Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association » PWRBA in the News

PWRBA in the National News again

Karla E — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:10:11 +0000

In the news, again… and with a color photo on the front page of the Washington Post no less!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-search-of-a-better-bee/2011/11/07/gIQA5e3RLP_story.html

Anyone who wants to read about our SARE project the results of which are mentioned in the article can find links here: http://pwrbeekeepers.com/education/sare/ and

PWRBA SARE Project and Report Completed

Karla E — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:31:55 +0000

The PWRBA SARE project, Promoting Sustainable Beekeeping Practices through local production of nucs (nucleus colonies) and local queen honeybees is now complete. The final report and appendices can be found at the following link:

http://mysare.sare.org/mySARE/ProjectReport.aspx?do=viewRept&pn=FS08-223&y=2011&t=1
Thanks to all of the SARE participants, SARE collaborators, and our wise guides.

PWRBA quoted in the Washington Post Article “As bee colonies die, beekeepers face challenge finding replacements” 5/26/2011

Karla E — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:00:10 +0000

PWRBA quoted in this Washington Post Article. Find it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home_garden/as-bee-colonies-die-beekeepers-face-challengefinding-replacements/2011/05/26/AG66BLGH_story.html

As bee colonies die, beekeepers face challenge finding replacements

By Adrian Higgins, Published: June 1

I’ve been a two-hive beekeeper hobbyist for several years, not so much to be awash in honey and mead but for the simple pleasure of seeing honeybees on garden flowers.

A hive forces close observation of an insect world that is mysterious, miraculous and largely unseen except by the veiled beekeeper. It helps to regard a colony as a single organism, so magical is the sum of its parts. But the hive is a dynamic beast, one that is either expanding or shrinking, which is why beekeeping is so engaging and, often, frustrating.

A swarm, deeply alarming to many people, occurs when a hive has too many bees. The old queen leaves, taking most of her loyal subjects with her. Clustered around her, they quietly wait for a few hours or a couple of days for scouts to return to direct them to some tree hollow or such. Balled in the open like this, they can be placed in a fresh hive without drama. It is the opposite phenomenon that worries beekeepers: the shrinking hive, destined to vanish by some pernicious ill. With the rise of parasitic mites and viruses, wild honeybees have died off, and domesticated ones seemed to need ever increasing help to make it. This was before the arrival of the enigmatic colony collapse disorder that has wiped out so many more.

My hives seemed strong enough in the fall. The bees had packed their winter larder with lots of honey and pollen. I gave them sugar syrup and could detect none of the varroa mites that cling to their bodies. But the winter was long and cold, and a hive needs enough huddled bees to stay warm. By February, it was evident that both colonies had perished.

The story was the same across the region: High winter losses, once rare, are now the norm. My beekeeping chum and guru Dane Hannum pegs the winter kill to the dry conditions of last summer. Drought halted the nectar flow, and the queens, accordingly, stopped laying eggs. The colonies had too few bees to keep warm. “We went into winter with old bees,” he said, “and come January, they had reached their life span, and that was it.”

Dane can be counted on by hundreds of local beekeepers to ferry bee packages from Georgia each spring. A package contains as many as 10,000 worker bees, a few drones and one queen, and has been raised by a breeder in the South. When I called Dane in early April to see whether I could get a couple of packages to restock my hives, there was a bemused silence at the other end of the phone. I might as well have asked him to get me some gold from Fort Knox.

Demand for packages has been outstripping supply for years, but this year it’s as bad as anyone can remember. A cold, wet January and February in the Georgia apiaries delayed and curtailed bee propagation at a time when bee societies everywhere are seeing a resurgent interest in beekeeping. Old-time beekeepers got out of the hobby when the losses mounted and the burdens of care grew. The renaissance of the past three years has coincided with increasing media coverage of colony collapse disorder, which is most pronounced among commercial beekeepers whose hives are rented to pollinate apples, peaches, almonds and other crops. The plight of the bee has entered the popular psyche, and many of the new beekeepers are young and female, itself a shift in the hobby. When I got into it, I was worried I’d have to grow an Abe Lincoln beard and start wearing suspenders. Anyway, this spring bee packages have been rarer than hen’s teeth.

“I think this is the largest demand I have seen to date,” said Tim Arheit, whose inventory of bees has been sold out for weeks at his Honey Run Apiaries in Delphos, Ohio. On one level, he is encouraged by the ranks of new beekeepers. After beekeeping became more difficult 20 years ago, with the arrival of parasitic mites, the number of beekeepers in Ohio dropped from 10,000 to 3,000, he said. “It’s encouraging to see young beekeepers start. On the other hand, to see orders from existing beekeepers with high losses is a little discouraging.”

Many bee societies are looking to move away from relying on shipped packages as a way of stocking hives, deciding instead to replenish them locally with nucleus hives, or nucs. Typically, four double-sided frames are lifted from a healthy hive — they contain honeycomb and, mostly, baby bees in various stages of development. A young, healthy queen is added to the fresh hive. This is done later in the season than with packages, and though you may forgo a first-year honey harvest, vigorous nucs can expand beautifully the following spring.

Karla Eisen of the Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association has been among the beekeepers advocating local nucs over packages. The initial motivation was to turn to bees that were healthier and more adapted to local conditions and to avoid the risk of getting Africanized bees from the Deep South, she said. But with demand for packages now sky-high, another factor favors the encouragement of nucs: their availability.

Meanwhile, I found a message from Dane, out of the blue, on the answering machine: “I have a couple of packages for you. Someone canceled, it was so late.”

Within 24 hours I was on his Arlington County doorstep. The bees spent a quiet night in my basement while I cleaned and prepared hive bodies and frames. They are now safely in their homes, and the queens are laying. Within the hive, some workers are building comb like mad, and the garden is alive with the sound of their foraging sisters. I can face another summer with equanimity.

PWRBA SARE Grant Article Published- Virginia Beekeepers Successful in Rearing Local Honeybee Colonies-

Karla E — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:57:04 +0000

See link here: http://www.southernsare.org/News-and-Media/Press-Releases/Virginia-Beekeepers-Successful-in-Rearing-Local-Honeybee-Colonies

Virginia Beekeepers Successful in Rearing Local Honeybee Colonies

Candace Pollock (cpollock@uga.edu)

06/08/2011

GAINESVILLE, Virginia – Beekeepers in Virginia striving to improve the health of their colonies are finding success by reviving what many consider to be a lost sustainable beekeeping practice.

Through a $14,736 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Farmer/Producer Grant, the Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association is seeing higher winter survival rates of honeybee hives started from nucleus colonies compared to packaged honeybee hives. Nucleus colonies are “mini hives” made from taking pieces of the main hive and introducing a queen or encouraging the bees to rear a new queen, thus forming a new hive.

“What we are doing is not anything new, but it wasn’t being taught anymore. It’s like a lost art,” said Karla Eisen of the Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association. “We are just trying to bring this sustainable process back into practice.”

The goals of the two-year research were to address the poor performance of imported bees, provide a way for beekeepers to produce their own hives, and eliminate the threat of Africanized honeybees.

“The plight of the beekeeper and the honeybees is a serious situation,” said Eisen, pointing to the 30 percent loss of managed honeybee colonies last winter addressed in the recent annual report from the USDA and Apiary Inspectors of America. “The No. 1 concern for Virginia beekeepers is the ability to become more sustainable and less reliant on bees imported from other states.”

In the first year of study, 83 percent of nucleus-started hives survived the first season, compared to 68 percent of the package-started hives. The survival rate increased in the second year, with 70 percent of the nucleus-started hives surviving compared to 40 percent of the packaged hives.

Eisen speculates that such factors as queen genetics, less stress, and the environment are playing a role in higher survival rates.

“The queen is the key to the entire hive. When you have a queen raised locally, and more genetically adapted to the environment of the region, then you are more likely to have a higher survival rate of the hive than from a queen reared in California and shipped to Virginia,” said Eisen. “Also, it’s a much more natural process to split hives into nucleus colonies than to install a package of bees, but it does take time. In the commercial industry, the rearing of the queen may be more rushed and my general feeling is that there is more chance queens are not being mated properly, especially early in the season.”

Eisen describes the natural process of queen rearing as “magical.”

“Every egg has a shot at developing into a queen,” said Eisen. “But if you pull an egg or larva less than four days old on a frame from a beehive and put it into a queen-less nucleus colony, you have a good chance that it will develop into a queen. Every larvae gets royal jelly for three days, but for those raised to be queens, they get royal jelly for a longer period of time. The bees just know and that’s what is so magical about it.”

Despite the success of producing and maintaining local honeybee colonies, there are limitations to their management. In Virginia, for example, there are only certain times of the year when a new queen can be reared and mated to create new colonies.

“Spring is an especially difficult time,” said Eisen. “If you are getting a lot of rain, forget about it. That queen is never going to be well-mated.”

To combat this challenge, five beekeepers participating in the SARE study produced new nucleus colonies from overwintering nucleus colonies to be made available to other beekeepers, and were welcomed with overwhelming success. The group had an 80 percent success rate in the first year and a 75 percent success rate in the second year.

“We more than tripled the number of nucleus colonies made from 10 in the first year to 34 in the second year, and nearly quadrupled the number of nucleus colonies made available to new beekeepers from 4 in the first year to 19 in the second year,” said Eisen. “And the majority of the colonies were produced from locally reared queens.”

The Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association is leading educational efforts to train beekeepers on producing nucleus colonies and rearing queens from their own hives. To learn more, log to http://pwrbeekeepers.com.

“The long term benefits of this project have been healthier colonies of bees headed by more locally produced queens and/or queens with hygienic attributes, more bees and queens produced locally and made available to beekeepers, and increased sustainability of our beekeeping association and beekeeping within the region,” said Eisen.

A final report detailing the project (FS08-223), “Promoting Sustainable Beekeeping Practices Through Local Production of Nucs (Nucleus Colonies) and Local Queen Honeybees,” can be found on the national SARE projects database.

Farmer/Producer Grants, one of Southern SARE’s seven grant opportunities, are designed for farmers to conduct research, marketing and education projects. Any producer or producer organization in the Southern region is eligible to apply for a grant. Learn more.

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Published by the Southern Region of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program. Funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Southern SARE operates under cooperative agreements with the University of Georgia, Fort Valley State University, and the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture to offer competitive grants to advance sustainable agriculture in America’s Southern region.

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Rearing Nucleus Honeybee Colonies

Worm Wrangling: Or, Why I Love Keeping Worms More Than Keeping Bees

Karla E — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:53:00 +0000

The PWRBA SARE grant is mentioned in this article from Mother Earth News online.

Worm Wrangling: Or, Why I Love Keeping Worms More Than Keeping Bees.