Beekeepers of the Northern Shenandoah

BONS Minutes

April 12, 2012

Doug Morris, Club President, called the meeting to order.

Old Business:

Extractor Committee: Rusty Foltz reported on club extractor storage set up.  He sent out a calendar to the extraction team for sign up with extractions starting in June through September.  His goal is to have the extraction team members sign up for the weekends that they will be available to assist members with extraction.  Rusty is drafting a book of extraction procedures to make the process easy for everyone.

Mentoring Committee:  The Mentoring Committee met at Tom Miller’s shop to assist new students build woodenware.  The students’ input has been helpful.

Bee Classes:  Field day for new students is scheduled for Saturday, April 14 at John Lewis’s.  Bring your bee equipment and bring a dish for lunch.

Bee Packages:  The 80 bee packages were delivered to John Lewis’s.  Club members purchased all packages.

New Business:

Sky Meadows:  Earth Day is April 27, 2012. Doug and Ramona Morris will be doing bee demonstrations from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Melissa Sylvan, landscape presenter, has volunteered to do some landscaping at Sky Meadows to promote bee pollination and provide a source of food for the Park’s four colonies.

Blandy Farm Event:  Mother’s Day Weekend at Blandy.  Club members can sell honey, wax products and bee related items.  Club members can attend just to answer questions for the public and to promote bees.

BONS Elections:  Doug Koch has agreed to be the nominating committee.  Elections will be held at the next club meeting.  A door prize will be given at the meeting.

At the June 14^th club meeting, Karla Eisen will make a presentation on the Prince William club’s project that compared the survivability of Packaged Bees vs. Nucs and how they developed a subsequent queen-rearing program

School Program:  Mike Rininger has made arrangements for bee club members to talk about beekeeping on April 25 & April 26 from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in 15 minute segments to 3^rd grade students from a group of North Fauquier county schools.  Contact Doug or Mike for more information.

Extraction Committee:  Rusty Foltz make presentations on extraction equipment at all the bee classes. Rusty put out for discussion that a suggestion was made that the club buys a refractometer to test for water content in frames with uncapped honey.  Rusty will come with a proposal next week.

Queen Rearing Class:  Class is scheduled for April 21 at 10 a.m. until we are done. Pat and Jim Haskell will be the instructors.  This class is being offered for free.  Attendees are asked to bring protective gear and food.

Club Program:  The program presenter was Frank Linton, Master Beekeeper EAS.   Dr. Linton has an observation hive that he has been monitoring for seven years.  He studies bee activity with a wireless sensor network to determine colony health.  Mr. Linton’s email: frank.linton@post.harvard.edu

The meeting was adjourned.

Minutes Respectively Submitted by:

Brenda Brown, BONS Club Secretary

The presentation at the BONS meeting May 10th, 2012 will be by our own John Lewis who will talk on his experiences as a beekeeper.
The election of club officers for the June 2012 to May 2012 will also be held at the meeting.
The Blandy Garden Fair will be held on May 12th and 13th. The club will have a booth and is looking for members to volunteer for two-hour sifts (or longer). Honey and other hive products such as lip balm, wax blocks, bees wax candles can be sold from the booth. Sign up sheets will be available at the meeting.
Hope to see you there.

Boston, MA — The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

 The authors, led by Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides “convincing evidence” of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.

 The study will appear in the June issue of the Bulletin of Insectology.

 ”The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated,” says Lu. “And it apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees. Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment.”

 Pinpointing the cause of the problem is crucial because bees—beyond producing honey—are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of the crop species in the U.S., including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and livestock feed such as alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses, experts estimate.

 Lu and his co-authors hypothesized that the uptick in CCD resulted from the presence of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid introduced in the early 1990s. Bees can be exposed in two ways: through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup beekeepers use to feed their bees. (Since most U.S.-grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid, it’s also found in corn syrup.)

 In the summer of 2010, the researchers conducted an in situ study in Worcester County, Mass. aimed at replicating how imidacloprid may have caused the CCD outbreak. Over a 23-week period, they monitored bees in four different bee yards; each yard had four hives treated with different levels of imidacloprid and one control hive. After 12 weeks of imidacloprid dosing, all the bees were alive. But after 23 weeks, 15 out of 16 of the imidacloprid-treated hives—94%—had died. Those exposed to the highest levels of the pesticide died first.

 The characteristics of the dead hives were consistent with CCD, said Lu; the hives were empty except for food stores, some pollen, and young bees, with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse—such as disease or pests—many dead bees are typically found inside and outside the affected hives.

 Strikingly, said Lu, it took only low levels of imidacloprid to cause hive collapse—less than what is typically used in crops or in areas where bees forage.

 Scientists, policymakers, farmers, and beekeepers, alarmed at the sudden losses of between 30% and 90% of honeybee colonies since 2006, have posed numerous theories as to the cause of the collapse, such as pests, disease, pesticides, migratory beekeeping, or some combination of these factors.

Pat and Jim Haskell have once again graciously agreed to provide a queen rearing workshop for us here in Winchester.

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The class will be on Saturday, April 20.  It will run 10am to whenever.   Place will be 114 Jeb Drive, Winchester.   We will focus on use of a closed cell starter and will work on grafting technique.

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After the cells have been drawn, participants will be able to stop back to pick up their queen cells for their own use.

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Anyone interested in joining the class, please contact John Lewis asap by sending me a message  through the Contact page of this website.

This year, with the unseasonably warm temperatures, many colonies are rapidly moving towards swarming far earlier than usual.   SWARMING IS GOING TO BE HIGH FREQUENCY THIS YEAR.  MOST HIVES WILL THROW SWARMS, unless you choose to intervene.

Looking at my apiaries, I’m estimating that one in four will swarm before April 1.  That’s early.  Many colonies are now jammed packed with bees.

If you have a colony like this, consider putting it on “swarm watch.”  This means checking the brood chambers at least weekly for swarm queen cells.  Once you find them, split the colony, preferably into several small colonies or nucs.  Just be sure to put at least a couple queen cells into each split.  If you can, leave the original queen in the original colony, which will collect all the older field bees, but hopefully decide not to swarm out after all.