Journal Entries W11

7/20/16-Internship-Today Kim and I went out on apiary inspections locally. It was nice to go and meet beekeepers that live near Amherst MA and see why they have bees. Some of these individuals keep bees because they believe that it is a must to continue promoting bees and their benefits. Others do it for pollination at their homestead. While some do it for the love of keeping bees and reaping the benefits of honey when it is time to harvest. We went to five different apiaries today each one was unique and had its own personality. The one apiary that stands out the most in my mind was at a home in Greenfield. The lady owned three hives and wanted them to be inspected. We started working with the hives and realized that these hives were not very well managed. Now it is not this woman’s fault that they were not managed well. What I started noticing over the weeks is the people who own one or two hives and are doing it because it’s a new project are actually the ones to bring in the diseases and mismanagement this is because there is not correct information that is readily available for all beekeepers. Though you may take a class and learn beekeeping when you are faced with issues and (you) as a new beekeeper don’t know what to do it can be very stressful and through mismanagement diseases may occur that may spread to apiaries in the area. We ended up working on this apiary for about two hours managing and putting the hives in order so that they can prosper. This experienced really showed me the steep learning curve of beekeeping and that there has to be a way for information to be spread to new beekeepers who don’t know when something is going wrong.

7/21/16-Internship-Today Kim and I worked in the UMass apiary and split up some hives that we had as well as managed hives. Splitting up hive is really fun this is because you get to look into a single hive and literally create two to three hives from a single hive. I think this is one of the beauties of beekeeping that as a beekeeper it is possible to create more hives. Splitting a hive Kim and I took two brood frames a honey frame and pollen frame and a drawn out frame and put it in a smaller hive called a Nuc we then re-queened the Nuc and created a new hive.

7/22/16-Internship-Today I went through some hives very slowly to really try and recognize certain things. I think this is one of the challenges of beekeeping. Being able to identify and correctly figure out what is wrong or with a hive. I took all of today to really try and figure out issues in the hives. Ken Worchal who is a senior beekeeping inspector then checked to see how I did. I correctly identified the virus European Foul Brood(EFB) as well as a hive that has two queens; Somehow living together in a hive.