Saturday, May 11, the good folks at Case Western University’s Squire Valeeview Farm, including Chris Bond, Horticulturist, Anna Locci, Farm Manager, and the wonderful staff, designers and builders, dedicated the A. I. Root Observational Apiary just behind the Farm’s Honey House.

The site was initially a small, almost empty field, located between experimental [...]]]>

Saturday, May 11, the good folks at Case Western University’s Squire Valeeview Farm, including Chris Bond, Horticulturist, Anna Locci, Farm Manager, and the wonderful staff, designers and builders, dedicated the A. I. Root Observational Apiary just behind the Farm’s Honey House.

The site was initially a small, almost empty field, located between experimental and residential gardens, a small rock retaining wall leading to staff housing, and the building holding the honey house, workshop, fish hatchery and hydroponic garden research facility.

When Case wanted to expand the apiary portion of the farm, they came to the A. I. Root Company because of the long-time beekeeping heritage both The Root Company and family have in northeast Ohio. They were looking for good ideas, some leadership in moving them in the right direction and of course some financial support. Brad Root, President of Root Candles, asked me to go and take a look at the facility and what it needed. I was able to meet with both Chris and Anna, and look at the existing buildings, equipment and other facilities. At the time, the apiary was in a field behind the honey house, and visitors…and there are a LOT of visitors to this apiary….had to watch any outside activity through a window in the honey house, some 25 or more yards from the actual hives.

It was immediately obvious that some way that visitors could get closer to the hives was needed. Other facilities wishing to assist close-up visits often use multiple sets of protective clothing so those close to the bees have protection, and can feel safe. But bee suits are expensive, are often ill fitting and far too often there are not enough of them.

A quick look at the setting and the use of a tall, screened observation area seemed ideal. First, visitors needed a safe and easy way to get to where the bees were, so it was suggested an ADA door be installed in the honey house so anybody could have access to the apiary. To accommodate that further, a cement walkway was installed leading from the honey house right to the hives, and then, the best part, a tall, screened fence was installed, such that bees leaving and returning to the hives had to fly upwards to 10 feet high to get over the fence, and thus away from visitors. The curved fence allows several indented areas for small gatherings and a large curved area for crowds. Beekeepers can take hives apart, show individual frames and talk about the bees up close and personal with visitors only inches away, safely standing behind the screen.

The dedication took place during a meeting of the Greater Cleveland Beekeeper’s Association, with Ross Conrad as the guest speaker. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held and Brad Root and Case farm management staff gave short talks before the cutting.

Afterwards, several live bee demonstrations were held both inside the screen and on both sides for those attending that did not have protective equipment…the perfect use of this new equipment.

The builders and designers at Case took the very simple design I suggested and made a much better and more functional structure. An employee did the paintings on the lower part of the screen of native flora and fauna, and the cement sidewalk makes access possible for anybody wishing to see bees, and beekeepers up close. They did a great job.

And, if you’re looking for a good way to get bees and people together in a relatively inexpensive fashion, take a look at how this works…it’s easy to build, and easy to use, and you’ll get a lot of curious people dropping by…just to watch the bees.

Last time we looked at getting packages, and I was going to take a long look at getting them started, but not unlike lots of times, something got in the way. The Post Office.

Here’s the address they published their proposed changes at:

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/04/24/2013-09603/new-mailing-standards-for-live-animals-and-special-handling

Here’s the summary:

The Postal Service [...]]]>

Last time we looked at getting packages, and I was going to take a long look at getting them started, but not unlike lots of times, something got in the way. The Post Office.

Here’s the address they published their proposed changes at:

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/04/24/2013-09603/new-mailing-standards-for-live-animals-and-special-handling

Here’s the summary:

The Postal Service is proposing to revise Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service, Domestic Mail Manual (DMM®) 503.14 and 601.9.3 to require special handling service for shipments containing certain types of live animals, to limit the mail classes available for use when shipping certain types of live animals, and to expand the mailability of live animals domestically to include any adult bird weighing no more than 25 pounds.

The special handling service looks something like this:

Special handling is required for shipments containing day-old poultry, adult birds and bulk shipments of bees (e.g. a queen bee packaged with an attending swarm), regardless of the class of mail purchased. Live day-old chickens, ducks, emus, geese, guinea fowl, partridges, pheasants (pheasants may be mailed only from April through August), quail, and turkeys are acceptable in the mail only if the shipment bears special handling postage in addition to regular postage.

And, basically:

A Special Handle Fee will be charged on every Live Animal Shipment. This proposal would increase the postage amount by $9 or $11.95 per bundle depending on the weight. Over 10 pounds is the higher price.

The proposal outlines the new fees to be charged but it does not include any new rules to insure us that service would also improve. Nor does it offer how the additional funds would address their concerns about; Protection of Postal Service employees, mail and the environment, or animals against death.

So, if you buy peeps by mail, or the folks you buy your peeps do, or you get packages of bees by mail, or the folks you get your bees from do, the price of doing business just went up.

It’s no secret. A million, maybe more colonies that were alive last Thanksgiving aren’t alive today, the beginning of May. What happened? Lots of things, actually, but mostly, from those I talk to and what I know and what I’ve seen it was this.

It’s no secret that holding yards are what make almond pollination possible.

Holding yards?

Unless a beekeeper is very, very lucky and finds a spot in the western foothills with blooming crops long into the winter (and usually some distance from any orchards, and always hard to find), a holding yard [...]]]> The Holding Yard Dilemma

Holding yards don't have lots of available forage...sometimes none at all.

It’s no secret that holding yards are what make almond pollination possible.

Holding yards?

Unless a beekeeper is very, very lucky and finds a spot in the western foothills with blooming crops long into the winter (and usually some distance from any orchards, and always hard to find), a holding yard is a patch of dry, mostly level, accessible land (assuming you don’t get that 100 year storm and the whole thing becomes a lake, or worse a river) somewhere in the vicinity of the almond orchard the colonies are ultimately destined to visit. Beekeepers deliver their colonies to holding yards starting as early as the previous October to as late as a week before they enter the orchards in early February.

Holding yard land is idle most or all of the time, other than, perhaps, hosting colonies from other beekeepers, so the bees can be brought in, managed or ignored, and then left alone for a bit, maybe managed again, until they are moved from the holding yard to the orchard just before the earliest blooming varieties of almonds start showing flowers. That management action is primarily feeding, feeding, feeding.

Colonies that arrive first…usually from the Midwest where winters come early and getting out before they get snowed in is mandatory…are generally at the low end of their season…the queen has slowed or stopped laying, there’s little or no brood, and most of the bees are winter, fat-body bees…not active foragers…ready to be idle for a few months. For these colonies the beekeeper’s job is clear – fool Mother nature. Convert that population of winter bees to a growing, thriving population of spring bees…ready to fly, ready to forage, ready to be bees. And do it in a location where nothing grows, there’s no water, it’s warm enough to fly…but there’s nothing to fly to and with shorter and shorter days telling the bees that flying is a mistake anyway. Remember that commercial … It’s Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature? Beekeepers do it routinely with sugar syrup and pollen substitute. Kind of.

 Those colonies that arrive later,  from locations where they have been on natural forage and able to fly are often in better shape than those who came early, ate only sugar and pollen substitute for weeks and months  and stayed long. That only makes sense.

It’s plain and simple…almonds are a Mediterranean climate crop…think Spain…and spring and almonds and bees wake up long before they do in Minnesota, North Dakota or Montana. In fact, they hardly ever slow down, winter-wise. You don’t have to fool a Spanish bee, or one from Florida, the gulf region or southern Texas. They know the score and the time of year. Almonds work for them pretty well.

 But many almond bees are Midwest bees, and for them if almond pollination is an annual event so is sitting in holding yards.  Along with that there’s the oft heard comparison of holding yards and hospital emergency waiting rooms. If there’s a problem in your community it’s sitting in that room, waiting for you to walk in, sit down and…well, wait. Spread your bees among all the bees in the yard…and see what you come home with.

Sharing pests and predators aside, Midwest bees do respond to sugar syrup and pollen substitute but not as well nor as fast as they would to a thousand acres of mustard, wild flowers or blooming alfalfa. But those crops need water, and water is a premium commodity almost everywhere in California. So growers are unable, or unwilling to part with some of their almond tree water to produce honey bee forage. Especially if it’s for a short, short time. Sometimes, when pollination is done, beekeepers head back to the holding yards because going home…back to the cold and snow of March…isn’t an attractive option. After living for a month in an ocean of bloom…providing it didn’t rain, blow or get cold…the colonies are ready to go…they’ve been building, growing and doing fine for quite awhile…but back at the holding yards they came from…once again it’s lots of nothing to do or places to go.

The easy, obvious answer is that growers could be investing in crops bees can use before and after almond bloom. Maybe, if there was a Garden Of Paradise awaiting beekeepers and their bees that was full of forage, safe from pesticides and easy to get to…they could charge less for pollination because they’d have to pay less to get those winter bees thinking of spring. What do you think?

It started with Marina Marchese, who came to visit our Medina Beekeepers last week. She’s one of the best known honey tasters…or sommelier as true tasters like to be called. Marina wrote a book [...]]]> I’ve been having the most remarkable conversations with very good honey tasters. I’ve been lucky with finding honey tasters lately.

It started with Marina Marchese, who came to visit our Medina Beekeepers last week. She’s one of the best known honey tasters…or sommelier as true tasters like to be called. Marina wrote a book a bit ago…The Accidental Beekeeper…she wanted to write about honey tasting but her publisher got blown away by the fact that this very feminine, attractive young lady actually was a beekeeper. So they said…OK, you can talk about honey, but first, you have to tell us about how you became a beekeeper. So being a wise lady she did…and the little bit about honey tasting is in the back. Once discovered, you’ll see that she’s a natural when it comes to talking about tastes like citrus, spicy, dry, moldy, toffee, apple, mint, cloves, or raw bean. She has it down when it comes to describing the hundreds of tastes you’ll find when tasting all the honeys you can find. In her spare time she is the President of The Backyard Beekeepers, a dynamic group in Connecticut, and runs her own business Red Bee Honey, selling lotions and potions and such. She’s busy.

Her honey tasting events aren’t just tastings though. She uses pairings…this kind of honey with apples, that kind of honey with strong cheese, another with dried apricots, still another with walnuts….ohhh, the tastes you’ll taste when Marina comes to town.

But wait, there’s more. Imagine which wine orange blossom honey goes best with…or starthistle, or clover, or basswood. Oh my…you can’t imagine what happens when you have an exotic mix of flavors rolling around on your tongue. It is unique beyond your experience.

OK, Marina’s good. Very, very good. And getting better every day. But I recently found out there was somebody that might be better.

Meet Leonard Kurtz. Here’s a master. Leonard has worked for Sue Bee Honey for 50 years. 50 years! For a lot of that time he was the taster, the guy who confirmed that yup, that’s clover, that’s alfalfa, that’s basswood, that’s starthistle, that’s soybean, or better, that’s a clover/alfalfa blend, or maybe that’s mostly goldenrod, but there’s some aster and thistle in there too, or there’s some clover in there, but it’s really mostly tallow. He could tell in a half second. And pretty much still can, even though he’s been away from it for awhile. But then, so can a lot of beekeepers who’ve been around, and I’ll bet a lot of honey packers can too. I kind of can…certainly starthistle is outstanding, and basswood if it’s mostly basswood, alfalfa…sometimes, and clover is clover, right?

Well, I thought clover was clover until I talked to Leonard. Now I’ve known Leonard for maybe 20 years. He visits the Root Company once a year to talk to our candle people about beeswax because we purchase a lot of the stuff from his company…it’s consistently clean, the right color and priced right for what we do. But when he’s done talking to the candle folks, he almost always stays on for lunch with me. When John Root was still here the three of us would go and talk bees for an hour over a burger and fries. Leonard had the scoop on what the national honey and wax scene was, and he always had stories on what his bees were doing and questions to us on what else was going on in the industry. It was a good time.

This year we were both at the Iowa State Beekeeper’s meeting and got to talking about tasting honey, and he shared some of his experiences from his time doing that…I hadn’t realized he was in the honey part of the operation…to me he’d always been on the wax side. Well, he was telling me he, and others at the plant could tell the difference between white sweet clover honey from South Dakota, Montana and Idaho…really. Maybe it’s the soil, he said, or maybe each place had something different blooming at the same time that altered the flavor just a tiny bit…enough to make it identifiable. Whatever it was, he could tell.

But wait, there’s still more. Not only can Leonard tell you what kind of honey he’s tasting, or what the blend is in the bottle…he can tell you, within a half point, what the moisture content is just by the way it feels. Really!

Now that’s a skill I’ll probably never attain. I’d like to try though. So I’m going to do some tests…make some changes to honey I have…add a little water…just a tiny bit…to see if I can tell. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, if you want to know more about varietal, or artisan honeys, check our Marina’s book The Accidental Beekeeper, or mine on the same subject, The Honey Handbook. I’ll bet you’ve got a lot to learn.

I don’t think you would either.

His philosophy is that everything he wants to do is OK, the rest of the world be damned. He is profane, belligerent, a bully, a bigot and stubborn. But he is not dumb.
Rules and regulations, laws, ordinances [...]]]> I don’t like one of my neighbors very much.

I don’t think you would either.

His philosophy is that everything he wants to do is OK, the rest of the world be damned. He is profane, belligerent, a bully, a bigot and stubborn. But he is not dumb.
Rules and regulations, laws, ordinances and codes are meant for other people. When someone gets in his way they are bullied, pushed, pulled, threatened or lawyered out of his way. Bullying is his best weapon…he’s short, wide, loud, pushy and vulgar. He doesn’t talk but gets in your face and shouts. His paranoia doesn’t allow him to believe anybody would talk to him. If bullying doesn’t work he has an attorney who is his second line of defense. This guy is a character out of a Bogart movie. He’s the classic ambulance chaser. No ethics, scruples, personality, respect, empathy, sympathy, remorse or fear. But he’s not dumb.

This neighbor from hell moved to Ohio from West Virginia twenty plus years ago. Since then he has been run out of about a dozen communities for flagrant violations of all manner of debt issues, zoning violations, land uses, business practices, environmental abuses, and being just plain ornery. I suspect he left West Virginia for the same reasons. I’m pretty sure they don’t want him back.

Some of the trash buyers at the auction.

What does he do to get himself into such trouble you ask? Basically, where ever he is he runs a junk yard. Old cars, bulldozers, scrap iron, tractors and farm machinery, truck trailers and truck frames and cabs and tires, tools, motors, trucks, truck parts, car parts, machine parts, junk, junk and more junk. And lots of it. Lots and lots of it. Piles and piles of it. Truck trailer’s full of it. Temporary buildings full of it, tents full of it, a porch, garage and house full of it. But that’s not enough so he opened a business in town for more of it…with even more cars and trucks and parts and pieces there. Sometimes, he brings home a junk car and smashes it with his bulldozer…flattens it like a pancake, loads it on one of his trucks and hauls it…somewhere. What happens to the resident liquids that were in that car remains a mystery.

The municipal code in town doesn’t allow a collection of wrecks at his garage on a very busy intersection so he fronts it as a place to sell or repair those cars and trucks and trailers and parts and pieces. Understandably, the city doesn’t seem to agree with that interpretation of the law and has been after him since day one…a few years ago…to clean up his act and get rid of the junk. It’s taken that long to get him to move…recall that attorney whom I’m sure was initially a partner in the firm Dewey Cheatem and Howe but now is with Sueum, Takeit and Runne.

When the city really gets on his case, he moves his junk out here, and when the township threatens him he moves his junk into town. It’s a game he plays and everybody knows…everybody knows.

Tractors on display. These are the whole tractors...there a piles and piles of parts somewhere around here.

Out here in the country the township Trustees have disagreed with his interpretation of the local zoning ordinances as well. Here, we’re zoned residential or agricultural. Home or farm…or both, but not a junk yard. To push the limits of that ordinance he actually purchased some animals. Sheep, cows, chickens, pigs. None of them have permanent housing, rather they have tents that aren’t as weather proof as the trailers he stores his junk in. Those trailers, he says, are equipment storage, feed storage and tool storage. I pity the animals. The local SPCA hasn’t had luck yet with this problem either.

To hide his mess from the world he built a landscape berm around the periphery of his four acre plot…a mound about four feet high. Volunteer poplars grew on top of some of it. In summer you can see most of the stuff inside, and in winter everything. He’s hiding nothing.

Recently he tried a different trick. He applied for a zoning variance to allow him to park some number of trucks on his lot…a variance not uncommon for part time farmers here who have a job away from home…say construction or hauling grain. But to be able to do that the zoning folks made him get rid of most of the junk. The piles and trailers and tractors and more piles and motors and stuff….hence the auction. Most everything must go. Not the animals though…this is a farm after all.

Winter Housing in Northeast Ohio

We met a couple of years ago, but he doesn’t remember me at all. But he knows all the rest of our neighbors who have been, for years, complaining about this ongoing crime. And they all came to the auction. We looked around…measuring the piles, counting the trailers, watching the crowd, listening to the auctioneers, wondering why people were paying good money for trash. Someone should tell their neighbors what will soon appear on the horizon. After a while my neighbors grew weary of this drama and wandered home but I stayed around. In fact, I hung around this faux farmer wondering if he’d say something interesting. I wasn’t disappointed.

He was standing near one of the two active auctioneering rings talking to a fat guy in a suit that didn’t fit with a haircut that was right out of hedge trimming 101, with a briefcase no less. Guess who…

I kind of edged in behind them as they talked and watched. And what I heard was scary…He said to this fat guy…OK, right over there go the 150 hogs, and back there, where the cows are now, another 100. This’ll show those damn neighbors. I’ll stink’em out.

I’m not sure of the confined animal feeding operation laws in Ohio yet….animals per acre, drainage, manure disposition, flies, more flies, odors. But you just know I’m going to find out.

This isn’t going to be good, I think.