Beemaster's

Monthly Newsletter

April 2001 Issue. 
NOTE: this Newsletter is UPDATED throughout the month, so check back often. 

Dear Friends :) 

I’m about a week late here. It has been a busy one. Still no Bees of course, but they are coming the 15^th. 2 packages of 3 pounds with marked and clipped queen: marked for photographic reasons and I don’t mind a marked queen one bit. Still in the low 50s, but guess what, those of you following my logbook know that New Jersey ( at least MY part has been whooped with rain for week after week and cold temps too. “Ick” is the only word I can call it in less than 4 letters – lol. 

I'm delighted to announce that the subscription to this Beekeeping Newsletter has grown to nearly 2500 people and many of you write at least once a week. Some of you ( and you know who you are ) fall into my "Beemaster Groupies" Category and your input and ideas are the driving force for much of this Newsletter 

Seriously though, it was either a cold or long Winter and in many state they faced a brutal Winter. Not a great Wintering for many beekeepers throughout much of the United States, and it shows in the recent statistical data released by the American Bee Journal. With the “luck” of hind site, I feel pleased that I'm just “beginning” this experiment Internet Experiment with you in my Logbook and Newsletter format. 

But March is now behind us, and I think we can officially say that this beekeeping season is here or only 3 weeks away. I don’t want to miss the short bloom of Maple Tree lined main street pollen flow. It is a biggy for me. New hives, have new larva that will munch down on all the pollen that they can get 

The nectar though is another thing. If you are satisfying your larva with pollen, there is NO NEED to feed the larva the nectar and it is stored and evaporated into honey. Then sealed and forever a wonderful thing to have if you are a beekeeper. When I lecture to schools, Kids are always amazed at the unimaginable weight of a well drawn frame of sealed honey. 14 to 16 pounds is NOT unheard of. Small kids luck surreal holding the hefty frames. They love to look at it with the window behind the frame. The sun makes the cells almost disappear and the honey looks a golden stain-glassed window 

To briefly recap: My hives are ready, all my equipment is cleaned and polished. Also, my camera, tripod and macro lens are all in prime shape for taking you deep into the colony. Only down fall is waiting on warm weather. 

Personal notes

first I'm afraid. But many of you know that I'm a Navy Employee and the Power Plant that I work in is closing next month. About 10 of us need to be swallowed up in one of two places; Power Plant Two or the New Heat Shop. But then the Job offer of a lifetime that just keeps teasing at me, but not in my grasp yet. It's been a roller coaster of emotions week. Where will I end up, I don't know - follow my logbook for more details on my mystery job offer :) 

Also, I’m trying my luck with using Microsoft Word for building and maintaining my website. This page is being put together FIRST in DOC form, so I get to work with it like a Desktop Published Print job first, then I simply choose save as HTML to convert it for the web. I’m telling you this because there is NO REASON that most of you can’t build a nice website of your own. I’m sure you have Word or Netscape, either way you have a great website design program with out the need to know any HTML code. You just then open a free web page somewhere like, Yahoo, Geocities, Snap and on and on. You can do it and I find word to be REALLY easy to work with. The best feature is of course the on-the-fly spell checker. I’m good in general, but I do appreciate the assistance. 

BEST DOWNLOAD OF THE MONth

This month, I want to list some great software to get you building your website, finally. Most of you have lots of ambition, some photos and lots of great links, but you just don’t know where to start. Well, lets get you some background material with my http://www.beemaster.com/design/design.htm which I offer to anyone with an idea and a dream to build a site of their own. 

But you willneed more than a dream though and here are the programs that make Beemaster.com happen. First and foremost there is Jasc Software’s Paintshop Pro 7.2 a very powerful image editing program. It really is wonderful software and will do transparencies, animation, layering, image maps, image slicing and hundreds of awesome photo tricks. Most importantly to me, I use PSP7’s thumbnail view for the management of my 24,000 images. This program is big though, a weighty 27 megs. I would not do without it though, it does 99% of my image work once they leave the camera.

If you aren’t up for a 27 meg download, you can still use thumbnails to manage your images with Thumbs Up another fine program for not only viewing multi-images, but resizing groups into thumbnails as a batch conversion file. Very nice.

Now you want an file management program, unless you are uploading thru an interface like Geocities. I use Netscape Composer to upload most of my web page modifications and updates, but I use CuteFTP to move files back and forth from the server.

But the good news, you can combine many of these tasks using Microsoft Word, which I am using more and more. It has a fast image viewer and saves your pages in HTML or DOC format for many different uses. No matter which software you use, it’s your imagination, enthusiasm and talents that make your web site unique to you. Beemaster.com is 150+ pages, not many people go that nuts, but every website brings us all a bit closer in our very different lives. 

Tool Tip of the Month

Cool, yet a new feature 

Here is my very old 2 frame hand crank extractor. I offer this photo with a few tips on properly using this great tool for the small hobbyist Beekeeper. This lesson could save you lots of aggravation and headache. But when used right, you can just pull this beauty out and go to town. 

I’ll cover comb scrapping later in the Summer, for now lets say we have a few frames of honey left over from last season and we want to bottle it up for gifts to our relatives who will be visiting all week. Got that – lol. So we already scraped the wax capping from each frame and all that great clean honey is ready to be spun free of this 14 pound frame. This whole process was taught to me by my friend and mentor Mike. I may have changed it some over the years, but it works for me without causing any damage to the foundation or drawn cells. 

You need to wash and prepare your extractor each time you use it, and have very clean tools too. I always use mind away from the bees and in a sunny spot if I need to keep the honey flowing. I like honey on the warm side, it spins out easier and if handled right will also reduce comb damage while spinning. 

Hopefully you have a few frames cause Step One is to find two frames that weigh about the same. The closer in weight the better and remember frames differ greatly in weight, due to the amount of honey in the frame and the depth of the cells. So match them up in pairs. 

Now, place the scraped foundation into the spinner and adjust it so that everything is secure in place. You don’t want your frames shifting and banging at high RPMs, they could easily damage. Slowly start the handle cranking until the frames start to spin and toss light strings of honey. Don’t over spin these frames at any time in this who extracting process, they turn plenty fast without you setting any land speed records. 

If you chose similar weighted frames, you will only need to hold the extractor down with one hand. A buddy is always handy, but should not be a necessity. Keep in mind that at high speeds the extractor can walk around and even kick away from you. Hold on it tight and bring it both up and down slowly like the Rotator Ride at the Fair. 

Closely watch as a light coating of honey covers the interior of the extractor, I like to stop when I feel 1/3^rd of the honey has been spun out. I then pull one frame at a time out and rotate it ½ a turn each so that the oppisite side will now spin. I again rotate the handle, slowly bringing the frames up to speed and I judge about 2/3^rd spun out and then I reverse the frames, this time spinning until the first side is empty and finally I rotate the frames and spin out the honey from the second side. 

By doing it that way, we are not casing an uneven thickness on either side of the frame. This is not as critical with plastic foundation, but with all wax foundation you need to be very careful not to literally BLOW the honey through the frame and cause needless damage to comb. 

This one was easy. It came late in the month, but still made it for the Newsletter. What I offer here is NOT a cure to the ills of beekeeping, nothing can make all the bee related problems disappear. But if this email response helps keep just one person in the hobby, then I Beemaster... for three years in a row I ordered bees and all new frames and foundation just to be safe, I feed them and treat them, but they die every year from different things. I’m going broke trying to do something I love very much. How do I keep going, if I can't even go a full season without total loss? 

Wow... isn't that sad?! I have had total loss, I think most beekeepers have suffered catastrophic losses in recent years. In March issue of the American Bee Journal, there are some horror stories throughout the US where bees have run out of food due to long cold Winters. They also had few Cleansing Flights, and overall bee count was low. Beekeepers in the Bee-L Newsgroup are mostly reporting better than average results though. Mainly because THESE BEEKEEPERS depend on their bees being healthy and alive at the beginning of each season, in order for them to put food on their families table. 

These professional folks spend tons of money each year to keep the bees medicated, fed, wrapped in severe climates, inspected, shipped and housed in strong supers. That not even mentioning the cost of trucks, hoists, strapping, hive stands, extractors, drums, tanks, wax melters, and hundreds of other tools and supplies that are kept handy for any emergency. So from their point of view, they too would have a horrible time limited to the few supplies a hobbyist keeps around. 

Lets go back to when you first order hive parts. I suggest that anyone who plans to stay a beekeeper ( while they are first planning to purchase equipment ) to take advantage of ordering in sets of 5 or more items, instead of singular purchasing of complete kits, supers, frames and foundation. Ordering 5 supers or kits, 50 frames and 50 foundations instead of 10 will save you some money on shipping and allow you to put hives together on the fly. I say this knowing that equipment isn’t cheap, but neither is ordering and reordering and shipping after shipping. When it comes down to it, nothing beats having spare hive parts on hand. Whether to support hive growth in the Summer or for starting over without the need to reorder because of Foul Brood or other hive sickness. All your other tools are safe and just need proper care. Ordering bees may be something that you need to deal with annually if you have loss, but wouldn’t it be nice to just pull out some hive parts and ready them for when the bees come, instead of dealing with constant shipping of heavy hive parts? 

I covered some of this last issue, if you remember I said it was easier ( most of the time ) for a larger bee yard to recoup from loss. The simple hobbyists only buy enough equipment to get started, and they add supers and frames on as needed. When first or second season loss is due to many different bee maladies, If it’s necessary to destroy the hive boxes, frames and bees – this leaves John Doe Beekeeper with nothing but a smoker and a hive tool and a very hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. 

So it may sound like a simple fix, but keeping spare parts around is beneficial to the hives ability to be Wintered. Elbow room in a hive can be a blessing or a curse. Having to few bees often subjects the colony to pests, wax moths, , hive beetles and other robber insects and small animals. Having too many bees of course leads to over crowded, temperamental bees who spend way too many resources trying to control hive temperature through fanning and evaporating water, etc.. You would like to add a super and build upwards, but you have to order one. By then they have swarmed. Swarming of course quickly reduces the over crowdedness, but here you are again without a hive to place these bees in. You can’t successfully keep bees if you are NOT ready to manage the bees through proper equipment usage. 

I have received letter from many people who just gave up, they really gave it a good try, but the experience of opening a hive to find tens of thousands of dead bees is just too much for many people to handle. Most will give it a second try, but after that they tend to shove everything in the corner and often they never pick up the hobby again. I think that if these people had extra hive supers, frames and foundation stored away, they would have gone the extra yard and ordered bees that 3^rd season. And just maybe Three would have been the lucky number. 

I’ve looked back over the last few 

months and hands-down I sent more people to www.beesource.com than anywhere else. Beesource is a great place to find Plans for building many of your own Beekeeping tools: hive boxes, frames, extractors, nucs, observation hives and lots more. These plans are in Adobe Acrobat format and the details are remarkable. You can zoom in and view any detail and print out full page plans that are perfect for reference. 

Another wonderful site that you can grab a load of info from is http://www.beehoo.com which is a bilingual Beekeeping Search Engine and Directory. It quickly finds relative sites in dozens of categories. I like it ( although I never did find Beemaster listed there – lol ) but I did find some sites that I didn’t find elsewhere in more general search engines. Complete it’s not. But a really good place to checkout. 

Thanks for reading my Newsletter.
Please write and let me know if it was enjoyable. I have wonderful hopes for this Newsletter and of course the Main Beekeeping Site. I'll continue to wait for Spring, but until then I'll be busy working toward making Beemaster the most entertaining and informative Beekeeping Site on the Internet. 

Best Wishes to you all :) 

John the Beemaster

please address any feedback to honeybee@beemaster.com

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Beemaster's Logbook - detailed logging of my beekeeping.