Apiaries and Bees for Communities

YYC Bees- Media Advisory

bees4communities — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:24:41 +0000

May 22, 2013

Contact: Stacey Cedergren

Calgary is a-BUZZ on Urban Beekeeping

Apiaries and Bees for Communities (A.B.C) has been dedicated to offering educational programming in urban beekeeping in Calgary for four years. This year will be the biggest year in urban beekeeping yet. Bringing in 96 colonies of bees to Calgary, hosting the Day of the Honeybee in conjunction with Hillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers Market, launching the Bees4Communities Program in partnership with Fairmont Palliser Hotel, Forage Foods, Calgary Food Tours and Downtown Food, as well as debuting our Home2Hive Bicycle Tours throughout the summer.

What?

We would like to invite you to attend:

A.B.C’s Honeybee Distribution Day on May 26^th from 11-3pm

- We will be distributing over 96 colonies to over 100 urban beekeepers and doing a hive demonstration!

Day of the Honeybee event at HSCA Farmers Market on May 29^th from 3-7, with a FREE documentary showing of Queen of the Sun from 7:30-9:30pm.

- We will be giving away honey, information about beekeeping and honeybees, a fun photo booth and honeybee crafts for the kids.

Home2hive Bicycle Tour is a fun bi-monthly after work event that allows up to 10 people to come and see an inside look at urban beekeeping here in Calgary. Viewing yards and opening up urban hives, these bicycle tours allow for Calgarians to check off beekeeping from their bucket-list. Once a month, there are Special Foodie Bicycle Tours, where we team-up with our B4C partners to offer an unique experience of Bees, Cocktails and Canapé’s. More information at www.backyardbees.ca/courses

Other Programs:

We are launching our Bees4Communities Program, where A.B.C manages honeybees for Calgary Food Tours, Fairmont Palliser Hotel, Forage Foods, and Downtown Food. They receive monthly report cards on their hives’ health as well as gain the honey surplus to share with their clients. In return, these colonies are used as educational tools in training the public in urban beekeeping in A.B.C’s Home2Hive Bicycle Tours. More information about these programs, and others like it, can be found here: http://www.backyardbees.ca/bees/b4c

National Day of the Honeybee in Calgary- Queen of the Sun Doc Showing

bees4communities — Sun, 12 May 2013 01:34:10 +0000

In 2010, approximately 70 Municipal Governments and many Provincial Governments in Canada officially issued Proclamations and dozens of celebrations, festivals and events took place across Canada. The first ever “Day of the Honey Bee” was a huge success. It attracted quite a bit of media attention and as a result, even more people were made aware of the threats to the Honey Bee. Now, more people than ever can appreciate how incredibly important these wonderful pollinators are to our way of life.

This year, over 150 Municipal governments have issued Proclamations for “Day of the Honey Bee” May 29, 2011. That is more than double the success we saw last year. Numerous Provincial Governments are also declaring the day. Eventually, it will become a federal day of Canada, like Flag Day, Daffodil Day or St. Patrick’s Day. It currently remains as a Motion in the House of Commons.

We are following suit here in Calgary!

We are teaming up the Hillhurst-sunnyside Farmers Market to host not only the First Outdoor Special Market of the 2013 season, but the un-official Day of the Honeybee! We will be offering honey sticks, a photo booth, information about honeybees, and a costume competition during the markety from 3-7pm. Then at 7:30pm, we will be offering an opportunity for you to watch the film, Queen of the Sun for FREE with popcorn and other snacks offered! Come on down and enjoy what urban agriculture and beekeeping has to offer!

Plan-Bee Swarm Catchers Training Day- Want bees? Come and get them!

bees4communities — Sun, 12 May 2013 00:47:13 +0000

So, you wanted bees this season, but were late on the ball on getting those bees ordered. Now you are thinking “how the heck can I get me some bees?”. Well, we have the answer for you!

JOIN PLAN-BEE SWARM CATCHERS GROUP

If you are interested in joining the Plan-Bee Swarm Catchers Group, do the following:

If you would like to join us in our training session, then you can register for the Training Day, set for June 7th, here.

We will be doing the following:

- Building swarm traps. If you would like to take one home, they are $20 each.

- Learning how to CATCH A SWARM

- FAQ’s when arriving to a yard, how to interact with the public, and how to participate in the program

- Receive fliers to have on hand when you do a removal, as well as honey sticks to sweeten the experience of the home-owners you are interacting with.

2013 CHCP Honeybees are Coming!

bees4communities — Sun, 12 May 2013 00:44:46 +0000

Hey everyone! THE BEES ARE COMING!

If you ordered bees through the Community Hive Collaborative Purchase of Honeybees and Equipment, you can expect to get your bees on the 26th of May! We are very excited to be inviting in 96 colonies of bees to the city of Calgary, as well as 18 other colonies for beekeepers in the surrounding area. So many bees, and all of them coming from loving and reliable beekeeping outfits in BC and Sask this year. BC’s bees are coming from Bill Stagg of www.sweetacreapiaries.ca and the Sask. bees are coming from www.tonylalondesales.ca.

You will be contacted in the next week about the location of hive pick-up. Here are general details:

Great news! Your Bee Nuc(s) will be ready for pick-up on Sunday, May 26 at Chiron Farm

This year there are two times for picking up your bees.

1. Pick-up & Go: if you simply want to pick up your bees and be on your way, please arrive at Chiron Farm between 11am and 12pm on Sunday. Recommended for seasoned beekeepers.

2. Hiving Demo: if you would like to see Eliese’s hiving demo, please arrive at Chiron Farm at 1pm on Sunday. We will be finished up and have you on your way by 3pm. Recommended for 1st timers and those wanting a refresher.

Please note that there is no street parking at Chiron Farms, only a limited parking lot.

Any equipment that you did not receive on the CHCP Equipment distribution will be made available for you on the 26th. Please bring protective equipment and wratchet straps if you are expecting a 9F Colony from Tony Lalonde.

If you are on the hunt for bees, you can join us for the Swarm Catchers Training Session on June 7th. More information about how to participate here!

Home2Hive Bicycle Tours- Hive inspections with A.B.C

bees4communities — Sun, 12 May 2013 00:04:28 +0000

A.B.C is proud to launch our first year of offering the Home2Hive Bicycle Tours of A.B.C’s honeybee colonies. This year, we have set up all of our beehives on bicycle routes! With the excellent feedback from the Calgary public, we had over 150 yards made available to us to keep bees in. We chose from these yards the ones that would most easily be kept by bicycle: our goal for 2013 to decrease emissions in our urban beekeeping experience and increase access accessibility to YOU!

If you are interested in joining us, you can register to participate here. We are only making these tours available to 10 people at a time and all tours will either begin near Shouldice Park or in Inglewood.

Home2Hive Tours

You must bring your snacks and a bicycle, and everything else (protective equipment and refreshments) will be offered. The price to participate in a General Tour is only $50! Register here.

Foodie Home2Hive Experiences: Bees, Cocktails and Canapés

Meet us on your bike (muster points revealed to those who register) and come with us to experience Bees, Cocktails and Canapés. we will be doing hive inspections, stopping off at local restaurants that support urban beekeeping, and try local meads (honey wine) and hive based cocktails. You must be over the age of 18 to participate and the tours are limited to 10 people each tour! To register, please click here.

Fairmont Pallisers Honeybees

bees4communities — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:35:34 +0000

On April 26, the Fairmont Palliser’s two bee hives were moved back to their urban setting. Nestled in the quite community of Inglewood just east of the Fairmont Palliser, the ‘Honey Bee Hotel’ and ‘Miss Bee Haven’, as they are affectionately known by our colleagues, survived the winter with tremendous success. Under the maintenance of Eliese Watson of Apiaries and Bees for Communities, the two hives are ready for another year of honey production downtown Calgary. Executive Chef Paul Peddle is already planning on ways to incorporate this year’s honey surplus into our menus in the Oak Room lounge and the Rimrock Restaurant. Last fall guests were treated with our very own honey comb on our charcuterie boards, which was extremely popular. A true testament to Chef Peddle’s commitment to building a menu around locally sourced sustainable items. This will be the Fairmont Palliser’s third season with bees and we once again are buzzing with excitement for what the season has to offer, hopefully with a few less bees stings.

As members of the Bees4Communities Project, A.B.C will be taking care of these colonies and using them as educational programming centres for new and budding urban beekeepers here in Calgary. As a part of the program, the Fairmont Palliser receives report cards on their 2 colonies development monthly. See the report cards for April below:

Honeybee Hotel colony:PAL_HBHRC_April2013

MissBeeHaven colony: PAL_MBHRC_April2013

A.B.C at Telus Spark! Science Centre

bees4communities — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:24:53 +0000

Over the weekend of April 20^th & 21^st Apiaries and Bees for Communities was invited to participate in the Telus Spark! Science Centre’s Special Event Weekend. The interactive, ‘Dig In’ weekend focused on a wide range of urban gardening topics from, vermicomposting to vegetable planting and, of course, urban pollinators!

A.B.C. had a blast teaching over 3000 kids and adults about the different species of bumblebees and solitary bees and had demonstration hives on hand to show where these little creatures live. The hands-on event allowed participants to examine real magnified bees, try on bee suits and see flowers through a bee’s eye. There were a lot of great questions about honeybees too, such as; How do I start a hive? Where do queen bees come from? and Can you tickle the bees? …the answer to that last one, by the way, is YES!

This event was a great way for A.B.C. to reach out to Calgarians to dispel myths and fears about honeybees and to teach them more about how to support urban pollinators.

A.B.C. has more events like this lined up for the summer season and is looking for volunteers to help out. If you are interested in expanding or sharing your knowledge of honeybees and pollinators in a fun, social environment contact Stacey at Stacey@backyardbees.ca for more information on how to get involved.

Dandelion Flow and Your Bees- #3 Honey Production

bees4communities — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:19:59 +0000

The Dandelion flow produces a very particular and delicious honey that you can selectively harvest. If you are interested in harvesting dandelion honey, now is the time to begin taking note.

How to Harvest Dandelion Honey

You will want to inspect your colony and take note of your combs that are already full of honey and capped, this will be honey from last year. I like to mark with a pencil on the top-bars so it is easy to remember on next inspection. What I like to do is to super my colonies as mentioned here but instead of empty frames, use empty fully-pulled combs in the bottom box, no frames with any honey stores in them. This means that the bottom box is ready for the nectar flow and the easiest to access by the bees foraging for storage. I want to keep the top box honey full with the brood. this way, when I come back at the end of the flow in 10-14 days, I am able to mark and harvest or wait until they are 60+% capped.

How to Harvest Pollen

Pollen trapping is done in the spring when you have very strong colonies with good pollen stores already in place. You dont want to keep the pollen trap on for longer than 7 days during the honey flow, and unload them daily. You can see how much pollen that can be taken in this video from Georgia:

How a pollen trap works?

Here are some good illustrations and detailed instructions on how pollen traps work.

How to build your own?

Click here for info

SWARM SUPPRESSION

If your goal is honey production, it is very important that you make sure that your brood nest is expanded enough that you have no concerns of honey locking and your queen has room to lay. Currently, your brood nest is on the top box. Eventually you will open the top entrance (end of dandelion flow) and begin supering up. You are going to want to make sure, that when doing this, you remove much the honey stores from the bottom 2 boxes and insert empty drawn combs, so the queen continues to have room. Moving the honey up to the supers will aid in moving the bees up too. Always add filled frames in to the middle of the supered box and never super without moving combs from the boxes below up. This will encourage your bees to move up quicker.

Dandelion Flow and Your Bees- #2 Bee Production

bees4communities — Sat, 11 May 2013 21:56:53 +0000

The dandelion flow is a great time to split and or re-queen your colonies if you haven’t done it already! By now, your colonies should be strong and resilient, your brood nests are growing exponentially, and the food available to your bees is blossoming! So, get your bees to become plentiful! If you have decided that your goal with beekeeping this year is to expand your apiary, or to replace colonies lost, or to just get your colony growing quickly, here are some tips.

SWARM SUPPRESSION

This is the time of year that you should be considering your hives size and potential for swarming to happen this June/July. So, now is a great time to make room , split, or grow your colonies.

Expanding your brood nest

TBH’s

Top bar management is very different than that of a Lang this time of year because you don’t have to be concerned with heat loss in the brood nest because of the linear hive design. The heat is evenly dispersed across the whole hive because the heat rises to fill the whole top of the extending hive body. So, here are some steps that you can take to encourage wax production in a TBH and therefore more bees

1- Make sure the brood nest is pushed toward the entrance of your hive. If it is currently in the middle or the back, push it forward. Always have 2 empty bars at the front of your hive, the bees will daisy chain from the 3rd bar to the entrance for the movement of nectar forcing them to build comb, as well, it will offer ventilation space for the bees to keep hive temperature down. This is done all year long.

2- Once the brood nest is moved to the front of the hive with 2 empty bars in place, you are going to inspect the brood, and the bars that have capped brood on them (over 60%) you are going to place empty bars in between. This will not only encourage your bees to continue to build straight comb between the 2 drawn bars, but as the bees emerge from the capped cells, they will build comb quickly in between so the nurse bees can feed the newly lain eggs in the recently vacated combs. It is important that you do the checkerboarding between capped cells because temperature changes in the brood nest from the seperating of combs will not effect the brood in a negative way.

Langstroth

If you are a second year beekeeper, you may not have frames of comb available to you, or you are looking to pull from foundation or foundationless frames so that you can not only increase your bee production, but the comb that you are going to use for honey production in July (sweet clover nectar flow). You have a few options.

TO DO: Close the inner cover so the bees are forced to use the bottom board entrance if you haven’t already. This will force the queen brood nest lower as the heat in the colony increases, and also force the bees to festoon down to get the nectar from the foraging bees to storage.

Here are some considerations on how your hive should/can look.

1) You currently only have 1 brood box of bees with 10 frames- With foundation or existing combs

You are going to want to add another brood box below your bees this flow, even if your brood nest is only 4 frames large. You are going to want to be smart about how you do this though.

Take the middle frames of the brood nest and move them to the middle of your bottom brood box. (Move frames 4 and 5 to bottom box)
Take frames 8,9 and 2 an place them beside the frames below. Fill box outside 4 spaces with empty comb
Compress the frames of the top and bottom boxes to the middle so that it is like so: New Frame (NF)

Top Box: nf-nf-1-3-6-7–10-nf-nf

Bottom Box: nf-nf-nf-2-4-5-8-9-nf-nf

This keeps the brood nest together, and also offers the insulating properties of the remaining periphery honey stores to keep the colony warm. The bees will build comb fast this way, but you need to have the inner cover closed or else the heat loss can stress your bees and brood development.

MAKING A SPLIT

Langstroth

NOTE:

- If you are going to have your bees raise their own queen, be prepared to see queen cells produced in the split within 48 hours, then do not inspect again for 11 days. You dont want to disturb your queen cells during development until they are on their final stages of pupation. When you get in there 14 days after making the split, you will see many capped queen cells. You can cage these cells and save the virgins for members of the community. If not, you will have your queens fight it out and have a queen right colony and ideally, a mated queen between 20-26 days after the split was made. More information about Queen Rearing here.

- If you are going to add a mated queen acquired from another beekeeper, you will need to leave the colony queenless for a minimum of 24 hours. Then you are going to remove the nurse bees with the queen in the cage and set the queen in your split within her cage, let the bees eat the candy to release her. Inspect your colony 4 days after you inserted her in to be sure that she has been released and accepted. Look closely for emergency cells. If they are found, your colony didn’t accept your new queen and you are in need of a new one or a frame of eggs from your parent colony.

Top Bar Hives

Same action as a Lang Split, but with 2 empty bars in front of the added brood nest.

Dandelion Flow and Your Bees- #1 Wax Production

bees4communities — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:14:41 +0000

So, today (May 10, 2013) is the official launch of the dandelion flow here in Calgary, the first big nectar flow for our honeybees. If you are out of town, give it a couple of days, yours will be coming. The city has everything come in a bit sooner than other locations in the Province because of the micro-climate that the buildings and development offers.

So, what now? As the saying goes: Year 1= wax production, Year 2= Produce bees, Year 3= Produce honey. So you need to decide, if you haven’t already, what your goals are with your honeybees this year.

1) Need More Wax?

Now this isnt saying that you cant produce honey surplusses in all of these years, but it is saying that you are going to have a greater honey surplus once you have the equipment and the means to get your bees healthy and growing over time.

Your bees should be booming now, and this always includes your brood nest. This is the time of year that you should be paying close attention to your colony’s development and growth. You will have lots of young bees in your hive right now, and with that, a growing population of foraging bees. The dandelion flow is the best time to push your bees to build up their wax production! Young bees produce the most wax, but also, the bees need a surplus of pollen and nectar to encourage this development.

So, how can you encourage your bees to produce more wax?

TBH’s

Langstroth

Here are some considerations on how your hive should/can look.

1) You currently only have 1 brood box of bees with 10 frames- With foundation

You are going to want to add another brood box below your bees this flow, even if your brood nest is only 4 frames large. You are going to want to be smart about how you do this though.

Take the middle frames of the brood nest and move them to the middle of your bottom brood box. (Move frames 4 and 5 to bottom box)
Take frames 8,9 and 2 an place them beside the frames below. Fill box outside 4 spaces with empty comb
Compress the frames of the top and bottom boxes to the middle so that it is like so: New Frame (NF)

Top Box: nf-nf-1-3-6-7–10-nf-nf

Bottom Box: nf-nf-nf-2-4-5-8-9-nf-nf

2) You currently only have 1 brood box of bees with 10 frames- Going foundationless

You have the same conditions as above, but foundationless, so you are wanting to be sure that the new comb built is straight. Do the same as above with the brood nest, but your hive numbering is going to be as follows:

Top Box: nf-1-nf-3-6-7-nf-10-nf

Bottom Box: nf-2-nf-4-5-8-nf-9-nf

I hope that this helps you in getting your hives prepared for the coming summer months!

Eliese