The Traveling Beekeeper - February 2012

The Half-Hive: Setting Up and Managing a Nucleus Hive

by Larry Connor

(excerpt)

  When we consider the possibilities we have as beekeepers to develop a dynamic management plan, I strongly recommend setting up a nucleus hive during the first beekeeping season. There are several advantages for having one or more small hives ready to move into larger equipment at any time of the season. Here are a few:
  • Should a full-sized colony lose its queen, you will have a queen that is already laying eggs and is immediately ready to place into your failed colony.
  • Some new queens are just not what we want for our hive. They may have a low egg-laying rate, suggesting an infection with Nosema, other disease infestation, or a partial blockage from mucus that was passed to the queen from a drone. If there is a mucus blockage in the median oviduct, the queen may not be able to lay as many eggs.
  • Early spring queens often do not obtain adequate amounts of semen during the early mating season as a result of inadequate drone supply, bad mating weather, or mating with drones with inadequate/viable sperm numbers. As these queens lay, they start to produce more and more drone eggs because they are never fertilized. The appearance of a large number (more then 10 percent) of bullet shaped pupae in worker cells is an indication of a depletion of sperm. Check this and remove some of these pupae to see if they have the large eyes of drone bees, or the smaller eyes of worker bees.
  • Should a queen produce a colony that is highly defensive, the use of a spare queen is the best way to requeen this colony. It may be necessary to move the mean colony 15 or more feet so the older (and perhaps more defensive) field bees go to dummy or trap hive you leave at the old site. This increases the chance of introduction success of a gentler queen located in the same apiary.
• First year beekeepers experience many difficulties in establishing bee colonies. If a new beekeeper can set up two and a half hives—two full sized colonies and a nucleus hive—they greatly increase their chances of success as beekeepers.

How to Establish a Nucleus
  L.L. Langstroth, the man who combined the bee space, movable frames and top-loading hives, promoted his hive as an easy way to produce increase hives by creating nucleus hives. From each nucleus a full sized colony could develop, or could be intentionally managed to remain small and become a service or support hive for the strong colonies. Since his bee space discovery in 1851, and later publication of his book, amazing little has changed in the makeup of a nucleus hive.
  1. Assemble a four or five frame hive box that holds regular 9 1/8 inch frames (or use the same size frame as your operation, if different, to maintain standardization). Each nucleus should have frames with foundation or starter strips to be put into the colonies from which bees and brood are removed. Some of these frames will be used to replace the frames removed from the parent hive.
  2. Evaluate your two new colonies, started from package bees, nuclei or purchased hives. In each hive, you should have evidence of a healthy queen as shown by frames of eggs, larvae and sealed worker pupae. During a good spring and early summer each of your colonies should be expanding in size. After three weeks there should be many frames of bees that are emerging or about to emerge. I do not recommend removal of frames for at least six weeks except if you purchased full sized colonies. They may be donor colonies within weeks, depending on their initial strength.
  If you do not see growth in the colony size, or if there is not an expanding range of eggs, larvae, and pupae along with emerging adult bees, you are either rushing the season or there is a real problem with your hive. Check with your mentor or someone who can look at the colony and help you with an evaluation. Most importantly, if there is no sign of brood since you introduced the colony, the queen has failed and other action needs to be taken. Here, the advantage of two colonies comes to your benefit—remove one frame of brood with eggs and larvae and add it to the queen-less colony, right in the center of the bees (take out an outside frame to make room). This will allow the bees to build their own queen, saving the colony 70 to 80% of the time.
Hopefully, your colonies have built in strength so when you find five to eight frames of brood covered with bees in both of your hives, you will be able to removed one or two frames of brood from one or both to make up your new nucleus.
  3. Place a frame of sealed and emerging brood (when young adult bees are crawling out of the cells) in the increase nucleus hive. This may be positioned where you want to keep it in the apiary.
  4. Add one or two other frames from this hive which contain food—pollen and nectar. If you found the queen—it is so much easier if she is marked—while removing these frames, make sure she is returned to the parent hive. Otherwise, you will need to recheck the nucleus for eggs in four or more days, the minimum time period for all eggs to hatch after a queen has been removed. Return the queen to the parent hive so she can continue buildup in that colony.
  5. Introduce a new laying queen into the nucleus. This should be a queen of varroa mite resistant stock purchased from a reputable, and hopefully, local supplier. If you cannot find such a queen, introduce a queen cell, virgin queen or mated queen. Avoid production of a queen from a frame of eggs and larvae, because it takes so long—over a month—to get new bees to emerge in the colony unless other options are not available. This is stressful on a small hive.

The Traveling Beekeeper - January 2012

For the New Beekeeper: Setting Up Two and a Half Hives

by Larry Connor

  January is an ideal month to plan the purchase of bee colonies. For the new beekeeper, it provides adequate time to research various options for colony purchase, assemble beekeeping equipment, and secure a safe location for the colonies where they will be able to gather a nectar crop and produce honey and/or pollinated crops. For the second and third year beekeeper it allows you time to consider options for colony replacement and apiary growth.
There is growing statistical evidence1 that there are heavy losses when beekeepers keep only one hive of bees. As a group, single colony beekeepers lose over 50 percent of their colonies every year. This reflects a lack of experience by the beekeeper, poor varroa mite control, and old fashioned bad luck.
  The solution to these heavy losses is  starting with two beehives instead of one, and during the first season establishing a small hive called a nucleus. Why start out with two and a half hives? Statistically, having a second colony provides you with double the bees and equipment, and this, in turn, will help protect you against bad luck, poor queens, bee mites, and a range of bee diseases and your lack of experience with bees.

   •  By having an extra bee colony in your apiary you can save a colony that has a queen problem or failure. Paired colonies increase your chance of having one colony that is doing well, one that you can use to save the other when things go wrong.
   •  By keeping a nucleus with a laying queen you can quickly replace a queen that is failing or missing. This can make the difference between making a honey crop and no honey crop. It also increases the chances of getting the colony through winter or a dearth period.
  The nucleus hive can be started from the two full sized colonies during the initial season and kept small by removing bees and brood (immature bees) periodically. In this nucleus you will keep a young viable queen (one that has mated and is actively laying eggs) ready to perform her duties in a full sized colony. In addition, many beekeepers have had excellent success wintering these small colonies in cold areas, so it seems like you might have a backup in case one of the big colonies dies over the winter. Consult my book, Increase Essentials for details.
  My goal is to develop and maintain a certain level of new beekeeper confidence as well increase your chance of getting bees through a full year of beekeeping. It is not to increase sales at the bee supply company, but since most of us who keep bees have poured a lot of cash into our beekeeping, we need to face reality if we want our new beekeeping activity to succeed.

Purchase Options
There are three options for a new beekeeper to obtain hives.

   •  Package bees – These are nurse worker bees in a screen and wood or cardboard box containing a newly mated queen in a special cage (to make it easier for you to keep her under control). Packages of bees are sold by bee supply dealers, some (but clearly not all) bee clubs, and independent beekeepers. Some of the producers make delivery of the packages to area drop-off sites. A few beekeepers will still ship the packages by mail, but at your risk of loss.
   •  Nucleus hive – Called nucs or nooks for short, these are miniature colonies, often with five frames of brood and bees removed from a strong colony, and then a queen is added to the bees. This may be done as a queen cell, the pupal stage of the queen’s development, from which she emerges, mates and starts to lay. The seller waits (hopefully) until the brood from that queen starts to emerge and there are plenty of young adult bees in the nucleus that will grow the population very rapidly. A good nucleus hive should have three or four frames of brood (eggs, larvae and pupae), a mated, laying queen, and one or two frames of stored honey and pollen in the comb. The colony should be disease free and have a low mite population.
   •  Full-sized colonies – These are often colonies from local beekeepers who sell bee hives to make money. Look for eight or ten frame hives filled with bees. A second box may be sold with the hive and this equipment should be new comb with copious amounts of brood and food. There should be a young queen, produced within the past year.

  Avoid combs that are old, disfigured, or diseased. It may take an experienced beekeeper to recognize this, as well as American foulbrood and other problems. For that reason it is always useful to have a mentor or experienced beekeeper with you when you purchase nucleus hives or full sized colonies. Refuse to accept any equipment or colonies that are not strong or healthy enough for your operation. If you have done some homework before you buy the bees, you should be able to recognize healthy bee brood, good combs and food reserves. It may take you several months of working with an established beekeeper to learn this, but once you know it, the knowledge will serve you well.
  A growing number of bee clubs in distant parts of the United States and Canada provide a service where existing club members mentor new members and provide a nucleus colony as part of a fee or condition of membership. The new beekeeper works with the mentor to establish the new colony, a valuable learning experience.

Moving in and setting up hives
Package bees – These are the most challenging for beekeepers to install, especially when unfamiliar with working with bees, and if they are working alone, and without an experienced person to help. Installation is really very simple: just remove the bees from the box and put them into the beekeeping equipment you have prepared for them in their permanent location. Some remove the queen in her cage and shake the bees out onto the comb, where the queen is hanging. A cork or plastic plug must be removed from the queen cage so she can get out (I like to leave it in for 3-5 days and then return to remove the cork or cap, giving the bees more time to get established and engorge the queen with lots of food. That gets her unique chemical pheromone production going at a high level, a desirable thing).

I recommend a method that does not require shaking of bees:
   1.  Open the package by removing the lid, feed can (with sugar syrup the bees have used for food during transit) and the queen cage, usually hanging from the top of the opening.
   2.  Place the cage in an empty hive body on the hive stand where the bees will live in your apiary. Use bricks or blocks of wood so the top of the cage is even with the top of the hive body.
   3.  In a second hive body with frames, hang the queen, in her cage, immediately above the opening of the cage. The odor of the queen will draw the bees out of the cage and onto the comb. The comb may be new or used, but must be disease free.
   4.  Place the lid on the hive and wait several hours or overnight.
   5.  When you return the bees should be out of the cage and on the comb. The foragers should be flying in and out of the entrance, looking for food. Carefully set off the top box and remove the shipping cage and the bottom hive body. Place the top box, with the queen and the bees on the bottom board. Make sure there is an entrance reducer in the entrance to reduce robbing.
   6. Put the inner cover on the single box of bees, and the empty hive body on top. Add jars or cans of 50-50 sugar to water mixture. Or use a top feeder. Do not use the entrance feeder often sold with beginner kits – these encourage bees trying to steal food from each other, a process called robbing.
   7.  Return in three or four days and remove the cork or cap from the queen cage, and return it to the colony. This will allow the queen to get out and start laying. Queens in package bees are sold as mated queens. If, in error or by natural causes, the queen is not mated, she will eventually produce unfertilized eggs that develop into drone honey bees. Since they serve to mate with new queens, the colony will die when the worker bees are gone from old age.
   8.  Recheck the hive every week for a month to make sure the queen is laying, and the colony is building. There should be brood sealed in 9 days after the queen is released from the cage. If there is not, you will want to do some investigation into what is wrong.

Nucleus Hives – The bees in these units are already up and running, so there should be no delay in egg laying and brood production, since they should have been doing this for several weeks. Many beekeepers deliver (or you pick them up) nucleus hives in temporary cardboard boxes. The entrance is screened for transport so the bees cannot fly out of the box. The bees must be removed from the boxes and put into your bee equipment.

   1.  Place the purchased nucleus box next to the permanent hive location, where you have set up a hive stand, bottom board, brood box, and cover. Remove the cover of the empty hive and remove a number of frames equal to the number of frames in the nucleus.
   2.  Using your bee smoker or a light spray of sugar water, open the nucleus hive and let them settle for a minute. Many bees may take to the air if they are excited, if it is warm outside, and especially if they have been screened into the box for more than a few hours.
   3.  Using the hive tool, carefully remove the outside frame (the comb) from the cardboard nucleus. Move that comb to its new home. Repeat the process MAKING SURE YOU KEEP THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE COMBS IN THE NEW HOME THE SAME AS THAT IN THE SHIPPING CAGE.
   4.  Check that the box has the desired number of frames, and close up the colony with the cover. Use a feeder if the bees require food (the box is not very heavy when you pick it up).
   5.  To protect her from injury, some beekeepers may cage the queen during shipping, although this is not routine. Make sure the cork or plastic cap is off the shipping cage if you find one, or, with the help of an experienced beekeeper, open the cage so the queen can return to her combs. She should not require any introduction as in the package colony.
   6.  Recheck the colony every week for a month, and provide expansion room (the second box of comb) as the unit expands. When the weather and honey plants cooperate, colony growth is remarkable: A two frame colony made in mid April may have 45,000 workers by mid June, just in time for nectar production in some areas.

Full-sized colony – These are the easiest to set up and often the most expensive to purchase. When you have agreed to the time and location of pickup and delivery of the hive, discuss equipment options (the seller’s or yours) and work out details of the hive swap.

   1.  Make sure the location for the bees is setup in advance. Level the ground, use a hive stand, and have shims available to level the hive once in place. Tilt the hive slightly forward so any rain or condensation will run out the entrance of the hive.
   2.  Position the hive in place and when all is set, remove the screen at the entrance of the hive. Use your veil and smoker if necessary, as confined bees are sometimes unhappy to be locked up.
   3.  Check the hive every week for a month, making sure the queen is still producing eggs, and there is open and sealed brood in the hive. Feed the hive if necessary using one of the feeding systems available to you.
   4.  You will be able to tell when the nectar flow is underway by increased flight activity at the entrance (learn to recognize orientation flight, where newly emerged bees learn the location of their hive by flying around in circles for several minutes). Make sure all the combs in the lower box are nearly filled with drawn comb (where the bees have added beeswax) and add the second hive body. If you purchase your hive late in the spring and the nectar flow is underway, you may need to add the second hive body as soon as the bees are in place. The appearance of lighter colored beeswax at the tops of the frames, and short comb on the top of the frames is an indication that the nectar flow has started and the bees need additional room for honey processing and storage.

Next month we will explain how you can use brood and bees from one of these colonies to set up a nucleus hive, and how to manage it during the season.
For book purchase from Wicwas Press, including Ed Simon’s new Beekeeping Equipment Essentials, go to the website www.wicwas.com and click on the bee book store. For the new speaker’s bureau, go to www.honeybeespeak.com and sign up as a speaker, a potential user of the bureau, or both.

The Traveling Beekeeper - December 2011

Bee Speakin'

 (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

To talk to you about talking about bees I need to talk about me for a bit. Some readers hate it when I talk about me, while others love it. So while some of you need to flip/click to the ads at the back of this publication to see who is selling what, the rest of you can stay on the page.

My speaking career started early, around age 11. I was in 4-H in the 1950s and there was a strong emphasis on giving reports about our various projects. There was also an expectation that you would give a ten to 12 minute demonstration on how to do some part of your project.

At this age I was involved in everything dealing with nature, conservation and science. I could be seen with both a butterfly net and a pair of binoculars. The net was to collect insects, the binoculars was used to watch birds. By age 14 or so I had a life list of over 150 birds, most of them seen within a few miles of the farm.

The project was Bird Study, and I still have the giant notebook I made of dozens of birds. Do I need to say how much work went into that project? Not just me-both parents were behind me, pushing me to get things done. I did enjoy being a birder. It was a great excuse to get outside and wander the woods. Did I enjoy the paper work?

Somehow I ‘signed up' to do a demonstration about Bird Study, so I decided that I would talk about how to make a bird feeder. This is the flat kind that sits on a window ledge and the birds are close to the glass so you can watch their activity during the feeding season.

How to Build a Bird Feeder

The advantage for me, as an 11-year old boy, was that How To Build a Bird Feeder is a sequential story, and I just had to tell the story in the proper order. If I had all the props in front of me, precut, then it was just a matter of lining things up and nailing them together. If I remembered to talk while doing this, it was all the better. Indeed I had memorized a script for this process. Mom helped me write the script on the insides of envelopes.

The key to anything like this is to practice over and over again. I would go through the motions while Mom ironed clothes (who irons anymore?) or canned something. She would listen and make suggestions. Together we edited my script. Then, I did the demonstration for neighbors, people who were most likely to show up, eat chocolate chip cookies, and listen to me for 10 minutes. Then, I went on to the local club. Other kids were polite. I think. A few of the older kids, the junior leaders, made suggestions and comments.

I thought it would all end at the county competition, where other kids presented their demonstrations. I guess I did pretty well, or because of it, people asked if I would present the demonstration at their club, or their gardening group. But the big deal was an invitation to speak at the local Bird Club. I was invited to dinner (catered and served, a first for me), in a nice part of Kalamazoo, at the home of a university professor and local newscaster. It required my negotiation of all the silverware on the starched white linen tablecloth. They were the nicest group I spoke to, I got a lot of positive feedback, and haven't stopped talking to groups since.

Building Your Talk
Lots of groups expect you to have a slide presentation ready to go, or on your computer or on a memory stick, ready to load. Others will expect you to speak in a shed or in the open air without electricity. Always know where you are expected to present your talk, because it tells how to prepare.

Some readers will be in Las Vegas in January and participate in the Serious Sideliner Symposium at the American Beekeeping Federation meeting. This will be the seventh year I have arranged this program, and I like to put in a lot of HIDI speakers: How I Do It! The beauty of HIDI is (a) it is a sequential story and (b) it is your story. There is no concern if you may be outside the mainstream of thinking on a particular process or idea-if that is the method you use, great. Plus, for even the driest professor/researcher, if you give them a HIDI assignment, they become alive, animated, and maybe even fun. Most of the presenters in 2012 are beekeepers with a wide range of experience, and we have a fantastic time with the two-day program.

A. Pick your topic and narrow it down!
Don't try to tell your entire life story in 45 minutes. Select a narrowly focused topic (or negotiate the scope of the topic with your host group) that can be handled well in less time than you have been given. This allows you a few minutes to digress and to answer questions. Examples of some topics that do well with the HIDI topics include: How to assemble a bee hive (sound familiar?), How to install a package, How to find the queen, How to remove honey from a hive, How to make beeswax soap, and How to set up a honey stand at a farmers' market.

Stay away from complicated subjects unless you know the material extremely well. I see this way too often-people trying to discuss something that is either over their heads, or they don't really understand, or they have not practiced the talk. If you are new to speaking about bees, leave the queen pheromone, the advanced bee genetics talks and the world honey market summary to folks who have more experience and knowledge than you do. Give yourself something to aspire to!

Selecting the right topic for you is a big part of the challenge in making a talk. Given a comfortable topic, you will be great. Given a subject you don't like, understand, or have passion about is certain to fail.

B. Collect materials for the talk

If you are giving a slide-free talk, start collecting props for the presentation. People like to see and handle items passed around to them. If you can have a hands-on session (to build their own bird feeder), then set this up with the organizers. That will require a lot of coordination. How many folks will be in the session? How many items do you need to bring? Who is paying for all of this?

Most slide talks don't use real slides anymore, but digital photo files off your digital camera or high-resolution cell phone. Programs like PowerPoint and Keynote (on the Mac) provide templates for you to load photos to build a presentation. Start months in advance taking photos for the talk. If you are not a good photographer, get someone who is who will help you a bit.

The Traveling Beekeeper - November 2011

At The Western Apicultural Society conference:

Rethinking Basic Assumptions

 (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

The 2011 Western Apicultural Society convention on the Big Island of Hawaii provided me with a return trip to this fascinating place, a chance to conduct a day-long workshop, and to hear some of the talks from the many speakers. Let me say that I do not intend to snub some excellent speakers, but have picked out a few comments that I felt were responsible for causing me to rethink some basic assumptions. So I will concentrate on a few talks.

Some statistics about dead colonies
A new spiral notebook is 2/3rds filled with notes from speakers. There are research reports and more. The small hive beetle, the varroa mite and nosema occupied many of these pages. I’d like to share statistics presented by Dr. Dewey Caron, U. of DE Emeritus professor and past president of WAS. He reported on the Bee Loss Epidemic, using data collected from beekeepers who offered up data on their losses. This, by default, makes this a biased sample. The reporting period was from October to March, which distorts data from beekeepers who lost bees before October and after March, as I did.

• Beekeepers who keep fewer colonies lose a higher percentage of their hives. In Washington and Oregon, commercial and semi-commercial beekeepers lost 21%, 24.6% and 20.8% of their colonies in 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively. Small-scale beekeepers lost 25.8%, 44% and 29.4% during those same years. Small-scale beekeepers are those who have one to 28 colonies. They average 2 hives, the median number was 3 hives, and the most common number reported was 1 hive, with 29% of all beekeepers having just one hive. While this statistic does not surprise me, we often forget that the most common number of bee hives beekeepers have is just one colony, and that the federal government does not include them in national beekeeping industry statistics.

• Small-scale beekeepers reported 42% with no winter loss, and 58% had loss. That means that 58% of all single hive owners lost ALL their bees, a tremendous blow to the new and more inexperienced beekeepers.

• The commercial beekeepers were most likely to report non-manageable conditions, such as poor queens and pesticides as causes of their losses. Only 7% of these beekeepers reported CCD as the cause of their losses, but this represented 57% of all colonies lost.

• Using package bees, nucleus colonies and purchased hives, beekeepers replaced more colonies than they lost over the sample period.

• There were no greater losses in colonies left in the home apiary compared with those moved to either almonds pollination or fireweed, suggesting that the effects of moving were not of themselves lethal factors for colonies.

Queen quality
Retired Washington bee inspector Jim Bach discussed factors we should use to measure queen quality. Here are some of his more interesting comments:

•You want a queen retinue (the bees around the queen) of 10 to 12 worker bees, with the best queens having 15 workers in the retinue. He considers this a factor of the queen’s pheromone, making her more attractive.

• The noise of a colony increases during queenless conditions, reaching about 85 decibels in a queenless colony compared to 50 db in a midsummer queenright hive.

• For the strongest colonies in the spring, overwinter colonies in three deep hive bodies.

• The lack (reduction) of queen pheromone results in queens being refused food, off colored larvae (a bit grayish like European foulbrood), nurse bees not tending brood as well, and a poor overall brood pattern.

The Traveling Beekeeper - October 2011

Moving Toward Gold

 (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

For most of North America, October is a transitional period when we start the move toward cold, but are not there yet. It is many people’s favorite time of the year, cooler days and colder nights, a time of beautiful fall color and a chance to fix favorite foods associated with the season. Many of us think in terms of apple cider, pumpkin pies and getting the honey bottled and sold before the first of the year.
As I travel, people are asking important beekeeping questions suitable for their location. My Alaskan and Canadian beekeeper friends are undoubtedly long past their ‘termination dusting’ where the first snow on the mountain warns of just a few days to finish their season’s outside work. Of course, they may have seen that dusting of snow back in August, and now have more than a little snow on the ground. Florida and Texas beekeepers fret about the fall rains—will they have enough soil moisture for fall and winter plants to build the bees to full strength for splits, queen rearing or almond pollination.
Midwestern beekeepers can expect freakishly early snows in October, and, in other years, no significant snow until January. It is a difficult time to make predictions.

By Now
Except for subtropical and tropical beekeepers, the season is changing. The bees are responding to the shortening day length and the reduced food supply and they are making significant changes for winter. What are those changes?

The Traveling Beekeeper - September 2011

Small-Scale Queen Rearing

Something That Could Fit Into a Small Place

 (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Sheldon and I got into the small boat in Beaverton, Ontario on the shore of Lake Simcoe to travel 4 km (2.5 miles) to Thorah Island, a 1,450 acre island made up of wooded and wooded-swamp ground. There are clearings for agriculture and recreational use. The main road is essentially a deep, muddy path during our late June visit.

Thorah Island is used as an isolated mating station for Buckfast bees, under the supervision of Paul Kelly who works with the University of Ontario, coordinating beekeeping activities for Dr. Ernesto Guzman, students and staff. Kelly's program was established to promote stock improvement in Ontario. Paul met us in Beaverton along with Bill, a local beekeeper-helper who helps with the bees (and drove the boat).

Buckfast queens have been produced in Ontario for some time now, starting with imported worker eggs and live sperm from England, and most recently mated breeder queens from Denmark, where they are produced on isolated islands. Kelly said that this year they imported more Buckfast breeder queens, under careful Ontario and Canadian government supervision. These queens are not kept on the island, but only daughters of the breeders. There they mate with the Buckfast drones produced by the queens produced in previous years.  Paul grafts and produces queens on the mainland and takes queen cells to Thorah Island for mating. In tests, no mating took place when queens were on the island and drones were on the mainland-there is scientific evidence that bees do not fly over water of this distance.

The breeder queens are expensive to purchase (under permit) and there are additional costs associated with the shipping and regulatory processes and fees to get the queens into the country. Developed by the late Brother Adam of Buckfast Abby, in southwestern England, the Buckfast strain of bees was carefully bred as THE initial survivor stock: survivor ability to acarine mite, renamed the honey bee tracheal mite, when they appeared in North America. From the ashes of the colonies ruined by the Isle of Wight disease in the early 1900's, the Buckfast strain was carefully constructed during years of experimental crosses made on the isolated moor outside Buckfast.

The ‘Bucks', as they are referred to by the Ontario beekeepers we met, are great for wintering in Ontario. Kelly winters the bees at the University of Guelph in single ten-frame Langstroth hives for the winter. The colonies on Thorah Island had queen excluders between the first and second boxes. Conservation of winter stores is associated with a low reproductive rate at the end of the season. But in the spring (May to July in Ontario) the bees produce at least nine frames of brood, are resistant to diseases and are less likely to swarm than other stocks.

The gentleness of the pure stock was quickly noticed when we arrived after a period of intense rain, and everything was wet and the bees were being worked without any protection. The smoker was lit but rarely used. Nobody wore veils. The bees were quiet on the combs and did not run or drip off the frames or move to the bottom board. My old teacher, Dr. Bud Cale, Jr., would have said that they had both a good temper and a excellent temperament.

Buckfast bees have a reputation for being excellent nectar and pollen foragers, and moderate to low propolis users. They reflect their survivor stock origins in being resistant to tracheal mites. But they also have good hygienic behavior, maybe not as much as other stocks, but enough to help against varroa mites and brood diseases. Many Ontario beekeepers continue to use seasonal miticides to insure healthy colonies going into winter.

Use of mini-nucs
Kelly uses Styrofoam mini-mating nucs. They offer temperature protection for a small mass of worker bees and a queen. Being highly seasonal, the nucs are established from bulk bees-like giant packages-shaken from strong bee colonies from various locations. There are three small combs and a feeder area. The ripe Buckfast queen cells are added to the units and allowed to settle. The nuc boxes are painted different colors for several reasons. First, the paint protects the plastic from degrading in the sun. Second, the different colors allow the queens and bees to orient to the correct location when the units are spread out on the mowed areas of the mating yard. Third they are attractive in the yard. They are set right on the ground.

Buckfast drones are produced by the colonies over-wintered on the island. They were strong hives and were being worked to harvest four frame nuclei for early summer increase using some of the volunteers who donate their time and talents to perform an endless list of chores. Paul makes up a list and tacks it on a tree so everyone can see what the work list is for the day. The boat is small, and it can only hold so much weight. There are often many trips made each day to carry people and supplies on and off the island.

Making four-frame nuclei
All the colonies had three or four deep boxes with the queen in the bottom deep hive body confined under a queen excluder. The bees were on a nectar flow from the wildflowers and trees on the island. There were basswood trees as well as hairy vetch blooming, which attracted many foragers.  The colonies had bees to spare and were being harvested to make up new colonies as four-frame nuclei. A four-frame plywood nucleus box appeared to make up nuclei to carry off the island. Les Eccles, the new Lead of the Ontario Tech-Transfer Team, was there with is wife Raquel. With two volunteers, Bill and Jeff, they inspected the colony, located the queen, and carefully removed four frames of nearly wall to wall brood along with bees. The old queen, marked green (indicating she was produced in 2009) and in her third season, was located and caged in a hair-curler cage to protect her from harm. There was a debate about her fate: pinch her after doing a great job but for being old; leave her in the hive to select for queen longevity, or put her into the nucleus. The last option won, and the three-frame nucleus with the old queen was carefully packed up using duct tape and screen to carry off the island on the boat.

Who's who
Paul Kozak is the new Provincial apiary inspector, replacing Doug McRory last year. Paul worked last with Dr. Nick Calderone in New York, running the educational programs there. Paul must have pulled the short straw and was given (or took on) the task of coordinating my visit to Ontario to speak at the June meeting in Midland, ON as well as to visit programs there and several beekeepers. I certainly appreciate his efforts as a great host.
Les Eccles recently moved from the University of Guelph research program of Dr. Ernesto Guzman to the Lead of the Ontario Tech Transfer Team, a program run by the Ontario Beekeepers Association with financial support from the provincial government and grant funds. Two years before taking on this job, Les worked in Mexico on projects run by Dr. Guzman. There he met his wife, Raquel, who is a skilled beekeeper, especially in the queen yard. She works for one of the Ontario queen producers.

Sheldon Schwitek was my traveling companion, a good friend and fellow Kalamazoo resident. A native of western Canada, he and Paul Kozak had a lot to talk about, both being ‘prairie boys' from the flat open prairie of the western part of that country. A small-scale beekeeper in Kalamazoo, Sheldon lived in Toronto for ten years before he met his wife. He helps me out at meetings when I have to be doing two or more things at the same time at meetings. He was eager to return to Ontario and share some of his favorite places.

Influence remains
The tech transfer program was started by Dr. Medhat Nasr, now apiarist in Alberta. Then Allison Skinner ran the program. She is recently married and producing queens of her own.

Canadian Buckfast in the United States
Canadian queen producers have been selling queens in the United States for many years. There is strong interest in the Canadian Buckfast queens, with a large number of individuals working together to produce queens in large numbers. When the Canadian-US border was closed to package bees (initially due to the tracheal mites), many Canadian beekeepers looked at late spring and summer queen production as an alternate to queens from Hawaii and elsewhere. Many Ontario queen producers are set up to ship queens to the United States, and have the experience working with the inspection and import rules and paperwork. With the combination of Buckfast stock and selection for wintering and productivity as honey producers, there is a lot in these queens that beekeepers want in their bees.

Differences
By comparison, by driving over the border from Michigan, you must appreciate the differences between the neighbors:

When the border closed, Canadian beekeepers were forced to rely on over-wintered colonies, stocks that over winter well and breeding programs like the Buckfast bees. U.S. beekeepers rely on migratory beekeeping economics and the availability of packages from southern and western states.

Canadian beekeepers have been over wintering colonies in wintering rooms and with outdoor insulation materials while many U.S. beekeepers have experienced enormous colony losses.

Canadian beekeepers are interested in well-bred and well mated queens; Many U.S. beekeepers are looking for a low-cost queens.

Both countries are faced with severe budget cuts, staff retirements and less-than-ideal economic environments. Yet, the Ontario beekeepers have a strong inspection program run by Paul Kozak (with nearly 20 part-time, seasonal bee inspectors), a vigorous research program run by Dr. Ernesto Guzman (assisted by Paul Kelly), and a Tech-Transfer team that takes those essential parts of out-reach/extension work with monitoring, testing and training. There is some overlap with these different groups, yet the three groups are able to kick back and race snails together on a late Friday afternoon.

The snail race
Paul Kelly said that Thorah Island is known for a variety of epidemics of various critters. One time it was mice, when you could not step anywhere without stepping on a mouse. Where I was, there was an epidemic of stripped snails. There were several on the sides of the each bee hive. Paul set up a race, on an unused hive lid, marking the shells with the initials of the participants. Each of us picked out our own snail. I am pleased to report that mine came in second. Sheldon's crossed the finish line when it turned around and the tip of its tail crossed the line in full retreat. It must have changed its mind.

I should point out that no snails were harmed in this race, although thoughts of garlic and olive oil flashed through my mind many times.

Check out my website for the latest bee classes and books on bees and beekeeping. That is www.wicwas.com

The Traveling Beekeeper - August 2011

Small-Scale Queen Rearing

Something That Could Fit Into a Small Place

 (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

The widespread concern over queen quality has been made dramatically clear to me during my five different classes around the United States this year, under a pretty diverse set of conditions. In my teaching, as in my book, Queen Rearing Essentials, I demonstrate to beekeepers how to use a starter colony and a finisher colony to produce queen cells using the transfer method as described by Gilbert Doolittle in 1888. This system is one that a small beekeeper can use that involves a minimum amount of equipment (a nucleus box most beekeepers already have), queen excluders, grafting frames and bars, and some simple techniques.

 The starter box is screened to keep nurse bees in and to provide ventilation. We add one or two large sponges soaked with water to insure the bees never dehydrate and are able to produce copious royal jelly. We add a frame of freshly collected pollen and one or two frames of honey, ending up with three frames in the five-frame nucleus box. We select a strong colony and find the queen. Then, we remove all the brood frames and shake all the nurse bees into the box. In a good colony there will be several pounds of nurse bees in the box-all bees of the proper age for royal jelly production. We know that old field bees don't produce the royal jelly newly transferred larvae require to become a queen, so we let them fly back to their colony.

 The starter is queenless and broodless. We set it up and use it overnight and then return the bees to their hive the next day. For less than 25 hrs the brood in the source colony is cared for by field bees and the nurse bees we missed when we shook the bees into the starter.

 We place the box so it is not in the direct sun. If it is cool weather, the starter is placed in a building so the temperature is never cold enough to force the bees to go into cluster, thus abandoning the cells.

 We position larvae transferred (a.k.a. grafted) from a worker brood comb from a breeder queen. We use 12-24 hour old larvae (since hatching from the egg stage), and place them into a cell cup. The cells are on grafting bars that are placed into frames so the cells hang down like a queen cell. We pick up and drop on the ground the starter colony to knock the bees off the combs, and place the transferred worker larvae into the queenless, broodless starter.

 Then, bee magic takes place. The nurse bees, thousands of them, which an hour ago were producing royal jelly for thousands of open brood cells, have suddenly been moved to screened box where there is nothing to feed. When we add the transferred larvae, they are the only larvae they have to feed. They are fed a lot of royal jelly. BINGO, a Queen is born! Or several dozen queens, depending on the size of the starter and the number of larvae that we decided to add.

 The next day the new queen cells are moved to a cell finisher. This is a queen-right colony with two boxes (deep or medium). The queen is kept in the lower box by a queen excluder, and several frames of open brood (eggs and larvae, and maybe some sealed brood), are placed in the center of the box along with frames of honey and pollen in a box above the excluder.

 Inside the cell finisher the young queen larvae are exposed to a lower level of queen pheromone, and this supersedure-like environment promotes good larval feeding of the started queen cells. The cells will be ready for use in the mating nucleus colonies 10 days after being put into the cell finisher. Don't be late moving the ripe queen cells, because one early queen will kill all her sisters and destroy your hard work!

The Traveling Beekeeper - July 2011

National Goal: All Resistant, All the Time (excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Teaching three-day queen rearing classes in four states this ‘spring' I am overwhelmed by the interest by local beekeepers to raise their own queens and propagate local and mite-resistant stocks. If even one out of four of these queen-rearing students is able to develop some sort of queen production program, there will be a significant change in the way queens are bring produced, and sold or traded within local beekeeping communities. In the past year there have been a combination of serious weather factors that have reduced bee colony numbers. The prolonged cold in the northern states and the prolonged drought and cold in the southeastern states (and elsewhere) during the spring of 2011 has been one with a tremendous loss of colonies. Add the flooding along the Mississippi River, and this has been a challenging season.

Many of the students in these classes are relatively new to beekeeping, having started their initial hives after the Colony Collapse Disorder was first experienced. They have installed bees, built them up, and watched them die over the winter, year after year. Other beekeepers have had much better success with their bees, and we need to understand the root of this difference.

Packages vs. Nuclei Colonies
 In one set of data collected from beekeepers in the Mid-Atlantic region there was a three-to-one advantage in survival from nucleus colonies over package bees, with about 75 per cent survival of the small hives and 25 percent survival of packages. These numbers are telling a story, and we need to listen. At first glance it suggests that package bees are less likely to survive because they are packages and lack comb and a queen-colony relationship. The reverse is that the nuclei are better units and their success is due to their nature.
­ 
The other explanation is in the queen stock that is in the two colony types. More of the nucleus colonies are sold with mite-resistant queens. We are not talking about the conditions of queen rearing, but the genetic nature of the queens in these two hive types. Nuclei can contain inferior queens, and packages can contain superior queens for survival. Two seasons ago I had sister queens in nuclei, and about half of them were heavily infested with chalkbrood, a fungal disease that should not kill colonies. But these were the colonies that did not make it to their first birthday-they died over winter.

Resistant Queens
 We have finally reached the ‘Tipping-Point' regarding the use of mite-resistant queens in North America. Some beekeepers are ahead of this by over a decade, as they have been using queens that generate colonies with low mite numbers. Some queen, package bee and nucleus colony producers are breeding or buying breeder queens so there are fewer varroa mites in their colonies, and they are able to produce a good honey crop, winter well in northern areas, and have an acceptable set of behaviors. Mite resistance is the key to this entire process. During the past quarter century in which varroa mites have been known to be in the United States, we have seen a large number of bee breeding programs that have focused on producing stock, or queen families, with lower varroa mite numbers. There are different mechanisms of resistance: hygienic behavior, grooming behavior, and reduced mite reproduction (on the stock). There are undoubtedly other mechanisms at work in these bees and the many, many survivor colonies that dot the map with increasing density. Ironically, many of these stocks are in the hands of small- and medium-scale beekeepers who are unable to produce any more queens than they currently do, so they do not advertise or promote their bees outside of a small group of neighbor beekeepers.

The Traveling Beekeeper - June 2011

Small-Scale Pollination

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Pollination needs drive the economic engine of many professional beekeepers, based primarily on one crop-almonds. For most small-scale beekeepers, the thought of loading their bees on pallets and shipping them to California is usually beyond their reach. Once set up for moving bees for pollination, professional beekeepers are deeply invested in a business model that keeps them moving bees into other crops, from apples to zucchini, and in most parts of the country.

Beekeepers of all sized operations are asked to provide bees for pollination of crops. For the small-scale beekeeper fulfilling these pollination requests can be a challenge. The income from renting perhaps a dozen hives of bees is adequate incentive for cash-starved beekeepers to jump at the opportunity.

If this describes you, we need to have a little talk. Before you agree to any pollination service, please do some research into the crop that needs pollination, and the local pollination market. Find out the costs and the potential income for crop pollination for your area. Find out if most of the pollination contracts are being handled by another beekeeper. Then find out if growers are happy with person's service.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself before agreeing to move bees from your apiary to a new site:

A. What are the pollination requirements of the crop?
Take time to learn some basic pollination biology. There are the traditional crops that need bees for cross pollination, where bees or other pollination agents are necessary to move pollen from the male flowers to female flowers. Depending on the plant, the different flowers may be on separate plants, on separate flowers of the plant, or the same flower but one that goes through a pollen-producing phase separate by time from the period when the stigma is expanded and receptive to pollen. Some plants have physical flower structures that make it hard to pollinate the flowers. Some blueberry flowers are like this. Other plants produce low sugar content nectar. Pears are hard to pollinate because they produce very low-sugar nectar.

When there is a clear need for bee pollination, but the flowers are not as attractive as other plants, you may need to provide additional colonies to flood the area in order to get positive results. Many small growers may not want to pay for his additional service cost, but will complain if their crop is incompletely pollinated.

The Traveling Beekeeper - May 2011

Lunch with Fred Rossman

(Full Version)

by Larry Connor  

In March I was on a road trip to meet and speak with beekeepers in Georgia, North Florida and Ohio. On the road I was able to visit Rossman Apiaries, Inc. in Moultrie, GA, and arrived before noon so I could have lunch with Ann and Fred. Ann was unable to get away from the telephone, which was ringing constantly. But Fred was able to take some precious time from the day and we were able to get some great Moultrie barbeque at a spot at the large farmers market (the area is known for melon production). After lunch Fred showed me a few of his mating yards for queens using five-frame nucleus boxes.

 The Rossman family has been keeping bees and selling stock for a long time. Established by Fred's father, Joe Rossman, the firm had a long-term relationship with Ohio beekeeper Emerson Long who kept bees in the Moultrie area. Together they were involved in the production of one of the very first and unique queen bee hybrids, the Kelley Island Hybrid. These bees were mated on the Kelley Island in Lake Erie. Long and Rossman propagated these queens for a number of years. The stock has since been lost.

 The Rossman firm continues to produce queen bees, as well as package bees. The firm is one of a very few that also produces and sells beekeeping supplies, with a very extensive catalogue with a wide range of products (www.gabees.com). They sell Wicwas Press titles and have a very extensive book list of other publishers as well.

 Woodenware has been manufactured at Rossman ever since the business was incorporated by Fred and brother Phil (now retired). They produce all types of woodenware, but specialize in cypress hives. Their southern Georgia location takes advantage of the supply of cypress lumber and in spite of the shortage of the wood and increasing prices, Rossman continues to manufacture and sell this product. Beekeepers use cypress because it lasts much longer than any other wood.

Queen Production
 Fred and I talked about queen production. He continues to use stock that carries the Cordovan gene, a genetic mutation that changes the black areas of the bee's body reddish-brown, giving the bees an even more golden appearance. Some people call the color orange. The pronunciation is kôrdəvən. A lot of folks like these queens for their gentleness, productivity and ease of finding the queens. The workers are big and beautiful on flowers. [Some bee breeders, like Dr. Joe Latshaw in Ohio, have worked with Cordovan bees using instrumental insemination. Latshaw only sells breeder queens to professional beekeepers, so to obtain his stock you must work through a beekeeper who purchases his breeders (www.latshawapiaries.com).] Of course, the Rossmans would be pleased to sell you queens from their work.

 Fred Rossman has been facing the challenge of the small hive beetles, and has been using more five-frame nucleus boxes that he starts with two frames of bees and brood and a ripe queen cell-one that is a day or less from emerging. In the box is a wooden feeder (Rossman-made, of course) filled only a quarter of the way with sugar syrup to allow the colony to build and grow through the season. We were able to look as some of these nucleus hives in mating areas located around Moultrie. Fred likes to set up the colonies in open pine plantings where the grower has kept the undergrowth under control by burning (in a prior season). The colonies are positioned in rows raked free of pine needles, some in straight rows and others curved, following the trees. The shade is partial, providing some heat protection for the bees and the work crews, but also providing sun protection from the beetles.

 Fred says that the key is to keep the mating nucleus hive strong, with plenty of mixed-aged bees and then allowing the queen to lay the entire nucleus with brood before she is removed to ship to a customer. "I hate to think how much money I've spent (on equipment and labor) to set up these colonies," Rossman said as he walked the mating yard with me. We opened a few without smoke and found queens that were just starting to lay eggs. Fred was pleased to see this, for it meant that the queens would be ready when he starts to shake package bees in April. Fred is following a trend among the more progressive queen producers to leave the queen in the hive longer, allowing her to fill the small colony with brood, but also allowing her body to develop further. This reduces the frequency of queen introduction problems, as well as improves queen longevity once installed in the customer's hive.

 While he still uses mini-nucs-what I have called Spam nucs in other articles- because the beekeepers use an actual spam can to measure out the bees, he knows that they are much more difficult to use with the population of small hive beetles found in southern states. The smaller mating units do not last the entire season the way the nucs with larger frames do, and they are only used to get over the initial pressure of the season.

 Fred also uses half-frame nucs. These are boxes that use a frame that is one half the length of a standard frame. These colonies are a bit better on the queens, but also require careful management for the queen production and mating. There are more challenges in getting these colonies set up in the spring.

 The larger five-frame nucs are part of the answer to these challenges. "I like that I do not have to shake the bees to set up the five-frame nucleus," Fred said. "Our crew is able to pull out frames with emerging bees, young or nurse bees, and some field bees. We like some honey and pollen on the frames, but our primary goal is to make the nucleus strong enough so when we return in a few weeks it is ready for a third frame of drawn comb or foundation." The ripe queen cell provides a virgin queen that will emerge, mate, and start laying eggs in the cells. With proper weather and feeding with the division board feeders, the colonies are ready to use all season. The frames from colonies with queens that do not successfully mate are easily added to other colonies. As the stronger nuclei expand with frames of brood and bees, some of the frames can be removed to make up a new mating colony, or to boost one that is not as strong.

 "Having stronger nuclei means that we can make the colonies easier in the spring, and it will mean that we can start overwintering nuclei so we have queens early in the season and lots of combs and bees already in operation," Rossman added. With the short winter period the chances of getting nuclei through the winter is very good.

Nutrition
 Moultrie is part of a diverse agricultural area where there are a number of important pollen and nectar plants that bloom early and throughout the season. This provides the pollen that is so essential for better buildup of the colonies to make up mating nuclei and for feeding the drones and queens that must mate so early in the season. As we looked at the two frames of brood comb (much of it had already emerged), Fred was pleased to see large areas of pollen stored in the comb, ready for the bees to feed on when the queen returned back from her mating and started to lay. The bees consume this pollen to generate royal jelly, the food fed to the queen bee throughout her larval life. Pollen is also critical for good drone production, necessary in the larval feeding for the development of large testes filled with sperm, and then again in the early adult phase of life when the drone requires protein (from pollen) so the sperm migrate from the testes to the seminal vesicles, where it waits for mating. Then it is rapidly ejaculated into the queen before the drone separates from the queen's body. The Moultrie area makes this easier, since there is plenty of pollen available for the mating colonies and drone-holding colonies so the queens and drones are both well fed. (Further information is available in my book Bee Sex Essentials sold on my website www.wicwas.com or bee equipment suppliers like Rossman Apiaries).

Package bees
 When I visited in March Fred Rossman had already sold his entire 2011 production of package bees. "We are not a large producer of packages. We have a loyal group of beekeepers who drive to pick up packages, and we give them a lot of personal service," Rossman said. He does not deliver packages by truck, but continues to ship using USPS and other carriers. "If we have a customer who has a problem with one of our queens, we want to hear about it, so we can do something about it," he explained. He is upset with anyone who fails to provide him with feedback about the queens and bees he sells, especially if it is critical. "I want to hear about it," he said.

 One of the big changes Rossman would like to see is for the entire package bee industry to slow down a bit in the spring and stop pushing out queens and packages as soon as the weather in Northern states starts to warm up a bit. "We'd all be better off if we all waited a week or more to ship," he explained, adding that so many of the problems beekeepers have with early season packages and queens would be solved if they just waited for the season to advance and allow for better bee conditions. This would improve queen rearing, brood nest conditions and give the bees a better chance of success. It would also reduce problems with issues of mating due to poor weather and drone issues.

A Busy Man
 We had to cut our bee yard visits short (Fred was the Southern gentleman and asked my permission to return to the office). An area beekeeper had arrived at the office who was picking up queen cells to make splits of hives, and needed some step-by-step instruction from Fred on how to handle the cells and how to introduce them to the new colonies. Fred knows that this is part of the business, and essential to building good will with area beekeepers who rely on him for a lot of support in their beekeeping activities. As I taught a queen rearing class near Monticello, Florida the next weekend, and then spoke at the Jacksonville, FL beekeepers association, many beekeepers mentioned how they rely on Rossman for special favors, instructions on how to do things, and as a supplier of quality wooden goods. As I left, Fred was talking to the beekeeper, placing the ripe queen cells in a towel for protection during transport, and explaining how to use them. Ann was busy on the telephone with a customer who was asking for something not found in the catalogue. Workers were in an out of the office while all this was going on. I suspect it was a typical day of work for them, and the queen and package bee season had not yet started. Then, things must really get busy!

 If you are interested in attending an intensive three-day queen rearing class in Galesburg, Michigan in June, contact Dr. Connor at www.wicwas.com. We will be talking about producing queens to make up losses, growing a business, and/or setting up a local queen bee business. You may email him at LJConnor@aol.com . Enrollment is limited and pre-registration is required.

The Traveling Beekeeper - April 2011

Fighting Back:

Olivarez Honey Bees,

Big Island Queens

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

 In late February I was able to visit the Big Island of Hawaii at the invitation of the Big Island Beekeepers Association and hosted by beekeeper Ron Hansen. I was taken around the Island to review the situation with the ‘Perfect Storm' of recently introduced pests to honey bees on the Island: Varroa mites, the small hive beetle, and Nosema ceranae. According to a survey of beekeepers updated Feb. 27, 2011 by the Big Island Beekeepers, 55% of the honey bee colonies reported for 2010 were lost, and 34% of all the beekeepers on the Island had lost all their colonies.

Some argue that the small hive beetle is killing the hives. With an enormous feral bee population and a beekeeper population inexperienced with mites or beetles, the beetles have wiped out so many colonies, and continue to do so in 2011. Others argue that the varroa mite has weakened the colonies so that the beetles are easily able to occupy, generate an enormous number of larvae, and the larvae slime the hive so the bees abandon it and the equipment is ruined.

Regardless of the mechanism, with 55% or more of the colonies on the Island dead in a year, I wondered how some of the commercial honey producers and early season queen producers were surviving under the attack. My host Ron Hansen made arrangements to visit the Olivarez Honey Bee, Inc., facility in Captain Cook, run by Russell Olivarez (Big Island Queens Division Manager) with the help of his father Ray Olivarez, the founder of Olivarez Apairies. The entire operation is overseen by Ray Olivarez Jr. and wife Tammi in California. Ray Jr. founded OHB, Inc, which runs the main booking office for Hawaii out of California. It was Ray Jr. who purchased Big Island Queens.

The Traveling Beekeeper - March 2011

Beeswax

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

How do bees produce beeswax?
After foragers return to the hive loaded with nectar, enzymes are added and moisture is removed to generate honey. During the process, certain worker bees inside the hive take up the liquid from the nectar processors and work as wax producers or remove it from the honey comb and digest the sugar in their digestive tract to produce a complex set of compounds in the wax glands and mirror plates on the underside of the abdomen of the worker. There are eight of these plates, each generating one thin scale of wax. The wax is secreted as a liquid but hardens immediately. Under the microscope the scales appear in layers, reflecting this secretion process. Once the scale is large enough the workers remove it with a spine on their hind leg and transfer it to their mouthparts where saliva is added and the striated scale is masticated into a pliable form so that it may be applied to the places on the hive where comb construction is active. This may be where honeycomb is being constructed, added to brood comb to cap the cells of larvae ready to pupate, or to construct queen cells.

Properties of beeswax
Beeswax is secreted by eight glands arranged in pairs on the ventral (under) side of the worker honey bee on abdominal segments four to seven. The glands are enlarged when the bee secretes wax, but shrink in size when the bee is not. Beeswax is a complex mixture. It is a tough wax, able to withstand great stress and pressure from the weight of honey, pollen, brood and the bees that hang on the honeycomb structure. Heavily loaded wax combs will stretch when exposed to high temperatures. The wax consists of monoesters, hydrocarbons, diesters, free acids, hydroxy polyesters, hydroxy monoesters, trimesters, acid polyesters, acid esters and free alcohols.

Peak wax secretion in bees is at 12 days after emergence, but bees must feed on pollen for the first five to six days of their adult life to be able to produce the fat bodies that are essential to wax production. These bees congregate in areas where wax production is underway, and maintain a temperature of 95 to 97 degrees F. It takes 8.4 pounds of honey to produce one pound of beeswax from 450,000 wax scales. New wax is white, but it quickly takes on the pigments of pollen-the yellows, tans or browns according to pigment color.
Beeswax is valued for its very high melting point range of 144 to 147 degrees F., producing superior burning candles and an excellent resist in both electronics and art production. When exposed to increased heat beeswax bursts into flame at 250 degrees F. Considerable discoloration takes place whenever beeswax is heated over 185 degrees F, an excellent reason to carefully monitor processing equipment to prevent wax overheating and discoloration.

The Traveling Beekeeper - February 2011

Pollen Collection

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Why collect bee pollen?
There is a strong interest in collecting bee-gathered pollen.  The upper end of the market is for fresh-frozen pollen that is used as a human and animal food supplement. Considerable pollen is sold as a dried product. In the United States there are no clear legal claims anyone can make about consuming pollen, but in other countries, and within the medical community (both human and animal), there are research studies showing the benefit of consuming pollen. It is the riskiest hive product to market, in my opinion, since pollen can trigger the same allergic reactions that folks get when they are exposed to certain air-borne pollens, but in larger concentration. For that reason I like to see customers start out consuming small amounts and carefully increase the amount of pollen they consume to make sure they do not experience any runny eyes, itchy skin, tongue or throat, or more severe symptoms associated with an allergic response.

 Ironically, part of the pollen market is stimulated by this allergic situation, as some allergists and other medical professionals start folks with a small amount of pollen to build up the protective antibodies against the allergens that might cause a reaction and in some cases an asthma attack. These same professionals recommend the consumption of honey that has not been overly filtered or heated, keeping all the pollen in its near-natural state. This is a key argument for consuming locally produced honey. We thus extend that logic to locally produced pollen.

How to collect pollen
 There are several types of pollen traps on the market, each making claims for some aspect about the pollen collection process. Look for traps that do not damage the bees' body parts-sharp edges that while removing the pollen pellets from the legs of the bees might also tear off legs or wing tips. I like traps that keep the natural debris of the hive from falling into the collection area of the trap, although it is not difficult to clean pollen with a series of different meshed screens or in a seed cleaning devise.

 Pollen  traps all use the same idea: make the returning pollen forager pass through a grid or hole that is big enough for the bee to enter, but more difficult for the pollen pellets to pass without being removed. Most traps are not 100% effective at pollen removal, and this is probably a good thing, since it means that there is still pollen entering the colony to support brood rearing and colony growth. Because of the potential risk of damaging the colony by over collecting, many pollen-collecting beekeepers use one of several concepts to collect pollen. Here are a few:

The Traveling Beekeeper - January 2011

The Different Forms of Honey

(Full Version)

by Larry Connor  

Honey is Honey, so some say, but the form of the product varies widely.
Different producers go after specific products

The majority of US-based honey consumers expect honey to be in a liquid state, but if you travel to Canada or Europe you will find that the majority of honey buyers expect honey to be in granular form. A variety of cultural influences support very different markets for a preference of different forms of honey. This is actually an advantage for those seeking to expand their honey market, since it often helps to stand out against a very similar assortment of honey products. If you are at a farm market and have the only granular honey in a sea of liquid honey, you can sell a lot of product with astute customer education, product sampling and old-fashioned sales and marketing.

Let's make a basic review of the forms of honey, how they are produced, and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each type.

Honey in the Comb
Do you remember your reaction when you first tasted honey on a comb from a hive you managed, and helped the bees grow in numbers so they could produce the honey? Technically, you did not produce the honey, the bees did, and it is not your honey, it belongs to the bees. But as a beekeeper you have worked very hard to help the bees to do their job. By helping the bees produce a surplus of the crop, you can benefit from the sale of the excess.

It is a great thrill to be in an apiary when a visitor or new beekeeper tastes honey ‘hot from the hive' for the very first time. There is often a struggle to get the honey-coated finger to the mouth because the bee veil is in the way. But once the honey snakes its way into the mouth of the taster, there is a quiet spiritual moment when the person realizes that this honey in the comb is not like any honey they have ever tasted before.

In the hive, new honey is almost always liquid. A few floral sources produce honey that granulates quickly, like canola (oil seed rape). This nectar produces a honey with a high percentage of glucose, one of the two monosaccharides or simple sugars in honey. The glucose molecules crystallize easily, while the fructose molecules are slower to granulate. In areas where honey is fast to go from the liquid to the solid form, the retail honey market often features much more granulated honey.

In the honeycomb, honey eventually granulates, making it difficult to remove. It may be necessary to crush these combs, heat the wax and honey mixture, separating the liquid wax and honey in the process, due to their different densities. Most beekeepers set aside combs with granulated honey for bee feed during the next late winter and spring, offering the bees the opportunity to clean out the crystals. They will need water to liquefy the honey. During this feeding, it is not unlikely to find sugar crystals at the bottom and entrance of the hive.
Combs or sections of honey can be produced in the hive and sold to customers. Volume honey users will purchase frames of honey for table use, cutting out the portion they need and wrapping the comb in cloth or foil. Others store the entire comb in a large plastic container with a tight-fitting lid to keep ants and other unwanted visitors out of the honey. Beekeepers experimenting with Kenya top-bar style hives may want to sell their honey in the comb, carefully wrapped in food-grade Kraft paper to protect it from handling. If the top-bar is still attached the user can hang it between two supports. If the comb has been cut from the top bar or frame, it really should be packaged as any cut comb product.
Basswood sections of honey have been replaced in the marketplace by plastic combs, such as Ross Rounds, Hogg Cassettes and other devices. All of these require a strong hive to draw out the wax and fill it with honey. Consult Killion's Honey in the Comb for suggestions.
The best way to store combs of honey, basswood sections, and the plastic holders, is wrapped and in the freezer at zero degrees F. This prevents wax moths, small hive beetles and a wide variety of common pests from getting into the honey. Because of the nature of honey chemistry, freezing actually prevents the sugar molecules from granulating, because they are ‘super-cooled'. To defrost, remove the honey from the combs and keep it wrapped so the honey does not take up moisture while returning to room temperature.
Of course, small amounts of granulated honey in the comb can be cut out and placed on very hot toast or vegetables. The honey-wax mixture will melt and be enjoyed. There is no nutritive value or harmful aspects to ingesting wax.

Cut Comb
Any piece of honey, from a frame, a bee tree or wherever, may be placed on a wire grid and cut into the desired size, drained, and placed into metal, plastic or glass containers. There are some nice plastic containers that feature the beauty of the wax while the package label holds the lid onto the container, preventing tampering and contamination. A large food-grade stainless steel cutting surface, over a drip tray, will allow the beekeeper to cut several frames at a time and allow the excess honey to drain off the comb. When carefully placed into the container, you have a premium product. Select only the most perfect areas of the honeycomb for cut comb. Avoid any unsealed cells (one or two are okay, but 20 or more detract). Of course, never put comb with brood or pollen into the container-you are selling honey, and just honey. The beeswax is the original packaging!

Left over bits of honey in the wax comb can be squeezed in a cloth bag to remove the honey. The remaining wax may be washed in clean water and the sweetened water used for mead production or as a cooking sweetener (on vegetables, in baking or the liquid in a fruit smoothie). Or the bits of honeycomb can be put in front of a bunch of hungry kids as they get home from school and put onto hot homemade bread. That's a golden memory of my childhood.

Chunk honey
When pieces of well-trimmed honeycomb are placed in an empty jar and surrounded by liquid honey, it creates a very desirable product called chunk honey. To produce this product you must have excellent skills at producing both comb honey as well as liquid honey. Usually the honey surrounding the honeycomb is from the same floral source, but this is not necessary. By careful matching, you can put a darker gold comb honey in the container surrounded by a lighter honey, drawing the eye to the bright comb inside. This also gives you a chance to experiment with floral flavors. I was recently given a jar of chunk honey where the comb honey is from alfalfa, but the surrounding honey is from sweet clover.

This is usually a small production, limited yield product. It should command a premium price. Careful jar selection, label design, and associated marketing should emphasize the uniqueness of the product as well as the sensory taste delights inside. Package and prepare this product as one might a $100 bottle of fine wine!

Liquid honey
As mentioned in the opening, the majority of the honey sold in the United States is sold in the liquid state. The use of Langstroth-style movable frames (and an uncapping and extractor system) provides a simple and effective method to produce a large volume of honey very economically. I recommend that all new beekeepers start with movable frame hives. If they want to produce ‘natural combs' (those produced without starter foundation, beeswax or plastic) they can put a bead of wax on the bottom of the top bars of the frames or use a short starter strip of foundation as an anchor point for comb construction. Of course, it takes much more honey production to produce the wax for this method (I have seen estimates of 8 to 15 pounds of honey to produce one pound of beeswax), but the honeycomb will only contain contaminates (natural and human-made) from a single season of production. These frames produce honey for use as cut comb or as crushed honey. It cannot be put into an extractor. Reuse of drawn out comb built on strong foundation is more economical, but even large commercial beekeepers are adapting comb replacement systems that replace honeycomb every three to five years. This is a huge investment in producing healthier bees that will be better able to withstand the attack of parasites, diseases, viruses and trace amounts of chemicals.

Honey in the comb is ready for extraction when the moisture content has been reduced from an average of 60% water to less than 20% water-I prefer to extract only when honey is in the 18% range, since we want our honey to be lower moisture so it keeps longer. ‘Wet' honey, over 20% moisture, is faster to ferment, producing an undesirable product, since the yeasts involved are not the same as used in producing honey wine, or mead. Fermented honey should not be fed back to bees, since it contains some nasty and indigestible products of this fermentation.

Granulated or Crystallized Honey
Since granulation is a natural process, there are several ways to deal with it:

1. Put honey into large containers and reliquify them before filtering and bottling. This is where the majority of the world supply of honey goes and how it is processed.
2. Put minimally processed (screening) honey into small jars and allow the honey to granulate naturally. A label that explains that this is natural, not a sign of spoilage, will help. I add that granulated honey may be used as is on hot toast or biscuits or in cooking and baking when warmed just enough to measure into containers. In the current US market, I see more and more folks seeking out natural products, even at the big box stores. As a local honey producer you can reduce your workload and sell a more natural product if you sell granulated honey. People in Canada and Europe prefer honey in the crystallized state; so many people who have traveled are looking for this product and will pay well for it.
3. Seed the warm liquid honey with a finely produced sample of creamed honey you produced before or purchased from another beekeeper. While some of these products are labeled ‘whipped' honey, I do not like to incorporate air into the honey, so I mix in a blender at a slow speed so the granules and the warm liquid honey are thoroughly mixed. Immediately bottle and store in a room between 55 and 60 degrees F. This will promote rapid and fine crystal formation. If you want to investigate this process, read about the Cornell University Dyce Process of making Creamed Honey. During preparation and seeding, this creamed honey product is ideal for the addition of freeze-dried fruit, vegetable or essential oil products. Each product increases your market range, especially when you are able to offer product samples.

Visit Dr. Connor's website www.wicwas.com for a list of the books he writes and sells. Check out the queen rearing courses he will offer in Florida, Virginia, Maryland and Michigan in 2011.

The Traveling Beekeeper - December 2010

So You Want to Live Off the Bees?

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

A visit with a Colorado beekeeper who left a state government position
to develop his beekeeping into a full-time income.

Many beekeepers dream about leaving their job and working bees enough to justify an adequate income. Many of the people who do this have a husband, wife or partner who has a good job with benefits so the beekeeper is in a position to walk away from the ‘unrewarding' position at work and follow their ‘passion' as a beekeeper. This is a visit with a beekeeper from the Denver area who has done this. He is not yet where he wants to be, as are many of the readers-and is in a period of growth and transition.

Matt Kentner is a 40-something beekeeper with a wife, Cathy, who is a music teacher. They have two daughters, aged 5 and 10. They live in a Denver suburb called Lakewood on a lot that is large enough for a horse, but already has too many bees but understanding neighbors. Plus, as you will see in the photos, the city bees are pretty well screened from view. Here is my visit to Matt Kentner of Kentner Farms (www.kentnerfarms.com).

Kentner is from Minnesota and Iowa, attended chef school in Minnesota, and worked as a baker in Steamboat Springs turning out hundreds pounds of bagels every day, plus getting time to ski and enjoy the local recreational opportunities. Then, he went to work for the State of Colorado as a computer specialist. But he walked away from that, and he and his wife are growing the beekeeping business. Early on they sat down and Cathy, the math person in the relationship, figured out how Matt could get the bees, equipment and bee truck by paying cash and not going into debt as he built up bee colonies. When I visited him he had about 75 colonies, with the goal of reaching 400. He produces primarily alfalfa honey packed into an attractive, well-designed jar and label combination that helps him earn a premium price. He recently went through the application process to sell honey through the Denver Whole Foods, a process that impressed him for the chain's passion for food quality and food safety.

The Traveling Beekeeper - November 2010

Honey - An Overview

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

The Traveling Beekeeper - October 2010

Variations On New Queens
(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Beekeepers are skillful at finding ways to use available resources in their operations. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to finding ways to add queens to an existing or new colony. The queen rearing industry and the teachers of basic beekeeping tend to focus on the use of newly mated queens as the ‘correct' way to introduce new queens. I have reviewed the many other options of queen introduction elsewhere and in my books. This past season I have had the opportunity to make further observations on two methods for new queen introduction that are not widely accepted by beekeepers in North America-48-hr queen cells and virgin queens. If you have read what I have written about these two subjects, this is an update.

48-hour old queen cells

About two years ago Dr. John Kefuss of Toulouse showed me the practice of shipping and using queen cells that are two days past grafting. Allowing that the larvae in the cells have a three-day existence as eggs, plus about a one-day existence before grafting, the individual bees in these 48-hr cells are approaching the end of their sixth day of development in a metamorphosis of a total of 15 to 16 days. The larvae are about midpoint in their larval development. John argues that the larvae are large enough to withstand time outside the colony and away from nurse bees, but still small enough so they will not crawl out of the cell when stressed.

 At the three-day queen rearing class taught at the Farm in Galesburg, Michigan in July, one of the students, Dwight Wells of Troy, OH, asked if he could take some of the cells grafted on Friday evening to Ohio to see if they survived. He ended up taking 14 48-hr cells out of the cell finishers and put them into holders inside a small plastic insulated thermos. He did not heat or cool the cells, but put a damp paper towel over the top for a little humidity. (I feel that the royal jelly provided the needed humidity for the larvae). Within five hours he was outside Columbus (in a drive that takes me longer) and placing the cells into a cell builder owned by experienced queen producer Dana Stahlman.

 The attached photo shows the cells that were produced. Of the 14 transported cells, 12 cells were drawn out and sealed. From this point on they were handled as ordinary queen cells.

The Traveling Beekeeper - September 2010

Colony Needs During Winter
(Full Version)

by Larry Connor  

 There is an enormous range of recommendations about getting colonies ready for winter. Some beekeepers recommend every colony have 90 to 120 lbs of stored honey and pollen to survive the winter, while others are able to winter colonies on just a fraction of that amount. Parallel to that is the overwintering of huge populations in large brood nests compared to those who winter bees in four and five frame nuclei. Some people winter colonies with no preparations, and others wrap their colonies in thick insulation materials. This contrast list goes on and on.

Part of this just reflects the adaptive nature of honey bee colonies, and their inherited ability to survive under a wide range of environmental conditions. There are variations on how different races and families of bees deal with wintering, with some with many adaptations for survival and others less fit for winter. The other factor, where you winter your bees, makes a big difference, too. If you have bees in an area where winter is only a few weeks long, your focus will be much different than the beekeeper in northern states and Canada who must prepare colonies for months and months of limited flight.

More and more beekeepers accept the reality that preparation for winter must start before the summer is officially over at the autumnal equinox. There are three focus points all beekeepers need to address at this time of the season: 1. The production of healthy ‘winter’ bees with optimal nutrition stored in their bodies, 2. The management or treatment of colonies against pests and diseases, especially varroa and tracheal mites and nosema, and 3. The colony must be provided with enough food to survive until the reappearance of natural food in the spring.

Anticipate
Prior to the appearance of mite parasites in bee colonies in North America, many beekeepers felt that their biggest problems were American foulbrood and pesticide losses. For foulbrood many beekeepers used a calendar antibiotic treatment program to prevent the disease from appearing in their bees. At the same time a number were strongly against this approach, since the colonies were being medicated with an antibiotic that usually was not needed by the bees. That pretty well reflected the attitudes of the medical and veterinary professions before 1980.

With pesticide losses, beekeepers were far more likely to anticipate losses, and most commercial beekeepers either priced pollination rentals to include some bee losses, or they kept their bees away from the fields or orchards being treated with bee-killing insecticides. Small-scale beekeepers often did not know what killed their bees, and were quick to blame disease, swarming or starvation for bee losses rather than consider a pesticide exposure, unless it was so dramatic that it was hard to mistake for something else.

In this post CCD era, more and more beekeepers are PROACTIVE rather than reactive in their bee management. Rather than waiting for problems to develop and for bee colonies to die, more and more are focused on the sampling and testing of colonies for various problems. Last month I discussed Dr. Medhat Nasr’s proactive testing for mites and nosema in Alberta, Canada. The beekeepers there are encouraged to treat only when necessary, and to treat in the correct manner.
All beekeepers should develop the habit of sampling for varroa mite levels. This is the premiere problem facing most beekeepers in North America, but this is often linked to other issues (hive-based pesticides, bee pathogens, and poor nutrition). Sampling methods range from the ether spray method, the double jar method shown in last month’s column, or using a powdered sugar dusting to count the adult mites that are dislodged by the sugar and fall to a greased sampling tray.

Sampling is one thing, but knowing what the numbers mean is another. A beekeeper spoke of a mite drop of 40 mites. He said it was a natural drop (no powdered sugar or anything else was used), over a three-day period. He thought the number was low. I suggested that it seemed high to me, since I like to see less than 10 mites drop in 24 hours with a powdered sugar dusting. This is the challenge, isn’t it? What do these numbers mean? It is frustrating that most of the time it is hard to get good advise on this.

For me, the lower the mite drop, the happier I am. I like to see well-chewed mites, ones with broken shells and torn legs. Get the hand lens out and take a look! Are your bees grooming the mites off themselves?

Here is what we can sample for in a proactive management plan:
Varroa mites – as discussed above, we can use one of the sampling methods and make decisions based on local practices and recommendations.

Tracheal mites — A few dissections under a lower powered microscope will provide evidence of any possible tracheal mite problems. This is useful in the fall and winter, and during spring buildup.

Nosema — A higher powered microscope (compound scope) is needed to check the spore levels in bees, and this is beyond the finances of small beekeepers. But they should put pressure on State officials for testing, if they do not already provide this service.
General beekeeping awareness should dictate elimination of certain colonies with diseases. Colonies with American foulbrood should be quarantined, and local practices followed for treatment or destruction. Colonies with the general symptoms associated with Colony Collapse Disorder are probably not worthy of any effort to save. Colonies with PMS (Parasitic Mite Syndrome, a collection of symptoms that can include European foulbrood-like brood, K-wing, dimunitive wing, and other virus-transmitted diseases) should be destroyed or put into an intensive treatment program with knowledge that few of these colonies can be expected to survive the winter period.

Feeding program
Even before the last of the late summer/early fall nectar is gathered, many beekeepers begin a protein feeding program with the goal of producing a large number of well-fed worker bees that will serve as the Winter Bees. By feeding, it is hoped that they will be ‘Fat Bees’, endowed with extra proteins, enzymes and other nutritional components needed for brood rearing during the winter. We fed protein patties from mid August to December in 2009, and the limited success we had in wintering bees (after an especially poor season) is credited to the feeding program. We fed thick sugar syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) in division board feeders. The frame feeders with that had built-in chimneys to eliminate drowning certainly had an advantage over feeders with smooth or rough interiors. We want the protein to go into the bees, with any natural pollen being stored in the cells. When the nectar flow is over our minimum carbohydrate feeding goals are:

4-frame nucleus 3.5 frames of honey (or stored sugar syrup)
5-frame nucleus 4.5 frames of honey (or stored sugar syrup)
8-frame hive  7 frames of honey (or stored sugar syrup)
10-frame hive 9 frames of honey (or stored sugar syrup)

In late October or early November we re-evaluate the food storage levels of colonies and add extra frames of stored honey to those colonies that require them. We do not feed colonies with poor chances of wintering since there is no point if investing the time, feed and equipment in colonies that are sure to die over winter. A better plan is to combine a marginal hive with a strong hive, and let the bees sort out the best use for these themselves. Don’t combine two weak hives, since they are still unlikely to succeed during the winter.

Many beekeepers medicate with Fumagillin as indicated by microscopic testing and spore counts. Follow the directions and use commonly accepted practices when using antibiotics in the hives. Keep records of the dosage, time and frequency of treatment.

Relocating hives
Wind can be stressful and deadly to hives in the winter. While a ridgetop may be a great place for bees to gather nectar during the summer, it may be lethal to colonies in winter. Move the bees to a wind shadow, where you and the bees can comfortably stand on a windy day. Avoid low and wet spots along lakes, rivers, streams, since they are likely to flood in winter and spring rains. Ask property owners how high the stream has flooded before you put bees into a winter location.

Some beekeepers group their nucs and single hives into groups of 2, 4, 6 and 8, depending on the design of the boxes and the pallets they are on during the rest of the season. The idea is to let each colony help the others out with some degree of heat sharing. They may wrap colonies, making sure each one has proper ventilation and flight openings.

Wrapping & Insulation
As you move north or into the mountains, wrapping is more common, increasing the percentage of live colonies in the spring. The simplest method is to wrap colonies with roofing paper (a.k.a. ‘tar paper’), cutting upper entrance holes in the paper to insure both ventilation and flight. During my Alberta, Canada visit, Medhat Nasr showed me the wrapped fiberglass insulation that they use at his facility. A four-inch sheet of fiberglass is enclosed in a heavy plastic wrap around the sides of double-deep hives grouped in fours (the pallet system). One sheet of insulation material is placed on the top of the hives, and tied down. A piece of plywood is put on the top of these four hives, and securely tied down to keep the entire wrapping system from flying away as the Alberta clippers move the snow around the hives.
This same method can be used for groups of five-frame nucleus hives as long as insulation does not block the entrance or reduce ventilation. A south-facing location helps the bees to get in cleansing flights when wind protected and the winter sun allows the microclimate around the hive to permit such activity.
The use of the polystyrene five-frame nuc boxes offers small-scale beekeepers an option for wintering with insulation. The boxes can be used all season long, or the bees and frames from wooden hives moved into the polystyrene boxes at the end of the season and fed heavily. Users like the fact that the bottom of the colony doubles as a feeder, that sugar syrup can be placed at the bottom of the feeder and the bees crawl down the frames to clean it up. In winter the syrup can be warm (100 degrees F) and cause the bees to break cluster before the heat dissipates. This might be something to try on a few colonies before jumping in with all colonies.

Economics of Wintering
If you purchase five-frame nucleus boxes or polystyrene hive bodies with frames to fill them (or pull down the strength of larger hives), raise or purchase queens, virgins or queen cells, and make sure each colony has between 20-25 pounds of stored honey or sugar syrup, the cost of each colony should be less than the cost of the average package bee colony or purchased nucleus in the spring. Locally Sun Belt packages sold for $70 or more, and some nucleus colonies were selling for over $100. In 2011 I expect to see these prices to increase again, as there is no apparent decline in the interest in beekeeping or the demand for bees. Further, many of the new crop of beekeepers is expecting to grow their operation.
In certain markets locally adapted queens in over wintered five frame nucleus hives sold for $150 in 2010, and I expect to see these prices increase. This created a double economic incentive. First, each beekeeper needs to evaluate the cost of packages and purchased nuclei against the cost of doing the summer split and over wintered colony on their own, even with a 50 percent success rate. Second, the smart beekeeper can easily sell strong over wintered nuclei colonies at any point in the season. I will repeat my old maxim: The money in beekeeping is in the bees.
Off to Georgia’s state beekeepers meeting in September. If you have not read Dr. Connor’s book Increase Essentials, borrow a copy or go to his website, www.wicwas.com to look at all the goodies listed there.

The Traveling Beekeeper - August 2010

An Interview with Dr. Medhat Nasr About Beekeeing in Alberta, Canada
(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

As the Provincial Apiculturist in Alberta, Dr. Medhat Nasr brings to the province a wide range of professional beekeeping experiences. Born and educated in Cairo, Egypt, Nasr did his graduate work at the University of California at Davis under Dr. Christine Peng, but also worked closely with Drs. Harry Laidlaw Jr., Robert ‘Rob’ Page, Jr. and Robin Thorp. Prior to moving to Alberta eight years ago, he worked in Ontario with the bee breeding program (searching for resistance to both tracheal and varroa mites) and at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

Describe beekeeping situation in Alberta
The Canadian Province of Alberta ranks second in the size of the beekeeping industry behind California. For the past 10 to 12 years, the number of colonies has increased 5-10% each year; in the past twenty years the colony count has gone from 135,000 to 255,000 in 2006.
During the past three years there has been  harsh winter weather, with about 30% of honey bee colonies dying, which coincided with CCD in USA. However, in Alberta the losses were due to three factors—the general failure of chemical controls against varroa mites, the problems of Nosema and very harsh winters. This caused a reduction in colony numbers to 225,000 in 2007, but with various proactive programs, the colony numbers are expected to reach 265,000 in 2010.
There are 700 beekeepers registered in the province, of which 113 are rated as commercial – having 500 hives or more. This makes up 225,000 hives or an average of 2,000 colonies per commercial beekeeper. The remaining beekeepers are rated as sideliners and hobbyists. Hobbyists usually have less than 100 hives. There are fewer than 50 beekeepers operating between 100 to 500 colonies and they are considered sideliners. This distribution gives a bimodal distribution with one peak around 10 colonies, and the other around 2,000. The smaller beekeeping operations are concentrated around the two large cities in the Province, Calgary and Edmonton.

What is the economic value of the industry?
During the past five years the total income from beekeeping has been 50 million Canadian dollars per year. There were and additional 10-15 million Canadian dollars per year paid for pollination services to the beekeeper for rental for hybrid canola certified seed production. Between 65,000 to 75,000 hives are rented for this pollination, and the beekeepers are paid based on colony strength, between $110 to $165 per colony. For the top payment, a beekeeper has to provide a colony with 16 frames of bees and a minimum of 10 frames of brood. The pollination season for canola is from the third week of June to the end of July. It is possible for individual beekeepers to make over a million dollars a year from canola seed pollination.

The Traveling Beekeeper - July 2010

A Visist with Joe Latshaw
(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

Every time I visit with Joe Latshaw he surprises me. In a recent visit to his home outside Columbus, Ohio, he was able to share several new items with me.

Latshaw is a low-key sort of person, but one with an enormous interest and intellect into bees and bee breeding. And that is a starter list. He has been around bees and bee breeding most of his life and can claim a quarter century of beekeeping experience, while being only in his early 30s. The son of a poultry nutrition professor at Ohio State University, as a boy Latshaw would shadow the apiary assistant at the OSU Beekeeping Laboratory, and produced his first queens when he was 12. This has provided Latshaw with a range of valuable experiences, contacts, and most recently a doctorate in bee behavior. He does some contract college teaching, but is not associated with Ohio State University. Basically, he is a beekeeper and a bee breeder, working for himself.

From his modest home and farm sandwiched between four-lane highways and suburban condos, Latshaw keeps bees, raises queens and instrumentally inseminates over 900 queens every year for testing and for release to cooperating beekeepers who use the bees as grafting mothers. His program is for beekeepers needing 1000 to 10,000 or more queens a year, and is clearly not for the typical small-scale beekeeper. Instead, the two lines, one yellow and one black, provide a choice for beekeepers who want production queens for an intensive queen rearing season. Many of the users of these queens are large commercial beekeepers who generate thousands of daughter queens for production hives and for nucleus hives for sale.

Latshaw filled a void left with the absence of an American producer of an instrumental insemination device, and has sold one for several years, the type that allows the operator to pull on the sting of the queen in order to eliminate the use of a hook to move the queen's valvefold out of the way for the syringe. In 2009 he released a newer, and much less expensive devise that will be within the range of serious queen breeders everywhere. Both may be examined at his website www.latshawapiaries.com. Joe's wife has organized another instrumental insemination training program for the fall: the Latshaw website indicates the program is filled for 2010.

The Traveling Beekeeper - June 2010

Stock Improvement in West Virginia

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

In April I was invited to talk on queen rearing and bee management at the West Virginia Queen Producers, a member-based organization that shared meeting facilities in Huntington, WV with the West Virginia State Beekeepers Association. My part of the program ran Friday morning to Saturday afternoon; the State group met on Saturday, with Florida State Apiary Specialist (and The Classroom author) Jerry Hayes serving as the featured speaker. Later on Saturday Jerry and I were able to tour the beekeeping facilities of WV Bee Inspector Wade Stiltner, of Wayne, WV.

For a number of years certain beekeepers in West Virginia have been dedicated to the idea of producing local queens and bees for use within the state. There have been some high and low spots in developing the program, a few setbacks, but with some talented grant-getting, dogged determination and intense dedication, the group has been able to make a significant impact on the production of West Virginia queens for use by West Virginia beekeepers. In 2009, the queen market in the state was estimated at 4,000 queens, and the members of the WV Queen Producers produced and sold nearly one quarter of those queens, providing income for local beekeepers, and more importantly, providing localized, adapted, and hopefully better fit queens for the variable conditions found in that state.

The leadership of the group falls into the hands of Dan O'Hanlon and Gabe Blatt. They steer the group around some dangerous spots while championing West Virginia bees and queens to the elected officials of the state. In fact, the state is the first in the country to pass legislation that indemnifies state beekeepers from lawsuits provided they keep bees using recommended practices. O'Hanlon is chief judge of the Cabell County Circuit Court (Huntington), and is politically connected to a wide range of elected officials, and knows who and when to call in a favor or ask for help from folks in the state. The State's governor sent his regrets that he could not speak at the state meeting because of the mining tragedy that was still unfolding while I was there. He had planned to have a ceremonial signing of the legislation during the beekeepers' meeting.

Any non-Sunbelt state that fills a quarter of its queen market is on the right track toward self-sufficiently and genetic survivor ability. Blatt, O'Hanlon and other beekeepers in the state (and one Ohio beekeeper who lives near the state line), have formed a non-profit corporation to promote and develop a strong queen program. Membership is $100 per year, a fact that selects out the partially committed. The reality is that through grants these beekeepers have received breeder queens, equipment, incubators and training that non-members do not receive. It has been a pretty good deal for these beekeepers. I hope that other states try to duplicate these efforts and reap the rewards of locally produced queens.

The Traveling Beekeeper - May 2010

Catching Swarms and Doing Bee Removals

(excerpt)

by Larry Connor

    Lots of new beekeepers and many small-scale beekeepers remove swarms every season as a means of obtaining lower cost bees (they are never ‘free'), and a certain number of them do bee removals, often called ‘cut-outs' of colonies that are established in trees, buildings and other structures.

Swarms
Swarm removal sounds easy. You simply drive up to a newly landed swarm, shake the bees off the branch and into a box, seal up the box, and drive home where you will dump the bees in front of an empty bee hive body.
Swarm removal, in reality, can be much more complicated. You may need to use a ladder or even a cherry picker to reach the swarm. There is a good chance that the swarm may fly to a permanent location between the time you get the call and the time you get into the car or truck and arrive on the site. Sometimes the swarms are really small, and not worth the fuel to drive to pickup the bees. Then, you charge that up to being a good member of the beekeeping community.
If you have never done a swarm removal before, it is not difficult. If you obtain good, secure access to the swarm it is just a matter of shaking (or brushing) the bees AND THE QUEEN(S) into the box or container.
We define a swarm by the queen that goes with it. If a colony leaves with the mother queen (the one that went through the winter), we call it a Prime Swarm (usually just the old queen, but sometimes daughter queens fly when Mother cannot join them due to injury or some other factor). It is often the largest and will range from 8,000 to 20,000 or more bees, the equivalent of one or three packages of bees. The parent colony has sealed swarm queen cells that will produce unmated queens that will not fight until the decision is made to produce an After Swarm. Colonies average about one and a half swarms per year, so there is a pretty good chance that an after swarm will be issued and will carry many virgin queens with it. These queens fight to determine the winner only after the swarm has entered its final nesting spot. After swarms are smaller, 4,000 to 10,000 bees and often have multiple queens. When I captured a swarm at the Farm, I got one or more queens, but left some behind. It was a large swarm and what I got was a good colony. But part of the swarm reformed on the tree with an uncaptured virgin and flew away after a few days and is established within the neighborhood. The swarm was at the top of an old apple tree and we could get the bed of the truck into the maze of brush to work, but not comfortably.

Container used for swarm catching
If you can lift a nucleus box, cardboard nucleus box, or an empty box of most any sort, this is fine for shaking/brushing bees into. Many of us have left the office after getting a swarm call, grabbing a copy paper box from the copy room with a sliding lid. These are great for catching swarms-in a pinch-since the lid can be gently slid back onto the box and air holes punched with a hive tool to provide air until the bees can be installed back in the apiary.
There are amazingly elaborate boxes in the literature and on the market for catching swarms. Some incorporate vacuum cleaner devices to suck the bees out of the trees and into the box. You certainly can have a lot of fun with these devices, and may become quite proficient at swarm catching by using one, especially swarms high off the ground.

Cost of swarm removal
If the swarms are free, how can they have a cost associated with them? If I drive an hour to get a swarm in a work truck, take off time from work, buy special equipment, and bring a buddy along who needs to stop for food and drink-these are costs. So swarm bees are not really free, but you know they are less expensive than other methods of starting new hives. Finally, you can charge for swarm removal and learn that PEOPLE WILL PAY TO GET RID OF FLYING STINGING INSECTS. Current rates seem to be in the $50 to $100 range. If people do not want to pay, you can give them the name of a new beekeeper, a teenager perhaps, who will do this for nothing and for the experience.

Care of swarms
I use the biological method of introducing swarms into a new home. I shake the bees at the entrance, perhaps on an old bed sheet, so all the bees, including the queens, walk into the cavity. I place frames of drawn comb, a frame of food (pollen and honey) and foundation in the hive so the bees will like what the find when they crawl inside. The bees seem to like being shaken at the entrance better than dumped into the hive and sealed up. Often swarms on foundation fly away because they don't approve of the new home you picked for them. The behavior of walking into the hive is an important piece of biology, as it seems to complete the swarming instinct behavior.
Feed swarms with one to one sugar syrup for several weeks to a month. This will continue their instinctive urge of build beeswax comb. They will start foraging for pollen and nectar almost as soon as they arrive in the box, so a source of carbohydrate is excellent and will stimulate more pollen foragers and rapid brood buildup.
Once the colony is established, examine it carefully for any problems and then put it  into your production cycle within the apiary.

Advantages of swarms
Swarms carry honey in the stomachs of the bees. This is digested to produce beeswax. A strong swarm can produce a full box of comb in a few days, more if fed sugar syrup. Swarms usually come from vigorous hives, and can be and real asset.

The Traveling Beekeeper - April 2010

Biology of Cell Production & Cell Starting

(full version)

by Larry Connor

In spite of some beekeeper's best hopes, queen bees have finite lives, although they are the longest lived of any individual in the superorganism we call the bee colony. As a result of their evolutionary history, honey bees have developed several strategies for queen replacement. Before we discuss queen cell production methods, we will review the conditions under which queen cells are produced in nature.

When a queen fails, the bees notice. There is considerable beekeeper and bee scientist debate about the reasons for failure and the mechanisms the bees use to detect it. The most widely accepted theory is linked to a reduction in pheromone production by the queen-when a vigorous queen starts to produce fewer chemicals that are part of queen pheromone, or queen substance. The bees stimulate the queen to start new queen cells. The most common reason for failure is due to the queen's increasing age and reduced egg laying. If a queen has been producing as many as 1,300-1,500 eggs per day and suddenly produces only 600, we would agree with the bees that it is time for the old queen to be replaced by supersedure. If a bee colony had an infinite life (even superorganisms eventually die), they would still need to systematically replace the old queen with a new queen in order to maintain colony population.
The second queen production strategy occurs when a colony grows strong enough to reproduce itself. Bee colonies, as superorganisms, reproduce the social unit by swarming, when part of the colony leaves with one queen and part stays behind with another.
At times it is difficult to sort out supersedure queens from swarm queens because both are triggered by a reduction in the concentration of queen pheromone per bee. The colonies with a vigorous queen and many bees-conditions we associate with swarming-predictably have brood areas filled with eggs, larvae and pupae. Queen cell cups are often on the edge of the brood area, and for that reason the swarm cells are located on the edge or fringe of the brood nest. We find queen cups at the bottom and sides of the brood combs, and also where there has been a break in the comb (and between hive bodies) or constructed on a piece of burr comb.
If we follow the theory that reduced queen pheromone is responsible for new cell initiation, then the supersedure process is explained in the very same way, only now the colony is often weaker and has a reduced brood area. The queen lays eggs into those queen cups located within the brood nest resulting in supersedure on the face of the comb. There may be empty queens cups outside the brood area that are not used.
The third queen cell production mechanism results when a queen is accidentally killed or removed, and the bees use the emergency response to build cells. Over time colonies have been subjected to extensive predation by mammals, birds, other insects and humans. During these attacks the queen may be killed. When the queen is killed or removed, the queen pheromone drops dramatically, so the cell production response is strong and immediate. Some estimate that colonies know that their queen is missing in as little as 15 minutes. Without the queen the worker bees select a large number of worker larvae and convert their worker cells into a queen cells. They feed the larvae with royal jelly throughout development. The chemical nature of royal jelly changes as the new queen larva matures and is fed by worker bees. This diet provides the biochemical triggers for development as a queen rather than a worker.
The emergency response gives each colony a survival strategy to keep itself alive by producing cells from suitably aged larvae remaining in the comb. In this behavior, many cells may be started, but relatively few are completed.

Cell Starting
When large numbers of young nurse bees are confined in a queenless state with abundant food and water, they will start a large number of queen cells and initially feed them very well. Because they are confined, they cannot sustain this intensity of feeding, so after the second day the number of viable cells drops. In this emergency environment, starter colonies are an excellent way to start a large number of cells, but not to finish them.
There are many ways to make cells in a beekeeping operation. For small quantities, beekeepers can remove the queen from a quality colony, and let the bees raise emergency cells in her absence. A modification of this method is to move open brood and bees above a screen or board with a new, rear entrance placed on the hive to let the queenless bees produce natural queen cells. Charles Mraz of Vermont used this method throughout his lifetime and felt it maintained genetic diversity. If a queen is a good brood producer and the colony is strong and healthy, move her with a frame or two of brood and worker bees to a new hive and let her establish a new colony. The queenless hive can then produce a new queen.

A Simple Starter Colony
To start queen cells we use the emergency response by removing the bees from the queen. In our system, we rely on the colony's biological urge to produce queens from the right-aged larvae we give the hive after the queen is removed. We introduce these suitable larvae to produce a new queen.
My most successful method of starting queen cells has been with a closed cell starter containing the following:

1. The young nurse bees shaken from one colony,
2. A frame of pollen and one of honey,
3. One or two drawn frames for cluster space, and
4. A sponge or towel soaked with water.

The easiest container for this starter box is a five-frame nucleus box with a screen on the bottom, and perhaps on the sides. It should be bee-tight and filled with nurse bees.

The Setup Process
This system was developed by Steve Taber and promoted by Marla Spivak and Gary Reuter in Minnesota. I have used it for over 25 years as a simple method to teach beekeepers how to raise queens. Are there other methods that work? Yes there are, and I have used many of them. However, this method is the most reliable I have found to teach others to produce cells.
The starter box is a four- or five-frame nucleus hive with window screen or hardware cloth fastened to the bottom and/or sides. This is placed on the rim of a bottom board, or two small boards, to provide ventilation. If the weather is below 45 degrees F. place it in a barn, garage or outside room to keep the bees from going into cluster. If the weather is hot, find a cool place to store the starter so the bees are not stressed.
Starter boxes can be made from a hive body you already own. I have used half of a double nuc box to establish a starter. One starter uses a cardboard nucleus box with window screen cut and taped to the sides. An eight- or ten-frame hive body (deep or medium) will work if a follower board (dummy frame), is used to confine the bees into a small area to maintain crowding and the temperature needed for cell production.

After the Graft
We will discuss the transfer (grafting) process later, but the starter colony is most often set up in the afternoon or evening, and the cell cups are placed into the starter colony following an hour or more of queenless confinement. One worker larva is moved-transferred or grafted-into each cell cup. The larvae were removed from a frame of worker brood produced by a breeder queen. The number of cells given to each starter colony will vary, according to the time of the year and the number of nurse bees. As you use this method, you will learn to estimate the ideal number of cells each starter can receive.
Because starters do a terrible job of finishing queen cells, move the started cells into a cell finisher the day after you graft. The starter is only used for 18 to 24 hours. If it has done its job, a large percentage of the cells you placed inside will have an expanded pool of royal jelly with the larvae floating on that jelly. In addition, the bees will have added beeswax to the edge of the grafting cell (either plastic or beeswax), creating a small cone of delicate beeswax.
If you use plastic cell cups, you will be able to look through them and see that there is a layer of royal jelly at the bottom of the accepted cells. Cells may be combined before being placed into the cell finisher.
Adapted from Dr. Connor's newest book Queen Rearing Essentials, which may be ordered at www.wicwas.com or at your bee supply dealer. He will be teaching three-day queen rearing programs in several locations this summer, including Connecticut and Michigan. Email him for details at LJConnor@aol.com or check the website.

The Traveling Beekeeper - March 2010

Excerpt

Ways Bees Are Bred

I am writing this from a campground in South-Central Florida, the week after the ABF meeting in Orlando. This is an area south of Lake Placid described by ecologists as ‘wet prairie' meaning that when the wet season arrives in the summer, it is quite possible to be standing in water. Think of it as a transition area to the Everglades. Don't walk your little yippy dog too close to the pond where the ‘gater feeds. The campground is set up in an oak hammock, with towering water oaks festooned with Spanish moss providing a respite from the hot Florida sun. This month has not been that, quite the opposite actually, with a prolonged cold spell that turned much of the landscape into a shade of brown or grey.

A great horned owl woke me in the night as I slept. Or perhaps it was answering my undirected snore. The sound echoed around the trees and the strong single ‘whos' were followed by a more rapid call, answered by another owl, some distance away. There are bears in this area, and panther too. I was lucky enough to see one years ago when I ran the Genetic Systems, Inc., bee breeding program in LaBelle, about 30 miles away, and we had apiary sites just a few miles from here. It was a young male with spotting, and a long, long tail.

The bee-breeding program is the one started by Dadant & Sons, Inc., with Dr. Bud Cale Jr. They produced two breeding stocks, the Starline and Midnite hybrids. In LaBelle we produced two others, the Cale 876 and the Cale 235, both produced by instrumental insemination. That part of the program ended in 1980.

The Traveling Beekeeper - February 2010

Excerpt

Time for Resitant Bees--Developing A Club or Bee Association Plan

A Model Agreement

   The Beeville County beekeepers, seeking to reduce and ultimately eliminate the need for chemical treatments on our colonies and to improve the overall health of all honey bees in our area, agree to the following plan:

Year one

We encourage all beekeepers in Beeville County, the adjacent town of Pollenville, and an area delineated by a perimeter of six miles around this area (the estimated combined mating distance of queens and drones) to install queens of the following types in their colonies:
1.Queens resulting from the work of bee-breeding programs that have documented reduced mite levels (by known or yet unknown mechanisms of resistance, including hygienic behavior, grooming or physiological reproductive reduction).
2.Local survivor stock that is documented to have been kept without chemical treatment for five or more years.
3.Any colony that shows a low mite level when tested using a standard method.
4.The club will sponsor and promote classes and field days where general beekeeping techniques will be taught, involving queen finding, requeening, queen cell use, and use of swarm and supersedure queens from selected colonies.

Year two
We continue to encourage all beekeepers in the defined area to maintain bee colonies with the above characteristics. In addition we encourage the formation of-
1.Queen rearing classes
2.General instruction on evaluating swarm, supersedure and other replacement queens in an effort to obtain colonies with reduced mite loads.
3.A simple method of evaluating colonies for their mite load, using a standardized test to check for mite levels that does not negatively impact the productivity of the colony being tested.
?  ? ?
If you look over the above plan, it should strike you that this is simple and direct. If any bee club seeks to develop a low or zero level of chemical control in its hives and still have highly productive colonies, it is going to take a great deal of work. It also must have a near perfect level of participation by beekeepers in the area, whether they are members of the club or not. Simplicity is needed to make the program understandable and within the range of beekeeper skills for the area. This may include some over-reaching for many new and under-motivated beekeepers, as such the plan should have a high level of teachability to make it work.

This plan is just a starting point. Each of you will build on this plan. In three or four years you should expect to see a definite change in the colonies, with both lower mite counts and lower levels of American foulbrood, European foulbrood, Sacbrood and Chalkbrood.

In March Larry Connor and Dewey Caron will conduct a four-evening Advanced Beekeeping Course in Comstock, Michigan, (near Kalamazoo). For information go to www.wicwas.com or
LJConnor@aol.com. Use those contacts for information about Dr. Connor's three books in the Essentials Series: Queen Rearing Essentials, Increase Essentials and Bee Sex Essentials.

The Traveling Beekeeper - January 2010

- Time for Resistant Bees --A Plan for the Individual Beekeeper

Excerpt

Every beekeeper must take on the responsibility of intentionally contributing to the level of resistance to mites and diseases in all colonies. They need to start it this year if they have not already done so, since the sooner we all start this process, the sooner we will be finished. This is not a function of operational size, since a single-colony beekeeper can keep resistant bees just as well, if not easier, than a thousand-colony operator. The change that must occur is in the mind of the beekeeper, with each one of us making the decision to keep bees that do not succumb to varroa mites, American foulbrood, chalkbrood, sacbrood, other viral diseases, Nosema (both species) and more. Like any trip to a new destination, we first must decide what we want to take with us, and for all of us, we must find queens that already possesses some level of natural resistance, and/or we must set up a selection program to develop such resistance.

Finding resistant queens
Many large-scale queen producers and package bee providers do not select for resistance. Period. They make no effort to work toward a resistant stock. The selection criteria they use are the same as those used in pre-mite selection: productivity, fast buildup, wintering ability (maybe) and low stinging behavior (also maybe). There are many breeder queens selected by large producers who select on just two criteria and two criteria only: brood production and honey yields. Sometimes the system involves the placement of a pushpin on the landing board following colony inspection or honey harvest-at a point where the colony impresses the beekeeper.

The Traveling Beekeeper - December 2009

Time for Resistant Bees--A Plan for Clubs

by Larry Connor
Wicwas Press
1620 Miller Road, Kalamazoo, MI 49001
LJConnor@aol.com
www.wicwas.press

   You have just had a meeting of your local beekeepers club where the members voted to develop a program to put varroa and disease resistant queens (and eventually their worker bees) into every colony in the club's geographical area. That is great news. Like deciding to write a book, you are off to a good start when you decide to get down to
business. Now the work begins.

There are a number of mechanisms of varroa resistance that have been documented or implied like hygienic behavior, grooming and physiological resistance. There are undoubtedly many more forms of mite resistance-the challenge is to find stocks that are able to resist mite development and disease infections BY ANY METHOD. There does not need to be a great deal of concern about what form of resistance you bring into your colonies, since it is a very good idea to have as many types of resistance in your area colonies as you can find. In fact, there are stocks that are resistant to mites and we do not know the resistance mechanism. Let me put it this way: I do not need to know how the Internet works to read my email! But where will you find these stocks?

1. Locally adapted resistant stock
Many beekeepers figure that they can cut out the bees from a bee tree or the side of a building and obtain varroa and disease resistant genetic stock. Not to discourage anyone from doing this, but the critical question is this: Where did those bees come from? Is this a newly established colony that came from a swarm from a Sun Belt package that was installed a few months ago? Time is the test here-at least as a starting point. You will need to find colonies that have survived for five or more seasons without being restocked by another incoming swarm. Bee tree nests are extraordinarily attractive to new swarms, since the empty comb offers a fully build and architecturally perfect home for a new swarm, with a huge savings in the colony's energy output, since the bees will have less comb to build and more resources to be stored for winter.
So, to be somewhat confident about the survivor status of a feral swarm, you need to have some history about the activity of that colony. Did it die out every winter only to be repopulated each spring by non-resistant swarms from beekeeper hives? Or did the bees keep it together for five or more years, issuing swarms and undergoing routine supersedures of queens? We want the latter.
One valid approach is to collect the colonies that are alive after a head-on attack with varroa mites. Dr. Yves Le Conte, a bee researcher at Avignon, France, collected and compared such colonies to control stock and obtained lower mite loads. American-born Dr. John Kefuss did the same sort of thing with his entire beekeeping operation outside Toulouse, France. In his "007, Live or Let Die" breeding strategy, he let the mites work through his colonies for four years before the stock turned around and has been relatively mite free now for over ten years. In the United States Danny Weaver did the same in Texas, letting the mites run their course so the colonies can be productive and free of chemicals. When Drs. John Harbo (USDA, Baton Rouge) and Roger Hoopingarner (Michigan State University) put out a call for survivor stock, they collected queens from colonies that survived the head-on mite attacks. That stock is now called the VSH (Varroa Sensitive Hygienic) stock and in my opinion is one of the least appreciated and most underutilized of the resistant lines of bees available to beekeepers. Why? That is a darn good question.
So it goes. There are a number of sources advertising in the journals, and even more that do not advertise (or do not need to advertise). Your club officers and members are wise to review the articles by M.E.A. McNeil in the March and April 2009 issues of the American Bee Journal for a detailed discussion of the various resistance programs that have had their origins in survivor stocks. We need to stop producing queens from non-resistant stock: All colonies should demonstrate some type of mite and/or disease resistance or be put into a 007 program so that resistance can develop naturally.
It is true that some hives may have been isolated from a high level of mite attack because of geography and low numbers of other colonies. Bottom line-any colony selected as ‘local' must be challenged to see its level of mite resistance. If a colony or its daughter colonies die overwinter they flunked the test. If a colony collapses in the fall months after demonstrating a full range of disease and viral symptoms associated with Parasitic Mite Syndrome, that colony flunked there. You want to obtain queens from a source that maintains low mite levels at all times, based on some standardized testing method. I like the powdered sugar/screened bottom board method of testing. This past season I have seen the ease of getting quick mite counts using the powdered sugar method. From the time you remove the lid of the hive to the final mite count, it only takes my students and I a few minutes (2-4) per hive to apply the powdered sugar and return to count the mites.

2. Stocks adapted for somewhere else
No matter how resistant they might be to varroa mites (and I am not saying that they are), I would not ask my buddy Jimmy in South Texas to send me some of his naturally mated queens. Why?  Because he keeps colonies in an area where there are lots of African colonies, feral colonies in the brush and buildings, and I do not want to bring in stock that I know will cause some problems in a urban and suburban beekeeping territory and might require me to put on a bee veil. I do not know what the fitness of African bees would be in the North, but in my opinion, it not worth finding out.
But if someone in South Florida, South Texas or Arizona has developed a gentler strain of African bees that is both mite resistant and socially acceptable (easily managed without as much concern about stinging behavior), I would encourage Jimmy to get a few breeder queens and produce daughters and evaluate them. It is time we start doing some serious stock improvement with African bees in the United States. What are we waiting for? In Brazil and Mexico breeding programs have significantly improved the manageability of African bees AND made them less defensive.

3. Documented resistance (of any type)
With the well-documented biological advantages of multiple mating of queen bees with a diverse drone population, we benefit by having as many documented varroa resistant lines as we can get within the mating area of our queens. I wrote about this in the last chapter of my book Bee Sex Essentials. Borrow a copy if you must, but you need to be familiar with the concept of multiple drone lines for healthy, disease and pest resistant colonies. Go to the website of Dr. David Tarpy at North Carolina State University and read some of his research papers on this subject.

Developing a Club Plan
Every bee club concerned about improving the stock in its area should form a small group (committee, task force or coffee bunch) that gets together and weighs the information and stock available for their area and have a plan written out they shared with the members of the organization. The plan should be pretty darn simple, but direct. I would like to include these points:
We will evaluate queen stocks by using a simple standardized testing method to evaluate mite loads. I personally think the ether roll kills too many bees, that soapy water technique is too time consuming, and the powdered sugar roll takes more time than it does to test an entire colony equipped with a greased tray in a screened bottom board. My experience with fifteen first-year beekeepers this past season has convinced me that the screened bottom board and powdered sugar method is not only doable, but the beekeepers like doing it (rather than using chemicals) and benefit by doing something proactive for their bees that gives them a numerical comparison of each colony. The bees we used were a generation removed from the Purdue stock that Greg Hunt and Krispn Given developed in Indiana. Our mite counts were variable from colony to colony because these queens were open mated to non-resistant stock. Yet the counts were always much lower than old-style susceptible bees. I noted in last month's article that these were not necessarily hygienic bees (we had a problem with chalk brood in some colonies, and you cannot have hygienic bees and chalk brood). I suspect the Purdue stock possess some other methods of mite resistance. Fantastic. We need to keep up these strategies for resistance at all levels. Queens that produce daughter colonies with extremely high mite loads when other queens have low counts-those queens should be eliminated from our hives. Pinch their heads and throw them into the underbrush with a proper good riddance. We are way past the point of sentimentality.
Every beekeeper in the club should obtain queens from an improved stock using one of a number of methods: direct purchase or gifts of splits from resistant colonies, 48 hr queen cells, ripe queen cells, virgin queens or mated queens. It does not matter what age or form that queen is in as long as she carries the genes we seek for resistance.
In the first year (2010) every beekeeper should be encouraged to put these queens into their colonies.  Some clubs may have  members who are resistant to this concept and in the first year the peer pressure should be turned down. The point of convincing will come from the reports from members. Every beekeeper should report the stock they are using and the mite count (how it was collected if it they used a method different from the club's standardized testing method). In the second season (2011) the club should show the entire membership its collective success, and failures, at obtaining low mite counts. As the second spring arrives, members may report great success in wintering or tremendous losses. Mentors will be needed to coach the new members (and maybe a few old ones) on the practices of swarm control, bee feeding and other basic beekeeping 101 concepts.
Ultimately beekeepers successful with this system should be encouraged to share their bee stock with others, either as a gift to club members or for commercial trade. In a local club there may be 1 to 10 members who are in a position to share resistant stock. But if 10,000 beekeepers nationwide start developing this program in 2010 and their resistant queens are moved around the country, we would take a huge step toward eliminating the genetic diversity gap that has developed since varroa mites appeared 25 years ago.
I would like larger clubs to be somewhat systematic about getting members to obtain queens from every resistant line they can find, putting together a full line of alphabet soup stocks with geographic stocks (foreign and domestic), as well as some cutout queens with remarkable behavior. While I was feeding colonies this fall with my helper Cathy King, we noticed that some colonies were vastly superior to others, even though the queens should be sisters and of similar genetics. On one colony lid she had written "PET ME." These bees were amazingly quiet on the combs and were responding nicely to the feed we had given them. Our season on the Farm outside Kalamazoo was far from wonderful, and we had had more than a few problems and challenges in the hives we set up this spring from Purdue stock nucs. It is nice to enter the winter months with some hope that the bees you have may actually survive the winter, and will be able to produce resistant daughters in the next season. That is the fun part of beekeeping, isn't it?
Dr. Connor finished his latest book, Queen Rearing Essentials, and it should be available for shipping in December or January. With 100 pages and 167 color photos, it will help the members of local bee clubs learn all about starter and finisher colonies. Check for the ship date and place your order at www.wicwas.com, or contact your local bee supply branch for a copy.

Traveling Beekeeper - November 2009

A Call to Action for All Bee Clubs: Time for Resistant Bees

(excerpt)

by LARRY CONNOR
Wicwas Press, 1620 Miller Road, Kalamazoo, MI 49001
LJConnor@aol.com    www.wicwas.com 

In the last issue I described some of my visit to California. From there I met with folks in Challis, Idaho about getting started with bees. My brother Jim has lived in Idaho for decades and he arranged a few folks to get together and talk bees. It is an interesting contrast to go from a highly organized beekeeping area like San Francisco to one with just one professional beekeeper with permanent locations and no local beekeepers' organization. The rest of the folks at the meeting are interested in bees because they are involved in a local farmer's market. Human population density certainly makes a difference.
It is time to issue a challenge to bee clubs everywhere. Now is the time to develop a program to convert the entire county or club service area of the organization into a zone where only varroa-resistant queen bees are installed in hives. This may seem to be downright militant or socialist or way too nosey, but there are strong reasons why the local bee clubs in North America (and elsewhere, for that matter), may be the best organizations to develop programs that promote resistant stock.
Why this? Why now? Simply put: We need to work together on varroa resistance. Bluntly put: We are stupid if we don't convert our colonies to mite-resistant stocks, and we could have done this years ago.
So, let me argue my case:
First, we have abundant supplies of tested, some well researched, and quality bee stocks that carry genes for varroa resistance. The USDA has developed two quality stocks: The Russian lines and the VSH lines, both from the Baton Rouge ARS Bee Lab, under the leadership of Dr. Tom Rinderer. I have known Tom since his grad school days at The Ohio State, and I also know he takes a lot of heat for bringing these stocks to the industry (most of the heat is because the bees are not Italian-type bees and are different. Beekeepers don't like different.)

_____________________________________________

Traveling Beekeeper - October 2009
 

Micro-Beekeeping: Diversity in San Francisco

(excerpt) 


by LARRY CONNOR
Wicwas Press, 1620 Miller Road, Kalamazoo, MI 49001
LJConnor@aol.com    www.wicwas.com 

Travel in the summer 2009 took me to the three regional apicultural society meetings: the Heartland Apicultural Society in Oberlin, OH the weekend after the 4th of July, the grand dame of summer conferences at the Eastern Apicultural Society in Ellicottsville, NY the first week of August, and the Western Apicultural Society (WAS) meeting in Healdsburg, CA the third week of August. A number of folks were in attendance at two of these meetings, but I think I was the only person who was registered at all three. It was a first for me, and while I had a huge amount of fun, I was both physically drained but mentally exhilarated by the time WAS was finished.

It was a summer of firsts for me. I gave the opening talk at HAS in a huge and historic UCC Church in Oberlin and was then invited to end the week with a Sunday Sermon in that same space with a discussion on the Sacred Bee. At EAS I gave three official microscopy classes (plus one unofficial gathering needed to get the scopes all set up and the lab tested), along with three field sessions and a workshop. This freely strates EAS's propensity towards speaker abuse, at least this one. Finally, at WAS, I conducted a special workshop for local Northern California beekeepers while the other WAS participants were off to wine country to test their enological skills.
Another high point was conducting a workshop the Saturday before WAS for the San Francisco Beekeepers Association. This was a special program introducing introductory queen rearing-not a full queen rearing course (we did not have time or hives available for that). It was not a huge crowd but more an ideally sized group considering the subject matter. This was a group filled with questions, all of them seem to be having a great time grilling the instructor.

San Francisco is an amazing and fun place because of its diversity of microclimates, neighborhoods and people. This is a huge melting pot of ethnic groups and a pretty accepting area for differing life styles and ual orientations. The president of the SFBA is Karen Peteros, a part-time lawyer and part-time beekeeper who is partnered with Janice, a physician assistant in heart transplant. They reflect the focus of the beekeepers I met in the Bay area-they live there by choice, and sometimes have to make compromises and sacrifice to afford to live in such an expensive city.

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HMS Beekeeper

Also that Sunday I was taken to a new store, Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper, a retail bee supply and honey store in the city, claiming to be the first bee supply store in the city (in recent memory at least). It is a trendy, well designed store with the clutter in the back, and eye-catching displays in the front. Honey from San Francisco beekeepers is sold, often with a map of the neighborhood on the label, so locals buy from locals. A one pound jar of Karen's honey was being sold for $24, and the demand had been extremely high. When you consider the income demographics of the people entering their store (often with a dog on leash, and there is a bowl of water for thirsty canine visitors), you realize that presentation, marketing and local production create a unique demand for high-end products.

Cameo Wood, the owner of the store, is a skilled marketer, and she has relied on the talents of beekeepers like Karen to provide advise on what equipment to stock (they selected medium-depth frames for brood and supers both), and to provide classes at the store. Over 400 people have signed up for classes since the store opened in June. If even a quarter of them take a bee class, it will be a huge educational effort.

Karen took me into her back yard and said it was "Larry's Nuc Yard". She explained that she had read my book on Increase Essentials and also attended my lecture on the subject at the January 2008 joint ABF/AHPA meeting held in Sacramento. "I remember what you said, that the money in beekeeping is in the bees, not the honey." She proudly showed me a yard filled with nucleus hives she had made from colonies and had plans to sell them to students at Cameo's store. With strong five-frame nucleus hives getting as much as $150 in this market, Karen was looking at return on her investment in beekeeping she had made over the past few years. She claims to be a student of Nuc-ology, one of several unique terms I heard during the visit (Another is the renaming of the Brushy Mountain 4-way Queen Castle to the "San Francisco Love Shack".

Sunday night SFBA treasurer Steven Cameron and I went bar-hopping in the Castro area of San Francisco's. It was a fitting end to a visit to an amazing and diverse city.

Dr. Connor will host ‘Fun with Bees: A program on Value-Added beekeeping' on October 10 in Comstock, Michigan. Check out http://www.wicwas.com/ for information. Then in November he will be in Texas and Connecticut. The same website has information on these meetings. You can also check out Increase Essentials (not yet renamed "The Complete Guide to Beekeeping Nuc-ology) and his new book, not yet released, on Queen Rearing Essentials.

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