PRESENT: Frank Lindsay (Pres.), John Burnet (Sec.), and 30 members as listed in the attendance book.

APOLOGIES: Silas Stedman, Karl Segessenmann.

MINUTES OF PREVIOUS MEETING: Minutes of meeting held 10 November as circulated in the Dec newsletter were confirmed.

Varroa Update: Now reported as far south as Johnsonville, Hutt & Whitemans Valley and west up the Otaki Gorge. To date no varroa reported in Kaitoke, Te Marua and Wainuiomata.

Grizzly Bear attack - Vaughan Kearns advised he had scored a NZ first. Several of his hives in Moores Valley had been attacked by a Grizzly (currently filming in NZ) – fortunately only lids were knocked off !

Diseases and Pests:

- Australia’s small hive beetle while devastating for the industry is not spreading. One suggested reason is the larvae are being taken by Carpenter ants when the larvae leave the hive and burrow in the ground. While the small hive beetle could migrate to NZ, it prefers a warm climate and moist sandy soil.

- EFB’s presence in South Australia is climbing dramatically with no apparent reason. New detection techniques are now being used and OTC is being used for treatment. OTC however is now no longer allowed in Canada.

- MAF is planning a surveillance exercise for all bee diseases and pests in the Bay of Plenty region.

Seasonal Management: Trees and shrubs currently flowering – kamahi, manuka, rewarewa, clover, some pohutukawa, barberry – described as producing "dark unpleasant tasting honey".

Equipment for sale: Michael Sommerville-Ryan’s at Mt Cecil Rd, 0Haywards. Includes varroa free bees. Hive can remain on site. Vicky Alexander has a smoker for sale.(sold) Members were advised that newly purchased plastic frames would be readily accepted by bees if first coated with clean melted wax - a paint roller was ideal for this purpose.

Beekeeping in Greece: Ivan Pedersen advised he had recently hosted Andreas, a Greek Island beekeeper. Honey earns AUD$20 per kilo and the industry is supported by the government. Thyme and heather are the main crops in the Greek Islands.

Recent Media articles:

- Frank outlined a recent controversial Sunday Star Times article which discussed the use of Bee Force units. These were placed in front of hive entrances and sprayed flying bees with carbon dioxide apparently to assist pollination.

- Ivan produced a recent NZ Geographic article on the effect of varroa on NZ bees. The article included a close-up view of a bee carrying 10 varroa but Frank assured members this was a laboratory experiment and a bee would not normally host that number of mites.

Ivan also produced a National Geographic article which described migratory US beekeepers.

Richard Dormer demonstrated his home-designed and made swarm collector consisting of a rechargeable Dust Buster, Vacuum cleaner hose and nucleus box.

Meeting closed at 9:00 pm. and was followed by our traditional Christmas supper.

TIP: Ivan Pederson suggests a handheld magnifying glass is a useful tool to see mites on adult bees if you don’t want to break the hive down to two brood boxes. Glasses with two lenses are available from the Petone Warehouse for $2.50.

Syngenta has patented VIP (vegetative insecticidal proteins) genes for use in transgenic crop plants and microbes (US Patent 6,429,360). For the purpose of this patent, the pests listed include insects and arachnids from various orders, including Hymenoptera, the honeybee family. Syngenta says it tried to exclude bees and wasps as non-target organisms without success.

The patent covers the use of Bt VIP genes and their synthesis and alteration to improve crop plant performance. Professor Joe Cummins comments that the Bt toxins of the VIP gene family provide potent broad spectrum insect control. The potential impact of such toxins on the receptors and death sequences in mammalian cells should be fully evaluated before GE crops bearing the toxins enter the mammalian food chain.

The results of four different projects, carried out by the Scottish Crop Research Institute, have been published by the British Govt. The research shows that Pollen from transgenic canola (oilseed rape) can travel up to 26km, 6 times further than previously documented.

(‘Organic NZ’ Jan/Feb 04, www.defra.gov.uk/news/2003/031013b.htm)

Question: When can I place the emulsion soaked cords in the hives?

Answer: In trials, emulsion soaked cords have been applied during the entire year. In fact, cords have been found to be especially effective during the winter months when conditions are not suitable for using the fogger. This technique is valuable during the late winter or early spring because the bees tend to leave the cluster and move within the confines of the hive, especially when their food supply begins to dwindle. This may mark the time when queens begin laying and mites begin their reproduction cycle. Mites exposed to FGMO will drop off prior to invading the newly hatched bee larvae, giving rise to healthy spring bee populations.

Answer: It has been clearly demonstrated that FGMO protects honey bees in two distinct ways. One, FGMO blocks the spiracles and body pores of the mites, interfering with the mite’s ability to breathe and depriving them of some of the moisture necessary for their biological functions. Two, bees that walk in FGMO effectively transfer FGMO over their bodies when they comb themselves. FGMO applied in emulsion or fog form is distributed over the bodies of the bees in the form of a film that interferes with the mite’s ability to cling to the bees, causing the mites to fall off. FGMO applied in the form of fog penetrates the spiracles of the honey bees, but contrary to the mites, the bees are not affected because the spiracles of the bees are larger than those of the mites and do not become blocked. FGMO in fog form can be used effectively for the treatment of tracheal mites, as it is capable of penetrating with ease the respiratory system of the bees where the tracheal mites are located.

Answer: While it is true that mites can effectively hide under the tergites, they become susceptible to the effects of FGMO. They may die from the biological effects of the oil or they may slip off the surface of the bees and fall off.

Answer: Mites in colonies treated with FGMO may drop off due to several reasons: their breathing capacity has been damaged; their clinging capacity has been impaired; the bees may have picked them off; or they may have been so abundant that they just fall off naturally. In addition to FGMO treatments, it is recommended that beekeepers practice integrated beekeeping practices such as screened bottom boards or simply no bottoms at all. Use of screened bottom boards equipped with a removable tray lined with an FGMO coated paper serve two purposes: they prevent fallen mites from climbing back onto the bee population and they are useful for measuring mite drop-off rates.

These photos come courtesy of Richard Wickens, whose article follows:

Cam and I career down one of the many long, narrow, dusty, shingle roads that are common on the prairies with the needle of the speedometer touching 90 kph. Cam drives with one eye on the road and one hand on the wheel and all the while I’m doing enough worrying for both of us while mentally revising my last will and testament. Up ahead, the open deck truck carrying Terry and Alvaro is sending up a long plume of choking dust high into the air. In between singing and slaking our thirsts, Can and I talk about beekeeping, ourselves and our respective countries. He’s good company, already a father of four girls, with another on the way. He’s a Minnonite, which is a religious sect, one of the two, the other being the Hutterite sect, which is more reclusive and its members live in communes.

On this first day we harvest four beeyards, with only a stop midway through for 30 minutes to eat lunch in the warm shade of a tree. Conversation over lunch is about beekeeping, largely initiated by me, as I’m the one with all the questions, the nosy Kiwi. Terry is a mine of information and enjoys sharing his knowledge of beekeeping, and I later discover he’s the author of a couple of articles on raising nucs that have appeared this year in the American Bee Culture magazine.

After lunch we harvest another two beeyards. The van is left at an intersection as it’s full and Cam and I ride in the open air on the back of Terry’s truck. By now I’m into the swing of things. And to my relief, I’m not suffering from any aches or pains. All the months of training I did back in NZ have paid off.

We arrive back at the honey house, a large building with 6,800 cubic feet of floor space, around 4.00 pm. Straight away we begin unloading the two vehicles, using the hand-trucks to wheel the stacks of boxes into the drying room. We’ve shucked our bee veils although the van and unloading bay is filled with hundreds of agitated bees. I get my 20^th and last bee sting for the day. This time I’m stung in the neck but there’s no serious reaction.

The hand trucks make unloading easier, but, with five boxes of honey balanced on them, each load is in the region of 200 kgs, and from time one will try to break away and head off in some direction other than the one you’re propelling it in. The drying room is kept in semi darkness to quieten the bees we’ve brought back with us, and those that are already resident from a harvest the day before. Believe me, it takes some deft manoeuvring and agile footwork in the gloom to park a stack in its allotted space, and the administration of a steel-capped boot is sometimes needed to align a box with its neighbours. My first attempts are none too flash, but if I can master driving on the right side of the road in Canada, I can surely manage with a little practice to drive a hand truck around the floor of a honey house. Of course, we’re oozing sweat once more, as the drying room is maintained at a constant 29 degrees celcius – almost as hot as the air outside the honey house. Within 30 minutes we’ve unloaded around 400 boxes of honey and walked a kilometre in the process. During the second and most productive round, we’ll take off around 500 boxes and harvest 5 – 7 beeyards each day, although a couple may be nuc yards that yield comparatively few boxes. Time to go home? Not yet. There’s still one final, important job to be done. Cleaning.

Honey production is part of the Food Industry and the boss is constantly expecting some Government Official to turn up and review the standard of hygiene being practised by us. There’s another, no less important reason too for the emphasis on cleanliness around the honey house: Honey has a high acid content and pits the cement floor if it’s left. So we hose and sweep and squeegee until everything’s as clean as we can get it. By now it’s gone five o’clock and we sign off and make our tired ways home, Alvaro and I together. We’re housemates. We’re the odd couple. It’s something of a blessing that Alvaro speaks no English and I speak no Spanish as we’re both too tired for conversation.

Tomorrow, we’ll be extracting. We need the empty boxes to replace those we’ll take off some more beeyards the day after tomorrow.

Crazy?

Well, perhaps it was a form of madness that possessed this middle-aged man to travel half-way round the world to work as an assistant beekeeper. Still, madness is not necessarily an unhappy state for the afflicted, and I can only describe my experience as having been truly wonderful. On reflection, make that a doubly wonderful experience.

You might be tempted to say, that as the weeks have passed since I arrived home, I have allowed memory to romanticise the experience. And you could be justified in thinking that. Hauling off hundreds of supers under a searing sun, or scraping burr comb off a seemingly endless stream of top bars in an airless, bee-infested honey house, could be viewed as a penance, not a pleasure. I will admit that many days I did sneak looks at my watch in the hope of discovering lunch or knock-off time was only minutes away, or delight in crushing the odd bee that had come within range of my hive tool in revenge for the stings that I’d received. But to focus on these aspects of the experience is take them out of context for I had embarked on this adventure with few illusions about how hard or mundane some of the work would prove. My hopes had been twofold; firstly, that I would learn in a season many of the lessons that it would take a hobby beekeeper nearly a lifetime to learn, and, secondly, that I would gain an insight into Canadian culture that only living amongst Canadians for a sufficient length of time could yield.

But let me go back to the beginning and start this story in the proper place. Tucked away in a bottom corner of an edition of the National Beekeeper last year, I happened to see a small advertisement inviting an adventurous spirit to spend a couple of months harvesting honey in Gladstone, Manitoba, during the Canadian Summer. It was an advertisement that I had also seen the previous year and decided I was too old, too inexperienced, too unadventurous, and too a lot of other things as well to even think of applying for the job. But, while I dissuaded myself from applying then, I found myself twelve months later, when the same advertisement reappeared, examining a map of Canada to discover exactly where Manitoba and Gladstone were located and wondering what it might be like to go and work there. Inevitably, the same reasons for not applying for the job cropped up in my mind as had done the previous year. This time, however, my curiosity was stronger and my confidence greater, and the obstacles seemed less daunting. Encouragement came from several quarters, and suddenly I stopped vacillating. I was going to do it. I was going there to work as a beekeeper. I was going to go Canada. And, if I was going to go half way round the world, I was going to make sure that I saw as much of Canada as I possibly could and experience as much of the culture as I possibly could. END

November, 1903

I have regarded this invention as a scientific discovery. The knife does what it does because so little of it rests in the honey to be uncapped. The honey is fixed, and comparatively rigid, yet plastic.

It will be readily seen that the bevel is the knife, and that this bevel depends upon the thickness of that part just back of the edge. That is why the knives are so thick. They should always be sharpened on the bevelled side. I have been using today the first knife of this kind ever made. (It cost me $2.00 in the edge-tool factory where all my knives are made). It is a perfect tool, and while a little wider than now made, it can not be improved. A pound of steel makes about three blades.

I have often seen accounts of how to use an uncapping-knife, and while I don't know how they should be used, I will state briefly how I use mine.

Bingham Honey-Knife
(Showing lower side with bevelled edges.)

I have a pail (wooden) so as not to dull the knife, or a shallow pan, filled with ordinarily cool water, into which I drop the knife whenever time will permit. The water removes the honey from the sharp edge, and is a great aid in starting the knife under the caps. It is at the starting point that the trouble begins. If it gets a clean start, all goes well. Never use hot water; the wax will stick to the knife, and, when it does, the knife might as well be iron as steel, as the edge will be thick with wax and will not cut - merely melt its way through the combs.