New President of Bee Club

It was a nasty campaign with a lot of mud slinging but I won the presidency with one vote, literally. I'm now the president of the Steuben County Honey Bee Association (SCHBA). Since there was no opposition, the secretary cast the single vote to elect P, VP, Secretary, and Treasurer. Wait! The secretary didn't show up at the meeting, so the future secretary who wasn't secretary cast the vote. That's illegal, isn't it. Is this one of Robert's Rules or did someone at SCHBA make it up? Well anyways, we borrowed the time machine from the Science Fiction Writer's Association that meets the following day and made it work.

The last time I was elected president, in 2002, I had 0 votes. The real president got all the votes, which made me, in the convoluted constitutional rules of the SCHBA, vice president. But the president died shortly after and I had to take over.

Article in Bee Culture

I believe its the absolute simplest hive you can make, except for top bar hives. It's a standard Langstroth style hive you can make in less than 2 hours, including the frames. Catch a swarm in the morning, build a hive and install the bees in the afternoon. It's a perfect bait hive because if a swarm moves in, you can set a regular super on top or transfer the frames to a regular hive without messy cutting. The plans are available right now in the online edition of Bee Culture and will be in the April paper edition whenever it comes.

Beekeeping class

This double nuc hive was packed with honey in the fall and still doing well. Some people think you have to have double deeps to survive the winter. The mortality probably is higher with something like this, but I've had single 5 frame nucs make it to spring.

4 bee-mails from the Alfred State College CCET coordinator yesterday. We're planning a one afternoon bee class on April 24th. Hopefully my bees will still be alive and the weather will cooperate.

We'll open and evaluate several hives, talk about fun stuff like nosema, foulbrood, chalkbrood, plus where to find bees if you don't have any, and making hives. I don't know what the class will cost, but the Sept. 2009 class cost $45.00

Dysentery

The spot are from the bee's cleansing flights. The large quantity of spots might indicate nosema, or it might be they had to hold it in for a long time.

March Inspection

The snow is still a foot deep, bees flying everywhere. It's hard to tell which colonies are alive and which are being robbed out. There were 3 types of hives: 1. wildly busy, 2. a few bees flying around quietly, and 3. hives with no activity. I flipped the lid on an apparently dead hive and no it was quite lively. Note the bee on my arm left a spot of bee poop. Another did it on the camera, but I couldn't photograph that.

I'll have to count surviving colonies when it's cooler and the bees are clustered. Then I can listen with my ear to the hive. Most of the 12 seem lively.

Hiving a swarm

Click here. See the author plunge his hands into a seething mass of venomous honey bees. Hear author's daughter as she is stung while holding a swarm of bees. Learn why you shouldn't work with bees in bare feet.

Dr. Larry Connor, Bee Sexpert

Combined meetings of the Ontario and Ithaca Finger Lakes Beekeeper’s Association

I sneaked in as the lone representative of the Steuben County Honey Bee Association. I felt a little furtive, like a robber bee, expecting at any minute that one of the people would notice I smelled different and they’d started pinching and biting me as they pulled me out of the meeting.

Having customers at work right up to the last minute and locating the meeting with faulty online directions, I arrive late and sat in back. There were approximately 180 attendees, including some vendors

Driving home, I couldn't remember anything I’d learned. ;(.

But I had a recorder! :), and have a poor quality but mostly audible record of Dr. Larry’s Lecture.

Arriving late, I missed the title, but it was about breeding bees for health and mite tolerance—moving away from medicating hives.

Here are a few new pieces of information I learned:

1. In mating, queens fly low and far, up to 6 miles (is this radius or diameter? Either way it’s counter intuitive.) Drones fly high and near.

2. Queens mate with 13 drones on average and can vary from one to (highest known) 45 drones.

3. Queens artificially inseminated with a single drone, but same quantity of semen as multiply mated queens were taken to the Adirondack area by Dr. Tom Seeley for research, by the end of the season, 80% had died from a variety of diseases. This emphasizes the importance of diverse genetics among a queen’s offspring for the health of the hive.

4. What about those bees surviving in the wild?

Dr. Connor says you don’t know how many times that hive has died and been reoccupied with a new swarm.

Mite tolerance may, as suggested by Dr. Tom Seeley, be the result of their isolation.

My un-medicated bees aren’t in isolation. Maybe they should be. If bees in the wild have mite tolerance and disease resistance and if your bees mate with wild drones, that means you will have some degree of tolerance/resistance already in your bees.