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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter September 2006 |
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Featured Beekeeper This month’s featured beekeeper is Jerry Kern. Jerry and his wife, Dalene, live and raise their bees at 410 E. University in Des Moines. Dalene has her own colony and has named the queen. Jerry has been around bees all his life. After 30 years, 7 months, and five days he retired from John Deere as a welder and started his own apiary. Since retiring he says he needs to find something to do and he likes to experiment. He now has 7 producing colonies and 12 nucs. Jerry specializes in comb honey and raising queens. He has taken a queen rearing class from Marla Spevic and beginning classes with John Johnson. Jerry is excited about raising quality queens. He put drone comb in his best colonies to control varroa mites. He was going to freeze them, but thought, you need a lot of drones to mate with the queens he was raising. After checking the drone combs and finding very few mites, he made up a nuc with the drone frame with some worker brood. Now he has saturated his queen rearing yards with drones from his best colonies. In late summer, after the drones have dwindled away, he plans to give this nuc a frame of eggs to raise a queen and try to over winter it. Jerry is very active at the Iowa State Fair selling honey lemonade. Donna Brahms says if she needs someone to fill in Jerry is always available. His favorite line for the lemonade stand is, “Good stuff for someone who has to walk a lot”. When he isn’t gardening and working with bees Jerry also raised pigeons. He has 400 and plans to expand. He shows his pigeons all over the United States and has won 4th place in the country at one show. Keep having fun and thanks Jerry for the interview and all your work at the State Fair. It was interesting and informative, but Dalene still has the best colony of bees. Submitted by Ron Wehr
Do you have trouble lighting your bee smoker? Do you have trouble keeping your smoker going? Does your smoker not give enough smoke when you squeeze the bellows? No, I am not going to try to sell you a new modern pressurized air powered smoker. I am just going to tell you what I found recently with my smoker that I have been using for 10 to 20 years. I would have trouble getting it to light. I had trouble keeping it going and it sometimes didn’t give much smoke if it did stay lite. After being rather fustrated with the smokers performance on day, I knew it wasn’t lack of experience of the operator; I took the bellows off the smoker in the bee yard to see how much air the bellows was producing. To my surprise the small hole at the lower end of the bellows didn’t allow much air to come out when I pumped the bellows.. Upon close observation I noticed that the hole appeared to be filled with charred wood or cresote. I took my pocket knife and carefully removed the cresote or charred wood. Now when I pressed the bellows a great volume of air came from the bellows. I then reinstalled the bellows on the smoker and to my surprise had the smoker lite in no time at all and when I pumped the bellows got a large volume of smoker from the smoker. When I set the smoker down for several minutes and then picked it up and pumped the bellows, I had smoke. In the past if I set the smoker down for a few minutes, I had to relight the smoker as it would go out. So my suggestion if you haven’t already figured it out could be reduced air flow from your smoker bellows if you are having trouble with your smoker like I did. Like anything a good piece of equipment needs a little maintaince from time to time. The Old Man
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