# Orlando!!



## justin (Jun 16, 2007)

looks like a lot of soap boxes and no rides for dnelson.


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## dnelson (May 19, 2009)

justin said:


> looks like a lot of soap boxes and no rides for dnelson.


Amen to that!! I guess I won't be going to Orlando

It's like voting, nobody wants to join the group to fix the issues they just want to talk the issues to death. I am sure if there were enough members that belonged to the ABF that are against the Aussie bees there would be no problem to force them to change their ways. 
If everyone at the party likes vanilla cake, it would be hard to get a piece of chocolate cake unless some chocolate lovers showed up and brought it.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

dnelson said:


> Amen to that!! I guess I won't be going to Orlando


Get your butt down to SC in the next hour and I'll haul you the rest of the way. Is transportation the only thing standing in your way?


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## dnelson (May 19, 2009)

sqkcrk said:


> Get your butt down to SC in the next hour and I'll haul you the rest of the way. Is transportation the only thing standing in your way?


I think I missed the boat.:doh:


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## Beeslave (Feb 6, 2009)

I think the river is frozen so you might have to take a different mode of transportation.


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## peacekeeperapiaries (Jun 23, 2009)

Show is only 50 miles from me and I am gonna have to work all week . I'm gonna try to go over Saturday morning at 7 and shop till noon when it closes.


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## Joel (Mar 3, 2005)

Remember when we could just stand by the road, stick out a thumb and get anywhere we wanted to go? Had a friend in Denver who used to hitch from Denver to Chicago every Christmas until he made his fortune. Good times!


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## fat/beeman (Aug 23, 2002)

I wish I could hitch a ride to a warmer place I am freezeing.
Don


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## Barry Digman (May 21, 2003)

fat/beeman said:


> I wish I could hitch a ride to a warmer place I am freezeing.
> Don


Don, there are probably a thousand beeks on here who would love to have your feet under their table for the duration of the cold just to take advantage of your knowledge. 

I'm thinking the experienced guys like you could spend the worst of the winters mentoring newbies in the sunshine.


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## fat/beeman (Aug 23, 2002)

hello
is that a offer??/ I eat awful lot maybe there is nothing to learn from a old geezer like me. lol
would be nice to get away for little while too cold here to play with bees.
Don


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## Barry Digman (May 21, 2003)

Shoot, Don, I was hoping to tag along with you to a warmer climate. It will be 15F here tonight, and won't be above 40 for the next 10 days. Not that bad as we just came out of a couple of weeks of the zero degree stuff.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Had a great time. Spent most of my time in the hall and lounge. My van was a hit w/ a number of folks, especially my college prof. Met a number of folks. Bought a book, got given one, bought a couple of tee shirts, one from the beegirls, along w/ their calendar, and one from ABF, bought an ABF shirt and cap too, bought a half suit from B&B, some magnetic stickers and mudflaps from Mann Lake. If someone had yelled "Dave" in the main hall there would have been a dozen or two guys who would have responded. The list of speakers and topics spoken upon is too long to list here.

I'm not going next year. It's too far away and I don't fly. It will be a joint mtng w/ AHPA. If you are thinking about it, go. You'll be glad you did. If not next year, then the year after. If not ABF, then go to AHPA. It's a great place to meet like minded people, beekeepers.


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## JohnK and Sheri (Nov 28, 2004)

Would someone please refresh my memory as to where the next joint meeting will be?
Sheri


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## Grant (Jun 12, 2004)

JohnK and Sheri said:


> Would someone please refresh my memory as to where the next joint meeting will be?
> Sheri


Galveston, TX January 4-8, 2011 at the San Luis Resort.

I'll be there! Orlando was my fourth ABF conference. The highlight was definitely Larry Connor's "Serious Sideliner" venue. Standing room only for several of the presentations.

Grant
Jackson, MO


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## suttonbeeman (Aug 22, 2003)

galveston TX.....geez you two missed a great meeting...one of the best yet. Sherri the cold in Fl stopped queens from laying. going to set back about two weeks worth of brood.


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## JohnK and Sheri (Nov 28, 2004)

Thanks Rick and Grant
Yeah, we kinda wanted to go but next year for sure. We made the combined convention in Sacramento and thought it was great; would have been better if they had booked a center with the room and infrastructure to handle the larger than expected crowd. I've never been that far south in TX, except driving through on the way to MX a few years back, looking forward to it! It is already on the calendar. Hopefully it won't be as cold that time of year next year as it was this year. Pretty rare when the valley is warmer than south TX in January.
Sheri


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## peterloringborst (Jan 19, 2010)

The high point for a lot of us was the presentation by Bayer. The room was packed. This is from a local paper, a few days later:


Bee expert, chemical rep clash over pesticides
By Diane Petryk

The Daily Item
LEWISBURG January 16, 2010 11:53 pm

Honeybees will die in greater numbers this year than ever before, and court fights over the chemicals some believe are killing them will continue to be a cat-and-mouse game.

That’s the opinion of Lewisburg beekeeper Dave Hackenberg, who last week was in Orlando, Fla., at the North American Beekeeping Conference with about 750 of his peers.

He’s considered by many of them, and others worldwide, as the authority on colony collapse syndrome.

That’s when an entire hive of bees dies for no apparent reason. It’s been happening since 2004, coinciding with introduction of a new kind of pesticide.

Instead of being applied on the exterior of a mature plant, the plant’s seed is coated with the pesticide, Hackenberg said. When the seed is watered, some of the pesticide gets into the soil and then is taken up into the plant in the normal growth process, just as the plant absorbs nutrients from the soil.

In this way, the pesticide becomes internal, or “systemic,” rather than applied.

Some beekeepers believe, as bees pollinate the plants, they are exposed to these pesticides and it eventually kills them.

Manufacturers of the chemicals say they are safe.

The argument played out in federal court Dec. 23 in New York in a suit brought by the National Resource Defense Council and the United States Department of Environmental Protection against Bayer CropScience.

Judge Denise Cote originally ruled that a pesticide with the active ingredient spirotetramat, manufactured by Bayer worldwide under the name Movento, must have been pulled from the market by Friday. But Bayer came back arguing the ban was based on procedure rather than science and got an extension to Feb. 16 to straighten out the paperwork with the EPA.

“We anticipate that EPA will reaffirm the registration of spirotetramat using the correct procedure,” Bayer said in a statement.

Meanwhile, bees are needed in California to pollinate crops and, Hackenberg said, they’re facing extreme shortages.

Even if the ban were restored, he said, bees will continue to die because the chemical stays in the soil for about four years. And there’s a market basket of chemicals out there.

The companies continue to alter the chemicals when their patents run out, so they will have exclusivity on the new ones.

It used to be, Hackenberg said, that a proposed new chemical would be “handed over to the great land-grant universities for testing.”

Now, he said, there’s no such research.

The EPA’s new attitude is, he said, “Just put it out there and we’ll see what happens.’’

“The chemical companies have been give a green light right through the front door,” he said.

Hackenberg met Wednesday evening with a chief toxicologist from Bayer and, not surprisingly, there was no meeting of minds.

We say we’re losing bees, Hackenberg said, and he says the science doesn’t show it.

“No,” Hackenberg said, “reality does.”

Despite the reality, however, many beekeepers don’t grapple with the science. Some are naive, Hackenberg said, and tend to believe what they are told — whether it’s mites or mold or the phases of the moon.

“They don’t understand these new systemic chemicals,” he said.

Few farmers in the Valley, he said, even know anything about the chemicals they’re using.

“If you talk to them and ask them ‘Do you know what you’re using?’ or ‘Do you know how it works?’ many will say no, they pay a crop analyst for that.

“The crop analyst goes out and looks at the crops and tells them what to use.”

Hackenberg said if you ask the crop analyst how he knows what to recommend, he’ll say the chemical companies tell him.

It was unknown whether the members of the conference, which ended Saturday night, would draft a resolution against the use of products that contain the suspect chemicals.

That’s analogous to the doctor who prescribes pills based on what the pharmaceutical sales rep tell him, he said.

Meanwhile, honeybees remain essential to about one third of all the grown food humans eat. In the United States, they pollinate 90 different agricultural crop species including nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables worth about $15 billion a year.


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## peterloringborst (Jan 19, 2010)

For all of you who weren't in Orlando, you missed a great conference. It was a joint meeting of several organizations, including the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF), Canadian Honey Council (CHC), Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA), American Association of Professional Apiculturists (AAPA), and Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA). 

For me the high point was the presentation by Medhat Nasr. I guess I wasn't the only one because he was handed an award at the Banquet for his service to the beekeepers of Alberta, CA. He previously received The Alberta Beekeepers 2009 Achievement Award in November. The title of his talk was Honey Bee Winter Kill From 2007-2009 in Alberta, Canada: Are Our Bees Healthy? Medhat showed some remarkable pie graphs that represented the percentage of hives in good condition from 2007 to 2009. This number went from 10% to 70% during those years. 

Dr. Nasr emphasizes the importance of monitoring and related that very few beekeepers were monitoring their hives for varroa and nosema when he began his inquiry. He attributes the steep decline in affected bees to the timely use of formic acid and fumagillin. I would suggest the change must be credited to Medhat's sharp focus and hard work getting to the bottom of the problem. 

The chief honey plant in the region is canola which, by the way, is treated with imidacloprid. They make huge crops of honey there. "Although there is an expressed concern by many beekeepers around the world about the use of systemics, the experience in Canada is that we have had 10 years of large scale use on canola with no observed ill effect. In the past there were more complaints from beekeepers about Lorsban and Sevin . For canola, the seed treatments, when applied according to label specifications do not appear to be an issue" - Heather Clay

Another presenter of note was Keith Deplane. He showed that coumaphos, fluvalinate and copper naphthalate caused significant increases in queen supersedure, which is a serious problem for beekeepers everywhere. In fact, many of the presentations showed the harmful effects of in-hive chemicals. A few years ago I contacted one of the researchers who was suggesting that in-hive chemicals might be causing hive failure, and I cautioned him against making such a claim without proof since it would lessen the public's sympathy for us beekeepers. Well, they have proof now. This stuff makes bees sick.

The issue of genetic diversity came up frequently with Sue Cobey outline the case for importing more stock from the regions that have high quality Carniolans and Caucasians. Marla Spivak voiced the opinion that the bees of the US are sufficiently diverse, a point of view supported by work by Dave Tarpy and Debbie Delaney. Speaking of Dave, he presented on the quality of queens, comparing measurements taken on queens over several decades. He stated that beekeepers rate queen quality at the top of the list of factors related to hive failure. Dave's work showed that queens today are good and that they have been of a good quality all along. This suggests that beekeepers may be attributing poor hive performance to the queen when in fact it may be caused by other factors, such as the health of the hives that these queens are being introduced into.

Nosema was discussed until it was coming out of our ears. There is a wide variety of opinion on whether nosema harms colonies. Geoff Williams (Nova Scotia) suggested that colonies with high spore levels performed as well as those with low. Frank Eischen showed data to support the idea that infected bees collect a lot less pollen, possibly only one third the amount that normal hives would. 

The reliability of counting spores was questioned, as it misses the vegetative stage (PCR tests would detect the vegetative stage). Also, there is some reason to think that counting the percentage of infected bees in a hive is a better predictor than the number of spores per bee. Data from New York State clearly showed that Nosema apis was almost totally replaced by N. Ceranae (96%). However, it does not appear to cause collapse in that state and frequently disappears on its own without drugs. 

Varroa sensitive hygiene was defined and offered as a tool for beekeepers to use in their efforts to select and propagate bees that can survive without chemicals, or at least with decreased dependence on them. It is pretty clear that everybody is sick of using chemicals, sick of finding it in the comb, sick of worrying about whether THIS is what is making bees sick, and we are all greatly concerned about ruining honey's reputation as a natural pure product.

Jody Johnson discussed her work monitoring the effect of imidacloprid applications to trees to try kill the asian longhorn beetle. She has been placing hives in vacant lots in Staten Island and in cemeteries in Queens, NYC. I suggested to her that she might be able to link up with the NYC beekeepers.

Mention was made about Bee Health Videos on YouTube. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/BeeHealth -- Even more information can be found at http://www.extension.org/bee_health -- Sorry this is a bit rambling, but it's just cobbled together from my notes which I scribbled on a little yellow pad provided for us all by the Speedy Bee. I hope some of the other people that were there will share their impressions as well. 

Peter Loring Borst 
Ithaca, NY USA 
peterloringborst.com


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Thanks for that comprehensize report Peter. I caught some of those talks, but not as many as you did.

"Keeping The Hive Alive" was the theme of the conference, but why they are dying seemed to be more of what we heard about. Did I miss the talks that pointed out how to Keep The Hive Alive? I did hear discussion of the importance of getting new comb into ones hives so they don't become chemical sinks, and the importance of well mated queens. What else did I miss?

Talking w/ my buddy Jonny Mac this morning I may be going to Texas after all. We'll see. It's a long drive.


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