The Buzz Newsletter

April 2005

 

 

Page 3

Featured Beekeeper of the Month

This month’s featured beekeeper is Christopher Taylor. He lives near Prarie City, Iowa, and his business is Taylor Honey.

Christopher writes, “I started keeping bees in 2003. I got into beekeeping because I was interested in bees and beekeeping, and thought it would be an interesting business to get into. My fater had kept bees for several years and helped me get started with beekeeping. I was very fortunate that he had been able to build up an inventory of used equipment that helped get me started. It was a big help to have his advice and experience as I started to build up my hive numbers. I have also received a great deal of advice from Phil Ebert. The internet has been a good source of information for me. I frequently use Allen Dick’s beekeeping website. The University of Georgia has a good site also.

We operate 225 hives in Jasper and Marion counties. My bee trucks are pickups so I try to keep yards fairly close to the home farm. Most of our yards are on farms that we own or farm but I have had reasonably good luck finding bee yards elsewhere when I need them.

Most of our honey is marketed bulk in drums. We bottle a small amount of honey for gifts and a small amount of retail sale. We do a few supers of round and cut combs each year. Our wax is usually sold in raw blocks. I have experimented with making beeswax candles, but I am still trying to perfect my technique.

I enjoy being able to work outdoors when the weather is nice in the spring and summer. I enjoy being able to work bees with my father. I enjoy looking for new bee yards and trying to guess how good of a honey producing area the yard is in. Keeping bees has made me much more aware of the flowering plants in my area as well as the weather during the honey flow.

We have been wintering bees in an old hog barn as singles the last couple of seasons with generally good success. I like this type of wintering setup because it keeps the bees out of the wind and moisture. It is also nice to have all of the bees in one or just a few yards in the spring when making splits. The downside of this type of setup is that feeding the bees enough to keep them in a single box over winter can be a chore. The next step I think is to try to create a more controlled environment in terms of temperatures and ventilation for them to winter in.

We are working on converting part of a swine-farrowing house to an indoor over wintering building for bees. The farrowing house has heat and ventilation fans, in contrast to our current setup, which is simply an enclosed area of an old hog barn. We are planning to install shelves in part of the farrowing house to experiment with over wintering singles and nucs in a more controlled environment. There has beeen some research done in this area in Canada and I am interested in experimenting with some of those ideas.

Our honey house is in part of an old corncrib that my dad converted to an extracting area when he started keeping bees. We would like to convert more of the corncrib to a storage area for supers and honey barrels.

We are looking at palletizing at least part of our hives to make them easier to move around. Our plan is to use a skid loader to load and unload the hives off of a trailer of hayrack that could be pulled with a pickup.

I think this would be helpful in the summer when spraying for soybean aphids occurs. It would also be nice to be able to move some of our hives around in September to take advantage of bee yards that traditionally have a much stronger fall flow than others.”

Thanks for the interesting story Christopher. Good luck with your bees.

Submitted by Ron Wehr