Honey??s

In reality Water will turn Honey Rancid in ANY quanity.

My nucs come May 15, I will pick two colonies worth of bees up in Fort St John, nearby. Should have our own honey by fall.

Alex

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Anyone heard anything more about the cellphone theory? I'm beginning to wonder if that one has a bit of merit. I visited a local bee tree located in a picnic area just north of here. Bees were merrily flying in and out of both entrances. I made the mistake of using honeysuckle scented shampoo while on the tractor the other day.....lots and lots of bees. I'll go check on a beautiful hive I found a couple of months ago....picture below. I wonder if the one reason the bees aren't being bothered here is because there are no cellphone towers. Cell phones do not work here. Satellite phones rarely work here. I'll continue to monitor some wild hives and see what happens with them.

There are 2 reasons that honey does not ferment or mold.

One is the low water content, but there IS some. And, by the same token, if a syrup was dense enough it would not interfere with this.

The OTHER is the tiny droplet of preservatives that the bees drop into each cell before it is sealed. Added syrup cannot compete with this! In fact, before the days of anti biotics people sometimes used honey as a wound dressing to take advantage of this.

And now for the bad news. In efforts to prevent hives from being wiped out from disease and mites most beekeepers, local or distant, are using chemicals in their hives. These chemicals transfer to the honey and you get to eat them. Even if the chemicals aren't applied when the bees are gathering nectar the chemical residue is absorbed by the wax in the hive that the bees store the honey in thereby transferring the chemicals to the honey. If memory serves me I don't believe there are any restrictions especially on import honey as to what chemicals they are using. Ask your friendly neighborhood beekeeper exactly what chemicals he uses in their hive. The only thing I've ever put in my hives is mineral oil and it's all I'll continue to use.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

Apparently by USDA standards they can add up to 30% corn syrup.

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I have attended workshops at the local organic fair, and even they were advocating the treatments for mite.

Saying that if you harvest your honey first, then treat for mites, then only the wintered-over honey will have the pesticides in it. Of course next spring, if any of that wintered-over honey gets mixed with the fresh honey, ....

It should be a fairly lower dosage.

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Chemicals introduced into the hive are absorbed into the wood and the wax. What you quote is what most beekeepers do. It still introduces chemicals to the bees directly into the hive. Then again who checks to see what people do and when they put the chemicals on and take them off. I have opened hives and found the strips in there during a honey flow at a neighbors hive. What do they do overseas? How much residue builds up year after year?

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I have friends that have an orchard. Their beekeeper who lives in the next county was wiped out of bees. But he had some overwintered in Florida which he brought up and placed in the orchard yesterday or the day before...If I owned the bee hives, I'd be concerned that those bees might "catch" something in this area since they don't really know what is causing the collapse. Scary picture before us!

Around here, the big beekeepers haul their hives South for winter, and back for summer. Their bees never feel cold weather, and so never collapse.

That practice appears to be the 'safest' method of hive management.

Whereas small local beekeepers who can not afford to haul their hives, lose hives.

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Around here winter losses are low, As there is A flow on almost year rounnd. And #2 the africanized bee appears to be more resitant the the mites.And the hives My brother has, Are never treated with Any chemicals.

CCD was first found in Florida.

Cool

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I actually heard it was happening more to transported hives.
When bees were cheap northern beekeepers would rob their hives completely and let the bees starve out if they didn't have enough stores and then just buy more bees.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, December 5, 2006

CONTACT: Michael Schommer, Communications Director, 651-201-6629ST. PAUL, Minn.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) recently concluded an enforcement action against Adee Honey Farms, of Bruce, South Dakota. Adee Honey Farms produces honey and in 2006 had several thousand bee colonies in Minnesota.

Adee Honey Farms paid a $14,000 settlement penalty to the MDA for illegal use of pesticides within bee colonies to control Varroa mites and for making a false statement to MDA inspectors. MDA learned of the pesticide misuse in June 2006 during a random pesticide use inspection at two Adee Honey Farm bee colonies in Yellow Medicine County. MDA inspectors noticed blue paper towels in several hives. Follow-up laboratory testing showed that the towels contained oxalic acid and fluvalinate.

The U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA) has not registered any pesticide with the active ingredient oxalic acid for use in bee hives. Additionally, the only fluvalinate pesticide EPA has registered for use in bee hives is found in the pesticide product Apistan. This product is available in the form of strips, not paper towels. Apistan strips, however, are more costly than the liquid fluvalinate pesticide that MDA determined Adee Honey Farm used. The owner and operator of Adee Honey Farms told MDA investigators he was aware that the pesticides he used were illegal and not for use in bee hives.

State and federal law requires that pesticides must be used in accordance with label directions, and this includes proper use sites. Pesticide label directions and restrictions are designed to protect human health and the environment, so it is imperative that users of these products read and follow the labels. Because the pesticides Adee Honey Farms used were not labeled for use in bee hives, no use directions and human or environmental precautions were on the labels.


I copied this from Beesource.com. This is one example of what I was talking about and this was here in the US.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I do not know then.

The 'local' guy that sales nucs, hauls 1400 hives North and South.

He says that the only thing that he loses colonies to is AFB and mites. So he is big on: terramycin for American Foulbrood, Menthol and grease patties for Tracheal mites, And really kind of alternating between the three main treatments [Apistan, Checkmite, Mite-AwayII [which is formic acid], and Sucrocide] in a Integrated Pest Management method to try and control Varroa mites.

His loses are few, and he splits enough each year to make a good business from selling the nucs. He ran one of the workshops that I attended.

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I just called Sue Bee Honey last week. I didn't ask them about the pesticide use of their member farmers, but they said 100% of their honey is from US sources and US fields EXCEPT that the 5 gallon Sam's Club honey has some Canadian content.

None of their honey is from anyplace outside the US or Canada.