2012 Workshop Presentations

Go to the Plant Growth Center Beekeeping Link to view pdf files of the 2012 MSU Beekeeping Workshop presentations.  Thanks to the presenters - Jeff Littlefiled, Rick Molenda, Cam Lay, and Ruth O'Neill for making the workshop informative and fun.  A special thanks to Western Bee Supplies, Dadant, and Jeff Littlefield for the door prizes.  Thanks to all of those who brought honey in for the honey tasting.  The "Rare White Hawaiian Honey" was exceptionally good.

Gallatin Valley Beekeepers - Getting Started with Bees

Save the date - Saturday, March 24th, 1:30 -4:30 pm.  Large meeting room at the Bozeman Public Library.

Tentative Agenda
Honey Bee Biology - David Baumbauer, Big Sky Bee
Equipment and First Year Management - Doug Stream, GVBC
Keeping Your Bees Healthy - Ruth O'Neill, MSU Extension

This introductory workshop is being offered as a community service by the Gallatin Valley Beekeepers Club and is free and open to the public.  Seating is on a first come first served basis.

Almond Bloom on NPR

Nice piece on the relationship between almonds and cropping systems in the northern great plains.
Listen to the story here.

Making Splits - Guest Post

Steve from Helena and I were having an e-mail exchange about cultural methods to manage Varroa mites.  Steve makes splits as his main mite management technique, as this leaves the new colony brood-less for a period of time, thus disrupting the mite life cycle.

Here is Steve's method for making splits.  I'm going to give it a try this summer.

I make a strong colony queenless and make sure they have some fresh eggs on alternating brood frames.  I put the strong colony's queen and a frame of brood or two in the top deep and separate that deep from the rest of the colony with a double screen.  I face the opening for the queen's deep to the back of the colony.  This way all the field bees return to the usual entrance to find their queen "gone," (she's actually right above them but they can't reach her) and several frames of fresh eggs in their brood nest.   Sometimes I'll move a frame or two with young eggs into the strong colony as part of this process to get the number of queens that I want.  Once the bees draw and close the queen cells (usually several per frame) I move those frames into a "mating nuc" and leave them alone.  Then I give the original strong colony back their old queen by removing the double screen.  Essentially I have "split" the strong colony into 4 or 5 nucs, each with a new young queen.  

When the queens have hatched and start to lay and the bees begin to outgrow the two frame chambers in the mating nuc I move them into regular 5 frame nuc boxes.  By the end of summer my earliest strongest "nucs" are usually thriving as colonies in two deep supers.  The weaker ones I combine into one or more colonies that usually will overwinter.  It is nice to have a spare queen or two around...  I have bailed out a couple of beekeeping friends whose packages or colonies went queenless, several times, using these spare queens.

The only extra equipment I use is a mating nuc that a friend gave me and the double screen thing that I built.  The nice part is that the whole process can be done with no special equipment AT ALL, simply with two or three five frame nuc boxes or with a deep super or two that have been compartmentalized.   The double screen isn't necessary either- one can simply remove the strong colony's queen and some brood and set them aside in a five frame nuc box of their own.  I've also pulled queen cells from a colony that wanted to swarm and simply used those queen cells the same way.  It works. 

Steve wrote that he would take some photos of the process this summer.  So will I.  I've tried to make splits several times and have had some success, but not enough to have confidence in any one method.

Gallatin Valley Beekeepers Meeting Change

From Doug Stream:

BEEKEEPERS, ONE AND ALL:

Due to an unforeseen conflict, our bee club meeting that was originally scheduled for this Saturday, February 11 has been cancelled.  Instead, we are planning to meet in the small conference room at the Bozeman Library from 1000-1200 on Saturday, March 10, 2012.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

Ruth O'Neill from MSU's Plant Pathology department will be giving a presentation on honey bee pests, pathogens, and diseases.

In the meantime if I can make arrangements with Dr. Bromenshenk (it would be on short notice), we may have a chance to hear him give a lecture one weekday evening.  Don't hold your breathe!  If/when I get the "word" from him, I will do my best to contact all club members as to time and place.

My final note is in regard to the possibility of conducting a club-sponsored beginning beekeeping workshop on March 24.  In order for this to be successful, we need at 2 or 3 volunteers to assist with refreshments, registration, advertising, etc.  If any of you would be interested and/or willing to help in this regard, please let me know as soon as possible.

Thank you for your continued interest and support in our fledgling bee club.  Best wishes to all of you.

Yours very truly,

Douglas Stream

A Very Expensive Bag of Chips

From the Billings Gazette 2/7/2012:

"A truck driver taking a load of beehives to California crashed a few miles east of Pompeys Pillar on Interstate 94 Monday night, spilling the hives and wrecking his truck.

Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Jerry Perman said the accident happened a little before 10 p.m. about five miles east of Pompeys Pillar.

Perman said the trucker, an Iowan who was driving to California from Minnesota, told him he reached down to get a bag of chips off the floor, and when he looked up there was a deer in the road. He said he swerved to miss the deer and went into median.

Perman said the accident tore the cab frame off the truck. The flatbed trailer was upside down in the passing lane and some of the hive boxes were broken open. The trucker wasn't injured, and no one else was involved in the accident.

Perman said late Monday that he was still trying to determine whether to cite the driver for careless driving.

Local volunteer firefighters were on the scene, directing traffic around the trailer blocking the passing lane. Perman said a wrecking company was called but wanted a beekeeper to be called, too, citing an incident in which a driver was stung in a similar situation.

Perman said he didn't think there was anything to worry about.

"I don't think that's a problem in freezing weather," he said.

Cleanup at the accident scene was continuing on Tuesday morning."

Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/truck-carrying-load-of-bees-crashes-near-pompeys-pillar/article_d4f123c3-7a93-534a-aaa4-f44728250516.html#ixzz1lijrjL4R

I'm just glad the driver wasn't injured.  However, there are some mighty upset bees that aren't going to get that trip to sunny California they were promised.

Nectar Time

Photo by John Kimbler, My Shot, National Geographic Magazine

WSU Indoor overwintering research program

Washington State University has begun an indoor overwintering study.  Read about it here.

Gallatin Valley Beekeepers Club Meeting Notice

The next meeting will be Saturday, February 11th at 8:30am in the small meeting room at the Bozeman Public Library.

MSU Beekeeping Workshop and Chemical Free Beekeeping

Over at the Gallatin Valley Beekeepers Yahoo Group there is a discussion about the "promotion of chemical use" in the MSU Beekeeping Workshop.  Below is my response to the group.  I present it here with the hope of starting a similar discussion with a wider audience.  Faithful readers will realize this post is out of the 'Big Sky Bee' character, so please humor me:

"I started the MSU beekeeping workshop eight years ago, as at the time there was no other offering in the intermountain west.  Each year the workshop fills at fifty participants from across Montana and Wyoming and I receive many compliments on our largely volunteer effort.   Presenters travel from Polson and Helena, so that precludes a second offering.  MSU extension has picked up on the demand and have hosted workshops in Kalispell, Townsend, Sidney and Helena in recent years.

All beekeepers would like to keep honey bees without the use of ‘chemicals’.  They are expensive, labor intensive to apply, and may have adverse impacts on honey bees, beekeepers or the environment.  I have yet to meet a beekeeper/farmer/rancher/greenhouse grower who enjoys the application of medications or pesticides, but it is seen as a necessary part of staying in business.

I applaud the efforts of Kirk Webster, Michael Bush, and Ross Conrad in leading the way to reducing or eliminating synthetic compounds from beekeeping.  But you must realize they took enormous losses of honey bee colonies over the many years it took them to achieve a strain of bees that are locally adapted and vigorous enough to survive without chemical intervention.  I study their methods intently and hope to one day join their ranks.

When the curriculum is developed for a beginner’s beekeeping workshop, the presenters have to ask themselves how to condense a vast amount of material in to six hours.  Our goal is not to make you a beekeeper, but to give you the resources to make the myriad of decisions confronting a beekeeper in today’s challenging beekeeping environment.   If I only promoted chemical free beekeeping, the vast majority of new beekeeper’s colonies would not survive the first winter.  Chemical free beekeeping doesn’t mean ‘hands off’ beekeeping, but involves a labor intensive, tightly scheduled series of events to use the honey bees’ biology to give it an advantage over Varroa mites and Nosema infections.  This skill set is beyond the scope of a beginner’s class.  If a hands-off approach to keeping bees worked, you would still find the bee trees (feral colonies) of years past.   Mites and diseases have reduced non-managed colonies to near zero.

So, I present a technique I call ‘minimal’ intervention.  An essential oil (thyme) based miticide treatment to reduce Varroa mite population in the late summer combined with one round of medicated sugar syrup in the fall to reduce Nosema loads.  The Varroa mites and Nosema fungus are everywhere and your colonies will have them.  Even with this level of treatment, I still lose about 25% of my colonies each winter.  This activity is not for the faint of heart.  Very few colonies will survive without any intervention, whether cultural or chemical.

Beekeeping is very much a combination of art and science.  You talk to six beekeepers and you will get ten suggestions on how best to accomplish a task.  Even after eight years of beekeeping, I still consider myself a beginner as there is so much to learn about honey bees.  Let the buyer beware as there is much witchcraft out there in cyberspace.  Regardless how you keep bees the recommendation is the same:  read, read, read.  Look at the data, pay attention to the graphs and charts.  Otherwise, you are just wasting money and time.  The scientific method applies regardless if you are an organic, sustainable, or conventional beekeeper."