Our local bee club, the Tri-County Beekeepers Association, meets the last Wednesday of each month. The usual agenda is to have a guest speak the first hour, followed by a recess and then the club’s business meeting. Unfortunately, this month’s speaker was unable to attend. The club officers agreed that the assemblage could probably find something to talk about in that time slot, so on with the meeting! -as IF beekeepers couldn’t easily fill an hour with talk…
The first topic was how to kill yellowjackets and small hive beetles. Depending on your location, they are a terrible problem this year. For the first, a bait of 1:1 apple juice:cider vinegar, laced with about 1 teaspoon of boric acid. The vessel suggested was a bottle with two small holes cut in the sides, and a stick to form a platform inserted in each hole. The strategy is to lure in the yellow jackets, but not bees, who hate vinegar, have them slurp up the boric acid and carry it home. Three days, tops, and the nest is toast. For small hive beetles, place a lump of pollen supplement in a wad of quilt batting and put two of these on the top bars of an infested hive. The beetles are lured by the pollen and get snared in the fluff.
The second topic was feeding, how much of what and how to keep mold out of the feeders. How to offer it, free for all in a tub, or hive by hive? In a pinch, a person can verrrry carefully pour syrup into the cells of an upright frame and load it that way. It is interesting that feeding to fatten and feeding to keep hives alive is now the norm and has been for many years. Was this typical during, say, World War 2, when sugar was rationed? Some veteran beekeepers say bees have changed, that they are less hardy overall. Is that true, or is more asked of them? Is their environment just depleted of resources by intensive monocultures? By now, the first of October, the hives should be heavy and ready for winter, with mouse guards in place or their entrances reduced.
Moving on, the group is now struggling with how to keep frames that have had brood and pollen in them safe from wax moths and small hive beetles. Freezing to kill their eggs and larvae is the first option, followed by various chemical solutions.
One member has been on a crusade to calibrate refractometers. It is essential to know honey’s moisture content so that it is not too high when stored, which will cause it to ferment. What seems like a silly little thing can make a massive difference! And the tools are not universally reliable. November has been set aside for the annual elections, chili and pie feast, and… refractometer work.
The talk took a turn when the call for arms in the most recent issue of Bee Culture was brought up. The very serious DOGE-induced loss of the Beltsville Area Research Center, specifically the diagnostic Bee Lab, with no clear substitute up and running, could not have come at a more unfortunate time. A task force has prepared a path forward, and the editors are asking for beekeepers to chime in with suggestions. This is very important, and any-and every-one with an interest in keeping the bee industry, whatever the scale of the hive owners, safe and healthy, needs to be aware and be mouthy.
The sorry state of our state associations was discussed. Ohio, at one time, was an epicenter for beekeeping. Currently, the state inspector program has been gutted, the Ohio State Extension Service has relinquished most of its outreach to local clubs, OSU has exactly one, overworked and over-extended beekeeping professor, the Ohio State Beekeepers’ Association, while it tries its best to make the Ohio Department of Agriculture aware of the industry’s presence and needs, has pretty much been ghosted by the agency.
To make our presence felt, members suggested joining the Farm Bureau, the country’s largest agricultural lobbying group. Also, showing up to work at the Farm Science Review to educate crop farmers on the importance of honeybees to agriculture. Doing anything imaginable to draw attention to the issues the honey industry faces. A morning after idea came to us: Ohio requires all beekeepers to register their hives with the ODA. This is not government surveillance: this is a precaution in the event of a catastrophic disease outbreak, a vestige of the American foulbrood years. Registration is free. Only keepers who sell queens pay a fee, and this fee funds the entire state program. If every keeper were to register their hives, even if they have only one hive, the numbers of keepers in the state would explode, and when the OSBA approached the state government, it could legitimately say, we have tens of thousands of citizens who need more in the way of diagnostic services, pesticide protection, market safeguards, and on and on.
A fast hour passed, concluding with, let’s do more of this! Speakers are great, but we all have plenty to say ourselves. The board will work out the logistics and expect much more engagement from the TCBA in months to come!