Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

The official word is that the scope of the beekeeping research on the Columbus (Ohio State) campus at the Rothenbuhler Bee Laboratory has been ‘reduced’ for the present.  While the OSU Entomology administration recognizes the importance and contributions of the lab, restricted funding is a fact within university systems across the US.

From those I’ve talked to, that’s short for: the Lab is closed until we can find someone who can bring in the grants to fund the lab.   The sad fact is much of beekeeping research and breeding programs simply don’t bring in the big corporate grants because there isn’t a product at the end of the research that can be sold to millions of people, directly at least.  While the high-tech science brings in the dollars with it’s promise for new drugs and treatments down the road (and only a few hives are needed for that).  Much of the research wanted by beekeepers involves the labor intensive and sometimes tedious task of running 100′s of hives.  All to develop a bee that doesn’t need treatment or inexpensive treatments that only 10,000s of people will buy.

It’s disappointing, but really not surprising.  The bee scientist position at the lab has been vacant for several years and Sue Cobey who ran the NWC program at Ohio State left for the Laidlaw Bee Laboratory at the University of California at Davis.  Sue will be a great asset there, and I have a feeling the Lab may still have closed eventually even if she had stayed.  The days when the university will do research for the public good even if a particular program can’t generate the direct income are gone.  Even with bee research in spite of the fact we all benefit every time we eat an apple, almond, blueberry, pear, or 100 other fruits and vegetables.

Now, if you could train bees to play football, then you would have a nearly endless stream of money.  The average coach in the BCS conference has a 1.4 million dollar salary.  Couldn’t we take just 10% of that and hire someone to do real research.  A fraction of the profits from football would fund the entire research program.  Are our priorities in the right place?

It didn’t take long after CCD hit the all the media outlets for the first person to try and take advantage of the hype.  Early this year, before anyone even had any evidence to suspect anything more concrete than little green men, someone was advertising CCD proof bees in one of the beekeeping magazines.  Amazing claims when no one knew the cause or even how to test for it. 

Now, there are another couple holistic tools to cure CCD (or to keep you amused on a cold winter day in case the snake oil salesman is fresh out):

Orgonite (as advertised on a few online forums).  It transmutes any negative, destructive electromagnetic fields into positive, life supporting energetic fields.   Confused?  Me too.  According to orgonite.info you can make your own.  Just fill a mold (an old muffin pan will do) with one crystal (doesn’t appear to mater what type), any shards of metal you have handy and resin.  Let it harden and you have a hard block you can smash the nasty CCD bugs with.  No metal shards handy?  I’m sure some scrapings from some recalled toys will have enough lead in them to do the trick.

theccdsolution.com (As advertised in the American Bee Journal)  The Add reads:

"Get the CCD Solution NOW!  Why wait?  $99 intro kit treats 100 hives and 1.5 acres.  Guaranteed to improve your hives.  No poisons, No chemicals.  No toxins.  Explains CCD.  From GW Agriculture: the inventors of Ultra High Technology for Agriculture"

Now call me skeptical, but a small agriculture company that does nothing with bees (at least on their primary web site gwagriculture.com) knows what CCD is and the cure?  So I looked up theccdsolution.com  and it’s just a parking page, no information at all.  You would think if they were advertising the site they would have at least something on the page.   Try to find out much about the company and you will turn up little.  "Ultra High Technology for Agriculture" turns up 0 hits in google.  Searching the company name and their old name Agri-Synthesis (agrisynthesis.com which redirects to gwagriculture.com) doesn’t turn up much, but does turn up an article in Wine Business Monthly where the founder is interviewed and he claims "We can cure any insect, disease, yield or quality problem on any crop, anywhere." 

(My chemist friend from college would get a kick out of it too.  "Chemical Free", it’s a vacuum in a can!)

As I’m sure  most in the US already know, the Post Office recently raised the cost of a First Class stamp from 39 to 41 cents.  They also raised the cost of most of their other services significantly.  This especially affects priority and express mail which in turn affects the cost to ship honey and queens.  (To the extent I’m now taking a loss on shipping for all pre-paid queen orders I still can fill).  In addition, they now are also charging by the size of the package (similar to what UPS does).  So your larger light weight packages will cost more to send.

I do understand the cost of labor, benifits (especially health), and transportation have gone up significantly.  All major costs to the post office.  So I do understand their need to raise prices.  But when I receive a package from the Post Office, like the one pictured at the right,  that contains plastic envelopes for international shipments, I begin to wonder.  For some reason they felt the flexible and virtually indestructible envelopes needed extra padding via on of those air bags.  It’s obviously extra cost, labor, a bigger package, and completely unnecessary (and something they didn’t do before the price increase).  I think I just found where my 2 cents went!

Any other beekeeper out there sick and tired about hearing this ‘mysterious’ bee disease, CCD (Colony colapse disorder?).  The coverage has been overwhelming from national to local TV coverage (on every network including PBS), radio and newspapers down the small local papers.  And it seems to be increasing with attention from even the US congress.  The continuous stream of stories all saying the same thing with little or no new information is becoming unbearable.  Then there are the questions for everyone I meet and phone calls from reporters asking about the bees.

I don’t doubt CCD exists, someting with the same symptoms has been described as early as 1915 and in many different countries.  There are many beekeepers in the US that lost quite a few hives with symptoms matching CCD exactly.  Some of them have been virtually wiped out by it, and I understnd their loss. However, not all the bee losses this year were due to CCD.  Many were due to well known and explained reasons such as starvation, mites and other diseases.  It’s almost too easy just to blame the unknown than to really take a look at what is really happening in some of these hives.

CCD has been reported in Ohio, but from talking to many beekeepers thoughout the state, the state inspectors and my own observations, the majority of the 72% average loss in ohio was not due to CCD.  Rather it was ultimately due to weather.  The 2006 summer was poor for honey production and the following fall was no better.  This resulted in many hives that either did not have enough honey to survive the winter, or that simply did not have a strong population of young bees, or both.  This ment that hives either starved, or their population dwindled thought the winter until they were too small to sustain themselves though the bitter cold this past February. 

Looking back, the loss of bees this winter in Ohio shouldn’t have been a surprise.  I honestly expected a bad winter, with losses several times the normal level, but even that was underestimating the loss I did have.  Starting around June of 2006, hives did not build up as they normally would.  This really continued into fall and should have been a sign to all of us that we needed to do something.  Sadly most of us (including myself) didn’t do enough.  We treated for mite and feed sugar syrup so they would have enough for winter, but failed to reconize the lack of young bees in the hive.  I know hindesight is 20/20, but should I ever see these signs again I will be feeding pollen and pollen substitute to increase brood production in the fall.  Interestingly I just spoke to a beekeeper who use to know Don Cox, a longtime beekeeper whom everyone seems to know.  Don recommend feeding pollen in the fall because it boosted the strength of the hive going into winter.  That piece of advise may have saved many hives this past winter.  The one beekeeper I know of who did this lost 0% of his hives.  (Note: Doc Cox was instrumental in founding the Northwest Ohio Beekeepers Association and started the honey booth at the Allen County Fair.  He passed away just a few years ago and will be missed by those who know him.)

On the plus side, honey bees are finally getting a lot of attention.  I’m not sure it’s putting beekeeping in the best light with all the ‘doom and gloom’ talk, but at least it’s getting attention.  And more important it looks like it may be translating into dollars for research in beekeeping, something that is badly needed.  So I do welcome the attention.

The image to the right is NOT, I repeat, NOT a honey bee.  Nor has anyone figured out how to get honey out of them.  It is rather a yellow jacket, a type of wasp.  They are the stinging insect that hangs around garbage cans at amusement parks and ball games, especially in the fall, and should not be confused with a honey bee.

With the blame honey bees receive for stings actually from yellow jackets (even in newspapers to the extent of calling them killer ‘honey’ bees), and the misidentification of the general public, this picture is especially troubling.  I already get calls about ‘honey bee swarms‘ in the fall that are really yellow jackets and don’t really need the public to have any encouragement in that direction.  I received a link to this picture on a honey manufacturers homepage (by the manufacturer soliciting their products).  What is especially annoying is that this manufacturer claims to run some 20,000 colonies themselves as well as processing honey from others.  You would think they know what a bee is.  (That said, the other pictures on their website showing ‘bees’ acually appears to be real honey bees).

I wondered how long it would take before spammers found this blog. Turns it it only took a little over a month before I started getting spam as comments. Fortunately comments are moderated. As is the Beekeeping Resource Directory, which typicaly gets 1 or 2 spam entries per day . It’s nothing new, but is one thing I really hate about the internet. Cheap open communication for everyone, Including those no one wants to hear.  I don’t think anyone invisioned spam when proposing ‘free speech’.  Of course you have the right to say want you want, but I also have the right not to listen.  And it shouldn’t mean I have to spend money to buy software to filter out the 200 spam e-mails I receive daily.

Tis that time of year again. Every October 1st. That’s the day when our companies (my day job‘s) health care plan is renewed or switched if they can find a better rate. The rate aways goes up, often many times the rate of inflation. Several years ago the company decided it could no longer shoulder the increases themselves which were in the 15-26% range for several years. So now the employees pay a portion of the bill. Plus typically co-pay’s and deductibles go up, which effectively is another pay cut (unless no one in a family of 5 gets stick all year, which isn’t likely).

In reality I am pretty lucky.  We still do have insurance and the company does pick up most of it.  Far more than the average.  However, every time I receive a statement from the health company summarizing a claim it reminds me how big a rip-off many health care services are.  I know the health care industry tells us that they need to charge such large fees for services, but when I receive the statement and the insurance company has settled for pennies on the dollar I can’t believe such claims.  They’ve paid such things as $15 allergy shots for $0.75, x-rays for 30% of the billed amount, etc.  Then there the medications where the insurance companies co-pay is actually higher than the cost of the medication if you payed cash.

Of course the people this all really hurts are the uninsured.  They get to pay the full bill with no discounts because they can’t afford the $10,000 for a typical family plan up front.

It has been a quite some time since I was directly affected by minimum wage. The last time I had a minimum wage job, or one based on minimum wage, was when I worked in the computer labs of the University of Toledo. It helped pay the room, board and tuition, but was far from enough to pay all of it. If I hadn’t saved nearly every penny from jobs I held since I was 14 years old mowing lawn and eventually working at a garden center, McDonalds then a local grocery store, I wouldn’t have been able to afford even the relatively cheap tuition at a state university. I don’t know how anyone could afford to pay even half what I did now that most things are more expensive and minimum wage isn’t much more than was in the early 90′s.

So there is no question that minimum wage is too little to make a living from in most areas of the country. And in some areas you would have a hard time finding a cardboard box to live in a minimum wages. And while everyone seems to aggree that it needs to be raised, no one can agree how, and business argue that they need employees at substandard wages (ensuring a high turnover rate and guarenteeing continuous training expenses and poor customer service). I can understand some worry about large jumps affecting their bottom line (increasing $5 to $7, a 40% increase), but does it really need to be so complex as a congressional action and large increases every 9 to 10 years. Don’t most non-minimum wage jobs get a raise every year, even if it’s only a cost of living increase?

Many contractors that work with the covernment (with the Ohio Department of Transportation for example) must pay prevaling rates. These prevailing rates are maintained by the state for dozens of different jobs, with varying rates by county that are updated frequently (montly I think). So why can’t minimum wage be maintained similarly? The mechanism is already in place. Just correct the minimum wage, adjust it regionally by state and county, then update it for the rate of inflation yearly thereafter (also kept the the US government montly) And the yearly increase may also need to reflect the cost of living in each county to keep pace with local development or deflation.

But that would be entirely too simple, and would probably be a permanent fix (something congress really hates). It would mean people would get a wage they could survive on where they lived, and possibly even live in the community they work in (impossible in many areas of the country). It doesn’t mean anyone is going to get rich (except perhaps the minimum wage poster venders who would now have an entire poster for minimum wages to cover all 88 counties of ohio), but it means people would earn enough to get by. It wouldn’t be enough to prosper, but just enough to put a roof over their head, put food on the table, clean clothes to wear and bus fare to get to work, just the bare minimum. Enough to make it worthwile getting up in the morning to go to work, the bare minimum. Isn’t that what minimum wage should be?

Are queen honey bees really the key to longer life? At least one researcher thinks so according to this article ‘An age-old question: will wax slow wane?‘, but I doubt it. Unless I’ve failed to learn anything about bees since I started keeping and studying them some 6 years ago, Mr. David Vaux of La Trobe Univeristy seems not to know much about bees and their normal behavior and life span, some of which would draw a big question on the theories presented in the article. (Ignoring the more blatantly wrong facts such as queens can lay up to 200 eggs a day when the accepted estimate is up to 2000 to 3000 egg per day.)

David Vaux notes that most cells of the queen bee don’t actively divide, which is true of worker bees as well. But queens can live up to 6 years where workers live only about 6 weeks. He give no consideration of why bees die. Bees die (workers and queens) when they succumb to disease, are found to be no longer useful to the hive, are injured or simply wearing out (since their cells don’t divide and repair themselves as human cells do). Workers literally work themselves to death when their muscles and wings physically wear out. So in summer they live for some 6 weeks, but when they cannot fly in winter they can live for 6 months or more (until they start flying again). Queens typically live until they no longer lay a consistent pattern of eggs. When this happens the workers will replace the queen or the hive will die out. Since she rarely flies (normally only for mating and swarming), she doesn’t wear out her wings or muscles (and apparently egg laying is a much less strenuous activity than foraging) Her life span is basically determined by how many eggs she can lay and how long it takes for her to lay those eggs. In cooler climes with longer winters when the queen doesn’t lay eggs, a typical life span may be 2-3 years. But in warm climates or migratory beekeeping operations that follow the blooming flowers a queen may only last a year.

We know diet, stress and the environment can have a significant effect on the health and life span of many animals including insects (and humans). But this research seems to discount the facts that queen bees are feed different food starting when she hatches from an egg, and as an adult she is constantly cleaned, fed and tended to by many workers, and isn’t normally exposed to the sun or weather. Even the temperature and humidity of the hive she lives in is controlled by the workers. Even when mating she won’t fly until it’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit, much warmer than temperatures workers will fly in. She simply is not subject to the same stresses that workers are exposed to. Instead La Trobe seems to think the magic is in the semen that comes from the most fragile inhabitant of the beehive, the drone.

Thus David Vaux proposes inseminating queens with semen and saline and comparing the two groups. I can already tell you the results of this trial. The queens inseminated with semen will life longer, much longer. This is because queens inseminated with semen will be able to head a productive hive and will be well taken care of by the workers. The saline inseminated queen will only lay eggs that will yeild drones and the workers will attempt to replace her as soon as possible before the hive collapses. Without constant infusions of new brood from another hive the hive lead by a drone laying queen will fail. Even when if the queens are banked (stored in hive but not allowed to lay) the workers will favor the semen inseminated queen.

But should the research actually show there is some magic in drone semen that’s great news for me and the few others out there that have the equipment and training to collect it. At $5 per microliter (somewhere around $2.3 million per pound), it’s much more valuable than royal jelly and the demand is sure to drive the price up

In some recent posts to two mailing lists I regularly read, BEE-L and beekeeping, there was an article posted about the Himachal Pradesh government encouraging the production of ‘sugar free’ honey. If you read the article they seem to be telling a much bigger story without meaning to, and also demonstrate a severe lack of knowlege about beekeeping.

It’s not enough that the market is already flooded with cheap, poor quality honey (that probably actually is honey), but the Himachal Pradesh government admits that beekeepers in that country are producing honey by feeding their bees sugar, at least in lean years. I’m not sure how they are getting away with producing and presumingly selling honey produced from sugar as no legal definition of honey I’m aware of would classified sugar syrup stored in comb as honey.

The sad part is that the most important attributes of honey to packers are it’s color and water content. And dry, water white honey (the lightest color on the scale) typically brings in the highest price. Something easily produced from feeding sugar syrup, if you could call it honey at all.

Perhaps I’m reading into it too much assuming that this sugar produced honey is being sold. But then why would the government want beekeepers to switch production methods to produce another product intended for sale?

I’m not sure if bees would even care about stevia. They may be tricked by it’s sweet taste, but a hive fed only stevia when other food sources aren’t availabe is sure to starve because it lacks any significant value as a carbohydrate. Certainly they would still have to be fed some sugar syrup along with the stevia just to stay alive, which would also mean their ‘sugar free honey’ would not be ‘sugar free’ or ‘honey’. So much for truth in advertizing! Hopefully the Himachal Pradesh government has done enough hard research on this before they invest in some 100,000 behives that are sure to be doomed.

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