The Buzz Newsletter

May 2005

 

 

Page 3

LSU Mite Survey

The Department of Agriculture Economics at Louisiana State University is asking for your help in a study we are conducting in cooperation with the USDA agriculture Research Service. This study focuses on the options for controlling Varroa Mites and Tracheal Mite in the beekeeping industry. As you may know, both types of mites pose a serious threat to the future of the American honey bee industry. Among other strategies for dealing with these mites, scientists have been selecting for different traits in bees or lines of bees that are resistant to or less susceptible to both mite. From this survey we want to determine: 1) How much economic damage has been caused by Varroa mites and Tracheal mites; 2) how beekeepers are dealing with Varroa mites ands tracheal mites; and 3) the economic value to beekeepers of these new lines of honey bee for dealing with Varroa mites and tracheal mites. For these reasons, we ask you to help us get the word out to all beekeepers about the on-line version of our survey and to complete the survey your self. Please ask all interested beekeepers to go to the survey website and complete the survey. The address of the on–line survey is www.honeybeesurvey.com

If you do not have Internet access and would like to participate with this survey, please call or drop me a note and I will send you a hard copy of the survey and the mailing address to reply.

Bob Wolff
319-366-5414
315 Linden Terrace SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52403-1822

 

May Beeyard Report

April came with a rush. I returned home from a trip to Texas on April 2nd. I got to Adam’s house in Sully about 9:30 in the evening. My intent was to tell him about the trip. I walked in the house and he said, ”Go get back in the truck. The package hauler will be here around 3:00 AM.” The packages were a week early. I was totally shocked. As long as I have been working bees, I have never had anything come early. Adam came home with me and we took care of the preparations. We got everything unloaded and I finally made it to bed around 5:00 AM. The first phone call was at 7:00 AM. I only had the packages on the place for 2 ½ days but it felt like 2 ½ weeks. Everything since then has been a blur.

I have prided myself the last few years on not losing colonies to starvation. This year I suffered a blow to my ego. I had around 25 colonies starve to death. Most of them were in yards I had been to. I just misjudged them. The colonies all felt heavy but it was brood, bees and pollen.

Every year we accumulate a number of frames that are clogged with pollen. I used to render them out on the assumption the bees would never clean them out. If we kept them on the outside of the box, the bees kept packing more pollen into them. Dennis Arp told me one time to put them in the middle of the upper brood box and the bees would clean them out. I didn’t buy into that. My thinking was that Arizona pollen was a lot drier than ours. It wouldn’t pack as hard. Then I started to think about all the holes the bees chewed in the boxes. If there was a little daylight showing, sometimes they would create a new access hole. Last year I decided to test the advice Dennis gave me. I took some real heavy pollen frames and marked them. Then we installed them in the center of the upper brood box. So far, the ones I have found have been full of brood with very little pollen present. We are now going to test it on a wider scale. I have five or six boxes of pollen frames we are going to put back to see if they get cleaned out.

We are deep into splitting now. Alex is helping me. Things are going well but we can’t move fast enough. The continuing rain has put a bit of a crimp into our schedule. In an attempt to stay ahead of the bees, we have gone to the yards that we aren’t going split soon and put on third story brood boxes so the bees have somewhere to hang out. A lot of these boxes will have brood in them before we get back. It makes splitting harder because we have to shake the bees off nine frames instead of three or four. Our last lot of queens won’t arrive until May 5th. We have to take some precautions or we will be seeing a lot of swarm cells.

We need to get our queen yard set up, also. We have colonies designated for breeding stock. They will get hauled home by the first of May. I hope to have the first of our own queens by May 20th. Hope reigns eternal, doesn’t it.

Submitted by Phil Ebert