A Year In The Bee Yard transcript

i voted 2003 beekeeper of the year bob has also been president of several beekeeping associations including the georgia beekeepers association the northeast georgia mountain beekeepers association and the macon county beekeepers in western north carolina so we we do ask that you respect bob by not having individual conversations uh while he's speaking as it can hinder the others from being able to hear him uh we also ask that you refrain from questions while bob is speaking until after he is finished and we will then open a q a before our raffle drawing so we thank you very much for your respect and understanding and now let us begin and give a big beekeepers in madison county to [Applause] i'm filming this if it turns out good you'll see it on youtube if it doesn't you won't it's as simple as that uh 40 years ago 1981 is the year i got involved in beekeeping and i purchased eight colonies and right away that summer split them into quite a few more up to 35 and that summer i met an old man in southern oregon where we were living and he kind of took me under his wing he had been a commercial beekeeper with 2 000 colonies in southern oregon and he kind of learned of my aspirations to be a commercial beekeeper and he really helped me a lot he was always giving he was a very simple person his little words of wisdom would be very short but profound in my view and that august of that same year 1981 he told me something that was very simple and at the time it was puzzling to me but over the years i've really taken it to heart now at first that sounds odd but it's absolutely correct if you were to put your finger on the calendar of any month and choose the month that would have the biggest effect on your success through fall winter into the spring and beyond it has to be the month of august and interestingly enough he told me this before there was any mites in the usa there wasn't a mic problem yet and he was already trying to tune me into this fact that what you do in august and then september is really important for your success through winter into the spring and it gives you the assets you need to split make honey in the spring and he was so right i've really learned it through the years it was absolutely correct august of course these days mic control is huge now i'm sure there probably are some people in this room that don't treat for mites and that's fine can i ask for a raise of hands of people that don't treat or make a practice of not treating not a single hand that's interesting i guess i could share this with this group and not insult anybody too badly several years ago i was speaking to a group of beekeepers in north carolina and it was a big non-treatment group it was also a destination for hundreds and hundreds of my nukes every spring and i really sometimes my wife will tell you i speak without a filter and i say the wrong thing without thinking and somebody asked me about treating and i said well i treat and i said well we don't and i said yeah y'all are really good customers too now i know i think the future is bright for beekeepers i think we have a future with out treating i just think we have a lot of work to do i think we're on the road to reach that goal i really do it's we're just not there yet feeding anybody that watches my youtube videos i have a youtube channel for those of you that don't know it's really simple just to go to youtube and type in my name which is bob binney my last name spelling is important it's b i and and i e i'm not related to jack benny which is spelled completely different now the younger people are here going who's jack benny jack benny by the way is one of my favorite comedians even today i can watch and i think he's great so we have a lot of youtube videos on feeding and the chemistry about feeding and lewis bartlett who just showed up in my last video i found out has done a lot of research on what happens with sugar syrup when it's fed to be so in the future i have i hope to have a lot of that coming out a lot of chemistry about sugar syrup and feeding i think august is the time to start feeding i believe that you need to uh you feed thin sucrose syrup just as if you had a nectar flow coming in a lot of people don't know that uh nectar is primarily sucrose and when you feed bee sucrose by the way that's cane sugar just like the stuff you buy at walmart make we make our own syrup and it the bees do wonderful on it when you hear people talk about feeding bees makes them lazy sickly um you know all of this stuff it's really hogwash there's nothing to that now you have to be mindful of the fact that there's more than one types of sugar if you're feeding high fructose corn syrup there is an issue there but with sucrose syrup it's really almost a 100 non-issue bees love it they do well on it they over winter well on it i like to feed it in such a way that the bees are are um are treating it as fresh incoming nectar i'll hit upon that just a little bit when you feed thin sucrose meaning one to one or thinner like as if it was nectar coming in the bees actually will put the enzymes in that sugar syrup just like they would as if it was incoming nectar there's three major enzymes that i can think of invertase which converts the sucrose that the nectar primarily is into fructose and dextrose and the reason the bees do that the reason they put that invertace in there is that sucrose syrup cannot be made thick enough to not ferment easily it's um it's not as soluble i think if i'm thinking saying that correctly as fructose and dextrose when they invert that sucrose into fructose and dextro suddenly they have something that can reach that magic 18.5 percent moisture or lower so it won't ferment that's the reason for that enzyme now the next one that i think is probably most important for us with from this discussion point of view is glucose oxidase the bees put glucose oxidase in there because it produces gluconic acid gluconic acid lowers the ph of your nectar or honey whatever you want to call it at that stage to an average ph of about 3.9 that level is highly anti-microbial microbial anti-bacterial and all of that stuff and that's the purpose for that now a byproduct of the production of uh gluconic acid is hydrogen peroxide there's actually hydrogen peroxide in honey it's in small amounts but it's there and it's extremely important for this it helps create this antiseptic situation in the colony and it happens when you feed thin sucrose syrup just as if you were feeding there was nectar coming in okay that's a very important thing to remember with high fructose corn syrup that doesn't occur it has to be sucrose syrup for that to occur now we'll get just off the subject of bees for a little bit we'll talk about honey as medicine there's something that magic magic happens with this most of us here know that if you put honey on a wound that it sits in many cases superior to anything you can buy in a pharmacy it really works well now follow me on this it's really interesting when you put when you put honey on your let's back up a minute when uh honey or ripening nectar reaches the point of around 3.9 uh ph of the production of gluconic acid ceases but if that ph rises as long as the honey is raw and the enzyme glucose oxidase is still intact it once again begins to produce gluconic acid and therefore hydrogen peroxide when you put honey on your skin and it mixes with the fluids and the salinity of your body and tissue the ph goes up the the water content goes up and once again glucose oxidase starts to produce gluconic acid that's the magic of honey on a wound right there and of course you need that enzyme intact if you pasteurized your honey it's going to be honey even pasteurized honey is good on a wound but that raw honey has something special going on yeah okay so let's go to the next slide well queen assessment we'll get to queen assessment in a minute too let's let's back up to monitor your mite load this is the biggest mistake people make they assume that whatever they did for treating for mites worked without going back and checking to make sure biggest mistake for instance last year i used apafar strips uh in august which is the most important month to treat and found out in september that we still had a fair amount of mites and we had to come back with other uh compounds to help bring our mite situation down before winter the mites are finding we're finding a little bit of resistance with the the active ingredient in hepavar is amaterase and it's been very useful for many years but now we're starting to see a little bit of resistance develop and plus there's an inconsistency in the strips themselves and in an upcoming video there's three parts of this interview with jennifer and lewis and in there louis tells us that the half-life of amatraz is very short when it comes in contact with water and it changes the chemistry changes there's a lot going on with amatraz and i feel like for me this year it's not going to be my treatment of choice i'm going to shift back to something i used to use which is apa apigard which is a thymol gel product that is mainly distributed by date ant you can find it with other supply houses but it's mainly a data item the problem with that there's pros and cons to all these mic treatments okay and with apa guard it's very heat sensitive here in danielsville if you treat with that in august you're going to be real careful or you're going to ruin your bees if you give your bees a full dose what's recommended on the directions of apagard in august you're going to ruin your colony because you're going to either drive the bees out you're going to cook some queens they just really don't like it so when it's really hot even though the instructions say it'll go up to 104 you need to give them about a half a dose and then do it multiple times about seven days apart it really works i've done it a lot of times in the past and that's what i'm going to go back to now for my august treatment amateurs is a gentle chemical it doesn't it doesn't react synergistically with other chemicals quite as bad as some of the miticides we've had in the past now if you um interchange your mite treatments you'll give some of these compounds a lot longer life before the bites become resistant to them so keep that in mind too it's good to shift don't keep using the same thing over and over and over that's a really good way to drive up resistance that right there is called the varroa easy check most bee supply catalogs will have that in there we carry it in our store it's a simple little plastic container with a as you can see kind of a perforated inner bowl and it's really good for checking for mites those are mites that you see on the bottom of that thing and those are a bunch of mites you if you see a if you see a mite level like that you need to figure out what you're going to do real fast because you're on a fast track for crashing these days they're trying to suggest that a one percent infestation is probably the economic threshold and that anything over that you're going to start seeing trouble mites are vectors for disease and mainly viruses a lot of viruses are already in our colony but when the mites get involved it creates it kind of i don't know what the right word is it just heightens that situation um i once heard a speaker say something that sounds kind of colorful and perhaps gross but he says a mite hanging on a bee is a lot like a rat hanging on us just just think of the disease and the problems that are going on with the situation like that kind of helps us understand what a mite does to a bee it's not a pretty picture so why do we want to treat for the mites in august keith delaplane from the university of georgia did a study a long time ago a couple decades ago what they did was they they treated mites different at different times of the year and then measured the bees in the spring to see how many bees they had and how big the colony was and the the best time of year for the best scenario in the spring was actually the first of august now why would that be the reason is you want to treat the bees that are going to raise the winter bees you don't want to treat your winter bees it's kind of this concept if you want a healthy baby the mother needs to be healthy first right it's the same thing the bees that are raising the winter bees need to be relatively mite-free or at least very low in mites therefore low in viruses and issues before they start nursing and raising the bees that have to make it for four months through winter i think we could all kind of you know picture the the logic in that first of august first week in august in danielsville i'd say there's nothing wrong with the the end of july right now honestly is the time it really is and the longer you wait the more you're going to be reaching into these winter bees so when do the winter bees start to be see i told you wesley august is we spend most of the thing right on august so when does the when do the winter bees begin to start being raised and my casual observation simple answer is when the goldenrod pollen starts coming in that's when they start what i call the fall buildup it's not a build up like in the spring where they expand their population hugely it's when they start building up the population of the bees that have to make it through the winter that begins with the pollen that starts coming in with the golden rod flow which in your neighborhood will start around the 1st of september it's not far away that's why you want to treat fermites now you need the mites gone the bees healthy before that begins when we're feeding bees it's helpful to understand what the different concentrations of sugar do for the bees thin sucrose syrup is highly stimulating thick sucrose syrup is less stimulating if you'll read in the books quite often that they suggest that two to one is what you should feed late in the summer or in the fall i like to start just a little earlier in august and start feeding this thin sucrose syrup which provides this stimulative effect thin sucrose syrup is stimulating for brood rearing for wax production for a lot of stuff and then backing up to this enzyme situation we're beginning to create this antiseptic situation in our beehive along with treating for mites we're really getting this hive really healthy before they begin rearing the winter bees if you do all these things the odds of your bees making it through the winter go up dramatically i'll just pause on this for a minute so y'all can look at that now if your colony gets if it's getting late in the season say it's late october and your bees just don't have enough weight on it that's the time when two to one is okay you need to get the job done and you need to get it done quick i don't like to be feeding sugar syrup late in the season because i don't want the winter bees having to do that work of processing the incoming sugar syrup it's best to get it done and over at least by the middle of october the first of october would probably be better so re-cleaning back to this checking on your queens before you go into winter queen management let's call it um if you see how do i explain this properly queens are middle aged by the time they're a year and a half old a lot of people don't want to accept that because they see a two-year-old queen doing a really good job well at 48 i was still doing a really good job but i wasn't doing the same job i was when i was 35. i think we can all relate with that right and now that i'm you know just a couple years from being 70 i really see the picture quite a bit more clearly if you can have a queen that's a year and a half old or less not only will she do a better job now but she's going to do a better job going into winter and coming out in the spring so let's back up and do a little math let's say yuri queen in april or may pick a spring month she goes through the season she runs into your second year she's still doing a good job because maybe she's only a year and a half old that summer or even less but how old is she the following spring if you want to have good overwintering percentages you need to replace your queens every year now that's one strategy another strategy is simply to accept the fact that you have more failure and not perfect colonies in the spring if you choose not to re-queen that's legitimate there's a lot of big commercial beekeepers that do it exactly like that they just replace their failures they re clean the dinks the duds whatever you want to call them and replace them and because it's a lot of work replacing every queen every year that's the path i choose to go because i want really good colonies in the spring for making nukes and packages which we do a lot of and then going into april and may when the honey production starts i can look across the yard and in most cases to point to you the queens that are two years old because they're the ones that have one or two less supers than the others so what would be the advantage to re-cleaning in the fall not only is a queen middle aged by the time she's a year and a half she really doesn't come into her prime until she's maybe four to six months old in other words a brand new queen will not do quite as good a job as a queen that's six months old just like human beings they have to mature and hit their stride queens bees i use humans as an example for bees all the time and what makes a bee comfortable and happy is pretty much the same things that makes us comfortable and happy as far as temperatures and humidity you know and have you ever noticed when it's real humid your bees are a little more testy and you know things like that what makes us comfortable makes a bee comfortable too so and and when we're talking about maturity it's the same way you know a teenager might be quite physically able but that teenager probably isn't going to do as good a job as a mature 20 to 30 year old does that make sense so that's the reason for fall re-cleaning is that if you re queen in the fall you will have the very best production possible the next summer the drawback to requiem in the fall is that the next spring you're now beginning your second season and it is an absolute fact there is no uh debate on this uh there's lots of research been done that a queen from the present calendar year will swarm less than a queen from the previous calendar year even if it's a fall queen a fall queen will swarm less than the spring queen from the previous year it really comes down to the younger the queen the less swarming you're going to have so that is the disadvantage or advantage depending on how you look at it to spring re-cleaning fall re-cleaning is great gives you the very best percentage of overwintering success but as far as swarming and the other issues that are going on in a colony spring week requieming is the best so steve tabor some of you some of the older guys in the room know who steve tabor was he's a famous entomologist that passed a little while ago about 10 years ago he's actually a friend of mine believe it or not i knew steve pretty well and i remember at a b meeting somebody asked him he said when's the best time to reclean and steve had no filter he'd insult anybody at the drop of a hat not on purpose he just was blunt and he said he looked at the person and exasperated like whenever you need a new queen well he was kind of right you know i mean if your queen's failing now's the time to requeen okay so you just got to be mindful of what's going on in your colony that's all with you with your queen i like checking the queen and just because the queen's brand new just like a human being uh 100 there's no such thing as a hundred percent just because the queen's brand new is not a guarantee that she's going to be a good queen through that season we replace a fair amount of queens in the same calendar year that that queen was raised maybe one out of 15 one out of ten if he's not doing a good job we get rid of her why wait bad queens almost always do not get better we're still on september see i told you it takes a while wesley that's okay i told him to warn me when we get going too far just raise your hand and i'll i'll make it fast um i can go on and on with this stuff uh september's simple finish my assessment and treatments continue feeding if needed october final feeding if needed that's the month you want to make sure the job's done don't go into november if you can help it obviously if the colony is starving you got i fit on the i fed at thanksgiving because i had to i mean you do what you got to do you know if your carts in a ditch you do what you got to do right so but in november you really want the beast to start settling down for winter and just be quiet no work to do just chill so to speak there's kind of a well-known saying among beekeepers that says take your winter loss in the fall if you see two colonies that are too weak in your opinion to make it through winter if you kill the queen in one and bring them together you know the odds are you might have something that makes it through the winter when when they were two separate colonies maybe they wouldn't have november and december take a break or in my view this is absolutely the perfect time to do oxalic acid vaporization um vape oxalic acid vaporization works best on bees that don't have brood other words if they're broodless that's when you'll get the best effect the reason is oxalic acid vaporization only kills the mites that are on the bees and at any given time three quarters of the mites are in the sealed brewed so if you have no sealed brood and the mites are all on the bees there you go and there's a little mis information out there about oxalic acid uh vaporization and we're talking a lot a lot about that in these videos the one video that came out already and the two that are coming up from university of georgia with jennifer and lewis about recommended dosages up until just very recently the recommended dose for oxalic acid vaporization was one gram per box and we're finding out that's just too low it works a little but it works so much better if you give them two grams per box so i believe in the near future that's going to be the recommended and approved dosage is two grams per box when you're if you have double deeps you're using four grams and you use it when they're broodless in late november and early december now down here in danielsville that's a pretty short window you go farther south there's no window at all up in the mountains we got three or four weeks and you're shooting for the perfect temperature for vaporization is between 42 and 48 you don't want the bees to be tightly clustered so the so the vapors penetrate the cluster but you don't want it to be so warm that they're flying and that that window is between 42 and 48 degrees if you go too cold the bees are too tightly clustered and you don't get quite the effect that you would if you did it just a little bit warmer january stay warm and prep equipment now that just sounds real simple and easy right how many people in here have gotten into their bees in april and said man i don't have enough equipment i didn't i did not do enough work last winter i am not ready well january is a time to think ahead i say that it's really easy for me to say and we work like the dickens every january and february there's not a year that has gone by in all my beekeeping career that i didn't enter summer wishing i had have done more in the winter every year winter projects we're we're still looking at winter projects from last winter hopefully we'll get them done this year february check colonies for stores um check for queen rightedness now this is a big deal your maple pollen starts flowing here i presume around early february late january maybe the most stimulating thing for brood rearing is a fresh pollen flow it's even more stimulating than incoming nectar or sugar syrup when that maple flow starts if you don't have a laying queen if you don't have brood in your colony you either have no queen or a very bad queen that would be a good time to combine the colony that may still have some bees in it with something that's queen right and get the benefit of those bees before they perish so also check for stores because the the most common month for starving to death is just coming next and that is the month of march more bees starve in march than any other month of the year because they're getting into high gear for brood rearing and they're using a tremendous amount of food this colony that had six full deep frames of food just a month ago suddenly can be looking like they're out of food so you really gotta watch in february and make sure you don't enter march with the low low food stores you get two weeks of rain can't get to your bees suddenly you have a starved colony march and we all most of us know what this this means by the way the lower picture there those are hatched queen cells if you see that just put it back together you don't need to figure that out you've got a virgin queen running around hopefully just put it back together if you've got a colony full of those queen cells like you see in the top frame there's an opportunity to do some work there if it's full of queen cells you have an opportunity to do some splitting if you choose or if you don't want to increase your colony numbers simply cut out all the queen cells except for maybe two good looking ones you have to be aware a lot of people say you know my colony swarmed four times well yeah but it only swarmed once with the original mature mated queen the ones that come after that are virgin queens that are hatching and successfully creating more but smaller swarms and i have seen colonies swarm themselves to the point where they just don't have anything left they swarm themselves to death and there's hardly any bees in there so if you just leave two cells that scenario doesn't occur [Music] march through june that's a common sight right there i mean it's a fun site but you don't want to see too much of it because you know to me that's i used to say that's like 150 dollar bill or 100 bill flying away but these days it's more like 150 to 200 when you consider the value of honey and whatever that colony would have produced if it didn't swarm so why split colonies exactly for the picture we just saw there's a few ways of keeping your colony from swarming in the spring there's checkerboarding which i won't go into here that's that's a lecture all by itself i prefer because of the size of our outfit and because there's so much labor and checkerboarding i prefer to split bees down to a point where you know we can have less swarming with 2000 colonies you can't visit every colony every five or seven days so we have to do something and kind of look towards the future we like to set our colonies up at a size that we that we think will keep them from swarming but yet produce honey and the same man that told me the little uh the little blurb about uh you know the beekeepers calendar starts in august also tell me something else that was important he said that a a colony that in the spring that has four frames of bees with brood this would be the colony when the maple's blooming four frames of bees with brood will peak in in population in seven to eight weeks a colony that peaks in population before the major honey flow starts has a high high degree of propensity to swarming if it peaks in population after the major honey flow starts a lot of times it'll just set into producing honey and forget about swarming so obviously intuitive we we think that the biggest colonies make honey and that's correct but let's let's say you got 10 colonies in the yard and you you've lost the battle with a few of them and two or three have swarmed the ones that didn't swarm might have a bigger honey crop than the ones you split but in the other yard of ten colonies if you split them all and kept them from swarming the overall average could be more and that's the way i look at it plus i don't have to worry about them so much and work them every week trying to keep them from swarming we split colonies down try to get them to a population that will peak out just after the flow starts and we have a lot better luck with that of course there's another reason for splitting colonies and that is making more colonies for for either yourself to up your numbers or for profit split or equalize equalizing is it just as important as splitting if you have ten colonies the odds are that some of them are going to be small maybe just made it through the winter and others will be big and they're going to swarm early they're already massive in march they're just a week away from swarming well before they start making preparations for swarm you can actually take sealed brood and bees out of the colonies that are large and add it to the small ones bring them up so they'll make a honey crop on time and bring the big ones down so they won't swarm before the honey flow starts equalizing can be a really great tool and the bees don't fight you you think you're going to add frames from one colony to another you have to do lots of fancy things to keep them from fighting i've just never seen it to be an issue we transfer brood around it will and never see an issue we like using sealed and if we can find frames that have you can actually see bees chewing out hatching brood that's the very best stuff to give to a small colony in april add supers have more more supers and hopefully add more supers that's a fun picture for us that happened two or three years ago these are our bees in south dakota and that was the honey crop that year in south dakota this year south dakota is terrible it's so dry they're into they're in a severe drought up in the dakotas and some of those states up there so i feel sorry for them i'm glad i didn't send bees this year that year though we really nailed it may and june and july harvest and process honey keep monitoring your overall health of your colony your might count you know be on the lookout for issues like viruses like european fall root and things like that and that's the we're back to the last slide again so now like am i correct we can open the floor for questions