Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

General Discussion of Diary Posts and Questions on Beekeeping Matters
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Re: Small cell

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Thanks, folks.

These are interesting observations.

We've seen big changes in the makeup of the beekeeping population lately.
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Re: Small cell

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I guess we have gone from small cell to what beekeepers need to learn, or want to learn, or should learn....
I get a lot of phone calls with bee questions. Yesterday’s call was someone looking to buy a queen. I am thinking in November? I spent a little time speaking with him and it turns out he did a thorough inspection the other day and found no brood. I told him that different races of bees will stop brood rearing at different times, Italian probably still having a little brood but not some of the darker bees. He had no clue what his bees where. As we spoke further he mentioned his bees are on an open screened bottom board. Our nights have been in the 30's (F). He kept asking if he should combine this hive with another or should he go back in a find the queen. I told him he would probably not find the queen so don’t go pulling the whole hive apart again. Io told him to put the insert in the screen bottom board and leave them alone other than to check their weight through the winter. I said if you feel you need to combine them do it and the bees will sort it out.

So what do most beekeepers need to learn? Well, some need to learn common sense but I guess that cannot be taught, some need to go back to beginner class now they have bees they may grasp what their being taught, some are at a more intermediate level but it is still hard to teach them because they do not get ¼ of what you say and they just do not have the vocabulary, when you learn beekeeping it gives you a whole new vocabulary. Or some already know it all because their bees lived through the winter and they are on small cell. So really the topic doesn’t matter as long as the subject is bees and half the room can grasp what your point is. The topic is mute because anything you say they will learn from, even if it is don’t pull apart your hive on Oct 31 for no reason.
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Re: Small cell

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I've been in beekeeping 7 or 8 years now. Screened bottom boards and small cell and foundationless seemed to be fads of sorts. From what I have seen and stuff I have read on forums, most of this stuff is advanced beekeeping techniques that is beyond the ability of the average hobbyist beekeeper. As Karen noted, hobbyists with screened bottom boards don't even know if they should close off the screen or not. (Or why you would or would not.)

I think the focus of every hobbyist presentation should be one thing. Getting into the hive. That is the foundation of beekeeping. Keeping (caring) of the bees. We don't have that with hobbyists.

From what I have seen, most hobbyists are intimidated by their new bees. They are curious, but intimidated. People tell new beekeepers not to get into the hive too much, so new beekeepers err on the side of caution, and avoid getting into their hive if they don't have to.

The internet only exacerbates this problem. As great of a resource as the internet is, there is still no replacement for hands on experience inside a beehive. How do you teach a new beekeeper over the internet what a queenless roar sounds like, or what foulbrood smells like?

I had some newer beekeepers over at my place this summer. I had production hives, and nucleus hives, stuff set up for queen rearing, etc. I told the beekeepers it would be informal...I would talk about and do whatever they wanted to learn about. They seemed most interested in having me show pictures on my laptop and talking about Apimondia in Ukraine and beekeeping over there. There was virtually no interest in actually doing anything with the bees. At the end I finally asked them if they wanted to watch me pulling some honey from my hives, using a leaf blower to remove the bees. So everyone suited up and watched that.

At the end when everyone was leaving, a lady in her second year of beekeeping told me she would like it when I did this again if I would just spend time getting into hives and manipulating frames. She's still a little intimidated by getting into her bees.

I think hobbyist presentations need to remind people of the importance of local mentors. From what I have seen, most hobbyists lack self-confidence with the hands-on aspects of beekeeping. The internet can't teach a hobbyist self-confidence when getting into a hive. People need to get into their hives on their own frequently and regularly to give them experience and confidence, and it is especially helpful if you have a real-life mentor to hold your hand while you learn to walk.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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Excellent and helpful comments. Thanks.

I split the topic and changed the title.

I guess we, as speakers at conferences and meetings should ask for a demographic breakdown from the organisations in advance so we don't find we are preaching to the choir or or shooting over the audience's heads.

I wonder how many organisations actually do a survey of that sort?
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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Allen,

That is always the conundrum, who will be sitting in the seats. Narrow titles help but, sometimes a topic is broader than a narrow title. There is nothing more frustrating than making a presentation and then finding out it is not what people expected. And, it is so satisfying when you hit a home run.

In graduate school I had a faculty member share with me a story that happened to him just after he started. This was at the University of Florida Vegetable Crops Department. He was asked by a grower group to give a talk on potatoes. He thought no problem. He had gone to school somewhere up north and knew a lot about potatoes. After concluding with his presentation the sponsor complimented him and then asked him what he knew about SWEET potatoes.

Identifying your audience and their expectations makes it easier to focus a presentation. Unfortunately, beginning beekeepers often don't know what they need to know.

Getting information and ideas for future presentations is sometimes difficult. Some groups seem to be more willing than others. Whenever I hosted a school or workshop I always had a place for people to provide suggestions for future programs. While the volume of input was small what I did get was usually very good.

Tom
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I'm observing that many organisations are run by volunteers and they are under pressure to get people with recognized names, and less inspired to negotiate the topic and content.

This is understandable, however I think that with a little more consultation that much more targeted programmes could be designed.

Without naming specific speakers, I am quite aware that the usual suspects are covering the continent and repeating the same presentations over and over.

I am coming to think that the bee speaking circuit is like the music or theatre concert circuit where aging performers do the same act over and over to the point to where they don't even know what city they are in at the moment.

I wonder about that, and as Ricky Nelson commented in 'Garden Party' after being booed for playing new material to an audience expecting a rote regurgitation of his oldies, "If memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck".

I think we owe it to our audience to interact and update material.

My son-in-law is a teacher and always preparing lessons. I said to him that he has been teaching the same subjects for years to the same grade levels, so why the need to constantly prepare new lessons?

He said that each class is different, things change, and, besides, he can always do better.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I am coming to think that the bee speaking circuit is like the music or theatre concert circuit where aging performers do the same act over and over to the point to where they don't even know what city they are in at the moment.
Recently drove a good distance to attend a bee meeting with the speaker from the bee lab in Beltsville. About 10 minutes into the presentation I realized it was the same stuff that had been on the internet for a couple of years. Very disappointed and it just makes bee meetings less attractive to me.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I'm considering whether it is worthwhile to go to one of the US national meetings this coming January or not.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I am giving a talk at a bee club on requeeing.
  • I am starting out with why you would requeen and how to know you need to requeen - requeening to change the race and how to tell a queen is failing, things like that
    choosing where to get your queens - purchasing or raising your own, this will include a short piece on the queens anatomy and the drones part in it all
    how to find the old queen
    should you mark or clip the queen
    introducing the new queen - nuc, push in cage, Snelgrove board, queen cell, putting a queen cage directly into the hive
    requeening queenless hives and what to do with a laying worker hive
Is there anything important that I have not thought about? Or something I should remove? I tend to get technical sometimes since I love science, anatomy and solving problems. My talk is a little over and hour so each section will be brief. The longest being how to introduce the queen. I have a PowerPoint with good pictures since I raise queens and over the years I have taken a lot photos. The audience is a county bee club so there will be a big mix of experience in the group. As an example my bee club has gone from 35 members to 307 members in the past 5 years. That is a lot of new beekeepers with very little time in the hive under their belt. I think it is like that every where, a population explosion of beekeepers.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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Karen,
Regueening and raising queens is a VERY hot topic. Total YouTube views on my channel is 650,000 views. 3 of my top 4 videos are about queens, and they account for about 175,000 of the 650,000 view totals. Estimates of commercial beekeepers in the US is 800, and sideliners about 4500...which tells me there is a tremendous hobby crowd interested in raising queens. (When I can get 100,000 views on a video of how to raise queens, it makes one question Kim Flottum's 2012 estimate of only 150,000 hobbyists. Either that, or 2/3 of hobbyists have watched my video, which I doubt, because I've never had any beekeepers ever recognize me as that YouTube guy with the video on queen rearing.)

If you are requeening, remember that it can be difficult to get a strong hive to accept a new queen, especially if there is not much of a flow on. (Feed during introduction.)

Remember that Russians can be finicky about accepting new queens.

The EASIEST way for hobbyists to requeen a hive is to make it queenless and let the bees raise their own queen. (Or make a nuc queenless, using frames from the hive they want a queen from. Once the nuc has cells, kill the queen to be replaced and combine the nuc with queen cells into the queenless hive.)
That is a lot of new beekeepers with very little time in the hive under their belt. I think it is like that every where, a population explosion of beekeepers.
Is this the crowd who should be hearing about requeening?

When I started beekeeping I was taught that the two hardest beekeeping skills were comb honey production and queen rearing.

It never ceases to amaze me how many new beekeepers are interested in learning the hardest things first...but never seem to grasp the importance of mastering the basics first...and there are no shortage of folks willing to teach these advanced topics. (Just check out my video.)

I kind of wonder if folks leading presentations try to teach harder skills because that is the skill level the teacher is at - rather than teaching beginner beekeeping basics to a hobbyist crowd when that is the skill level the hobbyists are at.

I remember a beekeeping conference (1000 beekeepers) I attended a couple years ago at Wooster, Ohio. The main reason I went was to hear a presentation titled "Diversified Sideline Beekeeping."
The guy was a tree trimmer. I think he had 20 or 30 hives. He began accumulating a bunch of buckets of honey in his basement and didn't know what to do with it. Finally he started selling honey.
THAT was the entire gist of his speech. And the audience was enthralled. LOTS of questions.

He finally got to my question. Did he sell nucs, or do pollination, or sell queens, or sell any kind of bee product other than honey. What diversity did he have in his sideline operation? He looked at me like I was an idiot. Um no, he didn't sell any other bee product, but him and a buddy once took a handful of hives to an orchard. He said he was diversified because he was an arborist, and he had diversified into selling honey. And then he quickly moved onto the next question.

I never went back to the conference at Wooster again. Although I did sit in on a presentation with Joe Latshaw on wintering nucs that was decent, even though it was the same material on his website.
An interesting thing to me was the Diversified Sideline talk was in the main auditorium with a couple hundred people who turned out to be beekeepers who haven't started selling honey yet. Latshaw's talk was in a small room with 10 or 15 people, who seemed to be a higher skill level...10 to 20 hives.

My advice...remember to KISS your listeners. Keep It Simple Stupid. 95% to 99% of your audience will be beginners who still lack the basic skill level needed before they do more advanced skills we experienced beekeepers take for granted. (I'm guilty of this too. I want the newbies to become masters, so I try to help them learn more, often not realizing that they are still crawling while I am trying to get them to run.)
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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Good comments from all lately. Thanks.
My advice...remember to KISS your listeners. Keep It Simple Stupid. 95% to 99% of your audience will be beginners who still lack the basic skill level needed before they do more advanced skills we experienced beekeepers take for granted.
So I discovered recently. The trick is to have a presentation that newbees can understand, but offers new ideas for the more advanced in the audience. Challenging, yes, but possible, I think.

Choosing the right topic is the tricky part. Topics like queen rearing necessarily imply a basic level of beekeeping experience and knowledge, but other topics do not.

As for queen rearing, it is not that tough. Bees do it all the time without our assistance. It is only when we want to do it our way that the matter gets tricky.

So, I guess the real question to answer first is why does anyone want to raise queens and how many, then what will be done with the queen(s) after emerging or being mated. For a person with one hive, raising a new queen should be very easy. When we want to raise batches, then the complexity increases.

Remembering back to when I started, I recall how seeing queens being raised in my hives was very interesting. Perhaps in many cases that is all the beginner wants to see, and come spring, it oftentimes just happens naturally.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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The club asked me to speak about requeening, I didn't pick my own topic. My main focus is going to be how to find the old queen and successfully introduce a new queen. Raising queens is a whole other topic, I know they are not ready for that. Most of the beekeepers around here purchase queens, they do not try to raise them.
There are ways to make finding the queen you’re going to remove easier. I am going to stress introducing the new queen into a nuc and then combining with the hive. Also important is how to introduce a new race. The summer of 2013 so many around here tried to change their Italians to Russians and of course lost their new queen.
I sell a little over 200 queens in a season so I know they are not raising them.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I think I have heard every idea imaginable about requeening, from push in cages to chasing the queen into the entrance with or without smoke, and tried many of them, but truth be told, I still don't really know anything about introducing queens.

I know commercial beekeepers who buy thousands of queens and who have bought packages, not liked the queens and requeened them all. I've often wondered what the success rates were. That part was never quite a clearly explained.

When it comes to beekeeping, I was once told, "The first liar never had a chance".
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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To expand on that, not only do people lie deliberately, but many of us don't really know what is happening in front of our eyes. We think we do, but too often we see what we want to see or expect to see and miss obvious signs that we are mistaken.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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The group will be beginners to old timers so I plan to give a couple of ways to requeen. Also speak about different scenarios because a hive that is broodless is treated different than replacing an actively laying queen. Also sometimes you have no choice, you may be having a dearth and just killed the queen pulling out a frame so now you’re requeening at a time when you probably would not have chosen to.

I have to remember what I have been told by several beekeepers, this is their hobby they will spend what they want on it. They will pull a perfectly fine queen to put in a queen from a breeder from some remote area in the north because their guru of a mentor says to or has done that.

So success or not they are going to requeen. I will be giving them some choices that may increase their chances of success, or not.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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I like some of the ideas that have come up here. I think it is time to start thinking outside the old box, too,.

Rather than expect people to remember details, maybe we need to be ready to provide a list of YouTube videos worth watching. That could either be on a handout, on a website, or perhaps by making a YouTube channel (I don't know anything at all about that).

That takes quite a bit of pressure off and allows more Q&A and wider-ranging coverage.

We are still stuck in the '90s with PowerPoint and old ideas about information transfer.

We have liv Internet available at the podium now and can present websites live. How many of us do that?
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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> We have live Internet available at the podium now and can present websites live. How many of us do that?

I was hoping to do that. I have made a couple of videos, my favorite being my queen bank swarming and returning back to their hive. Someday maybe I will give a talk on raising queens and show it since banking queens the queens is part of raising them.

For my talk this week I will encourage people to plan ahead and use a nuc to requeen. If they have all summer and enough experience they can do a walk away split, if not then they should purchase a bred queen. Whatever they do it is best having the backup of the old queen if the new fails. Also they get to see the brood pattern of the new queen before removing the old queen. They could fill the nuc box back up with the old queen and some of her frames/bees, the frames that occupied the nuc have to go with their queen. Make a nuc to winter over? They could drop her in rubbing alcohol or even give her away. I recommend hanging on to the old queen until the bees have accepted the new queen. My preferred method is using a nuc to introduce a new queen, I tend to use the old queens either for making brood/young bees for my queen rearing or making nucs that will be wintered over.

I really liked what I did in one yard this summer. I put the nucs in ten frame boxes and put them on top of the hives using a Snelgrove board. In two or three weeks I took out the board and put on a queen excluder. I ran the hives as two queen hives up until I had to do mite treatments. Then I pulled the queen with the worst brood pattern from each box and took out the queen excluder. Most of the 2013 queens from that yard still had good brood patterns and I actually had people wanting to buy them from me. So I sold them at a lower price, what the queen buyers wanted was a northern breed queen that had brought a hive through the winter. Don’t ask me how they got on that kick. What I want is a young queen going into winter so next spring there is less chance of swarming. I do not like to lose bees. So I tend to requeen most of my hives after the summer solstice. It may be an old wives tale that requeening after the solstice reduces the chance of swarming in spring but I find it works. I hardly ever have a swarm. I split in May and when I do I am not taking out dozens of queen cells and I leave the old queen in the hive until late June early July.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

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The best introductions I ever did were back when I had two or three frame standard frame mating nucs made by dividing standard boxes in three. The queens were hatched and mated in them and then the three frames were transferred as one unit into the middle of a hive being requeened. Never failed, and in beekeeping never is word I never use.
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

Unread post by Countryboy »

If they asked you to speak on requeening...I guess you should cater to their desires. :-)
My main focus is going to be how to find the old queen and successfully introduce a new queen.
And then there are the queens that refuse to be found...

If you have searched the hive but can't find the queen, remove a frame of open brood from a different hive, shaking all the bees from it. Then insert that frame into the hive with the hiding queen. Close the hive up and wait 5 minutes. Open the hive, and remove the frame you just put in. 95% of the time, the queen will be on it. She has to come check out that frame because it smells different. (Or so I assume.)
Rather than expect people to remember details, maybe we need to be ready to provide a list of YouTube videos worth watching. That could either be on a handout, on a website, or perhaps by making a YouTube channel (I don't know anything at all about that).
I often encourage people to watch my YouTube videos, but at the same time, I cringe a little because I know what some of the other beekeeping videos are like.
There is a beekeeper I know and I like the guy a lot. I think last year was the first year he ever had a hive survive winter, and that was his indoor observation hive that he could feed. He survives on swarms, packages, and cutouts. His YouTube channel is more popular than mine. He must know what he is doing - he is on the internet and has a YouTube channel. He's an experienced beekeeper, right?
And then there is a "commercial" beekeeper who has started doing YouTube videos. He is extremely popular on YouTube. He is so successful at commercial beekeeping that he has to beg YouTube viewers to give him financial donations. He even gives classes on commercial beekeeping, and makes videos of his "students" who just got their first hive and they are now commercial beekeepers.

So please be cautious about advocating YouTube videos. Make sure they are from quality beekeepers. (And I will be the first to admit that some of my first videos a few years ago were not the highest quality or best information. But as I have made more videos, I try to make better videos, and do my best not to give anyone bad information.)

Here is a YouTube channel I do like.
https://www.youtube.com/user/martinbrownstein/videos
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Re: Updating Topics for Beekeeping Groups in 2014

Unread post by Allen Dick »

I often encourage people to watch my YouTube videos, but at the same time, I cringe a little because I know what some of the other beekeeping videos are like.
That is what I was thinking. People are going to find and watch bee videos anyhow, so we might as well point them the right direction and provide a list.

(If we come right down to it, some in the audience are bound to be fact checking, looking at videos and checking Facebook even while we are at the front, speaking -- unless we put on a spell-binding show. (I know because I do all of that myself if the talk is dreary or a re-re-run.)).

The simple truth is that many how-to YouTube videos are terrible due to lack of editing and too much talk or footage about the presenter. Most ten-minute clips could have been done better in one or two minutes. It takes persistence to watch more than a few, so it is worth collecting and circulating a list of the best so the ones people do watch are the best ones.

In fact, that makes for a whole new topic, not that this thread is anywhere near done.
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