elbows, pith helmets draped with hoods that seal to the coveralls, and strategically applied strips of duct tape.

Getting down to business, Tisdale closes in with spraycans of professional grade pesticides. He whacks down the bees we can see, climbs a ladder so he can spray into the hole, uses a prybar to widen the opening, keeps spraying. Alarmed bees pitter-patter against us, trying to sting us through our gear, but it is not the folklore classic killer bee explosion. In a few minutes the whole colony falls silent and still, and Tisdale presents the customers with the bill: $235.

The Triple-A dispatcher relays another call for help and we drive to another neighborhood, where there is another kind of problem - a swarm. Thirty times a year or so, a killer bee colony divides: Some of the bees swarm away with the queen looking to colonize new territory and the rest stay put and raise a new queen. It is a way they maximize their territory.

We find the swarm in the backyard, clinging to a tree branch. It’s a writhing, solid mass of maybe 12,000 bees surrounding the migrant queen. The swarm is resting on the branch. Tisdale and Paul Gerard, another Triple-A pro who rolls in, discover that the swarm has just split from a big colony under a storage shed. We suit up again and the pros attack the swarm in the tree and then the colony under the shed. They use a smokepot to slow the bees, a soapy spray that clings to the bees and clogs their breathing, and the pesticides. Ripping up the floor of the shed to expose the colony, they find the eerily beautiful fins of honeycomb, pupae in the wax cells, and the emergent queen. It’s sweaty work in the thick protective gear, staving off the bees’ defense. Thousands of dead little bee bodies curl on the ground. But it only takes about an hour and half to do this job and present the bill: $600.

Tisdale’s cell phone keeps jingling. On an average day, he estimates, he does six service calls; on a busy day, he averages 10 to 15. Triple-A’s going rate is roughly $200 per hour per man on the jobs I observe, split between those on the front and the head of the company, who does the dispatching. Triple-A is probably the biggest anti-killer-bee company in the world, with five pros in Tucson and eight in the Phoenix metro area, a statewide toll-free number and 24-hour-a-day dispatching. Even the company’s name is a marketing ploy - AAA to be first in the Yellow Pages when customers under siege are looking for bee removal in a hurry.

I’m beginning to see that this is a story not only of ecology, but also of the good old resilient American instinct to make a buck out of anything that presents itself.

Read the rest of the article posted here:

The Buzz Business

Preparations for a garden

2007-03-20T08:33:00.000-05:00

This past weekend while working on the deck I also rented a rear tine tiller and turned over the soil in "the dog run". This is the area where I keep the 3 honeybee hives. I've decided to give my little Italian friends something to do in my backyard this Spring & Summer. After I returned from a business trip to Valdosta, Georgia on Monday, I planted sweet corn, watermelon, giant sunflower, cantaloupe & a mix of wildflowers. I did this all from seed. It is my hope to "fill up" some of the dead space in the dog run with some vegetation and bright colors. I'm currently watering the whole area really well and this should start the germination process. Also, I started germinating some Anise Hysopp & Bee Balm indoors last night. I will also plant these in/around the hives.

I've never planted a garden before and don't really know what to expect. The soil is very dark and rich in color. I noticed a lot of earth worms when I was tilling the area. Earth worms are good aren't they? I was always told that worms were a sign of good soil. I planted the seeds "guerrilla style". Meaning that I didn't concern myself with planting them in perfect rows, spaced perfectly apart. I figure that I get what I get, and that will be good enough. I just want to fill the dead space and if I get something for my efforts, it will be a big plus.

Does anyone else plant for their bees?

Phase 2 - Finishing the Deck

2007-03-20T08:16:00.000-05:00

Last Summer my Father built a deck on the back of the house for me. I of course assisted greatly but my skills are more directly related to the IT/computer field than carpentry. We completed "Phase 1" which was everything except the handrails coming off the back steps, the railing around the deck and the steps from the deck to the yard. If you've purchased any amount of pressure treated wood and all the associated materials to build a deck lately you will understand why this project was broken in to 2 phases...I ran out of $$$.

This past Saturday we began "Phase 2" which will be the final phase. The railing around the deck will look like the railing on the back steps. This deck is well built and everything is either screwed or bolted together with carriage bolts/lag screws. Additionally, we used joist hangers & metal corner brackets everywhere. This has posed somewhat of a challenge when we attached the posts for the handrail. We had to adjust accordingly to work around the metal brackets. We are hoping to finish the handrail around the deck this coming weekend and then the step from the deck in to the yard the weekend after next. I'll keep you updated on our progress and will also post some more pictures.

Saturday was a work day...

2007-03-04T12:29:00.000-05:00

My order from Mann Lake arrived mid-week while I was away on a business trip. Saturday morning my good friend Ronnie Tindle (pictured at left) helped me assemble & paint the following:
4 -9 5/8" deep brood boxes
3 -Nuc's boxes
2 -honey supers
4 - outer covers

This only took us a couple of hours from start to finish and was a real efficient process thanks to Ronnie's assistance. I would have spent most of the day on this task if I didn't have his help! As a side note, Mann Lake did short my order by leaving out the 3 bottom boards for the Nuc boxes. I called and left a message with the after hours receptionist. Someone is supposed to call me on Monday. I hope they ship the missing parts without any hassle. I have ordered from them on several occasions and been very pleased.

Just after we finished the assemly/painting of the materials (timing is everything!) from Mann Lake my brother Brian showed up with his sidekick Jeff Harrington. Ronnie & Jeff stood at the fence while Brian and I inspected the 3 hives we currently have. Unfortunately, I believe we have 1 hive that is Queenless at the moment. Almost no brood, no eggs and a low population. I did find several capped Queen cells. We thought about combining this hive with one of the others but decided not to. I want to see if the Queen will emerge from her cell, mate and begin to lay eggs. This hive will be one to watch over the next several weeks. Stay tuned....The 2 other hives appear to be booming and I'm going to attempt a split around the first part of April. I have 6 Italian Queens coming from Rossman apiaries on April 10th.

I have had a Fire Dancer fire pit for quite some time. I wanted to make it a more permanent part of my deck and Jeff offered to help me out. We went to Lowe's and got some Liquid nails & concrete adhesive to use. We were able to assembly the stones around the fire pit and "glue" them together. It looks great! I'm really pleased with the work Jeff did!

Click here to see a group picture of all 4 of us. We are a Motley crew that's for sure. If you only knew the stories we were telling on Saturday!!! We've had some good times together that's for sure!

Brian got stung twice when a couple of bees went up his pants leg.
Ronnie got stung on the forehead while watching from the fenceline.
Somehow Jeff managed to escape sting free. If you knew Jeff you would understand how miraculous this is! Jeff is usually the 1st person to get hurt or get into trouble.

Sting Count:

Chris - 7
Brian -5
Ronnie - 1

Beekeeping Tips

2007-02-19T15:52:00.002-05:00

Treat for Tracheal mites with menthol in August
Treat for Varroa mites on October 1st
Treat for Nosema in late October or November
Prevent robbing before it starts, equalize your colony populations
Feed 2:1 sugar syrup to provide 70 pounds of winter stores
Requeen your colonies in late August or September 1st
You will have NO DEAD BEES IN THE WINTER, and big, strong, HEALTHY colonies ready to make a record crop in the spring.

Sugar Syrup Ratios

2007-02-19T15:52:00.001-05:00

Sugar syrup can be made up into three different strengths, and you use different strengths for different purposes and at different times of the year, as follows:

1:2 -1 pound of sugar dissolved in 2 pints of water is primarily used as a egg laying
stimulant for the queen in late winter and early spring

1:1 -1 pound of sugar dissolved in 1 pint of water is primarily used as an artificial
nectar to get bees to build comb and feed brood larvae in spring and summer

2:1 - 2 pounds of sugar dissolved in 1 pint of water is a winter feed substituting
for honey in the fall or early winter

How to Make a Split

2007-02-19T12:48:00.001-05:00

How to Make a Split

A split is made to either increase colony numbers or to prevent swarming. In either case, a colony is NOT split unless it is strong in numbers of worker bees, has a prolific queen, and is healthy. Although sometimes desirable to be done in very early spring, a split should NOT be made until decent flight weather for pollen or nectar collecting in the spring. In Maryland, because our total honey crop is made in April and May, and little, if any, is collected during the rest of the year, the new split is NOT going to produce any honey in its first year. This might be dramatically different in states that have nectar collection during the summer and/or fall.

Order a new queen, preferably MARKED, and upon its arrival, give the queen a drink of water and put her in a cool, dark place until the next day. Go to the colony you want to split, find the queen and ISOLATE the frame she is on and the adhering bees in a spare hive body while you select the frames you want to remove and move them to the new split. I select 2 frames of honey, 2 frames of CAPPED brood, 1 frame of OPEN brood, and 1 frame of nectar and pollen ALL WITH ADHERING BEES which is a total of 6 frames.

Put these 6 frames in a new hive body and add 3 more frames of drawn comb, totaling 9 frames, put the new queen cage in place between the frame of OPEN BROOD and the frame of nectar, and then SHAKE the adhering bees off 2 BROOD frames from the old colony. Add a bottle of 1:1 sugar syrup and do not touch for at least 3 days and if the queen is out of her queen cage, remove it, and put the 10th frame of drawn comb in place. Going back to the original colony, return the old queen on her frame to the colony and replace the 6 frames you have removed for the split with 6 frames of drawn comb. YOU HAVE A SPLIT!

If you do NOT have drawn comb frames, if you are LUCKY, you might get by using foundation, but there MUST BE A STRONG NECTAR FLOW PRESENT and/or a CONTINUOUS FEED OF 1:1 SUGAR SYRUP to get that foundation drawn and drawn properly. As I have repeatedly said for over 40 years FOUNDATION IS NOT DRAWN COMB.

Making Fondant

2007-02-19T12:43:00.000-05:00

Bring a quart of water to a boil in a medium to large pot. Turn off the heat and add five pounds granulated sugar, stirring constantly. When dissolved, bring water back to a boil and keep stirring. Use a candy thermometer and bring the mixture to 260-270 degrees (hard ball candy state). Do not burn the sugar. Pour the mixture into molds (cookie sheet lined with wax paper works well). When cooled and set, break into convenient-sized pieces and store in freezer, between wax paper sheets until needed (Adapted from Beekeeping, A Practical Guide, by Dick Bonney).

A Larger Recipe:

15 pounds granulated sugar
3 pounds corn syrup
4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
Prepare in the same manner as the smaller recipe only use a larger pot.

Simply place a cake of fondant on the top of the frames closest to the main cluster of bees. A super or a one-inch wooden rim should be put in place to allow room for the fondant and bees. A six-pound cake may last 10-15 days if the colony is large.

Treating for Varroa, Small Hive Beetles & American Foulbrood Disease

2007-02-18T14:50:00.000-05:00

Brian came by to give me a hand on Saturday. We needed to treat against American/European Foulbrood disease, Small Hive Beetles & Varroa Mites. I'm not too concerned about "organic" beekeeping at this time. I'm more worried about protecting my investment and keeping the hives alive & strong. Perhaps as I gain more knowledge & experience I will work my way towards all natural or organic hives. Until then, I will use the recommended chemicals to treat for disease. We installed Apistan & Check-Mite strips for the SHB & Varroa Mites and used Terramycin powder for the AFB. Note in the picture the pollen patty I added last week. They really seem to eat this up fairly quickly. I would guess there's about 30-40% of this patty left. I removed it and discarded what was left because the SHB will lay eggs in the patty and this causes the SHB populations to explode. Overall all 3 hives seem to be thriving. We are expecting the weather to be well in to the 70's by mid-week and I'm hoping this will last for several weeks. I want to split all 3 hives and some warm weather will make this possible.

Brian & I now have a game plan for his future beekeeping. I'm going to place an order for enough equipment for 5 hives. I'll order this from Mann Lake. Once this arrives, I'll do a split to fill 3 of the hives and the other 2 hive we'll use the packaged bees I ordered from Rossman Apiaries. I will still need another package of bees for the Top Bar Hive that I have.

Sting Count:

Chris - 7

Brian - 3

Mystery ailment strikes honeybees

2007-02-11T21:54:00.000-05:00

By GENARO C. ARMAS, Associated Press Writer
Sun Feb 11, 6:12 PM ET

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.

Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.

Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers — who often keep thousands of colonies — have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. A colony can have roughly 20,000 bees in the winter, and up to 60,000 in the summer.

Read the rest of the article: Mystery ailment strikes honeybees

February inspection - getting ready for Spring...

2007-02-11T16:59:00.000-05:00

I did a very thorough inspection of my 3 hives today. I also did a quick inventory of my extra tools, supers, frames, etc...I'm getting ready for the upcoming season!

I found all 3 hives to be in really great shape! I found eggs, larvae & capped brood along with plenty of pollen, nectar & capped honey. I was worried that with the mild temperatures and increased activity in November & December this would have a negative effect on the colonies. So far I have been proven wrong! I did remove the hive top feeders that are used to give supplemental sugar syrup. I also added a 9 5/8" deep hive body to one of the colonies. It was busting at the seems and needed the extra room. I also took this opportunity to add 1 pollen pattie to each colony. This is done to give the hives a "kick-start" and the Queen should start laying pretty heavy. This will allow for a fast Spring population build up. More bees = more honey, right?

You may remember from an October post that I had a 4th hive that "diappeared" on me! I'm going to order (2) 10lb packages of bees w/Queens. One will replace the hive that absconded & the other will be used for my Top Bar Hive.

I've also put together a list of items I will need to order from Mann Lake. I will need to medicate for Varroa mites, tracheal mites, American Foulbrood & Small Hive Beetles. I also need (3) 9 5/8" hive bodies for brood boxes, (30) plastic rite-cell frames & (1) swarm trap.

Sting Count:

Chris - 7
Brian - 3

Astronaut Lisa Nowak

2007-02-07T08:08:00.000-05:00

You can only imagine how stunned I was to hear "Astronaut Lisa Nowak has been arrested in Orlando, Florida....."..blah-blah-blah! The words hung in the air for several moments as I tried to place the name I was certain that I knew. I was assigned to VAQ-34 at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California in the early 90's. Although I don't specifically remember Captain Nowak, I have verified we were attached to the squadron at the same time. I have been following her career closely for several years and have been waiting for her 1st shuttle flight. Oh Well! It looks like her first flight will also be her last.

Other VAQ-34 notables:

U.S. Navy Commander Rosemary Mariner. 1990 - Commander Mariner becomes first woman to command an operational aviation squadron (VAQ-34).
Chuck Palumbo - now a professional wrestler
CW03 Chris Palumbo - Army helicopter pilot awarded a Silver Star. (Chuck Palumbo's brother). Chris was stationed at NAS Lemoore. He was also assigned to an F/A-18 Hornet squadron.

Bee sting treatments buzzing in modern China

2007-01-23T16:15:00.000-05:00

Reuters
Updated: 11:40 a.m. ET Jan 23, 2007

Ancient remedy believed to ease pain, curb diabetes, even cure cancer

BEIJING - With doctors urging amputation to stop the gangrene spreading upwards from his toes, Liu Guorong was skeptical when a friend said bee venom might save his foot.
“I was doubting this place,” the 58-year-old diabetes sufferer said in a raspy voice during a visit to the Xizhihe Traditional Medicine Hospital on the outskirts of Beijing.
“When I got here, I had no idea what I was doing and what the bee sting treatment was all about.”

As Liu found out, it was painful.

Bees were placed on his foot and provoked to sting him in a bid to rejuvenate the blackened, rotting flesh by flooding it with a rush of protein-rich blood.

A folk remedy for treating arthritis, back pain and rheumatism for 3,000 years in China, practitioners say that such pinpointed stings can repair damaged cells, stave off bacteria and ease inflammation.

Doctors at Xizhihe hospital believe they can even cure liver ailments, diabetes and cancers.
They admit, however, that they do not really know how it works.

“Our knowledge has increased over the years,” said Xu Xiaowang, Xizhihe hospital director.
“But there are still large areas that are unknown to us all... There are too many unanswered questions,” Xu said.

Western-trained doctors dismiss the treatment as unscientific and dangerous.
“It’s alternative medicine and has no basis in western medical science... I would doubt its efficacy,” Professor Christopher Lam, a chemical pathologist at the Chinese University in Hong Kong said.

“People allergic to bee stings can develop hypersensitivity reactions like a sudden drop in blood pressure, swelling of the airways, cold sweats... it may be life threatening,” Lam said.
Hazy science notwithstanding, at 20 yuan (about $2.50) a sting, the treatment offers a cheap alternative to mainstream medicine.

“Doctors at other hospitals were telling me that they needed to cut my foot off,” Liu said. “I’d spent loads of money.”

Liu has been to Xizhihe several times to get stung and is now on a course of orally-taken bee venom medication. He now expects to keep his foot.

“The flesh is growing back ... I’m feeling better,” Liu said.

Dying traditionBee venom is just one of an exhaustive catalogue of ancient folk remedies involving bugs, herbs, animal parts and massage that make up traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

Incorporating elements of mysticism and based on a philosophy developed several thousand years ago, TCM is regarded as an alternative medicine in the West, but in China it remains a central plank of modern health care.

About 3,000 private clinics provided TCM treatments to more than 230 million people in 2005. Health officials say it generated 95 billion yuan that year -- more than a quarter of the medical industry’s total income — and revenues have grown an average 20 percent a year over the past decade.

The government, sensing an export-driven cash cow, ploughed 740 million yuan into research and development last year in a bid to bolster TCM’s scientific credistinbility and standing in Western markets where alternative remedies are increasingly welcomed.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16751949/wid/11915773?GT1=8921

Happy New Year!!!

2007-01-06T14:46:00.000-05:00

Lots of hive activity today! The temperature is about 68 degrees here in the Atlanta area and there's a lot of traffic in/out of all 3 hives. I'm still amazed at the amount of pollen that is being gathered. The pollen sacs on the bees are absolutely packed full!

The hives are thriving and they have plenty of food stores left. I look forward to the beginning of February when the Queen should start laying eggs to increase the population. I still anticipate adding a pollen patty to each hive to assist in getting the population to increase.

December Update

2006-12-27T12:43:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting! So far the Winter in Georgia has been relatively warm and uneventful. I've done some supplemental feeding with 2:1 sugar water. I did this because the hives felt light when I lifted them & it also gives me a little piece of mind. The upcoming season is rapidly approaching. Sometime in late January or early February I will give the hives a kick start by adding some pollen patties to encourage the Queen to begin laying. I may also feed some 1:1 sugar water. I expect to successfully over winter all 3 hives and am looking forward to watching the hive populations explode this Spring. I have extra hive bodies and honey supers ready to go when they are needed. I have decided to use the 9 5/8" deep hives for the 2nd brood box. This will ensure they have enough room to expand. I travel a lot for work and am skeptical about using the medium supers for the brood chamber. The last thing I want is to lose most of the population to a swarm.

I have been surprised by the amount of traffic most days. As I previously stated the Winter hasn't been too cold and most days warm up enough for the bees to break cluster and fly. I was surprised to see that a lot of pollen is being gathered. Most returning foragers are loaded with pollen. I wonder what the source of this pollen is?

Hive Activity

2006-10-26T14:03:00.000-05:00

I was outside today preparing 8lbs. of boiled peanuts for Saturday's UGA vs. Florida football game and noticed a lot of activity around all 3 hives. The last few nights have been near freezing and the daytime high has only been in the upper 50's. I presume the warm weather today has a lot to do with the amount of activity I'm seeing. Click on the picture for full-size.

ALMOND POLLINATION - 2006 and Beyond

2006-10-22T12:30:00.000-05:00

from November 2005 BEE CULTURE (pp.39,40)
by Joe Traynor

With the bee shortage of 2005 receding into the past, both almond growers and beekeepers are curious as to what the 2006 season will bring. 2006 pollination prices have doubled over 2005 and are in the $100 to $150 range (the highest prices for the strongest colonies). The two entities that drive the stock market, fear and greed, are also in play for almond pollination: fear (of going without bees) on the part of almond growers, and greed on the part of a few beekeepers who feel they are entitled to a $150 rental fee for substandard bee colonies. Beekeepers can also experience fear - of theft, of excessive winter losses, of growers not paying their almond pollination bills.

The driving force behind 2006 pollination prices is the unprecedented high prices for almonds - $3 to $4 a pound vs. $1/lb a few years ago. Growers don't mind paying high prices for bees if they know they are dealing with a reputable supplier that delivers a quality product.

There will be only a modest in bearing almond acreage in 2006, perhaps 20,000 more acres than in 2005; the real crunch for bees will come in a few years when bearing almond acreage hits 730,000 acres (vs. 550,000 today). Growers are looking to lock in long-term relationships with bee suppliers and are actively courting beekeepers; beekeepers are in the heady position of being able to pick and choose among anxious suitors (a position that can lead to a temporary "Master of the Universe" syndrome if one is not careful). What happens when almond prices drop back to $1/lb, as many expect they will, is anybody's guess.

If you've never brought bees to almonds before, you need to do some serious homework, just as the most successful pioneers that settled the early west were the ones that did sufficient homework before embarking on the trek. Good contacts are invaluable in this regard. Talk with beekeepers that have made the journey. Have a thorough knowledge of whom you're dealing with, whether it be a broker, a grower or another beekeeper that is placing your bees. Know that the most desirable almond locations are taken first and your truck may wind up in a muddy orchard or be forced to spend a day or more scattering bees to 10 different orchards 10 miles apart. Know the specific orchard where you will be taking your bees. Dealing with good people can mean the difference between a happy or a dismal experience. If you're dealing with strangers, ask for references and follow up on these references.

If you live outside of California, getting a reliable trucker is a key to being successful in almonds. Her again, it pays to do some diligent homework. Ask for recommendations from other beekeepers - you don't want your trucker taking a 4 hour break in Las Vegas on a warm afternoon. Get someone experienced in hauling bees and line up trucks well ahead of time. Give your trucker exact pickup dates and make sure he meets those dates even if it means multiple phone calls.

If you're from a southern state, make sure your equipment is free of Red Imported Fire Ants (RIFA) and arrange for an RIFA inspection certificate from your home state (current RIFA rules require an inspection certificate from the state of origin). Your load will also be thoroughly inspected at the CA border and if more than five ants are found (up from zero ants in 2005) your load will be turned back (an expensive one-time clean-up at the border and another go at crossing is an option). In order to pass border inspections, most beekeepers transfer bees to new or steam-cleaned pallets and pre-treat the ground in their holding yards with pesticides. Loads can also be rejected for weed seeds. Any debris of any kind on hives or pallets will trigger a meticulous inspection of your load at the border. Know the exact location where your bees will wind up in California (you will be asked this at the border). Make every effort to arrive in CA on a week day so that county inspectors are more available to check the load on arrival. For the latest RIFA (and small-hive-beetle) regulations, call (916)653-1440.

It is difficult for many beekeepers in eastern states to work up enthusiasm for almond pollination since most got into beekeeping for the life style and to make honey, not to put their livelihood on a truck and ship it to California (that crazy left coast). Some are looking to sell their bee operations rather than submit to a new life style.

There is long-term optimism for higher honey prices as developing countries, particularly China and India become more affluent and become major buyers of U.S. honey. If every person in China put a teaspoon of honey in their tea every day, U.S. beekeepers would be hard-pressed to meet the demand. With both India and China producing 10 times as many scientists as the U.S., it is likely that by 2040 China will surpass the U.S. as a world power, esp. if the anti-science bias of our current administration continues. South Korea (South Korea!) already surpasses the U.S. in cloning success. According to Dr. R.E. Smalley, Nobel Prize winning scientist from Rice University by 2010, 90 percent of all Ph.D. physical scientists and engineers in the world will be Asian living in Asia (Imprimis February 2005).

The best and brightest of our young people are looking to become lawyers rather than scientists (or beekeepers - and many beekeepers, whether they know it or not, are also scientists) because that is where the money is (and the accumulation of money is deemed to be a virtue in a capitalistic society). No other country comes remotely close to the U.S. in the number of lawyers per capita. Our bright young (and old) lawyers have a negative effect on the gross national product of our country. What a waste - and what a drag on the long-term prosperity of America.

But never mind. Looking at the world 30 years from now, U.S. beekeepers, although considered 2nd class citizens compared to the average Chinese, should fare well in the new world order. They should find a ready market in a prosperous China as millions of affluent Chinese peruse their (China-owned) Wall Street Journal while they sip their morning tea sweetened with premium U.S. honey. What a role reversal!

Getting back to almond pollination, the current situation offers new opportunities for individuals with beekeeping experience:

Supplying bulk bees - with 3 lbs of Aussie bees (+ queen) going for $100 an enterprising beekeeper in Alabama is offering 3# package bees (sans queen) for $45 to be delivered to CA just prior to almond bloom in order to boost up weak colonies.Why ship all that wood to California when you can just ship the bees?

California managers - Many out-of-state beekeepers would like to ship their bees to California but don't want to go with them. They are looking for a reliable person in California to care for their bees in the winter (if they winter in California) and to deliver the bees to almond orchards at bloom time.

Winter location scouting - with winter holding yards in California becoming increasingly scarce, a California based person could develop a good business securing yards and renting them to out-of-state beekeepers.

Colony strength inspectors - High pollination fees are causing almond growers to look more closely at what they are getting. A person should do quite well in a short period of time by offering an independent inspection program to growers.

Will there be a shortage of bee colonies in 2006? It depends on how you define "bee colony." There has been a shortage of strong bee colonies (defined as 8 or more frames of bees) each and every year since almonds were first planted in California 100 years ago; 2006 will be no different if two strong colonies per acre is the accepted standard. There will likely be the requisite number of bee boxes to cover CA's 570,000 bearing acres in 2006 but the content of these boxes won't be known until almond bloom commences in early February. If almond growers are satisfied with two 3# packages per acre as some were in 2005, we will see an influx of packages from Australia to make up any shortfalls. Florida bees will likely be used to cover any last-minute spot shortages as they were so used in 2005.

Whether there will be sufficient bees to pollinate 730,000 acres of almonds in 2010 is a question without an answer at this time. One solution would be to supply the same number of bees now being supplied but in fewer containers (boxes). One strong colony per acre will do the work of 3 or 4 weak colonies and should be sufficient. Two colonies per acre is the accepted standard for almonds and it is difficult to persuade growers to use less, no matter how strong the colonies are. If almond growers are satisfied with two 3# packages of Aussie bees, as some were in 2005, why wouldn't they be happy with one 10-frame colony per acre?

The solution to the upcoming bee shortage will not come from the bee industry, but from developing March-blooming almond orchards so that bees can be transferred to these orchards when February bloom is completed. Genetic material is available for March-blooming almonds. Perhaps South Korea can be prevailed upon to use their cloning expertise to make March-blooming almonds a reality.

TOP 10 SIGNS TO RETIRE FROM BEEEKEEPING

2006-10-22T12:28:00.000-05:00

From Dec. 1995 and March 1996 beekeeper newsletters.

10.
Your friends think you look better with your veil on.

9.
You take off your hat in a restaurant and someone throws a dollar in it.

8.
You're heading back to Montana after the almonds and see a sign saying "Welcome to Phoenix".

7.
You put a little Bee-Go behind your ears before heading out for a night on the town.

6.
The Mayo clinic requests permission to use you as an example of the cumulative effect of bee stings.

5.
You find your coveralls stuck to the seat at the local cafe and are forced to leave them behind.

4.
A biker asks directions to the nearest restaurant and you perform a short waggle dance. He punches your lights out.

3.
You wear an Apistan strip around your neck to formal events.

2.
You're asked to give a talk at a local school and you give an hour demonstration on frying varroa with a magnifying glass.

1.
Your wife kicks you out of the house in the fall and doesn't let you back in until spring.

New York City Honey

2006-10-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

David Graves is the owner of Berkshire Berries and markets New York City Honey.

You can purchase it here:

New York City Honey

Honeybees Thrive in New York City

2006-10-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

By JIM FITZGERALD
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Bears are nonexistent. Skunks are rare. Rats, pigeons and humans, though plentiful, are reluctant to approach.
New York City, it turns out, is a great place to be a bee.

``They do really well here,'' says David Graves, who has hundreds of thousands of honeybees in seven hives in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. ``There are so many parks and gardens and rooftop flowerpots. Even if it's dry, they can get the water they need from the East River.''

Read the entire article here:

Honeybees Thrive in New York City

Ready for 'Ole Man Winter

2006-10-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

I did a very thorough inspection in all 3 hives today and I'm very pleased with the overall condition of each hive. It would appear the 2:1 sugar syrup I've been feeding with the hive top feeders has really paid off. All hives are about 85% honey bound. I've very optimistic about the chances for surviving the Winter. There are a fair amount of eggs, larvae & capped brood in each hive, so I know the hives are all Queen right.

The weather has been cool, wet & humid over the past few days. I've noticed since installing the hive top feeders a lot of condensation is accumulating on the underside of the inner cover. Propping the outer cover up with a stick or rock would reduce the moisture level of the hives but also allows direct access to the syrup and the bees could drown. I used some mesh screen to cover the hole in the inner cover. Here's a picture of the modification to the inner cover. I can now prop open the outer covers and I don't have to worry about losing bees to drowning. This will allow the hives to ventilate and reduce the moisture content.

I also added a couple gallons of syrup to each hive top feeder after my inspection today. I doubt they will take it all and I anticipate this being the last time I feed them for awhile. I also noticed the population of the small hive beetles has drastically been reduced. Finally...I've got the upper hand over these little *&%#$@ ! ! !

Since these hives are elevated, I'm not too concerned with mice or other critters. To be on the safe side I have installed wire mesh in the entrance to reduce the chances of any un-invited house guests.

Life-Giving Secret of Bees

2006-10-18T20:00:00.000-05:00

Honeybees produce a substance that kills HIV. But what's killing the honeybees?

by Jeannine Ouellette, Photographs by Scott Streble - September 2005

The long, pointed whisker stands out sharply from the undulating mass of curious bees beneath the Plexiglas. Next emerges a lonely ear. And finally the whole, unmistakable outline of the tiny skull: a common field mouse. It is completely lacquered in something dark, sticky, and resinous. Just three days earlier, this little skull—not much bigger than a quarter—rested in the rather undignified open-air coffin of a petri dish atop the desk of Marla Spivak, a University of Minnesota entomologist and a national leader in honeybee research. Spivak—trim, suntanned, short-haired, and outdoorsy in a way more revealing of her work in the hives than in the hallowed halls—discovered the mummified skull in one of her bee colonies on the St. Paul campus about a year ago. She fished it out for a closer look.

An experienced beekeeper would recognize right away what had happened: A mouse had gotten into the hive, and it was killed. But rather than letting the intruder fester and breed bacteria and potential disease, the bees covered the corpse with something called propolis.

Propolis, or bee glue, is resin that bees collect from the leaf buds and bark of some trees. Though relatively unfamiliar in the United States in all but a handful of co-op grocery stores, apothecaries, and health-food shops, it has been used in folk medicine since antiquity. Propolis has long been credited with healing powers by people throughout Eastern Europe and parts of South America, where it is widely used for a host of minor health and skin ailments. In those areas, propolis products are as commonly available as are echinacea and chamomile in the United States.

But the mouse mummy captured Spivak’s imagination. “It was just so weird, I couldn’t stand to get rid of it,” she told me. So this bizarrely hygienic partial cadaver remained, perfectly preserved, through five seasons in Spivak’s Hodson Hall office. There, it bore distant and unlikely witness to the thrilling frenzy that ensued when, over the course of last year, an interdisciplinary team of university researchers, working with Dr. Phil Peterson of the medical school, synthesized and wrote up their remarkably promising findings from dozens of lab trials testing propolis against HIV. “Actually, it all started about five years ago,” said Spivak, “when Dr. Genya Gekker, who was working with Phil Peterson on lab trials with various substances against HIV, came down with a cold.”

Gekker, originally from Lvov in the Ukraine, grew up using propolis to fend off life’s bothersome viral miseries. And she might have picked up a propolis-based remedy from the Wedge, or from Present Moment Books and Herbs in South Minneapolis. But instead, she went to the Minneapolis farmers’ market looking for raw propolis. There, she visited Bob Dressen, owner of Cannon Bee Honey and Supply, who was selling his wares, including propolis.

“For several years we would have requests for propolis from Russian immigrants,” Dressen told me. “Finally, I brought some to the market packed in two-ounce plastic bags and I thought, Now I’m ready for them.” Dressen says he doesn’t normally have raw propolis on the display table. “We do have capsules displayed and ready for sale, but the raw propolis isn’t that appealing. We do sell it when it is asked for. The raw propolis I sell comes off of the hives’ bottom boards, which I clean in the spring. Other propolis I gather is from the scrapings of hive bodies, and this is sent to processors to be made into other propolis products like chewing gum and toothpaste.

”With a little alcohol, Gekker extracted a tincture from Dressen’s raw propolis, and began treating her cold. And that’s when the unbidden thought struck: We’ve never tried propolis on HIV. Gekker set up the trial, and it worked. Propolis killed HIV.

“The testing went on for about three years. It was difficult work,” said Phil Peterson, who heads the university’s Division of Infections Diseases and International Medicine, and co-directs the Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research. As a clinical investigator, Peterson has been especially interested in infections of the brain. “And HIV attacks the microglia of the brain—that’s where the virus grows when it gets in the brain cells. Its other main targets are T-lymphocytes, specialized white blood cells that effect immunity. And we found, lo and behold, that when you put this propolis in a cell culture system, it has potent activity against the virus in both microglia and T-lymphocyte cell cultures.”

Spivak supplied the propolis samples for the many lab trials that followed Gekker’s first serendipitous test. Every propolis sample the team tried (sourced from three sites in Minnesota, three in Brazil, and one in China) killed HIV in lab cultures. Even better, the propolis also appeared to at least partially inhibit HIV’s ability to enter cells—an elusive and sought after property in potential HIV treatments.

Perhaps best of all, propolis is a cheap, natural substance. “We know that of the forty million or so people affected by this virus, ninety percent of them are living in the developing world, where they can’t afford retroviral drugs at ten thousand dollars a year,” said Peterson. “Propolis, by comparison, is available for pennies. And it’s been used with relative safety for medicinal purposes for five thousand years, since Biblical times at least, all over the earth. We know it has activity against many bacteria, fungi, viruses—it’s a warehouse of antimicrobial activity. Because of propolis, a beehive is one of the most sterile places on earth. I have much greater respect for bees than I ever did,” he said. “They’re very clever beasts.”

Gekker and Peterson, with some input from Spivak, wrote up the results of the HIV-propolis study last year, and it will be published this fall in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. But a propolis-based HIV therapy is a long way down a steep and twisting road. Cheap and natural propolis from the co-op cooler is more like a prototype, or a proof of concept. Science needs more detailed evidence.

“There are major obstacles,” said Peterson. “Propolis is very potent in regard to its anti-HIV activity, but would I recommend that people take it for HIV? No. Because you have to see that it works in humans. You have to see whether, when taken orally, it’s absorbed and works against the virus in a live person. And in order to do that, you have to address safety, and this batch-to-batch issue. With the FDA, batch variability is not going to be tolerated. Think of the challenge with propolis, when the bees collect it from all these different trees. There are at least three hundred compounds in propolis, and maybe as many as a thousand. So we haven’t really pursued it, because we’re not set up to identify the needle in the haystack.”

Peterson was referring to the arduous process of identifying and isolating the active HIV-inhibiting component or components in propolis. “Right now, we don’t have the right people to pursue it. I’m not a separation chemist or a medicinal chemist. Over in the school of agriculture they have a lot of terrific scientists, but no one with the particular skills we need for this task. You could say the project is on hold. We’re in a position right now where we’re trying to figure out the best strategy to take.”

With any luck, the journal article will spur some fresh excitement. “My hunch is that other people are going to take an interest. Certainly there’s been work with propolis itself, looking at the various aspects of it, especially in the field of ethnopharmacology. But I’m sitting here in the Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research, and, as the name implies, our goal is to translate this stuff into the humans who suffer these diseases. Our mandate is to pursue answers to the questions.”

At the current pace, it will be years before someone who is HIV-positive might walk into the pharmacy and fill a prescription for a new drug based on this team’s pioneering propolis research—if it gets that far at all.

Meanwhile, as the gears of medical research grind laboriously onward, Spivak is turning her attention back to the source—the bees. She’s focusing on the function of propolis in the colony. What exactly is this mysterious substance, anyway? How does a bee locate a source of propolis? How does that bee recruit other bees in the colony to collect more of it? If it can kill HIV in human cells, what good might it do for the bees themselves? Such questions take on considerable weight in light of the well-publicized scourges that have afflicted U.S. honeybees for the last several decades. Few people realize that our honeybee population has dropped by half since 1950. Lately, it’s the Varroa mite—a vicious beast about the size of a grain of sand—that’s been wreaking havoc on commercial beekeepers’ stock. In the past few years, these mites have gained resistance to the only two effective conventional chemical treatments. Spivak estimated that losses in the winter and spring of 2005 slashed the number of honeybees in Minnesota by up to a third.

The national picture is similarly dismal, and “dismal” is not too strong a word considering that honeybees are responsible for the pollination of about one-third of all U.S. food crops. The main thrust of Spivak’s work is to preserve the honeybee population by breeding honeybees that can fend for themselves. “I think it’s sad that these bees have become so utterly dependent on humans to administer various forms of chemical management.,” she said. “They’ve lost the skills they need to fight for their own survival.” Since 1993, Spivak and her assistant, Gary Reuter, have been painstakingly breeding queen bees to propagate a new strain of bees with the genetic instincts to protect themselves. They carefully select and breed queens who demonstrate the “hygienic” genetic traits that will promote survival. It’s simpler than it sounds. Basically, a bee with the right hygienic tendencies will literally sniff out and eradicate (by eating or hauling out of the hive) diseased and mite-infested brood in larval cells before the colony suffers major damage. Spivak’s program is no quick fix—but over time, her specially bred bees have been proving their merit in a variety of working apiaries.

Now Spivak wonders if or how propolis might be used to further her honeybee cause. Could manipulating propolis somehow help fight deadly bee infections and parasites? Spivak finds early signs encouraging, especially when checking into variations in propolis from other hives. For instance, she found that one tropical propolis sample was as effective as a conventional antibiotic in lab trials against American foulbrood (the most dreaded bee disease of all, until Varroa mites were inadvertently introduced into the U.S. in 1987). “Our local propolis didn’t work,” Spivak said, booting up the computer in her cool, cinder-block Hodson Hall office. “But this tropical stuff did. Here, this is the tropical sample next to the antibiotic.” On the monitor are images of two petri dishes, each with an essentially clear circle surrounded by dots of defeated bacteria; the tropical propolis attacked the bacteria as aggressively as the chemical pharmaceutical.

Would propolis exist if not for bees? Scientists aren’t sure. That’s because it’s not clear whether propolis is unadulterated resin simply collected and stored by bees, or whether the bees somehow transform it—perhaps via glandular secretions—during or after the gathering process. “We have so many questions,” said Spivak. “We know the bees use propolis to seal cracks in the hives, and for other purposes—like embalming invaders—but there’s a lot we don’t understand. And it’s challenging, because propolis is not like nectar or pollen, which the bees are collecting all the time. Propolis is different. They don’t collect very much of it, and not all of them are that interested in it.” She sighed.

“This is behavioral research. If you want to observe bee behavior with propolis, then you have to induce them to collect it repeatedly and reliably to get sufficient data, right? And how do you do that?” Spivak explained that the matter of observing propolis collection for behavioral research is entirely different from collecting propolis for human health studies. To collect clean, pure propolis for human use, commercial plastic traps are used in full-size colonies. But these traps simply don’t work well in small observation hives. “That’s the question I was wrestling with when a visiting beekeeper from Mexico said, ‘Put a cadaver in the hive. The bees will embalm it in propolis.’ Of course! I thought immediately of my mouse skull, which was already embalmed, but I thought, ‘Why not? Maybe they’ll keep working on it.’ ” Spivak asked a graduate student to return the mouse skull to an observation hive on a scorching Thursday morning in late July, just as she finalized her presentations and loaded her car for the drive to the summer meeting of the Minnesota Honey Producers Association in Fergus Falls.

Three days later, on a sweltering Sunday morning, Spivak was back at the bee lab, checking to see how the bees were reacting to Thursday’s uninvited guest. Specifically, she wanted to see if they were adding more propolis. This colony lives in a hive inside an observation shed near the bee lab on the U of M’s St. Paul campus. Spivak and I crowded together into the shed—about the size of an outhouse but blessedly air-conditioned—looking for the skull. A few bees zigzagged around us. “Don’t worry about them,” she said, pressing in to get a closer look inside the colony. Suddenly she pointed. “There it is. That’s the whisker, right up there.” Her finger rested on the upper left corner of the Plexiglas plate. “Hey, look, they’re really interested in this guy,” she said. The bees appeared to be concerned about the mummified mouse head—which was at first hard to see amid the bees, but which became obvious once Spivak identified the resin-coated whisker. Several worker bees crawl over and around the skull again and again. “I don’t think they like it,” said Spivak. “Hey, wow, look at that!” She pointed again. “They’ve added more propolis to the ear. And look here: The whole bottom part is attached now to the frame. It’s stuck down with propolis.

“Well, that’s cool,” she said, laughing. “That’s very cool.”

Chances are, if you see a honeybee in your garden today, it’s because some beekeeper within a mile of your home is keeping that bee alive with chemicals. The once-thriving feral bee population in the United States was composed entirely of descendents of the first honeybees—the ones that went native after escaping from hives hauled over by colonists in the 1600s. But feral bees were pretty much wiped out in the 1990s by Varroa mites. “There essentially are no feral honeybees left in the United States,” said Spivak. “There’s some talk of a comeback, but it’s hard to know where that will go.”

When it first arrived, the docile European honeybee, Apis mellifera, adapted well and thrived in North America. Escaped swarms took off as far as the Great Plains, often outpacing colonists on the trek westward. Feral honeybees couldn’t cross the Rockies, but by the 1850s they were shipped into California. So ubiquitous was the honeybee that the Native Americans called it “the white man’s fly.” Many of the farm crops that now depend on honeybees for pollination have also been imported since colonial times. Today, pollinating insects are responsible for every third bite of the food we commonly eat—including apples, blueberries, broccoli, cauliflower, cherries, cucumbers, melons, pears, pumpkins, soybeans, squash, and cranberries. Indirectly, pollinators affect the dairy industry, too, since alfalfa and clover—both insect-pollinated—are important components of dairy cattle feed.

Insect pollination begins, as does most of life, with hunger. As the bees forage among flowers, gathering food in the form of nectar and pollen, they spread the pollen (which, like propolis, they carry on their back legs) from one flower to another, thus promoting cross-pollination and increasing production of fruit and seed.

Maybe early colonial beekeepers recognized and appreciated the good luck of this inadvertent pollination all along, or maybe they didn’t, but at some point, people caught on and started placing beehives purposefully in fruit orchards and gardens. From there, the management of honeybees slowly evolved to what it is today: a specialized commercial activity that still produces most of its revenue through honey sales—worth an estimated 250 million dollars annually—but deriving an increasing proportion of income from contracted pollination services.

As the general bee population declines, pollination services may face even greater demands, especially in California, where hundreds of thousands of acres of almond trees greatly depend on honeybees for pollination. All this pollination means a lot of bee migration, which is actually nothing new. The earliest beekeepers in ancient Egypt followed the blooming flowers by floating their clay-covered wicker hives down the Nile on reed boats. (They also used propolis to embalm the bodies of the pharaohs, a trick they presumably learned from the bees.) In the U.S., many beekeepers migrate their bees—and frequently their families—thousands of miles across several large-scale migration routes in pursuit of both nectar and pollination work.

The coordination of beekeepers, farmers, and consumers through pollination, crop management, and honey sales is no less strange and complex than the bee dance itself, and it offers a fascinating glimpse into the delicate partnership between biological science and market process.

To a common city slicker, Sundberg Apiaries looks just like any other farm. There’s a house, some fields and outbuildings, a swampy undeveloped area, and a large pole shed with a few semitrailers parked beside it. There is also a patch of lawn with an impressive collection of antique cars. You wouldn’t guess it was a bee farm by driving by, unless you slowed down to read the faded blue metal sign hanging from a slender post on the roadside.

Situated in Fergus Falls, three hours northwest of the Twin Cities on Interstate 94, Sundberg is a large commercial beekeeping business, managing seven thousand hives. The main honey house is across the road from an expansive cornfield. In the third week of July, these wind-pollinated cornstalks stand high and shimmer in the heat, providing a picturesque backdrop for the bumper-to-bumper cars and pickups flanking Sundberg’s long dirt driveway.

Tonight is the barbecue social for the hundred or so members of the Minnesota Honey Producers Association who are gathered in Fergus Falls for their three-day summer convention. Twice each year, this group comes together so members can connect with others involved in this unusual work. Formal presentations are held in town at the Best Western, where throughout the convention Spivak has been networking with the beekeepers who’ll attend her slide-show presentation tomorrow morning. The association donates ten to twelve thousand dollars annually to Spivak’s research program. Spivak, in turn, donates twenty inseminated “Minnesota hygienic” queens from her breeding program to the association. Spivak’s queens, with their desirable genetic traits, have the influence to change behavior in the hive. On the open market, they’d sell for two hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Here at the convention, they are auctioned off for cash, which is funneled straight back into association’s general funds. Eventually, it funnels out again in the form of the association’s annual grant toward Spivak’s research. In essence, Spivak’s queens are given freely to the beekeepers in return for the financial support the university has received from the Minnesota Honey Producers for decades. “I started donating the queens in 1997,” Spivak said, “when the beekeepers asked what they were getting for their research dollars. Somehow, I knew the right answer wasn’t ‘research.’ ”

But donating the queens also furthers Spivak’s work, since it enables her to propagate and monitor her selectively bred bees in working apiaries. Generally, that has gone well. Dave Ellingson and Darrel Rufer are two outspoken beekeepers who’ve been working with Spivak’s bees for years. Neither Ellingson nor Rufer suffered large-scale losses during this last devastating spring season. “It’s been mostly good,” said Spivak about her queens in the commercial apiaries, “though not always. There have been some disasters.” That kind of straight talk has, after twelve years, earned Spivak the beekeepers’ respect. “It’s taken time,” she admitted. “They weren’t sure at first that I could do this.”

Spivak says the afternoon’s roundtable discussion on pollination at the Best Western was especially good. But after this year’s tough hits, there’s a certain din of commiseration in the buffet line as the beekeepers inch up to the Elmer’s Texas Bar-B-Q and au gratin potatoes. Spivak lets the rush die down while she guides me through the Sundberg honey house for an abbreviated tutorial on the extraction process.

Everything here is a little sticky. Evenly spaced along the inner wall of the large room are vintage posters splattered with countless years’ worth of all things bee. Faint line drawings of various beekeeping tasks are explained in brief captions such as “Weighing packaged bees for shipping and shaking swarm into hive.”

“Wow,” said one beekeeper passing through Sundberg’s extraction room with a cold beer. “This equipment is getting ancient.” What would a more modern system look like? “Basically the same, just newer,” said Spivak. Both the process and the equipment used for honey extraction are remarkably simple, and largely unchanged since the first wave of mechanization. In simple terms, the frames of honeycomb are freed of their wax seals, then loaded into a cylindrical chamber and spun at high speeds until the honey is extracted by centrifugal force. The honeycomb remains intact for reuse in the hives, and the extracted honey is sold to commercial food producers across the country for use in cereals, baked goods, barbecue sauces, and, of course, jarred honey. At one time, all honey was packed by the same beekeepers who produced it. But in the years since World War II, specialization has set in, and most bee farms no longer package their own honey. Darrel Rufer’s bee business experimented with packaging in the eighties, and, as he put it, “That just wasn’t my deal.”

“Darrel is a character,” Spivak confided. “He’s colorful and outspoken. That’s why I like to have him using the hygienic bees in his apiaries. If he thinks it’s working, he’s going to spread the word and he’s going to be heard.” Broad and darkly tanned with gray hair and a mustache, Rufer was dressed in a leather vest thickly decorated with Victory Bikes insignias. His father kept bees not far from Fergus Falls, in Tintah, Minnesota. “The best bee country in the world used to be right here, in the Red River Valley,” he told me. Once carpeted with clover and alfalfa, Rufer’s childhood stomping grounds are now heavily planted with other crops—corn, soybeans, barley, and potatoes—meaning less clover and less bee pasture. These days, his main focus is not honey or pollination, but selling bees to other apiaries. “We sell queens all over the country,” he said. “They’re daughters of Dr. Spivak’s artificially inseminated queens, and they have the traits we’re looking for. Dr. Spivak and I have been testing her stock in my apiaries for three years now. The goal is to use less chemicals, softer chemicals.” He stopped short and looked toward the horizon. “Beekeeping,” he concluded, “was a lot easier in the past.”

So it was. And as a result, beekeeping as a way of life has dropped off substantially since the 1950s. At first, the shift was fueled by the transition to an industrial economy and the loss of land to subdivisions and highways. But in recent years, price competition from imports teamed up with the spread of disease and parasites in a double whammy that’s driving a lot of U.S. beekeepers out of business. Between 1976 and 1990, the estimated number of commercial beekeepers in the U.S. dropped by almost half, from 212,000 to 125,000. And things have only gone downhill from there.

Bonnie Woodworth, a petite blond woman with a perfect manicure, presides over the North Dakota Beekeeper Association. Bonnie married into beekeeping in 1972, and since then she’s seen all manner of unbelievable change in the bee business. “It used to be so easy,” she said. “You had feed, labor, and trucking. Now we spend more on medication than on feed. Just keeping your bees alive is an insurmountable task. If you let your guard down for one minute, something will take you out.” Bonnie has watched the number of new beekeepers entering the field dwindle and disappear. “It’s too hard a life, it’s back-breaking work, and then there’s the moving back and forth . . . as far as the money, well, there is none. It’s just not there.”

Woodworth said the bee business she owns with her husband practically went broke last year due to Varroa.” We lost more than half our bees and had a bad honey crop,” she said. “It was disastrous, just disastrous.” Furthermore, Bonnie is truly saddened by the onslaught of imports and imitations sidling up next to the real honey on grocery shelves. “It’s threatening the whole industry,” she said, handing me an article on the imitations. “It’s so fraudulent. Everyone loves using the name ‘honey,’ but the actual ingredient is corn syrup instead. Do Honey Nut Cheerios have any honey in them? Very little.”

With her very next breath, Bonnie renewed her pluck as if, by sheer force of will, she might reinvigorate an entire dying way of life. “Beekeepers are tough,” she said. “Life hasn’t been easy, but it was never boring. It takes a lot to get a beekeeper to quit.”That’s true. Beekeepers, not surprisingly, tend to maintain a certain “getting stung’s just part of the job” mentality. But is there an eventual breaking point? What would happen to the honey market, to the pollination of crops, to the propolis research—what would happen to it all if the last of the beekeepers quit tomorrow, and the colonies all flew free?

“About eighty percent of the current bee population would die off fairly quickly,” said Spivak, “if beekeepers stopped chemical treatments cold turkey. But the survivors—those ten or twenty percent left behind—would propagate a whole new, tougher breed of bees with the traits they need to take care of themselves.”

Essentially, that’s what happened in Brazil and most of South America when Varroa struck, primarily because the beekeepers there couldn’t afford chemical interventions. “Now their bees are resistant,” said Spivak as she rummaged through the bee suits, searching for one my size. She handed me a wide-brimmed, veiled hat. “Let’s adjust that,” she said. “I think it’s a bit loose.” She snugs it in a notch and we’re set to visit the hives. “You won’t be able to write with the gloves,” she warned. “But you need to take them anyway, because it’s really important that you’re comfortable. Just don’t put them on unless you need to.”

The sun was white hot in a clear sky as we entered the apiary through the chain-link gates that enclose it. A few paces away was the university’s soccer practice field, which explained the number of cars parked along the apiary fence. “They have no idea what’s sitting right here,” said Spivak. “Few people do. But we like it that way.”

Spivak has a smoker (it looks like the Tin Man’s oil can) to calm the bees before she opens up hives—which are actually wooden boxes painted in pastel pink, blue, green, yellow, and white to help the color-driven bees find their way back home. “We probably wouldn’t really need the smoke,” Spivak said, and I wonder aloud whether this is because the bees are in a good mood today. “These bees are always in a good mood,” she said. This morning she was checking in on some artificially inseminated queens she recently introduced to her colonies, and some from stock sent by a friend in Vermont. “He doesn’t use any chemicals, not to be organic per se, but for his own reasons. He’s sort of an oddity.” She fished around on the frame with her bare hands, oblivious to the bees crawling between her fingers. “There she is—see, she’s marked. Blue 51,” Spivak said, releasing the inseminated queen with the blue numbered tag on her back from her containment cell. “Come on, sweetie,” she cooed. “She looks great. I can tell the bees like her. She’s looking for something to eat right away, so she’s fine.”

In one colony after the next, Spivak checked on the queens. “Blue 52 is doing well,” she said. In fact, all but one of the queens had been accepted by the workers. “Uh oh,” she said, sifting through another colony. “That’s a shame. I don’t see any eggs. I don’t think she’s here. We’ll have to go to the queen bank and make a withdrawal.” All around us, bees were flying and buzzing. One landed on the veil right in front of my eye, and stayed there for a good while. When Spivak shook the frames, there was an angry roar to which she was seemingly oblivious. Getting stung, she said, is a given. But it’s not as bad when you’re used to it, because you know exactly how much it’s going to hurt, and for how long.

This must be true, or people wouldn’t keep bees. There are many reasons beekeeping is in decline, but stings are not one of them. “Oh, I know they say beekeeping is a dying art,” said Spivak, “and times are tough. But I’ll tell you what I think. Beekeeping will never disappear, for one simple reason: Some people are drawn to bees. There’s this peculiar relationship that exists between bees and certain individuals. It’s primal and ancient. There are rock paintings of the interaction between humans and bees in Europe, Africa, and Asia from 8000 to 2000 B.C. That’s how far back this goes. What’s the likelihood that’s going to change—now or ever?”

Spivak has seen all she needs to out here; the heat is too thick for dawdling. But she’ll be back soon. She is, after all, pulled by the bees, with whom she undoubtedly shares the enigmatic bond she so passionately describes.

Original article here:
Life-Giving Secret of Bees

The Bee Queen

2006-10-18T19:55:00.000-05:00

By Robyn Dochterman

Sunny weather puts honeybees in a good mood, and researcher Marla Spivak seems to be in one as well as she prepares to visit the bees. She slips off her black clogs and laces up the purple canvas high-tops she keeps in her locker at the bee lab. Next she reaches for a helmet draped with a veil of fine nylon netting and secures it so it covers her face and neck. White coveralls hang untouched on the cinderblock wall, and Spivak doesn’t even look at the elbow-length leather gloves nearby.

Both the suit and gloves are de rigueur protection for beekeepers. But after 32 years of working with bees the University of Minnesota entomologist is not afraid of being stung, though she knows she almost certainly will be; the painful pricks are an everyday hazard of her work. “Ten stings a day is OK,” Spivak says. “Twenty stings is a lot.”

Hollering distance from Cleveland and Larpenteur avenues on the St. Paul campus, the apiary, or bee yard, contains about 30 colonies of honeybees. Tucked just out of sight of speeding cars and strolling pedestrians, its busy residents make honey and pollinate residential flowers in relative obscurity.

“Many people don’t even know the bee yard is here,” Spivak says, nodding to a nearby field where Gopher soccer players practice corner kicks and thigh traps. The bees and the bee yard have a low profile on campus, but Spivak has just the opposite stature in the apiarian field. She’s leading an epic fight against bee diseases and a tiny parasite that is wreaking havoc on honeybees and the crops they pollinate.

Once known primarily for honey, bees have gained cachet for their larger contribution to agriculture: pollination. As they buzz from bloom to bloom collecting nectar for honey, bees become dusted with tiny grains of pollen from male flowers, which they distribute to nearby female flowers, fertilizing them. In California, almond growers depend on bees to pollinate their half-million acres of orchards, paying beekeepers to truck their hives to the orchards from all over the United States. Some apple, cranberry, and blueberry growers do the same. But during the winter of 2004–05, almost half the honeybees in the country died, jeopardizing the almond crop.

The primary culprit was a mite called varroa destructor. The parasite catches a ride on bees and feeds on them, much like a tick takes its meals from a deer or dog. If enough mites get a foothold in a hive, they weaken the entire colony to the point of collapse. For years, beekeepers kept the mites in check using pesticides and antibiotics. While chemicals control 95 percent of the mites, those that survive develop resistance, eventually resulting in a thuggish mite population impervious to chemicals.

Spivak’s work breeding bees that can better protect themselves against the perils of disease and mites may prove imperative to the future of beekeeping. Some honeybees can sense when immature bees have been besieged by problems and remove the diseased or mite-riddled larvae from the hive, literally throwing them out the door. The hives that are best at this are known as “hygienic” and are healthier than hives that aren’t so good at it. Spivak began selecting for this trait as she bred bees. Called “Minnesota Hygienic” (because it was developed at the University) her line of honeybees capitalizes on naturally occurring strengths.
“My hope is we can help bees defend themselves so they don’t require as much chemical treatment,” says Spivak, who views the bee situation as emblematic of a larger agricultural dependence on chemicals. “In my mind, that’s the most important thing, so we can get the bees off the chemical treadmill and back on their own six feet.”

***
On her way way to the apiary to check the health of one of the queens, Spivak starts to smolder wood shavings in a metal can. Soon, a ribbon of smoke pours out of the spout and she heads into the grassy yard filled with beehives. If the queen and her colony of workers are doing well, Spivak will continue to breed from her line. If things don’t look top-notch, she’ll try other queens.

The hive sits in a small circle with other colonies. Each consists of a stack of three pastel wood boxes. Amber-colored bees return from foraging flights, their hind legs dotted with bright yellow or orange pollen collected from neighborhood flora. They land at the hive entrance and then disappear inside. The vibrating wings of nearly a million bees in motion fill the yard with a sonorous hum.

Spivak lifts the cover and peers down into the hive. Thousands of insects move in different directions at once, like the swarms of people at the State Fair. They crawl over wooden frames in the box. They crawl over each other. A few crawl on the scientist’s blue jeans. Spivak is indifferent to their presence there.

She puffs smoke from the can into the hive to calm the bees and encourage them to move deeper inside. Spivak uses a small pry bar to loosen the frames from the edges of the box and slowly lifts out a frame, scanning it for the queen. The bees have built a waxy comb stretching from one side of the frame to the other and now cover almost every hexagonal cell of the comb. What looks like chaos is, in fact, an intricately choreographed routine of bee roles and responsibilities.

Some cells of the comb contain eggs so tiny they make a grain of rice seem super-sized. Because the queen is the only bee that lays eggs—up to 2,000 a day—Spivak immediately knows she’s alive and busy, but she wants to see the queen to judge her fitness.

In other cells, a shift of nurse bees is busy feeding small, comma-shaped larvae. As Spivak slowly turns the frame, a new drone, one of the few male bees in the colony, emerges from a cell and looks around. Still other bees guard the entrance to the hive to protect against predators. The field bees returning with pollen are the oldest in the hive and have already completed stints as attendants, nurses, or guards.

How hives manage such extensive coordination among thousands of individuals is still mostly a mystery, Spivak says. It’s one of the things she finds especially fascinating about her subjects. “I like looking at how the behaviors of the individual work in a hive,” she says. “No one bee is in charge. The queen doesn’t tell them what to do. There’s no central authority. None of the bees has the big picture. And yet, they just do.”

***
Spivak has been fascinated by honeybees since she came across a book about them while attending Prescott College in Arizona. “I stayed up all night reading it,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe that some insects were social and that some people interacted with their bee colonies like pets. I drove everyone crazy until I could see a bee colony.”

She soon went to work for a commercial beekeeper and then completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Humboldt State in California. After graduating, she traveled extensively in South America to sight-see and visit beekeepers. While in Peru, she fell ill and was hospitalized briefly. Her doctor was a beekeeper, she discovered, and she recuperated while taking care of bees on his property. Spivak continued her education at the University of Kansas, where she earned a Ph.D. in entomology and spent two years investigating Africanized bees in Costa Rica. While she was doing post-doctorate research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Lab in Tucson, Arizona, she saw an opening for an apiculture position at Minnesota.

David Ellingson of Ortonville, Minnesota, was among a group of honey producers who interviewed Spivak for the job. It was 1993, and mites had been gaining ground since 1987. The group quizzed Spivak about her view of the situation and ideas that might help them in their commercial operations. Ellingson, who has 3,000 hives near South Dakota and is the president of the 1,200-member American Beekeeping Federation (ABF), was impressed with her foresight. “She looked at the whole picture and she had this vision of something that would work,” Ellingson says. “Marla said the [mites’] resistance would build up. Boom! Just like that, it happened.” Now an associate professor in the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences, Spivak has provided hygienic bees to some beekeepers so they could see the strength of the line for themselves.

One reason for giving away queens is that “beekeepers are hands-on people,” Spivak says. “If they see it, they will believe it and then adopt it.” Ellingson, among the first to try the new line, did just that. With hygienic bees in his hives, he was able to reduce the miticides he used. He has become one of the most vocal proponents of Spivak’s line, which is now available to all beekeepers through a commercial distributor. What’s at stake for him is his livelihood. For the public, the stakes might be even greater.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture credits bees for involvement in nearly a third of all the food Americans eat. That adds up to $15 billion a year in food products, according to the ABF. Native bees do their share of pollinating, too, but since the 1600s, when honeybees were imported to North America from Europe, they have been the easiest to manage, and one of the few to sweeten the deal with honey.

Without sufficient bees to pollinate produce, the quantity and quality of avocados, blueberries, cotton, cranberries, cucumbers, hay, nuts, oranges, pumpkins, squash, strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins, and watermelons all suffer. Even milk is affected, since many cows eat alfalfa, which bees also pollinate. Poorly pollinated plants—in which not enough ovules received pollen grains—bear fruit that is misshapen and less sweet and that has fewer seeds.

In early 2005, when almond farmers discovered that only half the usual number of bees were available to pollinate their crop, they doubled the price per hive they paid beekeepers in hopes of luring more of them to California. Some of those bees were already engaged in other pollination jobs. “The beekeepers pulled the bees off alfalfa,” says Ellingson, one of several Minnesotans who truck their colonies west each year. “So if you don’t see alfalfa sprouts in your salad, it’s because there weren’t enough bees.”

***
The queen is not on any of the frames in the top box, so Spivak lifts it off the stack to get to the one below it. The elusive queen is not on any of the frames in the second box, so she sets that aside, too, and begins to look through the third and final box. “Some queens are like this,” Spivak says. “They run and hide.” She moves the 60-pound boxes smoothly. At 5-foot-6, her size belies her strength.

Whenever she speaks to an audience about her research, Spivak begins by projecting a photo of herself in the bee yard. She began adding this element to her presentation after speaking to beekeepers not long after she received her Ph.D. “I noticed everyone’s glazed eyes when I was done,” Spivak says. “Finally one gentleman stood up and very politely asked, ‘How does a little thing like you lift those honey supers [boxes] anyway?’ I realized they didn’t hear—and didn’t understand—my words because they couldn’t make the connection between me on the podium and me in the bee yard. I found it to be a genuine question, and funny, and I learned from it.”
It’s that kind of response that has helped Spivak build rapport with Minnesota beekeepers, says University entomologist Gary Reuter (B.S. ’75), who has worked with her for 12 years. “They really respect her,” Reuter says. “She’s earned their respect. They can tell she knows what she’s talking about.”

They respect her because she takes the time to understand their concerns. Beekeepers are driven by economics and ritual—what they learned about beekeeping from their parents and grandparents, Spivak says. “I just have to encourage them to see that bees bred for resistance produce as much honey and don’t require as much chemical input— and let the beekeepers make up their own minds.” Spivak’s work is becoming known worldwide, and Minnesota Hygienic bees are starting to make a difference for beekeepers all over the country.

***
The sun is high, heating up the bee yard, as Spivak searches for the elusive queen bee. There! On one of the very last frames. The queen is marked with a yellow dot and the code “85C” on its back, but its long abdomen would have made it stand out, even without the dot. No other bee in the hive looks like 85C. Spivak recognizes it as one of the bees she tagged after insemination in August 2004.

Each year, Spivak selects the daughters of the queens with the strongest hygienic traits and breeds them to continue and strengthen the line. During the summer, Spivak, Reuter, and their students collect drones from the hives and gather their sperm in a syringe. Then they anesthetize unmated queens. Spivak gets out her headphones, puts on some rock music or singer Cesaria Evora, and begins inseminating the queens under the bright light of a microscope.
Now, nine months later, 85C has laid an even pattern of eggs with few empty cells between them. One clear indicator of a thriving queen, that quality pattern was just what Spivak hoped to see. Not so far down the line, daughters or descendents of this hygienic queen could end up helping bees everywhere fight off hive hazards and stay healthy. The queen might have been elusive, but she is strong.

Read the original article here:
http://www.alumni.umn.edu/1Nov2005.html

Robyn Dochterman is interactive editor for StarTribune.com. She lives in Scandia, Minnesota.

Blog Changes

2006-10-15T17:25:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed some changes to the overall layout & design of this blog. I’m attempting to do several things:

Generate more traffic and increase the popularity of Urban Apiary
Add additional design features, change the layout and make it more aesthetically appealing
I’ve added the Google search tool, Google AdSense & have become and E-Bay affiliate. Hopefully this will generate some additional traffic as well as some income. Although, I could care less about the income. I want the additional traffic!
I’ve also submitted this site to several search engines and have used Pingoat to notify services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, hopefully increasing the popularity of Urban Apiary.
Anyone wishing to link directly to my posts/blog are welcome to do so. This will also help to increase my traffic.

I would like to solicit your feedback regarding the changes I’ve made so far and also ask for any suggestion on future changes or features. Your thoughts are always welcome!

Additionally, if there’s someone who has HTML, XHTML, RSS or other programming experience that would like to assist me with making this a top-rated blog, I would certainly welcome your help!

Thanks!

Hive #2 has absconded ! ! !

2006-10-09T19:22:00.000-05:00

After the last inspection I placed an order with Mann Lake for several hive top feeders. I need to feed a 2:1 ratio of sugar syrup to ensure they have enough stores to make it through the winter. The order from Mann Lake arrived Friday and I spent most of Monday morning painting them so they could be installed this afternoon. After work Brian stopped by to give me a hand, the picture above is of Brian pouring the sugar syrup into the last hive. The hive top feeder is housed in a shallow honey super and is made of molded plastic. It holds approximately 4 gallons of syrup.

I also took the opportunity today to replace some of the older boxes that were on the hives. I replaced 2 deep brood boxes and 1 honey super. I simply moved the frames from the old boxes into the new ones. During this process I found that Hive #2 was in terrible shapes. I didn't find any eggs, larvae, pupae or capped brood. The population of the hive consisted of a few hundred bees....total! Evidently sometime about 21 days ago the bees absconded! I found no apparent reason inside the hive that would have forced them to find alternate living quarters. The last time I did an inspection, I failed to pull out every frame in this hive (my back was bothering me). Had I done so, I would have realized a lot sooner I had problems. This late in the year I doubt they swarmed. I guess it's possible the were Queenless and the remaining bees drifted to the other 3 hives??? To be totally honest, I ain't sure what the hell happened to this hive ! ! ! Most of the frames were completly empty of any nectar or capped honey, apparently the other hives have robbed them of the remaining stores. I did have a couple of partial frames that I place in the weakest hive (hive #1)

With that being said..........I'm now down to a total of 3 hives. With the addition of the hive top feeder and the 2:1 sugar syrup, I feel good about their chances for overwintering. Notice I didn't say that I feel great about their chances. I feel badly about Hive #2 and cannot believe I totally missed the issues. Well, I guess that's another lesson learned the hard way! To top it all off....I also got stung today! Geez.....I'm starting to feel like the bees are keeping me instead of the other way around ! ! !

Sting Count:

Chris - 7
Brian - 2

Getting Ready for Winter

2006-10-01T19:20:00.000-05:00

Brian stopped by and we did an inspection. Here's what we found.

Hive #1 which was installed from a package in to new woodenware on June 1st, 2006.

This hive is healthy and disease free aside from some small hive beetles & I'm treating for them with CheckMite strips. This area of Georgia has been hot, dry and mostly drought conditions since the Spring. The hive has been resistant to drawing new comb & has only drawn enough for brood rearing and minimal stores. The hive appears to be thriving except they aren't gathering much pollen or nectar. There has been no nectar flow to speak of. Overall this hive is NOT ready for the winter. The hive consists of 1 deep brood chamber that is probably less than 50% full and it doesn't weigh much.

Hives #2, 3 & 4 were acquired through some horse trading and put in my backyard in late July 2006.

All consist of 1 deep brood chamber that is packed full of brood, pollen, nectar & honey. The brood chambers are 100% full & very heavy. These colonies are a solid bet to make it through the winter (I guess??). All hives had a medium honey super when I got them. Hives #2 & 3 were empty supers with drawn comb. They have not added any nectar to these supers & I just pulled them off to store for the winter. Hive #4 came with a full super of honey and is still in place. I added an empty medium super to this hive but they didn't draw out the comb or gather any nectar.

It's very apparent that I haven't had a nectar flow since installing these hives in my backyard. Next year I will move them to another location in hopes of catching the second nectar flow. This is also referred to as the Fall flow. The drought conditions are most likely responsible for the lack of nectar. I truly hope the Spring is a different story.

My next move will be to "rob" a couple frames each from the more established hives to give Hive #1 enough to make it through the Winter. Additionally, I'm going to start feeding them a 1:1 sugar water ratio until the brood chambers are "honey bound". I intend to feel all 4 colonies to prevent any robbing. I will have to closely monitor the hives to ensure they all make it to Spring.

Sting Count:
Chris - 6
Brian - 2

Hot Hives

2006-09-14T18:55:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to taking some pictures today when I did an inspection. I managed to snap the Queen in Hive #1 (left photo w/white dot). The other pictures is of a brood frame from Hive #1. The inspection of the 1st hive went smoothly and all seems well in this colony. I did see a few small hive beetles, but no big deal. They are expected to be present in most hives. That was the end of my good fortune, all 3 of the remaining hives were "hot"....to say the least! Hive #4 which is by far the biggest was really "hot". So much so that I didn't get to do a thorough inspection. As soon as I cracked the lid and hit them with the smoker all hell broke loose! Immediately they began flying into my veil and bouncing off. They just kept coming. Within the first 60 seconds I took a sting through my shirt...right in my stomach. That was 5 hours ago and I can't feel any pain/discomfort. The area is only slightly red and isn't swollen. I don't know if the rainy weather has them upset or I need to replace the Queen in order to change the temperment of the hive. I fear the latter as this is the 2nd or 3rd time this hive has stung me. They always seem a lot meaner than the others. I'll wait and see but I will most likely re-Queen sometime in the near future.

Sting Count:

Chris - 6

Brian - 2

Weather, Hive activity & The Farmers' Almanac

2006-09-14T11:17:00.000-05:00

It started raining Tuesday 9/12 in the late afternoon and continued until Wednesday 9/12 at 12/noon. During that time my rain gauge recorded about 1.25" of rainfall. This is great, since we've been in drought conditions for most of the Summer months. Just two weeks ago the average temperature was in the 90's for most of the day. Recently the temps have been in the mid-80's which is a much welcomed relief. Today the current temperature, as of 12:15 is a nice, cool & breezy 77 degrees (yeep-eeee). The overall trend has been a lot cooler with more rain in the past few weeks than we've had since early Spring.

All 4 colonies are extremely busy since the rain stopped. The area around the hive looks like a major airport with all the traffic in/out. I spent some time today just observing and I'm surprised that most bees returning from foraging are loaded down with pollen. I wonder if large pollen loads = large amounts of nectar? I sure hope so! The population of the colonies seem to be holding steady, if not increasing. I've decided to do an inspection later today and take some pictures which I will post later.

I can remember as a young child that my Grandmother used the Farmer's Almanac religiously. Since I've become more "in tune" with the weather, rain fall, etc.. I decided to grab the 2007 Farmers' Almanac. I'm going to use the calendars for planting nectar producing plants in the Spring for the bees & also a small vegetable garden. Additionally, I'm going to use the weather forecasts to plan outdoor events, etc.... According to the Farmers' Almanac their weather predictions are > 80% accurate. I would highly recommend everyone getting the 2007 edition of the almanac.

Sting Count

2006-09-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week I received an invitation from Billy "Bad Boy" Pate to come watch the UGA football game at his house. Billy has an awesome "Man Room" in his basement for hosting such events. This was an invite that I couldn't pass up! So, I made plans to travel to Cumming, Georgia on Saturday, September 9th to watch the UGA vs South Carolina football game. I last inspected the hives 1 week ago and all was well. I couldn't resist "taking a quick peek" prior to our departure for Billy's. Since I was only going to take a peek, I didn't feel the need for the smoker or "getting geared up". I went into the Apiary wearing shorts, t-shirt & flip-flops. I lifted the outer & inner covers on hive #1 and peered down into the top super. I killed 6 small hive beetles that were on the inner cover, all looked good so I carefully placed the covers back on. I almost started to walk off and head to Billy's when, in my infinite wisdom I decided to take a look at one more hive. Hive #2 wasn't as forgiving as the first. As soon as I removed the inner cover, 3 angry bees immediately came after me. The 1st sting was to the inside of my right forearm and the 2nd was to the inside of my right bicep. I quickly removed the stingers and carefully replaced the covers. This took several attempts as the colony was rather "pissed off" at the moment! The initial pain of the stings wore off within a few minutes and we started off on the 1.5 hour drive to Billy's house. By the time we arrived, the area around the 1st sting was swollen considerably. 24 hours later it's still very swollen and is very sore. I expect by tomorrow (Monday) or Tuesday the soreness will be gone and everything will be fine. I can only imagine what the neighbors thought when/if they saw me dancing in the Apiary trying to avoid getting stung. I knew the instant they came out of the hive at full speed I was doomed. The odd thing is that the 2nd sting site didn't swell at all and is not sore today. I wonder why that is? I would have thought it would be the worse of the two stings. I guess I learned a valuable lesson on Saturday. Use your smoker and wear the appropriate protective gear when going into the Apiary, even if it is for a "quick peek".

Sting Count:

Chris - 5
Brian - 2

Bees reared in cities are "healthier"

2006-09-03T20:17:00.000-05:00

Originally published by BBC News Corp.

Bees reared in cities are healthier and more productive than their country cousins, a study by French beekeepers' association Unaf has found.

Urban bees enjoy higher temperatures and a wider variety of plant life for pollination, while avoiding ill-effects of pesticides, the study said.

Read the entire article here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4621184.stm

Why London's beekeepers are a growing band

2006-09-03T20:07:00.000-05:00

Laura Barnett finds out what beekeepers get out of it - and why shops are clamouring for their honey.

Published: 04 May 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/

The first summer that Nicky Faith kept bees in her back garden, she built a pyramid 15 jars wide with the honey they made. Now, 10 years on, her three beehives take pride of place in her garden, and the labels on her jars of Willesden Green Honey picture a bucolic scene far from this crowded corner of north-west London.

Read the entire article here:

http://betsyandherbs.blogspot.com/2006/05/keeping-bees.html

Gloves or a lack thereof

2006-09-03T13:21:00.000-05:00

As a 1st year "beek", I've been a little timid when it comes to stings. Prior to Saturday I had only been stung twice. The 1st time was at the Beekeeping Institute during the practical exam portion of the Certified Beekeeping course. This sting was located in my "ear hole". Yes! You read that correctly. My right ear was bright red, I could feel my heart beating in my ear & it had a fever. This lasted for 3 days ! ! ! If that wasn't enough, Dr. Keith Delaplane was giving me the exam and had to remove the stinger. Dr. Delaplane is very well known for his honeybee work at the University of Georgia and I was a little embarrased by the whole incident. The 2nd time was when I moved the 3 new hives I acquired from Mike Sorensen to my apiary. I forgot to zip up my pants after tucking in my shirt and got stung on the inside of my upper right thigh. Needless to say that hurt a helluva lot more than the sting to my ear! My wife got a good laugh out of that, right up to the point that I told her I needed her to help "ice me down". All of the sudden it wasn't so funny to her!....LOL

Yesterday, I received the 3rd honeybee sting of my life. I have noticed that it's difficult to work in the hives while wearing leather gloves and have been contemplating not wearing them anymore. Brian has been stung twice while working in my beeyard so when I shared my thoughts about foregoing the gloves, he was all for it. He thought that was the greatest idea ever. I wonder why? I made it as far as the 3rd hive and was reaching for the outer cover to put it back on when...............BAM! Outta nowhere I got nailed on my index finger. I quickly removed the stinger and within 3-5 minutes the shearing pain & throbbing went away completely. I didn't think anything about it until a couple of hours later when I noticed my whole left hand was very swollen. I mean SWOLLEN! It's still a little swollen today (about 24 hours later), and it's very sore.

I've been a little eager to get stung I guess you could say. I just haven't been able to allow myself to actually get stung. I even thought seriously about intentionally placing a bee on me in hopes it would sting me. With more stings comes the benefit of becoming immune to the sting and I will not have any symptoms (so they say. Although I haven't identified who "they" are). It's not the pain so much as not knowing when it will happen and being able to mentally prepare yourself for the sting.

Sting count:

Chris = 3
Brian = 2

Brian's Urban Apiary

2006-09-03T12:53:00.000-05:00

The picture posted above is of an area Brian recently set up in his backyard. Brian lives 30 miles South of me, in an area very similar to mine. He lives "in town" and the area also has lots of ornamental & decorative plants, bushes, trees and shrubs that are beneficial to the honeybee and the production of honey. We don't intend to actually put any hives @ Brian's until the Spring. But....just in case I have any "issues" with my current location we can quickly relocate my hives to his house (that's called a backup plan!....LOL). I have some green mesh cloth that I will give to Brian to use as a barrier along the chain link fence and also obscure the view from any "nosey" neighbors. I know he's very excited about becoming a "Beek" and can't wait for Spring. I'm going to attempt to split a couple of my colonies and give them to him. He'll need to purchase a couple of Queens and some additional woodenware.

In an attempt to supplement his income, Brian is a distributor for XS Energy Drinks. A couple of weeks ago Brian asked me to place a link on my blog to his website. I didn't think my blog would generate traffic much less any sales. Well.........I was wrong! Someone purchased $387 worth of energy drinks and the traffic originated from my website. Brian works in commercial HVAC and like many Americans he needs to generate additional income to pay the bills, support his family and "just get by". If you have a need or know of anyone that has a need for sports drinks, energy bars and supplements... please direct them to his website. You can click on XS Energy Drinks in the link section of this blog or go directly to www.mrxsenergydrinks.com.

Game Day Inspection

2006-09-03T12:24:00.000-05:00

Brian stopped by with my nephew to watch the UGA football game on Saturday. I haven't been in the hives in more than 2 weeks, so we decided to do an inspection. Trenton got an up close & personal look at the inside of a hive (pictured above). I was really surprised to see that in all 4 hives there were at least 3-4 full frames of brood. The brood was in various stages: eggs, larvae, pupae & capped brood. Most hives had 2 full frames (both sides) of capped brood. Usually the Queen will begin to decrease the population of the colony this time of year. I'm hoping this is a sign that we will get a Fall nectar flow and the Queen is increasing her population to ensure they take advantage of that flow. The remaining 6-7 frames were full of capped honey, nectar & pollen. I'm starting to feel a lot better about the chances of the hives to make it through winter. 3 of 4 hives consist of 2 deep brood boxes and at least 1 honey super. Overall, I'm very pleased with all 4 hives. They seem to be thriving and are looking good. I did notice the population of the Small Hive Beetles seems to have increased significantly. I will treat for them in a few weeks. The packaged colony has 1 full deep and I just added a honey super. Hopefully they will fill the super with the Fall flow. This will be their food for winter!

In the past few weeks we've seen an increase in the amount of rain. For most of the Summer it really didn't rain at all. The recent rains have turned everything very green and I'm hoping for a Fall nectar flow. I don't know if we'll get one, we'll just have to wait and see.

As a side note: Brian and I attempted to equalize the populations of the hives several weeks ago. That seems to have worked as my packaged hive has really increased in population and the strongest hive has less bees.

I've posted some pics of the most recent inspection Brian and I completed yesterday. Take a look:

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j101/robert7355/broodframe9.jpg

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j101/robert7355/DSC01661.jpg

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j101/robert7355/DSC01642.jpg

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j101/robert7355/DSC01655.jpg

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j101/robert7355/DSC01665.jpg

Football Saturday in the South

2006-09-01T14:28:00.000-05:00

Yup. That's right! The college football season is upon us once again. I have to admit I wait impatiently for this time of year beginning just after the college bowl season is over in January. 8 months of wandering aimlessly through the weekends, begging & praying for the Summer to end so I can follow my beloved Georgia Bulldogs. The typical Summer temperatures in Georgia hover in the mid 90's from late May through August. The real killer is the humidy...typically 90% or higher. The college football season will bring cooler temperatures that are a much welcomed relief to the area. I know the bees will appreciate it as well.

I have a ritual that I like to follow, it usually begins on Friday afternoon. I start by cleaning the deck & grill, icing down the Bud Light, getting the plasma tv & satellite hooked up outside and starting some boiled peanuts.

Boiled Peanuts? This is an obvious Southern favorite that I've enjoyed since I was a kid. I can remember stopping at roadside fruit/vegetable stands and getting fresh boiled peanuts. They are usually served hot, right off the fire! I use a turkey fryer that I purchased at Wal-Mart to cook them in. I use 8lbs. of raw peanuts in the shell, one container of table salt and fill the pot 3/4 full with water. I will boil them for 6-8 hours on Friday and I let them sit overnight to absorb the salt and allow for the nuts/shells to soften. I fire them up again about 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, add another container of salt, more water and leave them on a "rolling" boil for most of the day. By noon on Saturday they are close enough to being finished that I can start munching. They are best served hot, so I usually dip them right out of the boiling water and start eating them immediately. Making boiled peanuts is not a quick process. It usually takes a good 12-18 hours of cooking to get the perfect taste. I've been experimenting with this process for a couple of years and have just gotten it down to perfection (atleast I think so!)

Note: The keys to great tasting boiled peanuts are salt (lots of it!) and time, time & more time. Anyone on a low salt diet should not eat boiled peanuts! ! !

"The Beekeeper" vs ? ? ?

2006-09-01T13:53:00.000-05:00

When I decided to establish an Apiary in my backyard, I wanted to protect the bees as well as my neighbors. I placed the hives at the rear of my property line in a fenced area. The property line has about 10' of overgrowth (bush, plants, weeds, etc...). I felt this was an adequate barrier and would prevent any unwanted attention from the neighbors.

I purchased UV rated green nylon mesh cloth (seen behind the hives in this picture) and "hung" it on the chain link fence. This would further obscure the hives from the casual onlooker and ensure the flight paths of the bees are immediately elevated above eye/head level. This will prevent inadvertent collisions between humans and bees.

I used zip ties to attach the nylon mesh to the chain link fence. When I installed it, I secured it over the top rail of the fence. Within a few days I noticed that a couple of the zip ties had "broken" and the mesh was now hanging away from the fence. I thought it was odd but didn't think much of it, I just replaced the zip ties. To date, I have replaced about 50 zip ties! I've now become obsessed with finding out what is causing these to "break". At first I thought maybe the zip ties were brittle due to heat exposure. I used a pack that had been inside my truck for a couple of years. I purchased new ones and guess what........they are still breaking! Next thought was perhaps some of the neighborhood kids were playing games with me. I have never seen any kids near my backyard, so that wasn't a reasonable explanation.

I noticed squirrels use the top rail as sort of a "highway" across my yard. The area I live in has an enormous population of squirrels and I love seeing them in the yard. I have to admit it never occurred to me the squirrels were chewing through the zip ties. I asked my brother (Brian) his thoughts on who/what may be the culprit. He's convinced it's the squirrels and suggested attaching the mesh fencing but not draping it over the top rail. Brian seems to think they don't like walking across the mesh. I'm not totally convinced the squirrels are the root cause, but decided to taken Brian's advice and adjust the mesh so that it's not over the top rail of the fence. It's been 3 days and not a single broken zip tie. It would appear Brian was correct and my 5 month mystery is now solved.

Beekeeping to get rich

2006-08-19T15:39:00.000-05:00

Everything considered, the small time hobbyist beekeeper probably won't quite break even. A well managed colony in a decent area will produce about 100 lbs. of honey per year. At $1.75 per lb. retail or $175.00 that does seem nice, until you start to consider equipment cost of more than $150.00 for each hive; then there's extracting, bottling, transportation, marketing, hive maintenance, medication costs, requeening, etc. etc.. However, frugal spending and diligent management can keep these costs to a minimum. The real value is in the opportunity to practice the age old art of beekeeping - the hands on personal experience of manipulating, and managing a hive that houses one of the most fascinating organisms on the planet. Honeybees are a gentle, and truly wonderful insect in many important ways. I could go on and on about the bees, and their value as pollinators. I could cry about the hard times facing the beekeeper, but hard times seem to be going around. Much of society does not seem to realize how much we depend on honeybees.

The value of a honeybee

2006-08-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

The Honeybee (Apis melifera) is one of the most beneficial insects in the world. There are some 150 U.S. crops and more than 50 California crops pollinated by honeybees, for example, apples, fruits, berries, almonds, melons, cucumbers, clovers and alfalfa. We have the honeybee to thank for one third of all the food we eat. Without the bees, we would be eating mostly rice, wheat, and corn instead of the wonderful variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts we enjoy today. This insect pollinates BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of agricultural crops each year. In addition, it is impossible to determine the tremendous value these pollinators have in our urban gardens. Now, since the demise of all of our feral (wild) honeybee populations, their value in our neighborhoods is greater than ever.

Urban Beekeeping article

2006-08-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

by Keri Fisher

Nancy Mangion remembers the first time she met a beekeeper. Her horse-drawn buggy was getting fixed in an Amish village when a man came up to her and asked, " Wanna see my honey house? " She was afraid of bees at the time, but she followed him. " There were bees everywhere, " she remembers. " He took a scoop of honey with his finger from a wax frame. ‘Wanna try some honey? It’s nice and fresh.’ So I tried it. " The man told Mangion that he hadn’t had a cold or allergy since he began keeping bees. That’s when she decided to get her own.

Now she’s the nonchalant bee-lover trying to calm a hysteric: me. When I pull up to her house and see them swarming around, I almost turn around and go home. She has to hold my hand as we walk by the hives to her gazebo. When I point nervously to the two insects buzzing above, she laughs. " Those aren’t bees, " she says. " Those are wasps. " Comforting.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/taste_honey.htm

Keri Fisher is a food writer living in Belmont. She can be reached at fishfood72@earthlink.net

Visitor: Erin - Ashley

2006-08-15T20:46:00.000-05:00

We had a visitor from San Diego, California stop by to see us today. She's my 7 year old niece and her name is Erin-Ashley Roganti, she's the daughter of my sister Ginger. Ginger is a Chief Petty Officer (E-7) in the U.S. Navy. Ginger is stationed in San Diego at Balboa Naval Hospital where she's a Radiology Instructor. Erin is visiting Georgia for a couple of weeks and came to stay with us today while my parents (AmMa & AmPa) went to work. She was here when Uncle Brian came to help me with the hive arrangement. After we finished I was able to coax her down to the fenceline for a photo-op. The entire purpose of this photo is to see how excited Uncle Chris & Uncle Brian can make Mom (Ginger) when she sees her little angel so close to 100,000+ honeybees.

Equalizing The Colonies

2006-08-15T20:24:00.000-05:00

Many of you may remember my brother, Brian from previous posts. Brian has been stung every time he's helped me in the beeyard. I felt guilty after last week's episode and ordered him a better hat, veil and some leather gloves. Brian stopped by today to help me change the position of my hives. I have two very strong hives, one medium & one weak. When the foragers were out during the middle of the day we swapped the order of the hives. The thought is that bees from a strong colony leave to forage, we swap hive positions with a weaker hive and when they return this helps equalize the population of the colonies. We swapped hives 1 & 3 and 2 & 4. I've also been feeding 1:1 sugar water with Honey B Healthy to all four colonies. This will ensure they get through the nectar dearth and are strong for the anticipated Fall honey flow. As a side note.....Brian managed a "sting free" visit today. It really helps to have someone assist me with labor in the yard. Brian is also interested in beekeeping, so he's tagging along and I'm sharing as much information as I can with him. In the Spring, I'll make a couple of splits to get him started with his own colonies.

General Honeybee FAQ

2006-08-12T16:58:00.002-05:00

Honey bees collect nectar from a flower, which is then turned into honey by a combination of the bee's digestive enzymes that invert the sugars, and evaporation. It is due to the types of flowers visited by the bees as to why honeys vary in taste, color and tendency to crystallize. Some flowers, like cotton blossoms for example, can produce nectar that results in an almost clear, and very light flavored honey. Others like Tahoka daisies can produce a dark honey resembling something very much like molasses in both taste and smell. Clover blossoms, due to their abundance of both long flowering seasons and high nectar production provide one of the largest sources of nectar used by bees to produce honey in many areas. Most clover produces a light golden-amber honey that is not overly delicate or strong and appeals too many. Clover honey has saturated the market in many areas for decades, so much so that some people growing up today may not even know other delicious honeys even exist!

Together with pollen, the nectar gathered from these flower blossoms provides food for the bees. They will easily hoard as much as they can, and often more than they could ever use. The nectar is brought back to the hive by a field bee (the older worker bees), where it is then given over to a house bee (the younger worker bees). The house bee will then take the nectar and place it in a cell, whereby the constant flow of air over the cell produced by other bees "fanning" their wings slowly draws the moisture from the nectar. Bees will usually place nectar that is being processed into honey above the areas of honey that have their cells capped for storage. These cells are in turn usually located above or outside of those used for storage of pollen, with the nest of brood residing in cells located in the center of the nest below the pollen storage areas.

Honey is more than just nectar concentrated by evaporation, however. As the nectar is moved by the house bees from cell to cell until is finally ready to fill a cell and be capped over with a thin layer of beeswax, it is ingested by the bee into its honey stomach where enzymes act on it to invert the simple sugars in the nectar into honey. This combination of inverting the simple sugars in nectar and evaporating it to a viscous state of approximately 18% or less moisture provides the bees with a food that can be stored for more or less indefinite periods of time. Even when the cells of honey have become heavily crystallized, bees have been known to add water to the crystals to dissolve them.

The bees will use this honey as food, as well as mixed with pollen to create a substance known as "bee bread" to feed to their young. In order for a hive to make it through the winter, a healthy storage of honey needs to be collected. Fortunately for us bees are hoarders by nature when it comes to honey and often collect far more than they need. If ready with strong hives at the start of a season of heavy nectar flow, the amount of surplus honey a beekeeper can harvest at the end of the season can be quite considerable.

How does honey get from the beehive to the store shelves?

Once the honey is ready to be harvested, the beekeeper will leave behind plenty of honey for the bees to make it through winter (and then some), and collect the rest. The honey collected from domestic beehives is contained in "frames" of honeycomb. Each frame of honey is usually about 1 1/2 inches thick, and made of individual beeswax cells emanating outward from a central rib, or sheet, of beeswax. The beekeeper can tell when the honey is ready to be harvested as the bees will cover each full cell of honey with a thin layer, or "cap", of beeswax. Once a frame of honey has almost every cell capped, it can be pulled from the hive.

Anywhere from 8 to 10 frames of honeycomb will fit in each section, or layer, of the beehive. These layers are usually referred to as "supers", and a beehive will usually consist of anywhere from one to five or even ten or more of these supers. The bees usually raise their young in the bottom one or two supers, storing honey in those supers above the nest. When a super or more of frames are fully capped (and is honey the bees don't need themselves), the beekeeper will harvest these supers of excess honey.

After collecting the honey, the beekeeper will either use the honey comb as it comes right out of the hive, or extract the honey from the frames of honeycomb for bottling. Special frames are usually used to produce comb honey for use or sell, and frames of comb are often taken from the hive as soon as they are capped (versus waiting for the entire super full of frames to be capped). This way the comb's appearance is light in color and very appealing. Fresh comb honey is often spread on breads and toast or even eaten "as is" or chewed until a lump of beeswax is all that's left, and then spit out.

Having more uses, extracted honey is more popular than comb honey. Therefore, the majority of honeycomb harvested is processed for bottling. The beekeeper, using a heated knife, will shave the caps off the comb, exposing the honey stored inside each cell. Once both sides of the frame have been "uncapped", the frame is put inside an "extractor". This apparatus is a machine that steadily spins the frames around until the honey is literally thrown out of the cells and drips down the inside walls of the extractor's tank, collecting at the bottom. When all the frames in the extractor are emptied of their honey, they are taken out and replaced with other uncapped frames.

As the level of honey rises in the tank, it will be drained off into a strainer and then filtered through fine-mesh nylon. The resulting honey is often called "raw" honey, as it still contains any pollen or the tiniest bits of wax that made it through the filter, making it slightly opaque in appearance. Many prefer their honey raw, considering it more "natural" at this stage, and are as far as some beekeepers go in the extracting process. Some commercial honey-producing operations may take it a step further and heat the honey slightly (making it less viscous, or thinner) so it can be strained through even finer filters. Much of the honey seen on store shelves that is a very transparent golden or amber color was processed by this method, with it's clarity due to the further filtering of wax and pollen out of the honey.

Once the supers of frames have had their honey extracted, the beekeeper will usually put the supers of sticky frames back on the hives. The bees clean them up very nicely, moving any remaining honey still stuck to the cell walls after the extracting process back down into their hive with their other stored honey. The beekeeper will then either leave the supers of frames of empty and dry honeycomb on the hive to be refilled again if a strong nectar flow is still going on or is approaching, or remove most or all of the empty supers if the nectar flow is over, or in preparation for winter.

How do honey bees carry pollen?

Honey bees carry pollen back to the hive in a small "basket" of fine hairs on the outside of their hind legs. As the bee scrapes pollen off its body, hairs on the leg collect the pollen. It is then transferred to the basket opening with a minute comb at the mid-joint of the leg. There is even a "pollen press" as part of the joint that will pack the pollen into these baskets. When the basket is full the bee will return to the hive and unload the pollen "pellets" out of the baskets into a cell. The house bees then take care of packing the pollen down in the cell until it's needed for food for the brood.

Where do bees get beeswax?

Bees actually produce their own beeswax. On the underside of the bee's abdomen there are eight glands that secrete the liquid wax. As the wax hardens it forms small flakes that are then removed by the bee with its hind legs and brought up to the bee's mandibles. Here, it is masticated into a malleable form where it is then used to build comb. To give you an idea of just how small these flakes are; one pound of the wax equates to about 570,000 of these flakes.

What are supers?

Supers are wooden boxes that have no top or bottom. Supers are stacked one on top of another as needed when the bee's population or honey storage requirements grow in size. A "standard" hive has a bottom floor, one or more supers that act as a hive body for the brood nest, usually one to several supers for honey storage and a cover for the hive. In the U.S. most beekeepers have standardized on supers that hold ten frames and come in four basic sizes... deep (9 5/8"), medium (6 5/8"), shallow (5 11/16") and comb (4 1/2" for round section, 4 3/4" for split section). In Europe other sizes and styles are used including the more garden ornamental WBC to National, Commercial or even a large Modified Dadant. In some areas plastic or Styrofoam supers are marketed and used.

Why do beekeepers paint their hives white?

Actually, not all beekeepers paint their hives white. A lot do, and this is to help the bees in keeping the hive cooler in summer, especially if the hive is located in direct sun during the heat of the day. White (or light colors) have also been proven to be colors bees don't seem to mind. Some beekeepers in colder areas stain or paint their hives a darker color to help the bees keep the hives warmer in the early spring when they start raising brood. Commercial beekeepers often use whatever light colored paint they can find on sale. Light blues, yellows and greens are not uncommon.

How do honey bees keep their hive at a constant 93-95° Fahrenheit temperature?

Honey bees do this in several ways. As the temperature rises inside the hive due to warm weather, they will ventilate their hive by having some bees create an increase in air flow through the hive. The bees do this by lining up in one direction into the hive and back out again, and fanning their wings. This creates an intentional draft through the hive that keeps temperatures down. Should the weather get hotter some of the bees will then collect water, placing these drops of water in cells and spreading thin sheets of water between their mandibles. The bee's fan-current evaporates the water, lowering the temperature even more (and you didn't think bees knew about air conditioning!). During cooler weather and winter the bees will actually "cluster", creating a ball shape that is hollow with the queen in the middle. The bees take turns eating honey and vibrating as they move through the cluster wall. The heat given off by calories being burned in the process warms the cluster. However, during the dead of winter when there is no brood being raised the temperature does in fact fall below the 93-95° range to about 85° Fahrenheit.

How do beekeepers get the honey out of the comb?

There are several ways of doing this, and the amount of honey being collected usually determines the process taken. If the beekeeper only has a super or two of honey, the comb can be broken up and strained through a fine-mesh bag into a bucket. Another alternative is a pair of wooden paddles hinged together to form a press that is used to squeeze the honey from the comb. Both these methods destroy the comb, which bees use honey to produce. As such, beekeepers usually use what is called an "extractor". An extractor is a round stainless steel (or super heavy-duty plastic) barrel with baskets (tangential) or frame clips (radial) inside attached to a vertical rod. The rod extends through the top of the extractor and is attached to pulleys or gears. The baskets spin inside the tank when a hand crank is turned (more expensive or very large models are motorized). The frames of honeycomb, once the capping have been removed, are placed in the baskets or frame clips and then spun around until all the honey comes out of the combs by centrifugal force. The bottom of the extractor has a valve for draining the extractor of the honey collected. Using an extractor enables beekeepers (and bees) to use the frames of empty comb again, saving the bees time and honey in creating new comb each time they're needed.

My jar of honey is crystallized. Is it ruined?

The sugars in honey may start to crystallize over time (honey from some nectar sources faster than others). This in itself does not harm the honey in the slightest. As a matter of fact, many commercial honey producers intentionally crystallize barrels of honey by storing them at temperatures of about 52-56° Fahrenheit. It makes them easier to handle. "Whipped honey" is honey that as been "seeded" with very fine honey crystals, then occasionally stirred over a period of days until the honey is uniformly crystallized and smooth. To liquefy a jar of crystallized honey, take a pan of hot (not boiling) water and set the jar of honey down in the water bath (top cracked open and well above the water level). The crystals should melt and become liquid again. Repeat if necessary. If your honey is "raw", unprocessed (but filtered) honey, make sure the temperature of the hot water is not over 95° Fahrenheit to preserve the full "naturalness" of the honey.

Why do some queen bees have a dot painted on them?

Most suppliers of queen bees will mark the queens they ship to you with a colored dot of paint on the top of the thorax for a very small fee (.50 cents or so). This colored dot not only helps you quickly find the queen among the other bees in the hive should you need to, but will also signify what year the queen was introduced into the hive. Queen breeders use a color numbering system so that queens marked with blue indicate years ending in 0 or 5, white a 1 or 6, yellow a 2 or 7, red a 3 or 8 and green for years ending in 4 or 9.

What is "bee space"?

In 1851 a beekeeper, Rev. L.L. Langstroth noted that honey bees allowed themselves 3/8" between combs. If a hive had a 1/4"-3/8" space it wouldn't be filled with comb. Anything over 3/8" was filled with comb, anything less than 1/4" was filled with propolis. He took this "discovery" and created the first movable-frame hive and is called by many the Father of Beekeeping.

Why is some honey light and some dark?

The color of honey depends on its nectar source. Usually, early spring honey is lighter than honey collected in fall, again due to the nectar source. Some flowers produce a light, almost clear honey (such as cotton); other blossoms provide nectar that produces a golden amber color (such as the common clover honey seen in stores). Others, such as buckwheat produce a very dark, almost molasses-color honey. There are shades of honey that cover the spectrum between these colors as well. Besides the color of honey, the nectar source also determines the taste of honey. It is common that the lighter the honey the milder the taste (but not always).

What is propolis, and what do bees do with it?

Propolis is a combination of gums and resins bees collect from trees and plants, as well as wax, pollen and oils. Bees like a tight hive, and use propolis to "glue" loose items in the hive and seal cracks. That's why you'll find frames glued down with propolis, and cracks between supers sealed. Some strains of honey bees, such as the Caucasians, use propolis heavily in their hive, and even use it to narrow the entrance as needed. Propolis is usually sticky when warm, and brittle when cold. It is also high in antibiotic properties and has been used in medicinal remedies since ancient times.

What is a queen excluder?

A queen excluder is a metal or plastic grill (similar to the wire shelving in refrigerators) that is placed between supers. The space between the grills is .16", which prevents the queen or drones from entering the supers placed above the excluder. Beekeepers place the excluder above the super containing brood to keep the queen from going into the honey supers and laying eggs. Since pollen is usually stored close to the brood, this ensures that the supers will contain only honey. Excluders are usually put on the hives in spring before the main honey flow, and removed in fall after the last harvest of honey.

If supers hold 10 frames, why do some beekeepers use 9?

Using nine frames in honey supers has a definite advantage when it comes time to extract your honey. Some beekeepers use only eight! For one, even though there is the same amount of honey there are fewer frames to extract. Also, if you are using an uncapping knife it is much easier to cut off the capping as the comb is wider and the capping extend beyond the edges of the frame. However, if frames of foundation are placed in the super, you should always use 10 frames. If you don't the bees will create burr comb to fill the space between the frames (which is too big... remember the 3/8" bee space?). If you've got frames of already-drawn comb, try using 9 in the super next time. I think you'll be impressed!

Won't setting sticky supers outside after extracting cause robbing behavior in the apiary?

It depends on a couple factors. If there is a dearth of nectar coming in from the field it very well may lead to robbing. If the supers are placed in close proximity to other hives (especially if there are weak ones present), probably "yes" again. If you choose to put the supers outside for the bees to clean, make sure to stack them so there is plenty of access to the frames in as many areas as possible to keep fighting to a minimum. Personally, I prefer to put the supers back on the hives over the inner cover (make sure the oblong hole in the inner cover is open). It may take a little longer for the supers to get clean, but I haven't had any problem with robbing by doing so. Make sure there's empty comb below the inner cover for the bees to store the honey from the extracted supers or you may find they use the very supers you want them to clean!

Do you have to sterilize jars before bottling the honey?

No. Honey is anaerobic, contains natural antibiotics in minute amounts (hydrogen peroxide is one of them), and therefore does not need to be stored in sterile containers. They do need to be clean, though! Many beekeepers use canning jars, recycled mayonnaise jars, plastic milk cartons or whatever they find that will work. Commercial producers use newly manufactured jars. Run the jars (new or recycled) through the dishwasher rinse and dry cycle right before you use them to remove any dust particles (which hastens crystallization).

http://www.bee-happy.org/

About Honey Bees

2006-08-11T13:36:00.000-05:00

• Bees have 5 eyes

• Bees fly about 20 mph

• Bees are insects, so they have 6 legs

• Male bees in the hive are called drones

• Female bees in the hive (except the queen) are called worker bees

• Losing its stinger will cause a bee to die

• Bees are 30 million years old!

• Bees carry pollen on their hind legs called a pollen basket or corbicula

• An average beehive can hold around 50,000 bees

• Foragers must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey.

• The average forager makes about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

• Average per capita honey consumption in the US is 1.3 pounds.

• Bees have 2 pairs of wings.

• The principal form of communication among honey bees is through the release of a chemical called pheromones.

• Bees are important because they pollinate approximately 130 agricultural crops in the US including fruit, fiber, nut, and vegetable crops. Bee pollination adds approximately 14 billion dollars annually to improved crop yield and quality.

Facts: Africanized Honeybee

2006-08-10T13:42:00.000-05:00

(from the Texas A&M Extension Service)

Facts about the bees:

Africanized bees are more defensive than regular honeybees. Each bee has the same amount of venom as a regular honeybee, and stings only once, but attacks usually involve many more bees and result in many more stings.

Things that can trigger an Africanized bee attack include (but are not limited to):

Vibrations from engines

Intrusion into defended space or a direct threat to the hive

Swatting of one bee (which then releases an alarm chemical)

Loud noises

Bees can nest in many areas including tree holes, swing set poles, shrubbery, bird houses, abandoned vehicles, sheds, stock tanks, etc. Be especially watchful of your yard, stock tanks and neighborhood. Remove all debris that can shelter bees.

Bees often swarm and aggregate on tree branches, fences, or shrubs. Such swarms usually leave in one to two days and do not normally require control actions. However, late summer swarms should be treated with caution because this trait is uncommon in European bees, but more common in Africanized bees.

Bees are attracted to water sources, so repair leaky faucets and irrigation systems. Place two tablespoons of vinegar in bird baths and pet watering bowls to make water unattractive to bees.

How to handle a bee attack:

Seek shelter indoors at the first sign of any bee attack. If you are away from a building, get inside a vehicle if possible. Africanized bees may pursue a person for 150 yards or more. Running is not the best option if shelter is available.

Bees will not enter water, so partial relief may be found by diving under water if it is available.

Attack events may continue for more than one hour.

Very young and very old people are most susceptible to bee venom. Any bee attack should be treated as a potentially serious medical situation, especially if it involves young or old people. Seek medical attention immediately.

Hypersensitive people should consider carrying an anaphylactic shock kit that is available by prescription from a doctor.

As a rule, some farm animals and pets do not know to run in an attack, and may instead try to defend themselves. This usually results in many more stings. Veterinarians are able to help these animals in most cases. Keep pets indoors when using brushcutters, lawnmowers or weedeaters as these may provoke bee attacks. Do not pen animals near bee hives.

Tips for controlling Africanized bees:

It is very unwise to attempt to control a colony of Africanized bees without the proper protective equipment. If control measures need to be taken and there is concern about aggressive bees, a Pest Management Provider should be contacted.

Infestations in the walls of a house are very serious and should be dealt with by a pest management professional. To prevent colonization, fill all holes 1/8 inch or larger in homes or outbuildings. Caulk cracks in the foundation or roof. Properly cover chimney openings. Put screens over drains, attic vents, irrigation control boxes, etc. Keep doors to outbuildings closed and locked.

How to get your bees identified:

Your local Extension Service does not collect bees and does not attempt to control bees. Their role is to serve as an information source for people with questions about bees. If you have suspect bees, I strongly recommend that you consult a professional trained to work with bees, such as a pest control operator. Call your county extension office for more information. Degree of Africanization cannot be determined with the naked eye, but requires laboratory examination. Samples can be collected by a Pest Management Provider or individuals with the proper protective equipment.

Note:
You must send at least 50 bees to the lab in order for them to give you their best answer. This is because they must examine a group of bees and not just one or a few bees. Submissions of less than 50 bees will result in more uncertainty in the answer.

Other Information:
Regular (European) honeybees are very valuable pollinators and should be preserved. There is no need to destroy most colonies of regular honeybees. Insect repellents do not deter bee attacks.

Never provoke bees by spraying them with a garden hose or chemicals.

Some veterinary salves and creams are made with a beeswax base. It is possible that these could increase the severity of an Africanized bee attack

The View from Taiwan: The Apiary

2006-08-08T23:59:00.000-05:00

The View from Taiwan: The Apiary

There are some really neat pictures of an Apiary that is operated by a husband & wife in Taiwan. I'm amazed they work their honeybee colonies without any protective gear whatsoever. Notice the wife is wearing sandals! Obviously, they have been "beeks" for quite some time to have achieved this level of comfort. Perhaps one day I will achieve a similar level of comfort. But....for know I will be "geared up" when I enter my hives ! ! !

Weekly Maintenance & Inspection

2006-08-06T15:29:00.000-05:00

I just returned from a trip to Los Angeles and found the screened bottom boards I ordered from Simpson's Bee Supply had arrived. I'm very pleased with the quality of their products and they ship very fast! I made arrangements for my brother, Brian, to stop by and help install them on Saturday 8/5. The process was straight forward and it only took us a few minutes to get the SBB in place on 3 of the hives. I now have SBB on all 4 of my hives. This should assist the colonies in keeping the hives well ventilated. Brian got stung once and has helped me once previously, and was stung then. He's 0-2 when in my Apiary (LOL ! ! !). On both occassions the area around the sting was very swollen and remained that way for a couple of days. Luckily, I've only been stung once since acquiring my hives. Unfortunately, that was on the inside of my thigh. After tucking in my shirt I failed to zip my pants back up. That was a lesson learned the hard way. It has been 4 weeks since then and it still itches like crazy.

We also did a cursory inspection and found that everything is normal. My "June" hive population has exploded and they are continuing to draw out the foundation. Overall, I'm pleased with everything and I'm planning to naturally medicate for mites in the next couple of weeks. I'll also give them some 1:1 sugar water with Honey B Healthy to sustain them until the Fall honey flow begins. If it begins at all.

Honey Helps Problem Wounds

2006-07-29T13:37:00.000-05:00

A household remedy millennia old is being reinstated: honey helps the treatment of some wounds better than the most modern antibiotics. For several years now medical experts from the University of Bonn have been clocking up largely positive experience with what is known as medihoney. Even chronic wounds infected with multi-resistant bacteria often healed within a few weeks. In conjunction with colleagues from Düsseldorf, Homburg and Berlin they now want to test the experience gained in a large-scale study, as objective data on the curative properties of honey are thin on the ground.

The fact that honey can help wounds to heal is something that was known to the Ancient Egyptians several thousand years ago. And in the last two world wars poultices with honey were used to assist the healing process in soldiers' wounds. However, the rise of the new antibiotics replaced this household remedy. "In hospitals today we are faced with germs which are resistant to almost all the current anti-biotics," Dr. Arne Simon explains. "As a result, the medical use of honey is becoming attractive again for the treatment of wounds."
Dr. Simon works on the cancer ward of the Bonn University Children's Clinic. As far as the treatment of wounds is concerned, his young patients form part of a high-risk group: the medication used to treat cancer known as cytostatics not only slows down the reproduction of malignant cells, but also impairs the healing process of wounds. "Normally a skin injury heals in a week, with our children it often takes a month or more," he says. Moreover, children with leukaemia have a weakened immune system. If a germ enters their bloodstream via a wound, the result may be a fatal case of blood poisoning.
For several years now Bonn paediatricians have been pioneering the use in Germany of medihoney in treating wounds. Medihoney bears the CE seal for medical products; its quality is regularly tested. The success is astonishing: "Dead tissue is rejected faster, and the wounds heals more rapidly," Kai Sofka, wound specialist at the University Children's Clinic, emphasises. "What is more, changing dressings is less painful, since the poultices are easier to remove without damaging the newly formed layers of skin." Some wounds often smell unpleasant -- an enormous strain on the patient. Yet honey helps here too by reducing the smell. "Even wounds which consistently refused to heal for years can, in our experience, be brought under control with medihoney -- and this frequently happens within a few weeks," Kai Sofka says.
In the meantime two dozen hospitals in Germany are using honey in their treatment of wounds. Despite all the success there have hitherto been very few reliable clinical studies of its effectiveness. In conjunction with colleagues from Düsseldorf, Homburg and Berlin, the Bonn medical staff now want to remedy this. With the Woundpecker Data Bank, which they have developed themselves, they will be recording and evalu-ating over 100 courses of disease over the next few months. The next step planned is comparative studies with other therapeutic methods such as the very expensive cationic silver dressings. "These too are an effective anti-bacterial method," says Dr. Arne Simon. "However, it is not yet clear whether the silver released from some dressings may lead to side-effects among children."
Effective bacteria killer
It has already been proved that medihoney even puts paid to multi-resistant germs such as MRSA. In this respect medihoney is neck and neck in the race to beat the antibiotic mupirocin, currently the local MRSA antibiotic of choice. This is shown by a study recently published by researchers in Australia. In one point medihoney was even superior to its rival: the bacteria did not develop any resistance to the natural product during the course of treatment.
It is also known today why honey has an antiseptic effect: when producing honey, bees add an enzyme called glucose-oxidase. This enzyme ensures that small amounts of hydrogen peroxide, an effective antiseptic, are constantly being formed from the sugar in the honey. The advantage over the hydrogen peroxide from the chemist's is that small concentrations are sufficient to kill the germs, as it is constantly being produced. As a rule much larger quantities of hydrogen peroxide would have to be used, as hydrogen peroxide loses its potency over time. However, in large concentrations it not only damages the bacteria, but also the skin cells.
Furthermore, medihoney consists of two different types of honey: one which forms a comparatively large amount of hydrogen peroxide, and another known as "lepto-spermum honey". Leptospermum is a species of tree which occurs in New Zealand and Australia. Honey from these trees has a particularly strong anti-bacterial effect, even in a 10% dilution. "It is not yet known exactly why this is," Dr. Arne Simon says. "Probably it is a mix of phenol-type substances which come from the plant and make life particularly difficult for the bacteria in the wound."

From: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060727090308.htm

Pictures

2006-07-26T16:47:00.000-05:00

These are pictures of brood frames from Colony One, supercedure cells and brood from "June" colony.

Liquid Gold

2006-07-26T16:04:00.000-05:00

In anticipation of an upcoming West Coast business trip I did an inspection today. I was interested in checking the conditions of the "June" hive. This is by far my weakest hive and I was pleasantly surprised with what I found! They've started to draw out a lot more comb and there is plenty of capped brood, eggs & larvae. They have a small amount of pollen, nectar and capped honey in the brood box as well. I did find a couple of supercedure cells and I intend to let nature take its course and replace the reigning queen. The colony can still destroy the queen cells and abandon their attempts to replace the queen. I guess we'll wait to see what happens.

Since I was all suited up and in the bee yard, I decided to take a quick peek at the three newest colonies that I recently acquired from BeeYond Wonderful Apiaries. All three brood boxes are 100% full of capped brood, nectar & honey. I'm very satisfied with the transaction I made with Mike Sorensen and can't believe the amount of bees in each colony. WOW! Perhaps one day my "June" colony will look like these! They're currently working to fill the honey supers that will be used for Winter stores. Colony One has filled their super so I added another deep brood box last week. I'm amazed at how fast they're drawing out & filling the comb in the new brood box. The picture above is a frame from Colony One's honey super. How beautiful is that? Colonies Two & Three have their honey supers filled to about 20% capacity, so they have a ways to go yet. It has been raining in the area off/on over the past few days. I'm hoping the rain will bring some relief and help with the Fall honey flow. I would love to have some excess honey this year.

Location

2006-07-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

Two years ago I decided that I could no longer stand my backyard. Katie (my wife) had two Black Labrador Retrievers that had destroyed our backyard to the point we couldn't go out there. I decided to replace the fencing, build a nice deck, install a dog run and have sod put down in an attempt to reclaim our yard. I spent most of the Summer working on this project and putting the finishing touches on my new "kingdom". The dogs took to their new space and it kept them from digging up the sod and "depositing" any surprises on my new grass. As fate would have it our 14 year old Lab, Bogie had to be put to sleep soon after. That left Diesel all alone in the backyard and he immediately became depressed. Katie found Diesel a new home out at the farm where she rides. I now had a brand new, barely used dog run.....and no dogs ! ! !

From the pictures I've previously posted, you can clearly see that I live "in the city". The edge of the dog run is about 60' from the deck on the back of the house. The hives are located an additional 12' from the fence and most are pointed away from the house towards the property line. The one exception is the hive (far right) installed from a package in June. I like to watch the bees in this colony and this helps me keep a close eye on them. I've installed a green mesh cloth on the fence that runs along the property line. On the back side of the property line is an area about 10'-12' deep that is full of bushes, trees and a storage building. This helps get the flight path of the bees above the head of anyone who may be outside. All in all, I feel that I have a safe barrier between the hives and any unsuspecting persons. I did take the opportunity to explain to the neighbors that I have honeybee hives and not to worry. I educated them about the Do's & Dont's and they are quite curious about my new hobby. They can't wait to get some honey!

I'm constantly evaluating the amount of bee traffic in/out of the hives, location and the risk vs. reward of having this in my backyard. I don't plan on adding any more hives......4 is definitely my maximum capacity. I've decided to shift all 4 hives to the left and push them back between the two big Oak trees. I cut my grass about once a week and have never had a problem with the bees becoming angry at the mower or my presence. The first time I cut the grass was about an hour after I installed the packaged bees. I thought for sure that I was asking for trouble, but they seem to totally ignore the mower and anyone who's in the backyard. We'll see if that changes! I guess I'll be the first to know

New additions

2006-07-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

I installed my first hive from a package of bees on June 1st, 2006. Since then it has been a very uneventful 7 weeks. The temperatures have been in the high 90's and we are in somewhat of a nectar dearth. The bees are very slow to draw out new wax on the Rite-Cell foundation I have installed in the frames. Because I'm a beginning beek, I have to use brand new wooden ware, foundation, etc... I don't have the benefit of drawn comb from last year. Also, the queen in this colony is "suspect". She has a spotty brood pattern and I have found supersedure cells on several frames. I've decided to let nature take its course and replace her! This should get me through the Summer and into Fall, when I plan on replacing her with a top quality instrumentally inseminated queen.

I did some "horse trading" with Mike Sorensen for 3 complete hives. As I've mentioned previously I travel for work, a lot! In doing so, I've accumulated quite a few frequent flier miles and traded Mike a couple of plane tickets for 3 hives. My small Urban apiary has now been expanded to a total of 4 hives. Once things settle down a bit I'm going to take 1 frame of brood from each of the 3 new colonies and put them into my weakest one. I hope this will give the hive a "kickstart" and get them in good shape headed in to the Winter. I'm worried they won't have enough Winter stores to make it to Spring.

The beginning

2006-07-25T14:09:00.000-05:00

April 2006 -

I was on a business trip when my local contact mentioned his father-in-law was a beekeeper. We discussed the European Honeybee and the benefits of honeybees in general (pollination, honey production, wax, etc...) over lunch one afternoon. By the end of the lunch hour I had become increasingly interested in beekeeping. I spent the evening (and many more!) in my hotel room researching honeybees, beekeeping and anything related to bees. I was rapidly becoming addicted...........and I wasn't even sure if I may be allergic to a bee sting!

It was during this research that I found out The University of Georgia honey bee program offers an annual Beekeeping Institute in cooperation with Young Harris College, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. I attended the short course from May 19th - 20th, 2006. I highly recommend this course for anyone remotely interested in honeybees & beekeeping. Prior to attending the course I read "The Hive and the Honeybee", "The BeeKeeper's Handbook" and "First Lessons in Beekeeping ".

I attended the UGA short course, read several books and was knowledgeable about the honeybee...........but I had no practical experience aside from the "field" exercises I participated in at the short course. An internet search turned up a local beekeeper, Mike Sorensen so I contacted him and we met shortly thereafter. I asked quite a few dumb questions and hung around while he worked his hives until I got a better feel for what I was getting myself into. Mike recommended I order my package of bees from Rossman Apiaries. On June 1st, 2006 I drove to Moultrie, Ga. and picked up my bees and returned home. I installed them in the late afternoon in a Langstroth hive and immediately began feeding them 1:1 sugar water to help strengthen the hive.

I live downtown, in an area that is ideally suited for the honeybee. Many homeowner's have nicely landscaped yards and have ornamental & decorative plants, bushes, trees and shrubs that are beneficial to the honeybee and the production of honey. This area is also native to many feral nectar/pollen producing plants. After careful consideration, lots of research and after speaking to several "beeks" (beekeepers), I decided to located the hive in my back yard so that I can properly manage the colony and truly enjoy my new hobby.