 So you might have noticed I slightly changed the title from the original. The grant was developing a method to capture and authenticate single varietal honey on diverse landscapes. But I want to encompass more of what we actually studied and learned. And our whole purpose is not just to get a single varietal honey, but to improve our pollination. Because we rely on honey bees not only for the apples and the pumpkins, but for all the other small fruits that we grow on our property. So today I am going to discuss the best practices for a small farm and give you a little background information on Maggie and me and Curtis Orchard, which is where most of our research took place. Also explain some of our inspiration and how we began this project and then our research conclusions and how this can relate to you if you also have a small scale farm. This is Maggie Wachter. She is the owner of Second Nature Honey in Urbana, Illinois. And she is a commercial beekeeper for about eight years. She has about 30 hives on five farms throughout Champaign County and also one in Chicago. And she keeps hers at lots of different properties. She is a master beekeeper certified by the University of Florida. She's also an experienced honey judge. She teaches beginner beekeeping classes and advanced topics through our local community college and also through our food co-op and other locations. And she, again, is the owner of Second Nature Honey, which sells at retail markets and in the past she's also sold at farmers markets. A little bit about me. I began beekeeping in 2009 in Paraguay, South America. I went down there as a Peace Corps volunteer and I was in a crop extension program but I really was interested in helping them with their honey bees as part of my projects. And they have Africanized bees down there. And I'm sure you've heard lots of scary stories about the killer bees. Well, they're not quite as scary as all of that, but they tend to be slightly more aggressive like, I wouldn't work with them with short sleeves as you see me pictured here. I would definitely be completely covered up. And then in 2011 when I returned home, I started beekeeping with my grandfather at Curtis Orchard. And we've had a range of 10 to 20 hives. It just depends on the year. So that's a little bit about my experience. Now a little bit about Curtis Orchard, which is where the pollination research took place. We have an 80 acre apple orchard, pumpkin patch and entertainment farm in Southwest Champaign. This farm began as a hobby by my grandparents, Paul and Joyce Curtis. And today is a must visit attraction hosting over 170,000 visitors annually. And we are open from end of July through December. And we retail all our honey pumpkins and apples directly from our store. This is our farm market here. This is our apple orchard. This is about 18 acres. And then the pumpkins you see here, this year, are here. They rotate between corn and soybeans. So sometimes they're a different location. That gives you a little idea. This is the retail market, also cafe and bakery. And then beyond here we have kids activities and then there's parking. We have, I'm sure a lot of farms look like that where you said, oh we need a little more space. So this is a drone footage, which is kind of neat to see. This is the original building right here. It was a hog shed because this was a hog and grain farm originally. And that's when my grandpa decided, hey, it can't do much with 80 acres and hogs. He's not going to support even one family, let alone now three families. So that's the original building. All right, our inspiration then came because Maggie and I, we just kept running into each other a time or two. And I knew she was a beekeeper and so we kept talking to each other and she thought, you know, wouldn't it be great to try and actually capture a varietal honey and then be able to identify that. And we talked also about how farms have changed over the years. You used to have a lot of, you know, maybe size of our farm, but they would not just grow corn and soybeans. They had cows and chickens and several different commodities. Whereas now that you see fewer farms, but the acreage of each farm is larger per farm. This is a little picture of what you used to see in the 1900s. Tobok Farm had chickens, milk, cow and corn. Actually had, grew five of the 17 major commodities. And now today you have two commodities per farm. And I would say that there's two commodities because of crop rotation. You might just have one if you didn't have to have crop rotation. But with that change you've seen natural habitats for wild bees decline because of this monoculture. Corn and wheat are wind pollinated so they don't rely on honey bees and you lose these wildflower barriers between the crops. And also there's been an increase in pest and diseases with bees which has declined natural populations of colonies as well. So this has led to a transition to need to have more managed colonies. And our, back in the day even, farmers used to pay beekeepers even if it was just in kind, or beekeepers used to pay farmers to keep their bees on the properties in order to, because they wanted to reap the benefit of the honey and the farmers were thrilled because that would allow for some more pollination. But now, there we go. Okay, so our goal became to investigate sustainable pollination techniques supporting small-scale agriculture while authenticating resulting varietal honey. Now, varietal honey is often sought after for unique properties like Tupelo honey which doesn't crystallize and Himalayan red honey if you've ever heard of that. It has hallucinogenic properties because of the source or for flavors like orange blossom honey or sour wood honey. Those are single varietals. Now, the best way to get a single varietal is to have monoculture actually of that source. But layers of flavor result because of diverse nectar sources. In fact, we won Best Tasting Honey in the Midwest in the Center for Honey Bee Research Black Jar International Honey Contest which is, I sent our honey to North Carolina and it won of this International Contest. So I'm very excited. I don't know about this year. I sent it again. So if you are going for a good pollination on a small farm you really want to go for good honey because if you have lots of nectar sources you're going to get better pollination because your hives are going to be stronger because the bees have multiple sources of which to collect nectar and pollen throughout the year and you're not going to be feeding them as much with sugar water. Maggie's tried to capture black walnut honey, pure black walnut honey because she put her hives right next to a grove. But since the bees are attracted to multiple sources and black walnut may not be their ideal source they went elsewhere. They went lots of different places. So we didn't have pure black walnut honey. In fact the honey, the varietal honey that you buy like Tupelo honey is actually sent to a lab for verification and we wanted to do some of our, they call it centrifuging where you actually extract the pollen grains from the honey in order to verify it. We were not able to get that in depth. We tried and we could not extract it. I think it's a much more complicated process than that but what we were able to do was authenticate using a microscope by comparing the grains that we found on the bees or the collecting pollen grains that the bees were collecting and then taking a flower source and looking at the flower source under the microscope. Originally we couldn't get our camera to work, well we had a camera, we were learning how to use the camera as well. So we sketched our pollen grains originally. But this is a red delicious flower and that is the pollen grain that we sketched and this is Maggie showing you some pollen grains that we were able to capture with the camera. There's some black raspberry pollen grains. And then we also used a book to compare what we were seeing because sometimes you get a little dust fragments and you're saying, is this really a grain? This doesn't look quite right. Let's see. So this is our pollen trap. Now I don't know if you've ever used a pollen trap but the way it works is you have this little board here that moves up and down. So the bees for now can just enter normally and you're not collecting any pollen. Well when you decide that you want to collect pollen you drop the board down. The bees then have to go through these little cone shaped entrances that are mesh and it will brush all the pollen grains off their legs. So this is important and this is the way we can tell oh what are they collecting? And we can look at this under the microscope and you see that there's multiple sources of pollen grains because they're all different colors here. And it gives you an idea too of what the nectar is flow right is at that time because you get a lot. We would open it for 24 hour period and then close it again and then you could compare it every two weeks or however often that we did it. And this worked really well with our program because we actually got involved with the University of Maryland and they had high, let's get high scales, take bee samples and pollen collection once a month and for six months. So how it worked is they, we would send the bees off for diagnosis for varroa mite and nosema counts and they would send us back a report comparing it to the economic threshold so whether or not we would need to perform some kind of treatment or to help bring the mite or nosema levels down and we also got to see it month by month and in contrast to everyone else who was reporting data. Now this was nationwide. So it was unique because most beekeepers had this kind of information. It's very time consuming. That was the one drawback, sampling a half cup of bees which you do have to kill from eight colonies every month for six months and it would take us about two hours per time we did the sampling. But we learned a lot and we got to collect the pollen at the same time which allowed us to analyze what they're collecting and how much is flowing and look at then the pollen source too. Now on the live scales, a note about those, they were actually Bluetooth connected. We put it on two separate hives in different locations and it would take a weight measurement every 15 minutes. This is also to help identify whether there is an ectaflow coming in. You know, is there weights going up? Are your bee populations increasing? So it was an interesting study to be a part of and I highly recommend it. If you meet the criteria and you're interested in actually doing and learning more, you can even visit them and see other people that are part of the program now and what's going on with their hives. Now about placement, so we always thought that we needed to put our hives right in the orchard because the bees would go to other sources and would not pollinate our apples which is our target crop. Now apples bloom fairly early in the year and they bloom right around the same time as cherries and dandelions so you have these competing sources. Now we always would put them in, so 2015, the first year, we did like normal, we put all the bees out there. We did have 10 hives that were new packages. So these were three pound packages of bees which means they're young, you don't have the established brood and you don't really know what you're getting because they're just a conglomerate of the bees that they shook into the container. So you might have mostly older bees which aren't going to forage as much or they're really young and they're not foraging yet because they're taking care of the nurse bees. So what we discovered, after we placed them in orchard and pears then we went bee spotting which is just walking through the orchard observing what we find, how quickly do we see a bee? Is it a native bee? Is it a honey bee? We really, in 2015, we didn't see a whole lot of bees. We saw them, yes, but it wasn't like a buzz or a hum. But we did spot a fair number of native bee pollinators which is good because honey bees aren't always the most efficient especially at pollinating your target crop. They like other things too whereas blue orchard mason bees, they really like the orchard a lot more. So the bloom length for both years was average. It lasted several weeks with temperatures above 50 and sunny. Now you really want your bees to get in there and pollinate that king bloom first if you can because that's going to give you the biggest apple. The temperature makes a big difference. Honey bees won't fly below 50 degrees and if it's not sunny they also won't fly because they can't orient themselves. So then in 2016, what we decided to do is we decided to leave them in a central location and we also had much stronger hives because we had overwintered hives. Now I'm going to go in depth a little more of what I think we did that helped our hives overwinter because a strong hive is going to give you better pollination overall in general. And Maggie had some really good ideas of what she always did and had good success and I was like, I need to try this and so we did it together. We also in 2016 we added one mason bee house with 40 cocoons and then we went bee spotting again. We noticed much higher numbers, same with native bees and the bloom length again was average. We also experimented with adding Russian and Carniolan and Italian hive bees. Notice not a huge difference. We always think the Russians are a little bit more hardy. That was not the experience in my case but in time they become nuts because they all kind of mate together anyway. So then why did we not want to move them? We found that if you have a small farm, bees will fly up to three miles, which is common that people know this, two to three miles they will find of the radius, which is about almost 2,000 acres. So because our farm is smaller than that, the bees will easily fly to all the sources on our farm. So this is what we call the two foot, two mile rule and this is why we're having some troubles especially when we move our bees back. If you see this cluster down here, this is not a swarm, like you might have thought. This is bees that have gone back to their original location after the hive is moved because they are on autopilot. When they leave the hive for their very first time, they will orient themselves. And then after that, they're on autopilot. They just get up and they go out and they go to their sources. They come back and they maybe tell other bees where the sources are but they don't stop and look at their hive every single time. It's like you, when you get up in the morning, you don't pay attention to every turn you make when you go to work and it'd be like if someone suddenly moved your house while you were at work and then you come back and you're like, where's my house? I wasn't paying any attention when I left this morning. So then you're stuck. You're like just hanging out where your house was. Like maybe it'll come back. I don't really know what to do. So we never realized this. We never went back to go get those bees in the past. But because of working with Maggie, I went and I checked every place where we had put the hives and sure enough, all of them had clustered like this because I had not forced them to reorient themselves after I moved the hives. We'd move them at night when all the bees were in the hive. So don't move them during the day. For sure, all your bees are out in the field. You're not going to ever get those bees back. But then I would collect all these bees and I'd put them back in their box. So what you need to do is you need to have some confinement. If you are going to move them under the two-mile rule. So they say if you move them less than two feet, that's fine. They don't need to reorient themselves. They'll find their hive. If you move them more than two miles, it will cause them to reorient and they won't have that trouble either. Or you need to do some method of practice to force them to reorient themselves. Whether it's confinement, which a max of 72 hours is found to be the most beneficial. More than that, you don't reap much more benefit. Or you can put brush or twigs in front of them. I found this was so, so beneficial. The best is if you don't have to move your hive because then you don't have to confine them. You don't have to worry about losing the hive and losing the bees to this. If the weather is cold, which it often is in the early spring when you're pollinating apples, you could lose them because it freezes or maybe it rains, any number of issues. It's a pain to have to go back there and collect these bees and put them back in their box. This is a nice little video that Maggie made and Maggie and I made, showing not only bees bringing in pollen, but also how they orient themselves or lead each other back into the hive when they first leave. Let's see if I can play it. I think I have to turn on the mic. Oh, where's the mic? Yes, please. Let's see if I can play it. Thank you. I added a box, another box to this hive and that disturbed them. So they, a bunch of them have taken it upon themselves to sit by the entrance and guide the other bees home. And the way they do it is they distribute a pheromone that says to them, follow me this way home. It's sort of a signpost pheromone and it's called the Nazanov pheromone. It comes from a little gland right above the stinger. And if you, I don't know if the camera will show it, but you can see there's a little split right above the stinger and that bee is distributing her pheromone and her wings are beating so fast that you can't even see them when they're going because she wants, she's using her wings to fan the pheromone into the air so other bees can smell it and they will know to come in. And then some of them are just bringing in pollen and nectar. Well, there's some dark orange and yellow pollen. Some of them are young bees and they're just learning what their hive is so when they go out to the field they'll be able to find their way home. So here is showing our farm. I guess we're going to go to watch it. There we go. Okay. So this is a Google Maps image of our farm and you can see that they never really have to fly all that far from our farm. And this box right here, this is where the apiary is and these are the other crops and this is our grant. So we mapped them out ahead of time to show all this is clover here and then we've got little bits of blueberry, black raspberry, strawberries. And here we have this additional source of all this neighborhood here that who knows what they grow. So it's giving more and more pollen and nectar sources for the bees because then we're also surrounded by corn and soybeans like I'm sure a lot of you are if you're not in the city. So let's talk a little bit about preparing our hives for winter. So like I said before, strong hives are the best pollinators. They're also good at defending themselves from pests and diseases. And the big killers for winter is starvation, moisture, wind and mice. So you may have a great hive going into the winter, but if you don't prepare it well or if these factors get in, you're probably going to lose your hive or if you don't put your mouse going on soon enough and you get a mouse in there, that will disrupt your hive. I've lost a hive for that before. So here what we do first is we put these little mouse guards. They're basically just these metal plates with holes in them that mice can't get through because mice will like to, once it starts getting cold, they'll go and build a little nest and that movement disturbs the beehives, all the bees the whole time. What we do is we have this windbreak back here. We also put this reflective insulation, which we just get at minards, like two foot long. We use these ratchet straps to tie it down. Then we add these sugar boards, which I gave and I printed off a recipe for you if you're interested. This one has a lot of pollen in it. We don't always put pollen in it because you don't necessarily want them to be affecting pollen right away because that can stimulate them to make brood when there's really no pollen source available yet. But you definitely want to make sure they have enough food. So we have, these look rather tall. You might normally see just two deep boxes. We add a third deep box after we collect the last of the honey, which we try not to do it any later than early September because we want nectar flows to go towards the bees because we want them to have a full deep box of honey. Basically, they can't have too much food to get through the winter. And then this just adds more so it gives them something to munch on as they're through the winter, especially if they cluster right below it. So then you put that on and that helps absorb moisture as well. And then we also put this piece of canvas, I don't know if you can see it, but basically put a piece of canvas and pick the moisture out. And we follow that up with the top, just the top cover. We leave our screen bottom boards on, all through the winter. You don't have to switch them out to be a solid bottom board because, again, that helps with airflow and trying to keep it from getting too much moisture build up. Well, because it's restrictive when they're flying in and out, there's just these little tiny holes so you don't really... You want them able to access everything not having to get through this. It'll slow things down. And you don't have to worry about mice getting in there until the wintertime because they're out in the fields, they don't have any reason to. But I certainly take a flashlight and look under there before I put the mouse guard on in case one has snuck in there and then you blocked them in all winter. That doesn't help your situation. And after we've pulled all the honey supers off, we will feed them. We feed them a 2 to 1 ratio of sugar to water as much as you can. Sometimes you can't quite mix 2 to 1 ratio sugar in there. But that just helps boost them up. If there's not anything flowing, no nectar, no pollen, they're collecting the sugar water and turning it into the honey for themselves. So now, how many hives do you need for your pollination purposes? Now, there's a lot of variables. I pulled this. These are a lot of similar crops that we have in this area. And this is the recommendation for how many that you would need. Oh, the first year we had only about 1 per acre. The second year we bumped it up and had about 2 per acre. And we did notice an increase. Now, it also depends on the flowers per acre. You have lots of flowers and that's partly what this list entails. Then the number of available forage hours, you know, some crops have such a short window. So you would need more hives in order to accomplish all the pollination that you're looking for. And what's your native pollinators look like? And the attractiveness of the target crop relative to the competing blooms. So for us, we know they like cherries, sweet and tart cherries. We found gobs of them in those cherries when they were blooming. Versus an apple tree, it's like one here or there. They're not clearly not as interested in apples as they are in cherries. So that makes a difference too. And if you want to discourage them from going to some of the crops, like dandelions for example, you could mow them. I don't recommend spraying them because that's not a good thing but if you are wanting to get started in beekeeping, I recommend at least two hives because then if you need to pull a frame from one and help the other hives, you have a better chance of success if you start with at least two. And then add more as your experience gets better. Now this, I wanted to put the little cost in there because some people think, oh, honey bees, there's really not much to it, you put them in a box, you're done. And then there are items that you might want to consider like the smoker and the hive tools and you want the entrances, you might need a stand for your hive and you'll need some supers if you're planning to collect some honey which I hope you would be. If you want to add extracting equipment, I mean you can spend a fortune on this stuff or you can do a very low key with just $25 and get some honey that way too. And what are your treatments going to be for your winterizing equipment? These are mito-way quick strips which are used for treatment of varroa mites and it's actually an organic approved treatment because it's formic acid which is something ants make naturally. So we have used that with moderate success if you're interested in that. And then the other alternative, so if you're not going to keep your own bees for pollinating your property, I want to mention that 15 to 30 hours per hive per year. So factor that in when you're considering what time you have to give to this because honey bees are not without work involved and you definitely want to be able to give some time to them or you'll probably lose your hive. You may not, but it's a better chance and if you're going to get into this you want to be interested in it and learning from them and the only way to do that is to know what's happening. These are some other options that we've tried. This is our mason bee hive and these are cocoons that we released. This is a bumblebee hive. Now the downside of bumblebees, you would need to buy that every year. They don't return. They don't go into the ground and come back year after year. You could also do a hive rental. Now some of the farmers and beekeepers could vary depending on who you talk to or who you actually are in communication with and this is the cost from one bee house of mason bees. It's something to consider if you're trying to improve your pollination that you may not want to keep them yourself but you may want to have some other pollinators. Do the mason bees stick around? I don't think they did. Do the mason bees stick around? I don't know yet because last year is when we released them. It looks like there's a few cocoons in there but I don't think there's certainly not 40. We'll see. If not, I can purchase more and get new straws and add more mason bees. Here are my final suggestions. You should orient your hive as close to the target crop as possible but far away from pesticide drips. Even if you're not spraying, who are your neighbors? Do you have monoculture around you that is going to be spraying? I highly recommend you register your bees on DriftWatch.org. The website is free and spray applicators need to check this in order to know what's around them and whether you have something specific that they need to avoid. Multiple sources of nectar and pollen will benefit your honey bees so don't just plant yes, you want your target crop to be pollinated but I recommend pockets of wildflowers and other sources for the bees. This is a great website that has lots of pictures and shows you what the nectar and pollen source benefit is to the bees too so you can plant the highest quality sources for the bees. Again, strong hives are better at fighting pests and diseases and they're going to be better pollinators because they're stronger and because they're not dealing with these pests and diseases. Also, hives with lots of young larva will be better at pollinating because they have reason to go get pollen and nectar to feed the young bees and one with older larva and nectar. So if you're doing a hive infection and you see that, you'll know, hey, this is a hive that's probably collecting a lot and doing really well. And overwinter hives can pollinate earlier and better than a new package or nuke. Sometimes you can't even get your package until of bees until late May and maybe that's completely missed your target crop or you've got to adjust as the blooms open and they haven't hardly established themselves. So thank you for listening and if you have any questions. What pesticides do you need to be concerned about to avoid with spray? Oh boy, I should have brought that, I should have brought the list. I mean, there's a whole bunch. Basically, you need to look, anything has a toxicity level on it. So anything that could harm the bees. You don't want to be, the most important thing is to not spray while the bees are flying. So if you spray at night or spray, you know, yeah spray at night is the best when after the bees have gone into their hive, you can also block up the hive if you have to spray during the day, block them up the night before. That way they're not out being exposed to this and, you know, that's what you want. So if I get your email, I can send you a list of the toxicity levels and what are the most harmful to the bees. I didn't bring that with me and I should have. Do you have a sign that you see in your hive that might sense, you might get a sense that they're about to swarm? Do you have a sense? I wish I knew because I would capture, usually I just find them swarmed on a branch next, nearby. So I try and watch. The best sense will be that you see a lot of bees start to fly and hover around your hive. Now sometimes that's just they're, if they're just staring at their hive they're probably orienting themselves. But if they're just, like, really agitated and just swarming like, flying around like crazy, that's generally when I've seen that they've swarmed. But then go get a box and you've got a split. If you can collect them. But they'll often stay in their location for a couple hours up to a couple days while they send out scouts to look for their new location. For the driftwatch.org who is looking at that? Are there farmers that are about to apply, encouraged to look to see if there are hives nearby? Yes. And I believe spray applicators as well too. So. Okay. Great. Thank you. I have a question about you said that you didn't seem to notice a benefit to having the bees closer to the apple trees as opposed to having them just as long as they're within their normal two to three miles that they go. There was a farm where they have an apple orchard aggra entertainment. So they had all their beehives on a flat bed near the trees. And then before the season when all the people had come they didn't want the bees to be agitated by that. So they would move it far enough away. But do you think that's not really necessary just to move it to another end of their farm where there were not people visiting? It would be okay. The bees would still probably pollinate the apple trees? It depends on where it is in relation to it. Are they moving it three miles down the road or is it still on their farm? Because, yeah, if it's easy to move then I mean ours are easy too. They're on skids. We could just pick them up with a forklift to move them. But it's probably not necessary. They could probably leave them far away from the public. But as long as they're close enough to the trees they would still pollinate them. Okay, so if it's within like the two to three miles which, you know, our farm is only a hundred acres so really anywhere that we were to put it on there they should be able to find the trees. They should, yeah, because they will fly up to a three mile radius. I'd say better is less than two miles radius. But you have a hundred acres. That's not much bigger than our farm and we've not noticed a difference. Like I said, strong hives, if you're not moving them, if you are moving them definitely make sure that they're closing them up and causing them to reorient themselves before. Otherwise, they're probably going back to that location where they had the flatbed trailer before. I don't know if you've ever noticed, if you've ever gone back to look to see after they've moved it to whether they go back to that location. They probably do. Oh, it's not your place. Oh, okay. Yeah, I would think that would be the best. It's also make sure it's a place you can access easily for working with them. Like you can get a truck back there because for harvesting honey and applying any applications, driving back there, it makes it so much easier. Is that what precipitated your decision to move the bees? Why did you move them from where you originally placed them? Well, we thought we needed to move them into the orchard because we thought they wouldn't we needed the bees right in front of the source. But then we found they will pollinate just fine where they're at, because if you saw that map, they only had to the farthest corner of the orchard was a quarter mile and a half mile if you're going to go to the pumpkins. So when we left them, we noticed no difference. In fact, the pollination was fantastic. Granted, we had bumped up a few more bees, but the hives we put were right in front of the trees. You'd think you would have seen tons of bees right around where the hive was. And that wasn't the case. You'd see a bee here and there. But then we moved them, we left them. We had nice, strong hives. We saw far more bees. So we thought, well, this isn't worth it. The bees will fly. We can access them. We don't have to disturb them. We don't have to worry about losing them and going and collecting them and trying to get them to re-orient themselves, losing three days with doing this, trying to drive all throughout the orchard to visit all these hives to check on them. So it was much easier for us as a farmer and how rarely is that the case when something is easier for us and better for your bees or your crop or whatever. If you have multiple hives on your farm, do you have any recommendations on how close or how far apart they need to be or does it matter? You can keep them fairly close together. Ours are two to like a skid. So there's like this big and there's one here and there's about a hives gap between them and then another set. And we have 10 to 20 hives that way in two rows. I think the best way to have them is maybe in a U shape or an L shape to help the bees orient themselves because sometimes you'll find that they'll go to the wrong hive. And we also paint our hives. I don't know how effective that is, but bees can see certain colors like blue, gray, yellow, white. So we tried to differentiate the hives so that hopefully they would remember which is their hive. One year I installed two packages side by side hives. A couple days later came back one box was empty, the other box was full of bees. So all the bees had moved to the other hive for whatever reason. I'd never had that habit before. But I say close together because then it's easier to work with them. You just go right on down the line. You don't have to have them far scattered apart.