The Buzz Newsletter

Page 5

THE BEEYARD REPORT

The hardware store in Lynnville is closing at the end of the month. It’s as much a victim of the shrinking farm population as the rise of Wal-Mart. It’s a familiar story in most small towns. People work away from home and do their shopping in other places when they get off work. We all vote with our dollars on who we want to stay open. When you vote, you need to ask yourself “Does this business help my community? Are they around to contribute to the school yearbook or the after prom party?” Dollars spent on main street stay at home.
Lynnville isn’t dead. We still have a bank, convenience store (locally owned), day care, two repair shops, a medical clinic, cafe and the seed company. There are a few new houses being built. The Chamber of Commerce members have been keeping the cafe open with volunteer labor. I don’t know how long this can go on. Remember that things don’t get better unless you help make them better.

Our early honey flow was spotty. The yards in the timber were the best. They caught both black locust and basswood. The bloom in other areas was good but there was very little yield. I checked two yards of 20 colonies each during the first week of July. They had two boxes of honey between them. Then, a massive flow started. Most of our yards plugged within a couple of weeks. Alex and Adam made the first pull on the 11th. We started extracting the next day. It has been a struggle to get the supers emptied and back on the hives. We are working on barrel #37 right now.

We miss having Anthony to run the extractor. All we had to do was show up in the morning and load whatever empty boxes we needed. Now, we have to extract before we can load. Adam usually shows up around 6:30 in the morning and starts extracting. I get up and do chores. I join him around 9:30. We work together until Alex gets the truck loaded. They go to pull honey around noon and are usually home by six or seven in the evening. I run the extractor through the afternoon and into the night. Some nights, when I am done extracting, I set a rack on top of the uncapper tray and cut out comb honey sections. We can pack them up first thing in the morning and not have space tied up while waiting for them to drain.

We are generating a lot more wax this year. Last year, we were able to pull about half our honey before it was capped. You give up a little on the moisture content but it saves a lot of uncapping. One or two strokes with the cappings scratcher and the frame is

ready to extract. This year almost everything is capped and we get several blocks of wax every day.

We have a big screen that we put in the doorway where the rollup door is. The bees that come home with the supers collect there. Usually, there aren’t too many. Given the necessity for speed, we have accumulated more than normal. There were probably five of six pounds of bees hanging along the door frame. We have a hive right outside the door but they wouldn’t go in it. Alex put a queen in a package cage and set it near the cluster. About half of them crawled right into the cage. We had wanted to do a video on package installation in the spring but didn’t have any packages left. Now, voila, we had the July package and a huge one at that. We put them in a box of foundation and gave them a bucket of syrup. I think we have enough bees for this to work.

A guy on one of the chat pages had an extractor for sale. It was a strange brand so I went to his “My Space” page where he had a picture of it. I checked out his documents while I was there and what did I find but the Ebert Honey Co Online Catalog and the Buzz Newsletter. How about that?

I’m really full of it this month. I could go on but I better quit before I wear out my welcome. I hope to see a lot of you at the fair.

Submitted by Phil Ebert