Another young person has sent the following link; The Guide to Beekeeping for Adults and Kids: http://www.fragrancex.com/Fragrance-Information/beekeeping-adults-kids.html

Recently a youth group member sent in a link about?? basic beekeepinmg info for those of you who are new to beekeeping. Here is the link: http://www.redenvelope.com/blog/resource-guide-on-beekeeping

Wired Magazine has a nice article in their February 2011 issue on Marla Spivak, and the work she is doing to create a better bee. Click here to read it.

Thanks to the??Stateline Beekeepers Association,??The Northern Beekeepers Association, Steve & Sue Kivikko, Rich Ramsey, and Jim Belli for the illinois bees.com website where spray applicators can check for bees and beekeepers can register there hives for protection during field sprays. Here is the link: www.illinoisbees.com

News from Glenn Apiaries:

Hello,

As you may have heard, we (Tom and Suki Glenn) retired at the end
of 2012. Our decision to retire is based primarily on family circumstances that
require our attention. This means that Glenn Apiaries will no longer be selling
breeder queens. We know that this may cause an inconvenience to you if you have
depended on us for breeding stock, especially the VSH line of queens. So we
would like to refer you to other sources that will continue to provide good mite
resistant breeding stock.

We have been working with Adam Finkelstein and
Kelly Rausch?? of VP Queen Bees for several years now.?? They are scaling up their
production to meet the increased demand for breeders in 2013. We believe they
will be able to do a fine job of supplying the bee industry with instrumentally
inseminated breeder queens.?? VP Queen Bees has been producing instrumentally
inseminated queens for about 11 years and have proven to be very competent in
both breeding and in their business practices. They also have been working with
the USDA Bee Lab on the VSH bees, and will continue to do so.?? VP Queen Bees has
not treated their bees with chemicals for 14 years, so they know the value of
breeding resistant bees. We recommend that you contact them early to reserve
breeders for this next season.

VP Queen Bees – 301-662-4844 – Maryland – VSH and Pol-line Breeder queens plus
custom Instrumental Insemination – info@vpqueenbees.com – website:
www.vpqueenbees.com

Susan
Cobey – scobey@mac.com – New World Carniolan Breeder
queens
Honeybee Breeding Insemination Service – www.honeybee.breeding.com

Glenn Apiaries has
been selling queens for 35 years, and we have enjoyed serving the beekeeping
industry and working with so many wonderful beekeepers and scientists. Though we
are hanging up our hive tools for now, we hope to again use our skills to work
on worthwhile bee projects.

Thank you for all your support over the
years, we wish you all well.

Tom and Suki Glenn

Glenn Apiaries
PO Box 2737
Fallbrook, CA 92088
Ph/Fax (760)728-3731
glennapiaries@gmail.com
www.glenn-apiaries.com

 

Link to an article by Sue Cobey comparing instumentally inseminated & open mated queens: http://www.honeybee.breeding.com/HBIS/pdf/IIvsNM.pdfhttp://www.honeybee.breeding.com/HBIS/pdf/IIvsNM.pdf

Ideas from the Recent Heartland Apiculture Society Meeting

A Boost for Summer/Fall Queen Production
Kent Williams was our main speaker at last year???s IQI
annual fall meeting. ?? Recently I was fortunate enough to talk with
him at the Heartland Apiculture Society annual meeting in St. Louis, where he
was a panelist on my ??survivor panel.??? Kent raises several hundred queens for
himself and a number for sale. He has gone 10 or more years
without treating for anything; except as he says, he ??treats colonies with
American foulbrood with a match.???
As many of you already know, Kent is a virtual fount of
knowledge about beekeeping, especially with regards to queen production.
One piece of new information to me was that Kent raises queens on into
October.?? This in a part of Kentucky where in summer even
production colonies must be fed in order to maintain populations that can
utilize the modest fall flow, or even make it through the winter.
The key to Kent???s long season of queen rearing is that he feeds a great
deal to colonies that are needed for producing those queens.?? What
is somewhat unique is that Kent feeds a sugar patty instead of syrup.
The advantage of patties is that the bees don???t store the sugar in them,
rather they consume it and build/raise brood on it.?? That is what
you want your queen and drone production colonies to do at this time of year;
the drone producing colonies are key.?? Otherwise colonies will
cease or slow down drone rearing and start to expel drones.?? This
is the opposite of what you want if you???re trying to raise queens at this time
of year.?? Kent emphasizes that you should never let these colonies
go hungry!

Here is Kent Williams??? recipe for his
carbohydrate-protein patties:

7 parts sugar
3 parts protein source (Kent uses Mega Bee)

1 part 1:1 sugar syrup

I made a batch recently starting with 7 cups of sugar and
3 cups Mega Bee.?? However, I used 1 ?? cups of sugar syrup in order
to get the batch well mixed by hand. Kent says that a 5-gal pail is enough to
feed 40 colonies for 5 weeks.?? Because the protein content is
relatively?? modest, he says that small hive beetles are usually not
a problem like they can be with regular protein patties.?? Should
they prove to be, he adds a few drops of wintergreen oil to repels the
beetles.
If you are trying to make more income from queen rearing,
late summer or fall production can be very important.???? Two IQI
members who raise more queens that anyone else in Illinois have told me that the
greatest demand for queens is in fall.?? Probably this is due in
part to the oft promoted idea that requeening in fall is a good idea, even if
trickier.
Another important application for Kent???s sugar patties is
to stimulate too-small colonies and nucs to continue to raise brood in the fall,
when colonies tend to slow down their raising of bees, just when lots of young
winter bees are needed for over-wintering success of honey bee colonies.


Are Africanized a Threat to Beekeeping in Illinois?

Another talk that was informative was by Jerry Hayes, who
now works for Monsanto in St. Louis.?? As many of you know, until
recently he was the chief apiary inspector in Florida, a state that will soon
become completely Africanized.???? Florida does have a number of
queen and package producers and a number of you have probably ordered them in
the past.?? Prior to the African Honey Bee (AHB) arriving in
Florida, the state of Texas had become almost entirely
Africanized. Several years ago a Springfield area beekeeper
ordered a package from Texas.?? This colony proved to be highly
defensive.?? When the Illinois Department of Agriculture sent off
samples of?? the bees, the results came back that they weren???t
Africanized.?? End of story? Not really — Jerry Hayes
explained that the USDA only tests 10 worker bees, even though they ask people
to send the a far larger sample.?? Since a queen can mate with 20 or
more drones, or about 12-16 on average, then 10 workers is not enough to
determine whether or not there could be several thousand workers that are
half-African.?? When European queens mated with one or two African
drones, that is enough to result in some very cross colonies.
That???s because the hybrids are about a defensive as the pure
Africans.?? In addition, the hybrids can ??stir up??? their half
sisters by releasing alarm pheromone as the drop of a hat.
Bringing in queens and packages from Africanized areas
could potentially spell doom for beekeeping in all but remote sites in the
state.?? The IQI, the Illinois State Beekeepers Association and all
Illinois beekeepers need to take the lead on this issue.?? Jerry
Hayes said that Florida provides a list of queen, nuc and package producers in
Africanized areas.?? Florida also have a list of Best Beekeeping
Practices, which includes the warning that bringing in genetics from Africanized
areas is a ??serious mistake??? (my words).?? He said that if a Florida
beekeeper were to ignore the warning and a neighbor were to bring suit due to a
stinging incident, then the beekeeper should be ready to ??open his
wallet.????? Of course, the great danger to beekeeping (vs. the
general public) would be that as a result of more stinging incidents,
municipalities will pass restrictive laws, ones that are much more draconian
that those many beekeepers have worked to get cities and towns to modify in
favor of more liberal ones.

We need to educate beekeepers about the dangers of
bringing in Africanized genetics.?? Recently I spoke with a Chicago
resident who had purchased a package from Texas last year.?? He
might as well have put up a neon sign saying ??PLEASE SUE ME.???
Fortunately, the package died on its own.?? We beekeepers
cannot afford for that kind of thing to go on and the IQI should work with both
the ISBA and the IDOA to educate and get in front of the curve, before an
unfortunate stinging incident and the media hunger for news get ahead of
us.?? According to Jerry, the Florida- developed a set
of Best Practices has been adopted by other S.E. states.?? These
could serve as a starting point for ones that Illinois adopts.
It???s important to recognize that the danger from
Africanized bees is not that they will spread here under their own
devices.?? Instead it is through they???re being brought into Illinois
by beekeepers ignorant of the threat they represent.?? A year or two
ago there was some web-based chatter in our state about the advantages of
African genetics; probably due to their reputed resistance to Varroa.
Their reported resistance is probably primarily on their frequent
swarming, which confers a brood break each time it occurs.?? That
swarming, along with defensive behavior and their tendency to abscond when
manipulated, as for example when trying to find the queen, are three of the
major reasons why they are generally poor honey producers.?? Lest
you are beginning to think that I am exaggerating the danger that the AFB pose,
I worked with these insects for a year in Venezuela and know whereof I
speak.?? They are awesome form a purely biological standpoint, but
not something that any same person would want inhabiting their
beehives!

The answer to the threat that the AHB poses to Illinois
is to avoid importing queens and bees from Sunbelt states, although not all of
which are completely Africanized at this point.?? Why would you want
to take a chance playing with fire??? In the latest ABJ one Florida
queen producer is advertising queens for $16 each.?? It???s still hard
for many beekeepers to pass up such a deal; at the same time at least some of us
are selling queens at $25 each.?? And, these queens may be coming
from an area not yet Africanized. However, it is both to the
benefit of Illinois beekeepers and to us as queen producers to help the
beekeeping community understand that in the long run Sunbelt queens and bees are
not a sustainable option.?? Even packages from areas not Africanized
yet may pose a threat.?? According to Gabe Blatt, the West Virginia
member of the Heartland Apicultural Society board, recently packages were
brought into Georgia that had Texas queens.