The Buzz Newsletter

February 2005

 

 

Page 9

Annual Awards Nominations

Please send me your nominations for 2005. I have a couple of late nominations from 2004 that I held over for 2005. Please don't procrastinate, get your nominations in early! Thank you.

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

We will not necessarily give all of these award 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

 

Reflections From The Past

Back in 1938, when I was fifteen, we lived in a two-story stucco house, which was in a state of disrepair. There was a hole under an upstairs windowsill large enough for a bee to get through. A colony of bees took advantage of this situation and decided to move in. Within several years they had used an entire downstairs wall, between two studs; the short upstairs wall; and three feet of the upper story floor as their hive. Occasionally a few bees would chew through the plaster and enter our living space. These bees often stung my sisters and me as we lit the lantern to prepare for bed and sometimes they even got into bed with us. Have you ever tried sleeping with a bee? Not fun!

There was a hole in the upper story floor, which I narrowed down to bee size so I could put a super over it. Then I put a pane of glass on top of the super to construct a makeshift observation hive to watch the bees as they worked. By fall it was full of honey.

I wanted to catch a swarm of bees from this colony, but as far as I knew they had never swarmed. So as Dad and I robbed the honey from the walls and floor we'd fill the empty space with straw or hay in order to crowd them enough to swarm. And finally it happened. You should have heard the noise inside our house when they issued that swarm!

The swarm ended up in the top of a huge Box elder tree which was in our front yard. I climbed up about forty feet and sawed off the branch they were on, then lowered it to the ground with a piece of electric fence wire. The swarm was large enough to fill a five-gallon pail. I built a hive, two feet by sixteen and a fourth inches and eighteen inches high with a twelve inch super on top, to keep them in. Within a month the entire hive was full. After we had forced the initial swarm to leave our house, I was able to take seven more swarms out of the wall space in another two weeks time. Bees were so numerous where we lived because of all the bee trees along the banks of the Iowa River, less than a mile away.
The next season I transferred my bees to a standard hive. During the ten years I had that hive, they were never requeened and they never swarmed. The first three years they made 300 pounds of honey each year. They consistently out produced my other hives. The only thing they were not good at was making comb honey. They always left a passageway through every section of the comb. So I left the comb honey production to my other hives.

I had always wanted to get a new swarm from this hive, but it never happened. Then disaster struck. One day an airplane sprayed a nearby field which killed off all of my hives, including my swarm from our house. I tried putting bees in these hives the following year, but they all died. The poison from the spray was still in the frames of pollen and honey. I had to cut out the combs and install new foundation so my bees would survive. In all of the years I have kept bees, I have never had another colony of bees that came close to producing, year after year, as well as the colony from our house.

Johnnie Matchie