Double or Nothing?

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Ron Miksha

gambling

A gentleman at our bee meeting posed a challenging question a couple of weeks ago: “What should I do with a weak hive? I think it might be queenless.” Well, it depends, of course.

I’m continuing with the series of questions which I overheard at a bee meeting not long ago. Today, it’s about weak/queenless hives. As in all bee questions, we are given just a bit of information. It’s not the beekeepers’ fault – they might not know what clues to look for and what information to bring to the club when they present their questions. (Actually, if they knew what information is needed to answer the question, they’d probably already know what to do.)

Here are the previous questions from this series:

The fellow asked us, “I have four good hives, but I think that the fifth might be queenless –  what should I do?” Whether the hive has a queen or not, he has a problem. It’s getting late in the year, so a queen-right weak hive most likely will die over winter. A queenless hive is trouble at any time.

Conventional wisdom says that you take your winter losses in the fall. Get rid of hives that won’t winter because if they die, you’ll have the sad task of the bee mortician, taking care of little dead bodies next spring.  Taking your winter losses in the fall doesn’t mean killing any bees. It usually means doubling up the weak with the strong so you save the bees – and maybe even the queen in the weaker hive.

Doubling-up goes like this:

  • Pick a healthy, strong, queen-right colony as the double-up partner for your worthless scum hive. (Sorry, I know that you’ve been nursing it for months, giving it extra attention, extra food, and maybe you’ve tried requeening it once or twice.  But this child just never did well.) If the poor hive is not sick (Nosema? AFB? Varroa? EFB? Hive beetles? K-wing? Galleria mellonella invasion? Acute Bee Paralysis Virus? Acute appendicitis?) but has been a persistent drain on the apiary’s cumulative production average,  it’s time to sing some hymns.
  • Consolidate the weak hive into a single box – pick out the best frames, all the brood, extra honey (especially in the fall), and end with just a single chamber.
  • Take the lid off the stronger, partner hive. Put a sheet of newspaper on the strong hive, as if it’s a substitute lid. Newspaper quality matters. Don’t use free cheap ‘traders’ newspapers or anything published by Rupert Murdoch. Pick something like the Times. Your bees are going to be looking at that paper for the next week, so they might as well learn something from this experience.
  • Poke a few holes into the newspaper, then set your freshly amalgamated weak single on top. (Check the video above!) Only the perforated newspaper should separate the two units.  Cover the top unit with a real lid. Over the next few days, the bees will read parts of the paper and then remove it from the hive. Meanwhile, the bees’ odours and pheromones will blend, and the bees themselves will slowly mix. By the time the paper is eaten, the bees will be one big happy smells-the-same family.
  • As soon as you’ve doubled them, you should probably feed your new monster hive. If you’re using frame feeders, you have the advantage of feeding the lower, stronger unit separately. You likely need to feed the top (weaker) hive, too, but be extra careful not to let leaky syrup start a robbing frenzy or your weak top unit will be in trouble and you’ll wish you hadn’t seen this web page and started doubling the weak.
  • Finally, a week or two later, you may want to sort frames, consolidate brood, and squeeze the big hive down into two boxes. This is optional. Plenty of beekeepers winter in three stories. You, too, could become one of them. But as winter is nearing, make sure the hive is in good winter shape, heavy, with brood down, honey up, and bees covering almost everything.

But what about laying workers?

laying-worker-brood

Laying workers’ brood

A wrinkle in the scheme (or wrench in the works, mud in the eye, or spanner in the works, if you prefer) occurs if the weak hive is queenless. Then you’ve got issues. My usual recommendation is not to let your hives become queenless. But let’s assume you thought you were smarter than I am (which wouldn’t take much) and you’ve managed to create a weak and queenless hive.

If the hive has been queenless for a week or two, emboldened workers will feel liberated, gender-fluid, and will start laying oodles of eggs. Unfortunately, none of them will be fertile and all will develop into drones. As if that’s not bad enough, if you suddenly insert a good laying queen into the laying workers’ den, they will kill her. And if you set such a hive atop a good strong hive, the laying workers will likely dominate and they and their allies will kill the queen in the (formerly) good strong hive. So, what’s a beekeeper to do?

I’m not going to go any deeper into laying workers right now. About six weeks ago, I wrote too much on laying workers (see The Worker Who Would Be Queen). In brief, laying workers are best treated crudely. On a warm day, walk the box a few metres away from the apiary and shake all the bees off the frames and onto the ground. Laying workers will mostly be stuck in the grass. The ‘normal’ workers will usually fly back to the old stand (but the hive will be gone) and then will enter neighbouring hives. This works OK during a nectar flow when every bee is welcomed, but not so well in the fall when the arrivals may be taunted, teased about their humble origins, or simply have their wings torn off by guard bees. But they may also end up joining the successful hive. I don’t know another option for laying workers so late in the season, if you do please send a comment.

Double or nothing

So, here’s the bottom line. In an era when 30 or 40 percent  of good hives may die during the winter, don’t expect many weak ones to make it through to spring. If the poor hive is not queenless (and laying workers aren’t running the place), don’t be reluctant to double the hive. It’s better than nothing.

Posted in Beekeeping, Queens, Save the Bees | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Water in Honey

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Nectar, shaking out of a frame during the honey flow

Nectar falls from a frame during a honey flow

Honey is about 80% sugar and 18% water. The rest is minerals and ash*, pollen grains and bees’ wings. The sugars and water come from nectar secreted by flowers. When flowers produce nectar (as a way of attracting pollinating insects and birds), it is very watery – maybe 20 to 90 percent water. (This varies a lot.) So bees may carry three or four or even ten pounds of nectar for each pound of honey they produce.

The bees remove water so that honey will be safe to store without fermenting into honey wine. Fermented honey would not last long in a crowded hive because the bees would drink it all in one evening of intoxicated merry-making. That would really put the ‘waggle’ in their famous waggle-dance.

For honey to be stable, the nectar needs evaporated until less than about 18.6% of honey is water. I’m not sure if anyone has figured out how the bees know this number. My hunch is that honey bees don’t actually know. They haven’t perfected their hygrometric skills – we sometimes find honey in the comb that’s been sealed and is not quite stable. In time, it can begin to sour or ferment. That’s really rare, but it can happen, so it points to some design flaw in the bees.

Last month, a friend brought some bottled honey to my home. It came from sealed frames. Surprisingly, it tested over 20% moisture. High-moisture honey is rare in western Canada, but my friend’s bees had been in a heavily wooded spot with poor air drainage. I told him that he had a few choices. He could deep-freeze it, then take out a little at a time and use it quickly. He could cook it until the honey’s yeasts died, but that would darken the honey and give it a burnt flavour. He could possibly feed it back to his own bees, if all the hives were AFB-free. Or he could make wine.

What you need: a refractometer, sampling spoons and toothpicks, clean-up cloths, markers to label the frames, and honey.

What you need: a refractometer, sampling spoons and toothpicks, clean-up cloths, markers to label the frames, and honey. A table cover is a nice idea, too.

A few days ago, another beekeeper brought honey to me for testing with our bee club’s refractometer. Her honey was still in the comb. Nearly all of it was low-moisture, some all the way down to 16%. But there were also a few frames of unsealed honey – it looked watery. Some of that watery honey approached 21% moisture. Fortunately, there was just a little which was that high. The highest-moisture honey was on the lightest, unfinished frames. The honey flow had ended days ago, so I was surprised that the bees hadn’t dried it out yet. But they had not and she’d removed the honey frames. Since there was so much dry honey (maybe 100 pounds) and so little wet honey (maybe 3 pounds), I did the math and told her to extract it all at one time and let it mix together. [Here’s the math: 100 pounds at 16.5% mixed with 3 pounds at 21% is 16.5 + .63 pounds of water in 103 pounds of honey, making it a very safe 16.7% – if well mixed during extracting.]

To mix the trivial amount of higher moisture honey with the thicker honey during extracting, it would make sense to stagger frames in the extractor and not do all the wet ones separately. I was really surprised that on one frame which we’d tested, the open cells were 20.5% moisture and the sealed honey, just inches away, was 16.2%. You could tell immediately that there would be a big difference – the sealed honey was very thick and sticky while the open honey was quite wet. (It takes only a surprisingly small percentage to go from watery to thick.)

The sealed honey was 16.2% moisture; unsealed was 20.5% (in the spot I tested).

During the nectar flow, you can get very watery nectar in cells right next to dry honey, but we were looking at the frames days after the flow had ended. On this particular frame, I think the small patch of sealed honey was made earlier in the season – it had a darker hue and slightly different flavour than the newer, wetter honey. Nevertheless, I was surprised by such a large difference in moisture in honey on the same frame, well past the end of the season.

🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

(*) An astute reader has pointed out that it’s not really ash, but the burnt residue of the honey following chemical analysis. See the comments below.

Posted in Beekeeping, Friends, Honey | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Sometimes They Get Caught (then gently tapped on their knuckles)

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Honey laundering: "Illegally claiming a false origin for honey in order to avoid taxes. Example: Falsely claiming Chinese honey was produced in Malaysia."

Honey laundering: “Illegally claiming a false origin for honey in order to avoid taxes.
Example: Falsely claiming Chinese honey was produced in Malaysia.”

This is a piece about someone in the USA who was caught selling tainted honey. This was not his first brush with the law. The same gentleman, Douglas Murphy, was an executive at American Rice, Inc. when the feds found him guilty of authorizing over half a million dollars in bribes to Haitian officials in connection with the sale of his company’s rice to the poorest country in the hemisphere. Part of the criminal activity, according to the court documents, included paying bribes for permits that were granted to charities that were allowed to import duty-free. American Rice Inc. was not a charity. Here’s the rice re-cap from the SEC’s website:

On October 6, a federal jury in Houston, Texas, found defendants Douglas Murphy and David Kay, former officers of American Rice, Inc., a Houston based rice company, guilty of authorizing over $500,000 in bribes to Haitian customs officials during 1998 and 1999 to reduce American Rice’s import taxes illegally in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The jury also found defendant Murphy guilty of obstruction of justice in connection with a parallel civil investigation of the bribery payments by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Murphy, a resident of Texas, was American Rice’s president at the time of the violations. Kay, also a resident of Texas, was an American Rice vice president of operations and reported to Murphy. The defendants are to be sentenced on January 6. This criminal action, brought by the Department of Justice, arose out of a joint investigation with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

On January 6, 2004, rice-defendants Murphy and Kay were sentenced – you can read how the judge handled that here.  But all that was over ten years ago – long enough to pay one’s debt to the world’s poor and maybe become a humanitarian doctor or an aid volunteer or something. But last year, Murphy was back in the news.

The Houston Chronicle ran this headline: “Honey smuggler busted”. The honey smuggler is not Douglas Murphy who spent half of his five year sentence in prison on the rice bribery conviction, but a wealthy Chinese-American who was fraudulently importing honey which the American government claims came from China but was misrepresented as Malaysian. (There are millions of dollars involved in these crimes.)  U.S. Customs and Border Protection found Jun Yang guilty of honey smuggling and sent him to prison for three years. This came about because a government secret agent worked at a company called Honey Solutions Inc., where Douglas Murphy was a director.

A government undercover officer became friendly with Yang by posing as a “bad guy”, according to the feds.  Thomson-Reuters World Trade Executive put it this way: “…Honeygate was so successful in part because an undercover ICE agent was placed in Honey Solutions – a real operating company that had its own customs fraud violations, which placed it well to uncover other bad actors. This style of approach takes a page from narcotics and organized crime investigations, but given the success of Honeygate, it could be used more frequently in food and customs fraud cases.”

The short of it is that Yang’s transshipment scheme unraveled and Honey Solutions (which was not accused of importing circumvented honey) paid a $1,000,000 fine, agreed to cooperate in the investigation (they allowed the undercover agent in) and said it “accepts and acknowledges responsibility for its conduct and that of its employees and agents.”

And Honey Solutions director Douglas Murphy was sentenced to six months in prison. This was for distributing honey from Poland adulterated with an antibiotic. According to court records, the honey was delivered to Houston for 65 cents/pound. Such honey might have cost twice as much if not contaminated.  In his admission of guilt, Murphy acknowledged he knew the honey was adulterated with Chloramphenicol: “MURPHY, while in the course of the discharge of his duties, caused Honey Holding to issue purchase order 461 and in doing so, agreed to purchase from ALW Food Group the adulterated container of honey from ALW Food Group’s purchase order 995 at a discounted price of 65 cents per pound, with the price reflecting duties paid and delivery to Texas, and did so knowing that the honey was adulterated with Chloramphenicol.”  Interestingly, because of his previous rice-bribing, the Global Anti-Corruption Task Force observes:  “This appears to be the first time in U.S. history in which the government has brought new charges against a previously convicted FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] defendant.”

Meanwhile, Honey Solutions Inc. has fought for its good name as a wholesome provider of quality honey (including Non-GMO and USDA Organic) by demanding retractions of false statements about its dealings. The American Honey Producers (AHPA), for example, had to retract statements it made about Honey Solutions Inc. on their website. According to PRNewswire which ran a piece (citing Honey Solutions as its sole source),  the AHPA corrected their story and acknowledged “the government did not claim Honey Solutions purchased or sold ‘tainted’ or impure Chinese honey” and “the government did not charge Honey Solutions with tax evasion.”

million-fine

They paid a million dollar fine.

So, let’s be clear about this. Honey Solutions’ director was sentenced to prison, this time for distributing honey adulterated with an antibiotic and the feds nailed Jun Yang for transshipment – but Honey Solutions Inc. is as sweet as the honey it sells. They paid a million dollar fine, a director went to prison, but, I repeat, “the government did not claim Honey Solutions purchased or sold ‘tainted’ or impure Chinese honey” and “the government did not charge Honey Solutions with tax evasion.” This sounds like a wholesome company, caught up in unfortunate circumstances, doesn’t it? Remember, the government did not claim that Honey Solutions Inc sold tainted Chinese honey nor has it charged Honey Solutions with tax evasion.

It’s a confusing story, so I’m quoting this, from the Houston Chronicle:

Yang and his company, National Honey Inc., deployed at least four companies to manage imports of Chinese honey – imports that would be unfeasible under antidumping duties as high as 221 percent of the honey’s value.

The transshipment scheme unraveled only after a government plant in the Baytown company Honey Solutions won Yang’s trust.

“Because of the complexity of the case, the underlying facts and the proving up of these very complicated schemes, it required us to essentially put in an undercover agent who pretended to be a bad guy,” said assistant U.S. attorney Andrew S. Boutros in Illinois’ Northern District, the lead prosecutor in the government’s string of successful honey cases.

According to court documents, the government plant began working at Honey Solutions as director of procurement in June 2011, shortly after Douglas Murphy, the company’s director of sales, was released from prison. Murphy had served about half of a five-year sentence for bribing Haitian officials in connection with his rice export business.

In a deferred prosecution agreement in 2013, Honey Solutions agreed to pay a $1 million fine.

Last week, Honey Solutions issued a news release noting the expiration of the deferred prosecution agreement with the government. But the company said it continues to assist an investigation into the honey industry.

The release asserted that neither the company nor its owner, officers or employees had been indicted or criminally charged with illegally transshipping, smuggling or importing Chinese honey into the U.S. The release did not mention company agents.

Above, I highlighted the phrase deferred prosecution agreement. That’s when a prosecutor agrees to grant amnesty in exchange for the defendant agreeing to fulfill certain requirements.  You might like to read this piece from Corporate Crime Reporter: Why Were Honey Companies Given Deferred Prosecution Agreements? In part, the piece tells us:

A second company, Honey Holding, doing business as Honey Solutions of Baytown, Texas,  admitted to charges that it purchased, processed, and sold the Polish-origin honey that was adulterated with the antibiotic.

Despite these admissions, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago allowed Groeb and Honey Holdings to enter into deferred prosecution agreements.

And one more time, for clarity: the government did not claim Honey Solutions Inc. purchased or sold tainted Chinese honey nor did it charge Honey Solutions with tax evasion. And I’m not claiming any of this either. I’m just repeating court records and depositions. You may draw your own conclusions over whether a “deferred prosecution agreement” was justified – apparently the prosecutor thought so.

All of this might seem esoteric. So, a little bad honey was sold to an unsuspecting public. And some honey, produced in China, was fraudulently imported (by Yang’s companies) to the USA. Who gets hurt?

We all get hurt: Honest honey packers (and there are many) have to compete against this crooked crap where prices are undercut by tainted honey and by honey without import duties properly paid. In May, 2016, Homeland Securities estimated it lost over one hundred eighty million dollars in revenue from illegal honey imports alone.  Meanwhile, beekeepers get hurt as they have to sell cheaply to be competitive with dirty imports. Consumers may be literally, physically hurt by adulterated honey. Finally, honey gets a bad name and sales drop.  It’s a dirty business, done for greed, just so criminals can have a bigger house, a fancier car, a grander vacation – at the expense of ordinary working people.

Although a few people were caught, some guilty pleas were entered, and a wee bit of jail time was awarded (Doug Murphy got 6 months – the law allowed for up to 25 years), millions of dollars in potential profit from honey laundering and associated malpractices is still a huge incentive when the punishment is not much more than a tap on the knuckles.

Posted in Honey, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Morgan Freeman’s Bees

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Ron Miksha

By now, most beekeepers have heard that Morgan Freeman is a beekeeper. Morgan Freeman is incredible. Whether you enjoyed him driving over Miss Daisy or just gaining redemption after Shawshank, you likely admired the way the man can perform.

I’ve long appreciated Freeman as an actor, but really began to appreciate him when I started watching his series of science documentaries on Discovery, the astrophysics lectures called Through the Wormhole. Respect for the actor is deep – he was born in Tennessee, grew up in rural Mississippi, yet became comfortable in Hollywood. To top it off, at age 65 he earned his pilot’s license and he flies a Cessna 414. He’s now 79. He decided to become a beekeeper a couple years ago, at age 76. And it’s not just a one-hive gimmick – he’s got about 40 hives on his Mississippi farm.

Here are a couple of clips of Freeman the beeman on TV:

More bee talk, a couple nights ago:

 

Posted in Beekeeping, Culture, or lack thereof, Outreach, People | Tagged | 8 Comments

Upside-Down Almond Pollination

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Ron Miksha
holeinground

Arriving in Australia.

It’s September, but some beekeepers are just wrapping up almond pollination and moving their bees to canola.  Sounds late. California’s almonds finished in March. Canola blossom ended months ago, too. But not for Australian beekeepers.

Here’s a news piece from SunraysiaDaily:

MILLIONS of bees trucked into Victoria to pollinate almond plantations last month are now working their magic to help boost the state’s spring canola crops.

“The honey bee industry provides benefits of between $4-6 billion to the Australian economy each year, and specifically to pollination-dependent plant industries such as almonds, cherries and pome fruit,” she said.

Beekeepers who move to almond pollination into the southern state of Victoria will face many of the same issues as California pollinators – monoculture limits nutritional diversity, pesticides wreck hives, trucking stresses the bees, and pests transfer hive to hive in the dense apiaries.  Hopefully, the migratory beekeepers are being compensated for all this.

Australia is now the world’s second largest almond producer, having just passed Spain’s production. Australia is still far behind the USA. California produces about 2 million tonnes a year; Australia, about one-tenth that. But the Australian groves are expanding. With that, the need for pollinating honey bees is growing, of course.

In 2009, just 55,000 colonies were rented for almond pollination in Australia. In 2012 about 110,000 honey bee colonies were trucked into Australia’s almond groves. This year, it was 195,000 with 300,000 expected to be rented within 5 years.

australia-almonds

Posted in Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Pollination | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Why do bumblebees follow ferries?

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Ron Miksha

This is a fascinating observation. Bees appear to ‘follow’ ferries across long stretches of open water. Shared at Bad Beekeeping Blog…

Jeff Ollerton's avatarProf. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author

Sejero - 20160910_180359.png

A few years ago I mentioned in my post “Garlicky archipelago” that I had seen bumblebees (Bombus spp.) following the ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, a distance of about 1.5km across water.  If I remember correctly it was my colleague Scott Armbruster who first mentioned this to me: he lives on the Isle of Wight and commutes regularly to the mainland.

I’ve not thought much about this since then as 1.5km is a fairly modest distance for a bumblebee to fly.  But then a few weeks ago I saw the same thing in Denmark, but this time over a much longer distance.

Karin and I were visiting friends on the small island of Sejerø, which (at its closest point) is about 8km from the mainland of Zealand.  To get there you have to catch a ferry which takes about an hour to cross…

View original post 258 more words

Posted in Ecology, Reblogs, Strange, Odd Stuff | Leave a comment

No bees, no honey, no Rosh Hashanah

Posted on September 25, 2016 by Ron Miksha

No bees, no honey, no Rosh Hashanah. Sweet. The Calgary Jewish Community Centre (JCC) is hosting a “beeswax and sweetness marketplace” this week, Tuesday, September 27th from 3 to 7 pm.

honey-and-applesRosh Hashanah – Jewish New Year – begins at sunset, next Sunday (October 2). For most, the day includes a taste of apple sweetened with honey. It’s a hope for a good, sweet year ahead.

This year’s market at the JCC: “No bees, no honey, no Rosh Hashanah” is a nice reminder of the bees’ role in the world.

From the JCC website:  Apples & honey tastings, cartis bracha (greeting cards) crafts. 
Everybody welcome. Free admission.

I’ll be there. Events like this really bring communities together.  If you’re in Calgary, drop by. If you are in England or New Zealand, there is still time to fly in. Let me know.

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Honey, Outreach | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Brood in Front of the Hive?!?

Posted on September 24, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Everyone has a question...

Everyone has a question…

I’m continuing with the series of questions which I overheard at a bee meeting a few days ago. Today, it’s dead brood.

Here are those questions:

Why is there dead brood in front of my hive? This is hard to answer without samples, a photo, or a trip to the beekeeper’s apiary. But anytime there’s a suspicious bee death, we should pay attention.

More winter-dead bees than you want.

More winter-dead bees than you want.

Usually, of course, dead bees in front of a hive are adult bees. The most common ‘natural’ cause (at least here in Canada) is cold. Bees may fly out on sunny winter days (to use the outdoor plumbing) but then get chilled and drop in the snow before they get back into the hive. A few dozen such casualties is completely normal, but hundreds of bees lying in the snow may mean some sort of trouble.

Fog can play the same nasty trick on the bees. Years ago, my father worked for Al Wynn, a California queen breeder. Along the coast near Napa Valley, according to my father, they would occasionally lose bees when heavy fog drifted inland. The beekeepers found chilled damp bees near the hive entrances and queen mating was poor for that round.

skunkAt almost any time of year, skunks might bother hives here in western Canada, and around much of North America, I suppose. Mephitidae scratch beehive entrances at night, inviting bees to come out and see what’s making all the commotion. Then the skunk laps up bees like a kitten with milk. The next day, the beekeeper finds hundreds of desiccated adult honey bee bodies in scat or spat piles near the hives.

Another big cause of lifeless adult bees in front of hives is poisoning. These days this isn’t too common up here in western Canada. But a generation ago, aerial spray to combat pests on canola and alfalfa led to honey bee deaths by the millions. Today, farmers are more aware of the need to keep honey bees and other creatures alive and healthy. Farmers have changed some of their bad habits and they’ve switched to pesticides that don’t blanket the entire field (and nearby apiaries) in poison. It’s been a while since I’ve heard of bee kill here on the prairies, but we know that insecticides are still used around honey bees – most recently the disaster in South Carolina where the county used bombers to attack mosquitoes. That resulted in millions of inadvertent honey bee deaths.

Those (pesticide, skunk, weather) bee massacres result in mounds of adult bees in front of hives. It’s all too common. But it’s rare to find dead brood in the grass. Obviously, the brood must be carried out of the hive by adults because bee brood is immobile. (It would be pretty creepy if you opened a hive and found your bee larvae crawling around.) Honey bees like to keep things tidy, so they drag out anything that seems out-of-place. That includes bits of paper that wrapped your pollen patties or united your colonies as well as dead brood.

Chalkbrood

Chalkbrood discarded

If the larvae died from foulbrood, it’s unlikely you’ll see it in the hive’s front yard. Such stuff deteriorates quickly into a smelly mess, then hardens and sticks in the cells. However, if the brood is chalk (or ‘stone’) brood, you may find masses in front of the hive and on the landing board. Chalkbrood stays together is a tidy clump that the bees pull out of the cells. Usually it falls to the bottom board after the bees excavate it. Often workers drag it from the bottom board, or directly from the cells, and deposit the chalk mummies in the grass. Serious cases of chalkboard reduce a hive’s population by ten percent or more, but I’ve never heard of it being fatal. Hygienic bees clean it up more quickly, so you can sometimes reduce chalk by replacing the queen. Moving the hive to higher, less mould-inducing turf also helps.

I couldn’t answer the question about why dead brood was in front of the hive because there is another possibility. Without a clear description of the dead brood, I couldn’t know if it had died from chalk or from mite infestation. Both relate to bees’ hygienic behaviour – honey bees remove sick or dead brood, reducing the chances of disease spreading within the hive. If the dead brood in the grass is plump larvae and not chalky gray/white mummies, then it could be brood that was accidentally killed during your last hive visit, or more likely, it’s brood that was infested by mites and then flown out of the nest by house-cleaner bees.

So, once again, I have failed to answer the question, except to say “It depends…” on factors that I wouldn’t know unless I visited the apiary myself. And even then, I might be wrong.

Posted in Bee Biology, Bee Yards, Beekeeping, Diseases and Pests, Pesticides, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Bright Shiny Extractors

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Ron Miksha
hand-cranked-extractor

We saw this cranky extractor a few years ago, somewhere in southern Europe.

I’m continuing with the series of questions I overheard at last week’s bee meeting. Today, it’s the bright shiny extractor.

Here are those questions:

  • My honey isn’t capped. What should I do with it? (I heard that one from three different beefolks.)
  • Wasps are attacking my hives. How can I stop them?
  • What’s the best extractor to buy? (Today’s topic)
  • There was a pile of brood in front of my hive. Why?
  • I have four good hives, but I think that the fifth might be queenless. What should I do?

museum-benny-extractorWhat’s the best extractor to buy? Someone whom I’d never met before asked me that question. I didn’t know anything about the beekeeper, so it was hard to answer.

What’s the best extractor to buy?  It depends. It’s the extractor that returns the most value for you based on your number of hives, average honey crop volume, food-health inspection requirements, extracting room’s space, your physical abilities, and your budget.

Plastic/stainless steel, homemade/store-bought, horizontal or vertical axis, radial/tangential, 2-frame/240-frame,  electric-power/crank, rent/borrow/own, permanently mounted or mobile –  so much to decide and so little time, especially if you are in the northern hemisphere and still thinking about extracting this year’s crop.

taylor-1880-extractorYou can see how complicated this is. A lot of beekeepers buy the smallest, cheapest extractor that suits all the criteria I mentioned (and more, I’m sure). Buy small and trade up if business grows. A 20-frame extractor will handle your small crop more quickly than a 4-frame, but set-up and clean-up take longer. You must also consider storage space for a contraption you use just two or three times a year. Most beekeepers suggest that nebbies start small and grow if interest in beekeeping continues.

I won’t write more than this about extractors today… there are oodles of websites and youtube videos to confuse inform you.

Here’s a review of a 2-frame extractor:

Reviews of 5- and 10- frame, electric and hand cranked:

A 20-frame extractor:

Finally, let’s pretend that someone gave you a 60-frame extractor and you don’t have a clue how to use it:

    🐝 🐝 🐝

Posted in Beekeeping, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Remembering: Charles Valentine Riley

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Ron Miksha

cv-rileyCharles Valentine Riley (1843-1895)

September 18 is the birthdate of British-American    entomologist     Charles Valentine Riley. Riley pioneered the scientific study of insect pests and their impact on agriculture.   He founded the US Department of Agriculture’s Division of Entomology and was one of the first to use biological pest control. Oh, he saved the French wine industry, too.  He had an unlikely start.

C.V. Riley (as he was usually known) was born in Chelsea, the yuppie section of 19th-century London. His father was a minister, a rising star in the Church of England. At age 11, C.V. was sent to the continent (France, then Germany) to study languages, art, and science. But within a couple of years, his father died and C.V. was brought back to London. His widowed Mum remarried and C.V. was disinherited.

By 17, C.V. Riley was on his way to America to work as a farm labourer on property owned by a British investor who had taken an interest in the young man’s plight. After a few years of grueling farm work, Riley found a job as a reporter and artist for a farm journal, Prairie Farmer. It was 1864 – Riley was 20, drafted into the American Civil War, and released after his compulsory 100 days of service. Riley then went back to the magazine, continuing as an artist and reporter, but taking on the added job of editor of the journal’s bug division. The boy from Chelsea was the Prairie Farmer’s entomology editor.

riley-moth-drawing

American politics

His talent as an observer and artist were noticed. In 1868, at age 24, Riley was appointed Missouri’s first state entomologist.  It was a time of huge emphasis on all thing farm-related. America’s first universities were “state agriculture schools” where research on best farm practices were conducted. The west was growing explosively, populated by European homesteaders. The government bolstered settlement and farming. To assure success, new crop varieties were developed, including drought-resistant wheat and fast-growing cotton. As farmers specialized, miles after mile of grain was seeded in 1870s-style monoculture, resulting in insect plagues. The concentration of food led to infestations of bugs, beetles, and especially grasshoppers. Economic entomology – mostly geared towards killing pests – was born.

riley-silkworm-drawingOne of C.V. Riley’s first distinguishing studies involved the 1873-1877 Kansas locust plague. He convinced Congress to form the US Entomology Commission. Riley was appointed chair of its Grasshopper Commission. In 1878, he was appointed the USDA’s first entomologist. But he got into a big spat with the ag department’s chief, a political appointee and Civil War general, so Riley quit. But two years later, the general was gone and Riley was back. But he never mastered diplomacy.

He was volatile  – I read a letter which he wrote to a famous naturalist, Mary Lua Treat, where he mocks her efforts at mailing galls (caused by parasitic insects) to him, then wishes she has many more galls in her future. He was probably teasing, but the letter sounds really rude. Riley was also severely overworked and given to bouts of “nervous exhaustion”. He held a USDA post until 1894. Simultaneously, he was the Smithsonian’s first curator of insects.

Science and wine

Throughout all the politics, C.V. Riley edited entomology journals which he founded and published – the American Entomologist (1868–80) and Insect Life (1889–94). These journals were brightened by Riley’s sketches and drawings of all manner of insect. He was a gifted observer, an talented artist, and an influential author. Charles Darwin’s work (butterfly colouration; insect kinship; cross-fertilization of plants; insect/plant dependence; insectivorous plants) was mentioned in nearly every issue. In 1880, Riley showed how flowering plants, hymenoptera, and diptera co-evolved during the Cretaceous.

1868-the-am-entomologist

On the science front, he is credited with the first use of biological control (instead of chemicals) when he imported a beetle from Australia to eat scale that was destroying California’s citrus industry. Soon after, he was one of the first to notice that American grapes, Vitis labrusca were resistant to a yellow sap- sucking insect called Phylloxera which was devouring European vineyards. With J. E. Planchon, Riley grafted French grape stems on American V. labrusca root stock and shipped them to France. Together, they saved the French wine industry. For this, Riley was awarded the French Grand Gold Medal and was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Not so enthused about bees

With all this brilliant bug stuff – saving the French grapes from Phylloxera,  starting entomology journals, founding biological pest control, rising rapidly in the ag department – I wondered what C.V. Riley had to say about honey bees. riley-the-bee-nuisanceNot much. And the wee bit of ink that he spilt towards bees was mostly negative. His magazine, The American Entomologist, carried a piece called The Bee Nuisance, which describes all sorts of bee complaints. At the Illinois State Horticultural convention in 1874, his talk was titled “Apis mellifica as an enemy to horticulture.”

His main contentions were that honey bees injure ripening fruit and they are a nuisance to farm workers. Riley’s journals carried numerous stories about honey bees attacking grapes, peaches, and raspberries, making farmers flee in fear while the bees bruised and battered crops before harvest. Riley also urged people to chase beekeepers out of their neighbourhoods if they ran too many hives.  Meanwhile, from what I could see as I leafed through several hundred pages of Riley’s journals, he wrote very little about the honey bees’ importance as a fruit pollinator. Because of Riley’s prestige, all of this created problems for beekeepers in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. Much of Riley’s criticism was unwarranted – I’ve not heard complaints from growers about excessive fruit damage and today they recognize the importance of honey bees as pollinators.

cv-riley-olderRegardless his apparent honey bee animosity, C.V. Riley was one of the world’s first true practical entomologists and his contributions (especially making Rhône Syrah and Bordeaux Cabernet Sauvignon possible) deserve our recognition. We can only speculate what he may have accomplished if his life had not ended tragically at age 52. In 1895, he and his fourteen-year-old son  were racing their bicycles down Columbia Street towards Riley’s Smithsonian office when he hit a granite building stone that had fallen from a wagon. C.V. Riley smashed into the pavement and was carried home where he died that evening,  never regaining consciousness.

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