Too few mites? I know the feeling.

Too few mites? I know the feeling..

A good Blog by Dennis Murrell – Bee Natural

Imidacloprid – systemic pesticide, systemic problem…

Today’s CATCH THE BUZZ email, published by Kim Flottum of Bee Culture magazine offers two completely opposing statements concerning the use of the systemic neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid.

http://home.ezezine.com/1636/1636-2012.04.05.17.00.archive.html

There’s just something really WRONG with a system that can say this:

“This is a key part of our wider commitment to ensure the safe and responsible use of pesticides.”

When will we learn to SCREAM when we hear a sentence so inexplicable – so illogical – so completely  WRONG???

 

Ground bees? They are not always wasps, hornets, yellowjackets…

A lovely and informative post about “ground bees” from Soulsby Farm’s blog by Denise Ellsworth – honey bee and native pollinator education from The Ohio State University Department of Entomology.

With great pictures too!  Check it out…  http://soulsbyfarm.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/native-bees-welcome-springs-arrival/

 

 

About honey bees and January… and April…

About honey bees and January… and April…

Beekeeping is funny, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a spring thing, right?  The flowers are blooming, gardens are growing, bees are buzzing, it’s an exciting, growing time. But to understand how “things bee” get started up in the spring, you have to go backwards into the winter, to see how things arrived at spring. For instance, honeybees finish up the summer season and go into the hive in the fall, where they cluster, and they do something akin to hibernating all winter long. Continuing beekeepers have to force themselves to sit on their hands all winter long–you can’t open up a hive in freezing temperatures, at least not with happy results.

New beekeepers, on the other hand, who are just getting started in the spring, have been planning for their brand new hives since the dead of winter. So these beekeepers discover that ordering bees should be done in January! The honey bee suppliers that I talk with are, like me, usually sold out of package bees by mid-March at the latest.  So new beekeepers are usually johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to ordering their first bees.

But consider the continuing beekeeper whose bees don’t overwinter. April is said to be the cruelest month in beekeeping, at least here in New England. Sometimes you see these hives flying in February, and again in March–but come April that hive is dead. That beekeeper did not even stand a chance when it came to ordering bees; and so, it’s not unusual for experienced beekeepers to order some packages of bees in January as “insurance”. Yes, that seems counterintuitive – if you think that’s odd, you’re right. January by rights is the month for sitting by the fire, and thumbing through your seed catalog, not for ordering honeybees.

The thing to know is this: if you are just beginning your beekeeping journey, be prepared to order package bees as early as possible. January is not too early. And if you are continuing your beekeeping journey, it is not a bad idea to order an insurance package, in the event that April does you wrong. The thing about having ordered a package in January, and then not needing it–is that now you have a cause for celebration! And a sad beekeeper, who didn’t order bees but then learned that their hive was gone in April, will celebrate too – and will be grateful to you when it turns out that you don’t need that package of bees.

So the moral is: order early, order often! It’s far more frustrating to need bees and not have them, then it is to have bees and not need them. I can almost guarantee you that somebody will be happy to get your “insurance package” when April rolls around. Of course, if your bees successfully overwintered, and now you have an additional colony, well – what part of this is a bad plan?

But when it comes to planning–if you think you *might* need bees–order bees. You’re not likely to be sorry. And besides, it’s a cheerful thing to think about bees when you’re huddling by the wood stove in January!

 

**For quality top bar beekeeping equipment, be sure to visit our webpage at http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com!**

A Christmas beekeeping blog…

Beekeeping.

Just what IS beekeeping? Is it art? Is it science? Is it magic? It’s notoriously difficult to define… Is it a hobby?  Is it a habit?  Is it an obsession?  Just what is it?

And what about those funny little bugs? Just what is it about bees?  They sting, yes – so it’s prudent to be cautious when you’re around them – but they only sting when they’re defending something?  Who knew? And it’s a kamikaze mission, that once-in- a-lifetime sting of a honeybee.  They never do it frivolously – it’s a life or death proposition for the honeybee.

Yet beekeepers can be seen standing, sitting, lounging in the vicinity of their hives for hours, and just… watching. That’s it – just watching the bees flying in and out of the hive. It’s mesmerizing.  It’s as if we think that if we watch long enough, we’re going to figure out their secret.

Truly, what we humans really know about honeybees is pretty limited. We cannot see inside the hive, we cannot see inside their minds, we barely even believe in a concept as advanced as a hive mind or a holistic super organism.

That’s probably one of the reasons that so much damage has been done – not only to the honeybee, but to our food system over the course of recent history. Because we don’t necessarily believe in magic or in a hive mind. We’re used to living isolated and alone, so how could this humble insect know, and live by, something so community-oriented, something so complex that we humans can’t understand it?

The honeybee has much to teach us about cooperation. Living and working together, taking only what we need, never damaging the planet that sustains us–but only ever helping and supporting it. We could go a long way on the things that we could learn from bees.

My Christmas wish to all of us would be this–that we take a lesson from the honeybees. That we learn to live in connection with the world around us–supporting and nurturing it, instead of industrializing and destroying it. That we learn to live in harmony with each other, recognizing the importance of each to the whole.

And as we take steps in that direction, we will find a sense of peace, of joy, of good will towards all men.

And that would make for a pretty good Christmas gift.

4th of July Message from Gold Star Honeybees

Hello Fellow Top Bar Beekeepers –

Well, here we are – it’s almost the 4th of July.  I know that all of you first year top bar beekeepers  have had some interesting experiences since becoming a beekeeper this spring, some good, some bad, all of them different – and I just thought I’d offer a few insights to you all about the way beekeeping season progresses from my point of view as a beekeeper, bee school teacher and equipment manufacturer.

In the early spring, there’s a great deal of excitement – making plans, buying equipment, going to bee school, learning everything you can, waiting for your bees.  We interact a lot – school is fun, questions are interesting, lots of anecdotes get passed around.

Then your bees come!  Everyone is SO excited, and you all go home and put your bees in their hive, then wait and worry and wonder.  You discover questions you hadn’t even thought to ask – how to do this or that, why are the bees doing x or y.  Then your bees get their bearings and start doing what bees do.  It’s fun and we all enjoy it.  You tell your friends about your new enterprise.

At that stage, it gets pretty quiet at Gold Star Global Headquarters.  I don’t hear from anybody.  Sometimes I check to see if my phone is even getting a dial tone!  Then the season progresses – to right about now, when folks have had their bees for somewhere between 4 – 8 weeks – and then I start to get a different set of questions.

And what I can generally tell by the 4th of July is that everyone is a little worried.  Everyone would like a little reassurance.  Everyone would like it if I could come and inspect their bees.  Some of you even offer to pay me to come and inspect your bees.  I appreciate it that you see me as such an expert!

But I hope that I have been able to get it across that the reality of beekeeping is that bees do what bees do – they are not machines, and they are definitely not predictable.  We want to see them build a brood nest, and store honey.  We inspect them and try to keep them making their combs straight so that our top bar hive remains a “moveable comb” hive.  But other than offering them sugar syrup to supplement what nature provides, or providing a new queen, or the means to make a new queen if needed, or monitoring for mite levels – there is not much we can actually do to change the course of things happening in the hive.  Nature is in control of that process and it is for us to watch in wonder.  That means that sometimes we will see things thrive, sometimes not.

Nature is awesome and in the face of her wisdom, we often feel powerless.  I get it.  Sometimes it’s thrilling, sometimes it’s heartbreaking.  Often it makes me feel small and inadequate.

So I know how much you want that reassurance.  There are days that I want it too.  I wish I could provide it.  But as Gold Star Honeybees grows – that becomes less and less feasible.  Which is truly bittersweet for me – I would love to stay personally connected to each and every one of you and see all of your bees.

But this growing is also a good thing.  Because it means that together we are building a larger community!  It’s getting more bees onto natural beeswax and into treatment-free lifestyles, and away from contaminated wax foundation and “Big Ag” style manipulations.  For most of you, that was the reason you gave for starting this journey – to keep healthier bees – for the bees, for beekeepers, and for the planet.

So I just want to remind you that what you’ve done is take a very bold, brave step.  You’ve become an iconoclast – breaking with established systems and practices that no longer make sense, and you’ve struck out and begun doing this very different thing, and I know that you sometimes feel very alone.

But all of you are Thinking Beekeepers – and I just want to repeat to you what you may have heard first at the end of a Gold Star Weekend Intensive class:

“Walk on, Beekeeper – this journey matters.”

Thanks for listening.  All the Best to you and your bees.  And have a great 4th of July weekend.

– Christy

22 Days to Swarming? Wow! That doesn’t seem good…

I hived a good sized package of bees on Friday May 20th in a Gold Star Top Bar Hive here in the Gold Star Apiary…

Yesterday, June 11th I did an inspection. This makes the hive 22 days old.

While I was pleased to see several bars of capped honey – which is a little surprising in a three week old hive, I was surprised as well that I found several torn open queen cells – on the edges of the comb. This edge of comb placement would indicate that they were “swarm” cells, not “supercedure” cells, and there was very little brood in the comb, another indication of a “queen replacement event” – since there is a “break” in the brood cycle when a colony swarms or supercedes their queen.

But 22 days seems very early for a colony to swarm, and since it’s difficult to say whether the population of the hive has dropped – we are mulling over whether they might have swarmed despite our disbelief, or superceded with a cell built closer to the edge than one would expect.

The other nagging concern that this brings up is the concern about just what are we doing to bees by selling packages and shipping them from hot southern climates to colder places such as New England? The bees in the package we hived came from Georgia – and had been foraging for months in that climate. Not much information is available about the effects of the shock of being shipped and having to start over again in an area where temperatures and forage are just getting started in May. We have heard a lot of stories of queen failures this season, so it is worrisome.

But at any rate – they’re building wax and filling it with stores and we’ll look again in a week or so and see whether we are seeing the laying pattern of a new and healthy queen, or whether some catastrophe has occurred and they are now queenless altogether!

That will bring up new and different stuff to talk about!

The Comfort of Why…

Everybody’s heard it – the insistent, persistent voice of a small child asking “Why?”

They start with one question and then dig deeper and deeper – to your every best answer – there is another “Why?”, another “Why?”  and yet another “Why?”  Eventually the questions become impossible to answer and the line of questioning comes to an abrupt end, sometimes with a bit of frustration on the part of the adult.

But we really never stop wanting to know “Why?”, do we?  As adults, it’s comforting to know that there is a reason for the things that happen.  Without a sense of cause and effect we feel lost and out of control.  More importantly,  if we know why something happens, we know what to do to cause the effect, and what not to do if we want to prevent said thing from happening.

So it’s challenging to live in a world where we can’t always know the “why” of things.  And beekeeping is a prime example of such a world.  There are a multitude of variables involved in the keeping of bees – weather, location, colony strength, queen fecundity, availability and quality of forage, temperature, pests and pesticides – just to name a few of the possibilities.

As a business owner, and even more, as a teacher in the top bar hive beekeeping world – it pains me when I am unable to give concise, scientific answers to the questions I am asked by students – answers that soothe and satisfy, instead of insisting that the student be brave, and to come along and learn to live in the uncertain world of nature and beekeeping.

Occasionally we get a little crazy in our search for the reasons why things happen with bees.  This can lead to some interesting superstitions!  At that point it’s a little like wearing your lucky t-shirt to help the Red Sox win!  It makes us feel better – if it works.

But sometimes the answer is “It depends.”  This is the answer to things like “How much honey does the average hive produce?”  “Will my bees swarm in their first year?”

Then sometimes, the only answer is “I don’t know.”  This is a hard one – both for the teacher to offer, and for the student to hear.  It’s frequently the answer to “Why didn’t my bees thrive?”  It’s especially frustrating to have two hives side by side, and to see one thrive and the other fail – and not be able to discern the why of that.

So one of the hardest lessons in beekeeping is learning that we can’t always know “Why?”.  It’s knowing that, and still keeping bees anyway – for the love of the bees, for their pollination skills, and for their wonderful “nectar of the gods” that convinces me that the world is full of  “thinking beekeepers” – caring, resourceful, thoughtful people – who will be the folks who help to shift the paradigm from industrial agriculture and its attendant beekeeping practices to S.O.L.D. farming – Small, Organic, Local, and Diverse.

Because that certainly looks to be the only sane direction in a world where you can’t always get the answer to “Why?”.

Top Bar Beekeeping 101 – Weekend Intensive

Announcing Gold Star Honeybees’ next Top Bar Beekeeping 101 – Weekend Intensive!

Saturday and Sunday, March 5 and 6 at the Morris Farm in Wiscasset, Maine.

Regular tuition is $175 – but earlybirds save $25 when they register before February 25th.  That’s only $150 for two full days of bee buzz!

Tuition includes breakfast and lunch both days – and be aware that when we say we feed you – we look for the very best organic food we can come up with – because we’ve got to make the connection sooner or later — ORGANIC IS A BEE’S BEST FRIEND!

Enroll online!

Detailed description of our Weekend Intensive.

Special Note:  We will be video-taping this class as part of our plan to make the Weekend Intensive available to on-line students who aren’t so fortunate as to be able to come to Maine.  Don’t be shy – you can help spread the word about healthy bees!

Sign up soon – procrastinating costs money!

And if you’re interested in hosting this class in an area near you (and that could mean anywhere on earth) – email us at classes@goldstarhoneybees.com.  We will be happy to send you our Hosting Package and the Planning worksheet with details on how you could host one and may even find that it raises some amount of funds for you as host.

Get ready for spring 2011!

What are you waiting for?  We can’t wait to meet you!

 

Gold Star Honeybees, PO Box 1061, Bath, ME  04530  207-449-1121 http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com

Just how big should a top bar hive be?

Just how big should a top bar hive be?

There is often lively discussion on beekeeping forums about the appropriate size for a top bar hive.  And frequently this data is given in inches – such as the length of the hive, or in numbers, as in the number of top bars the hive will hold.

But from the bees’ point a view, an important consideration is the VOLUME of the hive.  Just how big is the space they are planning to live in?  Being able to calculate the volume tells you more about the size of the cavity WITHIN the hive – and since bees are “cavity nesters” – meaning that they will go inside this cavity and create the structure of their nest – the honeycomb – then VOLUME is probably what the bees are concerned with.  It doesn’t really matter how tall a tree is, or even how big around it is – if the volume of the hollow cavity inside the tree isn’t large enough for the bees purposes then it isn’t a suitable home.

Now some of us can measure the time since we sat in a geometry class in units called decades, so conjuring up a formula to calculate area or volume might be a bit of a challenge.

Combined with the fact that most top bar hives have sloped sides in an attempt to ask the bees not to build their honeycombs attached to the sides of the box – which creates a trapezoid instead of a rectangle — and now things are really complicated!

Just how do you do the math on a three-dimensional trapezoid?

Well, here’s how it works:

The formula for the area of the trapezoid is this:

A = (( a + b) / 2) x  h  –> where h is the height, and a and b are the lengths of the parallel sides, in other words, the top and bottom.

When you have that number, the area, you multiply it by the length of the inside of the hive, and voila – now you’ve got the volume of your top bar hive.

So if we were to calculate the area of a Gold Star Top Bar Hive – it would look like this.  We are showing here the dimensions of our “follower board”, since that exactly matches the interior size and shape of the hive body itself.

a =  15 inches
b =   6.1875  inches
h =  9.5 inches

Note:  The decimal equivalent of 3/16 = .1875.  This makes the math easier.  (For some of us, fractions were a long time ago too!)


So, a + b would be 15 + 6.1875 = 21.1875 inches.
Then you would divide 21.1875 by 2.  This will get you 10.59375
Multiply that by 9.5 and get 100.64.  This figure is square inches – the area of the trapezoid, i.e. the follower board.

Then, to get the volume, you multiply the area 100.64, by the length of the interior of the hive.  A Gold Star hive is 44.5 inches long inside, and voila` – now you know that the volume of the cavity inside a Gold Star hive is 4478.5 cu inches.

Now we think that’s a lot of math, and apparently somebody else did too, because some kind and smart person made it much easier – by creating an on-line calculator that will do the math for you – all you have to know is the dimensions of your trapezoid.

Much easier!

http://www.onlineconversion.com/object_volume_trapezoid.htm
Here is the actual formula: 

volume = L * (b1 + (b2 – b1) * h1 / h + b1) * h1 / 2
where:  Base1 (b1)
Base2 (b2)
Total Height (h)
Partial Height (h1)
Length (L)
Volume
This calculator works to calculate a “partially filled tank”, so for a “filled tank”, you would set the partial height (h1) and total height (h) as the same number.

So gather up your dimensions, plug them into the Online Conversion calculator and then you’ll know a bit about what the bees are looking at when they look at your hive!