JUNE 5, 2008 NEWSLETTER

Reporter: Dick Counts

JUNE Report

Hi everyone, Our May meeting brought out 62 members. First order of business will be to correct a statement made about BEARS. It had been reported that the Texas P & W was in the process of releasing 700 bears in East Texas. NOT true, where would we find 700 bears.

GOOD NEWS, we are starting a Question and Answer session beginning at 6:00 PM. All are welcome, not just beginners. This will be headed up by Andrew Bellefeuille and assisted by others.

TBA Summer Clinic will be held June 7 in Paris. Dadant will be open for you from 10:00 to 5:00 PM . Program and BBQ will be at 12:)0 noon at Randy Johnson Honey Co. located 6.3 miles north on Hwy 195. Watch for the signs.

With the price of postage going up we encourage you to get your letter via e-mail, try it you may like it.

Swarms have slowed up but not bees in in buildings or trees, As a clearing house, for all types of bee calls I need willing beekeepers in all out lying areas.

Now that some of you have extracted I would like to urge you to keep your price of honey in the $3.50-$4.50 price per pound. From what I am hearing honey is going to be in short supply this summer.

I ask for help in writing this newsletter. Three people responded as you can see. Have something to say??? Send it to me. Please limit it to TWO columns, about 600 words. I will use all that I can.

Last month Linda Pelham/Gloria Harmon, brought a Blueberry Delight dish, by popular demand here is her recipe

Cook 5 minutes:

3 cups fresh or frozen blueberries with 1/2 cup sugar.

Dissolve 2 TBSP corn starch in 2 TBSP water and stir into berries.

Cook 2-3 minutes until thickened

Sift 2 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, 1/2tsp baking powder, cream in 3/4 cup butter. Add 1 cup sugar, blend all together. Stir in 1-1/2 cup coconut and 1 cup chopped pecans.

Press crumb mixture into 9/13 pan/dish bake 400 for 10 min.

Spread berry mixture on top and bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

You may substitute apricots. @-1/2 cups dried & cooked apricots with 3/4 cup sugar and 1/4 water

Thanks Girls...

President's Letter

Well folks . this letter is written hoping that all that hard work it takes to be a prosperous beekeeper has paid off in some supers full of capped honey just waiting for the harvest. Most all in the ETBA are small time honey makers mostly for some honey on the table and lots of bees to pollinate their gardens. But even to this end there is much travail in the life of a beekeeper. For the few years that I have been involved with this endeavor to be a worker of the apiary, it has yet to be the least bit boring or routine or common. Just when you think you may be getting caught up, then you enter another phase of the cycle of the beekeeper. This season has been so far a very active honey gathering time and many more calls to get bee swarms off of tree branches out of houses etc. The consensus must be that the vorroa mite and the other hazards that the feral bees have encountered have not diminished their existence. We may be the wiser to take these feral colonies ( if you can get them) and incorporate them into your apiary. What I mean is since these wild hives are surviving on their own without mans interference, they may have through the work of the Good Lord adapted the instincts needed to survive in the wild and we may combine these into our hives to introduce these survivors in to strengthen our colonies. They may make great nucs as we spoke of at the last meeting. I want to say THANK YOU to ALL who participate and attend the meetings month after month. There are some that we have not seen for a few months and we miss y'all. Maybe soon you can break away from the busy schedule that I know you have and can make it out to Tyler to catch up on some bee talk. Meanwhile hope all is going well. There are many thanks also to be said for those who have volunteered to help with the several functions every month, from the coffee, to those who bring such wonderful goodies, and many more that if not for you this club would not exist. This season I had a very active hive that filled up a super rather quickly even with a so called (honey excluder). The super seemed to be almost fully capped so when I put another super on there I removed the queen excluder so they, in my infinite wisdom, could have full unhindered access to fill that next drawn super with honey. Well I checked last week and darned if that queen had'nt got into that first super and layed a pretty pattern of brood. Well hopefully I shooded her back down into the double brood boxes where she is susposed to be. The moral of the story is that this is the last time an excluder is left off on one of my hives. Some may have better luck than I, but not me. Well may we count our many blessing at this time and give Him thanks that He (Our Lord ) deserves. Thank You Joe Moench.

The Buzz From Over Here

by OUR FRIENDS

One B’z Buzz by Standford Brantley

Last Month the need for Nucs was discussed. There didn’t seem to be a solid opinion as to their importance or if they were even necessary.

According to those professional who write about bees, and get paid for their efforts, anyone who keeps five hives should have at least one Nuc.

The following true story may get you to re-evaluate your attitude if it is "I don’t need a Nuc" This B , received two three pound packages of bees from a well known queen/package producer. They were received on Saturday, late in the day, so the decision was made to install them late the next day. All was made ready, plastic foundation with extra wax brushed on was used for each package. I squirted them good with peppermint water, removed five frames, dumped the bees into the space, put the frames back in, put the queen cage in the inner cover hole, put a gallon of syrup on the inner cover over the hole, added a deep brood box and a top and prepared to install number two. When I removed the queen cage, the queen was a curled-up frizzle. Hold everything !! I went to my closest Nuc, took out a clipped, marked queen, put her in a cage and repeated the related process and waited. I waited three days to pull the cork on the queen cage for package number one.

By the way all the syrup was gone. Refilled the can and put everything back. I waited five days to check on the second package. Would you believe, another frizzle!! I checked one frame from the center of the hive pf the hive and there were eggs in every cell. I replaced the frame, refilled the syrup can for that package and "Thanks" for the Nuc queen that wound up as another frizzle. If I had only the producer "shook" a queen into the package my Nuc would not be producing a new queen that I will need to clip and mark to be ready for the next time I get a frizzle !!

The June Rookie Times

By Mikael Rappazzo

This spring has been very busy in the bee yards. I am up to 6 big hives and an observation hive. I have 2 hives on a combination of blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and clover. I got my first real swarm call during spring break. We had just finished burning our bee slab off and were getting ready to go out to eat when the phone rang. It was a friend who had a basketball sized swarm on a flowering bush next to the ground. What a perfect swarm! After lunch we drove down and got most of the bees in a cardboard box. A few days after the swarm I picked up swarmed again in the same tree that my observation hive swarmed to (see below). After seeing my observation hive and one of my real hives, my neighbor Josh, who is age 16, decided he wanted to get 2 hives of Buckfast bees. He has enjoyed them and is turning out to be a good beekeeper. The other day I had a swarm in my front yard. Turns out it came from my observation hive that is my front porch. Instead of dealing with hiving a small swarm Josh put it in his Observation hive. I didn’t have a medium frame to go in top of the deep frame so we left it without a frame intending to put one in later. That never happened and the bees built wild comb. It is really neat! I have learned lots of lessons this year like not to wear only a shirt, veil, jeans, and gloves when putting in boardman feeders. I got stung at least 10 times! I got 3 of my 6 hives recently from Mr. Counts who ordered them from Mr. Collins. We had our first extracting session the other day prematurely due to wax moth larvae in my supers. I looked at my bees on the berries and there were lots of worms in my supers. We didn’t have any of our equipment ready so needless to say we were finished at 10 O’clock cleaning up.

We are off schedule

On our raffle

Lets wait till August to get back on schedule