Sustainable Beekeeping and More Early Blooms

Wow – this year is turning out to be a weird one. Today, I noticed a couple of dozen dandelion blooms over at one of my rentals! My bloom chart is getting a bit of a skew this year, as this seems really early. For some reason, I didn’t record the Dandelion bloom last year, but I think it was mid-March. This will be an interesting Spring for the beekeepers around Richmond, Virginia for sure. Having gardened for several decades, I know full well that very cold temperatures are in our future for two months ahead, but the last two weeks and the next two are like early Spring and not mid- to late-Winter! The bees are collecting nectar and pollen well in advance of when they normally do. In two of my yards, they are getting syrup and taking it down like piglets. How will this play out when it gets cold?

The big concern that most folks have is that the bee will ‘over lay’, effectively creating more brood then they can keep warm, should the temperatures drop. A big cold snap hits and they suffer – they stress themselves trying to keep a lot of brood warm. Normally, without the syrup or early blooming flowers, they wouldn’t have that much brood to cover. The other concern is around moisture in the hive. Putting a lot of sugar syrup in the hive somehow is a detriment. Having a fairly good background in chemistry and physics, I definitely do not understand this logic (we put buckets of water in the greenhouse to keep the temperature up – water stops it from getting cold, due to the massive energy it takes to convert water from a liquid to a solid.) Ventilation should resolve moisture issues and I think having a liquid in a structure actually keeps the temps from dropping as fast or as far!

In my opinion, the bees do what they need to do. I am pretty confident that they will be just fine, but only time will tell.

Sustainable Beekeeping

This past Friday, the Central Virginia Beekeepers Association out of Ashland, Virginia had Billy Davis of Sustainable Beekeeping up in Northern Virginia. It was an interesting talk and only cemented my resolve to focus on bees that are born and bred in my neck of the woods. Billy Davis focuses on splits, Nucs and overwintered Nucs to do increases off of bees that make it through his Winters. By ‘make it through his Winters’, he means that they do so after he gives them a lot of pre-stored honey frames and a big block of candy. I absolutely respect his work, but it does not surprise me that he has a ton of success overwintering bees in that manner. If you used the exact same strategy on a full hive, you’d probably have great results as well. But, the point is that he is doing it not to just ‘survive’ but to end up with an increase Nuc off of his prime hives. He advocates that we should all do this, trading our increases with other beekeepers or selling them to others in the area. This spreads good genetic material throughout, which benefits both the honey bee and the beekeeper.

He really focuses on using bees that are his version of ‘survivor stock’. He did not mention whether he uses chemicals or not, but you have to admire his tenacity. He uses tons of hives and weeds out the weak, making a great stock for his neck of the woods. If I lived up there, I’d get all of my bees from him. And that’s his goal. Folks up there should start getting their bees from him and from each other, effectively spreading survivor genes throughout the region and eventually (a tertiary goal that he mentions) leading to feral bees again. To be fair, he jammed a 6 hour lesson into 2 hours, so I probably missed a lot of the meat. I will take the full course from him in the future.

On a few points, I believe he is mistaken. The biggest is the African Honey Bee. He points out that getting local hives will prevent the spread of this bee to our region. I am here to say that AHB is coming and will be here, no matter what mankind does. The new Honey Bee pest in Australia will eventually get here as well, no matter what mankind does. Mother Nature rules, but we still fight it. As mentioned in previous posts, I believe that the future of our bee (the European) will hinge on the African strain (and the Russian strain and many others.) They will need the best traits of the mix to  make it in this rough world!

New Richmond Beekeeper’s Group

I have been given the honor of being the 2011 President of the East Richmond Beekeeper’s Association. My first meeting will be in February, so I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do as  ‘President’. We are a young group that has grown nicely over two years. So, as my Pop would say, ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it!’

But, I want to do more then simply preside over meetings. So, I have decided to focus on ‘adding’ to what is already there, instead of changing anything. One goal will be to add to our methods of communicating to the public. Although I have lots of ideas on how to accomplish this, I have decided to create a Richmond Beekeeping Yahoo Group (Click Here to check it out and join if you like!) today. Email groups are certainly not the wave of the future (I’d say Facebook and other social media fit that bill), but they do still offer a great way for folks with a common goal to ask questions and get information.

Since I have not presented this to our club, no mention of the club exists in the group just yet. If the club gives the ‘thumbs up’, then we’ll link it to that group and let her roll. Either way, I think it has good promise, especially since the big beekeeping months are right around the corner!

A New Beekeeper!

A Picture of my newborn daughter, Ann Katherine Tyler, with Mom and Pop
Ann Katherine, Mom and Pop

On August 14, at 11:53 am, Miss Ann Katherine Tyler entered this world! At 6 lbs 13 oz, she came into the world with a lot of squawling and a fairly emotional pop. Mum is recouperating and doing well, although our sleeping schedules are now completely out of whack. Ann Katherine is a dream all day long, pretty much eating and sleeping. Come around 11:45, she likes to squawl for an hour or two. Nothing quiets her down for more then a minute or two during this time. I’m not sure what she is trying to tell me, but she is very vocal and adamant about it.

As much as I love bees, I have honestly not given them much thought these past few weeks. I am sure that they are fine and will be back to more posts in September as the Winter approaches!

Man Dies of Bee Stings

An article popped up on my Google Alerts today about an Africanized Honey Bee Hive killing a man in California. It’s a real tragedy and my prayers go out to the man’s family. Hopefully they will find peace.

But, this event highlights the ongoing issue with the Africanized Honey Bee (AHB.) Several decades ago, a well-respected (internationally) beekeeper in South America began to observe the AHB and recognized several positive traits in that bee which he thought would be very desirable in his bees back home. The AHB is a fiesty creature. It has evolved in an environment that will go from a lush, wetland full of blooming plants to a desolate, dry land where everything is sleeping (waiting for the next downpour, which may be months away!) As a honey bee, one cannot live for months without nectar and pollen, so this bee developed a couple of traits to help it through this.

Primarily, the AHB can pick up shop and move at a moment’s notice. If this area is dry, it might be time to head many dozens of miles to a new spot where blooms still exist. To complement this, they build up comb very quickly. If you are moving around a lot, you need to be able to build up a place to hatch new bees and store honey quickly. Finally, since they move around a lot, they really do not put honey away to any great extent (if you might be moving next month, there is no need to store up a bunch of honey for the long haul.) These bees do not have our winters, so they simply never needed to store a lot of honey.

Finally, and most importantly, the AHB has a ton of predators that roam the landscape in Africa. Most of these predators are looking to get at the bee’s honey. Over time (thousands of years), the bees that were the nastiest/meanest were the bees that survived. If you could really put a good stinging on a possible honey theft – enough to get them to leave – your hive’s genes had a much greater chance to make it to the next generation. As time went out, the AHB became the meanest little bee in town.

But, there are a lot of Africans that are very successful beekeepers with this nasty bee. As you would imagine, they have worked to keep (and breed) those hives which absconded (picked up shop and left) less, stored more honey then normal and were not as mean. An insect evolves quickly (anyone doubting this has only to look at how quickly the varroa mite evolved to resist the treatments that came out only a decade ago.) It did not take the African beekeeper long to breed a very nice bee that built up much quicker then the European bee (honey-wise), but was missing many of the negative traits of the AHB.

This all sounds good, eh? But, why all the uproar about the AHB? Well, this researcher/beekeeper from South America went to many Apiaries and retrieved only the best queens. He sent them, by the hundreds, back to South America. This bee, when mixed with the European Bee, would be the answer to everyone’s prayers. But, things would not go as planned.

Of the hundreds of bees that were sent back to South America, only a handful (literally) survived. Instead of picking up a large gene pool, a very small sub-set arrived and survived in South America. In no time at all, a few (for all we know, only one – which would imply that all of North America’s AHB’s are descended from this one queen) absconded and intermixed with the local population. The bees spread and the rest is history, with the bees arriving in the southern part of the United States and causing all kinds of problems (and tragedies, born out by the headliner of this post.)

Now, these bees are killed on sight. Some beekeepers try to retrieve them, but requeen them immediately. Think about that. Someone actually catches an AHB (maybe this one has a gentle queen?), but they immediately kill the gene pool and replace it with a European queen. Now, if that hive had been really mean, making it impossible to catch before they absconded, that gene pool would remain in the wild. Thus, Natural Selection all but demands that the AHB remain mean (and get meaner) and abscond quickly here in North America. But, that’s the state of things today. I believe tomorrow will be a different beast.

Within my lifetime, I expect Africanized bees to be in Virginia. I believe they will continue to intermix with the European honey bee and that the Africanized strain will far outperform (and eventually overcome) the European strain in the wild (except, maybe, far up North – that will be my child’s lifetime.) But, am I worried? Not at all. I believe that this is a good thing. The AHB has a huge resistance to many of the problems that ail the European Bees of today. They also have good traits. The problem of today is the bad traits, but I honestly believe that we will one day learn to live with them (even embrace them) and be proud to have hives with that gene pool. We started out with the genetic trash of a handful of bees from Africa (or maybe just 1 queen.) Mother Nature has her way and we will, one day, end up with a superior bee. I believe that bee will have a good many genes from that 1 nasty queen that came out of South America.

Honey Extraction

The Richmond Beekeeper’s Association had their meeting last night, focusing on supering your bee hives and extracting the honey that your bees build out. An experienced beekeeper named Bob gave most of the presentation, however Kenny from ERBA also contributed. It was a very good discussion, although I almost passed out due to allergies or something. I honestly do not know what the heck was going on with me. I played 11 holes of golf prior to the meeting and thought I was coming down with the plague. Fortunately, I seemed to have lived through last night and feel ok this morning (I took an allergy pill last night.) The older I get, the more my body acts up on me.

At any rate, I forced myself to take a few notes for future reference. There was a general discussion of equipment, starting with the Honey Extractor (I had hoped that there would be a discussion of ‘How to Harvest Honey without an Extractor‘, as I am not in the mood to make that investment right now.) The primary tidbits that I picked up on the Extractor were to always purchase Stainless Steel and it doesn’t take long to need more then a 2 Frame Extractor.

The talk then went on to Capping Knife. Bob was an advocate of an electric knife that could be operated (tuned on/off) with a foot petal. Issues apparently arise when you use one of these things as they can burn the honey when they get too hot. Bob dealt with this via a foot pedal, which he would use judiciously (only turning it on for brief periods while working, instead of keeping it on all of the time.) As to this, Kenny advised he never used the knife and just used the scratcher (or some thing that looks like one of those metal combs that kids put in their back pockets.)

Regardless of the tools, the first step in the process is to get the Honey Super on your hive. In the Richmond, Virginia area, you want to make sure that you have at least one honey super on your hives by April 15 (although some of the folks claimed April 1 was the day this year, due to the unseasonably warm weather this year.) The primary flow, as mentioned in a previous post, starts in early May.

Once the bees have filled the super up with honey (you want to have a frame that is mostly capped), you remove it from the hive (probably replacing it with another super). I have definitely written on this blog about possibly leaving the supers on until the Fall. Folks at the Richmond Beekeeper’s meeting were not in favor of this for two reasons. One, you want to extract honey when it is hot. July and August are perfect. Honey runs/drips well in this temperature. Two, if we have a dearth (or maybe they were saying that anytime this can happen), the bees will start to eat into their stores, removing the honey from the supers. This second problem is a bit of a mystery. If you take their food that they would have otherwise eaten, won’t they go hungry? I guess those people just feed the bees sugar syrup for the rest of the Summer/Fall. At any rate, if you subscribe to this view, you want to get those  supers off by the end of June (when the nectar flow in the Richmond, Va area will be over.)

When you go to get the honey supers, it is important to get the bees out of the supers. Bob mentioned things like ‘Bee Off’ or ‘Bee Away’ or something like that. Basically, these items smell so badly that the bees leave the honey. Heh. I am pretty sure you will not catch me using something like that. Fortunately, Kenny mentioned that he just smokes the padoodle out of his honey supers (sending most bees back into the main hive), then he shakes his frames (shaking the bees back into main hive) and uses a brush for the last few still there. Someone mentioned a blower, which I may investigate down the road (in that distant future when I actually get  some harvested honey…)

Once the bees are out of the Super, you need to store it somewhere while you finish working the bees or getting other supers. The key is to have a top and bottom that are bee tight. Otherwise, a bunch of bees will run over and steal the honey out of your super while it is on the truck.

Now that you have your honey, you return to the honey extracting setup and go to work. The first thing is to decap the honey (using the electric knife or hippie comb) over a plastic tub which can catch the stray honey and cappings. Once all of the caps are off, place the frame into the extractor and give her a whirl. The honey will drip out and flow into a bucket (that you need to have setup with a double strainer (rough, then fine). This is the Stage 1 honey. Folks like Kenny (and probably like me, once I get some honey to try) will let this honey sit for a day or two before pouring it into bottles. This lets the last of the wax and bee particles float to the top. But, Bob actually strains it one last time, through a terry cloth or something. This really pulls out all of the tidbits.

Once you are done bottling, you want to clean up very well. Otherwise, according to the folks at the meeting, you will have a Small Hive Beetle paradise and a real mess the next time you extract.

That pretty much sums up the notes on Honey Extraction. The final tidbit that I picked up (by picked up, I mean noted to consider later, as I do not know very much about bees – not even enough to accurately judge the information (usually conflicting!) that I hear from various beekeepers around the area and on the net!), was that a lot of those beekeepers use an ‘Illinois Super’ (this is what I call a honey super) and a Deep for their hives. Basically, I would have already filled that up on both of my hives (I use two Deep’s.) I am a bit leary of this approach, as I think that Tom advised two Deep’s. I might try this setup on one of my new Nuc’s and watch it over the next few years.

ERBA and Splits

The ERBA had its monthly meeting tonight, focusing on the inner workings of the hive. Tom Fifer gave most of the talk and it was good. I opened my big mouth, primarily because of my general excitement about bees. In retrospect, I probably had the least experience of anyone in the room!

The problem centered on questions about ‘what to expect when you open the hive’. Well, I can tell anyone reading this blog that you can throw that out the window. I would say that about 50% of the time, I see what ‘people tell me to expect’. The other 50% of the time, I see things that no one prepared me for. As Tom Fifer said at our meeting tonight, ‘my bees didn’t read the same book that I read’. So, I was dying to speak the whole time, as if these folks gave a hoot what I had to say! Heh.

Regardless, I wish the talk had been on creating splits, like I thought it was going to be. I have a bunch of scenarios that could pop up in the next 72 hours that could require this knowledge. I have been combing the internet and trying to prepare myself, but who knows how it will go.

Of note, Tom did give me one tidbit of knowledge that I had not picked up before. To begin with, he only drops one frame of bees with the queen cell into the hive, adding a frame of honey and a frame of pollen to get them going. He doesn’t add more. I’m guessing this is partially due to the fact that he has that Deep divided into 3 or 4 sections that will only take a few frames. Regardless, the real bit of knowledge was what came next. You need to move your split at least 3 miles from the original hive. Any foragers that you move will simply go back to the original hive if you do it closer. I am guessing this is because the average foraging distance is about 2 miles. Go 3 and the foragers will not be familiar with the area. This is good info, as I had planned on placing my split about 3 feet from the original hive! It would have been yet another costly venture. I suppose I will have to move them out to Charles City and start my beehive out there.

Well, back to researching splits. The next post is likely to be a doozie…

Article in the Post

A buddy at work emailed me a link to an article on Bees and CCD in the Washington Post this morning ( Click Here to See It ). Like most articles for the layman, it beats the drum on CCD, but it did have an interesting tidbit on Winter losses. From the author’s perspective, we have had one doozy of a Winter with very high Hive Loss rates. To this author, it was expected that you would lose about one-third of your hives before this last Winter. They expect much higher losses when the Spring counts come in.

For what it is worth, Kenny advised that he lost half of his hives. That’s a major blow, to be sure.

Richmond Area Bee Meetings

The East Richmond Beekeeper’s Association has canceled their February meeting due to the rough Winter weather we are having (and the prospects for more in the near future.) They have moved this Feb talk to March. It will focus on a talk by Kenny Andrews on dealing with your wooden-ware. This should be good, as Kenny is one of the more knowledgeable Beekeepers around (in my opinion, anyway.)

The Richmond Beekeeper’s Association has not canceled their meeting (yet) for this month. A following is a copy of the news alert that I received on this meeting:

The next meeting will be held Thursday, February 11th in the Lewis Botanical Gardens educational building in Richmond, and is scheduled to go from 7 to 9pm. The topic for the February meeting is “Illinois super? I thought it was a medium!” The nomenclature of beekeeping. We will discuss the various types of beekeeping equipment and the names we use for them. It’s also show and tell. Do you have some special equipment you like using? Do you prefer a specific type of feeder? Bring it with you to the meeting.

Winter is a time for Education

As the cold spell continues (and my hope of the weaker hive surviving dwindles), I continue to immerse myself in educational material. A couple of local items have appeared on the circuit that I might take advantage of.

Lewis Ginter is offering their annual Beekeeping for Beginners course. I really should have taken this last year (I believe that my gardening obsession got in the way), but might attend some (if not all) this year, just to see what they have to say. If I join Lewis Ginter, I stand to save a lot of money for multiple courses. Click here for more on the Richmond Beekeeping Course.

Although I am very active in the East Richmond Beekeeper’s Association, I have never attended the Richmond Beekeeper’s Association meetings. They have a program for Thursday, January 14 (7 to 9 pm at Lewis Ginter) on the travails of the first year beekeepers. I definitely want to try this out, as I am sure that I have much more to experience in this regard. Here is a snippet of the topic from that group : The topic this month is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: My First Year of Beekeeping. People entering their second year of beekeeping will discuss the highs and lows they experienced for those of us starting to keep bees for the first time.

The topic this month is

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: My First Year of Beekeeping. People entering their second
year of beekeeping will discuss the highs and lows they experienced for those of us starting to
keep bees for the first time.