Portage River Farm
Notes on our struggles and successes on our family farm in rural Michigan.
(Pinckney, Michigan)
08 Apr Wed 2009
First Beekeeping Class
You might recall that during a recent beekeeping conference I decided to sign up for a beekeeping class to bring myself up to date with the latest techniques. That class is being taught by Ed, an elderly gentleman who has about 50 hives in his suburban backyard. We had our first get together in late March and it was an interesting experience.
I arrived to find his driveway choked with cars and the class gathered in a cluttered little classroom that he has built onto his detached garage. There were about eight students including myself. As with the beekeeping conference, I was again surprised to see that roughly half of the class were women. Somehow I had always thought of this as a nerdy male hobby and I'm glad to see that isn't the case anymore.
Ed's presentation is a bit disjointed and meandering but clearly salted with many years of experience and well worth the concentration it requires to take it all in. The class is also being attended by and perhaps co-taught by a younger man who is a professional beekeeper and also very knowledgeable. The trouble is that he tends to talk throughout each session to anyone who will listen, generally rather loudly and continuously over the top of whatever Ed is saying.
The intention of the class is to be a hands-on experience of working the bees right alongside Ed for the next year. For that reason we spent only a short time in the classroom before suiting up and heading out to the yard. As we were suiting up, a knock on the classroom door announced the arrival of Ed's wife and daughter bearing a coffee urn and a tray of cookies so we made the bees wait a while longer.
Once out in the yard Ed took us through the steps of the task of an early spring inspection of the hives, all the while overshadowed by the narration by the other beekeeper on a number of mostly unrelated topics. The purpose of this inspection was to check on the condition of the bees after the long, cold Michigan winter and to boost their health by feeding them pollen cakes to help them get through the last lean month before things begin blooming. What we found as we went from hive to hive was educational but disheartening.
As we worked our way through his apiary, it became apparent that few of his hives had made it through the winter. They had perished for a number of reasons including simply freezing to death but the overwhelming majority had died from a disease called nosemosis. Nosemosis is caused by two different species of a single-celled organism called Nosema.
Recent evidence has revealed that is it a type of fungus and is closely correlated with the dramatic crash in honeybee populations worldwide known as colony collapse disorder. This parasite is ingested as a tiny spore by the bee and it reproduces in the intestinal tract causing dysentery-like sickness in the bee. Honeybees are normally very tidy and fastidious about the conditions inside the hive. They even take short flights away from the hive to relieve themselves and to "take out the trash". When nosema strikes those rules break down as the sick and weakened bees defecate all over the interior of the hive and spread the disease to other bees who try to clean up the mess.
A hive that is infected with Nosema is easy to detect because it is covered with deep-brown smudges. If you look at the tops of the wooden frame boards in the open hive in the picture (enlarge it by clicking on it) you should be able to see the little spots all over them. Hive after hive was opened to reveal dead or dying colonies infested with this nasty disease. Ed was visibly shaken by the loss of so many bees that left him with only about a dozen of his original fifty hives. When you consider that a package of bees to reestablish a hive costs around $65 you can see how the impact of this loss would add up.
In the weeks following the class, Ed had a number of helpers come over to help him clean up the mess that the nosema made of his apiary. They disassembled all of the dead hives, melted the wax out of the frame and thoroughly cleaned and disinfected the equipment. Our next class would be timed with the arrival of the replacement bees that he ordered so we could experience the steps involved in installing them in their new homes.
I drove away from that first class feeling sorry for the loss that Ed had suffered but glad for the opportunity to see the problem first hand. In the few seasons that I have kept bees in the past I have never had to deal with nosema. At least now I will know what it is and what to do about it.
John_3
12:00 AM EDT
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