The Two Types Of Bacterial Diseases
There are two bacterial diseases that beekeepers must be on the lookout for they are American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood.
The American Foulbrood, also known as AFB, is the most serious of the bacterial diseases of honeybee brood and is caused by the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae. This disease is started and can be transferred only in the spore stage. The reason for the seriousness of the disease is the spores can remain alive and last for an undetermined length of time on beekeeper’s equipment. It is highly contagious and spreads easily via contaminated equipment, hive tools, and beekeeper’s hands. The best way to handle the American Foulbrood is to avoid it at all possibilities.
To detect the disease examine the larvae. Normal healthy larvae are white, but the infected broods turn chocolate-brown and melt into a gooey mass on the floor of the cell. The colonies will display a “pepper box symptom” as the disease progresses. The “pepper box symptom” is when the bees are capping the cells, the brood capping are perforated and sunken into the cell. When the larvae are brown and have not formed a hardened scale, the symptom of ropiness can be demonstrated. To do this, poke at stick into this mass, moisten it and withdraw it from the cell. The contents will draw out like melted cheese, the ropiness, if AFB is present. As the dead larvae dries, it becomes a black scale that sticks tightly to the cell floor. These scales are difficult to remove and are site for re-infection. A single scale can contain one billion spores. It only takes 35 spores to trigger the disease. These scales are difficult to see and easily missed when purchasing used equipment. If you are around a colony that is extremely infected with American Foulbrood, it will emit a foul odor like a chicken coop. The colony dwindles and eventually collapses as more and more brood become infected and dies.
The beekeeper has an advantage if new equipment and tools can be purchased, install packaged bees and maintain them in total isolation from other apiaries, hive collections. Of course this is not realistic or practical, but it always makes good sense to practice sanitation, such as washing hands and hive tools regularly. Avoid using hive equipment of unknown history, and avoid feeding bees honey from an unknown source.
It is possible to breed bees that are genetically resistant to American Foulbrood and other diseases. One of the most important characteristics is the disease resistant bees is the ability to detect and remove from the colony abnormal cells of brood. The resistant queens are available from nationally advertised queen breeders. You will find the advertisements in the “American Bee Journal”, “Bee Culture”, and “Speedy Bee”.
European Foulbrood, also known as EFB, is another of the bacterial diseases that effect the honeybee brood. There are some differences between the European Foulbrood and the American Foulbrood. The colonies infected with the American Foulbrood sometimes recover from the infection. The symptoms can sometimes be mistaken for those of the American Foulbrood, but there are some important differences. Instead of being a normal healthy white, the larvae with European Foulbrood are off-white, progressing into a brown, and are twisted in various positions in the cell. Larvae with European Foulbrood usually die before they are capped whereas with American Foulbrood die after they are capped.
The sanitation precautions recommended in the section on American Foulbrood also apply to the European Foulbrood. Bee stocks that are bred for resistance to diseases can be expected to minimize outbreaks of European Foulbrood. There are times at the onset of a strong nectar flow that the disease will go away on its own. The beekeeper may be able to control the disease by stimulating a nectar flow and by requeening the colony.
There is a preventative measure that can be used on either the American Foulbrood or the European Foulbrood, and is periodical treatments of the veterinary antibiotic TerramycinJ. It is fed as a mixture in either powdered sugar, sugar syrup, or in vegetable oil extender patties. It is very important to never feed the antibiotic within four weeks of a nectar flow to avoid contamination honey for human consumption.
The use of TerramycinJ in European Foulbrood infected colonies may actually be counter productive because the medication permits those infected larvae to survive when they would have died. These survivors then are in the colony as a source of recontamination. If the infected larvae die instead, the house bees eject them from the hive and with them the source of the infection. The bacterium does not form long-surviving spores that will stay on the hive surfaces.
There has been recent evidence of the disease becoming resistant to the antibiotic. One of the suspected causes is the use of the oil extender patties as a method of medicating the bees. If the bees do not consume the patties rapidly, it leads to the antibiotic staying in the hive for weeks or even months. Until the use of the oil extender patties in the 1990′s, resistance was not a problem. Beekeepers are now being told to remove uneaten patties after a month.
Sacbrood is a virus infection that is like a cold in humans. There is no known cure at this time. The best preventive measure is sanitation. Comb replacement and requeening the colony is the best response to the infection.
Beekeepers do not consider sacbrood a serious threat, however one larva killed by the sacbrood virus contains enough virus to kill over one million larvae. More research needs to be done on the sacbrood virus. It is unknown how the virus is transmitted to the larvae in nature, why severe outbreaks occur only during build-up season, or how the virus seems to return year after year.
Symptoms of sacbrood are partially uncapped cells scattered about the frame or capped cells that remain sealed after others have emerged. Diseased bees inside the cells will have darkened heads, which curl upward. The dead prepupa resembles a slipper inside the cell. Diseased prepupae fail to pupate and turn from pearl white to pale yellow to light brown and finally, dark brown. The skin is loose and flabby and the body watery. The dark brown bee becomes a wrinkled, brittle scale that is easily removed from the cells.
Find tips about how to kill bees and bee identification at the Bee Facts website.
A Practical Manual of Beekeeping: How to Keep Bees and Develop Your Full Potential as an Apiarist
Product Description
A fascinating hobby; a remunerative business; or a globetrotting career? Which type of beekeeper do you want to be? It is entirely up to you: beekeeping can provide it all.Beekeeping can provide anyone with an interesting and useful hobby or a lucrative and rewarding business. It is recognised as a vital agricultural industry and can therefore also offer you a globe trotting career. The whole subject is, however, often shrouded in mystery and loaded with jargon, leaving many people unaware of its true potential or how to start. This book strips away all the mystery and explains step by step how – from day one – you can start beekeeping as a hobby; how you can progress to running a beekeeping business; or how you can start a career as a beekeeper which can quite easily take you all over the world. No other guide explains in such detail the true potential and accessibility of beekeeping or of being a beekeeper.
beekeeping in Ghana 5—baiting hives
See www3.telus.net for more information on Famer-to-Farmer and/or beekeeping development. Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, OIC Tamale Beekeeping Technical Specialist, and Conrad Bérubé, Farmer to Farmer Volunteer, assist novice beekeepers in baiting hives to capture swarms near Tamale, Northern Region Ghana.
How To Have Your Own Bee Business
Starting a beekeeping business may sound exciting and fun, but in all reality it’s a lot of work and is time consuming. Most people who are in this are actually doing this as a hobby. Having a hobby and a livelihood are two entirely different areas since one is something you invest time and in some cases money and one is when you’re trying to make a living at. Beekeeping is like farming you have to stay on top of the market demands and be technologically savvy because much of the business is going to depend on how fast you can produce a single product.
Yet this is where you’re going to learn that beekeeping isn’t even like that because if you expect to make a profit you would have had to have been in the business for a long time and following the trends on what the market demanded of the time. Today if you don’t even have a website consider yourself a fossil in the area of business because that’s your only link to the rest of the world by having a website or even a page.
Most of the companies today are commercialized because the small businesses today are just not equipped to handle the mass production of honey and small businesses won’t make a lot giving the fact you are paid by the pound and the average amount after weighing the whole season isn’t a whole lot. Commercial beekeepers average a couple thousand pounds, but farmers have to really push production if they want to average at least $15-30 a year. This is a competitive field to be selling honey and producing beeswax products since the beekeeping industry doesn’t function as a co-op like many organic farmers do in this day and age where they work together beekeeping is sub-contract work and many of these small businesses are sub-contracted by these major corporations to produce honey under their label and their food line.
Sub-contracting may sound good and all, but you are also competing for these contracts as well with other small businesses and the high risk is that you can lose your contracts if the companies who hire you aren’t happy with something for whatever reason it could be the quality of the product to anything. That’s why this is a risky business to get into because you never know what the outcome is and how the market will fair during the season since this is what a beekeeper bases their financial output by which is how much they anticipate to make on a seasonal basis.
Beekeepers almost have to base their financial gain through good weather and season with the market demand, but you can’t always predict good weather, which is what many worry about. They have more to worry about than crop farmers since they can make the difference when they get rain and lower climate suitable to the food they’re growing. Beekeeping is dependent on the activity of the bees and how well they produce honey since bees produce in certain climates and temperatures. If you’re expecting to thrive in this business understand that it’s a lot of work and a lot of time invested into making this work for the long run.
Learn about bee sting treatment and how to get rid of bees at the Bee Facts site.
Learn How To Harvest Honey
Obviously the whole reason to set up, maintain, and stock a beehive is to harvest honey. You will know that it is time to harvest the honey when you look in one of your hives supers and find that the frames are full of honey combs that your bees have covered with wax caps.
Now all you have to do is remove the honey combs.
Harvesting your honey won’t be a problem as long as your put on all your beekeeping gear, wear light colored clothes (beekeepers swear that lighter colored clothes have a soothing affect on bees) and stay calm.
When the super is full of capped honey combs you are going to have to remove the bees from that super. There are chemicals available on the market that will make this easier. One popular chemical that beekeepers use to remove bees from the super is Bee-Go. All beekeepers have to do is apply Bee-Go to a fumer board. When the bees smell the Bee-Go they head to the bottom of the hive, leaving the super full of capped honeycombs empty for you to harvest. Another product beekeepers use to clear out supers is one called Fishers Bee Quick. Neither of these products harm the bees, the bees simply find the scent offensive and move away from it.
Now that you are in possession of the honey comb you need to prepare it to be extracted. The first step in this preparation is to remove the wax caps the bees have used to seal the honey into the honey comb. Many beekeepers prefer to use nine frames instead of ten in their supers. By using nine frames they give the bees enough room to draw the comb out, placing the cap right on the very edge of the comb. This makes it easier to remove the wax caps. Beekeepers use a metal knife to remove the caps, the knife works best if the knife blade is warmed, after all its easier to cut warm wax then it is to cut cold wax. You can keep the knife blade warm with frequent dunking in a basin that is full of hot water. Many beekeepers like to use their bread knife to remove the wax caps from the honey comb while others prefer an electrical knife that is designed just for beekeepers. What do you think bee’s wax candles are made out of. Removing the caps from the dripping honey is easy, just use a piece of cheese cloth to empty the contents into a second pot, the honey will drain through the cheesecloth and the bee’s wax caps will collect on the top.
Once the caps are removed from the honey comb the honey is ready to be extracted.
As you remove the caps, let them fall into a pot, do not just through them away. You will notice that there is a surprising amount of honey attached to these caps, honey that can be processed and used. Also there is a market for the wax caps. Once the caps have been removed from the honeycombs the honey combs are ready to have the honey extracted.
Visit the Bee Facts website to learn about mason bees and bees disappearing.
Beavers Beekeeping (Package Bees)
Installing a package of bees for the first time. I was a bit nervous but it was very fun.
Market Your Honey To The Locals
One of the reasons people become involved with beekeeping is so that they can market the honey. Many beekeepers chose to sell their honey to a local market.
Beekeepers who choose a local market for their honey typically sell their product to friends, family members, and neighbors. They typically set up a roadside stand to display their product, selling the honey produced in their hives along side berries, apples, and vegetables that they have grown in their gardens. If they produce a quality product their honey may start to appear in stalls at farmers markets. Some small honey producers will gain enough local credit to sell their honey at local grocery stores. Beekeepers that sell their products locally typically only a few active bee hives. The key to a successful local marketing technique is to provide the customers with a quality product and good customer relation skills. Beekeepers that market their honey typically enjoy face to face contact with their customers. Often the sale of the honey has as much to do with friendship as it does with the product.
Beekeepers that sell their honey locally should take an active interest in their product. They should make sure that their display is kept clean. They should spend a significant amount of time designing the package. Bottles that are filled with honey should be made of clear plastic and glass. The bottle should be attractive, something that will catch a customer’s eye. Glued on the bottle should be a label. The label be clear an easy to read. Clearly printed on the label should be the type of product, honey, and the name of the beekeeper who produced the honey. The bottle of honey should be something that the customer will want to display on the their kitchen counter or table.
If you are a beekeeper that is planning on marketing your honey at a roadside stand you should make sure that they have a sign that can be easily read by drivers. In large letters the sign should read Honey for Sale. The sign should be eye catching, but simple. If the sign is to complex, drivers won’t be able to read it. Try to keep shade over your road side stand, a comfortable customer is one who is more likely to take their time and spend some their money purchasing your product.
Keep an eye on the honey you are selling. If you notice that one of the bottles on honey is stating to crystallize immediately replace it with a fresh bottle.
Many beekeepers claim that setting up a hive near their roadside stand helps attract customer interest. Successful beekeepers pass out literature that gives customers insight to the art of beekeeping seems to increase sales. Handing out cards that have recipes that use honey gives customers an idea about how they can use the honey they are purchasing. Many beekeepers encourage handing out free samples and promote spending time getting to know potential customers.
When you are pricing your honey make sure you consider the demands on your time and the cost of all the products you are using to turn your honey into a marketable commodity.
Information on honey bee hive can be found at the Bee Facts site.
The Whole Family In The Bee Business
Beekeeping isn’t just something you go into it’s something you’re raised and brought up in. Most companies that deal with beekeeping and providing beekeeping supplies are family owned. Dadant and Sons, a company based out of Hamilton, IL has been in the business of providing beekeeping equipment and attire for the past 140 years. They sell everything from beekeeping attire from the head to the torso, and even full body suits with headwear. They also sell journals that are published about beekeeping and also selling copies from the archives as well.
They have a large selection of books for giving you a short course on beekeeping to candle making since many beekeepers also not only collect and sell honey, but they make things out of beeswax as well like candles. Most family owned beekeepers usually produce the honey and beeswax items on their farms and sell the products they make at local stores. Usually it’s a family business that has been a long-standing tradition.
Most beekeeping families have been at this for several generations so it’s not a new thing many families get into with this. A lot of children grow up making this into their livelihood since it’s how their ancestors made their living. Many companies now are in fact commercially owned since so many family-owned businesses are forced out because of the rising cost of running a business and many mom and pop places that were not technologically advanced were the ones who suffered because those who had the resources to invest in websites and tools needed to stay ahead in the business were the ones who made the transition into the 21st century with their businesses. This was a business that began as a simple hobby and just a small way to make extra money on the side or to just have something extra for the dinner table since honey was super popular to be put on hot biscuits and toast for dinner and breakfast since it was used as a marmalade.
Honey wasn’t really a huge resource at the time since people used sugar and other things like molasses to put in their food, but when it was discovered that honey was cheap and inexpensive to make that’s when beekeeping had become a hugely popular and profitable business for many families in regions that beekeeping was a widely practiced activity. As a result of how inexpensive it was to produce honey, which became what beekeeping has developed into today. The only issues was in this day and age more pesticides was being used and the problems with having to treat much of the honey that was being made which left a lot of people wondering how safe it was to consume such a product.
It was a concern since you have the organic food movement that totally goes against the use of pesticides and any means to chemically alter or treat food or livestock used for food products. Today you have family owned companies at the commercial level that produce honey products and beeswax used in cosmetics and candle making.
For tips on african bees and bee types, visit the Bee Facts website.
Beekeeping, Beekeepers Beehive Frame Waxing with Bees Wax by Georgia Beekeeper, www.georgiabees.com,
Beekeepers Beehive plastic frame foundation re waxing with bees wax. Georgia Beekeeper John Pluta doing beekeeping repair. Beeswax bee hive frame redo.VISIT georgiabees.blogspot.com for more info Honey bee hive frames getting bees wax coating for honeybee comb building.gabeekeeping
Processing Raw Honey – How To Make It Fit For Human Consumption
When the bee keeper removes the honey from the honey combs he has to process the raw honey immediately to prevent it from crystallizing. Once the row honey comes into contact with the oxygen in the air it reacts and begins to crystallize immediately. This does not happen in the honey comb as the wax caps over each cell in the comb keeps the honey away from the air.
Apart from processing the raw honey to prevent crystallization, the bee keeper has to kill some very potent bacterium in the honey to prevent poisoning. This is the bacteria that cause the symptoms of botulism in humans. These symptoms are better known as ‘food poisoning’ and are removed by heating the raw honey for some time at temperatures between 150 to 170 degrees centigrade.
Honey is naturally sweater than processed sugar and is stored in its natural color. Sugar made from sugarcane is bleached to remove the natural brown color of sugar. This is why table sugar is white and crystallized.
Honey is a whitish substance that is very gooey in nature in its raw form. It is only the pasteurizing process that causes it to get that yellowish color. When the honey is processed on a hot fire it begins to caramelize, very much the same way sugar does. Honey has a very long shelf life and cam be kept for years after processing. People buy honey for it’s medicinal value as it has many vitamins and an extremely high amount of antioxidants and digestive enzymes. The healthy properties of honey cannot be enumerated in this short article.
Honey is fast taking its rightful place in society by replacing many substances that aggravate diabetes. For instance corn syrup is being replaced by honey as corn syrup is a known cause of diabetes. Corn syrup is a product of man through many automated and mechanical processes where as honey is only processed to remove bacteria from its constituents. Any sweet produced by man is a sure cause of diabetes. Natural sugars are not.
Honey has a lot of medicinal values too. For instance it is used as a topical application to treat conditions like MRSA, this is a type skin infection. Honey is also known to be very good for the treatment of laryngitis. A bit of honey mixed with a bit of lemon will sooth your throat as it does contagious conjunctivitis.
Beekeepers across the world like to stick to the organic way of processing honey because they do not believe in using harmful chemicals to purify their produce. These chemicals if used will destroy the many benefits of honey in its natural form. This is something the large manufacturers of honey cannot guarantee, many of them do use harmful chemicals to process the honey they sell. This is the reason people stick to local farmers for their supply of honey.
Abhishek is an avid Bee Keeping enthusiast and he has got some great Beekeeping Secrets up his sleeve! Download his FREE 59 Pages Ebook, “How To Become A Bee-Keeping Pro!” from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/89/index.htm . Only limited Free Copies available.