Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA. Surer:0--

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The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA Published by the MICHIANA Beekeepers Association JULY 2011 Our July meeting will be Saturday, July 16, 9:00 am to noon at the

1 The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA Published by the MICHIANA Beekeepers Association JULY 2011 Our July meeting will be Saturday, July 16, 9:00 am to noon at the workshop and sales outlet of Earl Schmucker (Hive Tops, see ad), C. R. 54 east of Nappanee. Danny Slabaugh will demonstrate queen grafting, will will discuss honey prospects, mite assessment and treatment, and of course, any concerns you may have. Greetings from Bob Baughman. canon 2 C9 990 : Earrs Place 15, ;o Rd 91 - e Meal 91 ^Co R[165 g Mano:41 t 4 Surer:0-- I want to thank Emily Johnson for her plant lecture at Linton's for our June Association meeting Emily put a lot of research into her talk and it showed. Afterward, it was nice to see folks go out into the nursery and pick up bee friendly stock to take home and plant. MBA CONTACTS PRESIDENT Bob Baughman bob.deb.baughman@sbcglobal.net VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives liquidgold2009@embarqmail.com TREASURER David Emerson emerson3434@verizon.net EDITOR Henry Harris henry4744@frontier.com As I type this note I hear folks celebrating our Nation's Birthday in our neighborhood. I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! With every 4th of July comes the rest of the month, hot and humid, with hives reaching their maximum population for the season. The summer honey flow normally wraps up the third week of July, harvest time. When we go into the hives at the end of the month for that wonderful yearly product, remember you are a robber. Hives tend to be aggressive, along with the day time heat, you could end up in trouble. By profession I am not a doctor, but I have a few tips that may save your life. Everyone prepares for those times we get to spend in the hives, but July is unique. Drink plenty of water the hour before you suit up, take water with you while at the bees, have the smoker lit and working properly, take extra fuel along just in case your smoker runs low. Tell someone where you are going and how long you might be, just because! Carry a cell phone, and keep it handy. And have an Epipen if at all possible. Should you experience a number of bee stings, or maybe just a few, if you become dizzy, trouble focusing, confused, get away from the hives, seek shade and pull out that water. Get Help! Get on the cell phone and call that someone who knows where you are. Use the Epipen if you feel you are having a reaction to the stings. Epipens are not prophylactic (just in case) they are emergency help to keep you alive through an allergic reaction. Overcome by the heat, get away from the bees and head for shade. Use the cell phone, Get Help! Did I mention check for "Ticks" - they hide in the tall grass on the underside of leaves! If they do not come off easily hold something hot to them and they will release and back off. July is a great month, 'Bee' prepared, mother nature is, beekeepers merely help her out! Page 1

2 Saturday, August 20 There were 47 present in the green house room at Linton's. Emily Johnson, left, was the speaker at our June meeting at Linton's Nursery to tell us about beefriendly plants we can have in our gardens. A good number of bee friendly plants from Linton's were given out as door prizes. Saturday, September 17 Warsaw, Indiana Saturday, October 15 Proposed meeting schedule for 2011 The St. Joseph County Fai r is al ready history. The 4-H winners are Sara Eperjesi, Division III - Champion and Grand Champion, and State Fair Entry, Jessy Harris-Forkner, Division III - Reserve Champion and Reserve Grand Champion, and Sarah Eperjesi, MICHIANA Beekeepers Association Award. If you would like to enter honey in the Open Class of the Home It ry vfamily Arts Department you will Ai need to provide a one pound jar cuinvaws with a small sample for tasting Strong Roots and checking moisture Monday, July 18 between 1:00 and 7:00 pm at the Home and Family Arts Building. One entry per category: liquid, comb honey, chunk honey and creamed honey with a $1.00 fee per entry. Honey Baked items. Categories are/ Breads, Cakes, Cookies (6 on a plate)' and Others. Sweeteners used must be- 51% honey including toppings and glazes. One entry per category, $1.00 per entry, and they must be presented Thursday, July 21 between 7:30 and 11:00 am at the Home & Family Arts building. Judging takes place from noon until finished. Except for being a 'baked' item, the 'other' category has had no restrictions. Look at the baked items in the non-honey ' areas for ideas. Bee Yard meeting at LeRoy Kuhns near Nappanee, IN Banquet location to be announced. iv / 2J64,23 Cp.. 54 f,a_lt. y-0"-ea bee.sia--pp"c-7 st4.0,00 Slabaugh Apiaries Honey and Supply Danny Slabaugh County Road 52 Nappanee, IN Home (574) Cell (574) clslabugh@embarqmail.corn PIP c Local Honey Select Hive Bodies Select Deep and Medium Frames Screened IPM Bottom Boards Local Matted Queens, Queen Cells Honey Supers Telescoping Covers Inner Covers Candy Boards Pined Snap in Foundation Indiana 5 Frame Nu. Page 2

3 Wit4,114:1:41 441% 144% 010( TN/ 44 by Henry Harris JULY already. I guess the 'already comes from being busy, for which I really am thankful. Last month I talked about comb honey and the need to watch it constantly to avoid travel stains. If you are regularly checking you may catch any misstep the bees may make in building comb. Some times they make a turn for some reason, or none, when building comb. If you catch it quickly you can steer them back into the straight and narrow with little loss of effort or damage to the beautiful end product. And do not forget to freeze all forms of comb honey for at least 24 hours right after removing it from the bees protective custody. No matter what kind of honey you are producing remember to snug the frames together when you finish with a super. Just put your hive tool down between the outside frame's shoulder and the hive wall and tip the top of the tool towards the center of the hive. Do this with all four corners leaving the outside frames equal distance from the walls and you will avoid burr comb like what you see above. If you are not doing one of the more labor intensive forms of supering, extracted honey will leave you with some free time in July. In June I set up my solar wax melter but July and August are just as good times to melt last year's cappings and any older frames you have culled from your hives. It is recommended we replace 3 older combs from each super and brood box every year with new foundation to reduce chemical and biological build up in the wax that can shorten the life of queens, drones and workers or out right kill them. Even if you are not using chemicals in your hives the bees will bring back traces of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and other things they encounter while foraging all of which are absorbed and \ stored in that wonderful sponge like substance we all bees wax. 3. Wax melters can be r large, small, complicated, simple, expensive or cheap. The basic requirements are to have a clear top through which sunlight will pass and become intensified, something to put the wax in or on which will allow melted wax to pass but will retain most of the impurities, something to catch the melted wax in all contained in a box that will_ handle the high temperature (1400) needed to melt bees wax. At right is a small Styrofoam cooler into which a bowl of water has been set. The bowl has paper towel stretched over its top and tied in place. The bees wax is laid on the paper towel and a piece of plexiglass or glass is placed over the top of the cooler. The bees wax melts, soaks through the paper towel and drips into the water in the bowl where it becomes solid. When all the wax is melted the paper towel is thrown away, the bowl washed and that is all there is to it. This large, multiple pan wax melter is the, creation of Tim Ives and Bob Basham. It will melt larger quantities of bees wax and leave it as blocks when removed from the bread pans. Bees wax can be re-melted and re-filtered to clean it further if you want. Bees wax can also be melted in a double boiler but this requires constant observation. Melted bees wax, in addition to being highly flammable, can give severe burns if spilled on the skin. Pans or utensils that come into direct contact with liquid bees wax are difficult to clean so do not use your wife's kitchen things. Bees wax can be sold to a variety of people for more purposes than you can imagine: cosmetics, soaps, candles, thread and cord waterproofing, Ukrainian egg coloring, painting, molding, casting and much more. If you just let it be known that 04 sada

4 you have bees wax people will come out of the woodwork to buy it from you. SO YOU WANT TO FIND YOUR QUEEN Why find the queen? There are not really many good reasons you need to see your queen: 1) If you want to replace her, 2) if you want to make a split with the colony and do not want to accidentally include her in the new unit, 3) If you want to isolate her so you will know the exact age of the larvae you will be using to graft for new queens, 4) if you want to create a break in the brood cycle as a means of reducing a varroa infestation, 5) if you are trying to maintain a specific behavior in your colony and want to be sure the queen is the same one you introduced rather than a supersedure. There may be a few other legitimate reasons for finding the queen but not many and curiosity is not one of them. Looking for the queen is a stressful experience for a colony. You let all of the necessary incubating heat out of the hive, confuse the pheromones (scents) that tell workers and queens where what is in the hive and what to do about it and confuse the signals nurse bees give to foragers. It can take a day or more for the colony to reestablish heat and pheromone ques. If you are looking for the queen because of reasons 1-4 above none of this confusion matters and in the case of number 5 if you wait until the honey flow is over you will minimize the damage. If the queen is just a generic queen and you just want to know if she is there doing her job, look for eggs or just hatched larvae. If you want to know if she is a good queen look at the brood pattern and the population. There will always be open cells in the brood pattern but too many may mean a failing queen, a queen whose eggs have a poor hatching rate due to having been too closely related to the drones she mated with, it could be evidence of foul brood which the workers are barely keeping under control, or the same case with chalk brood, or they simply may have been cells containing honey or pollen that the queen worked around. Low traffic at the Alb entrance or not enough NW bees in the brood nest can also be indicators of a queen unable to keep p up with demands or one that has already left with ip a swarm. 1.11, lagib The fastest and easiest way to find a queen is to look for the painted spot on her back. This year it is blue but I think a bright yellow stands out best every year. Oh, you didn't have her marked and did not mark her ueeh ide v yourself. That's too bad. Looking for a marked queen can reduce the search to 1/4 or less of the time trying to find an unmarked queen takes. Okay, so she is not marked, the first thing we need is a complete understanding of what the queen looks like. The more familiar you are with what a queen looks like from above, side front and back the better are your chances of finding her on a comb while surrounded by workers. Light colored workers have dark bands on their abdomens while dark workers have light bands. Queens, whether light or dark, seldom have bands on their abdomens. On a laying queen, fully 1/3 of her abdomen extends beyond her wing tips while worker wings are very close to the same length as their abdomens. Probably the most identifiable part of a queen's anatomy is the black bald spot on her thorax between her wings. It is this bald spot that is painted 4. to make the queen easier to fmd. The same spot on

workers is covered with fine, feather like hair to catch sticky pollen grains during foraging. Workers also `1'have hair on their abdomens at the overlapping of the abdominal plates.

5 workers is covered with fine, feather like hair to catch sticky pollen grains during foraging. Workers also `1'have hair on their abdomens at the overlapping of the abdominal plates. The more hair they have the more pollen they can collect. New beekeepers often mistake drones for queens. To me a drone's most distinguishing characteristic is his eyes which take up his entire head and resemble a fly's eyes. Drones are pretty uniformly barrel shaped and their wings are about the same length as their abdomen. The back of the drone's thorax is not completely bald like the queen but is not as thickly covered with hair as the worker's. He is bigger around than the queen but not as long. In the picture below there are three drones, a queen and several workers. ine court or attenaants arouna the queen in the above picture can also help you find the queen but do not count on it, especially if you have used smoke on the colony. WHERE NOT TO LOOK (hardly, anyway) Most of the time (MOTT) the queen will NOT be on: (1) a full --frame of honey, "s""capped or uncapped, (2) a full frame of capped brood, or, (3) a full frame of pollen or any combination of the these. ALI BECAUSE there is no place for the queen to lay eggs on any of - these frames there is no reason for her to be there. Of course she might be crossing one of these frames as you are looking for her. She also may be running from you and end up on one of these frames but she will not stay long. You can set aside any of these frames with only the briefest of looks. SO WHERE SHOULD YOU LOOK? An empty frame next to the frame at right is a good possibility. There are both eggs and tiny, recently hatched larvae in the cells of this frame. The larvae next to eggs means the queen was here about 3 days ago. Check front and back carefully, at 1,500 eggs a day she might still be on the other side. We cannot narrow this down matmatically to say she should be in a given spot on an adjacent frame because there are too many variables, her speed of laying, what is on the next frame or even which way she was going. This frame is a good candidate for find-! i n g the jjj j queen. New bees have emerged from the center of the frame leaving space for the queen to lay eggs. I found a queen on just such a frame just before writing this. 5.

Before you start a serious search for the queen have a frame holder attached to the side of the box you will be looking into or, have an empty brood box next to the hive on a board or the upturned

6 Before you start a serious search for the queen have a frame holder attached to the side of the box you will be looking into or, have an empty brood box next to the hive on a board or the upturned outer cover. Do not forget that queens can go up or down from one box to another. If you look at a frame then set it back in the box the queen could walk up from below onto what you think is a queen free frame. Setting the box you are going to look through on another outer cover or board and sitting yourself on yet a third box will make the job easier and you will know the queen is not running from the box you are looking in to the one below it. Another trick is to group frames in twos with a space between each set after looking at them. By putting frames in groups of two, if you missed the queen, who spends all of her life in the dark except for mating or swarming, MOTT she will go between the two frames to hide from the light. There she goes, it is easy to miss her. If she is not walking around the bottom to the other side she may be going through that hole at the bottom corner of the frame. HOW DO YOU LOOK FOR THE QUEEN? Besides knowing where she is most likely to be or not to be how you look for her is something that may help find her. Some people like to look straight down onto the frame relying on the bald spot and 6. the longer abdomen to make her stand out. Some like to hold the frame at an angle eliminating the distractions of the open cells to be able to better see the differences between queen and workers. For a lot of us it is a combination of these that eventually works. There is yet another thing you can do to make your actual search easier and shorter. If you can plan ahead go out to the colony four days before you want to find the queen and put a queen excluder (QE) between each box. Just tip the boxes up, slide the QE in between the. boxes, square them up and walk away. In four days all of the eggs the queen laid before you put the QEs in will have hatched. Now you just look for eggs in open cells and set each box aside until you find them. That box has the queen in it. Now you have just ten frames to check. You can put a super of combs or an empty super on a board, put a QE on it then put another empty super on the QE and shake the bees into the top super one frame at a time and smoke them down through the QE until you find the queen. Use a queen catcher to pick her out and then mark her.

Making Summer Nucs to Overwinter for Spring Use

Making Summer Nucs to Overwinter for Spring Use Purpose: How to produce summer nucleus colonies in preparation for successful overwintering Goal: The goal of this workshop is to provide knowledge on how to create a nucleus (or Nuc) colony how to manage