Ommatidia The monthly newsletter of the Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association

Transcription

1 the Ommatidia Nov The monthly newsletter of the Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association President s Buzz by George McAllister During the last bee club meeting when I asked everyone to comment about what s going on in their bee yard, much of the discussion was around feeding our bees. Most people are not aware that the main cause of colony loss in the winter is starvation, not the cold. However, feeding is only one part of getting your bees ready for the winter. Here are the things you need to consider when getting your bees ready for the winter. Just because you left a full super of honey on your hive when you extracted earlier this summer doesn t mean it s still there. That is why you want to periodically check your hives to make sure they have a full super once winter sets in. If you need to feed, you want to feed a heavy syrup mixture of sugar and water at a ratio of 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds, therefore add (doesn t have to be exact, but round down) pounds of sugar for every gallon of water used. It s almost impossible to get the sugar to dissolve completely by stirring. To speed up the process heat the water. If you buy sugar syrup premixed it is sometimes called 67% brix sugar syrup. Brix is a scientific measurement of concentration. In this case, for every 100 grams of syrup, 67 grams is made up of sugar or a 2:1 sugar to water ratio by weight. This concentration of sugar is the maximum amount of sugar that can be dissolved in water. There is also a debate on whether to feed your bees sucrose (common table sugar) or HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) which is cheaper. Sucrose is the sugar found in nectar. However the bees change the sucrose in nectar into fructose and glucose in the process of making honey. There is limited research on the subject, but it seems that bees winter better on sucrose. Who has the best tasting honey in the club? Maybe it s your honey. To find out don t miss your opportunity to enter the club s honey tasting contest during November s meeting. Bring your official entry jar (1/2 pound glass queenline) filled to the top with your best tasting honey to the November meeting. You can enter up to two jars from this year s honey crop. Each jar will be assigned a random number so no one will know whose honey they are judging. Everyone will get a chance to be a judge. At the end of the meeting the names of the winners will be revealed and ribbons given out. You must attend the November meeting to enter the contest. If you don t have any honey to enter, come anyway and be a judge. Join us on the third Thursday, 7 p.m., Nov. 21, at Mouzon United Methodist Church, 3100 Selwyn Avenue, Charlotte. During the November meeting, in addition to the honey tasting contest we will hold our year end business meeting. Officers for 2014 will be elected. If you would like to nominate someone or run yourself, please Wayne Hansen at whansen319@yahoo.com The main issue with HFCS is the formation of HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural) which occurs when the fructose in ( cont d on page 3 )

2 As colder weather approaches, make your final adjustments to the bee yard. Feeding and medicating should be finished. Entrances should be very small to prevent mice or other critters from entering the nice warm cozy hive. There should be no other openings or cracks where drafts can get in. If the bee yard is especially vulnerable to wind you can stack bales of straw around the hives to stop the worst of it. On the other hand, ventilation at the top of the hive is important to let moisture out, so don t seal up the inner cover. Adjust the telescoping outer cover so that air flow is allowed at the top of the hive. Sometime in November or December I switch out the screened inner covers for solid It s That Time by Libby Mack ones, and put a cardboard insert into the screened bottom boards. Many hives do just fine without these items though. I m always grateful that we (and our bees) don t have to deal with the harsh winters and snowdrifts of the northern states. It s also time to scrub and tidy things feeders and tools and buckets need washing, extra boxes need scraping, equipment of all kinds needs stacking neatly out of the weather. Make an equipment inventory while you re at it, noting anything that needs to be replaced or repainted. This naturally leads to thoughts of expanding the apiary next spring! Better start the Christmas list. President s Buzz ( cont d from p1 ) solution is exposed to warm temperatures. HMF is deadly to bees but not to humans. If the HFCS solution has a light brown color of tastes bitter it s probably not a good idea to feed it to your bees. As a result most hobby beekeepers use sucrose. There are several types of feeders to use. I don t have the space in this newsletter to discuss the pros and cons of each type. Preferences also vary among beekeepers. Instead, conduct an internet search on the types of bee feeders to determine which type or types fit your needs. Regardless of the feeder type, the goal is to get as much sugar syrup as possible into the cells before winter sets in. Bees begin to cluster when the temperature drops between 54 and 57 degrees. When bees are in a tight winter cluster, they will ignore food just inches from the cluster. A cluster will move around the hive to be near food if it s not too cold outside. Placing an entrance reducer on your hives is useful in minimizing the risks of robbing. As pollen and nectar becomes scarce, bees will rob from each other especially if there is a feeder on the hive. Having a reduced hive entrance gives the guard bees an advantage since they have a smaller opening to defend. I have seen beekeepers reduce their hives entrances to.75 to 2 inches in length. The smaller the opening the better for the guard bees but you want to make sure you are not blocking normal bee traffic. Another advantage of reducing your entrance is to keep out mice. A mouse can cause major damage to a colony of bees. Ventilation is another key component in winterizing your bees. Bees generate a large amount of water vapor during the winter and that vapor needs a way out of the hive. If you don t provide ventilation at the top of the hive, water vapor will condense on the inner cover and drip down on the bees. Most inner covers have one or more notches on edge for ventilation. Make sure your inner cover is configured so there is a path for the air to escape outside the hive. You will notice your hive top does not fit snugly on top of your hive. Position your hive cover so the gap between the side of your hive cover and the hive body is on the same side as the inner cover ventilation notch. There is one thing you don t want to do when preparing your bees for winter. In our climate you do not need to cover your screened bottom board or wrap your hive with insulation. Insulation tends to overheat the hive making the bees think it is warmer outside than it really is. The bees will fly outside expecting warmer temperatures and die from the cold. Now you are ready for the winter. Have fun with the bees, ~ George

3 Tanging works, with a little seed Okay, fine, call me nutbag-crazy. But I m here to tell you that tanging does, indeed work. It s not just for breakfast (or laughing at) any more. My apiary has been devastated this year, by operator error and just plain bad luck. The cold and wet weather set off a small hive beetle explosion in my back yard. I went from 8 queen-right colonies and 5 starts down to 1. On Sunday, October 28, while watching football and enjoying an all-day pajamas day where my one big effort would be spent making a cozy fire in the fireplace, our dog Honey whined to be let outside. I opened the front door. A little girl was crying across the street, having just fallen off her bike (she was fine, and was being attended to by a gaggle of friends). I decided to skip that scene and get in and out before the team timeout was over and the Denver Broncos got back to beating the snuff out of Washington. I took our dogs quickly to the back yard and let them out. Just two steps out into the yard, I heard the unmistakable sound of a swarm. I looked up and saw the tell-tale circular flying pattern. The entire back yard was filled with honey bees, their wings humming in unison with a purpose. Where are they trying to land? They didn t seem to have a spot picked out as far as I could tell, though some were starting to invetigate a nearby bush. I called the dogs in, who ran quickly through the cloud of bees that stretched from ground level to about 25 feet in the air. We all scurried inside. I threw on my white shirt and jeans, told Yvonne I was going to try to convince my bees to stay (or at least watch the last of my hives leave just like all the others), and said a prayer. I believe that the legendary use of tanging, which is to make a loud clanging or ringing noise (done in the olden times with a pot or pan) works. Now, I ve been called crazy before and have no problem with that. I also believe in UFO s, Bigfoot and ghosts. I think there are things seen just as well as unseen. And, I d read just the other day about having faith the size of a mustard seed in Luke. I ran into our yoga room and grabbed Yvonne s Tibetan singing bowl, a small hand-hammered bronze bowl that sings with the slightest circular motions on the rim with a small wooden mallet. I just knew tanging would work. I could feel it. Regardless I was going to tang those bees. It was the only thing I could do at that point, other than stare in awe. I ve seen a video of someone using a hive tool on the metal portion of a telescoping top. They rapped repeatedly and loudly, and the swarm landed just a few feet from where the person was standing. I researched the myth, and by Tom Davidson photo by Yvonne Brown Good vibrations from this Tibetan singing bowl tang this swarm onto its hive discovered some who say it only works while a swarm is active and hasn t settled. Others say it was originally a way settlers could claim a swarm was theirs, running across neighbors property lines. But, maybe, just maybe, both were true. For whatever reason, I d been called by circumstance, or Providence, to my back yard in the middle of a swarm. I was happy to experience it, sad to see my last bees leaving. As soon as I stepped into the back yard, the sound was even louder than before and the yard was filled with a cloud of bees flying in a great big circle. As it turns out the swarm wasn t that large, but in the middle of em it it sure seemed big. I believed that I could tang them into a desirable place and told myself, I know this will work. I commenced tanging the small metal broze bowl with the wooden mallet. Tang, tang, tang, tang our backyard sounded like an oldfashioned fire alarm going off. I held the bowl up high and tanged even louder. I started going near the bush, and then realized, Heck, I m tanging them to the hive stand instead of this bush. Why not?! Were these my bees? Most likely. But then again swarms are often attracted to bee yards. The hive boxes were 50 feet away. Holding the bowl as high as I could, I took slow steps toward the hives and methodically struck the bowl each second with the wooden mallet. The sound of the bees got louder and louder. About 7 feet in, I realized the swarm was circling around me. It was working! I smiled and reveled in the moment. The view underneath the swarm, a small circular cloud of bees above, was beautiful. ( cont d on page 5 )

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5 Tanging... ( cont d from page 3 ) I continued my slow pace, tanging the bowl and approaching the hive. I knelt close to the hive entrance, and kept on. This time I changed where I was striking the bowl and successfully got a smoother, slightly lower and softer tone than before. I don t know if that made a difference but I sure felt like the Pied Piper. The bees quickly covered the Boardman feeder and hive entrance. I was amazed at how fast it happened. I let the bowl stop on its own and just took it all in. With a quick, excited phone call to George, I told him the news. Tanging works! Bees were indeed going into the hive, one by one, as a few bees were Nasinov fanning at the entrance. A few foragers with a tiny amount of pollen landed and looked utterly confused. Before I realized it, about halftime plus the 3rd quarter of the Denver-Washington game, it was all over (just as fast as those poor Redskins were). When do I inspect the bees? George encouraged me to waste no time. What damage would you do? If they were my bees and were convinced to swarm regardless of this false start there wouldn t be any harm in inspecting. If it was a different swarm of bees that just got settled in, a quick inspection wouldn t convince them to leave, either. I lit my smoker, just in case it was needed (it wasn t). I opened the top nuc box with 5 frames of food stores and a few bees, and placed it to the side. No queen cells were present in the brood chamber. Tight brood pattern, nice food stores, single eggs present, no foul odors, and no small hive beetles seen. Time now to inspect the top box. I removed a frame that I thought my baggie feeder had dripped syrup onto. Then I realized I was looking at small hive beetle larvae, tiny ones, feasting on this food frame. They had slimed just one side. Another frame with only a piece of comb had been slimed also. The other frames were untouched. Only 2 small hive beetles were found, and I dealt them swift justice. The remaining three honey frames were untouched. I took this box and frames off the hive. To be safe, on the slimed frame I performed the rope test with a nearby twig to check for American Foulbrood. A little bit of capped brood was on this otherwise food frame, which was odd. The cells caps weren t sunken, but still I wanted to be sure. Each time I stirred up the larva with the twig it came out clean, white and not at all ropey. I let out a sigh of relief. I went inside with my head hung low, humbled with the knowledge that so very little damage was required to make my bees abscond. If only, if only..., I mentally began to beat myself up. What s that sour look on your face for? Yvonne asked. Well, my last bit of bees almost left, because yet again I d made the same stupid mistake I ve been making photo by a super-excited Tom Davidson all year long with these beetles. Then I realized her question was right on time. It was a different time, a time for thanks and optimism. I had faith that tanging would work, and it did! It was possible to use sound vibrations to direct a swarm. Some may call it a coincidence and that s fine. Me? I call it a mustard seed.... If you had faith as big as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, Pull yourself up by the roots and plant yourself in the sea! and it would obey you. (Luke 17:6). The legendary practice of tanging swarms, something reserved for by and large as a crazy legend that does nothing more than making you look like a fool, fits neatly in with all my other crazy ideas and beliefs. But I tell you, it s not so crazy. Science will teach you there are always exceptions to every rule. And sacred texts will tell you there s more to life than things you can put your finger on. For we fix our attention, not on things that are seen, but on things that are unseen. (2 Corinthians 4:18) Did I get rid of that sour look on my face and start smiling? You bet, because I realize that tanging, and maybe other crazy ideas will work, as long as you give that mustard seed of faith some fertile ground to grow in. I ll be keeping that Tibetan singing bowl in my truck, now, with the rest of my swarm equipment, a happy reminder of those mysterious things like faith that ring true. Bee good, ~ Tom D.

6 Neonicotinoids let virus thrive in bees 21 October 2013 _ Scientists in Italy believe they have found a molecular trigger by which neonicotinoid pesticides may harm colonies of honey bees. The team s experiments suggest that exposure to neonicotinoids results in increased levels of a particular protein in bees that inhibits a key molecule involved in the immune response, making the insects more susceptible to attack by harmful viruses. Francesco Pennacchio, of the University of Naples Federico II, and colleagues identified a gene in insects that codes for a protein family similar to that found in other animals that is known to regulate the immune response. This leucine-rich repeat protein family, or LRR, has been shown to suppress the activity of a key protein involved in immune signaling, called NF- B. When the researchers exposed bees to sub-lethal doses of the neonicotinoid clothianidin they saw a significant increase in the expression of the gene encoding the LRR protein, and a concomitant suppression of the NF- B signalling pathway. These effects were not by Chemistry World Magazine seen when bees were exposed to the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyriphos. When the team infected bees with a common pathogen deformed wing virus and exposed them to clothianidin and another neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, at concentrations similar to those that would be found in the field, there was significantly increased replication of the virus, which was not seen either in untreated bees, or those exposed to chlorpyriphos. The virus is common in bees and usually remains inactive kept in check by the bees immune system. The results suggest that insecticide-induced suppression of bees immune systems lets the virus replicate unchecked. The reported effect on immunity exerted by neonicotinoids will allow additional toxicological tests to be defined to assess if chronic exposure of bees to sub-lethal ( cont d on page 7 ) Dandelion Bee Supply For all your beekeeping needs! Woodenware Protective clothing and tools Fondant / Sugar syrup Package Bees Custom woodenware available upon request Concord, NC Contact: / bees@carolinanc.com

7 Another nail in the coffin for neonicotinoids? ( cont d from page 6 ) doses of agrochemicals can adversely affect their immune system and health conditions, says team member Francesco Nazzi of the University of Udine. Moreover, our data indicate the possible occurrence in insects, as in vertebrates, of a neural modulation of the immune response. This sets the stage for future studies in this research area, and poses the question on how neurotoxic substances may affect the immune response. Susan Kegley runs the Pesticide Research Institute, an independent consultancy in the US. She tells Chemistry World: The EU has already implemented a minimum twoyear suspension of the use of the most toxic neonicotinoid insecticides clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam on bee-attractive crops, to take effect December 1, The US EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] remains unconvinced that neonicotinoids could be a primary factor in recent pollinator population declines. This new study, in conjunction with other observational studies showing enhanced susceptibility to pathogens caused by exposure to neonicotinoids, should prompt US EPA to re-evaluate the science. President - George McAllister, (704) , meckbees@yahoo.com Vice President - Tom Davidson, (704) , tom@tsbeeshoney.com Treasurer - Libby Mack, (704) , mack.bees@gmail.com Membership Secretary - Sam Bomar, (704) , sam@theiag.com Chaplain - Jimmy Odom, jimmy.odom@gmail.com Webmaster - Kevin Freeman, f 3128, meckbees@gmail.com MCBA Newsletter 7623 Glencannon Dr. Charlotte, NC 28227