The Buzz Newsletter

August 2004

 

 

Page 3

Annual Awards Nominations

I have only received one nomination so far. Iowa Honey Producers send me your nominations Please!If you know of someone who should be recognized for an award to be given at the annual meeting please send your nominations to me:

Mark Tintjer
25711 L Ave.
Hubbard, IA. 50122
or e-mail mltintjer@netins.net

We will not necessarily give all of these awards in any one year.

1. Pioneer Award - for having been involved for 50 years or more & still active in beekeeping.

2. Distinguished Service Award - for assisting other beekeepers, willing to share information, and/or serving the association.

3. Education Award - teaching beekeeping classes, speaking at service clubs, giving presentations to school children or speaking about beekeeping on radio or T.V.

4. Promotions Award - for promoting honey and beekeeping, promotions for the state association of promoting their own product.

5. Friendship Award - for being a friend of the association. This could be someone who has displayed at the annual IHPA trade show, a state official who has assisted or encouraged beekeeping, someone outside our industry of producing honey.

6. Youth Award - for a young person who has shown commendable involvement in such things as helping at the state fair, successfully keeping bees for at least one season including wintering, writing, making a float for a parade, speaking, etc.

Submitted by Mark Tintjer

 

A Swarm Summer

I've heard a number of reports/complaints this year about supercedure of queens, swarming of nucs, and just plain non-acceptance of new queens in colonies. Even one report of new queens installed on foundation being drone layers. We've had some of the same problems.

As most of you know, Bernie and I adhere to the theory of NO MORE than 5 frames of brood the first week of May to avert swarming in colonies. Well, it didn't work this year. We had colonies with 3 and 4 frames of brood the first week of May swarm, we had most of our nucs either swarm out with plenty of room left or supercede the queen after she'd started laying.

We caught a number of these swarms, so have increased, again, instead of lowering the number of colonies we have, like we'd planned to do. At least by catching our nuc swarms we were able to keep our costly queen, and after the swarming the bees seemed to settle down and accept the queens we bought. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.

The only thing we'd been able to come up with is that the queens were rushed into mating and shipment, they weren't mated properly, the weather wasn't conducive to proper/good mating, or we've lost our touch in starting nucs. Since I now find out that others are having the same problems, maybe we haven't 'lost our touch' after all. That at least is gratifying.

I think, after all the soul searching and teeth gnashing, that it's probably a combination of circumstances that caused our problems this spring. The weather certainly hasn't cooperated and been 'normal' this spring and summer, so that's likely played a big part of our problems. Because of the weather, the honey flow hasn't been as it should either, which also contributed to our problems. I know it sounds like a cop out, but 'blame it on the weather' would probably be the base cause of most of our swarming, supercedure and non-acceptance problems this year.

Those are my thoughts, what are yours?

Margaret Hala