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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter December 2006 |
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The Beeyard Report It’s the middle of November. We are still sucking wind. We are still trying to kill mites and the bees aren’t taking syrup worth a hoot. After the strips failed to kill any mites we bought 500 Miteaway pads. I only put out 150 of them as temperatures weren’t very favorable. They are supposed to work when daytime highs are over 50 degrees. We have found, however, that if the high is not reached until mid afternoon and nighttime temps are in the 20’s and 30’s, not very many mites are going to be killed. I put a sticky board into one of our breeder colonies that we keep close to the house. I sampled this colony and estimated the mite load to be somewhere between 2000 and 3000. We were only dropping 20 or 30 per day with the Miteaway pads installed. When daytime highs got into the sixties, the drop would be 150 to 200. The other zinger is that the bees wouldn’t go around the formic pads to get the syrup. I was worried about this when we put the pads in. In one yard I gave the colonies division board feeders when I put the Miteaway pads on. They took their syrup but I had to make three trips back to the yard to refill the feeders. They don’t hold enough. The only thing we have found effective on the mites is oxalic acid. It only kills the mites that are exposed. I have one yard that had a lot of brood where I used it three times. Most of the others got it twice. When I talked to the Miteaway people, they told me that most of the Canadian beekeepers using Miteaway give an oxalic treatment when they take the Miteaway pads off. They also told me that I would probably be lucky if I killed 60% of my mites with the weather conditions I was operating under. Dennis Naeve visited the Wisconsin meeting this fall. He said they were working with oxalic up there. Like most of the other benign treatments, it’s effective under the right conditions. There needs to be minimal brood and it’s not going to work if the load is too high. If the mite load is in the 6% or 7% range it seems to knock them back pretty well. If it’s higher than that, you go back a second time and hope.
Why are there so many mites this year? Who knows?? Maybe my spring treatment didn’t work as well as I thought it did. We tested but maybe I just happened to test the colonies with small loads. We took colonies into winter last year with a 6% to 8% load. They came through fine but that’s a fairly high load to start with,. If you couple that with a spring treatment that may not have worked as well as we thought, the result could be a lot of mites. We also had a much longer brood cycle this year. In 2005, brood rearing in our area stopped in early to mid September. This year we have a lot of colonies that still have brood in mid November. This struck me as really odd because conditions in October were not conducive to brood rearing. 50% to 75% of the mites are going to be in the brood. If your colony tests 3% and 75% of the mites are in the brood, you will have a 12% load in 12 days when the brood emerges. If you get another brood cycle after that, the mite population can double to 24%. Your colony is toast if that happens. Most years are not that extreme but this year it happened. I don’t think my poor nucs have much chance to survive. They haven’t received much attention. Adam checked them at the beginning of October. He weeded out the bum ones and gave everything some feed. I brought part of them home but have never taken the lids off. See you next month. Have a great holiday season!!!! Submitted by Phil Ebert
Board Meets With Secretary of Agriculture
Elect The IHP board and other interested individuals met with Secretary of Agriculture Elect, Bill Northey, on Thursday evening, November 16th at the Best Western Inn in Marshalltown. Gordon Powell set the meeting up. It was short notice but it was a good fit. We had a board meeting scheduled for that night and Bill had met with the horticulture group earlier in the day. It was a very positive meeting. Bill took a lot of notes and asked a lot of questions. He is a good listener. The IDALS budget for the upcoming year is already set. There won’t be any immediate changes. We need to look for opportunities to work with the state in the future. Submitted by Phil Ebert
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We
had another good year production wise. We extracted 121 barrels
and produced another 50 supers of nice comb honey. We hope to
expand the comb honey production next year. This may be contingent
on how many bees we have left alive in the spring. We had a 50%
loss during the winter of 1999-2000. Since then, our losses have
been in the 5% to 20% range. I’m probably due for a big
loss. If I had any vague thoughts of sending bees to California,
the mite load has killed them.
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