July 9, 2011 Part I

11:00 am Oxford Honey & Supplies Visit

I went to visit Oxford Honey and Supplies in Burgessville this morning.  I had just been there a few days prior to buy more supers (honey boxes) since the bees are extremely industrious these days.  They told me that John, the owner and bee keeper of 100 hives did chats about bees every Saturday at 11 am.  So I went to learn more...there is so much more!  John has a screened in viewing area so people can watch without feeling frightened of the bees.  Today there were 2 older tourist being shown around Southern Ontario by a friend, another brand new bee keeper from Dorchester and a father with two small children.

John opened up a hive that was performing really well and proceeded to show us the frames with capped honey, the brood areas, pollen areas, drone cells...he poked a few drone cells open to check the larvae for Varrao mites (the scourge of the bee keeping industry).  We found one larvae that looked suspicious so saved it for a closer look inside the store.  We were shown an Australian queen in another hive who was not perfoming well...this hive had no extra box on it and the one we opened first had 4 extra boxes.  Then we were shown an Ontario bred queen...tiger striped and very beautiful.  He answered question after question and the session lasted 2 hours.  Amazing...and I wanted more.  We went into the store to check on the drone larvae and sure enough, it was a mite.  A little round red insect that you can see with the naked eye.  They like to hang in with the drone larvae since they are in the cells the longest before coming out.  These mites latch onto the backs of the bees and suck.  The worst they do is weaken the bees and leave opening for viruses to take hold and if they are not controlled can destroy an entire colony by weakening it.  More on that story later...I promise the information posting is coming!

While we were in the store, a neighbouring bee keeper came in for supplies.  Chris started with two hives last year and now has about 60 hives!  He goes to markets with an observation hive that he built that has two frames on top of each other enclosed in plexiglas both sides.  He challenged me to find the queen...which is an easy task when you are standing in a cool store studying only 1500 bees behind plexi!  I found her very quickly...the same cannot be said for my foray this afternoon as you shall see.