Brushy Mountain's "Back to Basics" May

Back to the Basics

It is amazing to know that the honey bee will travel between 2 to 3 miles in search of nectar producing flowers. This distance for a bee to travel is extremely far. Would it not be more beneficial to have a flowering garden closer to home for the bees to pollinate and forage? But what flowering plants are the honey bees attracted to?


Provide the best bee-friendly garden:

• Choose the right plants: When selecting bee-friendly plants for your garden, you want to consider what will be useful for the bees. Flowering plants will be highly melliferous but are they all beneficial for honey bees? They may produce nectar and pollen but the shape and size of the flower may prevent the honey bee from visiting them.
  Bees enjoy flowering herbs, berries and many flowering fruits and vegetables but they will also travel through surrounding wildflowers. If you have the space, planting any type of fruit tree or other blooming trees such as maple, tulip poplar, sourwood, willow, black locust, sumac, and basswood are all good food sources for your bees. Look into different nectar producing plants for your state.
• Consider Blooming Season: You will want to offer a range of plants in different blooming seasons. Have an early spring bloom, summer and fall so the bees will have a continuous food source. Some plants will have a short infrequent bloom whereas others will have a long rich bloom. The longer the bloom, the more frequent visits it will receive.
• Weeds and Wildflowers are your Friends: When you have noticed your bees bringing in pollen and nectar but you know your garden is not in bloom, you always wonder where they are getting it from. Look around your yard for dandelions or clover;these are vital plants for bees. Your bees will also forage through the native wildflowers.
• Be Conscious of What You Spray: Many pesticides are toxic and can be harmful or deadly to your bees. If there are no other options to using pesticides, use them in the evening so the field force are not carrying the chemicals back into the hive.Do not place pesticides directly onto blooming flowers and try using less toxic or rapidly degradable pesticides. There are different formulations that can be used to reduce bee exposure (solutions, emulsifiable concentrates, and granulars are the best to use). Mention this to your neighbors as well.

When planning your garden, consider how you can accommodate more bee friendly plants. Check on the blooming season of flowers and what vegetation will grow in your area. Providing a bee-friendly garden is as simple as planting small patches of wildflowers, herbs, or a flowering vegetable garden. Start planting your garden for your bees. 

Experimental Natural Beekeeping...

The Sun Hive: experimental Natural Beekeeping

Sun Hives are a hive design coming out of Germany and now gathering interest in Britain. They’re part of the world-wide movement towards ‘apicentric’ beekeeping – beekeeping that prioritizes honeybees firstly as pollinators, with honey production being a secondary goal.

The Sun Hive is modeled in part on the traditional European skep hive, and is aimed at creating a hive that maximises colony health. The main thing I love about this hive and the enthusiasm surrounding it is not the hive itself, but the philosophy behind it, that of apicentric beekeeping.

In brief, the Sun Hive has an upside down skep hive at its base with curving frames in the top section and no frames in the bottom section. The hive is placed well above ground level (optimal for bees – they never choose to create a hive on the ground).

Like a Warré hive, the Sun Hive allows the queen bee to roam freely through the entire hive and lay eggs where she wishes to, which in turn allows the colony to manage the location and progression of their brood nest, which is great for colony health.

The top curved frames of the Sun Hive provide the ability to (in theory) remove each frame, with the free-form comb beneath coming out as well as it is (again, in theory) attached to the frame directly above.

The Sun Hive can also have a super attached to it on a honeyflow (not sure about that, as I assume that means a queen excluder would be used to prevent brood comb being created in said super, which goes against the idea of allowing the queen to roam the hive, but anyway).

As I said, it’s not the design of this hive that particularly gets me going (though it is very beautiful), but the philosophy behind it… putting bees first before honey yields.

Also, this sort of experimenting is important. We cannot keep relying on the industrial style of beekeeping that is currently the norm. Well managed Warré Beehives are one branch of natural beekeeping, and this hive is another.

What we need, right now, is lots of apicentric beekeepers refining, experimenting and progressing resilient beekeeping techniques. Backed up by good information on bee behavior, not just whacky ideas.

Would this hive style work in Australia? I am not sure, but I suspect it might not be ideal for most parts of Australia. And that is ok. Each continent has vastly different conditions – nectarys, climate and other variations that necessitate adaptation for hive design for effective natural beekeeping.

A hive design developed on the other side of the world, no matter how groovy, is not necessarily going to result in a happy and healthy honeybee colony over this side of the world. There’s seasonal differences, the way honeyflows work is different, humidity, etc.

But Natural Beekeeping, in all its global variations, is at the heart of future honeybee health. The Sun Hive is definitely part of that matrix and is causing many in Europe to rethink hive design to ensure colony resilience.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: MILKWOOD

USDA Spending $3M to Feed Bees...

USDA Spending $3M To Feed Struggling Bees In Midwest

MILWAUKEE (AP) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend millions of dollars to help farmers and ranchers improve pastures in five Midwestern states to provide food for the nation's struggling honeybees under a program to be announced Tuesday.

Commercial honeybees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of produce each year. Many beekeepers bring hives to the Upper Midwest in the summer for bees to gather nectar and pollen for food, then truck them in the spring to California and other states to pollinate everything from almonds to apples to avacadoes.

But agricultural production has been threatened by a more than decade-long decline in commercial honeybees and their wild cousins due to habitat loss and pesticide use. Colony collapse disorder, in which honey bees suddenly disappear or die, has made the problem worse, boosting losses over the winter to as much as 30 percent per year.

The USDA hopes to stem those losses by providing more areas for bees to build up food stores and strength for winter. The new program, details of which were provided to The Associated Press ahead of the announcement, will be "a real shot in the arm" for improving bees' habitat and food supply, said Jason Weller, chief of USDA's National Resources Conservation Service.

Dairy farmers and ranchers in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas can qualify for about $3 million to reseed pastures with alfalfa, clover and other plants appealing to both bees and livestock. Farmers also can get help building fences, installing water tanks and making other changes that better enable them to move their animals from pasture to pasture so the vegetation doesn't become worn down. The goal is to provide higher quality food for insects and animals.
"It's a win for the livestock guys, and it's a win for the managed honey bee population," Weller said. "And it's a win then for orchardists and other specialty crop producers across the nation because then you're going to have a healthier, more robust bee population that then goes out and helps pollinate important crops."

The USDA is focusing on those five states because 65 percent of the nation's estimated 30,000 commercial beekeepers bring hives there for at least part of the year. With limited funds, Weller said, the goal is to get the biggest payoff for the investment.
Corn, soybean and other farmers can qualify for money to plant cover crops, which typically go in after the regular harvest and help improve soil health, or to grow bee-friendly forage in borders and on the edges of fields.

The program is just the latest in a series of USDA efforts to reduce honeybee deaths. The agency has partnered with universities to study bee diseases, nutrition and other factors threatening colonies. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also recently created a working group on bees to coordinate efforts across the department.

The work is already paying off with changes to once-common beekeeping practices, such as supplementing bees' diet with high-fructose corn syrup, said David Epstein, a senior entomologist with the USDA. He noted that the quality of bees' food is as important as the quantity.
"You can think of it in terms of yourself," Epstein said. "If you are studying for exams in college, and you're not eating properly and you're existing on coffee, then you make yourself more susceptible to disease and you get sick."

Tim Tucker, who has between 400 and 500 hives at sites in Kansas and Texas, said he may take some of his bees to South Dakota this year because the fields around his farm near Niotaze, Kan., no longer provide much food for them.

"There used to be a lot of small farms in our area that had clover and a variety of crops, whereas in the last 20 years it's really been corn, soybean and cotton and a little bit of canola," Tucker said. "But those crops don't provide a lot of good nectar and pollen for bees."

Tucker, who is president of the American Beekeeping Federation, said the last "really good" year he had was 1999, when he got more than 100 pounds of honey per hive. Last year, he averaged about 42 pounds per hive.

He hopes dairy farmers, beef cattle ranchers and others will sign up for the new USDA program by the March 21 deadline.

It's not a "cure all," Tucker said, but "anything we do to help provide habitat for honeybees and for native bees and pollinators is a step."

ORIGINAL SOURCE: TPM

Ted Talks- "Why Bees Are Disappearing"

Speakers: Marla Spivak: Bees Scholar

Marla Spivak researches bees’ behavior and biology in an effort to preserve this threatened, but ecologically essential, insect.insect.

Whh

Why you should listen to her:

Bees pollinate a third of our food supply -- they don’t just make honey! -- but colonies have been disappearing at alarming rates in many parts of the world due to the accumulated effects of parasitic mites, viral and bacterial diseases, and exposure to pesticides and herbicides. Marla Spivak, University of Minnesota professor of entomology and 2010 MacArthur Fellow, tries as much as possible to think like bees in her work to protect them. They’re “highly social and complex” creatures, she says, which fuels her interest and her research.

Spivak has developed a strain of bees, the Minnesota Hygienic line, that can detect when pupae are infected and kick them out of the nest, saving the rest of the hive. Now, Spivak is studying how bees collect propolis, or tree resins, in their hives to keep out dirt and microbes. She is also analyzing how flowers’ decline due to herbicides, pesticides and crop monoculture affect bees’ numbers and diversity. Spivak has been stung by thousands of bees in the course of her work.

"Bees have a champion in Marla Spivak."

The Promised Land

ORIGINAL SOURCE:  TED Ideas Worth Spreading

The Beauty of Pollination...

If you haven't already seen this video it's a MUST watch.

iPhone Cameras are Great!

I snapped this photo with my iPhone while shopping for plants at a local nursery.  Not bad for an amateur with a cell phone camera!