Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

The Ohio Queen Projects was started by the Ohio State Beekeepers Association in 2007 with two goals in mind.  First, to teach beekeepers to raise queens and second,  to develop a stock improvement program (ie. a breeding program).  To quote directly from the Ohio Queen Project's Mission Statement from their website:

The Ohio State Queen Project was begun in the spring of 2007. A need to improve the quality of queens used by Ohio beekeepers was recognized by the OSBA board and a committee was established to set up a state wide program to help beekeeper to raise their own queens from outstanding queen stock. OSBA decided to develop a stock improvement program in conjunction with the classes being taught…….

……A need exist within Ohio for queens which will carry desirable characteristics for our climate and will provide an enjoyable experience for beekeepers to keep bees.

Both parts of the program are critical.  Without beekeepers to raise queens, stock that does better in our area wouldn't benefit anyone.  Without improved stock, we just have less desirable stock that happens to be raised in Ohio.

OSBA supported the program from 2007-2009 while coordinators give queen rearing classes and OSBA even held a queen symposium which I hoped would be repeated but never really happened.  Minimal work was done on the stock improvement portion of the project, in part due to the difficulty of running a distributed breeding program and due to a lack of funding and guidance.  In 2010 a member of the Ohio Queen Project stepped up to lead the the breeding program and the project had an opportunity for a significant grant to fund the breeding portion of the project to really get it off the ground.

However, after meetings, work preparing the grant and shortly before submitting the grant, the powers that be decided:

"…it is not appropriate nor would it be effective for OSBA to play a primary and direct role in achieving those goals."

"…the goals  … for an Ohio queen project would best be accomplished by a separate group."

In short, since OSBA is not interested in supporting the Ohio Queen Project per their mission statement the Ohio Queen Project is DEAD.  All they apparently want are some random queen rearing classes given by volunteers.  While I can't speak for those that have lead the Ohio Queen Project and the other coordinators, I feel disappointed, used, mislead and have little interest supporting OSBA's volunteer teacher program and I believe many of the others involved in the program feel the same.

As for me, I will continue my breeding efforts, and while not a breeding program yet, I'm working towards that goal.  I also hope to enlist others in the effort much in the spirit of the Ohio Queen Project, but it will not be associated in any way with OSBA.

West Virginia has become the first state in the nation to pass a law giving beekeepers immunity from liability for ordinary negligence. This law came about as a result of strong support by the leadership of both the House and Senate. We are fortunate to have a State Senate President, Earl Ray Tomblin, whose father is a beekeeper. Additionally, House Speaker Richard Thompson was raised by a grandfather who was a beekeeper. Finally, it helped that the honeybee is the state insect!

The law requires that beekeepers register their hives. It also mandates the WV Department of Agriculture to promulgate Best Management Practices for beekeepers. All beekeepers who abide by these two provisions will have absolute civil immunity from ordinary negligence. The Department is working on a set of emergency rules they hope will be in effect soon. Governor Joe Manchin signed the bill into law the first of April making this the first state to protect its beekeeping industry

Come on Ohio!  West Virginia is getting their act together.  Why can't the Ohio legislature get something done?  The best they have come up with is to form a Task Force to study what they may want to plan.  (Basically they planning to plan.  Which means nothing will be done for quite some time, if ever.)  -Tim

The 2008 Farm Bill (June 18, 2008) created a new Emergency Assistance program for Livestock, Honey Bees and Farm-Rased Fish (ELAP).   According the the limited documentation on www.fsa.usda.gov you would need to buy in by September 16, 2008.  Most of us would not be requried to pay any "buy-in" fees as we would fall in the "Limited Resource Producer" classification (Less than $100,000 in gross farm sales), though it’s unclear what needs to be done if you fall in such classification…

However…..  there is no additional information at all on what the program covers, what documentation is required nor what the benifits may be.

So I wrote the USDA…. their official response after 3 months….

Until the regulations are published in the Federal Register for ELAP, all types of losses for which honey bee producers may be compensated for under ELAP will not be known.  However, some of the possible losses that may be compensated for under ELAP are:

1.  purchased or harvested feed that was intended as feed for honey bees that was destroyed or lost because of an eligible adverse weather event;

2.  physical losses of honey bees/honey bee hives because of colony collapse disorder or eligible adverse weather events.

Remember, these are just examples of losses that may or may not be compensated under ELAP.  A forthcoming regulation in the Federal Register will provide final determinaitons.

So, in short.. nearly a year after the program was created, and long after any losses and required paperwork should have been submitted….  The USDA still does not know what the program covers, what is required to obtain coverage or make a claim, nor when they might actually have this information.  I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise coming from a government agency.

The sad thing is, any producer who really needed the money to stay in business due to losses over the 2008-2009 winter will be out of business by the time they receive any money that could have helped them rebuild their apiaries this spring.

It shouldn’t be a complete surprise.  Ohio’s inspection program has been dwindleing for some time now as state inspectors retire and aren’t replaced.  However, I got that gut feeling that something terribly wrong when my 2009 apiary registration came in an envelope marked ‘Emerald Ash Borer Program’.   I know the program was litterally down to one state inspector, but now it was looking like the Apiary Division of the Ohio Department of Agriculture which once has several inspectors and a secretary was demoted to a lone inspector given a corner in another programs office.

Not long after I received news report about the loss of Ohio’s inspectors.  4 more counties had dropped their inspection program and the last remaining inspector at the state, Andy Kartal, will likely retire mid year and I honestly don’t believe he will be replaced.  At best I suspect his many, many years of experience will be replace by a plant pest inspector, likely with little experience with bees, and will serve double duty as state bee inspector and plant pest inspector.  Even a single full time inspector can’t begin to cover the state, including the growing list of counties with no county inspector, so this could put the state inspection program in a comatose state.  It may still be there, but virtually lifeless.

Does this mean disease will be on the increase in the coming years?  Perhaps, after all the inspection programs started due to widespread disease (mainly American Foul Brood) and the inspection program effectively brought it under control. But perhaps the worst thing besides this and the lack of a valuable resource for new beekeepers is the negative impact to beekeeping research just when it is needed most.  Inspectors often provide valuable information to research programs and are often partners in the process (See The Fate of Bee Inspection in the U.S, Bee Culture 2003).

Want to see a change?  Talk to your county officials (they pay for the county inspector), and your state representatives both at the state and national levels.  I know everyone is asking for money right now and everyone needs to do their share of belt tightening, but we can’t afford to completely eliminate funding for beekeeping without paying far more in the future.

I have periodically given talks and even classes last year on raising your own queens. Inevitably someone will come up and ask questions and seek advice beginning with ‘I don’t want to compete with you, but I’d like to know how you do x’.  My response is always the same, ‘Please compete with me.  Raise a few queens for yourself, then for your neighbor, and sell as many as you care to produce. The industry needs it.’  It may be just the view I see, but the demand seems to only increase each year with few new producers entering the market, large or small.  In fact two large companies with a combined production of 75,000 queens retired this year according to Kim Flottum.   At the same time the number of hobbyist does seem to be growing.

I’ve also heard plenty of complaints about supercedure, queen size and other problems from those who have purchased mass produced queens.  I’m not saying all mass produced queens are bad, nor are all operations at fault.  I just hear the complaints and know the pressure of getting queens out on time, disease, stress, financial concerns, and residue from mite treatments can affect the queens in a real operation.   Many beekeepers want a queen at the lowest price possible, and they want it now.  Quality and cheap just don’t play well together . But this is a topic for another post.

So there is a good market out there, and there are beekeepers not happy with the queens they are getting.  They are looking for quality queens, the kind YOU can raise in small number at home.  It really isn’t that difficult to do, even on a very small scale. So I’d encourage you, if you have even the slightest interest, and even if you only intend to raise queens for yourself, to take advantage of the queen rearing classes given though the Ohio State Beekeepers Association or your own local or state association.

[I'm happy to see both the American Bee Journal and Bee Culture have several articles on queen rearing and breeding in the latest issues (March 2008).  Of particular interest to the beekeeper who hopes to make profit at it one day is Larry Connor's article 'Raising and Managing Your Own Queens and Drones' in ABJ where he outlines a plan to start a small scale operation, and 'Small-scale Queen Rearing' by Roy Hendrickson that is a practical article on a small Ohio operation.']

I’m sure most people receiving email from companies, sooner or later receive one with a legal disclaimer or warning on the end of dire legal consequences if you use or even look at the email in the wrong way.  They go something like the following (names have been changed):

Attention: This e-mail message, including any attachment(s) (collectively the "e-mail"), has been sent by ACME Drinking Water and Porta-John Recycling Co. and may contain PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION.  If you are not the intended recipient, then please (i) do not read this e-mail, (ii) do not forward, print, copy or otherwise disseminate this e-mail, (iii) notify us of the error by a reply to this e-mail and (iv) delete this e-mail from your computer.  Thank you.

This has to be one of the most worthless legal statements ever written.  The first problem is that this statement  is almost always found at the end of the email, and is sure to be read only after reading the contents of the email (i).  Nearly anything I do to the email will break (ii), deleting it will copy it to the deleted folder (iv), replying (iii) will copy it to the sent folder, not to mention the multiple copies made since I check email from multiple computers and the copy that remains on the server and in the ISP’s backups.  And let us not forget the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, it requires that email be backed up in public companies.  I’m also not sure if one could legally be bound to such a statement without agreeing to it first or a method of opting out before breaching the statement is available (as is often done with software licenses).

Of course, none of the statement is valid unless ‘you are not the intended recipient’.  Of course, since the email came to my inbox, and is stamped at the top with my email address, the only logical conclusion is that it was intended for me.  Other than the address, I can’t possibly guess what the actual intent of the sender was.  Even if the email says ‘Dear Anne’ at the top (obviously not me), the sender may be forwarding a message they thought I may be interested in.  How could I guess the ‘intent’ was anything other than for me to receive the email?

Personally I find every email I receive with such a statement rather humorous and I’m really tempted to forward every one I receive to the media (after all, as the intended recipient I can use it as I see fit).  But if you do business with any company that uses such a statement thinking it gives them any security or expectation of privacy, I would be worried.

When the USDA gets involved of course.  The USDA has mandated that raw almonds grown in the US be pasteurized.  So by the common persons definition raw almonds aren’t.  At least they aren’t if they are grown in the US, the rule doesn’t apply to imported almonds.

Not to be outdone, Ohio is now considering making it illegal to label milk ‘rBHG free‘ or ‘artifical growth hormone-free’ using the argument that such labeling implies that the other stuff is bad and would be unfairly discriminating against those products originating from cows that aren’t enhanced (Lets ignore for a minute that the stuff is banned in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and All 25 European Union countries.  I’m sure those countries just banned it for completely unjustified reasons – right, thats it).  So what is next?  Any other labeling that may imply another product isn’t as good?  ‘low-fat’, ‘sugar-free’, ‘cholesterol free’, ‘GMO free’, etc.  All imply the product in question is better (and the product without the label is therefore inferior).  It’s a very short step from banning ‘hormone-free’ to banning these and others like ‘local’ or  ‘raw’ which many customers look for in the honey they buy.  

So much for truth in advertising.   (We need to apply these rules to political candidates and their ads.  You can say anything you want as long as it in no way implies that you are better in any way than anyone else.) 

Haagen-Dazs announced this month at the National Beekeeping Conference announce a ‘vigorous and ambitious’ program supporting honey bees, honey bee research, and a plan to generate awareness of the plight of the honey bee.  This includes a donation of $250,000 to fund sustainable pollination and CCD research.  Any guesses who received this money?  It certainly wasn’t OSU since they’ve closed the Rothenbuhler Bee Lab.   The money instead went to Penn State and UC Davis, both of which are still doing research and are increasing their research efforts in recent years.  UC Davis is also where Sue Cobey now works after leaving OSU.

I guess it isn’t completely fair to say the Ohio State University rejected the funding.  I’m sure they weren’t even considered a recipient for the funding since they had already dumped the beekeeping program at the main campus and have seriously downsized the program at the Wooster campus.  And why would any give OSU money to research an area they have no program?  But it does make it even more unfathomable that OSU has decimated their beekeeping program just as the honey bee has gained national attention from the media, legislature and even corporate America including significant monetary contributions to research.

Simply closing the bee lab in Columbus was apparently not enough for the Ohio State University.  The University has now decided to destroy the Historic Rothenbuler Lab located on the Ohio State University property in Columbus.

Dana Stahlman from the Ohio State Beekeepers Association is organizing a " Save the Building" project.  Dr Tew is checking to see if he can place the building near the bee lab in Wooster.   Meanwhile, a group of volunteers are organizing to remove the building from the OSU property to a location for safe keeping until a "New" home is found.

Funding is needed for this project and some clubs have already made their pledges.  The purpose of the building relocation in Wooster will be to house the OSBA Queen Project activities. 

Any monies donated and not used in the moving will be earmarked for the queen project from which we all benefit.  All donations should be sent to OSBA Treasurer, Bob Hooker,  100 Pyle Rd, Oberlin, OH  44074, email beekeeperbob17@hotmail.com,  ask Bob to "earmark" this for the bee lab relocation.

So we don’t have many answers yet when it comes to CCD.  We know several things it is not (cell phones, power towers, aliens…), and know a few things that may be a symptom or part of the cause (most notably IAPV and nosema).  But at the end, the only thing that we really know for certain is the name assigned to it, CCD, and that it has brought more media attention to beekeeping that I think we’ve ever seen before.

But what can we do to prevent CCD from making our hives disappear now?  The 10+ step lists published in newsletters and beekeeping magazines should leave most beekeepers asking ‘is that all?’.  In short it’s simply ‘Be a better beekeeper‘.  The slightly longer version is minimize stress, monitor and treat disease, re-queen frequently, and keep strong healthy hives.  Isn’t that what we were trying to do already?  Of course the bee-havers out there are probably staring at the list in disbelief wondering how they could possibly start doing even a 4th of what’s on the list.  I shouldn’t be to harsh.  These people make good regular customers for package bees.

The only thing possibly new is that given the possible connection with nosema, treatment for Nosema (with Fumadil-B) is considered important.  Personally I’ve never treated for it and have not had a problem with it.  The samples our bee inspector sent in to Beltsville found no nosema this past spring and I really don’t expect to see any difference this winter. So for now I’m taking my chances.  This is about the time it started being noticed last year and so far no disappearing bees here.