This is round two of this entry…I had a beautiful one all ready and then just as I was getting up to get my flash drive the power went out…literally the same moment. I didn’t have the heart to do it again that day.
My mom wanted a more detailed description of the beekeeping activities and the bees in general so here it is. Ill talk a bit about the program and then some about what I have been doing with the women´s comíte in Rio Negro, the community that is 8 km away by field and so much further by transportation.
So I work and everyone in Paraguay works with Africanized bees, these are those ones that are the fright of the bee industry of the US and general population, ´killer bees.´ Obviously with no experience with non-Africanized bees I can´t detail the comparison that greatly but from the information that I have received and my experience with Africanized ones here in PY I have some thoughts. Africanized bees have some benefits and some draw-backs, the former first – they are more defensive, sting more, can´t live in cold if you are in the northern US for example and have a tendency to swarm…that’s all or in my opinion…good things about them – they are more defensive so stronger hives so less susceptible to disease, insects etc…produce more honey and more brood, live well in hot climates obviously, and the tendency to swarm is good if you are a poor upstart beekeeper b-c you don’t have to pay for bees you just find them…Ill get to that soon.
So in Rio Negro and with PC PY beekeeping, we focus on starting beekeeping to bring additional sources of income…though a lot of it is just used as autoconsumption and not for sale. Honey is a pretty expensive product here and there are the other hive products as well being sold, pollen, propolis and royal jelly – as an export it has not really taken off but currently you would get a better price domestically then for export anyway on honey at least. So in the vein of starting beekeeping, we shy away from trying to get people to invest in modern beekeeping equipment specifically, Langstroth hives, the white boxes you all know that have frames with wire, which you would buy stamped wax for and need a centrifuge to harvest. We teach the construction of Kenyan Top Bar hives, ´bateas´ which are made for African bees so also suited to a more aggressive personality. The biggest difference is, is that instead of centrifuging the honey out and not damaging the comb, you cut the honey out and the comb so bees need to constantly rebuild the wax. This limits the honey production because it takes like 8 liters of honey to make 1 liter of wax, in energy etc…but for new beekeepers the price of modern equipo is a huge impediment. So with the comíte, we built a small top bar hive, only 10 bars, an example and to use in a trasiego (wild swarm capture).
After a couple of excursions to find hives, the one they decided to try was nice and hard…it was in the ground or more like in the hollow of the roots of a guava tree (live tree) under it. Nice hard wood to cut through and nice and dirty and dark making it almost impossible to recover good panels or find the queen. In a trasiego, you want to recover panels with cria, brood, to tie to the top bars so as to encourage the bees to stay and the smell is helpful as well and secondly or more primarily find the queen, because if she stays then the hive will stay as well. To do all of this you want to open the hive up, with a little bit of smoke but little, so you can see in it and so you can easily cut the panels off the sides or the wall etc…In this case, some of the roots were hacked out and we dug about to at least have some visual of the panels. The whole thing was too deep and dark for it to truly be successful. Basically, I could put my whole arm inside the whole with a machete and then touch the horizontal width of the hive – so most of the bees and definitely the queen hid and I didn’t see them. I cut some of the panels, the clean ones with brood on them to tie them to bars and then took out the rest of the other panels, some honey etc…one must destroy the hive to induce them to move to the new box or they will just stay with the panels….hoping that the destroyed hive and that the tied panels in the new hive would get the queen to move up into the box we left it overnight.
The next day, I went back to check with all the expectation that the bees would have left to find a new home…what I did find was all of the bees had indeed left the hive but were coating the side of the tree, about an inch deep of them and a meter tall stripe on the trunk. So with this opportunity for the queen to be out in the open and for me to see her, I started working with them again without any smoke. Two things, I assumed that the queen was there because there is not other reason for them to all be out in the open, they were probably waiting for scout bees that were looking for new locations, the queen attracts the rest of the bees with her scent and send signals with pheromones. Second the lack of smoke – the bees in a trasiego are very calm because once you start destroying the hive and removing panels they are just confused and also don’t have much to defend so smoke just is an annoyance for you and breathing it in. I start taking handfuls of bees looking in them for the queen, she is longer and has a fatter abdomen also runs really fast, and then dropping the by the handful into the box.
I only got stung twice in the hand and that was more due to me grabbing a bee the wrong way not because they intentionally did it. Sadly, I didn’t find the queen and since I had to leave Rio Negro that day I don’t know if the trasiego was successful…I can only hope that I grabbed the queen accidentally and dropped her in. Note – when you do find the queen, you put her in a match box to prevent her from swarming, have the box a tiny bit open so the workers can feed her and put it in the new hive. Her smell will get the bees to stay with her and start working there and then they will eat her out of the box in three days…she might stay in the nice new dry box or she might leave after that but there is more success if you put her in that matchbox.
Sorry this was a long entry but it had a lot of information. Everything is well here…I hope to move into my small house soon – just across a field from my contact – they are doing some work on it right now. Semana Santa, Easter week, is coming up and that is sure to be exciting.
Miss you all!
Marcy
