The Buzz Newsletter

November 2007

 

 

Page 10

THE BEEYARD REPORT

We sold some queens during the last half of September. This gave me enough extra bees to put the rest of our queen mating nucs into full size boxes. We have  over 40 colonies that we made up out of this yard.  We'll have to see how many of these are alive in the spring. This is starting to look like a good way to make increase.

Several times this year, I have noticed queen cells in colonies that obviously have a new queen already. I don't know if this is a new phenomena or if I have just never noticed it before. We tried Russian bees a few years ago. They build queen cells constantly. We may still retain some of this in our gene pool.

Alex pulled the last yard on Sept 28. This is the first time in years we have had all our honey off before the middle of October. Testing the mite load early on with sticky boards was a good thing. We got most of our mite treatments on in time. There are, however, two yards with mega mites. They have lots of deformed wing and we could see multiple mites on individual bees. The initial load estimate in both of those yards was 5%. That is our treatment threshold but it took us three weeks to get back to the yards after the test. By then the mites were on a roll. The other yards look excellent. The three yards of package bees have bees rolling out of the boxes. The problem there will be getting enough syrup down them. I used to think it wasn't possible to get those Italian queens through the winter but it's just a matter of getting enough feed in them. Some years back, I visited Al Baldwin in Darlington, Wisconsin.  He had some really big feeder buckets and was having good success. It is expensive, though.

High fuel costs have meant fewer trips to the yards. This has resulted is a few colonies being sacrificed to the wax moths.  There is no doubt in my mind that low queen vigor contributes to CCD. Some of the queens we buy in the spring only last two or three months. We try to keep close tabs on the yards close to home but the ones a long way off only get a visit once a month at best.

Some of our yards got a great flow after Sept 20. We visited some of our yards east of Lynnville with the truck loaded down with syrup only to find we didn't need it. The only thing blooming at that time of year is the little white asters. I've had a number of people tell me that this is really poor honey to winter bees on. We have had good luck with it in the past. If it is a problem, we must get it mixed in with enough other stuff to make it work.

On Sunday, October 2nd, a tornado went through our place. My barn and the chicken house were leveled. Several windows were broken on the house along with some other minor damage. Most of the trees were heavily damaged.  Two storage buildings across the road received heavy damage. The remains will be torn down. The honey house only received minor damage.  Monday morning, I was standing around trying to decide what to do first when people started to show up. The tree damage is cleaned up. Vermeers came with their chipper and cleaned up everything we had piled in the yard. They even hauled away the chips. We salvaged our hay and were able to store it in the barn of a neighbor. Lots of people brought food. I feel pretty fortunate. Much worse damage occurred at farmsteads to the west and east of us. The building where we used to park our loader had four sliding doors on the south side. A neighbor found two of them 80 rods away in his corn field.  We still don't know where the other two are. Picking corn proved to be quite a challenge with all of the debris in the field.

 Thanks to everybody who called to check on us.

Submitted by Phil Ebert

Almost Perfect Day

Fern and I went on the Back to Basics Beekeeping Club apiary tour at Ottumwa. We met 16 other beekeepers at Gerald and Pat Bradley home. We checked out Gerald's bees. Gerald winters most of them in one deep box. We looked at Gerald's extractor and how he sets up in his garage ( Pat does the extracting ).

Most of the honey is sold at there house, there customers call ahead, Gerald and Pat have the honey ready for them to pickup. From there we went to Greg Bairds home. All of Greg's 34 hives are around his house so he can take care of them. Inside of Greg's basement he has a room for extracting and drying of the honey. After the tour Greg and his wife had refreshments and honey tea for everyone.

Then Fern and I drove to Indianola to Mike Wyatt's retirement party. Mike plans on doing more beekeeping now. We got to see the room he is setting up for extracting and bottling. After a meal and more refreshments it was 6:30. By that time I was to tired to go to the CIBA meeting so we called it a day and went home.

Submitted by Delmar Nelson