The Buzz Newsletter

April 2005

 

 

Page 8

Master Beekeepers Scholarship

The deadline for applying for the Master Beekeepers Course is May 1st. As of March 15th, I have five applications. Remember to include a short personal profile with your beekeeping history. Your profile has nothing to do with the selection process. It just gives us something to print in “The Buzz” after the selection of the winners. The course is from June 23 – June 25. Let’s get those applications sent in.

Submitted by Phil Ebert

 

April is Package Bee Month

There are several ways to install a package of bees and be successful with them and to make some surplus honey the first year. Generally if you start your new package of bees on foundation, I always tell a new beekeeper that if they manage the bees to produce two deep hive bodies of drawn comb and to fill one hive body with honey for the next winter they have been successful in their first year of beekeeping. Now for second year and beyond beekeepers the following ways of installing packages of bees are for you to try and to learn from and to improve your technique of installing package bees before moving on to making divides. If you have one of more colonies of over wintered hives of bees then you are well on your way to getting your package of bees off to a great start. After you have ordered your packages of bees and know when they are due to arrive, it is time to get your hives ready for the new packages. Go ahead and set the hives up out in the bee yard and close the entrance so other bees and critters, like mice can’t get into the hive. You will want at least three or four combs of drawn comb in each hive. When the packages arrive and you are ready to install them in the hives take a clean paint brush and brush a one to one ratio of sugar water on the screen of the cages three or four times just before you open the cages. Open the cages and remove the queen cage and place a cover over the hole in the cage where the can of sugar water was while the bees were shipped to you. Make sure the queen is alive and if the cage has candy in one end of the queen cage, remove the cork in the candy end. If the cage is like the ones from California and some of the other states and the queen is in a small cage by herself, you will need some miniature marshmallows. I always put a marshmallow in the hole when I remove the cork on those cages so the queen can’t just come out immediately and lead the bees out of the hive and off to who knows where. Not confining the queen to the cage for a day or two is a good way to see $55 to $70 fly away. Now the queen is ready, it is time to prepare the hive for the package of bees. Since you have one or more over wintered colonies of bees, I recommend that you open one of those hives and you should have been checking these hives from about the middle of March and equalizing brood to make them all about the same strength. You remove one frame of mostly sealed brood from this over wintered hive and gently shake or brush most of the bees off into the old hive. Now put this frame of brood center of the hive where you are going to install the new package. Now dump the bees in the new hive and put the queen in the hive placed so the cage can’t fall to the bottom board. Install the inner cover and place a two gallon plastic bucket of sugar syrup or fructose on top of the inner cover hole and place an empty deep hive body around the feeder bucket and place the cover on the hive body and weight it down with a brick or rock weighing about two pounds. Make sure the entrance to the hive has a small opening, no more than two inches wide so the bees can get out to fly and to protect the hive. In two weeks you give the new hive another frame of brood from the over wintered hive and the two hives should be about the same strength at the end of one month. This method of starting a package will allow the package to grow steadily from the first week and at the same time reduce the swarming tendency of the over wintered colony. There are other variations of this method that can be used, but I won’t go into those at this time. If you don’t have an over wintered colony of bees to get brood from, make sure you start your new package of bees on drawn comb if at all possible.

Ramblings by The Old Man

 

Speaking Up in Washington DC

Several members of the American Honey Producers went to Washington, DC on February 6 to help lobby for cash bonds under the antidumping suit and also for funding for research on mite controls by the ARS. Due to a loophole in the antidumping law, new shippers don’t have to pay duties in cash. They only have to post a bond. When it is time to pay the duty, they just walk away. This resulted in a record amount of 66 million pounds of Chinese honey being shipped into the US in 2004.

Meetings were also held with the FDA about honey adulteration and Kodex standard for the identification of honey. Thirty meetings were held with government officials throughout the week.