Registration is Open for the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Short Course!

This year my friend and fellow beekeeper, Julia Mahood, and I are the co-chairs for the MABA short course.  The course is a one day event from 8:30 - 4:30 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden on January 18, 2014.

If you are in the Atlanta area or know someone who would love to start keeping bees, please sign up!
It's a great day of learning and finding out lots of tips and tricks about being a beekeeper.  We have a good line up of experienced and Master Beekeepers to provide tons and tons of information.  A good lunch is provided with vegetarian and gluten-free options and we are going to have a great day.

Historically the course sells out long before the day of the course so you have to sign up ahead of time.
Here's the SIGN UP PAGE!


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Come one, come all!

Inspection at the new Chastain Conservancy Site

This year we are holding inspections at the Chastain Conservancy.  We still have hives at the Blue Heron, but with vandalism, critters, and floods, we needed a new site for teaching new beekeepers.  We now are grateful to have use of the land at the Chastain Conservancy.

It's a great site - Noah, Julia and I each have a hive there and hold teaching inspections about monthly during bee season.  It's a sunny spot, near water, the hives face east - only one drawback - it's directly in the middle of the Chastain golf course and I've never inspected the hive there without an errant golf ball flying into the apiary.

Perhaps we should wear hard hats!!!

Here's a slide show of our most recent inspection.  You'll notice me doing a powdered sugar shake and Noah collecting bees to do a powdered sugar roll to count varroa mites (we only counted ONE).



 Be sure to click on the slide show to see the pictures bigger and to read the captions, once I have gotten them up!

The Chastain Conservancy is located in an old Quonset hut.  You'll see it in the background...

Metro Atlanta Short Course coming up in January - Register NOW

If you are in the Atlanta area, the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Association offers a fabulous short course for beginning beekeepers that happens this coming January on January 24, 2009 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The focus is always on helping one get started "bee-ing" a beekeeper and you'll find it well worth your while if you are within driving distance of Atlanta. We actually had a beekeeper from Mississippi come to take our course last year!

A good description of what will be offered and what you may learn can be found here.

If you sign up after reading this, be sure and tell them that you read about it on my blog! I'd love to know if writing about it here has any impact.

Talk at Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Association

Tonight I was part of a panel called "Everything Honey." Jerry Wallace and I were to talk about harvesting honey. We went together well since he uses an extractor and I do not. I talked about four honey harvest methods: Jar to Jar, Crush and Strain, Chunk Honey and Cut Comb Honey. Jerry talked about extracting and how different honeys come at different times of the year.



I had four slideshows - one on each topic above and I showed my video on Crush and Strain.
I'll try to post the slides in a single group later.

It's the Little Things.....

At Young Harris Beekeeping Institute this year, I heard two different people talk about making splits in the summer to disrupt the varroa mite life cycle and to take care of your bees. One of the problems for me with using nucs to make splits is that the nuc I own is a deep (as most nucs are) and I am trying to move to all medium boxes.

The vendor at Young Harris, Brushy Mountain, offers a medium nuc that comes with two boxes. I ordered two at the meeting. I have to confess that when they arrived, the nucs looked like doll houses for bees. I've left them unbuilt for a couple of months.

Yesterday I needed to harvest some honey for a panel that I am going to participate in at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' meeting tonight. As I thought about bringing in the honey and thought about how heavy a full super (medium) is, I remembered the bee doll houses.


I built two of the boxes right away. BTW, the medium nuc is a two box nuc, each a five frame 6 5/8" depth.



What a joy it was to carry the honey frames into the house in these small boxes - so much lighter. The boxes are designed for five frames and if I were doing it really correctly, I would have placed a space holder fifth frame in each of the boxes since I was harvesting an 8 frame super. However, it's only a few steps from my hives to my back door, so I brought the light, light (comparatively) boxes in one at a time.



Although I plan to use the medium nucs I bought to make splits, I will also be using them for honey harvest carrying going forward!

Honeybee Botany and Dr. Paul Arnold

Tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' meeting, Dr. Paul Arnold spoke to us about Honeybee Botany. Paul is a professor and researcher at Young Harris College and I have met him several times. He spoke to us last year about palynology and he was one of the teachers in the Journey(wo)man course I took at Young Harris.

He talked tonight about basic plant biology - the difference in fertilization and pollination as well as the parts of the plant and how they function. I had learned all about perfect and imperfect flowers at Young Harris. Here's a summary of my notes:

1. He described the two types of imperfect flowers: Monoecious and Dioecious. These two terms have Latin roots. Mono means "one" and Di means "two" The "Ecious" part comes from the same root as "ecology" and means "house" So if Monoecious means "one house" that refers to a plant in which the staminate and pistillate flowers are both on the same plant - like corn and cucumber. A Dioecious or "two house" plant refers to a plant that has staminate and pistillate flowers on different plants - such as holly where there is a male and female shrub or the ginko tree where there are male and female trees.

2. Bees find the flowers that they pollinate in several ways - some flowers have UV markers on their petals. Bees don't see red so if they are attracted to a red flower, it is not because of the color, but rather because of something else like UV markers or scent. Bees seek out flowers which will give them the reward of nectar or pollen. Sometimes the scent of the flower draws the bee.

3. Bees make good pollinators for several reasons. First they have perennial colonies which have large populations (lots of pollinators). Second, bees only eat nectar and pollen - they don't eat anything else and aquiring nectar or pollen results in pollination every time the bees seeks food. Bees have plumose body hairs that collect pollen easily ("plumose" means having feathery hair as bees do all over their bodies). Bees tend to stick to one type flower per trip. So if a bee goes out foraging to get nectar from the holly tree, she moves from holly flower to holly flower, rather than to two or three kinds of flowers at once. This makes it easy for her to carry pollen from one holly flower to another. Finally bees are good pollinators because the hives can be manipulated as well as moved to increase effectiveness.

4. The attractants for bees to flowers include sight: nectar guides on petals, color, pattern, and movement of the flower
and scent: the bees hold the scent memory for up to five days.

Finally he got to an explanation of my abelia.

5. Some plants, including abelia (I asked him), have "extra-floral nectaries." Looking at the trumpet shape of the abelia flower, it's hard to imagine a little honeybee sticking her body in far enough to stick her tongue in far enough to get the nectar. But as I reported in last night's post, both the bunblebees and the honeybees appeared to be getting nectar from where the flower meets the sepals.

In many flowers, the nectary is in the center of the bloom. But in the case of abelia and tulip poplar and many others, there is an extra-floral nectary. This is exactly what it sounds like: a nectar source outside the petals of the flower. This is the case with abelia and this explains why the bees are hanging on the outside of the flower to get to the nectary at its base.


If you enlarge this picture by clicking on it, you can see that the bumblebee is on the outside of the flower, slurping nectar from the extra-floral nectary.

Rare Day - Snow on my Beehives

It snowed off and on all day today - an unusual winter occurrence in Atlanta. The bees, wise as they are, apparently remained indoors, as well they should. Temperatures are supposed to be in the 20s tonight, so I don't expect to see bees before next week when it warms up.

I spent today at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Short Course, held in spite of the inclement weather. I had a small role on the agenda and did the "goody bags" which we gave to the participants. We had a fantastic turnout and I hope will end up with inspired new beekeepers as well as new members of our Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Club.

Goody Bags for the Short Course

It's my job to put together the "goody bags" for the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Short Course that happens this Saturday, January 19th at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. (not too late to register, if you're interested)

The goody bag is a compilation of wonderful items that I put in the bag, but that come from other places - it's a great gift for the participants, if I say so, myself.Included in the goody bag are:

• American Bee Journal
• Bee Culture Magazine
• A catalog from Walter T Kelley Company
• Some have catalogs from Rossman Apiaries
• Others have Dadant catalogs
• Each person gets a copy of First Lessons in Beekeeping by Dr. Keith Delaplane
• Some literature from the National Honey Board
• A gift certificate to go on a hive inspection led by a Metro Beekeeper at the Atlanta Botanical Garden beehives
• A list of Internet resources
• A handmade pinecone candle
• A jar of honey
• A container of my lip balm (!)
• A votive candle

It's like going to a party - the participants at the Short Course will have a lot of fun, get to eat together and talk bees, and go home with a goody bag full of treasures.

Jennifer Berry and Queen Rearing

Tonight Jennifer Berry talked to the Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Club meeting about queen rearing. She talked a little about grafting, but focused on choosing the bees from which to rear your new queen. I was most interested in what she said about hygienic queens.

She chooses the hive from which to make a queen based on many factors including honey production (which she said was 15% genetics and 85% management), hygenic behavior, gentleness, and several other factors. She said to determine whether a queen was raising bees who were hygenic, you can do the following:

• Cut a section of comb out of a brood frame - about 3- 4 inches round or square
  
• Count the number of empty cells, ones with pollen, or ones with honey so you'll know how many in the section did not contain brood to begin with
  
• Freeze the section overnight in the freezer
• Return the section to the brood frame and toothpick it back in place
• The next day (24 hours later) check on the section and count the empty cells.
  

Since all of the brood in the frozen section will now be dead, what you want to find is that the bees have cleaned out the cells in the section. This will be a great indicator of good hygenic behavior and will then indicate a hive from which to raise a queen. If they don't do a good job of cleaning out the dead cells, then you wouldn't choose to raise a queen from this hive.

Isn't that fascinating?

BTW, her reference for a good book about queen rearing is Successful Queen Rearing by Spivak.

Entering honey contests

I'm no expert in honey contests, but my comments on my videos about bottling honey have brought questions about honey contests, so I thought I'd post about it. Honey contest judging is based mostly on how the beekeeper handles the honey. The beekeeper doesn't make the honey so the honey itself is only occasionally judged for taste in such things as black jar contests. The honey judge does taste the honey and points would be taken off if the honey tasted bad or tasted contaminated, which could reflect on how the beekeeper handled the honey.

The main honey judging is on how you handle the jar of honey. This comes down to packaging cleanliness. You are not supposed to have any human fingerprints on the inside or outside of the jar. There should be a clean rim of the jar - not sticky honey between the top of the jar and the lid. When you are cleaning the jar for entry into the contest, you have to be careful not to get cloth fibers in the jar - a man's linen handkerchief is recommended for avoiding fibers.

There are guidelines on the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers web page for how to prepare your honey for a contest. Another wonderful guide on how to think about preparing honey for honey contests is here. Ultimately it comes down to how clean your jars are from lid down and how clear your honey is (indicating how you filtered it). But as the writer in the University of Florida guide referenced second says, "Judging honey is not like evaluating other commodities. The product itself is not examined so much as the care the exhibitor takes in putting it up for show."
However, honey should taste like the delicious honey it is, and the judges do taste the entries.

Here is an example of the honey contest rules for EAS 2006 honey contest. You'll notice that while taste is one of the items to which the judge pays attention, it is last on the list. I noted in red the cleanliness issues:

Honey Classes
Class # Description
H1 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Light
H2 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Medium
H3 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Dark*Entries must be in 1 lb., glass queenline type jars and may have metal or plastic lids.
International entries may use 500 gram universal jars. (see clause 3 on show rules)
H4 Twelve 1lb. jars of honey: ExtractedEntries must be in 12 identical 1lb. queenline type jars with metal or plastic lids.
International entries may use 12 identical 500 gram universal jars. (see clause 3 on show rules)H5 Three section boxes of comb honeyH6 Three packages of cut comb honey: 4 inch squareH7 Three round section of comb honeyEntries must be in the appropriate container: Window cartons, round section lids-both
transparent, cut comb box-all sides transparent. (see clause 3 on show rules)H8 Three 1lb. jars of creamed honeyH9 Three 1lb. jars of chunk honey
Entries must be in cylindrically uniform “wigwam” jar or in the new “shoulder” jar.
(see clause 3 on show rules)H10 One frame of honey: suitable for extraction
Frames may be of wood or plastic and should be housed in a glass sided bee proof enclosure. (see clause 3 on show rules)1. All entries must be the product of the exhibitor’s apiary and have been produced since the previous EAS Honey show.2. Entries will be judged on their individual merit. Cleanliness of the container, lid or hardware, uniformity of wax cut, proper fill of jar or container, cleanliness and clarity of the honey, moisture content, aroma and taste will be considered by the judges. In creamed honey texture and firmness will also be considered.
3. No tamper-proof seals.
Now I'm no expert - I've only entered one honey contest for my bee club last year. My chunk honey did get second place, but I have learned a lot more since then about how to put it in the jar.

Dr. Keith Delaplane Speaks to Bee Club on CCD

Tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting the speaker was Dr. Keith Delaplane speaking on CCD. Interestingly the media was there. I saw camera people from two TV stations and he was asked to go to a different room after his talk with us to speak to CNN.

I'm only the messenger and don't necessarily know that he has all the answers (personally I think Michael Bush has all the answers!)

This is what I got from what he said:

**Honeybees have been on a steady decline in this country over many, many years, due increasingly to our agricultural practices no longer requiring animals to feed in the fields, so less crops for the honeybees.

**With the advent of the varroa mite, beekeeping went from an organic, hands off endeavor to a chemically dependent endeavor. This has resulted in

• The quality of queens going down, with many queens living only 6 months - 1 year; finding drone brood among worker brood, and having high supercedure rates. (He had a chart showing that with increased use of chemicals in the hive, a study done at UGA showed shorter life for queens.)
• Poorer life span and sperm quality for drones
• Increased cognitive dysfunction for worker bees, including not being able to find their way home to the hive.
  
  He encouraged us to buy our queens from people working to develop hygienic queens such as the Purvis Brothers in N Georgia. The University of Georgia is also working on developing hygienic queens which will be available for distribution to queen breeders in August. They will, of course because it is a research university, not be for sale but will be distributed by lottery, I think he said, to the queen breeders.
  
  He also laughed at himself in his earlier books in which he highly encouraged medicating the bees and said that he is the author of the new edition of First Lessons in Beekeeping from Dadant out later this year and in this new book he encourages IPM and no chemicals.

The issues contributing to bees disappearing from hives (CCD) are some not in our control (environmental pesticide usage, the presence of mites in the world, viruses, etc). However the issues that we can change include:

** In hive pesticide use
** Old comb
** Migratory stress
** Nutritional deficiencies
** IPM (Integrated Pest Management)

He encouraged using no pesticides in the hives and replacing old comb regularly.

He said that migratory stress is about how the honeybee in one setting works about 6 - 10 weeks per year during the honey flow. Commercial beekeepers by moving their hives from flow to flow ask the bee to work many 6 week periods in the year, thus wearing the bees out and making them more subject to disease.

He mentioned a commercial beekeeper in N Georgia (Bob Binnie) who feeds each hive 5 gallons of syrup every fall and Dr. Delaplane said that we are not feeding our bees enough, thus resulting in poor nutrition and this makes the bees vulnerable to disease.

He strongly encouraged IPM - screened bottom boards, powdered sugar shakes.

He cited studies done at UGA for all of what he had to say and presented graphs and data to support his talk. In general he doesn't think that CCD is anything new, but is the cumulative result of chemical beekeeping.

A kid in the audience asked if cell phones were the problem and he smiled and simply said, "No."

Bee Status Report

I donned my beesuit and lit the smoker! I used dryer lint to get it started and pine needles to keep it going - Hooray!

I checked on both hives and they look great. Bermuda has gotten a new shot of adrenalin and is growing rapidly - still a couple of frames behind Destin. Both are working well in the medium that I added last week.

These two layers - the hive body and the medium super are for the bees. This weekend or even maybe on Friday I'll add a honey super that may actually be for me.

I went to the Metro Beekeepers
meeting tonight. In Atlanta we have one of the oldest ongoing beekeepers' associations in the country. It's a great place to get help with beginner questions. Cindy Bee (that's really her name) who is famous in Atlanta for rescuing swarms of bees was there. She knows so much about it. I loved hearing her talk about her bees.

I'm learning more every day and from every contact with other beekeepers.