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Apiary Products Create Farm Show Buzz

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Producing honey is hard work for both the people and the bees, according to Charlie Vorisek of Crawford County, Vice President of the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association.  “One pound of honey is representative of about two million flowers,” Vorisek says.  Beekeepers use a special machine to extract the honey from the wooden frames where bees build their hives.  “I describe it like a washing machine spin cycle… we spin it and the honey will fling out just like the water in your clothes.” 

PA Beekeepers are conducting honey extraction demonstrations all week long at the 96th Pennsylvania Farm Show.  A variety of displays in the Main Hall help people to understand the importance of pollination, and the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association booth is always buzzing with activity in the Farm Show’s PA Marketplace. 

That’s where consumers go to buy pure, raw, natural honey, according to beekeeper David Anderson of Lebanon County.  “Depending on the flower that the nectar came from to make the honey you can get clover honey, alfalfa honey, buckwheat honey, wildflower honey – and there are all different flavors”    

Farm Show, Bees, Honey

In this display, the queen is marked with a green dot.

Each hive is home to just one queen.  Her job is solely to lay eggs, as presenters told one demonstration crowd that the queen must lay 2,000 or more eggs a day for a hive to be productive. 

Farm Show judges awarded prizes in more than 40 categories of apiary products – everything from three pound chunks of comb honey, to honey quick breads and candies.  Pennsylvania is home to 2,500 registered beekeepers.  Many are commercial enterprises, but officials say most are hobby beekeepers.

Honeybees

PSU Leads Multidisciplinary Effort to Save Honeybees

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Researchers from seven universities, beekeepers in every state, economists, epidemiologists and others have joined the Bee Informed Partnership.  Senior extension associate at Penn State Dennis vanEngelsdorp is leading the project, and tells us honeybees are essential to agriculture. “About one in every three bites of food we eat is either directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees,” he says. 

The problem is that for the past five years, an average of 30% of honeybee colonies are being lost overwinter.  “That means about one in every three colonies dies every single winter for the past five winters,” vanEngelsdorp says.  He tells us most beekeepers would be happy if they lost about 15% of their colonies.  So the goal of the Bee Informed Partnership is to cut the mortality rate in half, over the next five years. 

Beekeepers are now being surveyed on how many bees they’ve lost, and what management practices they used last year.  “Even though the average is 30%, some beekeepers are losing more than 50% and some are losing less than 10%,” vanEngelsdorp tells us.  The Partnership will share the ‘best practices,’ as determined by their research, to help beekeepers manage their hives.

The Bee Informed Partnership is a five year, $5-million dollar nationwide program, funded by the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.