The Bee Line Creating good and healthy beekeeping throughout MICHIANA

Published by the MICHIANA Beekeepers Association

JULY 2011

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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), 25123

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.

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 574276-3959 bob.deb.baughman@sbcglobal.net

VICE PRESIDENT AND RECORDING SECRETARY Tim Ives 574-910-0060 liquidgold2009@embarqmail.com

TREASURER David Emerson 574-295-1855 emerson3434@verizon.net

EDITOR Henry Harris 574-875-9617 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

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 bee-

friendly plants we can have in our gardens.

A good number of bee friendly plants from

Linton's were given out as door prizes.

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, Divi-sion 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

Airy vFamily Arts Department you will 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.

Slabaugh Apiaries Honey and Supply

Danny Slabaugh 26123 County Road 52

Nappanee, IN 46550-9138

Home (574) 773-2345

Cell (574) 315-5586

E-mail clslabugh@embarqmail.corn

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.

PIP c

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.

Proposed meeting schedule for 2011

Saturday, August 20

Bee Yard meeting at LeRoy Kuhns near Nappanee, IN

Saturday, September 17 Warsaw, Indiana

Saturday, October 15

Banquet location to be announced.

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Page 2

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 encoun-ter while foraging all of which are absorbed and

\ stored in that wonderful sponge like substance we all bees wax.

Wax melters can be r

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 quan-tities 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

large, small, complicated, simple, expensive or cheap.

The basic requirements

04 sada

3.

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 num-

ber 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.

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 under-

standing 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.

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

On a laying queen, fully 1/3 of her ab-domen extends be-yond 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

If you want

to know if she

is a good

queen look at

the brood pat-

tern and the

New beekeepers often mistake drones for queens. To me a drone's most distin-guishing 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.

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,

workers is cov-ered with fine, feather like hair to catch sticky pollen grains during foraging. Workers also

1̀'have hair on their abdo-mens at the overlap-ping of the abdomi-nal plates. The more hair they have the more pollen they can collect.

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.

(2) a full frame of capped brood, or,

(3) a full frame of pollen or any combi-nation of the these.

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 possi-bility. 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 candi- date for find-

! i n g the jjjj 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.

ALI

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 walk-ing 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

the longer abdomen to make her stand out.

Some like to hold the frame at an angle eliminat-ing the distrac-tions 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 be-fore 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.

6.