August is for bottling

Well it will be August when you read this and your harvest should be in barrels and pails; time to bottle and get ready for the fall craft fairs to sell our honey. I was pretty disappointed this year, only about 60 pounds per hive down in southern Gage County. I think the extremely hot and dry June nectar flow season was to blame. The yellow sweat clover bloomed and wilted in just a very few days. The wild white sweat clover continued to hold flowers much longer and if I hadn’t seeded the mixture, I wouldn’t have done even that well. I certainly hope your area was better.

We always use a wide variety of jars, bears and jugs. I think people like the choices; you can also get quite a bit more for an antique or decorated jar of honey at a fall craft sale as people are looking for Christmas gifts.

I just email Charlie that I need coumaphos strips, I’m giving up on my Minnesota hygienic queen experiment, lost 6 of the 10 hives now and the remaining 4 produced very little as they are quite small even though the producing and treated hives are boiling with bees having just lost their supers. I’m just gong to combine them and treat before they die. Other smarter people than I are reporting it’s very hard and may be impossible to keep the bees untreated for 3 years running. I know if I don’t treat they won’t winter, no use just throwing them away. I’ve learned some things; it takes varroa over a year to kill a colony. I know that the varroa resistance of the stock can be selected by testing hygienic behavior, in my case using the pin prick method as I kept the sugar shake counts down for over 1 year. I will have to leave it up to those with much larger populations to keep up the testing. I did learn to raise the few queens I will need each year.

Quite a few farmers around this area quickly switched from milo to corn, some for the first time this year. At Beetopia we are going to learn frp, Kpjm Gruzska about Canadian farmers switching to Canola and how a similar event is being promoted in Nebraska. I don’t know beans about canola but I do know it requires honeybee pollination; opportunity knocks! The other speaker is Bob Danka from the Baton Rouge bee lab where they are trying to develop SMR queens.

I just remembered the fair is coming up, Jane has already got me scheduled on Sundays. It’s really fun to talk to people about the bees. Last year I spelled Ken in the cage and when the kids started pointing and asking questions it made the whole day worthwhile. Any one of you can talk about bees and share the many fun facts. If you forget the numbers, they are on a large poster behind the observation hives. Any one of you can sell honey ice cream. Any one of you can explain the items in the exhibits. Every one of you already knows how to sell Nebraska honey. Give Jane a call, its really fun to bee at the fair.