Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

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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