I always look forward to this day and consider it the first day of the beekeeping season. I have been feeding pollen replacement for three weeks now and am seeing good brood development for early March. Naturally the stronger colonies have larger brood nests than the weak ones. I opened some hives to see how much pollen they were storing and it looks like they are feeding it out as fast as it is coming in. They really do prefer natural pollen when it is available but at this time of the year, the natural pollen supply can be sporadic at best. This is why I always keep MegaBee patties on all colonies till I see several frames of freshly stored pollen in the hives and good foraging weather ahead. In southern New England, we are blessed with an abundant and varied supply of pollen during the spring. The problem is that, especially in the last several years, we get these long stretches of cold, cloudy, and rainy weather. Nothing will shut down brood production like a dearth in pollen intake. I need to have large strong colonies for late April. This will allow me to make divides and have adequate number of colonies for Apple pollination in early May. No brood, no bees!

It is now St Patrick’s Day and I want to finish this post! We just have had five days of cold, rainy, and very windy weather. I sure am glad that my bees had pollen substitute to feed the brood. If they hadn’t they would have shut the queen down and possibly cannibalized the young brood. This is just what I was getting to in the above paragraphs. This week looks to have sunny skies and mid to upper sixties. There is a lot of pollen coming in again and they are taking sugar syrup. I try to feed a gallon of syrup a week until the maples start to blossom then I watch the weather. If the nectar flow stops then I resume feeding.

I started out by talking about signs of spring. It always amazes me how fast things change this time of the year. One day the lakes and ponds are frozen and the next it seems they are all clear. It seems like things are early this year, The Fox Sparrows flew North in mid February which is two to three weeks earlier than normal. They nest in the far north and I guess that they follow the snow line. We have not had much snow pack in Connecticut while just over the border in New York and down to the Middle Atlantic States , they have been just hammered with snow! Let them have it, I have been done with snow since New Years Day!

Two weeks ago, Charlene and I went out to the Natchaug Forest to photograph Skunk Cabbage coming up. Skunk cabbage is usually the first source of pollen in this area, followed by the Silver Maples and then some of the poplars. The next group is the Red Maples and Norway Maples. This group also provides the first nectar, sometimes quite copiously! I love driving down residential streets where Norway Maples have been planted and when in bloom many times you can smell the nectar. Lately I have been seeking out these areas for wintering yards. They are a major boost in early April and some times the bees will store several frames of honey in the brood nest. This becomes their insurance policy and then I can super up the on the first of May for the Autumn Olive. I am hoping for a good May honey flow this year. I am all out of my honey and will need to buy some  until I can harvest some of my own. This year I plan on harvesting some as soon as it is ready instead of waiting until August like I usually do.

The next two months will be a continuous parade of renewal and rebirth. Each day brings something new sprouting or a new bird coming north to nest. Meanwhile, the bee colonies will keep expanding, preparing to swarm and then store honey for the next long winter. We beekeepers will have our hands full with staying ahead of not only the bees but also the stresses that conspire to do our hives in. Make sure that starvation or poor nutrition are not one of them. I need to deal with that other sign of spring, INCOME TAXES!!!!

At this time of the year the ground is still frozen here in Connecticut and therefore it’s a great time to collect dead outs and check stores before  mud season begins. My first stop was a large wintering yard where I usually have fifty or so hives during the winter. This year I put forty eight colonies there. About half were full sized colonies and the remainder are single story colonies that had been queen mating nucs that I built up to ten frames to winter over. I hadn’t been there since last November when I stopped feeding.

I lifted the first cover– DEAD, @#$%, this looks bad! I lifted the next cover– ALIVE, the next –ALIVE, the next– ALIVE, and so on and so on!  Out of forty eight colonies, I only lost two!!! Needless to say my anxiety levels plummeted. I went to the next yard and lost two out of ten. The next yard, all ten alive, the next yard, two out of ten dead. I came home and checked my home yard, Two dead out of eighteen! Went to a yard in Brooklyn eleven of eleven alive!   I have to be honest and say that I have a few that look very weak and won’t amount to much for a long time if they even make it till April. With all things considered, it appears that my winter die off will be a lot lighter than many beekeepers are experiencing. I attribute this to the thousands of dollars I spent last fall feeding to not only prevent starvation, but also to get the queens laying brood for winter bees. The payoff is that I will not need to buy bees to replace dead outs and will have plenty of bees to increase another fifty hives and also raise some queens.

As I find dead out hives, I  load them onto my truck and bring them home to clean up in the warmth of my shop. One thing that I do in the field is make sure there are no signs of American Foulbrood and then separate the combs of honey to feed to colonies that are light on stores. This is a very easy way to save a starving colony. Even with the temps in the thirties, I can pull out empty combs and place full ones either side of the cluster. This causes minimal disturbance to the bees and the reward far out weighs the stress of working hives in the cold. I give all colonies a Mega Bee patty and close them up. I feel that it is still a little early to feed sugar syrup and as long as I have some combs of honey to feed the needy, I will wait a couple weeks to give syrup. This is the benefit of starting my spring feeding in September! If the bees have lots of food then few will be starving in February. The ones that die, generally do so from other causes ( like mites) and usually will leave honey to feed the hungry ones.

When I return home I try to immediately get to cleaning up the empty hives. In years past , I have stacked them up outside and got to them “later”. Sometimes that “later” turned  out to be more like  April and May. By then the dead bees and some of the stored pollen would have started to mold, resulting in far too many ruined combs. Nowadays,  I brush off the dead bees and then scrape propolis and  burr comb immediately. I can then cull the old dark combs and recycle the old wax. Any rotted boxes or bottom boards are turned into heat in the wood stove. I seldom repair more than a broken rabbet on a hive body and usually burn all but  the best of the melted out  frames. They are just too much work to clean up and reuse.  

Now would be a good time to mention my solar wax melter. Several years ago, I made one that will hold five deep frames and seven medium frames. It works great in hot sunny weather. Most summer days I can run two batches. On one day when it was nearly 100 degrees out , I had the interior temp at 206 degrees! Last year we had so much grey weather that it went weeks in a row with no action. The end result was that I lost a lot of wax that just rotted or got wax moths. I have an alternative of a very large pot to boil wax in, but with propane prices as high as they have been, it didn’t seem worth while to render them that way. I think that I will make a second solar melter this year then be able to process them twice as fast. It’s worth mentioning that while I don’t get all the wax from the combs, I do get the best of it with little further processing needed in order to use it for waxing plastic foundation.

As is usually the case , I have wandered from my original topic and need to get back to the point. While I have not yet checked half of my bees, things look good as spring approaches. Each year is different and I am sure that this year will bring it’s own share of challenges. I  hope we have a good crop of honey because last year was just rotten!   One thing is for certain, it feels good to be back working bees even if I am wearing a winter coat while doing it.

It is very easy to blame all these losses on  varroa mites or other mysterious malady’s, but the truth is, that’s not all that goes wrong. Let’s take the last season for example.  As I mentioned in an earlier post ( The year with no summer!) , last year was a disaster. Any nectar flow was spotty at best and the queens just stopped laying  brood by mid July. This resulted in small  populations of old bees going into the fall and many colonies died before winter set in! This, my friends, for the most part, could have been  avoided. Yes, that is what I said, it could have been avoided!  The problem was that many beekeepers realized too late in the game that their bees were in serious trouble. The old days of supering up in June and forgetting about the bees until fall are long gone. If you expect to keep bees in this day and age you have to be more watch full during the summer. This includes watching the bees but also minding the  nectar flow, or lack thereof, as well.

By mid summer I was feeding sugar  syrup to many of my bees. Mostly the ones that I had started in the spring as replacements and  for increasing my number of hives. By September 15th, I was feeding all of my bees and I didn’t stop until November 1st when it got too cold. It cost thousands of dollars but the end result was that I got the queens laying in the fall and for the most part, they went into winter cluster with a good population of young fat bees.  While it is early yet, I have snuck a peek at some of my bees and from what I can see, they seem to be doing well. Light on stores but healthy. I expect to start feeding in a couple weeks because we are still 9 to 10 weeks away from any nectar flow and they just don’t have the reserves to go that long.

This is not really a new problem or a new remedy! In 1908, “A year’s Work in an Out-Apiary by G M Doolittle” (re published by Wicwas press in 2005,  available from www.wicwas.com), Doolittle confronted a similar year. It rained when it should have been sunny and was sunny when it should have rained. By judicially feeding combs of stored honey back to the bees, he was able to keep the queens laying and still managed to get a very respectable crop of honey. I collect back issues of Gleanings in Bee Culture (going back into the 1800s) and often spend nights reading them. A recurring problem is winter losses of 20 to 50%. This was long before varroa ever caused the loss of a single colony in this hemisphere . Time after time, the writers of these old articles stressed the importance of feeding not only to prevent starvation, but also to stimulate large clusters of young healthy bees for the winter. They also say time and again that no other livestock enterprise could  tolerate such huge losses and still remain in business.

Don’t think for one minute that I am claiming to be immune to winter losses. I have killed bees in most imaginable manners and then some. But one thing is for sure, I vowed years ago not to let any more bees starve. While it costs money to feed bees, it costs a whole lot more to replace them in the spring, not to mention the lost honey crop or potential splits they might have produced. Each spring we all vow to do better than last year and some of us do just that,  and some just keep making the same mistakes. I keep thinking of Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day”  Every morning he wakes up and keeps living the same day over and over until at the end of the story he sees the light and gets every thing right. Then he gets the Girl and can go home!  Perhaps this is what we beekeepers are destined to do.

In any event, we still have package bees available, although the March load is sold out. This year because we can only get so many packages from Wilbanks, we also will have 5 frame nucs available in mid to late April. We have a good supply available and hope to be able to meet the demand. These  nucs will come with a queen who was mated in the nuc and there should be no issues with queen acceptance. In addition, because they are stocked with frames of brood, they will have new bees hatching out from day one and the populations will continue to expand immediately instead waiting four weeks for newly hatched bees like a  package requires. This benefit out ways the additional cost of a nuc over a package.

So, like they say in the movie ” Wake up campers!, It’s Groundhog Day!!!!

In any event, I spent the day in New York State “paying the rent” and visiting with the landowners who allow me to keep bee yards on their property. On the 19th we had a major snow storm here on the East Coast and at my home  in Hampton, CT, we got about 16 inches of snow. Out in Dutchess County NY they got only a couple of inches. I took the time to visit a couple of yards just to look around and see if any bees were trying to fly. The temperature was 25 degrees F and the sun was shining. As expected, I watched a few bees leave the warmth of the winter cluster and fly a very short distance away from the hive, only to crash land on the snow and shortly thereafter, die. I keep ten hives in each yard and the snow was littered with dozens of dead bees. Healthy honeybees do not defecate in the hive, they usually wait until the weather is  warmer than 50 degrees and then will leave the hive to void their feces. In years past, I thought that this was what was causing the dead bees, even on cold days. The  bees , it seemed, were trying to take a cleansing flight and couldn’t make it back to the hive. However, there were none of the tell-tale yellow and brown spots that would have indicated a cleansing flight. I predicted that when I got home there would be calls from beekeepers who were wondering what was going on with thier bees. Sure enough, there was one phone message and one email wondering why bees were leaving the hive to die and hinting that something mysterious was happening.  This has nothing to do with CCD or any other malady. Here is what is going on.

I  recently read a book called Winter World by Bernd Heinrich. He is a well respected biologist, author, professor, endurance runner, beekeeper, the list keeps on going. One of his fields of expertise is in thermoregulation. Not just in insects but mammals, birds, turtles etc. In this book he talks about how organisms survive in the temperate winter and in one chapter writes about just this subject, why bees fly in winter.  He goes into great detail describing the methods he used in determining  that quite often the bees that are flying at low temperatures are actually leaving the winter cluster to look for sources of nectar or pollen!  He discovered that the cleansing flights actually took place at higher temperatures and involved much larger numbers of bees. His conclusion was that even if these foraging bees never returned, they were individually expendable due to the value of fresh food to the colony if some of them ultimately did find a  food source.

This makes sense to me when you consider that the older bees are the ones who would be leaving and they probably would perish before spring anyway. Some times there is a thin line between winter survival and starvation. It is surprising how early in the late winter we can see some bees returning with pollen on their hind legs. It is well known that bees finding skunk cabbage flowers in March are able to warm up in the protective spathe  that surrounds the flower. The temperature is several degrees warmer than the outside air. These plants are able to push up through ice in order to blossom.

In another of Heinrich’s books  ”In a Patch of Fireweed” he has a series of  chapters dealing with how wasps and bees warm up and stay warmed up in order to forage. One chapter deals with swarms and how the bees regulate the temperature of the cluster. Its too involved to go into now, but the common idea that the out side or “mantle bees “ change places with interior bees in order to warm up is just not true.

Another essay in “Winter World” deals with winter roosts of crows. Two of Heinrich’s passions are Crows and Ravens. He wondered where and why crows roost at night. He discovered a large crow roost, not deep in the woods, but instead near a brightly lit shopping center!  There were thousands of crows flying for miles to roost in the trees in a well lit area. He determined that the crows were roosting there to avoid one of their most feared predators, the Great horned Owl (another passion of Bernd Heinrich, he once rescued an owlet after a late snowstorm and kept it semi domesticated for two years until he was able to integrate it back into the wild).

While I was returning home from New York tonight, I was driving on I 84 through Hartford CT as the sun was setting. There were hundreds of crows flying to roost in a group of trees in the west side of the city. It is near the former Xerox Building right next to the highway, another well lit area similar to the one Heinrich talks about. As I drove through the rush hour traffic in Hartford, I could see a steady stream of crows headed in that direction. I continued to see them all the way to East Hartford and the Manchester line, at least ten miles “as the crow flies”!  Several years ago, not too far from the crow roost, there was  (and maybe there still is) , a large European Starling roost under the highway bridges near the Hartford bus station.  These birds also form large winter flocks not only for feeding but also for roosting.  I don’t think that these flocks are for sharing warmth as much as for spreading the individual risk from predators over a large population. The individual bird, in this case, would be less likely to be taken by a predator than would one bird sleeping alone.

It never ceases to amaze me how organisms deal with the cold winters in the temperate regions. My friend Glenn has a very simple way of dealing with the long cold nights here in New England. He borrowed my copy of Winter World and went to Hawaii for the winter.  He says he will return with the Warblers!

Adam Fuller

          For the most part, my bees came through the winter in pretty good shape. I started feeding both Mega Bee pollen supplement and sugar syrup in early March. The bees built up nicely and of coarse the weather stayed cold well into April. Then around the 26thof the month, the temperature spiked up to 96 degrees for a couple of days.  After this it went back to cloudy and cool and stayed that way for ever! In late May we had a decent flow from  Autumn Olive and then the Black Locust had the heaviest bloom we had experienced in years. The day it opened up it started to rain and rained for weeks. When it wasn’t raining, it was threatening to rain. The result was no Locust honey, no clover honey, no sumac honey, no anything honey.

           I had started about a hundred nucs and packages to replace dead outs and for some increase. They had a lot of plastic foundation and no nectar. A real bad combination, so I started feeding them heavily. I hoped that if I built them up to double hive bodies they would be roaring for the fall flow!  Usually, I can plan on some help from Mother Nature to draw foundation. Well she is a fickle B#&%? and gave me nothing! I spent the entire summer feeding bees in order to protect my investment. Late August came and the Jewel Weed was six feet tall and loaded with bloom. You guessed it. No nectar flow! Goldenrod came into bloom, no nectar!  Aster came into bloom, no nectar! I did get some honey from purple loosestrife in two yards where it has not been killed off by those beetles that our all knowing government allowed to be introduced from Asia. I surely miss those 100 lb crops of loosestrife honey!  Now the swamps are filling up with phragmites, another invasive species that produces no honey and doesn’t have any other redeeming qualities as far as I can see.

      On September fifteenth, I harvested what little crop I had and started to feed. Usually,I need to give an average of two gallons of syrup just to fill in the gaps with many colonies needing no feed at all. This fall, I had to feed an average of  six gallons per hive with some taking as many as ten gallons. I just couldn’t seem to fill them up.

        The good news is that all of the feeding coupled with warmer than average temperatures, stimulated the queens to lay a lot later in the fall than is usual. This late flush of young bees should help with wintering. The bees consumed a lot of pollen in order to raise the brood so I will need to feed more Pollen Substitute in March to get good build up. I  seems like all I did this season was feed and wait for the nice weather that never came. Like Larry Connor says “some times you just need to write the check”.  I wrote a lot of checks for sugar this year!

        This poor crop wasn’t limited to the Northeast. From what I gather it was nationwide as well as world wide. Without getting into climate change discussions, I can say that the weather has been different during the last several years with 2009 being the worst season in my thirty years as a beekeeper. I need to locate a plant physiologist and find out just what makes a plant produce or not produce nectar. We had plenty of moisture and the late summer and fall had many nice sunny days that I thought should have been right for a honey flow.

      At any rate, in a few weeks the days will start to get longer and by February the queens will start that magic cycle all over again. I can’t wait.

          Happy Holidays from Adam & Charlene Fuller!

Any chance that I get to start packages early I jump at it. These bees have the ability to buildup in time for the Locust flow in early June. With a 3 lb package costing  $77.00 this year, it is good to be able to recoup some of the investment in early summer.  This does not come without a price, on April 1st in Connecticut we usually have some pollen coming in but nectar is weeks away. When I set up the colonies for new packages, I was able to include at least one frame of honey and one of pollen for each hive. These came from dead outs that I brought in and cleaned up during late winter. I like to start new colonies, whether packages or nucs, with a reserve of both carbohydrate and protein so the queens can start laying and keep going regardless of the weather. The only problem is that it takes a frame of honey and pollen to raise a frame of brood. This is where the “Domino” nectar flow comes to the rescue. I keep a division board feeder in each colony at all times. It is an easy task to fill the feeder with  a gallon of sugar syrup without disturbing the bees. If we don’t have any pollen coming in, I can add a pollen substitute patty over the top bars. I fill the feeders when installing the bees and keep them full until they have three full frames in reserve and there is natural nectar coming in.

When starting bees on foundation,whether wax or plastic, it becomes even more important than ever to keep the feed on them. The good news is that if the bees can get to the syrup then they will be able to draw out the foundation and make room for the queen to lay. This is the place where I get on my soap box and scream about how useless boardman feeders are. There is no place in any northern beekeeping operation for these toys!  When out side temperatures are below 55degrees, the bees can’t get out of a loose cluster to get to the feed. This creates a lack of energy for the bees to consume so they produce enough heat to enable them to make wax or raise brood. In many cases the bees can starve to death six inches away from their feeder. If the temperatures are suitable for flying then the small colonies are set up to be robbed by other stronger hives. Yet another problem is that they don’t hold very much syrup and you will need to refill them very frequently. Boardman feeders are probably the biggest cause of starvation in small colonies of bees, so get a good division board feeder with a float to keep the bees from drowning! I recently bought some of the new two gallon feeders from Mann Lake. They work very well and you can get a lot of syrup in a hive without having to refill every few days and they don’t cost nearly as much as a hive top feeder. In addition, hive top feeders can have the same problems as boardman feeders in that the bees can’t get to them when it is cold.

This will be a good time to talk about introducing queens. If you read the literature, you will find all sorts of methods to introduce queens. One from about 100 years ago even suggested that you immerse the queen in sugar syrup and then let her go! My method is a little different. First, weather you are introducing a queen with a package or re queening, I always begin by feeding sugar syrup. This simulates nectar flow conditions and greatly improves the level of success. Queens come with a candy plug in one end and this should be exposed either by removing the cork or in the case of packages you will remove the metal disc on cages that are supplied with packages. I always secure the queen cage in the upper rear corner of a frame near the center of the cluster. If installing on drawn comb, I squash it edge first into the comb so the screen is accessible to the bees when the hive is put back together. The bees need to be able to tend to the queen at all times. In addition, they will be able to spread her pheremones to the rest of the bees. I never disturb the bees, except to fill the feeder, for seven days! I believe that this is a critical step in the procedure. I often say  it is like a first date, the bees think that they like the queen but they need time to get to know her!  They don’t need Mom or Dad bothering them.  After a week you can check for fresh eggs and larvae. If, in the rare event the queen has not been released, you can remove the plug from the other end and let her run out into the colony. Often times beginners, and even experienced beekeepers ,will get worried that she won’t get released in time and disturb the bees too soon. This all too often results in the queen getting killed by the colony.

So to sum it all up, feed and be patient!  There is nothing to be gained by rushing the relationship and a lot to loose if you try to hurry things up.  After you fail to introduce the first queen, the next try will be even harder to get accepted. One final thought, it is not necessary to remove the attendants that come with the queen. More often than not the queen may fly away while you are fumbling with opening the cage to release the workers. In most cases I never have trouble re queening a colony that doesn’t yet have laying workers! If you have laying woorkers then you are usualy better off just combining them with another hive and then starting over.

I guess that I have rambled on enough for a while!  Later, Adam

Many beekeepers  in New England also make Maple Syrup. It is a similar but very different pursuit that kind of dovetails with keeping bees. When I was a kid, I used to help my grandmother make a little syrup. We lived on a small farm down in Bozrah and had a few nice Sugar Maples to tap. We never had all the right equipment but managed to get some syrup of varying degrees of quality. If I had a sugar bush close by I guess that I would  think about taking it back up. There are a couple of problems with a new endeavor, one being that the way I generally dive into projects means that I would spend a small fortune setting up a top notch sugar house and all the accompanying equipment. I am getting sick of spending money like that!  My wife keeps mentioning retirement funds etc.

The other problem is that this time of the year is also when my bees need a lot of very necessary attention. When the sap is running, maple syrup producers have to hustle in order to keep up with collecting and boiling off all that water to make syrup. In times of a good run they just can’t afford the time to work bees. Because of this they generally have to ignore their bees in March and therefore often miss the important early spring management steps that result in good spring buildup of honey bee colonies. I have too much invested in bees to let that happen. My time is better spent insuring that my bees have ample nutrition so they stimulate the queen to lay up to 1200 eggs a day. I accomplish this by placing a pollen replacement patty over the cluster of bees and weekly filling of the division board feeders that are a permanent fixture in my hives.

One of the things that always amazes me is how quickly the flowers start blooming witha little warm weather. This Sunday, when I was adding Mega Bee Patties to some hives in Lebanon, I noticed a bee with lemon yellow pollen on her legs. I opened the hive to see if there had been more natural pollen coming in and sure enough, there were several hundred cells with fresh pollen in them.  The queen had laid a nice pattern of eggs in the center of the frame. While there is nothing like natural pollen to get things rolling, the problem in March is that the weather will change on a dime and shut off any additional incoming pollen for days or even weeks. When the bees run out of resources, the first thing to go is brood. In many cases the bees will cannibalize young brood in order to recycle the nutrients and in severe cases avoid starvation. Enter the Beekeeper.

When I teach “Bee School” I often will say that the best time to start spring feeding is on September 15th. There is nothing  like a well supplied colony of bees going into winter. This will avoid starvation and insure a good supply of stores to be used in spring to raise lots of new bees. Reality can be somewhat different. Often by March the honey and stored pollen supply are getting a little thin. Only by supplementing both incoming protein and carbohydrate sources will the queen be able to ramp up her production of eggs and the workers be able to keep the larvae developing. I generally keep pollen replacement patties on the hives until mid April when I am sure that there is a continuous influx of natural pollen. I also feed sugar syrup as long as the bees have less than three full combs of stored honey. Sometimes I have to go back to feeding when we have a long cold and rainy period in May. Most hives starve out in April or May when the nutritional demands from  thousands of growing larvae quickly consume the stored reserves in a hive. Beekeeping is really about raising healthy bees, then the bees make the honey.

I am not sure what the source of the pollen was last Sunday. I think that it must have been either skunk cabbage or a Silver Maple tree. At any rate I always look forward to the first pollen as both a sign of spring and that the annual cycle has come full circle. Now I need to go make a batch of sugar syrup.

This tree is an incredible source of pollen and nectar for insects. Not just bees but wasps, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, almost everything but the kitchen sink visits this plant!  The first day it flowers, it is attractive from 7:00 Am until after 3:00 Pm. There are literally hundreds of insects of many kinds buzzing along collecting  pollen and apparently nectar in huge quantities. I can hear the noise from 75 feet away!  On each following day the frenzy starts an hour later and ends an hour earlier until after about four or five good days it is over!

Last year a pair of American Robins had  nested in the midst of its dense folliage and I wondered if all this activity disturbed the birds at all. Birds  have evolved being exposed to nesting in flowering trees so I don’t think that this would be any exception. At any rate, as summer progresses my tree becomes covered with thousands of small green berries that ripen into  pea sized fruit in the fall. These fruit are very hard and aren’t very sweet so they stay on the tree until well into the winter.

Usually sometime in late February on early March, a flock of Robins will descend upon the tree and in the course of a day or so will eat every last one of those berries. The iconic image of a Robin pulling a worm from the lawn is still too far in the future to do these early birds much good!   The birds that return the earliest will be able to claim the best nesting sites, but part of the price is scarce food supplies until worms and insects are readily available.  No doubt, in the naked light of yet another late winter cold snap in New England, this fruit will help keep dozens of birds from starvation. It reminds me of the old addage about not wasting food in the summer because some winter day it will taste mighty fine!

Its February 23rd, 31 degrees outside and the robins are back! I can’t wait for spring, but for now I need to tend the fires.         Adam

Last night was the first evening of the bee school sponsored by the Eastern CT Beekeepers Assn. Members of ECBA spend various amounts of time  planning and preparing for the four nights of class. My involvement as President of the club consists of oversight of the entire process as well as presenting several segments of the classes. Therefore, I get a lot of the limelight and each year my job becomes easier as now all I  have to do is slightly modify last years presentation to reflect changes in beekeeping practice.

The real work  is performed by the soldiers of the group, the members who agonize over  how many students to plan for, print and assemble the notebooks, order reference books, register students, haul all the materials to and from class, account for the money, update membership data, bake cookies, buy supplies, make coffee, make more coffee, usher students to the last available seats, find more chairs and on and on!

Then there are the fellow instructors who plan and present their class segments. Each one updating hand outs, hauling in their stuff, showing students how to hold a hammer and nails etc. Two of them have a background as professional instructors while we other two are carpenters. The one thing we  have in common is that we all have a passion for beekeeping and a desire to share this with other people.

This year we have more than sixty new students as well as fifty current beekeepers who want to update their skills. This reflects a renewed interest in beekeeping that is occurring not only in our area but across the nation as a whole. Many people are tired of the disconnect from food sources that has happened in the last couple of decades. Our food is most likely shipped hundreds or thousands of miles from farm to table, many times coming from overseas, grown in countries that don’t have the standards of our farmers here in America. By starting a hive or two of bees, some one can not only produce some honey for themselves, but they can also contribute to the pollination of local food sources as well as the plants that make up our environment. Some estimates claim that 40%  of our food requires pollination from insects in order to grow and reproduce. That’s quite a responsibility for a bunch of bugs!

So what does bee school have to do with fstops? Years ago, Charlene and I took up photography. Like most people all we really did was ruin a lot of film and once in a while, mostly by accident, we got an good photo. One day we decided to take an introductory photography class.  It was at a local Middle School and was taught by a skilled photographer. She spent the next several nights teaching us how a camera works. Things like shutter speed, fstops, depth of field, composition and so on. By learning the basics, photography no longer was frustrating.It became enjoyable and we could predict results, not just waste film. We now have many photos that we can be proud of.

Beekeeping is a similar endeavor. If you spend the time and money starting a colony and then don’t know the basics, all you will do is kill bees. At beginner classes like ours, you will benefit from the experience and knowledge of seasoned beekeepers who will save you from the pitfalls that trip so many beginners.  It costs over $300.00 to set up a beehive. If you go to a beginners class and pay attention, you can have a reasonable expectation of keeping the bees alive and perhaps harvesting a little honey for your self!