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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter August 2007 |
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IHPA Award Nominations It is time to think of who should receive one of the Awards that the IHPA presents at the Annual Meeting banquet. Please review the categories and submit your suggestions along with a short letter explaining why you feel that this candidate should receive an award. The categories that we present are as follows: 1. Pioneer Award- for having been
involved for 50 years or more and still active in beekeeping. If you would like to nominate someone, please send the information to me by the deadline of September 1st. : Donna Brahms
THE BEEYARD REPORT Shortly after I sent off the write up for the June Buzz saying there was no honey coming, I found we had a few yards that were bringing it home. At that time, it was limited to the overwintered doubles and the very early splits. It was in areas where the alfalfa had frozen off and they were letting it regenerate. Some of those fields bloomed for over two weeks. The other yards weren't quite there yet. By July 15th, we were seeing a nice flow that had been going on for a couple of weeks. I don't know if I should wish for rain. Hot dry weather is great for bees but we are moving into the soybean phase in our area. Soybean flowers will dry up quickly if there is no rain. Maybe the best scenario would be to get a ½" around midnight. That way, the bees wouldn't lose any flying time. We went almost three weeks without our flatbed. There is a long story that goes with this but I will spare you. In the end, it turned out the turbo housing was cracked into the drilling that carries the oil to lubricate the turbo. This led to a rather stiff repair bill. Still, I was glad I didn't try to work on it myself. I don't have a torch and exhaust stuff just doesn't come apart without heat, especially on older vehicles. We didn't go back to Schuyler, Ne, for the rest of the honey we bought from Suchan's until July 18th. We started home after loading and hadn't gone 25 miles when we blew out a front tire. We don't carry a spare so this was a bit of a problem. We managed to get the truck off the road and into a farm yard. With the tire flat, the front axle was really close to the ground. Fortunately, I had a stubby jack that just barely got under the suspension. The jack wouldn't go high enough so we had to block the suspension and then block up the jack so we could go up in stages. We had an assortment of bricks and pieces of 2x4's that we were using for blocks. We had to take up the cleats that were holding the barrels in place on the trailer to get enough blocking. We had called Brian earlier. He arrived about the time we finally got the front wheel in the air. He had an assortment of tires and blocks. None of the tires he brought would fit our truck. We had foreseen this possibility and had driven the inside dual up on a block before we started jacking the front end. This made it possible to get the outside dual off without having to do any jacking. We took the outside dual and put it on the steer position and singled out the dual. This whole ordeal consumed about four hours before we finally limped into Fremont where we had an unscheduled overnight stop. The following morning, Brian's dad lined us up with the Bauer Built Tire dealer in Fremont. They took care of our tire problem in about 30 minutes. Brian had taken our trailer back to his place so we had to backtrack 45 miles to get it before we were homeward bound. We finished lunch in Blair about 1:00 PM and decided to stop at DeSoto bend and look at the steamship museum. The museum is pretty interesting but there aren't any waterfowl on the reserve this time of year. The tourist type stop helped to put me in a more positive mood. We sold all of our queens the first three weeks that we had them. Then we hit a cycle that mated poorly. We are just now coming out of that. We had to turn down some orders. Adam went to the queen rearing class that Marla Spivak runs at the University of Minnesota. He had the basics down pretty well already, but he wanted to see how she was set up. He thought the class was well worth the time and expense. He took in a Saint Paul Saints game with some of the university people while he was up there. The Saints are an independent baseball team. They scrounge up players wherever they can. Sometimes they get ex major leaguers who still want to play. I thought about when I was a kid. The Giants had a team in Minneapolis and the Dodgers had one in Saint Paul. That was in the old American Association. Willie Mays spent time in Minneapolis around 1950. Our comb honey system is constantly evolving. It has evolved so much, I'm not sure we have a system left. Adam announced he was doing it this year without queen excluders. My thought was, "That will never work." I have since found that it does. I have also found other people that do it that way. We aren't using it, but Kelley actually makes what they call 7-11 foundation for this purpose. I've looked at their catalog for years and never noticed it. It has an "in between" cell size that the queen doesn't like to lay in. We've pulled about 12 boxes of cut comb so far. We have another 60 out in the yards. I don't know how many will get filled up. The state fair is only three weeks away. I hope to see a lot of you there.
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