The Buzz Newsletter

January 2005

 

 

Page 8

The Beeyard Report

At long last, the feeders are off and the colonies are wrapped up. I think wrapping colonies is the job I hate the worst. It goes quickly with colony quilt but I am so close to the end of the year, I just want everything to be over. I mentioned earlier that the feeder buckets leak when the temperature drops. The leaky buckets in one of my yards proved to be quite an attraction for the raccoons. The landowner had called to tell me that the wind had blown all the buckets off the hives. This seemed odd. The bees usually stick them down pretty well, but I didn't think about it much. When I got there a few days later, I found all the plugs had been ripped out of the buckets and there had been some serious digging in front of the hives. From the weight of the hives, I'm pretty sure the bees got most of the syrup before the visitors came.
I found out that I didn't have as many colonies as I thought. I counted the colonies in each yard last spring after we were done splitting. I thought we had around 550 based on the number of queens we had used. I never actually added up the tally until last week. Neither did I take into account the number of nucs that we had sold. The actual tally was only 510. The good part of this is that it makes my average per colony look better. We always base our average on the number of colonies that we start out with. It gives a better reflection of cost. The bum colonies cost just as much as the good ones.

This was the first year that we made over 40,000# of honey. There was 40,500# of extracted honey and about 650 sections. We are going into winter with 437 colonies.
I'm on my winter schedule now. I'm starting to think about fixing all the things that got broken during the season. Sometime during November, I backed my flatbed up to the loading dock and it died. I was in a big hurry, so I threw my stuff in another truck and took off. The flatbed is still sitting where I left it. That's project #1. My bulk tank, that sets out in the cold warehouse, has been emptied and cleaned up but the rest of the extracting line has yet to get torn down. There's heat in that room. I keep saving that job for a real nasty day when I don't have anything that needs to be done outside.

I have around 50 barrels of honey in my warehouse. That's about 20 more than I need. Honey prices are dropping like a rock. Do I want to sell this honey into a declining market? There are lots of stories out there about massive numbers of colonies crashing. Maybe I should sit on my honey and sell bees in the spring. That's assuming they will still be alive. Looks like potential for plans A , B and possibly Plan C.

Adam wants to come home and get in the bee business. That is both exciting and really scary. I squeeze a living out of 500 colonies but my financial requirements aren't very high. My place is paid for and the other kids are gone. We sell a few barrels on the open market but we have always bottled most of our honey. Now, we have to look at how we are going to market the additional product. Production is going to move way past our market and capacity to bottle it. This would seem to shove us toward the bulk market where a few large packers dictate the price. I have no idea where we are going to wind up.

Submitted by Phil Ebert

 

A Thank You From Friends Up North

Dear Iowa Beekeepers,

I want to thank you very much for your support of our research program at the University of Minnesota. Your recent contribution of $2500 is very generous and will be put to good use. We continue to breed bees for resistance to diseases and parasitic mites. In our recent research, we discovered that the SMR trait (Suppression of Mite Reproduction, originally discovered and bred by Dr. John Harbo at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge) works in much the same way as the Hygienic trait. Bees bred for SMR are able to detect and remove mite-infested brood, just like hygienic bees do. But the SMR bees go one step further: they are able to detect when the mites are reproducing, and tend to remove pupae on which the mites are reproducing, leaving mites that are not reproducing! This is tricky business! When we (researchers) look for successful mite reproduction, we inspect worker pupae that are about to emerge as adults to see if the mites have daughters that are old enough to have mated in the cell. If these daughters are present, we consider that the mite successfully reproduced. If the bees have removed the pupae with reproductive mites, then all we find is mites that have not reproduced! We thought the pupae were somehow inhibiting mite reproduction, but now we know the adult bees are removing the reproductive mites!

Based on this finding, we now know it is a good idea to incorporate some of the SMR trait into the hygienic line we have bred. We are doing this slowly and carefully, since the SMR line can be difficult to work with -- sometimes the colonies have uneven brood patterns, sometimes the queens are superseded, and the colonies don't produce much honey. But we are having good success in reducing mite loads in commercial colonies of bees bred for both hygienic behavior and SMR. Your research money will go toward continuing our evaluation of this mixed line of bees!

Thank you again for your moral and financial support of our research. I hope to see you again at one of your state meetings. Until then, stay well, and stay away from the chemicals in your bee hives, as much as possible!

Sincerely,
Marla Spivak