Bees

[darwinslair]

So, Roger Olson, who used to own Melo-Honey, called me up today and asked if I had checked on my bees lately.  Told him that I had not done anything since taking off the queen excluder since none of the bees were going through it into the upper supers.  He asked me to go check to see how they were doing.  So I geared up (rare I am home on a weekend, but we are having a summer birthday party for all my girls this afternoon so I am not at one of the outlaying gardens) and went to take off honey.  Top super, no honey, and no new combs.  Next super, no honey, no new comb.  Broke into the brood boxes, tons of bees, no honey, and no brood.  Found the queen, but there are oddly no drones.  Just workers.  Called Roger up, told him what I had found, and he says that this spring when she flew she did not have a sucessful mating, and the bees there are the last from the sperm she held since last spring.  All of the bees in the box will die of old age in the next two months, then I should clean out and store the boxes until next spring when I should get a new queen and workers.  He will get me a year's worth of honey this fall so I have enough until next year.  <sigh>  oh well. 

He then went on to tell me of the 13 hives he harvested today, 4 of them had the same issue, the other 9 were doing gangbusters, but unusual to have 1, much less 4 of 13 have unsuccessful mating flights.

Tom

[Lady Lilya]

If you combine yours and his for statistical purposes, that makes it more than a third that had that problem. 

[opsec]

Is this colony collapse disorder in action?

[darwinslair]

Not extactly, but Roger told me that while on occasion there will be an unsuccessful mating, he has never had this many failures.  Of the 150 hives he has, he usually has 1 or 2 a year.    This is not hive collapse.  This is a failure of the queen to have a succesuful flight, and that means that the male she mated with was sterile.

Tom

[Lady Lilya]

I guess that means a high rate of sterile males out there. 

[Dame]

If you take a frame or two out of the top brood chamber of the hives where the queen appears to be infertile, and replace them with a frame or two of fresh brood from a strong hive, the bees will produce a new queen for themselves in two weeks and the new queen will mate and return to the hive to lay eggs.  Fresh brood is one to two days old.  If you look down to the bottom of the cells you will be able to see egg about the size of a pin head.  Near the egg, which takes 3 days to hatch, you will see one day old brood, it looks like a tiny white thread in a droplet of clear liquid (royal jelly).  Two day old brood is about 1/8 of an inch long in a slightly larger pool of royal jelly.

When bees produce thier own queen they ellongate the cell where the fresh brood is and pack in large quantities of royal jelly.  These cells can be up to 1 1/2 inches long before they seal them.  The difference between a worker and a queen is the amount of royal jelly the workers put in the cell. 

To have a better success rate, find the old queen and kill her so she does not destroy the new queen(s) before they are out of the queen cells.  When the first of the new queens emerges she will then go to the other queen cells and kill the other queens before they emerge and prior to a mating flight.

If the weather is good for mating and the other hives have mature drones; and, she is not killed by birds etc.; you will have a strong hive to winter over in a month to six weeks.  To check for successful mating, look for fresh eggs in the center frames of the bottom two boxes (brood chambers).  There is time left in this honey production season to make this and one more attempt at re-queening your hives this way; that is, if the current populations in the hive are sufficient to raise the queens.

[darwinslair]

So, weather is nice, took a break from seed starting this afternoon, and cleaned out the hive.  I am getting 2 hives this year and hoping for a better year.  If there is an upside to all of this (other than the fact that I will have 2 instead of 1) it is that we are STILL eating honey from 2  years ago.  2 hives in a good year should give us 4 years worth of honey then.

Tom

[Beeherder]

Hi Tom, glad to see you will be continuing your life with bees. Do you think that having them close to your gardens increases your vegetable yields? I like the way you project future honey harvests based on past performance. Hope it works out that way because my plan is to split the strong hives this year to increase my hive count from three to six. So maybe i get twice as much honey? Don't know if it works that way but lets find out.

This avatar picture is the one remaining Warre' hive in the apiary. Notice it is tied securely to an oak pallet to prevent the winds from tipping it over. Also notice that i have started feeding sugar syrup using "entrance feeders". I started feeding this hive in early March because they went into winter as the weakest hive and i did not expect them to survive. Since they made it through the first year, its now a survivor, locally adapted hive. This hive was started with a three pound package of Minnesota Hygienic bees last spring which contained an unmarked queen. I assume she has been superseded at least once and that the new queen has been mated with local males of other local survivor hives.

The current plan is to move this Warre' hive to Langstroth equipment as soon as the weather permits. Since these Warre' boxes do not have frames designed for moving the comb some losses are expected but with care perhaps i can get them into a more manageable box. The concept with this style is to let the bees build downward every year then the beekeeper takes the entire top box and returns an empty box to the bottom of the hive so they can continue to move down. Have not opened them yet this year so it will all be a surprise when that occurs. One of the Langstroth hives is not building up quickly so its time to check out why.

The top priority here is splitting the strongest Langstroth hive into at least three hives, maybe four. The plan is to wait for signs of queen cells and split as soon as the queen cells are capped. I'm told that swarm queen cells will be in the lower areas of the brood nest. This plan requires monitoring every week which has not been my pattern in past years and goes against the plan of letting them do more of the work. So we shall see. Today there is a light dusting of snow over the 1.5 inches of moisture we have gotten in the past 3 days. Opening the hive when temperatures are below 50 is not advised so maybe in a few days.

Its now time for building or assembling beekeeping equipment for the new season and frames are getting foundation, supers (boxes) are getting paint, and of course keeping the feeders full because once you start feeding they begin the spring buildup and feeding must be continued until there is a nectar flow. We are just seeing the first dandelions, hiacyths, jonquil, daffodil and rose tulips this past week so will stop feeding as more things come into bloom.

Ahhhh spring, ain't it grand!

[Beeherder]

Here is a nice video about beekeeping and how to install a package of bees. The last week of April and first week of May is the time for package bees to be brought from the California almond groves where some 80-90% of the country's bees spend the winter. The demand for almond pollination is so great that most beekeepers migrate their hives to be part of the almond pollination, then make packages to sell and move their bees to their bees to the next crop in need of pollination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaYD3e9KOA&feature=feedrec_grec_index

just thought you might like to know what its like.

[Beeherder]

And now a video about my plans for making splits. This beekeeper is working just after a weather front has passed his apiary and showing that he has queen cups ready to open with a few hours of when the video is taken. It is raining here now and has been cool and wet ever since i found that one of my hives had no laying queen so when i open them up after the weather changes here perhaps there will be evidence of queen cells that i can then use in splits. Hope you learn something from the video, eye did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVKLgBgYPok&NR=1

@ Darwinslair, sir if i have offended you by my abrupt manner of entering in this thread you started so long ago, I apologize, and humbly beg your forgiveness. Please tell us more about your bees this year.

[Beeherder]

The weather is not cooperating with my plans to make splits, after the driest winter in memory it has rained 7 of the last 10 days and not been two days of nice weather in a row since i last opened the hives. Maybe tomorrow.

For news about the bees check this out:

http://www.naturalnews.com/032521_honey_bees_pesticides.html

Who gains by interrupting this research using these bees?

[Beeherder]

Apparently Chris Martenson also thinks beekeeping is a good survival skill:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/small-scale-beekeeping/50369

and he even has a very nice forum about small scale beekeeping.

[Beeherder]

Just another reason to purchase local and know your producer? Some folks may be storing the brands named in this article anticipating that they have an inexpensive holistic food product, perhaps they will want to upgrade that stored honey to a know good producer.

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/

This is another example of the complete breakdown of borders, food standards and ethics

John Ambrose's battle for a national definition goes back 36 years. He said the issue is of great importance to North Carolina because it has more beekeepers than any other state in the country.

He and others tried to convince FDA that a single national standard for honey to help prevent adulterated honey from being sold was needed. The agency promised him it would be on the books within two years.

"But that never happened," said Ambrose, a professor and entomologist at North Carolina State University and apiculturist, or bee expert. North Carolina followed Florida's lead and passed its own identification standards last year.
 
Ambrose, who was co-chair of the team that drafted the state beekeeper association's honey standards says the language is very simple, "Our standard says that nothing can be added or removed from the honey. So in other words, if somebody removes the pollen, or adds moisture or corn syrup or table sugar, that's adulteration," Ambrose told Food Safety News.

But still, he says he's asked all the time how to ensure that you're buying quality honey.  "The fact is, unless you're buying from a beekeeper, you're at risk," was his uncomfortably blunt reply./quote]

[Atash Hagmahani]

Great minds think alike; I am going to post about this elsewhere.

I wrote a blog post elsewhere about hidden inflation through the use of fillers--or in other words, "food adulteration".

I mentioned the fake honey from Asia, and the fact that it has shown up in name-brand commercial products. But the situation is worse than I had realized.

Unfortunately that article is not clear on what the problem is. They can't tell from the lack of pollen whether it was EVER honey or not. Apparently regulations state that honey that has been ultra-filtered, so that even the pollen is filtered out, is no longer considered "honey". That's presumably to prevent companies from hiding evidence of adulteration or wholesale misrepresentation.

The article mentions opinions that there's no compelling market reason to do ultra-filtration, which implies that the motive is probably to hide something.

Unfortunately, that leaves the rest of us in the dark regarding the degree to which store-bought honey is fake. Is it all of the pollen-free honey? Is it a mixture? Does it depend on market conditions?

I looked around and found an estimate that about 1/3 of the honey in US markets is of Chinese origins and of doubtful authenticity. Indian honey which has its own issues and is officially banned in Europe is also in US markets.

It turns out there is a way to distinguish fake honey from real honey, but it requires the use of a chemistry lab to do chromotography on it, to check the distribution of sugars within the product. I would be curious for a lab to run the same kind of authenticity check.

All the do-it-yourself tests suggested on the internet won't necessarily work; they all assume that fake honey has a higher water content, which isn't necessarily true.

Beeherder, I suggest doing some marketing based on this fact. "Cheap honey" might be rather expensive fillers...not to mention could contain some problematic ingredients.

[Beeherder]

I beecame aware of the commercially marketed technology to do this in about 2007 and since that was very early in my beekeeping experience it probably means it has been an available mass produced adulteration technology for decades. The issue i was researching in 2007 regarded pesticide contamination of honey's from other parts of the world and from north american commercial agriculture. My perception at that time, was that this adulteration technology was being openly marketed (for reasons of purity of course) for the first time in north america but had been available in other parts of the world for decades. I suspected i might lead to exactly the measured levels of fraudulent frankenfoods the above article identifies and eventually 100% fraudulent corpulent corporate food products.

But hey, some people say i'm an optimist, and others say i'm a pessimist, me i think if it wasn't grown by me or somebody whose hand i can shake its probably gonna be fake. In my perception, only the real producer of a product (any product) has an incentive to quality and the further you get from the producer the more incentive there is for fraud. But hey, what do i know?