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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter April 2005 |
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The Beeyard Report It’s deadline day again. I wonder if I will get fired if I don’t get finished? Spring is almost here. Package bees are three weeks away. There is equipment I have purchased that needs to be sorted, I really need to get my feeder buckets fixed. Mann Lake no longer sells the fine mesh wire for the feeder hole but I found it on the internet without much trouble. I don’t like to use regular screen wire. It leaks too much when the weather gets chilly. If anybody needs some fill plugs with the built in screen, I can give you a real good deal. I have now seen all of my yards. The bees look great. Death loss is going to be in the neighborhood of 5%. If past results indicate future performance, 10 or 15% of what is left will wind up queenless or dwindle down for a variety of reasons. That still leaves me in good shape. I am now working on the problem of “What am I going to put them all in?”. Most of my death loss is in one yard. It had 26 colonies going into winter. There are nine left alive. This is an obvious mite problem. The bees have abandoned the colonies. I am blaming this on tracheal mites since I know there wasn’t much Varroa in this yard. I am going to pull some tracheal mite samples in some of the other yards. I have never done this in the spring. I’m curious to see what the results will be. Most of my other yards have one or two dead colonies. I lost my spread sheets when my computer went up in smoke. I found memory wasn’t the same as reality. I thought I has given half my colonies a Checkmite strip last spring. After I went back and checked the written notes, I found it was only a third. The rest of my yards haven’t had a strip in eighteen months. I decided to give them all a strip for three weeks. We used splits to fill the holes in the yards. I don’t know which yards they came out of. If I don’t treat them all this spring, I will have some colonies that won’t have had a treatment for two years. The last time I tried that, the results were not good. So, the plan is to give TM and one strip on the first trip to the yard and give feed to those that need it. On the second trip, we pull the strip and give a second shot of TM. When we split, we will give a final TM treatment. So far I have not had any sign of TM resistant foulbrood. I still have a few extra barrels of honey but I’m getting it sold down. We’ll be able to bottle most of what we have left. I consider myself fortunate. Our honey last year was very high in quality and I have been able to get a decent price out of it. Those two things don’t always go together. Prices are plummeting in the bulk market. I hope everybody has a great spring. Submitted by Phil Ebert
The following is a reprint of a letter from Stuart Volby, Sales Manager for Mann Lake Ltd., to Mike Neville, Regional Territory Manager for Cargill Sweeteners. The letter appeared in the March 2005 issue of Honey Producer for the American Honey Producers Association. January 7, 2005 Attn: Mike Neville This letter is to voice formally our concerns regarding your honey substitute product Likewise. This product is being marketed as a “Honey Product”, comparable to USDA Grade A Honey. As you know, we have a partnership with Cargill Sweeteners providing HFCS and Sucrose products to beekeepers as a livestock feed. We purchase a large volume of HFCS products annually from Cargill Sweeteners. In the past few years US beekeepers and honey producers have been beleaguered by a myriad of tribulations, ranging from illegal foreign dumping of honey on the US market to plagues of ever increasing pests and diseases which are resistant to treatments. The latest threat to beekeepers’ lively-hood is ultra-filtered honey from China that bears little resemblance to real honey. Now, publications have been featuring your pres release for Likewise. As you can imagine, the feelings of goodwill towards Cargill as a company have been changed to an adversarial attitude as you market imitation honey as an ‘affordable honey product’. Please take our concerns into consideration when looking at Likewise as a viable product. Thank you,
NEWS RELEASE After lengthy discussions with Cargill Inc. a
decision by Cargill has been made to discontinue selling “LikeWise”
Honey replacement product.
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