46 members
attended. New members: Corrine & Mike Burkett, Scott &
Audrey Stewart, Mahlon Mast, David Miller, David Yoder, Tobias Yoder, Bob
White.
Paul
Durenburger of 1398 Franklin Ave, West Branch, (319-643-4055) would like someone
to put bees on his 73-acre restored prairie land. This brings up a
possibility: we sometimes hear from other landowners who would also like to
host beehives on their land. If you are looking for places to site your
hives, please let me (Dave Campbell) know. I’ll start a list, and try to
match you up.
Bob Wolff
reported on his classes at Indian Creek Nature Center, 319-362-0664. Beginning
Beekeeping class is now off to a good start. This is probably the only
beekeeping class in Iowa that offers work sessions scattered spring through
fall, so as to focus on the different tasks that come at different times.
The second ICNC course is Queen Raising, a new course to be taught by Paul
Gardner June 2nd and 3rd, 9:00a.m. - 3:00p.m. Cost is $60 for ICNC
members, and $75 for non-members, with enrollment limited to 10.
Floyd
Otdoerfer gave his recipe for making pollen patties to boost bees in the
spring. He mixes 4 cups of pollen substitute (such as “MegaBee”, from
suppliers like Dadant or BetterBee) with ¾ pint of 2:1 sugar syrup and ¾ pint
of his own honey. He says you can actually use soy flour (available from
HyVee or New Pioneer) instead of the commercial pollen substitute. He
mixes it to stiff dough and flattens it into patties in a waxed bag.
Store in fridge till ready. Makes 8 hives worth.
Floyd also showed
a booklet on small hive beetles he got from the apiary extension service of
Clemson University, South Carolina. One point was that you can use strips
of corrugated cardboard as beetle traps. The beetles will hide in the slots,
and you can tap them out and crush them. This works more to monitor
beetles than to control them, though. Best of all is to have healthy
swarms, because beetles hurt weak ones the most. More at http://www.clemson.edu/extension/beekeepers/publications/small_hive_bettle_ipm.html. Discussion: cold winter frosts kill
beetle eggs in the soil, so we don’t see many small hive beetles here in
Iowa. However, it has been a very mild winter this year. Did they
survive?
Dave Irvin
has arranged to have our ECIBA booth at HooverFest in West Branch on August 4th.
He also has talked with the Johnson County Fair people. Besides having
our booth there, he will give a beekeeping demo to the public at 2:00 p.m.
Monday of the fair. ECIBA will also sponsor a $25 prize for the best 4-H
beekeeper. Dave has now paid the first installment of the insurance we
need in order to do these outreach activities.
Matt Stewart
and Bob Wolff encouraged everybody to enter apiary products at this year’s Iowa
State Fair, August 9-22, 2012. There are 24 categories and $1500 in
prizes. Many of the categories have had sparse entries in past years, so
it hasn’t been hard to win something. This year will be the 100th
anniversary of Iowa Honey Producers Association (IHPA) so they want a big
turn-out. To egg us on, IHPA will give a prize to the club with most
entries (entries, not prizes won). ICNC plans to provide transport
for entries; drop them off at ICNC on the Tuesday before fair opens (August 7th),
and they will go up on Wednesday. ICNC also will give a workshop on how
to prepare prize winning entries on either June 23rd or 30th.
Contest categories are listed in the January 2012 issue of The Buzz.
Entry forms can be downloaded from www.iowastatefair.org. Get them early and make
plans. However, because you never know what apiary products you will
actually have available at fair time, the absolute deadline for submitting
entry forms is very late, August 1st.
IHPA
announcements (Deb and Dennis Nielson): a) The IHPA cookbook needs
recipes. Send to Donna Brahms, 14922 535th St, Griswold IA
51535. b) Annual IHPA field day will be June 16th in Perry
IA. It is $30 admission and pot luck. Larry Connor, “Travelling
Beekeeper” columnist for American Bee Journal, will speak. Come a
day early and take Connor’s class on Queen Rearing for $75. c) Central
Iowa Beekeepers will hold their auction April 21st, also at Perry
IA. d) Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey has agreed to address IHPA on
the occasion of their 100th anniversary at this year’s Iowa State
Fair. e) The IHPA website www.abuzzaboutbees.com is being revamped.
If you
haven’t yet, be sure to check out the ECIBA website that Jim Davis has
constructed. It is at http://eastcentraliowabeekeepers.blogspot.com/. Our thanks to Jim for this
good work!
Finally,
because our meetings have been extending past the 8:30 p.m. closing time at
Coralville Public Library, I propose we start the next meeting, June 11th,
a half-hour early, at 6:30 p.m. Use this early half hour to look at
interesting stuff people bring in. Business meeting to start at 7:00 p.m.
as usual.
Dave
Campbell, ECIBA Secretary
