by Dewey M. Caron, Communications and Content Specialist for the Oregon Master Beekeeper Program
News from WSU
Steve Sheppard has retired: Dr. Steve Sheppard is no stranger to Oregon beekeepers. He regularly attends the OSBA annual meeting as speaker on the program and usually helps get up to open wallets in the auction. A 1986 Univ of Illinois PhD, he spent 10 years in Beltsville at the USDA Beneficial Lab before moving to the Bee Disease Lab. He came to WSU in 1996. He was the Thurber Professor of Apiculture in the Department of Entomology. He served 10 years as the Entomology department chair. Now has been named emeritus faculty. He specializes in honey bee genetics and evolution, honey bee breeding, colony health research, honey bee gene diversity and honey bee germplasm acquisition.
New position filled: An Apiculture faculty position at WSU has been filled after a national search. The new faculty member will be none other than Dr Priyadarshini Chakrabarti Basu– Priya was a post-doc at OSU with Dr Ramesh Sagili for 4 years before moving to Mississippi State Univ. Priya earned her Ph.D. in Zoology from University of Calcutta in India, where she studied the effects of pesticides on Indian honey bees. Part of her responsibilities at WSU will be the WA Master Beekeeper program.
New Research position: Dr. Ge Zhang was a Post doctoral student and now is Assistant Research Professor. His current research focuses on fine-tuning Metarhizium as a biological control option for Varroa and the potential for using enzymes to neutralize pesticide toxicity to honey bees (Drs Han and Nicholas Naeger, formerly doing the fungal research, have left WSU). Dr Zhang recently won the Journal of Economic Entomology, Editor’s Choice award for his manuscript published in the JEE: “Can Native Plants Mitigate Climate-related Forage Dearth for Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae)?” https://academic.oup.com/jee/article-pdf/115/1/1/42447621/toab202.pdf
Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey –10 tips for Healthy Productive Bees
Are you seeking to keep bees in a manner closer to what occurs in a feral honey bee colony? Author Theresa Martin describes her treatment-less beekeeping. With this approach, this 6-year beekeeper with 20 colonies has only lost a single colony in her beekeeping journey.
Dead Bees has 4 different sections. The first section offers 10 tips that includes topics such as: Acquiring local bees, encouraging more propolis, space colonies out in apiary, keep colonies smaller and insulate hives. Each tip is discussed in less than 10 pages. Tips begin with a bee biology section and then, relative to that tip, coverage of conventional beekeeping. The next subsection zeros in on how adoption of the tip can improve bee health and productivity and then there are personal notes by Theresa identified as “my implementation.”
The second section is 40 pages of 10 illustrative precision beekeeping practices. The data presented by Theresa was from use of a T2SM BroodMinder© (https://broodminder.com/) temperature sensor. Included are 5 examples of how temperature data illustrates brood rearing and colony queen right condition. Other examples show how temperature can detect swarm departure (a distinctive 4◦ temperature spike), there are 2 examples of how temperature can illustrate colony stressors of varroa and a single nighttime visit of a skunk and the last two illustrate how beekeeper management (winterizing and colony examinations) can be documented simply via temperature measurement.
The third Section (20 pages) covers why and how the author adopted treatment-less management after her effort to establish a treatment-free zone around one of her apiary sites could not get buy-in from 9 surrounding beekeepers. The 4th section includes 18 frequently asked questions (FAQs) – developed from talks to beekeeping groups. She additionally includes 7 suggestions for novices. There is a detailed 21 page seasonal management calendar that includes sufficient detail to permit adoption not just for Kentucky but for where you keep bees. There are numerous photos, mostly by the author, the Broodminder charts along with references (she uses footnote to key to the references) and tables of her beekeeping results.
Check out this blog
EAS master beekeeper Adam Hickman, Foxhound Bee Company, writes a great blog from Alabama. His latest is information about feeding bees pollen and protein substitutes. He includes good information. Check it out at here.