You, me, the bee, and the wind

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Saturday was Windsday here. The forecast claimed we would see record high temperatures and some wind. They were almost right with the temps – it was close to a record and continued the trend of the past two months: warm and dry. T-shirt weather, in the winter, in Canada. But the weather folks were a bit subtle when they told us to expect some wind. It was the wind that legends are made of.

What happens to bees on a windy day? Even though it was quite mild and honey bees would normally enjoy a bit of exercise, windy-day bees stay home, eat honey, and play cards. Or they become argumentative grumps like the rest of us. Beekeepers know that bees are aggressive on windy days. This weekend, it would have been impossible to work bees anyway. The smoker couldn’t be tamed and lids and frames would be airlifted to other apiaries. But it is windy-day aggression that intrigues me at the moment.

Decades ago, scientists noted that flat, expansive, windy places have sadder people. Statistically, North Dakota leads the nation in both depression and dusty wind. Abroad, Hungary has long been studied as Europe’s nation with the highest rate of suicide and depression. (Hungary is a land-locked, mostly flat country with a huge windy prairie.) Is there a link between the wind and depression statistics, or are these just coincidental? The Swiss Meteorological Institute believed the link and looked into health problems appearing during spells when the Foehn Winds blew down from the Alps. The people at the institute attributed stress, anxiety, depression, exhaustion, fatigue, dizziness, and body aches to the winds, resulting in increased rates of suicide and highway accidents. It seems winds can sometimes bring misery and chaos. But why?

Why does the wind make us sad and make our honey bees aggressive? Some research points to the tendency for dry dusty places to have more particulate ionization during windy weather. The friction of moving air with and against dust ionizes the particles. An excess of positive ions occurs in some windy conditions and it seems that the positive ions are not a very positive thing when it comes to human moods. Possibly related are the effects of living near wind turbines, which may stir the air and further ionize it. Complaints have been coming from people living near large wind farms (you can read a CBC news story here) with people citing depression, elevated blood pressure, and mood swings – although it may simply be the result of the noise and the unsightly turbine views.

Medically, the increased positive ions around our heads may be enough to disrupt neural activity. Even at a very minor level, such disruption could make it harder to concentrate, think, and even motivate movement. The brain may compensate for the stress by working harder, bringing on headaches, fatigue, and sleeplessness. All this may sound like pseudo science (and maybe it is), but there probably is some general malady at play. Obviously, not everyone responds the same and the grumpiness is not universal. Personally, I am not prone to depression, but when I farmed in southern Saskatchewan, my motivation and energy were invariably sapped on windy days.

How about the bees? People and insects don’t always respond the same way to similar external pressures, of course. It’s not usually safe to extend our attitudes and motivations to our bees – that’s a tendency called anthropomorphism and it leads to comments like, “Hey, look at that bee on the clover – do you see that? She’s smiling!” It may be true that ionic particulates make bees aggressive, but it may be a stretch to believe their lips are sweetly curled on nice days. However, it is pretty good advice to avoid working bees on days when it is so windy that both the smoker and the smoke become airborne.

Posted in Climate, Science | Tagged | 2 Comments

Knowing Nothing

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Ron Miksha

He might teach you something.

When I wrote my book Bad Beekeeping, the title came to me as a response to meeting a pompous, self-absorbed beekeeper. You know the sort – the person with a year or two experience who has an undeservedly inflated ego. Such a fellow is likely to write a book about his idea of brilliant beekeeping. But if he persists at keeping bees, he may eventually discover that he doesn’t really know very much. My favourite beekeeping adage is “Beekeeping is an activity where you start out knowing everything and as the years pass, you figure out you know less and less. Eventually, you realize that you don’t know anything at all.” The next time you meet a beekeeper who confidently has all the answers, remind yourself of that adage. Then slowly back away from that expert’s fountain of wisdom.

If you would like to avoid the pitfalls of knowing everything, there are two things that might fix you. (1) You can keep blundering along with an attitude of smarty-pants-ness and after enough years, your confidence will break and you will become a better beekeeper. Or (2) you can seek out a local beekeeper who seems to have a humble demeanor and years of experience. Marry him/her. If that’s not to your liking, see if you can be adopted. Whatever it takes, stick around like granulated honey. Offer to carry a hive tool. Smoke her bees. There is really no better or faster way to learn to be a beekeeper. Our local bee club has a mentor program. Perhaps yours does, too. You can hook up with someone who needs help and offers training. Good luck with your education. May you one day discover that you know nothing. And that’s not such a bad thing. It keeps beekeeping interesting.

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Airport Honey

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Apiary at Prague’s Vaclav Havel Airport

Looking for a noisy place to keep some bees? Urban beekeepers struggle to find spots to set landing boards for their hives. Most towns and cities have limits on the number of hives that can be kept in the backyard. Three? OK. Thirty? Probably not. But there are a few areas tucked within some city boundaries where as many as 75 colonies are comfortably kept. Big city airports.

I had not thought of this before, but apparently the idea has been around for at least 15 years. Airports want to be noticed as the eco-friendly green patches that they think they are, so inviting bees on the property gets some positive attention. Sometimes the honey is sold at the airports’ gift shops, boosting the airports’ meagre profits.

Bee hives next to busy airports has probably been happening ever since the Kitty Hawk Apiaries were established in December 1903, but according to a New York Times article, the modern trend dates back to Hamburg, Germany, in 1999. At least a dozen other airports in Europe have also welcomed beekeepers. America’s O’Hare has 75 hives, making it both the busiest and the buzziest airport on the continent. Prominently featured in the NY Times is Montreal’s Mirabel which has 6,000 beckoning acres. The airport authorities reached out to Montreal’s Miel Montreal, a honey makers’ cooperative. The group responded with the five hives of bees now kept at the airport.

You might wonder how the bees feel about their new location. It’s almost certainly a good thing. The hives are kept out of sight, somewhere on the back 6,000. They aren’t going to bother anyone – no one ever wanders around on a commercial airfield and any pilot who runs into the hives has bigger problems to think about than the hives he just hit. The fields at most airports are not farmed so pesticides are not likely an issue. What about the noise? The bees won’t complain – they don’t have ears.

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Thermo-Zapper-Gun

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Ron Miksha

My 12-year-old ordered a laser gun from Amazon. Apparently it could burn your eyes out, but we are hoping not to test that. It’s a thermometer. The laser part is just a pointer, the laser actually has nothing to do with gauging heat or cold. It just helps you know you are pointing the gun at the right thing. We’ve tested it on snow (-2C), boiling water (94C here along the Rockies), armpits (34C). It seems accurate and it’s certainly easy to use. It’s not a toy. Maybe you know all about it already – I heard it’s available at Costco. (I wouldn’t know about that because I was expelled from their campus the day I cleaned out their week’s sugar supply.) This gun cost my boy less than $20, delivery included, from Amazon.ca

I can see a lot of beekeeping applications for the thermal gun. It could be a quick way of checking the temperature of honey tanks and wax melters. When people ask me about heating honey before straining it, I’d always say, “make it hot, but not too hot.” 140 Fahrenheit (60 C) is good, then strain the honey and cool it as quickly as you can. (Containers into cold water usually does the trick.) But lacking a thermometer, I’d suggest making the tank so hot you could just barely keep your hand on it – and not any hotter than that. But then I found out my palms are pretty thick and can take more heat than those of some other folks. The thermo-gun removes ambiguity. If you make a freezer to store your comb honey, you can check all the corners to see that the temp is consistent and heat is not leaking in anywhere. I am also thinking that you might use it to check your hives mid-winter. Shining the red laser beam into a hive’s top entrance should result in a temperature warmer than ambient air. You might have to do a number of hives to see if any are anomalously cold (which might be dead) or warm (the bees might already be up in the top chamber and may soon be hungry). I won’t collect a commission on this device, but you might make use of it, so here are links to (Canada) Amazon.ca and (USA) Amazon.com. If you think of some other uses, let me know.

Posted in Tools and Gadgets | Tagged | 1 Comment

Honey on tap?

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Ron Miksha

In the past, I’ve written rather cynically about the various kickstarter projects aimed at people who care about bees. Entrepreneurs have been sucking up cash to “Save the Bees” and to sponsor new beehive designs for quite a few years. Here’s another. I won’t go all cynical on you yet – I’ll give these people a chance to prove themselves first. Watch their video. If for nothing else, for the inspiring music, the resurrected 1960s hippies, and the three-year-old girl dipping her finger into the honey. The video is expertly (and I guess, expensively) designed to tug at your heart and your purse. But there is a fundamental flaw in the whole scheme.

If it works at all, the honey flow beehive (www.honeyflow.com) deems to separate us yet another step away from our food supply. Rather than becoming intimate with the makers of our honey, we conceal them in a magic box – the ultimate in “Black-box Technology.” No need to get your hands dirty, to become aware of the harm – or good – you may be doing to the hive of bees as their honey is being “tapped”. (In the southern USA, where I lived for ten years, it was called “robbing the bees” which helps the beekeeper remember what his role really is during harvest.) Don’t misunderstand me – I produced over a million pounds of honey from my bees, wrestling with my little colleagues for each ounce. I care about bees, I love honey, I know how to produce it, and I have done the battle. But it was hands-on. If a hive was short of honey and didn’t have what it needed for winter, I gave the colony honey. Getting your hands dirty while harvesting gives you a chance to be sure you are not hurting the bees and over-harvesting. It helps you appreciate what the bees did for you more than turning a tap ever will. This honeyflow hive allows us to be much more casual about the process. Perhaps it would be like leading a calf into a box, pushing a lever, and watching hamburgers and hotdogs drop out the other side. OK, that was a bit cynical – I think it was the soundtrack of the video that got to me. Also Sprach Zarathustra would have been more subtle. But if you’d like to support them, “Like our Facebook page, join our mailing list, and stay in the loop,” says hive maker Cedar Anderson.

Posted in Strange, Odd Stuff, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Ultimate Valentine

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Honey hearts.

I know, beekeepers usually are not sentimental. For most of us, Saint Valentine was some mythical character built upon Lupercalia, an occasion observed by the Romans for three days (February 13–15) each year, and intimately connected to fertility. Like many Roman customs Lupercalia was borrowed by a start-up church in Rome almost 2,000 years ago. They used the holiday to remember a sainted martyr named Valentino who would grow a new heart every night and give his old heart to anyone who was sick, feeble, or heartless. Or maybe those were chocolate hearts for some favourite pigsneys. Anyway, that’s about all most beekeepers know about Valentine’s Day. But at least one beekeeper – someone whom I shall probably never meet – employed enormous energy and talent to make the really cool heart-shaped comb in today’s picture. I ran across it on a Polish language bee-talk forum where members were showing various comb-honey gadgets. I couldn’t understand very much of what I read on that site, but the pictures are great. (I have grandparents from Slavic countries and I studied Russian at university, but the Polish language is many degrees above my abilities.) If you have seen these heart-combs before or know the person who makes them, please drop me a note so I can credit the appropriate craftsman. Until then, maybe you can make a few of these yourself. You know, just before taking your special honey out to dinner.

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Journeys in Books

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Ron Miksha

A reader of this blog asked if I would add his two books to the ones you see floating around the left edge of this page. I like beekeeping books and own several. Several hundred. A few are ancient classics, written and printed over three hundred years ago. My copy of Bee Treatise (1593) by Thomas Hill predates Shakespeare. Except for edges singed during the Great London Fire, it is in pretty good shape and makes entertaining reading. Sort of like a Shakespearean beekeeping manual. Some 15 generations of beekeepers have held this book.

My Hungarian in-laws have given me a number of central European classics: one is Méhész Naptár (1856), a prized beekeeping manual in my collection. It was printed on the exact same printing press that inked the 1848 declaration of Hungarian independence from Austria. (That revolution failed and its leaders were executed.) Among my other foreign language books is a first edition volume of Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeiles (1792) written by the blind beekeeper Francois Huber, the fellow who figured out how queen bees mate. It is a brilliant and practical book. (Huber describes an observation ‘leaf-hive’ with frames that flip like pages of a book – a precursor of Langstroth’s moveable frame hive.) For easy reading, an account of Huber’s story is told by Sara George in The Beekeeper’s Pupil (2002), a romantic novel based on the lives of Huber, his wife, and his beekeeping assistant. By the way, that paperback novel was a bit cheaper than the gilded Huber original I picked from a bin of old books on a trip long ago.

I like these unique and vintage bee books, but most of my beekeeping volumes are modern. They resemble text books and have titles like The Bee Craftsman, The Art of Beekeeping, and The Behaviour and Social Life of Honeybees. There are also dozens of specialized books on things like raising queens, producing comb honey, and diagnosing diseases of honeybees. These are all good instructive volumes, but my favourite beekeeping books are the ones that tell stories about beekeepers. That’s part of the reason that I wrote Bad Beekeeping back in 2004. I like stories about the failures and successes of beekeeping, especially when told from a personal perspective. Bad Beekeeping, released eight years ago, tells the story of my younger days as a commercial beekeeper and it (as I have been told) has become something of a minor classic in the bee literature. I am grateful for that, but I have encountered a number of much better books that tell better yarns about beekeeping of yore.

My favourite personal-account beekeeping book is Fifty Years among the Bees (1911) by C.C. Miller. That book is a true classic. Like me, Miller was from western Pennsylvania and headed west to become a commercial beekeeper. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. CC, as most people called Dr Miller, was brilliant – arguably the best beekeeper of his generation. He lived during the “Golden Age of Beekeeping” – an era about a hundred years ago when good beekeepers managed 300 hives, produced 50,000 comb sections a year, and made a comfortable living of it. CC originally trained as a physician. He gave that up because he was in constant fear of making a mistake that might kill someone. He kept bees instead. Fifty Years is a fantastic story, a very personal tale of how one can live a good life as a beekeeper. If you can’t find a decent hard-cover edition (Years ago, my father gave me his copy.), you can download it online as a PDF here at Archive.org. The book was published over a hundred years ago, the copyright has expired, and over a thousand people have likewise downloaded Dr Miller’s informative and amusing story.

The reader of this blog who asked if I would link his work is Dennis Brown. He runs a website at Lone Star Farms and he offers two books: a question and answer collection and a personal journey tale. I can’t say if Mr Brown’s book, Beekeeping: A Personal Journey, is as good as Dr CC Miller’s Fifty Years, but the title is promising. And if you follow the link to Amazon, you can “Look Inside” and read a few sample pages. I did and I decided to order a copy of the Personal Journey so I can read the rest of the story. I hope I find it interesting. Sometimes the most useful lessons are taught by people who have made a few mistakes and then shared their experiences. It’s certainly less painful than creating one’s own stupid follies and then trying to recover from them.

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Rustic Hive

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Furniture catalogs may have to add a new line – Rustic Hive. If you are like most commercial beekeepers, you’ve used bee boxes for desks, boot organizers, and book shelves. When I was a child, we kept bees on the family farm, so hive furniture was vogue there, too. In fact, when the twins were born, their home-birth was a month early and my little sisters spent their first few days in a make-shift beehive crib – an empty rim with a cover nailed on the bottom. As you might guess, my siblings don’t suffer much from allergies.

Empty deep supers were my first furniture when I left home when I was a teenager. But Rustic Hive is for grownups, too. Maybe it’s hereditary – my daughter has this same great look in her farm house. That’s where I took these pictures last week. If you – beekeeper or non-beek – want in on this kitschy new trend, drop me a line and I’ll tell you how you may buy your very own Rustic Hive space organizers. (But don’t tell Martha Stewart.)

Rustic Hive Storage: In the kid’s library.

Rustic Hive Storage: In the kid’s play area.

Rustic Hive Storage: In the mud room.

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Is Grocery-Store Honey Safe?

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Is it or isn’t it?

A school chum sent me this: “With everything we hear about honey these days, how do we know how to pick out real honey at the grocery store?”

I answered his question and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

You have a reason to be concerned about some of the honey found in grocery stores. As much as one-third is believed to be either mixed with cheaper and less healthy products such as HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) and sucrose (beet/cane sugar) or the honey may be contaminated with agri- cultural pesticides – sometimes drifting in from farmers’ spraying. As of yet, I have not heard of any adult becoming ill from honey contaminants, though low-levels of unwanted chemicals from any and all food sources may have a cumulative effect.

You have probably heard that “germs can’t live in honey”. This is true for most bacteria which find the mild acidity and hygroscopicity (ie, water-sucking quality) of honey deadly. Imported honey is rigorously sampled and inspected by USDA/Customs inspectors. Unfortunately, domestic American honey is not inspected except in rare circumstances when it is already on the store shelf. Nevertheless, honey purchased in stores is almost always safe when consumed by people over the age of 2. So, the issue is really more about food quality than food safety.

The quality of most honey in stores is fine. But how can you recognize which is the real honey and which is adulterated by HFCS or sucrose? You can’t, unless it is clearly labeled as a “honey blend” as shown in this picture. (By the way, this example is legal and probably tastes fine. It sells for $2.65 US for 12 ounces, or $3.53/lb) – but a honey blend is obviously not pure honey. To be sure that most honey on US grocery shelves is good, a tiny sampling is randomly pulled off shelves in most states and is run through a battery of tests. If found adulterated, the honey is recalled and the packer is usually hit with a fine and some embarrassment.

To complicate things:

  • Honey has a range of colours. It is almost black if the floral source is buckwheat and almost white if it is high-prairie alfalfa. Goldenrod, common in the eastern states, is dark yellow – we promoted it as golden. Other flower sources yield the whole spectrum of colours. An odd colour has nothing to do with adulteration or contamination.
  • Honey has a variety of flavours and scents. Just as every flower smells different, the flowers’ nectars give differently flavoured honey. Again, this is not a good way of selecting honey – unless the honey smells fermented. Fermentation (eventually leading to vinegar or mead) happens if honey has more that 18.6% water content. Packers avoid mixing too much water with the honey they pack because it might spoil and the shopkeeper will demand a recall. Honey sold in stores is usually 18 to 18.6% moisture. Nectar from flowers is 90% water, so the busy bees remove the excess by fanning their wings inside the hive, drying the nectar.
  • Honey granulates. Usually. You have seen “sugared” or “crystallized” honey. This happens to most pure natural honey. As noted above, honey naturally contains water, making it a supersaturated solution. With time, solids crystallize. However, some honey never crystallizes – for example, the famous tupelo honey from the rivers banks of north Florida. (Watch the movie Ulee’s Gold, starring Peter Fonda, for more about that.) Granulation correlates with a higher fructose/glucose ratio. Crystallized honey can be made liquid by heating a jar in the microwave or in hot water. (Too much heat can “cook” the honey, ruining its flavour and darkening it, so be careful.)
  • Pollen in honey. Raw, locally produced honey usually has a bit of healthy local pollen in it. Some buyers use this as a test of quality, thinking that honey without pollen is not real honey. They are wrong about this. Others claim pollen in honey is a contaminant – so far governments have not seen pollen as an impurity. Most honey sold in stores has been filtered to remove pollen, but it is still honey. The amount of pollen in raw, unfiltered honey varies but is too small to detect without a microscope. Some consumers feel that those extremely low doses of pollen helps their resistance against allergies.

The real deal

Bottom line? If you can find a local beekeeper, check out his/her shop and buy direct from the producer. The honey and shop will not be inspected, but if the outfit looks clean, neat, and organized, it is probably better than the majority of (um, rather messy) honey businesses I have seen across the USA.

You might also consider buying old-fashioned comb honey. Comb honey is not processed in any way – it is taken straight from the hives in the form it is created. No suspicious mixing or handling by potentially dirty equipment. If you do use comb honey, then you can squeeze it or carefully melt it to get the liquid honey out. Or just eat the honey, natural beeswax and all. As a disclosure, my daughter’s honey farm specializes in comb honey. (She and her husband bought our Canadian farm a few years ago.) She ships all over the world. (Believe it or not, China is a big customer of Canadian comb honey!)

But I think you still might like to find a local producer to support. Check out the farmers markets and ask the vendor if you could drop by at their farm and pick up some honey. I also would not totally ignore the grocery stores. Honey in retail shops is often cheaper, convenient, and as I mentioned, even if it falls into the adulterated and contaminated group, it is ‘probably’ not going to be harmful. However, if you want to be sure it is real and imbues health, check out the local beekeepers.

Post Script: That sums up how I answered my friend, a non-beekeeper, when he asked about buying honey from a grocery store. If you are a beekeeper or honey packer reading this, let me know if you think I’ve missed something important and I’ll pass it along to readers.

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Cold Bees

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Long lines of hives are not recommended,
but upper vents definitely are.

It’s not the cold, it’s the humidity. We hear people say this a lot. That’s one reason 20º Fahrenheit (-7º C) in the eastern US can feel a lot colder than -20º in Montana. Generally, it’s the humidity that makes a colony of bees suffer the most through winter, too. As bees eat honey they physically convert some of the honey’s calories into heat, keeping the center of their nest far above the ambient temperature. You might remember that when animals eat, sugars combine with oxygen and carbon dioxide and water are respired. Remember that honey is about 17% water. If the bees eat 50 pounds of honey, over 8 pounds of water is released. If that moisture doesn’t leave the bees’ nest, it rises, condenses above the bees, and drips back down on the cluster. That is deadly.

The reason so many successful beekeepers keep upper entrances open during the winter is to allow excess moisture to drift out and away from the hive. You have probably heard the recipe for a good bee location – among other things, southern exposure, sloping landscape, and good air flow are usually cited. These all help keep the air around the bee yard dry. But first the water has to exit the colony. In addition to upper vents, I have even seen wintered hives supplied with burlap sacks draped over the top bars and extended out beyond the cover, thus serving as a moisture-wick. The wee bit of exposed burlap tends to stay dry and a capillary effect sets in, drawing moisture out of the hive. I have not seen this used out here in the dry west, but upper vents are almost always supplied.

Does the cold kill bees? Of course it does. A small cluster of bees exposed to minus 20º for a few hours will die. This is one reason package shippers don’t like to send 2-pound packages off to northern states in March. Nor should you install a package in bitterly cold weather. But large clusters of bees inside insulated hives typically survive even the longest coldest winters. That’s why beekeeping can be successful in the far north. The bees hug tightly for months, then quickly build strong spring populations and gather honey 16 hours a day during the long summertime flower feasts.

It’s not the cold, it’s the humidity. Seems to be true for bees, too. A Swedish beekeeper once told me that in his country a beekeeper’s success is not measured by pounds of honey produced but by the number of colonies that survive the winter. And, he told me, “I always expect 100% of the colonies to be good in the spring.” I have never had such good results in the north, but I always felt that any losses greater than 15% meant I was doing something wrong. Perfect wintering may be almost impossible to achieve in a larger outfit, but anything over one hive in six dead probably means some part of your wintering system needs to be fixed.

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