Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

One of my goals this year, among others, is to have all my queens marked.  So in the course of routine inspections I’ve been making an attempt to find the queen and mark her, because it is much easier to find them now than later in the season when their population is much higher. (or at least it was easier a couple weeks ago when this picture was taken).  I’ve also started the habit of always having my marking pen handy, especially when I go to an outyard just in case I run into an unmarked queen.

So during inspection of one week hive, I found the queen, pulled out the pen and was ready to mark her.  Then I looked down and noticed a white dot moving around on the adjacent frame (last year’s queen).  This apparently was one of those cases where mother and daughter live side by side happily.  So I marked the ‘new’ queen and put her back in the hive to let the sort it out.  This picture was taken a week later and both queens were found near each other on the same frame.  And just last week I found yet a 3rd queen in the same hive.

In another hive in the same yard I found one of my breeder queens I thought had been superceeded last fall.  But I was happy to find both queens doing fine, having co-existed for nearly 9 months now.  It’s not somthing you see often, but it would be interesting if you could breed in the desire to maintain multiple queens on a regular basis.

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!

At first it’s hard to think of a positive side of losing 55% (or more) of your hives.  It means lost sales of nucs, queens, expense and time buying packages and/or making splits and possibly a reduced honey crop because split hives aren’t as strong as they should be when the flow starts.

But there is a positive side.  In good years every scrap of equipment I have is on hives, unless it’s in such bad condition that even the bees won’t touch it (and that takes quite a bit).  This year, all the damaged, old dirty or mouse eaten frames from all the deadouts were piled up for recycling or burning.  Over the past week as I did an inspection of all my hives, I also pulled any (unused) junk frames from the live hives as well.  Most were positioned on the outside of the hive bodies so in most cases they weren’t really used yet.

The wax melter was first filled with frames, but with litterally 100′s of frames to process it would take all summer, with only a little bit of wax in these old frames.  So the rest went into the burn barrel.  Sort of a sad sight, but I’m sure the bees will be happier and healthier without all those old dirty frames harboring an untold number of AFB spores and other contamination.

The other upside is that I’ll have more time and can focus more on queen breeding rather than queen rearing.  The first batch of queen cells destined for instrumental insemination have just been placed in queenless hives and next week we’ll be inseminating them. 

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).