The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA PUBLISHED BY MICHIANA BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION Saturday, August 18 we will meet at Danny Slabaugh's home, 26123 C R 52, Northeast of Nappanee. Turn East at the traffic light at S. R. 19 and C. R. 52. Go almost 2 miles. Danny lives on the North side of 52 just before you reach C. R. 9. (41o 27' 29.57" N 85o 57' 57.63" W) Danny's home We will start at 9 a.m. and be done about noon. Bring a sample of your honey along to be County Road 52 checked for moisture content and maybe tasted by others. Danny will probably be showing us something to do with his queen rearing. Danny specializes in mature queen cells rather than mated queens. Once again bring bee suit, gloves, veil if they make you comfortable and a lawn chair. County Road 9 Behind pond AUGUST 2012 MBA CONTACTS PRESIDENT Bob Baughman 574-276-3959 bob.deb.baughman@sbcglobal.net VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives 574-910-0060 liquidgold2009@embarqmail.com TREASURER David Emerson 574-295-1855 emerson3434@msn.com EDITOR Henry Harris 574-875-9617 henry4744@frontier.com From the MBA President, Bob Baughman. Rain FINALLY arrived in mid July! I wish to reflect back on the may 2012 MBA club meeting held in Middlebury at the picturesque Lehman Family Farm. The perfect setting for our annual event. Norm Lehman and family are to be commended for the extraordinary effort put forth by all family members. The transformation of the beautiful farm setting into a meeting forum was outstanding. Mrs. Lehman begins days in advance, planning her table of good "snacks" for us. Her Noodles are a staple for our carry-in luncheon on Auction day. The addition of the staging tent was a big hit, something here to stay for future gatherings. The gentlemen who erected the tent and tore it down afterwards, a job well done and appreciated by all. Additional bathroom facilities with wash stands were welcomed. Norm's brother-in-law, Dave, stepped in and ran the paperwork required to hold an auction. organizationally. His skill were extremely valuable. Thank you. A huge benefit To the Emersons organized the registration and identification tags, or more appropriately put, they staged the signing in operation to it the event. Many hours of preparation took place, it payed off, and also for the follow up of the event, thank you for that extra effort! Thanks to Debbie Baughman and Amber Cecil for working the registration table. Congratulations are in order to Amber and Ken Cecil upon the arrival of a baby boy! What would an event be without refreshments - Tim Ives for the iced liquids. A welcome product on a hot day in May. "You are the Man!" I want to thank Mrs. Graham for allowing Roger to travel North and MC the auction as our auctioneer. Roger, the wit and charm was overwhelming to a crowd bent on purchasing everything you called out. We are grateful for your service
and hope to have you returning for years to come. You make the afternoon enjoyable for all! Thank you. To the numerous folks who traveled long distances, Rochester, South of Fort Wayne, Kalamazoo, and Chicago. Events like the May meeting bring in folks who normally do not attend regularly, individuals who are avid beekeepers with talents and ideas to share with the local folks. Our break sessions reveal that every time. Folks huddle up and talk about things critical at the moment for their bee yards. MICHIANA is home to very generous folks. When asked if they cared to donate additional funds to help offset our club expenses for having such a notable speaker as Randy Oliver, it was met with enthusiasm. Our thanks to everyone who was able to donate. It is greatly appreciated. Auction items. Various items found their way to the auction table this year. Wine, maple syrup, honey, wall hangings, bees, queens and hive bodies. Ray Oliveres and Wooten queens were a great donation. It meant a lot coming from two global queen production companies. Thank you. I was fortunate to be able to arrange for Dr. Randy Oliver of California to be our main speaker for the May meeting. Randy, thank you for traveling to Northern Indiana and speaking to the MICHIANA Beekeepers. The time Randy spent here in MICHIANA was two fold. Randy did research for his July ABJ article while in our company. Danny Slabaugh, who was Randy Oliver's personal host, saw to it that Randy had a place to sleep and got him to and from events. Overall, time spent with Randy will pay off in the years to come for all of us. Randy had a knack for conversation, non-stop regarding BEES. What we heard on Saturday was the tip of the iceberg so to speak. Danny is still remembering things discussed, two months removed from the visit. Many thanks to the Slabaugh family for allowing Randy Oliver to spend two nights under their roof. Note: lodging was a last minute ordeal, conflicting with local university graduations. Numerous folks met with Randy on location at Tim's various bee yards to exchange mid-west beekeeping culture with a western commercial beekeeper. Tim had Randy grasping for words when he saw the tall hives with corn fields in the background. The experience was overwhelming for all who attended. Thank you Tim for allowing everyone to view your yards. In closing, I wish to compliment everyone who attended our May meeting, members and guests. memorable day for all. Not sure who will be our 2013 speaker but I can assure you 2012 will be talked about for many years to come! Thanks to all for everything. Bob Baughman. 2012 Meeting Schedule It was a GPS Saturday, August 18, Danny Slabaugh's, Nappanee 41o 27' 29.57 N 85o 57' 57.63 W Saturday, September 15, Warsaw 41o 14' 14.97 N 85o 51' 27.71 W Saturday, October 27, Nelson's Port-a-Pit, Wakarusa 41o 31' 34.12 N 86o 00' 37.36 W Custom Extracting: 35c per pound plus the cappings.
Imagine my surprise a week or so ago when I saw honey bees working buckhorn. I have often seen tiny miniature solitary bees working it but never honey bees. There were several bees working the buckhorn in an unused gravel driveway. They were obviously collecting both nectar and pollen. The pollen was a pale cream. Initially the head is green and looks like a small pine cone. The head begins to bloom at the bottom and resembles a tiny 4th of July sparkler as the blooms open progressively higher. The head may even grow longer to prolong the bloom. Below the blooms seeds develop. It is not very pretty but it is a flower and one that honey bees like and use. Wandering with an Old Timer by Henry Harris I have just had my first experience with Small Hive Beetle (shb) larvae. Like everyone else I have had the black bugs for several years but they have never been more than an occasional curiosity in my hives. I would squash one if it was convenient but there were never enough to warrant a beetle hunt or the use of traps. I witnessed the massive, wholesale destruction of two of a friend's hives, worse than what you see in this picture. It was a mess and there was no way to make any sense of what we saw. My experience was with a nuc and it was enlightening as well as interesting. Once again this summer I made a number of nucs in 6 frame medium boxes and some did well and some did not. I ran out of 6 frame nuc boxes so I did what I have told you not to do: I started a four frame nuc in a 10 frame medium box. I never gave shb a thought. The nuc seemed to be coming along well. We never saw the queen to mark her but there were eggs and larvae so there was no reason to worry. After some time I opened the hive to see if I could find and mark the queen. There were no bees or brood in the box but there was plenty of honey and pollen and there were shb larvae. Not masses of larvae like above, but they were crawling in and out of cells (left) and 6 of the ten frames were shiny with their slime. The shine and glisten you see in the picture at bottom left is not nectar or honey, it is the slime that shb larvae produce. The slime covered most of the 6 frames. At right the area inside the red line is shiny and darker from slime but the areas outside the line are dry and wholesome looking.
Literature says the slime is from the shb and its larvae defecating on the honey which causes it to ferment. The slime weeps from the honey and spreads like mold. There was no slime or larvae on the 4 empty frames in the nuc. I had read that the slime can be washed off and the frames reused, so I tried it. I sprayed the frames with my garden hose and most of the pollen was washed out of the cells and some of the honey. I made a point of spraying the larvae out of the cells and onto the parched, brown grass in the sun. I beat the frames on the ground to knock the water from the cells and any larvae that I may have missed. The frames did not look "clean" of the slime but I trusted the writers in the bee magazines on this. I opened a strong hive and put 5 of the frames in a brood box and closed it up. I broke the lug or ear on the 6th frame (beating shb larvae out of the cells) so I sat it out on the other side of the yard for the bees to clean out without starting robbing. I'll repair it later. By the next day no bees went near the 6th frame. Bees were still bringing in nectar and making honey so that did not bother me. When there is nectar to collect bees will seldom pay any attention to honey spilled outside the hive. An interesting thing was that there were no ants on the frame either and ants will eat anything. Ants were steadily working on something not far away so I lay the frame down right over their route of travel but the ants would not touch the frame. Out of curiosity I went to the hive I had put the other 5 frames in to check on them. I found all of them just as slimy as before I had supposedly cleaned them. There were shb larvae crawling on the frames, probably some I failed to wash away and some hatched from eggs I had also failed to get rid of and there were a number of adult beetles on those frames. Shb were not evident in numbers anywhere else in the hive so they were taking advantage of the bee repellency of the slime to have a party. I pulled the frames out and raked open the capped honey and set them out for whatever might want to eat the honey. After a day I found some bees and ants, but not many, working on honey I had raked open but going nowhere near the slimy areas. Now several days later most of the honey has been removed but the frames are still slimy. Bob said he had good results from dunking the frames vigorously in a pail of water. I will give it a try but I have almost concluded that the only effective way to deal with slimed combs, their larvae and eggs, is to scrape the wax off down to the plastic foundation, melt it down and let the bees rebuild the comb next year. In trying to find out more about shb, since I have had more than a casual brush with it now, not devastating like some have had, but enough to make me want to know more, I have tried to turn it into an educational experience. One of our members stated at our Plymouth meeting that he believed the shb were eating honey bee brood. He was right!
SHB do eat honey bee brood! Several on-line reports describe adult shb as scavengers which do best when eating honey and pollen but do also eat honey bee brood. Shb larvae are chips off the old block and will eat anything the adults will. Shb adult females will open capped brood cells and deposit their eggs right on the developing bee pupae as you can see at right. Adult shb carry a yeast on them which, when it contacts stored pollen in the hive, creates a smell similar to the bee's alarm scent. You can imagine that this would cause a state of constant alarm and confusion in the hive. Combine this alarming smell in the hive with the repulsive slime that shb larvae spread in their wake with their stopping the growth of the colony by eating the future generations what honey bee colony would choose to remain? Nearly from the beginning of our experiences with shb I have pushed economy of space and strength of the colony as ways to prevent shb from taking over a hive. I was wrong. According to local experience and published reports sometimes something just triggers shb to make an all out attack and that is all there is to it. Both Bob Baughman and Nancy Baker had strong colonies taken over and destroyed by shb. The small things like controlling space, using shb traps, keeping hives in full sun and even painting them a darker color (shb are heat sensitive) may help reduce the likelihood of a takeover but cannot be counted on to do the whole job. The entrance trap pictured here was developed in Australia. The top of the trap has bee removed and is sitting against the front of the hive. Shb like to fly just about dusk. They land at the entrance and scuttle into the hive. All hive traffic goes in and out through this plastic sleeve, most walking over the screen covered oil tray. The openings in fall through but loose their hold beetles that may leave. the screen are too small for bees to shb will go through and hopefully and fall into the oil. Same for any have gotten into the hive and try to Shb larvae on their way out of the hive to pupate in the ground must also cross the screen and will most likely end up in the drink too. In the picture notice the bees crawling on the sides of the sleeve. A shb doing the same would avoid the screen. Above is the second generation trap improved to minimize any accidental avoidance of the trap.
Bees and beetles must enter at the white arrow, travel up the tube, under the screen, and up through the rectangular opening into the hive. The distance from screen to comb is 3/8", just right for a bee to reach. The only way for the smaller shb to get to the combs is to walk across the screen to the sides increasing the likelihood that it will fall into the oil filled tray below. Same with shb larvae trying to leave the hive to pupate. A study posted just this July by Duehl, Arbogast, Sheridan, and Teal says that both shb and shb larvae are attracted to light. The addition of a small LED light emitting in the 390nm wavelength, which is ultraviolet-a, to almost any shb trap will increase the efficiency of the trap by 10 fold for adult shb and 20 fold for shb larvae. Along the same line as the idea of light, the inventors of the improved Australian trap were considering window screen covered vents around the sides of the oil tray which would certainly attract shb and their older larvae looking for a way out of the hive, down through the screen and into the oil and not require an electrical hookup. The research team found that hanging a lighted trap in a dark room did not do better at attracting shb than an unlighted trap. However, in enclosed spaces, hives or stacks of supers, LED lights improved the capture of shb and shb larvae. They believed this holds promise for the storage of empty combs and full or empty combs in honey extracting facilities. Nucs grow slowly when left to themselves since they must divide their population between foraging for nectar, pollen, water, and propolis and tuning nectar into honey, pollen into bee bread, feed larvae and warm pupae. Nucs must be fed to make them grow faster. Those nucs you started in July to increase your colony numbers or just to replace anticipated winter losses must have about 100 pounds of winter stores in the hives by mid to late September. Nearly all natural sources of nectar will be gone by mid September and by late September the cool weather will make conversion of sugar syrup into a honey substitute much harder than in warm weather. Nucs can be fed sugar syrup now to build their population for both nectar and pollen gathering and to produce the crop of winter bees that will get the hive through to Spring. You want them to store this syrup as a honey substitute so make it thicker than Spring feeding: 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. The water needs to be hot enough to dissolve all that sugar but do not let it boil after adding the sugar. If you would rather not feed sugar syrup you can feed your bees YOUR OWN honey. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER feed your bees any honey but your own. Honey off the supermarket shelf that is clear, light and tastes good may contain, or even probably does contain, American Foul Brood (AFB) spores. You would be kinder to your bees to
let them starve. Do not even give them your neighbor's honey because he could have AFB. Do not give your bees MY honey. Nobody else's honey but your own is safe to feed to your bees. I hope you take that seriously. The one and two colony hobbyist may not understand what he is seeing or may not look and nearly all large scale beekeepers do not have time, or the financial inclination, to do anything but dust with Terramycin, which only suppresses AFB but does not kill it or prevent it from being spread. Only heat kills AFB. So back to your own honey. Did you save some frames of honey back in the Spring or maybe last Summer? Frames can easily be put into a hive. They will not stimulate brood rearing but will be there as winter feed. Killed by AFB If you have a colony that needs feed and want to use stored frames of honey to sustain them place the combs of honey next to the brood nest and rake the honey open with your hive tool or a cappings scratcher. While bees will usually ignore open honey outside the hive when there is nectar to gather they cannot stand honey running loose inside the hive. They will rush to clean it up and restore the damaged comb or move the honey to a more convenient place for them to use it. Now if you want to feed a colony extracted honey, your own of course, you can drizzle it around over frame top bars or on the inner cover. Just do not pour in so much that it runs out of the hive and attracts ants. A little several times a day over several days can get a lot of honey into a hive. Be sure there is empty drawn comb for the bees to put the honey into. They will not draw out foundation on this honey, it is too late in the year. Honey can be diluted with water and fed like sugar syrup but you must me careful so you do not make the honey ferment. Add no more than 1/3rd water to the honey then warm and stir until it is thoroughly mixed. Do not let it boil or burn, burnt honey or sugar is hard for bees to digest and may give them diarrhea. Mix up only small amounts at a time or you will waste your honey. Both of these methods are time consuming and tedious. It is much better to be able to move full supers of honey for a large colony onto your nuc.
Here a beekeeper is feeding creamed honey or crystallized honey to his bees right from the jar during a time of no nectar flow. It looks like a slow, non messy way to feed honey to bees. I hope it was his own honey. Most of your MBA leadership do not treat for varroa mites with chemicals. We have become convinced that chemical residues in beeswax does more harm to bees and honey in the long run that they do good in the short term. However, if you choose to use chemicals you need to understand that the mites you need to kill are the mites on the bees now. You need a low mite population by September so your Winter Bees will not be parasitized and damaged as they go from larva through pupa to adult. You need what Randy Oliver calls 'Fat Bees' to go through Winter. This means that they carry a form of body fat that Spring and Summer bees do not have and which will allow them to produce Royal Jelly and worker jelly (protein) to keep the colony healthy through the winter and to be able to feed brood in late Winter and early Spring much later in life than their Spring and Summer sister could produce these jellies. So if you are going to treat for varroa mites start by the middle of August so you will be done by the end of September. Take honey supers off before you start treating so your honey will not become contaminated by the chemicals and do not break the treatment before the allotted time has run through. If you make a break in the middle of the treatment for any reason you give the mites a chance to recover and encourage resistance in any mites not killed outright. I have to admit that I have failed you in that since I do not use treatments for varroa I have not learned what is available in 'soft' treatments and how to use them,so read the labels carefully and check to see what on line sources say. "Sources", more than two and four would be better to be sure you are not being led wrong by an over enthusiastic person who does not really understand how to use it themselves. In July there are lots of workers and drones in the hive and lots of brood for the mite population to be spread around on so any one bee pupa is not usually infested by more than one mite. July In August nectar is getting scarce so the nurse bees are slowing the queen down in egg laying so dying bees are not replaced one for one. The mite population does not die off with the bees. More mites crowd onto the dwindling number of bees and into the cells of available brood.
August If you have not started killing varroa mites in August by September the large mite population is crowded onto even fewer bees and more mites are entering cells with larvae to reproduce. September In this last case it is your winter bees that are being infested by multiple mites laying multiple eggs and crippling your bees by loss of blood as well as being injected with any number of debilitating viruses. I prefer to invest is bees bred to resist or remove mites than in chemicals that contaminate bees wax so that the residue in the wax eventually begins crippling and killing worker larvae, drone larvae, and queen larvae. Do not forget to bring a sample of your honey to the meeting at Danny Slabaugh's. Danny's early honey tested at 15% but that was before it began to rain in the middle of July. Once the drought ended the honey would begin registering higher moisture content. If you had drier honey extracted and sitting in a less than tight container it would slowly take on moisture. Honey is 'hygroscopic' meaning it absorbs moisture. So keep your buckets tight and extract as fast as you take the honey off the hive. Think ahead and put your extracted honey into containers that you can decrystallize in. Be sure the container will withstand the heat of decrystallizing and that the container is not to big to fit into whatever you will be warming it in. That heat should never be higher than 110 o so that you do not burn the honey. Slow warming is better than fast and remember to stir the honey. If the whole container has crystallized solid the honey closest to the heat source could burn while inches away the honey is still solid.