The Beeyard Report
It's looking more and more like a crop failure. For sure, it's going to be our worst year since 1993. We have 12 barrels done as of August 19th. The only reason we started extracting was because we needed some honey for the fair. There is still a little bit coming in but I think we are going to be doing well to wind up with 40 barrels. We were a little off last year when we got 80 barrels.
Some of the yards have a lot of mites. We put in three sticky boards in every yard to get some idea of the mite load before we start stripping the supers. This gives us some idea of where we need to go first. Some of the yards were dropping 100 per day. That's way too many. We had to pull the boxes off a yard that sill had honey coming so we could get the mites knocked down. I found this painful.
At the end of July we still had 600 supers in the shed that we didn't need. We finally made a round to put them on the colonies just to keep the moths out. There are still 150 in the shed with moth crystals in them. It was the same story with the brood boxes. Those are stacked up on end in the warehouse. Being exposed to the light seems to discourage the moths. We will be using those directly when we start to double up the singles.
There are some good spots out there. Dennis Naeve, who lives north of Cedar Rapids, is going to have a good yield but his colony count is down. John Reece said his bees around Laurens have four boxes of honey on almost every colony.
In the time of long ago and far way, we seldom saw swarms after the end of July. It happened but it wasn't common. Now, we see a lot of them in August and some in September. I wonder if this isn't somehow stress related. What do the rest of you see?
Our building addition is complete except for the electricity and some dirt work. I seem to get busy every time it's dry enough to do the dirt work. I can't get the rock in until I finish it. We put a pit in the addition so we can relocate our extracting system. There is so much water in the ground it's coming up in the pit. I had a foot of water in there at one point in time. I've got a tube around the building but I can't tie on to the neighbor's tile until fall
I'm getting calls for queens every day. I'm still turning them down. It was a poor spring and a nasty June. We started out behind and never got out from behind the eight ball. Pat Ennis asked me if I thought the queens we produced were better. My answer at the time was, "They disappear into our system." We mark them but we don't see them very often. After I thought about it, I decided that good ones were good ones no matter who you got them from. The problem is that the good ones are getting to be fewer every year. We have to raise queens to keep our colony count up. I've heard reports from several beekeepers that queens from various producers were having 30% to 40% failure rates. We experienced this with the hygienic queens this year. Year in and year out we have had less trouble with Koehnens than anyone else. However, I know this is not the case for others. It gets down to the luck of the draw.
The fair was pretty spectacular-both attendance wise and sales wise. The IHPA sponsored a program at the Knapp Center every day at 2 PM. Andy Joseph, Pat Ennis and I put it together. I did some of the presentations. I was a little shaky the first day but I got better as it went along. I actually got some applause the last day. I always look through the pictures at the Cultural Center but I never made it to the second floor until this year. There is some neat stuff up there. I never dreamed there was an Iowa Association of China Painters. There was a one man band that played out on the grounds. He was really good. I gave him a tip. I never do that.
Winter preparation is right around the corner. Let's hope for more favorable conditions this year.
Submitted by Phil Ebert
Honeybee Swarms
This has been a very busy and long swarm season for us. These swarms are the natural method of colony reproduction for the honeybee.
Most of us know firsthand that swarming starts in springtime as the numbers of bees within the hive increase. When conditions trigger the bees' swarming instinct, they rear a new queen (often more than one), and just about the time that the new queen is to emerge as an adult bee, the colony splits. The old queen leaves the hive along with up to about half of the adult bees. This is the swarm. They usually fly en mass to a temporary location where they stay until "scout bees" find a more permanent location to start the new hive. Meanwhile, the emerging queen begins life as an adult. She mates in flight with several drones (male honeybees), returns to the hive, and the "parent" colony continues on...
I field calls and email requests from people all over the state wanting a beekeeper's assistance in handling honey bee swarms. I've been getting several calls a week for a couple months now -- in fact, I received two swarm-related calls today. Of course, at this time of year, most of us are mush less interested in chasing these swarms down than what we were a month or two ago.
All this said, does a season of heavy swarming translate into an increase in our bee populations? I wonder what you all think. I'm hesitant to say that we’re gaining anything much. Many of us have heard that maybe one out of eight or ten swarms will survive the upcoming fall and winter. I wonder if even that estimate is a little optimistic.
It’s true that people are becoming generally more aware of bees; this probably does play into an increased awareness of swarming bees - and more conversation between people about bees and swarming.
I believe swarming is about as related to seasonal, environmental conditions as it is to the bees themselves. The slow spring and early summer's weather has been almost ideal to trigger swarming. We definitely lost a lot of our bees due to the severe winter but the surviving colonies seem to (for the most part) have come through pretty well.
With all of our storms, wind and rain, many trees (and even buildings) have blown down which had been home to bee colonies. Often, then, these bees then need to swarm or abscond (whole colony leaves) in search of a better suited hive location.
Also, in the wake of so much bee loss, many (if not most) of us have had to purchase bees to re-start lost/dead hives through packages, nucs, or new queens for our own splits. The quality of these purchased queens from a number of bee suppliers has been nothing more than trash. This is a true problem, and is worse this year than before. Would you agree? When bees in a colony detect a problem with their queen, they will often "supersede" her by rearing new queens from her eggs. Supersedure does not always result in swarming, but often it does. I have opened colonies this year containing as many as twenty queen larval cells as the bees attempt to make a better queen for themselves. When these queens emerge from the cells as adults, they either kill the other emerging queens or take off with a swarm. Sometimes this repeatedly occurs in a colony; smaller and smaller-sized swarms leave the parent colony as queen after queen emerges. Personally, I've had my hands full with this sort of bee behavior as I try to start a number of hives here for outreach/education purposes.
So, we have a good amount of swarming and we have a good number of cast-off colonies in "natural/wild" locations. These bees now are not cared for by beekeepers who work to keep them at least relatively healthy and somewhat protected from accidental pesticide exposure. These colonies are now more susceptible to overwhelming parasite load, diseases, and agricultural pesticide exposure. These factors contribute to a very high level of wild colony die offs.
Hopefully, the above serves to show how a high level of swarming doesn't necessary reflect strong, healthy colony reproduction and an increase in honeybee fitness -- but may be interpreted as possibly quite the opposite. What do you think?
If this raises anything further in your mind, please don't hesitate to write or call the number below.
Andy
(515) 725-1481
Andrew.joseph@iowaagriculture.gov
