Seacoast Beekeepers Association Newsletter September, 2009

Transcription

1 Seacoast Beekeepers Association Newsletter September, 2009 Next Meeting: September 17, 7:00 p.m. Lee Grange Hall, Lee, N.H. President: Amy Robinson Vice President: Amy Antonucci Treasurer: Don Powers Sec. /Editor: Karen Johnson Notes from our President Next Club Meeting: Thursday, September 17, pm We will be stacking our cord of wood for the Grange. Come a half an hour early if you can!! August has been beastly hot, but what a honey flow!!! The wildflowers had lots of water to beef them up and the bees seem to be finding plenty of nectar. Winter bees are produced from mid August until about the autumnal equinox, so this is a good time to give them an extra boost with a pollen patty. About September 15, check to see what the bees have for honey, and if necessary, supplement their winter feed with heavy syrup until mid October. But best of all, leave them pounds of their own honey. I would like to bring your attention to an amazing three-part series of articles in American Bee Journal, entitled The Importance of Microbes in Nutrition and Health of Honey Bee Colonies (DeGrandi- Hoffman, Sammataro, and Alarcon). They can be found in the June, July and August issues, and if you don t have a subscription you can order individual copies from ABJ for only $2 per issue. Although dense, these articles talk about how bees need many bacteria, yeasts and molds to maintain healthy food processing and digestion. When we treat with antibiotics, especially on a prophylactic basis, we destroy all of these important functions. They discuss how fungicides, sprayed on blooming fruit trees when bees are pollinating, can produce a sub-lethal effect, where pollen is not properly converted into bee bread, thereby inhibiting proper nutrition for developing larvae. Although the EPA insists that fungicides are safe for honeybees, Florence Chamberlain has maintained for years that it isn t so. This article certainly supports her suspicion. Check these out although not light bedtime reading, they contain extremely important, new data. A number of us have been working hard on Bee School. This year it will be held primarily on WEDNESDAY nights so as not to confuse it with our regular club meetings. See below the schedule, and any member is welcome to sit in on a class. Tell your friends who have been wanting to take up this wonderful hobby! The cost is $55 per family and includes a textbook and a binder of materials put

2 together by Margaret Agnew. Registration is required; contact Margaret if interested at or BEESCHOOL SCHEDULE: September 16: Bee Biology and Products of the Hive September 23: Equipment September 30: Installation of Package/Feeders October 7: Summer Management October 14: Fall/Winter Management THURSDAY November 19: Pests and Diseases/What is on Ben and Bev s table? Hope to see you at our September meeting! Amy Editor s note: There are lots of opinions about feeding colonies here are just a few for you to sample. All About Fall Feeding: Some of you may be wondering what to do if your bees are in an area where the main forage was washed out with the rain during the month of June, or your package bees just haven t built up the stores they need for the winter. Here re some excerpts from experts, beginning with: ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, A.I. and E.R. Root, 1929 edition. What is a food chamber and why is it so important? It is a super or hive body filled with combs of natural stores, the best honey of the season. This super of honey is not extracted, but is held in reserve from the crop until after the main honey flow, when it is placed back on the hive, either then or in the fall, to save the cost of sugar and the labor of feeding, to promote better wintering, and to increase the crop next season. At one time it was believed that sugar syrup made the best food for the entire winter and the following spring. Later opinion is almost unanimous that the best honey stores sealed in the combs are better for all around wintering and spring management. But if colonies must be fed sugar syrup mainly, the general practice is to feed sometime in September, in the northern tier of states.

3 Beekeeping for Dummies, Howard Blackiston, 2002 edition. Does the colony have enough honey for its use during the winter? Bees in cold northern states need eight to ten frames of capped honey. They ll accept a 2-to-1 sugar-syrup feeding until colder weather contracts them into a tight cluster. At that point, temperatures are too cold for them to leave the cluster. I use special syrup for feeding bees that are going into the winter months. The thicker consistency recipe makes it easier for bees to convert the syrup into the honey they ll store for the winter. You also can add Honey B Healthy, a food supplement that contains essential oils and has a number of beneficial qualities. Natural Beekeeping, Ross Conrad, 2007 edition. Bees need to be fed only when starvation is imminent. This can occur when, due to weather conditions or some other factor, the colony has not stored sufficient honey to last the bees through the winter, or because their keeper has taken more than his or her share of the harvest. Colonies that need to be fed in the spring are typically a sign that the beekeeper has harvested too much honey and did not leave enough on the hives in the fall, that the late-fall honey flow that was anticipated to fill out the empty space within the hive did not materialize and adequate supplemental feeding did not take place, or both. Another instance when a hive typically requires feeding is when a nuc or swarm is starting out with nothing but foundation or empty combs. A full sealed super of honey is first class bee feed. If honey is not available, the next best feed to use is white sugar. The reason white sugar is preferred over brown, turbinado or other types is that white sugar has had all its nonsugar components removed and will not contribute to dysentery within the hive during the winter. A 2-to-1 ratio is best when mixing up sugar syrup for feed in the fall, a time when hives need to make and store as much honey as possible as quickly as possible. Hive Management, Richard Bonney, 1990 edition. If stores are low, feed. Frames of honey are best. If no honey has been saved, then feed sugar syrup. In the fall you are interested in building up winter stores, and a thicker syrup is more efficiently processed by the bees. Feeding is appropriate in any season if the bees need help. It is also appropriate whenever a new colony is established, whether it be from a swarm, a nuc, a package, or a split. Such new colonies are usually started during the period when established colonies are approaching or at the peak of population, ready to do their best work of the year. These new colonies are under-strength, probably having little or no stores, and often, no drawn comb. Left to their own devices most of these colonies will probably become established, but a substantial number of them will be of questionable strength, will not make any surplus honey that year, and may not survive their first winter. If the beekeeper does not intervene he or she may shortly become a former beekeeper.

4 Stay Tuned this month s beekeeper interview has been postponed til next month. Sometimes we just don t have enough time in the month. Here s something sent in by V.P. Amy Antonucci: Honeybees sterilize their hives Matt Walker Editor, Earth News Honeybees sterilize their hives with antimicrobial resin, scientists have discovered. In doing so, they give the whole colony a form of "social immunity", which lessens the need for each individual bee to have a strong immune system. Although honeybee resin is known to kill a range of pathogens, this is the first time that bees themselves have been shown to utilize its properties. The team published details of their discovery in the journal Evolution. Honeybees in the wild nest in tree cavities. When founding a new colony, they line the entire nest interior with a thin layer of resins that they mix with wax. This mixture is known as propolis. They also use propolis to smooth surfaces in the hive, close holes or cracks in the nest, reduce the size of the entrances to keep out intruders, and to embalm intruders that they've killed in the hive that are too big to remove. A number of studies have shown that propolis has a range of antimicrobial properties, but mostly in relation to human health. For example, numerous publications cite its effectiveness against viruses, bacteria and even cancer cells. That is how Mike Simone, a PhD student from the University of Minnesota in St Paul, US, and his supervisor Professor Marla Spivak became interested. Spivak and her colleagues had tested the effectiveness of honeybee propolis against the HIV-1 virus. They then progressed to see how it impacted bee pathogens, such as American foulbrood. "This led us to wonder what other things propolis might be doing for the bees," said Simone.

5 In experiments funded by the US National Science Foundation, Simone's team painted the inside walls of hives with an extract of propolis collected from Brazil or Minnesota. This inside layer mimicked how propolis or resins would be distributed in a feral colony nesting in a tree cavity. They then created colonies of honeybees and housed either in hives enriched with resin, or hives without the resin layer - to act as a control. After one week of exposure they collected bees that had been born in each colony. Genetic tests on these 7-day-old bees showed that those growing in the resin-rich colonies had less active immune systems. "The resins likely inhibited bacterial growth. Therefore the bees did not have to activate their immune systems as much," said Simone. "Our finding that propolis in the nest allows bees to invest less in their immune systems after such a short exposure was surprising. Resins in the hive have been thought of as a potential benefit to a honey bee colony, but this has never been tested directly." Using resins to help sterilize the colony can be thought of as a type of "social immunity" said the researchers. And it may partly explain why bees and other social insects, such as ants, collect resins to build their nests in the first place. "Honeybees can use wax, which they produce themselves, to do all the things that they use resin for in the nest. So it is interesting to think about why they might go and collect resins," said Simone. "Especially since resins, being sticky, are hard to manipulate and take a lot of energy for individual bees to gather in very small quantities." There is also some evidence that some mammals and birds coat themselves in naturally-occurring plant resin in a bid to reduce infestations with parasites. (Story from BBC NEWS) Fall Flowers Favored by Honeybees: What s flowering in your area?? Here in the seacoast, the bees are visiting knotweed, wild mints, goldenrod, asters, loosestrife and hydrangeas.

6 Did you know? Beekeeping associations and journals, between 1850 and 1900, helped increase women s participation in beekeeping. Women could acquire knowledge of beekeeping directly, instead of being dependant on what their husbands told them. Women began to get hives of their own, and keep the profits from their bees. (From Eva Crane s The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting.) SPRING FEVER FARM Local Bee Supplies Ben & Bev Chadwick 49 Lane Drive, Alton, N.H (603) Beekeeping tools, honey products, cases of assorted honey jars, books, protective clothing, etc. NH Distributors of Honey-B-Healthy and now a MANN LAKE Dealer! When ordering, call ahead 24 hours for products delivered to bee-meeting. Hive Side Lessons Hive Maintenance Mentoring Lectures