Before I start on Part II, a declaration and apology: I realize Assamnet is not a BLOG. It is NOT my intent to use assamnet as my personal BLOG to write about MY hobbies and such. I am doing this only because some netters asked. And I will be perfectly happy not to indulge in this any farther, should anyone be annoyed.
************************************************************************************************************** A renewed Attempt at Rebuilding and Trapping Feral Swarms: After I returned from Assam the last week of March, I was stunned to find that my sole over wintered hive was almost dead, with just a handful of bees, plenty of left over honey and with a few eggs and larvae. The queen was still there. But there were sealed cells with dead larvae, indicating that a disease has struck. I did treat the hive last fall for the common honey-bee disease Nosema, with antibiotic in sugar syrup. So, it could not have been Nosema, or at least so I think. But symptoms were like Nosema. There was no hope that the hive would survive. So what now? I can certainly buy one or two nucleas hives again to start all over. It is never a good idea to have just one hive, because if something f goes wrong, one will be left with nothing. It can be an extremely depressing thought. A nucleas hive ( 'nuc' in beekeeping parlance) is composed of a queen, three frames of larvae and sealed brood , a frame containing pollen ( protein source for brood) and a frame of honey ( to sustain the emerging colony, before nectar becomes available in spring) along with young nurse bees. It is houseApril. Ordinarily it begins mid to late April in our area. When the queen begins to lay eggs more rapidly and the brood expands, the frames and the bees are transferred into a standard hive box that holds nine or ten frames. A good honey producing hive requires to maintain six frames of brood during the nectar flow. Since the life of worker bees vary from one to four months, adequate number of newly emerging workers are essential for good production. The more the number of worker bees, the higher the rate of honey collection. Purchasing nucs to re-start the project, however, had a serious problem . Local beekeepers won't have a nuc available to sell until queens become available in May. That would mean NO honey for the season. Because by the time the nuc grows to producing strength, the nectar flow would be over in our area, which would be by the end of June to mid July. I almost gave up hope. But just out of a need to talk to someone about the sorry state of affairs, I called my mentor and President of our club, Bob, who was my go-to-guy since I started in 2010. Bob was driving to his bee yard, when I called him. After listening to my sad story, he said: Chan, we will have to figure out a way to get you some bees so that you are not without honey this season. While it sounded hopeful, I had my doubts and asked how that could happen. He said he will check with Ted, an octogenarian and the most experienced bee-keeper in our area, who had some over-wintered nucs ( thus won't have to wait till May to get queens for them). I knew Ted. He sold me a nuc in 2010 after I lost one of my hives due to the workers' rebellion that I wrote about last year. Ted, in his hey-day had over two hundred hives in his then semi rural subarban homestead near St. Louis. He told me in 2010 that he used to sell honey nationwide, by the ton, and that he makes more money selling nucs now ,( at $ 110. 00 a pop) than selling honey. He said he is limited only by the availability of new queens and can't keep up with demand. Shortly afterwards Bob called me and asked me to call Ted right-away. I did. Did he have any nucs for sale? Yep, he had a couple left. I said I am coming right over. Ted sold me his two last overwintered nucs., which were actually very strong. Ted said, I could start setting up honey supers on these two colonies in two weeks. That was the first week of April. And I felt sooo relieved! There was a very good chance we would have honey again this year. Won't be like 2011, but we won't be left empty handed. We got spoiled from last year's bounty. Our sweetener consumption has entirely turned into home grown honey. Could not bear the thought of returning to sugar. Our children , nephew and grand nephews, all got used to having honey from the Mahanta apiary. What is a honey super? It is a shallower box of honey comb frames, that we place over the main brood box, sometime with a queen excluder, where the workers store honey for their use during the nectar-less months and for the winter, and which we steal for our consumption. What is a queen excluder? It is a screen made of metal bars that are spaced just enough apart to let workers through to go store honey, but too narrow to let the queen go past , to lay eggs on the honey supers. I got re-equipped for a hopefully productive spring: I had two hives going again. But buying nucs is an expensive way to keep bees. It was fine to get started. But I didn't like the idea of doing it for my third season. So, this year I decided to try to lure swarming bees looking for a suitable home to build up my yard with FREE BEES ( thus the term 'freebie' ). It is in the nature of honey-bees, to fly the coop every year. The old queen takes half to two thirds of a strong hive after the first season at their old home and SWARMS to a new location. It happens every spring. If your hive swarms, there will be few bees left to produce any honey for the bee-keeper. So a beekeeper's most important management task is to prevent a second year hive from SWARMING. THere are many ways to do that. But it always needs some serious doing! So, how does one lure a swarming hive to one's own hive box? Entomlogists have studied bees like few other insects. They now know exactly what a swarming colony of bees is looking for in a new home. Before they swarm ( fly from the old home), they send out SCOUTS to find a good home. Scouts are veteran workers with special skills. They go looking for tree hollows, chimneys, crawl-spaces under floors, roof eaves, attics, whatever. Once a scout finds a promising place she goes back and spreads the info. to other workers who come to inspect and approve of or discard. There could be a dozen such scouts' finds to check-out before a consensus is built in the colony to select the most desirable find. Once that is performed, the workers gorge themselves in stored honey while straving the queen, to lighten her up, so she could fly, and on a good sunny day they fly to the new home. Knowing tall this, all one needs to do to get freebies is to set up a hive box in an ideal location and wait. To make the lure more attractive, we also add some artificial pheromones ( actually it is lemon-grass oil) that mimics the Nasonov pheromones that scout bees release to guide the colony to a new location. That is what I did, and within a week of setting up such a box I got a swarm of bees to come set up home in it. That was a BIG thrill! Next: Freebies Ain't All That Free ************************************************************************************************************* Part I Now that you asked Utpal :-): It has been quite an awesome journey for me since I took up beekeeping in the spring of 2010. Some of you read about the emotionally roller-coasting experiences: The loss of a queen, laying-worker colony, destruction of the colony, replacement with a new starter in early summer and so forth. Anyway, I managed to get two good colonies going thru the fall of 2010, overwintered them successfully, started the spring of 2011 with two solid colonies ready for the spring honey collection. I split off some combs from both the two strong colonies and made a third one with a new queen purchased thru our bee-club. The two older colonies started collecting honey in earnest as soon as the nectar-flow began and the third built up strength to join in the effort early in summer. I extracted my first honey during the Memorial-day weekend of ( last one of May) of 2011, and kept harvesting until mid-July. I extracted 327 lbs. of honey by the time I stopped. That was much more than my wildest expectations. Samples of our bounty traveled across the continent and beyond the oceans, all the way to Assam. I sold some too. But UPS got a whole lot more on shipping costs than my sales could make up for. My mentor in the club told me that our crop was much, much above the average yield of the club members. I attribute that to the strength of the colonies -- all the hard work paid off-- and the abundance of nectar in our environs. As if all that was not enough, I took up mead making. Mead is wine made from honey and is the earliest form of wine that humans ever brewed. "Soma" is speculated to be honey-wine, as was the Greeks' Ambrosia. 8 thousand year old Egyptian honey-wine remains have been discovered in the Pyramids. More recently, the merrymaking libations supplied by Friar Tuck to Robin Hood and and his band was mead. So, as you can see, mead has a sweet and intoxicating history. I used 15 lbs. of my finest clover honey to start a batch of 5 gallons of mead on New Years day, 2012. Today I am cleaning salvaged wine bottles to bottle 4.5 gallons of our very drinkable mead. It tastes like semi-sweet Riesling. If you pay us a visit, we shall break bread, or more precisely, partake of maasor-tenga with a fine bottle of Mahanta Mead of the Ole Jamestown Apiary, 2011 vintage. Experts say, however, that mead should be aged at least a year for it to taste good, better still with about three years of aging. I doubt my 4.5 gallons will last that long. That was the good news. My bees ran into trouble in the summer of 2012. By the end of fall I lost three of my hives. Only one overwintered successfully, but that hive got diseased by March, and after returning from Assam by the last week of March, I was without a single hive. It was devastating. The roller-coaster never seems to end. Next: A renewed Attempt at Rebuilding and Trapping Feral Swarms. c-da _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
