The Buzz Newsletter

October 2004

 

 

Page 5

October, Reflecting Month

Now don’t you think we should have a month for reflecting. We have Dairy month, Pork month, Beef month, Honey month and a month for just about anything and everything you can think of, so I feel October should be reflecting month. It is the beginning of fall and the end of the growing season and is the time that you can look back over the past spring and summer and reflect on what you did and how successful you were by how full your “larder” is now that fall is upon us. Did you plant potato’s last spring and if so did you get enough to last you and your family all winter and next spring until new potato time. One of my favorite dishes is new potato’s and green peas cooked together in a heavy creamy sauce.

You also can look back on the past season and determine how successful you were as a beekeeper. Are you a bee lover or are you a honey producer or are you a crop pollinator using honeybees. All people that keep bees don’t just keep them for the honey they can produce. Some of the beekeepers with the most hives of bees in the U. S. keep bees mainly for pollination service and simple harvest honey as a byproduct. In my years of keeping bees I have learned how to raise bees for pollination early in the year for apple bloom and I have learned how to manage hives for honey production with the least amount of trips to the bee yards and harvest in excess of a 100 pounds of honey from each hive for several years consistently. Of course I am still a beginner when it comes to understanding bees and knowing what they will do next week or even tomorrow.

By reflecting on what I did this past year I should be able to avoid the same mistakes for the next several years until I forget what I did wrong this year and repeat it again if a few years. I had a good friend that has passed on a number of years ago and he was a very good beekeeper. He also was the type of friend that would give you the shirt off of his back if you needed it or his last dollar if you had asked for it and he knew you needed the money. He placed a stake with a number on it by each hive of bees and he kept about 60 to 70 hives of bees in two bee yards. He wrote in a notebook the condition of each hive as he checked his hives throughout the year. He would often refer to his notebook if he found a problem with a particular hive so he could watch it closer to have it produce honey. He kept a double five-frame nuke box in each bee yard to raise replacement queens. When he would find a queen less hive or a queen failing he would take two frame of bees with the queen on one of the frames from his nuke box and place it in the hive without a queen or where the queen was failing after he had killed the failing queen. He was very successful with this type of introduction of a queen even in the middle of June. I recall one year when the fourth of July arrived and none of his hives had any surplus honey in the supers to speak about. By the fourteenth of July he had put every super he had and some of the last boxes only had four or five frames in the supers. He produced 6300 pounds of honey that year on 61 hives of bees. I went up to Boone and helped him removed his honey crop and unload it into his basement where he extracted and stored his honey crop until he could sell what he didn’t need for his local customers.

Now in reflecting about that just goes to show you must be ready for the unexpected. It is somewhat like this year seems to be ending up. With all of the late rains in July and August and the cool weather in August leaned real close to providing a fall honey flow. If it has proven true, it will have been the second “good” fall honey flow in the past 30 plus years. We were still having a honey flow in late August, as I went out on August 30 and removed honey from the eight hives I have in one of my bee yards and I didn’t need a veil, gloves or coveralls. I used a smoker; hive tool and a bee blower sitting in the back of my pickup with two hoses to remove the bees from the supers. I did forget to take my screen tops to the bee yard with me, so I brought a few bees home with me. I have screen covers the size of the supers that I normally take with me when I remove honey. I have found that after I have blown the bees from the super and placed it on the pallet board in the pickup that by putting the screen board on the super keeps the bees from robbing and at the same time it will draw the bees that are left in the super to the top to the sunlight. The next time I carry a super to the truck I flip the screen cover over and this lets the bees fly back to the hive while I am still in the bee yard. I will stop about a hundred yards from my bee yard and remove the screen covers and wait a few minutes to allow the bees to leave the supers and the pickup and then I head for the honey house. This way I seldom have more than a couple of dozen bees when I get home to the honey house with my load of honey.

In reflecting back on the year, I hope you all can look back and say; well it wasn’t such a bad year after all. Now just try to put some of that reflection to work on improving your beekeeping for next year. Maybe you should start out by attending the Iowa Honey Producers Annual meeting next month Nov 12 & 13 at Marshalltown. If it has been 2 or 3 years since you attended a annual meeting, are you keeping up on what is happening to bee keeping in Iowa? What is the biggest problem to bee keepers in Iowa today? Will we have an inspection program next year or are you going to let the current Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, Patty Judge; eliminate that like she did the state apiarist? Is there a new product available for the control of varroa mites? Is the small hive beetle a threat to Iowa bee keepers? If you don’t attend the annual meeting and keep up to date and support your association, The Iowa Honey Producers Association; are you going to do like an ostrich and stick your head in the sand in hopes the danger will go away? Well, I hope that I have stimulated you to reflect on the past year and to look at where you want to go next year with your beekeeping.

Till next time have a happy Halloween.
From The Old Man