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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter September 2007 |
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ANNUAL MEETING OF THE IOWA HONEY It's meeting time again! The annual meeting of the Iowa Honey Producer's Association will be held Friday, November 16th and Saturday, November 17th, 2007 in Marshalltown, Iowa at the Best Western Regency Inn located at 3303 South Center Street. Rooms for the event are available at the Best Western Regency Inn at the rate of 1 adult for $67.50 or 2 adults for $72.00. The rooms need to be reserved by October 25th to get the convention special rate and please mention the Iowa Honey Producers when reserving the rooms. The telephone number to call is: Best Western (641)752-6321 . The Super 8 Motel's number is (641) 752-3137 We have a full schedule planned as usual. Make plans to enter the photo contest or the foods made with honey contest to show off your skills. There will also be a home mead contest for all of you mead makers. Some of the speakers for this year include T'Lee Sollenberger , Chuck Norton and Rick Hellmich from ISU to speak on the CCD session held during the Pollination Symposium. Make your plans now to attend the annual meeting of the Iowa Honey Producer's Association on November 16th and 17th, 2007.
Don’t forget September is National Honey Month. Not that anyone needs an excuse to sample the sweet taste of honey, but why not try out a new honey recipe and share with family, friends, and neighbors! Need a new recipe? Take a look at what the National Honey Board
has to offer. Online recipes can be found at: http://www.honey.com/consumers/recipes/recipes.asp TM Resistant Foulbrood TM resistant foulbrood is in Iowa. We have seen it in our operation and I know others who have it. Sometime in July, I was checking a couple of colonies that were lagging behind. They just had a few spots of foulbrood. I thought I could clean them up. Two weeks later, after a couple of TM treatments, they were a lot worse. I gave Del Nelson a call. He came over and took a comb sample and sent it to Beltsville. Their test confirmed that it was TM resistant. I have reservations about using Tylan. It leaves a residue in honey. There is an acceptable level that has been established for honey. Nonetheless, I don't want to use it. I think we are on the edge of some real food purity issues. There is already plenty of junk in our food. We don't need any more. If you do decide to use Tylan, the instructions on how to mix it are pretty vague. Some of the instructions I have seen say to use 100 milligrams of Tylan (the contents of one container) to 200# of sugar. This is grossly incorrect. They got an extra zero in there. It should be 20# of sugar. This is described as 500 hundred treatments. What they don't tell you is that this is supposed to be administered in three applications one week apart. The total dosage for all three treatment should be between 6oz and 7oz depending on whose data you are using. For smaller doses, mix 2 1/2 teaspoons with 2# of sugar. This is a tiny amount of Tylan compared to the amount of sugar. I have some concerns about getting it evenly distributed. The people at Mann Lake say not to use powdered sugar from the store because it has starch in it. Starch can be bad for bees. They have sugar that is pure sucrose with no additives. I bought some just to see what it looked like. It looks like very finely granulated table sugar. After almost 30 years of administering TM mixed with powdered sugar, I'm not too worried about the ill effects of the small quantity that goes into the hive with the meds. After you get your Tylan mixed, I was instructed to administer two heaping tablespoons per colony. That was supposed to be about 2oz. I weighted it out and it took me three heaping tablespoons to get slightly over 2oz. Remember the total treatment has to be over 6oz. I decided to try it out. I infected a colony that I had at home with foulbrood. I treated them with Tylan. So far, they look okay. If you have scale in your combs, it doesn't matter what you treat with, the foulbrood will come back. Baring some huge outbreak, we are planning to go with the New Zealand control method. Submitted by Phil Ebert
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