2004 Bee Yard Inspection Details Announced
One of the changes in the bee yard inspection program
is where the funding comes from. The Board of the Iowa Honey Producers
Association recently voted to financially support the program
with $10,000 of it’s own money. The board probably will
not do this on a continuing basis! Outside sources of funding
need to be obtained in the future. The remaining $5,000 of the
program comes from left over money from USDA through alternative
crops grants. Available funding is $5,000 short of the last two
years.
Inspectors will not have the exact county assignments
as in the past although the program will run with four inspectors.
Local apiary operators will need to contact their previous inspector
or Steve Petersen at IDALS at 515-281-5717 or 515-281-5783 for
an appointment or to have questions answered. Inspectors will
be strongly encouraged to inspect a number of bee yards in close
proximity on a given day.
Beekeepers who sell equipment at auction or privately
(hive bodies or supers with combs), sell locally produced packages
or nucleus hives or full sized hives need to be state inspected.
Beekeepers who make themselves available may find inspection to
be a valuable learning experience.
Cleaning up repetitive American Foulbrood occurrences
will be of major importance this year as well as monitoring mite
populations.
On a related matter, beekeepers need to watch chemical
labels (particularly removal dates) when using strips and chemicals
for verroa and tracheal mites and Terramycin for foulbrood. With
warmer temperatures honey supers may go on earlier than normal
this year.
Submitted by Tim Laughlin
The Bee Yard Report
We have reached the time of year that I think of as meals on wheels.
We get to eat while driving between bee yards. The bees look exceptionally
good. Our overall death loss wound up at 10%. There were a few
that looked good in early spring that seemed to die for no good
reason, but that happens every year. There just weren't as many
of them this year. We only lost three out of the seventy-two Russian
colonies that we took into winter. Even the ones loaded with mites
lived. This is the first good thing I have had to say about the
Russians.
Package bees arrived April 9th.There was a constant flow of people
through our place for the next two days. We started nuc build
the same day that packages arrived. Some of our colonies have
two boxes of bees already. We are going to be woefully short of
queens. This caused me to call my son, who does the grafting.
We are going to try to produce some queens in late April. The
drone population is going to be a little short but I think there
will be enough for the small quantity of queens we will raise.
Dealing with too many bees is a problem I haven't had before.
We are going to have to do things differently. We usually split
our bees way down and then wait for the summer flow. This year
we are going to pull a nuc from every colony and super immediately
for dandelions. When we run our of queens, we are gong to give
deeps with foundation for a third story and hope we get some combs
drawn. The labor situation looks good. My #2 son, who has spent
the last nine years in the Marine Corps, is home for the summer.
The problems will come in the fall when son #4,who does all the
bottling, goes off to college. Oh, well, if it was easy, anybody
could do it.
My original plan was to coast into spring. I thought we had plenty
of equipment. It suddenly became obvious I was mistaken. The bees
weren't on the same program I was. While this presents problems,
it also means opportunity is knocking. I need to answer the door.
Submitted by Phil Ebert
