The Buzz Newsletter

October 2007

 

 

Page 9

Honey,Mead,Pollen

The Summer is almost over and the school has started. My hives are strong and queen right finally. I left one super on each hive to get some goldenrod. The honey has been selling as fast as I could bottle it. Looks like I will have very little to start the farmers market next spring. maybe I will have more next year. I say that every year.

I gave my brother honey to make five gallon of mead for me, that could be a mistake. My brother has made wine that some times mistaken for grain alcohol. I will bring some to IHPA Nov. meeting for everyone to taste.

I have been seeing a lot of wax moths in very weak hives, so I checked my honey supers that the bees had robbed out and found them full of moths. Moths like old brood comb that are in dark storage. My supers never had brood in them and were nice white comb, they were stored where there was some light. Para-Moth crystals should take care of the moths until cold weather.

Fern and I have been taken pollen since last Fall so we started selling pollen this year and we could not believe how well it sold. When you believe in a product it is very easy to sell. We had customers buy five bottles at a time and had many people tell us they had been taken pollen for years. We had hand outs that told all about pollen and it's benefits. We use one pound honey bottles, if you shake them as you fill them they will hold eight ounces. Draper's has a good supply of pollen. Pollen is a great extra to sell give it a try.

Delmar Nelson

THE BEEYARD REPORT

The winter hay for the horses is in the barn. The days grow shorter. I feel a year older. The things I had on my list for summer projects are only half done. The bees look good. Last year at this time we were deep into a struggle with the mites. This year, I sampled most of our yards before we pulled the last honey. I put in three sticky boards per yard unless the yard had more than 20 colonies. In that case, I used four. It required an extra trip through the yards but it gave me an idea where we were at with the mite load. You have to guess what the population is order to come up with a load percentage. I used 40,000 bees. If you have a 100 mite/day drop and five percent of the mites drop daily, the total mite load figures to be around 2000 or 5%. 5% is what we established as our indicator for immediate treatment. It's always a guess how many mites are in the brood. The worst case scenario is 90%. Last year we went form a 4% load to 30% in about three weeks. As we move into October, brood rearing decreases. Spikes in the mite load will be less extreme.

Tylan does work to clean up foulbrood. I don't plan to use it but I wanted to see if I could mix it effectively. The amount of Tylan relative to the amount of sugar is tiny. I infected a colony I had at home with foulbrood and treated it with Tylan. I also treated a colony in one of the outyards. Treatment was successful in both cases.

Some of our queen mating nucs have swarmed. I'm not sure what precipitated this. They weren't that big. Adam was in the yard one day when a small swarm came out and usurped a nuc that was already queenright. We have also had a problem with them getting robbed out. There are a lot of bees in that yard by the end of summer. Adam has put together over 20 colonies from the bees in that yard. He has worked a lot harder than I was at getting the bees put on pallets. Once they are in full sized boxes we move them into other yards.

We have extracted 70 barrels of honey. We probably have five of six left to go. The honey is different this year. It's darker and has a distinct bite to it. Our average per colony is going to be slightly over 90# when the comb honey it taken into account. Colony attrition has been significant. I was in a yard tonight that only had 13 colonies left out of 20. The production average on the colonies we have left is much higher that 90# but I always take the average off the highest spring count. We have to figure our expenses on that number.

Adam has gone to Sweden for two weeks. I thought things would get really jammed up without him but we are holding our own. Alex has been cleaning the yards off and I have been coming behind him with the mite treatments. We are using a variety of treatments. Part of the colonies are getting Miteaway pads. Those need to go on early because the bees won't take feed while they are on the colonies.

Be sure to get your mite treatments on if you need them and get those colonies fed up to weight.

Submitted by Phil Ebert