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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter March 2006 |
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From the American Honey Princess Greetings Iowa Beekeepers! Speaking of those promotions, back in January I had the opportunity to join Polly Carver-Kim from 93.3 KIOA on her Sunday morning show called “Information Iowa.” We spent about 15 minutes talking about the wonderful things that bees do for people, and even shared a couple recipes on the air. I was also able to submit recipes for her monthly newsletter. On March 3rd and 4th I will be in Overland Park, Kansas for the joint meeting of the Kansas Honey Producers and the Missouri State Beekeepers. There are many wonderful speakers planned. Furthermore, I will be helping in the selection of the new Kansas Honey Queen as well as doing some training with both the Kansas and Missouri Queens. Something that I have been working on intensively
this past month is a new program that is in the works for the
IHPA. It is called the IHPA Youth Beekeeping Partnership Program,
and it is a program designed to help get new youth involved in
the industry. More information will be printed in The Buzz next
month, but begin thinking about possibly helping out. The whole
purpose is to bring young people into the organization, strengthening
both the IHPA and the industry. The backbone of the program will
be YOU, the members, and we will need people who are willing to
serve as mentors to the young people. Be thinking about the option,
and watch for more information next month.
The Beeyard Report We had looked at about 275 hives in 17 yards as of the 15th of February. There were 14 dead ones and 38 that I rated as weak. That means they have less than four frames of visible bees. 127 were excellent. That means they have a box full of bees. Everything in between is rated as good. Some of the colonies I rated as weak will have bees in the bottom that I didn’t know about. By the same token, some of the good ones will dwindle down to almost nothing. It evens out. It’s too early to predict actual death loss but things look promising at this point. If I had to put a number on it, I would estimate our death loss will be around 20%. I was concerned about the early end to brood rearing last fall. The young bees that go through the winter have higher protein content in their bodies. They need it because they have to live until spring without any pollen coming in, Most of the colonies looked like they had plenty of bees but we put the pollen supplement to them anyway. I find making patties a real pain. We mix the supplement with three parts syrup. It’s just stiff enough to hold together when we dump it on the top bars. It has to be pretty wet or it will dry out and get hard before the bees take it down. We used to put it in with a big spoon but the supplement always stuck to the spoon. It got to be real inconvenient. We found this year that an ice cream scoop works real well. We get as much as we can on the scoop. The ejection mechanism on the scoop dumps the supplement out nicely. I went up to Orange City to visit Anthony last November. I stopped at Storm Lake on the way home to visit Bob Guntren. Bob is out of the bee business but he had some odds and ends left. Among the things I picked up were 50 winter cartons. I had never used them before. This spring, the best bees I have seen so far are the ones in the cartons. I don’t know if the cartons are better or if it’s just the luck of the draw. We have used colony quilt to wrap the last few years. It’s pretty good but seems to stretch over the winter. It looks tight when we put it on. When we go back in the spring, it’s real baggy. This really cuts down on the heat retention. In other new developments, we bought a Swinger. I had been thinking about a Swinger or Bobcat for some time. In early January, I was driving past the skid loader dealer in Sully. I was really surprised to see a Swinger with a bucket sitting in his lot. We dickered on it for a month before I decided to buy it. I can’t think of anything I like about having bees on pallets except that they are easy to move. I don’t think we will ever get all of our bees on pallets. Some of our best yards are hard to get into. Pulling a trailer into them is out of the question. Others are not level enough for pallets. I want to get around 200 colonies on pallets this year. This should be enough to show if this is a workable system for us. The up side of pallets is that it gives us the option of going to California for almond pollination. There will be a lot of new acres coming into production in 2008. It makes me nervous to start tinkering with a system that has worked well for us. The hope is that it will make us more efficient and give us more options on the things we can do. We’ll see if it stands the test of time. Submitted by Phil Ebert
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