Saturday, September 15, from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Old Munson Building, 126

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1 The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA PUBLISHED BY MICHIANA BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION AUGUST 2012 Saturday, September 15, from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Old Munson Building, 126 North Lake St., in Warsaw. (41o 14' 22.94" N 85o 51' 28.41" W) From the Elkhart area take S.R. 15 South right into Warsaw. From the South Bend area take U.S. 30 East to S.R. 15 and into Warsaw. Turn Right onto Main St. then right again onto North Lake St. The Old Munson Bldg. is on the right side after your turn. There is plenty of parking beside the building. Bring a sample of your honey to be tasted and judged by all present. Taste testing contests often tell more about the testers and their preferences than the honey. We will also have a refractometer there to check the moisture content of your honey. Two samples at the August meeting tested at 17% and 17.7%, very good moisture levels. There is always an interesting variety of subjects to discuss at the Warsaw meeting since it bridges the period between honey removal and Winter preparations. MBA CONTACTS PRESIDENT Bob Baughman bob.deb.baughman@sbcglobal.net VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives liquidgold2009@embarqmail.co m TREASURER David Emerson emerson3434@msn.com Winter is coming and our next meeting will be EDITOR our banquet so lets list a few things that need to be on beekeeper's minds now. Henry Harris There is a circle of things that are absolutely necessary for our bees to survive henry4744@frontier.com the coming winter. It is not possible to list one as more important than another because if you have an abundance of food but the hive is sitting in the path of a full western wind the wind chill can keep the bees from moving to the stored honey. Low Spots: cold air collects in dips and Ventilation: not a draft but enough air Valleys. Bees in cold low spots will have movement to remove CO2 and Little chance to take cleansing flights. moisture from the hive. Empty Cells: shared heat keeps the bees Forward Tilt: drains condensed moisture Alive. Honey or pollen in cells between that falls to the bottom board out of the Bees prevents sharing and communication. hive. Young Bees: young, Fall raised bees Mouse Guards: keeps mice from Have what it takes to go through winter. chewing your frames and wax and eating Summer bees do not. your bees. Pollen: pollen provides the amino acids Necessary to produce needed protein. Honey: if there is still honey in the hive in March you left enough. South or Southeast Exposure: The earlier in the day a hive is exposed to the warmth of the sun, particularly the entrance of the hive, the longer the window of opportunity for bees to make cleansing flights. Wind Breaks: wind chill sucks the heat out of a hive making the bees eat more honey to make more heat increasing the chance of late winter starvation. Wind chill can also keep bees from moving to needed honey. 1.

2 Young Queen: with bees, as with humans, the young handle stress easier than elderly. Also a colony is doomed if its queen depletes her store of sperm before Spring arrives and she can be replaced. The August meeting at Danny Slabaugh's was attended by 45 people. Danny talked to us about making splits, what to put in and how. He also talked about honey. Two samples offered for moisture checks showed 17% and 17.7%, very good. The low moisture can easily be lost if the honey is not kept in tightly closed containers because honey draws and absorbs moisture. Danny brought out one of his 3-queen condos in which he had introduced queen cells. The queens had emerged and mated and were in different stages of egg laying and put them in nucs. Danny likes his nucs to produce three cycles of brood before winter which means midaugust is about the limit for starting nucs. Left, Danny explains an ultra simple nuc box he was introduced to by another beekeeper. Danny likes Honey-BHealthy in almost any feed formula and has changed from candy boards to candy blocks. Forget liquid feeding when it gets below 45o. In an experiment with wrapping hives for winter one group was wrapped in rigid Styrofoam, one with tar paper and one with nothing. The tar paper group did best overall with survival and amount of stores used while the rigid Styrofoam group used too much honey producing too much brood (too warm?). The no wrap group came in last. We talked about traps and guards for skunks, raccoons and opossum. Custom Extracting: 35c per pound plus the cappings. 2.

3 Wandering with an Old Timer by Henry Harris The weather may be nice but Summer is staggering and about ready to fall. This month is your last chance to do anything in a comfortable manner. Unless you have a heated place to do it, extracting is going to be slow and unpleasant after September. I think it was my first year extracting honey and I had waited until September to take my honey off like the old timers said they did. Those old beekeepers either figured a hard lesson learned was more valuable or they just figured I'd ask if I wanted to know. The bees let go of the supers grudgingly and the honey let go of the frames grudgingly and then it let go of the cold, thin, metal, sides of the extractor grudgingly. The old guys had not said anything about warming rooms or heated extractors. If you take the honey off while it is still 70 o or above outside and extract it right away, while it still holds the heat of the hive, it will flow out of the combs and down the sides of the extractor easily. That Fall Jim Wernicke, my wonderful friend next door, helped me wrap my extractor with heat tape, the kind made to keep ice from forming in your gutters and cover it with insulation. Heating and Cooling was his business and he rigged the heat tape up with limit controls to keep it from going over 100o. The inside of the extractor was toasty warm but never hot to the touch. Honey changes temperature slowly but if the outside temperature is around 50o or lower the bees will be clustering low in the hive, far away from honey supers, and the honey will already be cooler and thicker than it was a few weeks ago. While looking for some aid to demonstrate the difficulty cool honey presents to extracting I ran across an 8th grade science project. The student set up three beakers of honey. One with 50o honey, one with 100o and one with 70o honey. The student dropped a marble in the 50o honey and the 100o degree honey and video taped the result. In the 100o honey the marble traveled the inch and 8 tenths in 4 seconds while the marble in the 50o honey poked along barely moving 3 tenths of an inch. The student then dropped marbles into the 50 o honey and the 70o honey. The marble in the 70o honey sank through the one inch and 8 tenths in 15 seconds while the marble 3.

4 in the 50o honey dropped between 4 1/2 to 5 tenths of an inch to finish the entire drop in 60 seconds. You can do the statistics and see the advantage of extracting warm honey. You can view the 43 second video demonstration on Google, Images, 'viscosity of honey', go do down to Page 5 and click on the image at left. If you do not cover the top of the extractor while it is running you will have tiny droplets of honey windmilling out of the extractor and sticking to everything in the vicinity with an extensive clean-up to do when extracting is done. Keep the extracted honey in a warm place while it settles, at least 24 hours. Air bubbles, wax and propolis flecks will rise to the top faster and the honey will bottle easier. Stack the supers in a very warm room, people feel comfortable at 68o to 72o but in the hive your honey was close to 90o. Another alternative is to stack the supers over a light bulb to provide heat, just be sure you will not melt the bottom most combs. A small fan can keep the heated air moving. Old refrigerators and freezers can be converted to be warming chest but be sure to control the temperature. You will not get any benefit in increased fluidity by raising the temperature over 100 o but you could burn your honey. If your colonies did not make enough honey to get through winter, about 100 pounds which is about one and a half deep boxes, you can make up the difference with sugar syrup. Two parts sugar and one part very hot water. Do not allow the sugar to burn. Burnt sugar, caramelized, will give your bees diarrhea. Water Sugar That makes a syrup that is 33% water. The bees will need to evaporate moisture from the syrup to bring it down to 17% or 18%. Evaporation requires heat. Remember how we talked about bees placing drops of water around the hive when it was hot because it took heat to evaporate that water away and that "cooled" the hive, if you can call 94o cool. If the temperature is in the 60s or lower the bees will have to use some of the syrup to make heat to make evaporation possible. The cooler it is the more they will have to 4.

5 consume to turn your syrup into a honey substitute. With a nectar flow the bees are using part of the incoming nectar to feed themselves so they can turn nectar into honey and Sugar do other things. It has been estimated that a colony of bees will use between Water 300 and 400 pounds of honey in the course of a year to heat itself, cool itself, feed itself, feed its larvae, build comb, keep the hive clean and healthy, turn nectar into honey, search for a new home site, cast a swarm and hundreds of other tasks that we have no inkling of. Bees do not eat honey in its thick, concentrated form like we do, but dilute it with water, they even prefer to consume nectar. Bees will consume the relatively thin sugar syrup you give them to fuel all of their colony and hive activities. Once the immediate needs are taken care of they will concentrate and store any surplus. So do not imagine that giving a colony one gallon of syrup means it now has a gallon of honey substitute stored away for winter, it will be far less. If you must feed sugar syrup do it as fast as the bees will consume it and feed until they stop taking it. Hefting a hive is a popular, often talked of, method of estimating how much honey a colony has stored. But, testing beekeepers to see if they really can tell how much is stored by hefting has shown it is very inaccurate. The only real way to know what is in the hive is to open it and look. If you have waited until cool weather to feed your bees it will take them longer to convert and store less syrup. So start now! Here in the middle of August Goldenrod has started to bloom and I can smell it when around my hives. The smell of goldenrod being ripened in a hive is distinctive. Many say it smells bad, even like something rotting. Others, me included, find it interesting but not offensive. The honey is darker and stronger tasting than Summer honey but nothing like its smell would lead you to believe. In the natural order of things a colony will collect a lot of Spring honey but most will be consumed to produce the workforce to make a crop from the Summer flows. So there may be a small amount of light, mild, Spring honey at the top of the combs. The bulk of the honey stored in the hive will be Summer honey. This will be mixed, light from early sources and trees and darker from weeds and later sources. 5.

6 Spring Honey Summer Honey Empty Comb There will be less Fall honey stored near the bottom of the combs. This is darker, and stronger and has more "stuff" in it that bees will have to void themselves of making some believe goldenrod is not good for winter feed. Fall honey, being at the bottom of the combs, will be consumed first as the bees eat their way up through the combs. There will always be empty combs at the bottom and center of the hive for the bees to cluster in. With only the Fall thin foundation wall at the base of the cells bees can form the Honey tight ball needed to regulate and hold heat for the cluster even though they are not physically touching. Not only are things harder for the bees when it is cold but they are harder for you too. Feeding bees sugar syrup is time consuming, sticky and messy enough when it is warm but it is even worse when your hands and feet are wet and cold. Feeding inside the hive is a must in the Fall to keep robbing from starting which can leave you with one or more decimated starving colonies. If it is cool the syrup needs to be right next to the bees, not 6 or 12 inches away. A frame feeder placed right next to the bees or a zip lok baggie right on top of the frames they are on are best. Bottling honey. First plan ahead. What will your sell your honey in? How long before it is sold? How long will your customer keep the honey before it is consumed? All honey will crystallize. I have had honey that went from August into January before crystallizing and other years I have had honey that would crystallize in less than a month over and over. Crystallization is the result of the per cent of glucose in the honey. The higher the amount of glucose in the honey the faster it will crystallize. The lower the amount of glucose and the higher the amount of fructose in the honey the longer it will go before crystallizing. 6.

7 This balance, or imbalance is produced in the plant that provides the nectar. The two honeys I mentioned above were produced in different years but on the same location. The weather caused different plants to predominate in nectar production making for different composition of the honey's constituents, not just glucose/fructose but the enzymes, acids, oils and other things that determine flavor, color and aroma. If you plan to sell or give your honey away in plastic containers, but not immediately, it would be best to store the honey in heavy duty plastic buckets that can be warmed without melting or deforming. And do not label the containers until they are ready to go out the door in the customer's hand. De-crystallizing can be very destructive to paper labels. We talked about settling to get rid of bubbles and unsightly particles from the top of the honey. Avoid re-introducing bubbles to your honey during the bottling process by 'flowing' honey into the jars. Either tilt the jar so the honey strikes the side of the jar at an angle and flows down gently to the bottom or lean a wooden or plastic paddle in the jar so the stream of honey strikes the paddle at an angle and flows down without causing bubbles. Very warm honey is less likely to end up with bubbles but if you are trying to sell a more natural product you will not want to heat your honey. It is best for your bees if you do not open hives and move frames around after the middle of September. The bees know by instinct where they need pollen, honey and empty cells. After my grandkids have been here for a while it takes time to find everything and get it back where it belongs. That is only an annoyance. For the bees it can be life or death if the beekeeper misplaces pollen stores or honey. Mouse guards and entrance reducers are better put on while your fingers are not numb with cold. Mouse guards and entrance reducers are not the same thing. A mouse guard needs to be made of metal because mice Cute, but... can chew through wood and plastic to make a hole big 7.

8 enough for them to enter a hive. Mice not only chew up wax combs to make their nests, which bees will later repair as drone comb, they chew through wood and plastic frame parts they consider in their way. There are lots of mouse guards on the market and others that you can make from things you have There are lots of mouse guards on the market and others that you can make from things you have around the house. Tabs at each End hold the Center piece Which can be Removed to Clean the BB. Destructive! This mouse guard has Two rows of holes to Accommodate a deeper Bottom board. Guards Should always have 3/8 Holes to be easy on bees. This mouse Guard expands To fit any width Hive. Danny Slabaugh has cut 1/2" hardware cloth into strips long enough to cover the entrance and just two half inch squares tall. 5/8 Cut A small mouse can get through a 1/2" opening since, when 1/2 tall measured diagonally, the opening is a little over 5/8". What Danny has done is to cut the cloth right above a cross 3/8 tall wire with the result that, when the cut ends of the wire are set against the bottom board and the cloth stapled in place against the entrance reducer, the opening is 3/8" tall, a comfortable entrance for bees but not for a mouse. An entrance reducer can be made of almost anything that will withstand winter weather. It closes down the entrance reducing the amount of air that can enter a hive during winter to allow ventilation but not cause a draft. It is installed behind the mouse guard. By heating and cooling standards the entrance opening at the bottom for fresh air should be the same size as the exit opening at the top for the expulsion of CO2 and moisture. As far as varroa mites and Small Hive Beetle (shb) are concerned, the Screened Bottom Board (sbb) does not need to be left 8.

9 open during Winter. When one of these pests falls to the bottom board it will chill, freeze, and die before it can make it back to the warmth of the bee cluster. Some research has been shown that an open sbb can be beneficial to the cluster by providing better ventilation eliminating moisture and CO 2 but don't allow it to create a draft through the hive or provide a shelter for mice under the hive. Never put a ssb under a nuc. All of that cool air will prevent the bees from raising all of the brood they could in a closed, warm box. A rectangle of plastic or thin plywood can be laid on the screen to block out cold air over winter. I have used both, just be aware of the thickness and clearance so the bees can still move around and get in and out. I like to leave the rectangle a bit smaller than the screen to allow for some air to enter. Bees usually void their feces while in flight. During Summer this is not very noticeable but in Winter and early Spring it can be a problem for on cars and laundry. One author suggested that water sources should either be covered or not be near the hives so that bees leaving the hive and voiding themselves do not foul the water. Bees eat all winter long and must void themselves in flight outside the hive at least every four weeks. Bees can make a dash outside on a bright, calm day when the temperature is only around 20o. They will not go far, 5 or 6 feet at most if it is really cold, farther is it is warmer, and rush back leaving brown spots on the snow and anything else within their flight radius. The place your bees have been sitting all Summer may have been interesting, charming, or just convenient but not such a good idea once they start staying close to the hive. A foraging honey bee's mind records the location of its hive so she can find her way back from anyplace she has already been. If you take her beyond where she has been she will begin flying in ever widening circles until she encounters something she recognizes, then she flies home. If you move a hive a short distance the foragers will all return to the original location and fly in circles there looking for the hive or sit on bushes or the ground because the concept of their home moving is not part of their makeup. Since foraging honey bees will not go any farther than necessary to collect nectar and pollen, the cost/benefit 9.

10 thing, the average honey bee will not have to go beyond one mile to find nectar or pollen. So we can usually safely move a hive beyond two miles without foragers running across their old foraging grounds and following their previous recollections back to the original hive location. It is safe to move hives short distances after flowers all wither from cold and the temperature of natural water sources drops so that honey bees can no longer collect it without becoming fatally chilled, usually late October or early November. Then bees will only leave the hive to void themselves. Since they almost always stay within sight of their hive they are not going to get lost if you turn the hive around or put it in a more sheltered, nearby, location. Make your move, just not too early. At right is a beekeeper moving a hive with a modified two wheeled hand cart. Large tires to smooth the move and extended handle to provide leverage to make the lift easy. Below, left, we have Bob Basham and Tim Ives fitting a hive lifter onto a hive to move it. At right are Roger Deacon and Jim Kendall with a similar lifter moving a hive at our August meeting. The long, side lifting bars have a lip that extends into the bottom boxes hand holds. The lifting bars on one end are connected with a hinged cross bar while the other end is open and free allowing the lifters to be spread to fits around or down over the hive then the free end must be held inward to keep the lips engaged in the hand holds while the hive is picked up and moved. Similar arrangements have been made with pipes and channel iron and work just as well for two people. 10.