Just got off the phone with Mark in the Dadant Chatham branch and he advised that they will be offering free shipping from Nov 28 to Dec 12 this year. It’s a great opportunity to pick up any gear for the 2012 season.

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!

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.