The Buzz Newsletter

June 2006

 

 

Page 2

Dates to BEE Remembered:

June 30th, 2006
Bid sheets to sell product at the Iowa State Fair sales booth must be received by June 30th.

July 8th, 2006
Summer Field Day

July 8th, 2006
IHPA board meeting, following the Field Day

July 23-28, 2006
The 9th International Pollination Symposium. Scheman Building, Iowa State University. www.ucs.iastate.edu/mnet/plantbee/home.html

Aug. 10-20, 2006
Iowa State Fair

To add an important date to the list, contact the Buzz by email at
thebuzz@abuzzaboutbees.com

 

FOR SALE: Locally raised queens grafted from our overwintered colonies--$12.50 each plus shipping. Available in early June. Our mating boxes have full sized frames with a good population of bees. We hold these queens until they have capped brood so we know what their pattern looks like. Contact Adam Ebert at 641-594-3126 or e-mail ehoney37@netins.net

 

Pink Rhubarb Punch

8 cups chopped fresh or frozen rhubarb
8 cups water
2 ½ cups honey
2 Tbs. strawberry gelatin
2 cups boiling water
2 cups pineapple juice
¼ cup lemon juice
6 cups ginger ale, chilled

In a large saucepan, bring rhubarb and water to a boil.

Reduce heat; simmer for 10 minutes. Drain, reserving liquid (save rhubarb for another use).

In a large bowl, combine honey, gelatin and boiling water until dissolved. Add pineapple and lemon juices; Mix well. Stir in rhubarb liquid; refrigerate.

Just before serving, pour into a punch bowl and add Ginger ale. Yields: about 5 quarts.

Submitted by Donna Brahms

 

THE BEEYARD REPORT

We pulled on to the yard at 11:00 PM on May 7th. Splitting was over. Now I would have time to mow the yard for the first time. The horses had been working on it but they hadn’t gotten it clipped in a very even manner. I need some hay, so I hated to mow it.

I feel real fortunate that our packages at least showed up on time, even though we didn’t get everything we ordered. Others weren’t so fortunate. The queens we had ordered from California got set way back. They canceled me two weeks in a row. Finally, I called Dale Bauer and he bailed me out with a box of queens. Because Dale helped us, we pretty much got through splitting on time.

We didn’t see many queen cells until we got to our last three yards. By then it was the first week of May. The colonies were large. Almost all of them had cells. Up until that point, I thought we were going to have a lot of extra queens. When finishing knocking those colonies down, we had almost 60 splits and the original 47 colonies were still there. We left a box of bees behind on the old stand with either a queen or a cell and took the rest.

Adam is home from Iowa State now. He and Alex started supering on the 9th. They will pull a couple frames of brood from the really big colonies. They also check queen acceptance in the splits and pull the rest of the winter wraps as they go. It’s normal to find queen cells in some of the overwintered colonies even after they have been divided. If there are cells, they have several options. One is to separate the boxes and set them on separate bottoms while making sure there is a cell in each box. Sometimes they harvest the cells and bring them home to mating boxes. If they find multiple virgin queens, they may harvest them but Adam has never has any success getting them introduced.

I don’t think our first lot of grafted queens is going to have much chance to mate. The weather turned cold as we entered the mating period. There has been almost no flight at all. The second lot is grafted. We’ll hope for a better outcome next time around.

Anthony has a summer job in Colorado. He will only be home briefly. Someone else will have to run the extractor this year. Eric, the son you don’t hear much about, has a free month at the end of the summer. He has had a couple of years off from the bee business. He worked here the spring and summer after he got out of the Marines. Maybe I can get him to run a few barrels.

I hope everyone has a productive spring.

Submitted by Phil Ebert