Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

We have had some weather in the mid 40’s to 50’s in the past week, plenty warm enough for bees to fly on most days.  I have yet to see any real pollen coming in, and the activity at the pollen bucket pretty much confirms my observation.  When it got into the 50’s the bucket of pollen substitute looked like a swarm of black and white bees covered with pollen.   

Maple trees may be a bit behind where they were last year and the buds on the trees in my yards don’t look like they’ll be blooming anytime soon.  The 10 day forcast doesn’t show any warm days yet either.  Still, I can smell spring coming and it shouldn’t be long now.

One critical part in the honey stick machine is the optical sensor.  They will be used in several locations in the honey stick machine to determine if a straw is in position and when honey is in the straw at a particular location.  it consists of a very simple circuit containing an IR LED and transistor.  The output voltage is detected by the Phidgets UBS interface.

The circuit is setup so that the output voltage increases when the IR is blocked.  Testing showed that the circuit was plenty sensitive enough to determine the varying levels of light when a empty or full straw was placed between the LED and transistor.   I did observe one very interesting thing when the straw with honey (or water) was centered between the LED and Transistor.    In this case the IR intensity increased instead of decreased as one might expect.  I suspect in this case the straw is acting as a lens, focusing light on the transistor.  Offsetting the IR LED and transistor so that it lines up with the bottom half of the straw eliminates this problem and actually increases the voltage difference between honey and no honey in the straw.

I was hoping the silence on television, radio and the newspaper was a sign that CCD had gone away as quickly as it came, or at least wouldn’t be as big a problem as it was for many last year.  Apparently that may not be the case. Maryam Henein, who is working on a documentary about CCD, wrote in Kim Flottum’s blog that the largest beekeeper in the US apparently has been stricken by CCD.  She describes a sickening scene where nearly 40,000 hives moved  to holding yards in California in preparation for this years Almond pollination are now  were empty.

Maybe it simply hasn’t hit the news yet since many hives are still snow covered and beekeepers haven’t yet checked their hives.  But I’m still hopeful that the loss won’t be so widespread as last year.  My own hives seem ok at this point, but spring isn’t here yet.

Update: CBS ran a story tonight on the above including an interview with the beekeeper Kim Flottum’s blog mentioned.  No new news unfortunately, just a very ugly picture.

In keeping with the modular theme for the prototype, I’ve assembled the AC Driver board as a separate circuit.  It contains 4 of the very simple AC driver circuits designed earlier.  Assembly and testing was uneventful.  There is a lot of wasted space on this board that can be eliminated later with a custom printed circuit board, but I definitely wanted to keep the 120VAC circuit separate from the others for the prototype.

Yesterday was in the mid 40s and was a good time to do the first inspection of the season and install pollen patties on the hives.    The forecast was for a high of 50 with Monday being even warmer, but with a narrow window and rain being called for on Monday, today was the day.  Once the temperatures warmed up to 42 I headed off to the first yard hoping that what I found would be dramatically different than last year’s huge loss.  The bees weren’t very active at the first yard, but as it got a bit warmer though the day they were more active until the sun disappeared behind the clouds.  The timing for placing pollen patties was just about perfect.  While we are expected to get some very cold weather yet this week, it should only be 2 or 3 weeks until the maple trees begin blooming and the bees will quickly loose interest in the pollen patties when the real stuff is available.  So they really need to be on the hives soon so the bees will take advantage of them.

Much to my relief I found most hives were quite alive.  Most had fairly tight clusters still with the chill in the air from the snow pack, but many more hives than not were very strong.  Even with the smoker going to drive the bees down into the hive it was a challenge to place pollen patties on some hives without squishing any bees.  It was too cold to consider pulling frames a checking brood, but judging by a peak between frames and the warmth coming from the hives, they have started raising brood already.  It’s like night and day compared to last year where I could count the strong hives on my fingers.

It’s also very important this time of year to check the weight of the hives to evaluate how much honey they have left.  As the bees start rearing brood over the coming weeks they will accelerate their use of honey and hives that are strong now could quickly be lost to starvation.  I found a few hives will need some feeding soon myself, but most will be fine, at least until I get around to check them again in a couple weeks time.

The tally at the end of the day, 123 Live hives, 8 dead (including 2 I knew were dead months ago and 2 others that are so weak right now that I’m betting they won’t make it), and one very tired beekeeper.  Checking 131 hives in 5 yards in a matter of 6 hours by oneself, even if it was only a quick inspection, is exhausting work.  But it’s a good feeling when you get back home and peal off the soggy boots after finding only a 6% loss.

There is also be portions of the honey stick machine, including heaters and pump, that will need to be run on 120VAC and sill be switched on and off by the Phidgets interface.  Relays would be the simplest option here, but again these mechanical relays have a far less than desirable rated lifespan in number of cycles.   So I’ve opted to use solid state optically isolated AC relays.  They typically have a far lower amperage rating, but I only expect to drive a maximum of 0.5 amps presently on any given AC device.  The circuit pictured shows the very simply NPN driver circuit triggering an LED and the solid state relay.

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.']

The report from California is that the almond bloom is late, at least 2 and maybe 3 or more weeks late.  The main almond variety is only just starting to bloom and later varieties have yet to start.  In most years the bloom would have ending by now and beekeepers would be starting to move bees out of the orchards the first week of March.   This could cause a delay of  queen and package bee production for operations that also do pollination.  This is not limited to just California beekeepers, but also may affect many other beekeepers across the southern states because many of the 1.2 million bee hives needed for almond pollination are moved into California.

Does this mean that our package bees will be delayed?  I can’t answer that yet.  It may very well delay the earliest queens and packages,  but there is still is more than a month to go before the earliest packages could be available here in Ohio.

The local association’s meeting was canceled tonight due to snow.  This gave me a little bit of time to work on the honey stick machine that’s been left sitting for awhile while I caught up on other things.  I was able to finish and test the final 4 to 8 decoder previously built on a prototype board.  For testing I connected to the DC driver board simply to have a display of the output on the LEDs.  I was a bit worried at first because it didn’t work at all, but then I found some insulation had melted allowing two wires to come into contact with each other.  After fixing that issue the circuit worked perfectly while running it though some 20,000 on/off cycles.

One thing I learned building this circuit was how slow and tedious it can be building these circuits on prototype PCBs.  The boards have no circuit traces and every wire needs carefully positioned and soldered by hand.  Should I get to the point where I can produce even a small number of machines, I’ll definitely be looking to design a printed circuit board.  Fortunately that’s almost as easy as desktop publishing now with software like PBC123 that lets you design and order custom circuit boards in small numbers.

I Spent some time this evening making pollen patties.  I now have around 110 ready and waiting in the freezer to go on the hives the next warm spell we have.  Hopefully that will be in just another week or two in time to get the bees moving shortly before the maple trees start blooming.  When trying to raise early queens in northern climates as I am, early drone production is often the limiting factor and feeding pollen (protein) helps get them started.  It’s not the only limiting factor, but it’s one of the few the beekeeper can do anything about.  It also increases the size of the hives earlier to one can afford to make all the splits necessary for mating nucs.  With luck I’ll be running around 200 this year.

Another sure sign spring is coming: emails and calls daily from other beekeepers wanting to order queens.  The earliest queens have been booked for some time now and recent orders are starting to book the summer and late season queens.  It seems like the demand is as high as ever, and the supply seems to be diminishing.  So if you need to order queens, get your orders in now if you can regardless of who you are ordering them from.