Check out the new MICHIANA Beekeepers Association web site!!

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1 TheBeeLine Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA PUBLISHED BY MICHIANA BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION MAY 2013 MBA CONTACTS PRESIDENT Bob Baughman VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives TREASURER David Emerson HISTORIAN Danny Slabaugh Check out the new MICHIANA Beekeepers Association web site!! Ken Cecil has our very own web site set up and it is easy to get too. EDITOR Henry Harris Michiana Beekeepers Annual Auction Saturday, May 18, 2013, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. At the home and farm of the Norman Lehman family County Road 16, one mile East of Middlebury, IN, next to the Dutch Country Market. Registration, $5.00 per family, will begin at 8:30 a.m. Buy a ticket for 1/2 a Golden Glow chicken, $5.00, and renew your MICHIANA Beekeepers membership, $15.00 per family. Buy Raffle tickets for a single story 8 frame deep hive at registration. Enjoy coffee and Amish donuts, rolls and cookies while you catch up with other beekeepers and check out the items which will be auction off in the afternoon and register any items you brought to be auctioned off. 1.

2 The success of this auction, which pays for guest speakers and refreshments at meetings and makes things like our Fall Banquet affordable, depends on YOU bringing in items to auction and in turn buying items others have brought. The auction specializes in beekeeping related items but we welcome anything you no longer need and someone else may find useful. Normal terms are a 50/50 split of the sale, many members donate their items so the MBA receives 100%. A more suitable split on high ticket items such as large extractors, honey tanks, bee blowers, lawn mowers, dinning room tables, or your family car can be arranged at check-in. You may also deliver items to the Lehman farm on Friday. At 9:00 a.m. President Bob Baughman will open the meeting, make announcements and introduce our guest speakers: Larry Connor, one time queen breeder, owner of Wicwas Press which specializing in beekeeping books and materials, is now living in Michigan, and will be here to talk both before and after lunch. Crispen Givens is Dr. Gregg Hunt's assistant. Crispen was in California for almond pollination in February and will tell about his experience with bees there. Noon, lunch is a carry-in affair. Bring a dish to pass, anything you enjoy taking to picnics and cook-outs. Drinks will be provided along with plates and plastic flatware. Buy chicken tickets at registration. After Larry Connor's second talk we will have a chance to look at Norman's apiary so bring protective gear if you need it. Roger Graham will be our auctioneer again this year and the auction will go on until everything is sold. About 65 people were present at our April meeting at Christo's banquet hall. We discussed the present situation of hives and what we should be planning on doing with them to get ready for honey flows to come. Mike Ross showed the 5 frame swarm trap he 2.

3 hangs in trees or sets on stumps. The drawn come helps attract bees and provide a start while they are waiting to be picked up and transferred to a full size hive body. Marvin Gunn showed his latest refinement in swarm trapping. Marvin uses a pulp paper cone with a wood lid on the back (large) end. He has cut a deep frame in half and attached a hing so the frame can be folded to half length for mounting in the trap or out to full length to hang in a hive. Roger Deacon wanted everyone to know about an online beekeeping information resource. Just type "Fat Bee Man" or "New Fat Bee Man" on your browser for tutorials on a lot of beekeeping topics Meeting Schedule Saturday, June 15, 9:00 a.m. to noon, Carol Shaw's in Granger. Saturday, July 20, 9:00 a.m. to noon, Tim Ives' in North Liberty. Saturday, August 17, 9:00 a.m. to noon, VanZile's in Vandahlia, Michigan. September to be announced. Saturday, October 12, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., Nelson's Port-A-Pit in Wakarusa. Saturday, November 2, 9:00 a.m. to noon, Nappanee Public Library. Wandering with an Old Timer by Henry Harris Last year I said that in normal years May is the month that our main honey flows start. that perhaps that is not exactly right. And May is the month that most of us have managed to build up our colonies enough to take advantage of honey flows. There are other earlier opportunities to store a surplus of honey for truly strong colonies and beekeepers ready to take advantage of them. Many years back Richard Taylor1 and more recently, our own Tim Ives, told us that it is the strength of the colony that makes all the difference. Come through the winter with a strong colony and it can store a surplus of honey from nectar that weaker colonies must use to build up their populations. 3.

4 Strong colonies make more honey than weak ones in the same way that a larger, more muscled person can lift more than a smaller, less muscled person; more mass. The queen in a weak colony is only laying 1,000 eggs a day, or less. As those 1,000 eggs change to larvae and on through their cycle they require a certain number of support bees. You have honey, pollen, water and propolis foragers at work to support the developing bee. You also have bees turning nectar into honey, bees turning pollen into bee bread and royal jelly, bees making bee bread, bees making wax, bees feeding the brood and each other and cleaning the hive and who knows what else. Plus, you may have a few bees left over to make a little honey to store, maybe. When we talk about a stronger colony where the queen is laying 3,000 eggs a day they will have more bees doing all of those jobs. It takes brood to have bees and more bees to have more brood and on and on. In the end they will have more than "a few" bees left over to produce surplus honey. The sooner the queen can be brought to the point of producing that larger number of eggs the sooner the population will be ready to store a honey crop. Of course there has to be nectar available to be collected in the first place and this year everything seems to be about 3 weeks behind a normal year, nearly 2 months behind last year. Which may give you a little more time to bring your colony's population up. 2 When foragers are bringing nectar and pollen into the hive and giving the nectar to house bees to process into honey and deposit pollen in cells near the brood nest nurse bees encountering this activity feed the queen more royal jelly to make her lay more eggs since flying bees are dying bees which will need to be replaced. Foragers die to the tune of about 4% of the colony population every day they are flying due to being eaten by birds and spiders, picked off by other predators, exposure to sudden cold and rain, hit by cars, stomped by animals and just plain wearing out. Alternately if there is no nectar or pollen to be had the queen's food supply is cut back so she will not be filling the brood nest with hungry mouths that there is no food coming into the hive to feed them. As a result the colony population stays even or begins to shrink some. You need that queen laying 3,000 eggs a day so that you will have a big enough population to collect nectar from Black Locust in May and then clover and Basswood in June. 1 Richard Taylor, , produced primarily Ross Rounds, wrote for Bee Culture and was our auction guest speaker in Or maybe not. On April 27 I found lots of open and capped drone brood and several adult drones walking around in the hive and taking flight. Mature drones are necessary for new queens to mate with. Mature drones = swarm anytime. 4.

5 There are two things that you can do to help your colony grow. One is "stimulative feeding" of sugar syrup and the other is providing a good quality protein supplement. Stimulative feeding is a trick. You will be trying to fool the colony into thinking there is a nectar flow by giving them a steady trickle of very thin sugar syrup (one part sugar to two parts water) so the nurse bees will feed the queen more royal jelly to get her to lay more eggs thus building up the colony. The syrup provides the incentive and the protein supplement provides the basis for brood food. Since no foragers need to fly to collect this fake nectar and pollen flow they are not dying which keeps the population pumped up so the colony can raise more brood and grow not just faster but very much faster. Most of this syrup will be consumed to raise brood and very little if any will be stored. Honey for bees is like orange juice concentrate for us. We open the can and add water to make usable orange juice from the concentrate. Nectar, in its thin state, is what honey bees eat. Honey is concentrated nectar. Bees do not concentrate the nectar just to make honey but to prevent the nectar, which is high in moisture, from spoiling and to reduce the space needed to store it. Bees dilute honey with water to eat it. It makes more sense to use thin incoming nectar (syrup) rather than to reconstitute a product they have spent time and resources to prepare and store for future use. This feeding should be done inside the hive over the inner cover. Some larger beekeepers put feeders in the open because it is economically impractical for them to feed individual colonies. No matter how big the source bees will fight over it, other insects will feed from the common trough and diseases can be spread more easily through communal feeding. So use an inverted friction feeding jar over the inner cover hole. Stop the feeding as soon as there is sign of a nectar flow on. Black Locust was blooming during our auction last year. Walt Wright, writing in Bee Culture, said that while black locust has a reputation for being temperamental the reality is that our bees are not ready to store the nectar when black locust blooms but use the nectar to raise brood. If a colony has been kept in two deep boxes the colony will signal that a nectar flow is on and it is ready to take advantage of it by "whitening" the top edges of the combs in the top box. It is new white wax and it looks like the bees are getting ready to build burr comb across between the frames if they are not given more comb to fill up, and they will. 5.

6 I have been harping on the use of the Queen Excluder (QE) since It is useful for a lot of things in beekeeping but it is most often thought of in relation to excluding the queen from laying eggs in honey supers. And there it is most often used incorrectly. Bees hate QEs. It is like a person trying to move through a doorway in which a group of people has stopped to discuss something and they are so involved that they do not realize they are in the way and resent and resist your attempts to get past them. The difference between the diameter of a queen and a worker is so small that the space between the QE's wires is a snug fit. Some bees are not at all bothered by the QE but most will avoid going through it if at all possible. This means they will build burr comb in every conceivable place to put nectar and honey and even put it in brood cells shrinking the brood nest and eventually the total population of the colony. To over come this reluctance to go through the QE it needs to be placed in the middle of the bee cluster so that they cannot all live below or above it. In a two deep hive this means in between the two deeps. In my four medium configuration the QE goes between boxes 2 and 3. Remember what our last two banquet speakers said: make up your winter losses by starting nucs in June, and do not sacrifice strong colonies to build up weak ones before the late spring honey flows. The leadership of MICHIANA Beekeepers Association is nearly unanimous in rejecting the use of chemicals in the bee hive to kill mites or beetles. But if it is the route you have chosen remember that honey supers and chemicals do not go together. Wait 4 to 6 weeks after removal of any chemical before putting honey supers on a hive to give the chemical time to run its course and not be stored with honey in the supers. If you feel you must treat a colony to save it take the honey supers off before you begin treatment. A colony that much in danger of being destroyed by mites or beetles will not make you honey anyway. This is the most beautiful time of the year with all of the ornamentals in bloom and soon it will be the most tasty time as bees begin storing honey. Break off a piece of burr comb full of fresh honey or stick your finger into some freshly capped honey and taste the warm richness of that new honey! 6.