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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter August 2004 |
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HAPPY NEW YEAR What, it’s not New Years! Then you must not be a beekeeper. Beekeepers New Year starts in August. It is time to plan how many colonies of bees you are going to over winter and plan to make increase of new colonies from next spring in 2005. You have to remove the surplus honey supers and extract the honey and then put the empty supers back on the hives so the bees can dry the honey from the frames and keep the wax moths out until it gets to cool weather about the last of September. Then you will want to bring in the surplus supers and store them in a mouse proof building. Now you have removed the honey supers you need to make sure that you bees have enough food for winter and that the queen is laying good so you have a lot of young bees to go through winter. You will need to place a miticide control in your hives if you test and the mite population is high. A high mite population is 10 or more mites from 200 bees. You can test for mites using the powdered sugar method that doesn’t kill the bees in case you happen to accidentally get the queen in the jar for testing. You need a quart jar a canning ring that will screw on the jar and a piece of 1/8 inch mesh screen wire to cut and fit in the canning ring that you screw on the quart jar. Place about a ½ cup of powdered sugar in the jar and capture about 200 bees in the jar. Put the canning ring with the screen wire on the jar and tumble the jar to dislodge the mites from the bees. This tumbling action needs to be done for 5 to 10 minutes. Then genteelly shake the sugar out of the jar on a paper towel. The mites will fall out through the screen and can be seen on the paper towel in the powdered sugar so that you can count them. You can then dump the bees covered with the powdered sugar at the entrance to the hive. You can use the ether roll method for checking for mites, although this method kills the bees and the mites. Use this method only if you are sure that you don’t have the queen bee in the jar. Put about 200 bees in a quart jar and using a can of starting fluid ether spray into the jar for about 10 seconds and immediately place the lid on the jar as this makes the bees very mad. In a few minutes all of the bees will be dead and you can roll the jar on its side where the dead mites will stick after falling off of the bees. They will be a little round dark specks on the side of the jar. Some people use rubbing alcohol and pour this into the jar with about 200 bees and shakes the jars vigorously and this kills the bees and mites and dislodges the mites from the bees. You then pour the bees and alcohol out onto a 1/8-inch mesh screen over a light colored bowl to be able to count the mites. You can then reuse the alcohol on the next batch of bees for a test if you wish. If you plan on over wintering your bees, keep in
mind that each colony will need from 55 to 75 pounds of honey
to survive the winter and have enough food to raise enough bees
next spring to make a divide for a new colony from or just to
build up sufficiently to make a honey crop. It is better to take
your losses in the fall than to have a weak colony eat up 30 pounds
of honey and still die in the middle of March next spring. If
you had dumped the bees out of the hive on the ground and extracted
the 30 pounds of honey and sold it you would have the money to
buy a 2# package of bees with Queen in the spring. You just have
to weight the risk of losing the bees against buying a package
next spring. I have always over wintered my bees and some years
I would have been money ahead to have dumped the bees and extracted
the honey they ate for food and sold it to have to buy the packages
I needed in the spring. I know it is not always possible to get
packages in the spring, so I will probably continue to over winter
in the hopes that I can make a few divides and sell nukes in the
spring. The next major event on the Iowa Honey Producers Association agenda is Honey Month. This is September and we want to have the governor to proclaim September Honey Month. If you are selling your honey in a grocery store, ask the manager if you can put up a end cap display of honey for a week and have one of the Honey Queens come for a visit on the weekend if she can’t come during the week. Prepare a observation hive and have it on display with your honey and spend a few hours telling the customers how important honey bees are for pollination. You just might sell twice as much honey as you normally have in the past. Give samples of your honey on crackers to the public. You probably will convert a customer to your honey or better yet you may get some new customers. In September the Clay County Fair will be from Sept. 11 to Sept 19. Have you been to a old fashioned farm oriented fair lately? If not I would suggest the Clay County Fair. They put on a “agciting” fair presentation for the school children each year during this fair and bring in the kids by the bus load for learning about agriculture. If you are a beekeeper and live in the northwest part of the state or have time to assist with this fair for the Iowa Honey Producers Association, call Jim Strachan at Humboldt and volunteer. Jim’s phone number is 515-332-3499. There is camping in the field right across the road north of the fair grounds and also at the city park in Spencer. It is time to make plans to attend the annual meeting November 12 &13 at Marshalltown. I don’t know who the main speakers will be at present, but I hear that one of them has a southern drawl. I just hope I will be able to understand him. You may want to consider one of the national meeting this year also. I hope none of you hurt your back bringing in this years honey crop and that the moisture is all below 17%.
So long until next time from the old man.
Please note that Gordon Powell’s email address has changed
to Iabekeepr@juno.com
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