How to Handle Bees

Intruders are going to get stung by the bees protecting the hive. As a beekeeper you will have to be prepared to receive your share of stings. If you have any fear of bees or of being stung, you will have to conquer those apprehensions. As you gain confidence and more adept at the handling of the bees, the stings will happen less frequently.

One of the tips you will want to learn is when to manipulate bees. You can open and examine the bee colonies on days that are warm and sunny with no wind. The older bees will be out searching for food on those days. The older bees will stay in the hive on colder, windy and rainy days.

When there is an abundance of nectar, bees are much easier to examine than when there is a shortage of nectar. Plying them with sugar syrup may help, but not always.

Spring is the best time to examine the bees because of smaller populations.

Bees will usually tolerate a moderate beekeeper manipulation for 10 to 15 minutes. It is best not to keep the hives open any longer than you have to. Brood examinations should never be drawn out. When examining the hives, if bees become noisy or very nervous, the hive needs to be closed. If there is honey in the combs, they will attract robber bees unless there is an over abundance of nectar. If robbing start, you will need to stop examinations for the rest of the day and reduce the entrances to the hives. Once the robbing starts it is difficult to stop.

If you need to manipulate a colony, have a lighted smoker that omits cool smoke. Before you open the hives, you want to puff smoke into the entrance of the hive. Move on to the other colonies allowing time for the bees to react to the smoke. Keep your smoker handy because you will need it while you are making your close inspections of each colony. If you have some of the bees looking at you, make them scatter with a few puffs of smoke. When you are around the bees, you should move smoothly and carefully so that you don't alarm the bees. When prying off the cover to the hive be as gentle as possible, bees are sensitive to vibrations. Avoid any jolting of the hives. After removing the cover to the hive, work from the back or the side of the hive. Remove the frame nearest the outside to be examined. If robbing is not a problem, lean the frame against the outside of the hive to give you more room to work. If robbing could be a problem make sure to cover the hives and never leave a frame out in the open.

If you are going to examine all the boxes, start with the lowest one. Make sure the boxes you are not examining stay covered. After examining the lowest box, examine each box after it has been replaced on the lower one.

When you need to remove the frame, pry it loose with the hive tool. With a firm grip on the loosened frame, gently lift it, trying not to scrape the bees on the adjoining frame. Leave the frame outside of the hive or box, to give you a larger working area. If you scrape the comb, do leave the bits and pieces in the hive or box. Only scrape comb that it in the way, scraping is irritating to the bees.

Clothing and Equipment Needed

One of the most important pieces of clothing a beekeeper wears is the veil. Bee stings on the face can be very painful and there is the possibility of damage to the eyes and ears.

If by chance a bee gets inside the veil, walk away from the hives and remove the bees. Never remove the veil when you are in with the hives.

Use protective clothing to avoid getting hive product on your regular clothes, and to protect sensitive areas of your body. Avoid dark or rough textured clothes. Bees are able to hold on to a rough texture material than smooth material. Wear white or light colored coveralls. If you are not using boots, do not wear dark socks. Boots that fasten over the coveralls or in the coveralls should be worn. A windbreaker jacket will help you to avoid being stung. Pants, veil, sleeves should be fasten securely to prevent bees from getting into your clothes. If a bee does get into your clothing, squeeze it in the clothing or walk away from the hives and open up your clothing to allow the bee to escape. Before handling bees, do not use any sweet smelling cologne, hair spray or any other products. The odor may irritate the bees or attract them. Glove should be used sparingly. Gloves are useful during bad weather or when moving colonies, but gloves can hinder the manipulating of the colonies. Without the interference of gloves, you will find that the bees respond better to a lighter touch.

As a beginner you will want to contemplate the number of colonies you want to start out with. Two or three is a good number to start off with because it will give you a chance to compare the two colonies, such as the growth and the production.

The equipment you will need to start off with for a complete hive is:

1 metal covered top

1 inner cover

1 bottom board

2 standard 10-framc hive bodies, each body contains 10-frames

1 queen excluder

2 shallow 10-frame supers with frames.

1 bee smoker

1 hive tool

1 pr. bee gloves

1 pr. coveralls

1 bee veil

You can buy this equipment new or used. If it is used you will want to make sure it is in good condition. Also have it examined by the Apiary Inspection Service for any possibility of disease. The equipment will run you $250 or more. If you are really talented and ambitious you can build your own hives. Just make sure you have the dimensions correct because bees will build combs where you least want them.

Getting Started in Beekeeping

If you are considering bees as a hobby or as a sideline business, there are things you will want to keep in mind before making that decision. Since there are many factors involved with making money with the honeybees produce, you might want to start doing it as a hobby. There is a significant amount of money in the start-up of beekeeping. Before investing any amount of money in your beekeeping project, you might want contact beekeepers in your area. As a rule, they will more than happy to share their experience with you. Most beekeepers love keeping bees and to them it is just a "hobby", but they can give you some insight into beekeeping. Take plenty of notes. More likely than not you will need them.

In making the decision of becoming a beekeeper, you will want to consider the safety of family, friends, and neighbors. You wouldn't want someone to get stung that is allergic to bee stings. The best course of action on that account is to ask your neighbors and friends, if any of them are allergic to bees. You will also be able to find out if there might be someone who would not like beehives so close to their proximity. You will also want to check with the county you live in. You will want to know about any ordinances or laws prohibiting beekeeping.

You will also want to consider whether or not you have a location that would be conducive to maintaining bees. You will also want to consider where the bees will have to fly to retrieve nectar and pollen. Keeping plants they like close by is not a bad idea either. Since bees need water every day, you might want to have water for them close at hand. You don't want them visiting the neighbor's swimming pool. Here is a list of spots unacceptable to the health of the bees.

How many months of the year will pollen and nectar will be readily available to the bees?

Will you have to feed them in order for them to survive and how much of the year?

Is there a water supply available year round for the bees? They need water every day.

You will need to consider what will be underneath the bees as they fly to get the nectar and pollen they require. The bees will defecate as they are flying and their feces will leave spots on everything below them. The feces can even ruin the surface of a vehicle. There are methods to use to force the bees to fly at a higher altitude, such as.a tall fence or thick tall plants near the hive.

You want the hives accessible year round.

You will want to avoid low spots for your hives because they hold the cold, damp air too long.

You will also want to avoid high spots for your hives because that would be too windy.

These are just some of the things you will want to consider before taking on this hobby.

During a nectar flow, many of the older workers will be in the field hunting for food. This is the best time to examine the colony. During the summer more bees will be in the hive and the situation can change, especially between the nectar flows. There can be some robbing going on at this time, which will make the bees even more defensive at any intrusion to their hive. Leaving the colony open for more than a few minutes can accelerate a robbing as can leaving cappings or honey exposed. It will become a necessity to reduce the entrance of a weak colony to prevent stronger hives attempt to rob from it. A honey flow will reduce the likelihood of robbing.

The mood of the bees can have a lot to do with the weather or the time of day. On the days of rainy weather, cool temperatures, early in the morning or late in the afternoon will be more likely to make them angry and they will attack. Always inspect them on warm, sunny days in the middle of the day when most of the bees are foraging.

Keep a constant warm water supply for the bees to cool the hive and dilute honey to feed t heir young. They will collect water from the closest water source. If you do not have a constant supply of shallow water for the bees, they will look for it somewhere else, like the neighbor's pool, birdbath or wading ponds. The bees are more likely to drown in those sources. If you have a water supply for them when they first fly out in spring, they will not go anywhere else for water. Once they find a water source, it is hard to keep them from going back to it.

A beekeeper must keep the bees in control every time the hive is open. A typical hive can house thousands of workers all capable of stinging. There are measures a beekeeper can take in the open that he can not take in the city because of the closeness of other people.

Smoke is the most important tool for the beekeeper opening a hive. Smoke should be used in moderation, but the smoker should be capable of producing large volumes of smoke on short notice. The beekeeper must smoke the entrance of the hive, under the cover, and periodically smoke the frames while the hive is open. Try not to jar the hive or the frames as that may anger the bees, which will make it hard for a beekeeper to do his work. The beekeeper must work quickly and carefully. By going through the frames several times a year, the beekeeper keeps the frames movable. Remove any excess combs.

Using gloves when working with bees make the beekeeper clumsier and he may lose control of the hive. The stings that the gloves are protecting you from are easily removed and the pain quickly passes.

Honeybees Go on Strike (comic)

Honeybee Colony Collapse to Devastate Food Companies, Result in Food Scarcity

Monday, May 12, 2008 by: Mike Adams
The ongoing phenomenon of mysterious honeybee deaths is starting to raise alarm in the food industry, which depends heavily on bees to pollinate many critical crops. "Honeybee health and sustainable pollination is a major issue facing American agriculture that is threatening our food supply and endangering our natural environment," said Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State.

I tend to think that honeybees are simply "on strike." They're tired of being slave workers for the very humans who continue to destroy their habitat, pollute their air and water, and steal the labors of their hard work (honey, bee pollen and free pollination services).

Honeybees pollinate 130 different crops, which supply $15 billion worth of food and ingredients each year. One out of every three bites of food on your dinner plate was made possible by honeybee pollination.

The Emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder

In late 2006, beekeepers in the United States began to notice that unusual numbers of honeybees were dying during the winter. Beekeepers reported losing between 30 and 90 percent of their bees, in contrast to the usual 20 to 25 percent.

The phenomenon, which continued through last winter, remains unexplained. Some of the potential reasons being investigated for the honeybee die-off are poor nutrition, invasive mites, diseases or toxins, air pollution, or a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, in which bees abruptly desert their hives and die (i.e. they go on strike). In general, human beings have a very poor appreciation of all the services "provided" by Mother Nature, including the removal of CO2 from the air by plants, the turning of soil by worms, and of course the free pollination of crops and orchards by honeybees and other insects.

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and a number of institutions are currently researching the causes of the die-off, the food industry is now entering the fray. International ice-cream giant Haagen-Dazs has announced a new program to fund and encourage research into the problem, with the hopes of staving off a crisis for its own business.

"Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made from the finest all-natural ingredients, and the plight of the honeybee could mean many of the ingredients used in our top flavors, like Vanilla Swiss Almond and Strawberry, would be difficult to source," said Haagen-Dazs brand manager Josh Gellert.

Nearly 40 percent of Haagen-Dazs' ice cream flavors include bee-dependent ingredients. "These are among consumers' favorite flavors," brand director Katty Pien said. "We use 100 percent all-natural ingredients like strawberries, raspberries and almonds which we get from California. The bee problem could badly hurt supply."

The "Haagen-Dazs Loves Honeybees" (HD loves HB) campaign includes the creation of a board of bee scientists to help guide research into the problem, a $150,000 grant to honeybee-related programs at Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences and a $100,000 grant to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honeybee Research Facility at the University of California-Davis

"Honeybees are in trouble," said Walter Leal, professor chair of the UC-Davis Entomology Department. "One-third of our nation's food supply depends on bee pollination, but bees are vanishing in massive numbers. This gift will help us to rebuild and revitalize our honeybee program."

The Laidlaw program suffered greatly from budget cuts and faculty retirements during the 1990s, before colony collapse emerged as a problem. The Haagen-Dazs grant will go toward a postdoctoral researcher's salary and toward funding research into colony collapse disorder and sustainable pollination.

At Penn State, the grant money will help purchase equipment that will be used to analyze samples and more effectively detect and identify viruses, pesticides and other potentially harmful substances. It will also fund small student research grants.

Beyond ice cream: The coming era of food scarcity

Of course, the honeybees-on-strike problem goes way beyond ice cream. We're talking about one-third of the human food supply here. If honeybees stop doing all the free work they've been doing to pollinate crops, humans are going to find themselves in very difficult situation regarding global food supplies. A global famine is not out of the question here, especially when you combine the loss of honeybee populations with the situation of rapidly deteriorating soil quality across the world's farmlands. Without usable soils and willing insect pollinators, humans will quickly find themselves chewing on their shoelaces, wishing they could bring back the "good days" when honeybees freely volunteered to work, and farm soils actually contained nutrients.

In my view, the collapse of honeybee populations is just one sign of many that humans have pushed Earth's ecosystems over the edge. We've polluted the skies, the land and the waters. We've raped the planet of its minerals, slashed and burned its rainforests, depleted its soils and devastated its wild animal population. We've dumped chemicals, radioactive waste and endless mountains of trash into the oceans and waterways. And then we balk when nature hiccups. We scratch our heads, wondering why some element in nature that we've exploited for so long suddenly stops behaving in the way we want. Why are the ocean fish populations collapsing? Why are our food crops nutritionally depleted? Why are infectious diseases now threatening to unleash a new pandemic? Why are honeybees going on strike?

The answer, of course, is because humans have turned planet Earth into a toxic world. We've poisoned the one thing in the universe that openly and unselfishly offered to give us so much for free. Yet instead of appreciating Mother Nature, we've chosen to betray her. We've turned what was once an Eden into a toxic world, and it's only a matter of time before the destabilizing, harmful practices we've adopted to feed an expanding human population come back to haunt us in a devastating way.

There is a tipping point where Mother Nature will simply refuse to cooperate, and this honeybee collapse is one sign that we may have already crossed a threshold, beyond which balance will only be achieved by a sharp decline in the human population.

Not coincidentally, the loss of food pollinators will cause precisely that. As I've said many times before on NaturalNews, eventually humans will live in balance with nature. The question is whether we will consciously create that balance as a mature species, or if we will be starved into submission by a global ecosystem that refuses to support such a large population of human beings. One thing for sure: The problem of rampant obesity is about to come to an end. A few years from now, the very idea that half the people in any nation could feed themselves into a state of extreme obesity will be considered outlandish.

The alarm bells are ringing, folks. We have reached the limit of the planet's ability to absorb our pollution and environmental devastation. I sadly predict the human species if not mature enough to make the necessary forward-thinking changes, and that it will only learn from disaster. That disaster is coming. Prepare to live in a world where food becomes desperately scarce. Prepare to see the human population collapse in almost precisely the same way the honeybee populations are collapsing.

As go the insects, so go humans.

Survey shows US honey bee deaths increased over last year

By JULIANA BARBASSA
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.

Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."

The survey included 327 operators who account for 19 percent of the country's approximately 2.44 million commercially managed bee hives. The data is being prepared for submission to a journal.

About 29 percent of the deaths were due to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn't.

"What's frightening about CCD is that it's not predictable or understood," vanEngelsdorp said.

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania's Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.

The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honey bees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.

Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Daazs' varieties flavor depend on honey bees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.