Oregon Sustainable Beekeepers

With the blackberry honey flow coming to a close, its time to look harder to see what our bees are foraging on this time of year.  Be part of the the mid-summer honey plant challenge.  Walk around your neighborhood and look for particular plants that seem to be attracting bees in large numbers.  Make a list of the three or four most interesting and bee-covered plants you come across.  If you don’t know what the plant is, take a sample and bring it to the mid-summer picnic at Philip’s house and we will all try to figure out what it is.  Identifying honey plants that are especially attractive to the bees once our blackberries stop flowering can help us design year-round beescapes to get the bees through the usual late-summer nectar dearth.

Summer is a busy time for everyone – especially beekeepers – so we are skipping the July meeting.  The next gathering of Oregon Sustainable Beekeepers will be a potluck picnic at Philip Smith’s house on Sunday August 5th and 4:00 PM.  Hope to see everyone there!

Bee Friendly seeds are now available for planting. It is a mix and is available from members, and also at Saturday Farmer’s market. Happy planting:)

Here are a few ideas for meetings topics.

Nosema Ceranea – This is a new and poorly understood problem.  We could do a prevalence screening at the meeting if folks brought in 10-20 bees from each of several colonies.  We could go through lots of bees while other people blow hot air, and really get an idea of what the Nosema epidemic is like among our colonies.

Swarming and Swarm Prevention –  General discussion and different approaches depending on equipment style.

Recognition of Pests and Diseases, Looking for Trouble –  Aimed at the beginning beekeeper to learn to recognize when the colony has a problem before it is too late – and what to do about it.  Should cover Varroa, Nosema, Tracheal mites, AFB, Phorid fly?, viruses, wax moths, anything else we can think of.  Use of screened bottom boards as diagnostic tools.

Your turn…  suggest something in the comments!

The Bee Informed Partnership is an extension project that endeavors to decrease the number of managed honey bee colonies that die over the winter

Since the winter of 2006 – 2007, overwintering colonies in the US have died in large numbers. Affected beekeepers span the entire spectrum of the industry: migratory beekeepers to stationary beekeepers; and commercial beekeepers, part-time beekeepers, to backyard beekeepers. Migratory and stationary beekeepers alike have, on average, lost 30% or more of their overwintering colonies over the last several years. These losses are unsustainable. If they continue, they threaten not only the livelihoods of beekeepers who manage bees, but the livelihood of farmers who require bees to pollinate their crops.

But there is good news! Not all beekeepers are losing 30% or more of their hives each winter. About a quarter of all beekeepers responding to last year’s winter loss surveys lost fewer than 15% of their hives – an acceptable rate. Sadly, however, another 25% of all beekeepers lost over 55% of their colonies. So what’s the difference? Why are some beekeepers losing a few colonies while others are losing so many? That question, in a nut shell, is the main question that the Bee Informed Partnership is trying to answer.

Visit the Bee Informed site and read more…

Sign up to be part of the survey here…

This could be a web site for us if you all think it is a good idea.  What I would suggest is that those that wish to add content or modify the site, send me an e-mail and I will add you to the list of Authors, Editors or Administrators, depending on what makes sense after I figure it out.

I  added our mission statement to the About page.

This is the no-cost way to go – using the oregonsustainablebeekeepers.wordpress.com URL.  For $17/year we could lock in the same URL without the “.wordpress” in it.

WordPress is easy to use and would allow us to collaboratively add content.  Those with creative energy could help systematize the layout, get us a nicer header picture, change “Themes” if desired, etc.  I just picked something that I thought had promise.

There are lots of things to mess with – and it can be fun if you have too much time on your hands.

From my limited blog experience, WordPress is set up for either specific Pages or Posts.  Pages are best for static information.  Posts work better for more dynamic content.  Using Categories on posts allows you to have Menu items that will refer to all of the Posts in a Category.    For instance, we might want content on Diseases,  Nutrition, Toxic Chemicals, Methods, etc.  Then the menu tabs at the top of the page could be linked to these categories and it makes finding content pretty easy.

Gary