Kim Flottum Visits MABA and Speaks on Preparing for Winter

Metro Atlanta was privileged to have Kim Flottum speak to our club at our monthly meeting last week.  He talked about overwintering bees and after a break, addressed the small hive beetle problem. 

 I always enjoy hearing Kim speak - he's conservative in his approach to beekeeping and I appreciate that.



Kim lives in Ohio and he was shocked to find out that in Atlanta we only need about 40 - 50 pounds of honey on a hive for it to have enough to survive the winter.  Apparently in Ohio, he needs to leave a hive with 145 pounds of food for the winter.



Another interesting thing he said was that  when it is cold outside, the bees in cluster need to have holes in the honeycomb to more easily travel across the frames to the honey source.  I've noticed in foundationless beekeeping that the bees often leave space (holes) in the comb they draw - passageways, as it were.



The most important thing he said the whole night came in this slide:



If we have put bees in a box to live and we are "keeping" them, then it is our responsibility to do everything possible to keep them alive.  Made me feel so much better about feeding my bees last fall and this fall to make sure they make it through the winter.

In the Red at GBA

GBA was an interesting meeting. I had fun seeing beekeeping friends from all over the state. I enjoyed the connections.

Amazingly they didn't ask for an evaluation of the meeting, which may reflect a money issue or may mean they don't want feedback. I desperately wanted to give feedback - they didn't have a timer for the speakers so the speakers often ran over or were short of time; the speakers could have been more stimulating in their topics; there was no food except for snacks at the breaks - I would have gladly paid for dinner with my registration; they didn't supply the agenda ahead of time on their webpage - maybe they knew the speakers' topics and didn't want to share ahead of time???

I heard three good speakers - Keith Delaplane, Kim Flottum and a woman from Locust Grove, Kathy Henderson, who isn't a beekeeper but is a fabulous gardener and talked about plants for bees. I went to a workshop with Kim Flottum on marketing varietal and artisanal honey which was top-notch.

Above is Keith, talking about the CAP grant and what they are learning. He reiterated what I have heard him say many times that he himself has only seen one case of CCD in all these years. His CAP grant is looking at bee decline and the many contributing factors.

Below is Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture, who is talking about marketing honey. I loved his perspective which was find something to make your honey unique. For example, he described how he has three pines in his front yard - one of which has been struck by lightning. He can call his honey "Broken Tree Honey" and everyone in his area knows where the honey location is!

Note:  Feedback I would have loved the opportunity to give - for the first 15 minutes of Kim's talk there was a mother with small children playing games in the back of the room.  They were not quiet and very distracting - why were they not asked to play somewhere else before the workshop started?  They were not there to hear the workshop, but were playing in there before the workshop began.

Our Metro Atlanta club had this display for our club entry in the honey show. It had to include 16 pounds of honey. The background cut from wood by my friend, Jay, is our MABA logo, and my friend, Jerry, cut the honeycomb hexagons that rotate and form the stand on which the honey, wax, etc. sits.

I entered light honey, medium honey, chunk honey, a photo of the bees, and the quilted bag that I made (in the photo above) into the honey contest. My light and medium didn't place, but my chunk honey came home with a red ribbon as did the quilted bag and the photo - three red ribbons for me in the event.

Earlier post on talks I've heard with Kim Flottum can be found here

Earlier posts on talks from Keith Delaplane are here and here 

Kim Flottum at Young Harris Beekeeping Institute

I'm very glad to share with all of you some of what I learned at Young Harris. You realize, of course, that you are only getting my take on what the speakers shared and that may not be entirely accurate! I encourage you, if there are beekeeping gatherings - meetings, conferences, local speakers - in your area, go to hear them.

Beekeeping is an art as well as a science. I learned SO much at Young Harris, as I did last year as well. Every speaker brings his/her own perspective and good ideas.

We were so lucky to have with us Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine and author of The Backyard Beekeeper. I heard him speak on two topics.

Here he is talking about "The Many Uses of Nucs." He doesn't think of nucs as devices for making splits. Instead he uses nucs as a source of "spare parts" in the bee yard. By this he said he meant that with a five frame nuc that is thriving, you could take out a frame of brood or honey to give to a hive in need of either. And the use of nucs can provide special "spare parts:" extra queens, should you need them.


In addition to the above wisdom, he suggested a unique method of requeening. He starts the nuc with five frames (his rationale for the five frame nuc is that it is convenient to buy nucs that size). He only uses medium boxes, so he buys medium nucs.

He puts together the nuc with 2 frames of mostly eggs, one of sealed brood, one of honey and pollen and one foundation or drawn comb. He takes these frames out of strong hives and gives one shake to get most of the bees off of them, leaving the young nurse bees still on the frame, before adding them to the nuc. This is the core of a hive and with these resources, they make themselves a queen.

After the queen is up and working the nuc to build it up, if Flottum has a queenless hive, he removes five frames from that hive and substitutes the five frames from the nuc and presto! he has requeened. The five frames he removed from the hive go into the nuc (including a frame on which there is a queen cell or a new egg) and he begins the process again. Sounds like no fuss, no bother.

He sometimes even overwinters nucs...and he's in very cold state, not Georgia where we should fairly easily be able to overwinter a nuc colony.

After his talk, I went to the Brushy Mountain vendor table and ordered two medium nucs. I've had queenless situations in both of my two beekeeping summers and this sounds like a painless way around the problem.




In the second talk I heard Kim Flottum give, he talked about using the web to access beekeeping resources. I must admit that I have never looked at the Bee Culture website as anything other than a link to the magazine. Well, think again. It's a fabulous link to so many helpful beekeeping resources.

For example, if you click on The Science of Beekeeping, it takes you to the many universities who have bee labs, newsletters about apiculture, and research information. Among many others Flottum talked about the University of Nebraska where you can read about the origin of the powered sugar treatment for varroa mites, UC Davis, which has an outstanding newsletter from the Dept of Entomology. Assuming you don't get distracted by the wisdom-filled university web pages on bees and bee labs, if you continue scrolling down the science of beekeeping page, you can find links to the Department of Agriculture for all the states and for Canada.

You can also click on "Catch the Buzz" to sign up for Flottum's own newsletter. Since he had praised a number of University entomology newsletters, he joked about how after his talk, all of us would have very full email boxes!

Bees, Books and Honey

I am in a women's book club that meets monthly. At our meetings the hostess generally serves food that fits the book - either food that was mentioned in the book or food that relates in some other way to the book.

Last year in my first year as a beekeeper, I had chosen (pre-my own bees) Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as the selection for my turn in October. There's a wonderful passage in the book about bees, as it turns out. Janie, the heroine, has spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree. Here is the passage (it's rather seductive):

"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!"

a little later:

"Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?"
So in response to this part of the book, I gave all of the women who came to the meeting jars of honey to take home.

This year I wanted to do the same thing - give the members honey to take home and I wanted to have a book for which bees played a significant part, so that I could make food that all had to do with honey. Everyone had read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and just about everyone has either seen or read Fried Green Tomatoes (although wouldn't that be fun to have fried green tomatoes!) so I couldn't suggest those titles.

I searched Amazon and ordered a number of books:

The Beekeeper's Apprentice - by Laurie R. King
A good book but has very little actually about bees. It's based on the premise that Sherlock Holmes retired and became a beekeeper. There's a wonderful passage right at the beginning about bee-lining, but other than that the bees are like wallpaper for the mystery and play a very side-line role.

The Honey Thief - by Elizabeth Graver
I liked this book about an unhappy little girl who befriends a neighborhood beekeeper. Early on we learn that the child takes things that aren't hers and this applies to her beekeeping relationship as well. Somehow it didn't quite work for me as the book for this year's book club.

Beeing: Life, Motherhood and 180,000 Honeybees - by Rosanne Thomas
This is a nonfiction book about a woman who learns a lot about life and herself when she becomes a beekeeper. She sort of fell into beekeeping so I identify with her and her struggles parallel some of my own with the bees. While I loved reading this book, I thought my book club members who were not actual beekeepers would not particularly find it as intriguing as I did.

A Hive of Suspects: An Irish Village Mystery - by Sheila Pim
This wonderful little book has been republished by Rue Morgue Press. It is about a murder, closely linked to bees. The victim was a beekeeper and for a while, it looks as if the bees may have murdered their keeper. The author, who was also a fabulous gardener, weaves so much interesting knowledge about beekeeping into the fabric of the story that I thought even the non beekeeper would find it fascinating. The beekeeping while always playing significantly in the background does not dominate the plot. I thought it would be perfect.

The meeting is on Tuesday night, and I've had some feedback from a few members that they liked the book, but we'll see for sure on Tuesday.

I'm serving all honey based food. We're having:

Honey-baked Chicken from Kim Flottum's The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 129)
Honey Carrots (also from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 142))
Apple Salad from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 148)
Biscuits with my own cut comb honey from The Gourmet Cookbook (p. 596) - which despite the terrible yellow unreadable titles for the recipes is one of the best cookbooks I own, and this is the best biscuit recipe ever - better even than my southern mother's recipe.

My daughter gave me for Mother's Day a cake pan that bakes a honey skep cake from Williams Sonoma that came with its own recipe for Lemon Beehive Cake - so we'll have that for dessert.

I'll take pictures and let you know how it all comes out.