THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE MECKLENBURG COUNTY BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION

Transcription

1 THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE MECKLENBURG COUNTY BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION August, 2016 President s Buzz Hi Folks Hope you are enjoying these last warm days of summer and are feeling successful with your honey bees. As always, if you are struggling, please be sure to reach out to your mentor or to someone at our meetings. This is one of the most important parts of our club's function - to lend support to our fellow beekeepers and make sure that we all do well. There are always so many questions especially in the first couple of years. Please don't hesitate to ask. I have to make a confession to you all. I have been playing Pokémon Go. It's true. Why in the world would a 50 year old woman with way too many gray hairs to count, be playing a game for kids? The answer is teenagers. You all may have seen them sulking around the back of the meeting room on occasion and yes one is even a Certified Beekeeper. They are however still teenagers. So if I can find a fun way for us to connect, I will. We even went hunting for Pokémon while we were down in Jacksonville, Florida visiting the in-laws. The fantastic part was that we stumbled upon a Monarch Weigh Station with all kinds of great forage for the Monarchs (we spotted one flitting about) but also for the honey bees. There was even a bench painted with bees. (see photo). My point being that you never know where you are going to find a nod to the honey bee. They do seem to follow us beekeepers. Last month, our July Trivia Night was a blast. There were many laughs and some long discussions about which answer was correct - can you say Koschewnikow?. We continue with our homegrown monthly meetings in August. It is an open panel discussion "Avoiding the School of Hard Knocks" with Ed Moyers facilitating the event. This will be an excellent opportunity to get beekeeping advice from some of our more experienced members. Please join us on Thursday, August 18th 7p at Mouzon United Methodist Church. See you at the meeting on the 18th! Kris Daniels August s Meeting August 18 th, 7PM Mouzon United Methodist Church 3100 Selwyn Avenue Charlotte, NC Avoiding The School of Hard Knocks An Open Forum format facilitated by Ed Moyers. Thank you to Brad Gebert & Lecia Pearce for providing refreshments! David Segrest will be providing Cleanup and Teardown after the meeting. Please feel free to thank them for volunteering and to lend them a helping hand. "The Honeybee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others." - St. John Chrysostom, WEH3Y SAVE THE SHIPPING COSTS: Patrick Ferrer of Dadant Bee Supply will be in Charlotte August 21st. As he has done in the past, he will bring your order with him and you don t have to pay tax or the shipping! Patrick at pferrer@dadant.com 1 August 2016

2 In The bee yard by George McAllister The nectar flow lasted longer than usual this year. It started in early March and ended June 21. The nectar flow started strong but as the dry weather set in the flow slowed down. Because of the isolated thunderstorms, area beekeepers have seen mixed results. Beekeepers that received the isolated thunderstorms got more honey than those beekeepers that saw little rain. I extracted my honey on July 23 with the help of my mentees. Involving other beekeepers makes the time go by faster with all the bee talk. Also you don t wear yourself out uncapping frames. Now that the club has an electric extractor, extracting is not as strenuous. If you did not extract last month, now is the time to do it. Because robbing is an issue when the nectar flow stops, it s time to put hive reducers on your hives if you have not already done so. I experienced robbing on July 15 which I wrote about in a separate article in this newsletter. Check for varroa mite loads and treat as needed. Varroa mites tend to spike in the late summer and fall. If you need to treat, the sooner you treat the better. Depending on the treatment used, varroa mite treatments can be stressful on the bees since you are trying to kill a bug on a bug. You want your bees to recover from the treatment early so they can prepare for the winter. You may want to consider replacing your queens especially if they have been through two or more nectar flows. Some beekeepers replace queens annually. Dr. David Tarpy of NC State found queens that have not experienced a nectar flow are less likely to swarm in the spring compared to queens one year or older. Now the nectar flow is over, it s time to start preparing for the winter. NCSBA ANNOUNCEMENT: It's August 1st and time for all new Quizzes and Games from the Master Beekeeper Program. Go to the NCSBA website at and look at the bottom of the home page, also on the MBP section. New quizzes and games for each level Certified, Journeyman, and Master. ENJOY! EDITOR s NOTE: She will never announce it. So, as the proud husband of Kris Daniels, your Meckbees President, it is my pleasure to let you know that she has received her NCSBA Master Beekeeper Certification. In a Season of 1st s for women, she is the only Female Master beekeeper in Mecklenburg County and I am sure she hopes this inspires other women beekeepers to obtain their certification as well. Congrats, Kris! 2 August, 2016

3 Making Meckbees Proud by Jodie Rierson State meetings are always fun to attend because you get to learn new things from different people. At the meeting in Hickory last month, it was a double delight to attend a workshop presented by our very own George McAllister. He gave an excellent, information-packed presentation on "The Versatile Queen Castle." More than 100 people attended, eager to hear what he had to say; and they did not leave disappointed. George explained the many ways and benefits of using Queen Castles and described how he manages his own. George went the extra mile and provided each student a printed copy of his 42 slides, including a pie diagram showing Queen Castle seasonal usage. Color-coding on each slide enabled students to match the information to the applicable season. I believe each student left with something practical they could use in their own bee yard. George's presentation made me proud to say to the people around me, "This guy is in my bee club!" Vita Releases a Varroa Infographic Great graphic for download that traces the history and research into the Varroa Mite. Go to the Vita Gallery to download the Varroa Infographic 3 August, 2016

4 Club Equipment Rental It s Harvest Time! Club Members may rent the Extractor. * 9 Frame Maxant motorized extractor (Manual extractor available as a backup.) * Uncapping tank * 5 gallon bottling bucket * Electric and non-electric uncapping knife * Uncapping roller * Capping scratcher * Two stage honey strainer. The charge is $5 per day to rent the equipment with 2 day minimum. To reserve the equipment: Go to the club s website meckbees.org and under the Members tab and select Extractor Rental. With the growth of the club, there is heavy demand for the extractor in the summer months. When you get the equipment, please return it promptly so the next person on the list can get it. If you have any questions contact: George McAllister gmcallister@outlook.com or call August 2016

5 Robbery, Puzzling Bees, RNA & RNAi... by Andrew Thiessen First, the robbery! My neighbor across the street has a great big bee tree. This tree is the oldest planted Willow Oak in our area, which happens to live in the front yard of the first house built in our section of Myers Park. The homeowner feels very pleased that bees have--fittingly--resided in his tree for several years. Just the other evening it threw off a monster of a swarm. We're talking two basketballs, at least! The swarm settled on a tree branch in the backyard of his next-door neighbor, who called me to retrieve it. However, I was on a "date night" with my wife and didn't have my phone with me. Being the impatient paranoid type, he couldn't wait for me to return his call & found "...a guy off the internet" to come collect said swarm. I don't know who this "Internet Bee Guy" was, but he should have worn a ski mask under his veil. He told my neighbors that they're lucky he arrived when he did because swarms can be very dangerous & they take highly specialized equipment and knowhow to "capture" safely! He then proceeded to use his "special bee vacuum" (I saw the pictures--it was a Shop Vac) to suck the bees off the branch, all the while telling my neighbor, "Stay back! You never know what these bees will do in this situation!!!" Now, I don't know how everyone else operates, but I don't charge a nickel to shake a swarm off a branch and be on my way. And I definitely don't use a bee vac to do it...to each their own, I suppose. But this guy charged my neighbor $229 to remove this swarm! Then he went on to tell my neighbors that they need to take down that "awful tree" because the remaining bees will be an even more dangerous problem next time if they're not destroyed right away! Folks, this is shameful behavior and gives us beekeepers all a black eye. Again, I have no idea who this guy was & I'm not investigating to find out. But I would like to ask that none of us respectable Club members operate like this. Swarms are not dangerous or aggressive, nor do they take specialized equipment to remove from a tree branch. Heck, my six year old daughter taught a Mentee how to do it with a hands-on demonstration this past April with a good sized swarm in a backyard right off Sewlyn Avenue (See picture). Puzzling Beehavior Emma Thiessen, 6 years old I'm starting to think about winter. It's time to get hives in order to insure winter survival. For me that means identifying & killing the worst performing queens, dismantling their hives and distributing those bees into the mediocre hives, which I'll use to make new nucs in Spring. On Monday, July 25 I did just that. One hive which received an infusion was a swarm I recently removed from underneath a shed floor--the only swarm removal I did this year that had a marked queen! (She was green, if anyone off Woodlawn may be missing her.) This colony had only four frames of brood in all stages, including eggs & bees covered only six frames. I gave them 2 frames of capped brood with clinging bees and two frames of capped honey. On July 27, I got a call from the SouthEnd homeowner who's yard they're in that this hive had just swarmed. I went over to find the bees balled up on the end of a very skinny tree branch about 40 feet high. Shucks! Looking at the hive, I didn't see any traffic at its entrance. So, I popped the lid. NO BEES inside! AND, no brood, no more capped honey, nothing! What the? After my infusion just two days prior, there were six frames of brood, including one frame packed solid with open brood and eggs. All gone now. All the comb inside was freshly cleaned & spotless. The only activity was just a very few adult small hive beetles. Those suckers waste no time, do they!!! I bid those bees on the branch farewell & went home scratching my head. I guess some bees are just born to run. (Article continued on the next page.) 5 August 2016

6 (Cont. from Previous Page) Robbery, Puzzling Bees, RNA & RNAi... by Andrew Thiessen RNA & RNAi Did you see the recent article in the St. Louis Post by Jacob Barker about the latest hope for treating Varroa mites with RNA & RNAi gene-targeting pesticides? This is ground breaking stuff. NOTE: Let me stop right here to reiterate I do not treat my bees--save for one experiment last year that yielded data to suggest there was no benefit (in terms of winter colony survival rates) to my treatment (of vaporized oxalic acid). I see no reason & have no further plan or intention to ever treat again. Period. Here's the gist of the article. Everyone who's anyone producing varroa-treatment chemicals for bees is racing to be the first to release their product that uses RNA interference (RNAi) to target the genes specific to the varroa mite. RNA is Ribonucleic Acid-- "...the messenger molecule that copies instructions from genes within a cell's DNA to protein-making mechanisms in cells." "Scientists discovered that if they introduced RNA into the cell that matched existing RNA messages but was made to look like some viruses, the cell's defenses would fight it off like a virus." Holy cow, Batman, this is big! In the past, the varroa treatment chemicals have simply been pesticides applied in a dosage that was big enough to kill the mites, but small enough that it didn't kill the bees. But this new technology uses a completely different varroa-specific gene-targeting approach. "In the process, the cell would destroy the RNA messages it was making naturally that matched the virus-mimicking RNA, essentially 'silencing' a particular genetic trait. RNA messages can carry the instructions for virtually every function of life, including making the proteins that some insects and mites need to live. If the cells stop making them, those pests die." In a nutshell, varroa suck the "juice" out of bees. If we can feed bees sugar water laced with varroa-gene-targeting RNAi drugs (and now we can), the varroa will suck that drug right up within the bee juice. Since the drug is specific to varroa genes, it has no ill effects on bees. It seems we've flipped the game! Bees will soon be the vector who transmits lethal virus-like substances to varroa mites.. But wait, there's more! These RNAi drugs don't hang around for long wreaking havoc on the environment like all the nasty stuff we've used to date. In fact, that's one of the current stumbling blocks that scientists are working through. This stuff is currently unstable and breaks down so fast that it's a challenge to get it through the bee and into the mite in time to still be effective. But rest assured, they'll get it figured out. And likely, pretty soon too. Nitzan Paldi, formerly of Beeolgics (acquired by Monsanto in 2011), now of Forrest Innovations predicted we'll see this RNAi treatment hit the mainstream market by Again, I run a treatment-free 30-plus hive operation. But If I were treatment-minded, I'd be excited about this new technology. 6 August 2016

7 Gil s Honeybee Crossword Puzzle Across 4. The New extractor is. 5. Do this to keep down your Varroa Mite loads. 9. This helps stop robbing. 10. Now is a good time to check the counts of these. Down 1. When did the nectar flow stop this year? 2. If this has not experienced a nectar flow then a hive is less likely to swarm. 3. It is time to prepare for this. 6. An issue for a hive when the nectar flow stops. 7. If you got lots of these then you got more honey this year. 8. When did the nectar flow start this year? 11. Treating bees can cause this for the bees. Last month s puzzle winner Johnny Preston Send answers to ed@2219meck.com (subject line puzzle) by Wednesday, August 20th. You must be present at the meeting to win. Last Month s puzzle answers by Jodie Rierson 7 August 2016

8 I ve Been Robbed! by George McAllister On Friday, July 15 while I was out of town one of my bee hives was robbed by a massive number of bees from the surrounding area. For over two weeks I have been unable to go into my hives so I did realize this hive was in decline. When I went into the hive after the robbing I only saw capped brood and no queen. The hive did not swarm, because if it did I would have noticed the sudden drop in weight when I downloaded the weight data. The hive is on a scale that weights the hive every 15 minutes. As the bee population declined, the hive was not able to defend itself against robbers. It didn t help matters the hive didn t have an entrance reducer. The robbing started around 10am and peaked at noon. Between noon and 1pm the hive lost 12.1 pounds. Throughout the afternoon and early evening the robbing continued but at a decreasing rate as time progressed. The robbing stopped by 8pm with pounds taken from the hive. After weighing my other hives Friday night I learned several things. First, I had no idea bees could take so much honey in such a short period of time. It took the hive 26 days to gain that much weight during the nectar flow. Second, the hive next to the one being robbed was also robbed but this hive only lost 9 pounds. Thirdly, my other two hives, which are less than 10 feet from the one being robbed, briefly participated in the robbing having gained 1.1 and 2.2 that day. However, it appears my other hives only a few feet away focused on defending their hives from robbers rather than robbing. The next morning I placed entrance reducers on all my hives. The robbing was so strong the day before, the entrance reducers did not stop the robbing. Next I put on robbing screens and that kept the robbing bees away. I have never experienced robbing like this before. Next year I will put on entrance reducers when the nectar flow ends and robbing screens if the entrance reducers don t work. At the same time I will make sure all my hives are strong enough to defend themselves from robbers. Never a dull moment keeping bees. 8 August, 2016

9 Bees Thrive in an Unexpected Paradise: Paris by Aurelien Breeden, May 24th, 2016, New York Times If you are a honeybee in France, the best place to live (and work) might be smack in the middle of Paris. Audric de Campeau, who set up his first hives in the French capital in 2009, said he was surprised to discover that his Parisian bees produced more than twice as much honey as the ones he kept back in the northeastern Champagne region. Mr. de Campeau said that green spaces in Paris and other large cities like New York or London actually had a better mix of trees, flowers and other plants than farming areas dominated by vast single-crop fields. Plus: no crop-dusted pesticides. Honey produced in Paris tastes of red berries and lychee, Mr. de Campeau said. He said that traces of the city s high air pollution had been found in beeswax and the bees themselves, but that the bees still lived longer than their country cousins. Bees were cultivated in Paris as far back as 1856, in the Luxembourg Garden, where there is still a beekeeping school. Now, the local authorities count 700 hives in parks, private residences and office buildings. They have been set up on the rooftops of the National Assembly, France s lower house of Parliament, and on top of the Palais Garnier opera house, which sells small jars of its own honey online for 15 euros, or about $17. At the Tour d Argent, a Left Bank restaurant, diners could recently enjoy roast duckling with spices and honey from our roof as they took in the sweeping view of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where several hives sit atop the sacristy. Even the French Communist Party recently set up a handful of hives on the roof of its imposing 1970s-era headquarters. One Twitter user wryly noted that the party was now in the capitalist business of exploiting workers. 9 August, 2016

10 Cooking with Honey Ginger Honey Lemonade (Reprinted from epicurious.com) Ingredients 3 cups water 1/2 cup honey 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 cup minced peeled fresh ginger 1 1/4 cups fresh lemon juice Ice cubes Preparation 1.Bring 1 cup water, honey, sugar, and ginger to boil in heavy medium saucepan over high heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. 2.Boil 5 minutes. 3.Cool. 4.Strain syrup into pitcher. 5.Mix in lemon juice and remaining 2 cups water. 6.Fill pitcher with ice. Let stand 5 minutes. 7.Fill 4 to 6 tall glasses with ice; add lemonade. 10 August 2016

11 2016 MCBA OFFICERS Contact Us President: Kris Daniels Vice President: Ed Moyers Treasurer: Diana Smith Membership Secretary: Melinda Mitchell Chaplain: Don Rierson us with questions at Pictures & Article Submissions are always needed and are greatly appreciated. any submissions to: Subject: Honeycomb Webmaster: Kevin Freeman THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OF THE MECKLENBURG COUNTY BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION August, 2016 MCBA Newsletter 2219 Mecklenburg Avenue Charlotte, NC PLACE STAMP HERE