The Buzz Newsletter

November 2004

 

 

Page 4

November Ramblings

November is the month we celebrate Thanksgiving. Have you every thought about what you are being thankful that you have. Is it good health, or a good home, or a wonderful family? Now there is something to consider. Just what is family? Some people will tell you that family is your parents and siblings. Some one else says family is your wife and children. Then you will have some one tell you that you actually have a very large family even though most of them are not blood relatives. If you were one of 8 or 9 children and your parents were from a similar large family you probably have a number of nieces and nephews as well as brother and sister in laws, not to mention 1st and 2nd cousins and your own aunts and uncles. Then if you attend a church or other religion, you have your church family also and that can include a lot of individuals depending on the size of the membership in the church. As a member of the Iowa Honey Producers Association you are a member of a large beekeeping family.

As a member of this beekeeping family you have available a wealth of knowledge from all of the other members. You can receive information on keeping bees just by being a member and receiving the Buzz monthly. You can also submit questions to the Buzz and receive several replies, some of which will certainly come direct to you if not answered in the Buzz. I have in past years had to call on help from my beekeeping family for assistance when I had injured my fingers in a power saw and could not do my regular beekeeping work in the spring. I was thankful that I had such good friends that all I had to do was let them know I needed help and they came to my assistance. Like wise there has been times when I helped a friend. I recall a couple of times that I assisted a beekeeper’s wife in taking care of the bees after the beekeeper had passed away until the bees and equipment could be sold. I am not trying to toot my horn, as much as I just want you to know that I am thankful for all of the experiences that I have been able to enjoy through the years as a beekeeper and all of the friends I have met as a beekeeper.

I am sure that our Pilgrim Forefathers were also very thankful for the friends that they meet and made with the native Americans in those early years of living in this great new world. If the Native Americans had not been friendly and helped the Pilgrim Settlers, would they have survived? Would it have been another hundred years or longer before America would have been settled? Who knows and would it have been the great nation, as we know it today. We all can be thankful for those Native Americans that befriended the Pilgrims.

Normally if you garden, you would start looking through seed catalogs to see what was new in vegetables and fruit trees and other things of interest about this time of year for next spring. Well, it is no different with beekeeping. It is the time of year to make repairs on the wooden equipment that you have stored for the winter. Go through the combs from the honey supers as well as the deep supers and cull out any bad combs that are very dark or full of drone cells. If the frames aren’t worth putting new foundation in and reusing, remove the old drawn comb and render the wax either by using a solar wax melter or some other type of method for recovering the wax. You can put old combs in a gunny sack and tie it shut and place it in a small barrel of water and build a fire underneath the barrel outside of your honey house or home and using a concrete block to keep the sack of combs below the water the wax will melt and rise to the top where it is easily removed the next day after everything has cooled. This wax may be a little darker, but it can still be traded for new foundation at the bee supply houses. I personally like to use beeswax foundation in my hives as I think the bees accept it easier than plastic foundation or plastic reinforced foundation.

If the hive bodies or supers are in bad shape with large rotten places in them it is probably cheaper to replace them with new than it is to repair them. Some times you can take a deep hive body and cut it down to an Illinois super and still get a lot of use from them if the top edges are sound. I have even trimmed a ¼ inch off of the top of an old deep super and then shorten the bottom up to where it made a 6 5/8 Illinois super. Unless you have plenty of free lumber it is cheaper to buy boxes that are already cut and dovetailed by the bee supply houses. I used to repair hive bodies and supers by sawing out the bad parts of the boxes with my table saw. It seem that no matter how hard I tried to remove all of the nails that would be where the saw blade was going to cut I would hit a nail and dull the saw blade. It cost almost as much for sharpening as a new saw blade, which was more than the cost of a new box. So what did gain? Time lost cutting out parts of the old box and then having to cut a board to a precise size for the repair and replace the saw blade. I finally learned that I could do a service job for someone else and make more money to buy new boxes and the time to nail them together was less than the time it took to try to repair those old boxes. Another thing I learned was to take a electric soldering iron and burn the date into the box when I assembled it new and then I knew how old a rotten box was and then I wasn’t as likely to think it was only a couple of years old and try to do a repair. It is amazing how quickly a box gets to be 10 or 15 years old when you think it is only 2 or 3 years old.

You can even put your new foundation in the frames and store it out in the honey house and it will be ready next spring when you are very busy and need those frames ready for new packages or nukes. If you don’t drop or move the boxes around during extreme cold weather you won’t damage your combs or the new foundation. If you place a couple of frames with new foundation in each box you will find that your bees will do a good job of drawing out the foundation next year and it will help to reduce the swarming tendency of your hives.

Are you afraid of your bees? If you are you probably don’t check your hives as often as you should during the year from spring to fall. I went out on Oct 11 and prepared one of my bee yards for winter by checking to make sure they had sufficient honey to go through the winter and to remove the last of the honey supers on those hives. I pulled a sample of bees and did an ether roll test for mites and only found 4 mites on almost 300 bees. Now I did all of this work and I was out there for about four hours and the temperature was in the mid 60’s. The reason I tell you this is I did this work without the use of a bee veil, gloves, helmet or coveralls. I did receive about four stings, which I consider three were my fault as I squeezed the bees. Yes, I used a smoker to keep the bees calm; but I also used the blower to blow the bees out of several supers before loading them on the truck. In recent years, I have become more comfortable in working bees without gloves or a bee veil. Yes, sometimes the bees will fly up to my hands when I move them across the top of the hive suddenly. I just stop and slow down and the bees go back to the combs without stinging. I suggest that you try starting with a nuke next spring and keep working with them until you get comfortable without gloves. You can then work up to not using a veil. If you do get a very aggressive hive then the thing to do is to requeen it and you will be amazed at how fast it will become a gentle hive even before the time it takes for all of the old bees to die off. Well, I guess I have bored you enough for this month, but I certainly do wish you a wonderful peaceful Thanksgiving Day.

Rambling from The Old Man