2011 Master Beekeeper program and Univ. of Florida Bee College

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the 2011 Bee College in Marineland, Florida.  This is a two day conference dealing with beginning and advanced classes in beekeeping and honey bee biology.  Preceding the class is a half day review for the Master Beekeeper Program followed by examinations for the Aprentice, Advanced, and Master Beekeeper levels.  I passed the Apprentice level in October and thus have to wait one year before sitting for the Advanced exam but I attended the review classes in order to garner a little extra knowledge.  Two of the members of the Palm Beach County Beekeepers Association, of which I am affiliated with, passed the exam they sat for.  Also we had one member qualify for the Welsh Honey Judge class.
The bee college included a honey competition, which I entered some extracted honey and a photograph.

My extracted honey entry is the second set to the right of those entrys with ribbons.  This was the first contest I have entered, also it is the first honey I extracted, so I wasn't surprised or disappointed at not capturing a ribbon.

I thought my photograph would have attracted some attention.  I entered the infrared picture of a brood box (second image from left) that shows a bee cluster maintaining 93 degrees Farenheit observed in a hive in Ambler, Pennsylvania at Temple Univerity in April 2010.

This is a closeup of the thermogram I entered.  The white or yellow areas are warm and the purple or blue areas are cool.  This picture was taken in Pennsylvania in April but a similar phenomenom can be seen in Florida in February when I took th photo below.

This thermogram demostrates how the warmth of the brood chamber is concentrated in one area of the center of the hive in order to keep the queen and all of the workers warm throughout the winter.  This heat signature was radiating right through the wood side of the hive box.  The two bright white spots at the entrance of the hive are individual bees.  I am hoping dispalying these pictures will give someone an idea of how this technology could be used to help the Beekeeping industry.

Cutouts and swarms

I recently got a call from a friend that he had some bees in the water meter outside his house.  So I went over there Saturday morning all suited up ready to do battle.  I puffed some smoke into the small opening in the water meter cover then carefully lifted the cover exposing the hive.  It turned out to be three small pieces of newly drawn comb and about 300 bees.  There was a queen present so I cut the come out and placed it into Langstroth frames in a medium size hive box.  I left the hive on the ground next to the water meter and returned after midnight to pick up the hive when I was sure all of the bees were inside.  The following day I wanted to transfer the bees to a nucleus hive box, add a coupe frames of nurse bees and brood from an existing hive and effectively have a new hive.  To gain more experience with handling queens, I scooped the queen from this feral hive into a small cylinder used for marking and clipping the queen.  I didn’t have any luck clipping the queens' wings but I did manage to rile her up with my manipulations.  I decided to just transfer her into a queen cage so she would be protected from the nurse bees from my other hives that I was going to combine her with.  I have never placed a queen in a cage before and I was taking much too long for her liking.  After about the third attempt she escaped and started flying around the bee yard.  She made a few passes beneath the nucleus hive I was setting up and then I lost track of her.  I waited to see if she would join her hive mates who were crowded in the corner of the nucleus hive but I never saw her return.  I then realized that she may have flown over to the other hives in the yard so I checked them out and sure enough there was the queen on the top of one of my other hives and with five bees on top of her stinging her to death.  Having lost the queen I just joined the remaining bees to an existing hive using the newspaper technique of isolating the bee box form the established hive with a sheet of newspaper that the bees will eventually chew through.

I had some redemption from my chance to increase my bee yard three days later when I went on a call to retrieve some feral bees from a flower pot.  When I arrived I was told the bees swarmed the day before.  Having driven quite a distance I was discouraged to think I had lost the opportunity to capture the bees until the homeowner pointed out a branch in their hedge where a nice ball of bees rested.  I quickly changed my focus from the flower pot, which still had some bees leaving and entering through the drain hole, and moved over to the hedge with a bucket and lid.  A few firm taps on the branch the bees rested on and I had about three pounds of bees in my bucket.

I transferred the flower pot to an outstretched sheet, pulled up the four corners like a diaper and tied the loose ends with rope to prevent the bees trapped in the flower pot and sheet from escaping.

So my feral hive rescue turned into a two-for-one.  I have begun feeding the two rescued hives to encourage them to stay put and make my apiary their new home.