The Buzz Newsletter

June 2005

 

 

Page 4

Greetings to the Iowa Honey Producers!!!

I always find this time of year to be a great time for reflection, and this season has given me a great deal to reflect on. It is hard to believe that it has 6 months since the honor of being your queen was bestowed on me, and I must say that it has been an incredible six months. I have visited many places, given many speeches and presentations. However, the best part of this time has been the time spent meeting people.

Since I wrote last, I was able to spend the day at the Central Iowa Beekeeper’s Auction. It was a little cold, but thanks to the hard work of many it was a day well spent. I met many new people, and I look forward to working with them all soon.

With the summer months here, I want to remind you to include honey in all of your cooking. Don’t be afraid to experiment. After all, if it has honey in it you really can’t go wrong. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to find something quick to take to a pot-luck. This might not have been a hard task, except for the fact that I am a college student and my fridge did not exactly contain the necessary ingredients for a gourmet dinner. After a little digging, I discovered that 2 pounds of ground beef, a jar of salsa, and a ½ cup of honey makes a delightful sloppy-joe.

Thank you all for you encouragement and support, I am truly excited to serve you more over the next few months. As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me with anything at (712) 779-0321 or tjurchen@iastate.edu.

I would love to help out in any way!

Until then,
Teresa Jurchen
2005 Iowa Honey Queen

June Beeyard Report

We finished splitting on May 10th. I got my yard mowed for the first time on May 13th. The horse had been eating it but she doesn’t get a very even cut. We have gone through an incredible amount of syrup. There just haven’t been many flying days. We have spent several days working in the yards when there was zero flight. When we finally hit a nice day toward the end of splitting, I thought, ”The bees will be in good humor today.” Since it was warm and quite humid, I only wore a light shirt. This proved to be a poor choice. We hit a mean hive on the second colony we worked and they stayed with us through the whole yard. We had gotten a pickup stuck in this yard a few days earlier. It’s at the bottom of a steep hill. We drove in there after dark to pull the wraps. The grass on the hill was tall and quite wet. We couldn’t get back up the hill. Adam had to come and rescue us. When we came back with the flatbed, we brought the chains. After we got the pickup out, I had a premonition we were going to have a problem so we chained up the flatbed before we started working the yard. I was really glad we didn’t have to put the chains on with a lot of mad bees after us.

I nearly always overestimate what I am going to get out of the bees. I look at the number left alive and project a number of splits. I don’t know how many colonies wound up queenless but it was quite a few. Some yards were good but others had three of four queenless. We probably averaged around two per yard. It you take that times twenty five yards, we are down another fifty colonies. By the time we get back to super, some of the big colonies will have swarmed even though we split them. It makes one wonder how we make any money at this. I don’t know where our colony count is but I think somewhere around 600. All of the equipment we had stacked up has bees in it. We even used all the junk I save for backup.

Adam has done his first graft. We will be keeping nucs on hand for queen replacement until the middle of July. If past trends continue we will need sixty to seventy nucs to keep our colony count up. We also hope to sell a few queens. This is the first year we have made any attempt to select breeding stock. In the past we just selected a good looking queen that seemed to be doing okay. Then we put the mating nucs close to a yard that had a lot of drones. This year we selected the breeders and drone mothers from our top producing colonies of 2004. The other criterion was that they come through the winter with two boxes of bees. We set these colonies up in a yard near home. At this point the post office in Lynnville is still trying to determine if we will be allowed to mail queens from here. UPS is a lot more reliable but is more expensive if you are only sending one or two queens. We don’t look for our queens but we find some of them by accident. We mark the ones we produce ourselves. We saw a number of them when we went through the yards this spring. It was gratifying to see them doing well.

I had my first wax sale overseas to a soap company in Japan. They have beeswax readily available in Japan but they can’t find wax free of chemicals. They like to use beeswax as it makes the soap set up faster. It wasn’t a big sale--around $200--but it was exciting just the same. I have hopes it may get bigger.

Here’s hoping for a big year.

Submitted by Phil Ebert