1) Before planting, please, please please, make sure you have the soil in your yard tested for lead and other contaminants.  Because of the history of some neighborhoods, there is a serious lead threat that could affect any fruits and vegetables you grow with intentions to eat or sell.

2) Options for avoiding this if your yard is found to have some type of contaminant are:

2a) Raised bed gardens in which using ties or other stacking products  you lay a barrier on the ground and dump fresh, clean soil over that to a depth that will support new plant growth.

2b) Potted gardens.  Using large pots and containers that are filled with clean soil that will support new plant growth.

3) Whole, un-cut, non-”prepared” food items meaning fruits and vegetables that come straight from the garden, not being heated, treated, cut, sliced or otherwise “prepared” may be sold without a permit from the health dept in terms of food   preparation/handling permits.  You do not need a commercial or otherwise licensed kitchen.  This includes raw, unheated or otherwise treated honey.

4) Any and all “canned” items such as home made pickles or salsa or anything else that would require a stove/oven, cutting, preparing to make require a licensed kitchen permit. and a food vendor license from the health dept.

5) Be aware of zoning restrictions and other neighborhood ‘agreements or covenants that may restrict retail sales activities in your area.  While the Health dept may not require any special permits or licensing to sell from a table in your driveway or front yard, being in areas zoned only as residential or having signed a housing covenant may prohibit those activities.

6) Don’t get mad or behave poorly to local inspectors, they are only doing their job.  They don’t make the rules, that’s what those folks you vote into office do.  If you have an issue with a law that is on the books, take it up with the elected reps office.  Bee nice to the field inspectors.

I would have to agree with that.

There are some posts and websites that like to jump from the beginning to the end and tell you that not treating bees will give you healthier, survivor bees that have adapted and developed traits allowing them to co-exist or eliminate these pests, etc without interference from beekeepers.  It’s just that easy.

Except, it’s not that easy.

The hard, costly part of this scenario is the middle part of the story.  What is happening to the bees while all this adapting is going on.

Bee will die, make no mistakes about it.  Be prepared to see some colonies, many colonies, struggle and die out.

If you are buying bees, this can get very expensive and that is why you will find that most beekeepers who pay for bees will also treat bees to protect that investment.  Buying bees is not cheap.  You don’t fork over $65 to $150.00 per package or nuc to watch them die.  Although, that will happen too sometimes, no matter how much you treat.

For those of us who don’t pay for bees, we get them by catching swarms and removing colonies that live inside house or garage walls, etc….  The financial argument is much decreased, if not existent at all.  For us, our investment is in time.  Both those who buy bees and those who catch them have an equal emotional investment (for the most part).

Folks who catch bees spend a lot of time and effort in safely catching and hiving bees, we have to look at it as a “tough love” situation, much as we do our family and community members.

If the bees are going to “make it” they have to do it themselves. Some things we just can’t do for others.

Like make the adaptations required to overcome obstacles and survive. We can’t do it for them.  all we end up doing is propping them up.  Keeping bees from adapting because they are relying on our treatments and not experiencing the necessary roughness that prompts adaptation.

It is taking a risk.  You risk the bees dying instead of adapting.  But, they would have likely died anyway had they been left where we found them.  The mites and shb and other pests would still have faced them and they still would have been forced to adapt or die.

If they didn’t die, they would have exhibited those behaviors and traits to survive and those are exactly the traits we are seeking to add to the genetics of local bees.

So now we can help the bees in general by allowing the survivors to adapt and breeding from those, allowing them to propagate the species by sending their drones out to the drone congregation areas and letting the queens from who knows how many colonies have access to survivor traits.

Everyone benefits from bees adapting. We just have to have the patience, the willingness to risk and the toughness of character to let those bees live or die on their own.  Much as we have to let our children live their own lives and fail or succeed on their own.  We can’t do it for them.

Once they do succeed, we can help them to repeat that success though.  We can be there to do splits and queen raising and other things to help those successful, survival traits continue on beyond the one colony.

No treatment beekeeping can work and leave you with survivor bees that need no or few artificial chemicals and interventions that cost money and possibly work to the long term detriment of the bees.

It takes time though and patience and heartache, letting them do what they have to do.

I have searched the web to find may instances of this story from a variety of online news stations and  newspapers, etc.. and it is pretty much the same canned material over and over again.

This is a clear example of irresponsible reporting to me.  Something we have come not only to expect from the media, but to not even question anymore.

I am not doubting the boy and dog were stung, I’m sure they were.  My question is, who verified that it was bees that did it?

Apparently, no one bothered to verify that it was indeed honey bees, in a swarm, that “attacked” the boy and his dog.

To be honest, from the description of the “attack”,  I am more likely to suspect Yellow Jackets in this case than bees. They are not the same and it doesn’t require one to be an entomologist to find that out.

It’s a sensationalist story that has continued to go repeated un-verified by a supposedly “objective” and fact based media  (I say that only in jest as  I don’t believe the media knows hows to be objective and fact based anymore, it pays more to tell people what they want to hear, it seems.)

Some people might say that it’s not important what stung the boy, the point is a bunch of insects attacked him.   I say this is a sad way to look at it.

Our honey bee community of beekeepers, conservationists, pollinators and honey producers is working very hard to educate the public on the truth of how honey bees behave and help human society.  It is due to irresponsible and cavalier attitudes that the honey bee community suffers damaging and non-fact based fear that continuously pushes our efforts back.

Once again, an ineffective and irresponsible media leaves us with more work because they could not be  bothered to fact check a story before pushing it out to the public.

Eleven Chinese and German executives and six of their food supply and honey export companies were charged Wednesday with 44 counts of conspiring to illegally import Chinese-origin honey, including honey tainted with antibiotics, into the U.S. by mislabeling it as originating in other countries to avoid paying anti-dumping fees, Fitzgerald said.

Why the foreign intrigue with something as benign and universally loved as honey?

The one-word answer is money. Tens of millions of dollars, and that’s just what the field agents and federal prosecutors can prove at this point.

These are not nickel-and-dime scams.

“They are charged with conspiring to import more than $40 million of Chinese honey to avoid paying anti-dumping duties of approximately $80 million,” said Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in the Pacific Northwest. (HSI was formally known as ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

With the crack down on cheap, adulterated honey having, hopefully, more of an impact, perhaps our honey producers can get some respect from the big honey packers who choose to buy cheap foreign honey up till now.

I just don’t think that bigger is always better.

Keeping smaller, manageable objectives is healthier for people and society overall, in my opinion.

By keeping my bee yards smaller and building up more of them,  I can pay more attention to the hives in each yard.   I am able to pay more attention to what is going on around me.

If  I get so many bee yards that it becomes difficult to keep track with one or two people,  I can help the community by hiring someone to help, thus contributing jobs to the area.

I don’t run big stores to sell my products,  I prefer to run small shops and open air market places.  I do this for a reason.  I have been involved in corporate store management many times in my life and I find that customers and people in general, act better, they treat each other more decently, in a small, personal setting.

They get to know me, the seller, better.   I get more opportunities to really talk to people and listen to them.  To learn what they want and what they are looking for.

To be perfectly honest, I am not looking to get rich.   I just want to be comfortable, be happy and take care of my family and my bees.  That gives me freedom from focusing on increasing profits and pay more attention to making things the best they can be and increasing customers instead.

If I can do that, the profits will come.

The devil is in the details and big things come in small packages.

My personal favorite saying though is, a good life is not in the getting, but in the doing.

By keeping things smaller and manageable,  I can do a lot.

We all can.

As of May of this year, the city council has amended that and now allows beekeeping in the city..

With it’s designation as a “Greenest City” it is only fitting that Hastings recognizes how important having honey bees and bee keepers in town is.

AGRICULTURE COMMITTEE
Senator Bob Kremer, Chairperson
ENACTED LEGISLATIVE BILLS
LB 835—Change Provisions of the Nebraska Apiary Act (Kremer)
LB 835 deregulates Nebraska’s beekeeping industry. The bill
amends the Nebraska Apiary Act, eliminating the requirement that
bee colonies be registered and inspected by the Nebraska Depart-
ment of Agriculture. The bill also provides that beekeepers no
longer need to obtain a permit to bring bees into the state.
This reduced regulation reflects the decline of beekeeping in Ne-
braska. The number of registered apiaries fell by more than half in
the last decade and because there was a corresponding decline in
inspections, it became difficult for the department to maintain its
inspection program.
LB 835 passed 39-0 and was approved by the Governor on March
19, 2004.

Many thanks to Drew Dickson for bringing this information to our attention.

a small garden in one’s yard certainly belongs in urban ag, but, urban ag is more than home gardens.

There has been a trend in the past few years in many urban environments  (cities) in which “community gardens” are popping up again.  These are large spaces consisting of 1 to 10 acres on land that used to have buildings on them or have never been developed and so on.

By planting a variety of fruit, vegetables and flowers on these urban ag areas, people can be close to the earth again and grow their own produce.  They can take pride in neighborhoods again where old, busted up houses and buildings once were, are tended and cared for plants and trees.

Urban agriculture is also a boon to local honey bee populations.  Providing a source of plentiful variety in nectar, pollen and other resources honey bees need to thrive.

They also offer people who live in residences where gardening or planting is not able to be done to be able to engage in growing plants.

City governments should look at urban agriculture as an investment and find ways to turn un-used land into urban ag locations as a way for people to have access to fresh, healthy foods, get exercise, interact with each other and make the entire neighborhood a more sociable place to be.

I think humans or (two-leggeds) are great when we leave our egos in the sock drawer.

We have so much capacity to facilitate, support and be a part of the world around us.  We are avid learners and studiers. We are able to have compassion toward the other inhabitants of earth who are more subject to natures laws of “survival of the fittest” than we are.

At the same time, we can be dumb as bricks when we allow our pride and egos to become inflated.  We have a tendency to over-value our place in the world, as though we are immortal “little gods” or something.

There are those of us who begin to think that what knowledge and information they have gained about the world around us somehow makes us experts and thus somehow qualified to micro-manage the world around us.

As I said,  I am not anti-human.  We are great.  Terrific. Capable of so much good works and abilities.  There are those among us who feel guilty about having opposable thumbs though,  and that we as a species are unworthy of sharing the planet because of a propensity to curb our enthusiasm, as it were.

I use the word “facilitate” a lot.  mostly because that is where our greatest strength lay, I think.  To facilitate means we see the world around it as it is and respect that.  We can turn around and find ways to take trouble situations for other creatures and help them make it on their own.  If we choose to see them, that is.

I do not apologize for our existence and the place we currently hold in the world of living creatures.  In many ways, we are still ultimately guided by Natures law of “Survival of the fittest”  in that we hold keenly to the idea that “Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, do not”.

In general, this means that among us two-leggeds, those of us who are continually working and adapting ourselves, flexible and open minded, will continue to succeed and thrive.

As with all other creatures in nature, there are those who are ‘do-ers’  and there are parasites among us as well.

In the insect world, there are do-ers like honey bees and there are parasites like varroa mites.

Among humans, our do-ers are those who build and grow and create things.  Then we have our parasites like politicians, lawyers and corporate investors.

Despite having our parasites.  those who take from others instead of doing for themselves, us humans are largely do-ers.

As we do those things lie building, growing food, making tools and resources, we have slowly but surely learned to be more mindful f of how we use the natural resources of the world around us and to not be as wasteful as when we began the process.

We continue to learn to reduce, re-use and recycle.  We replenish the forest planting new trees for those we cut down.

We are overall more mindful of the ‘wild’ places that the other living creatures on this world need, just as we need our spaces.

I am proud to consider myself one of the more mindful “do-ers” of our species.   I encourage you to be a mindful do-er as well.

By being mindful do-ers of our species, we continue to earn our place among the survivors of this world.

From Wikipedia…

A bumblebee (also spelled as bumble bee) is any member of the bee genus Bombus, in the family Apidae. There are over 250 known species, existing primarily in the Northern Hemisphere although they are common in New Zealand and Tasmania.

Bumblebees are social insects that are characterised by black and yellow body hairs, often in bands. However, some species have orange or red on their bodies, or may be entirely black.^[1] Another obvious (but not unique) characteristic is the soft nature of the hair (long, branched setae), called pile, that covers their entire body, making them appear and feel fuzzy. They are best distinguished from similarly large, fuzzy bees by the form of the female hind leg, which is modified to form a corbicula: a shiny concave surface that is bare, but surrounded by a fringe of hairs used to transport pollen (in similar bees, the hind leg is completely hairy, and pollen grains are wedged into the hairs for transport).

Like their relatives the honey bees, bumblebees feed on nectar and gather pollen to feed their young.

On nests…

Bumblebees form colonies. These colonies are usually much less extensive than those of honey bees. This is due to a number of factors including: the small physical size of the nest cavity, a single female is responsible for the initial construction and reproduction that happens within the nest, and the restriction of the colony to a single season (in most species). Often, mature bumblebee nests will hold fewer than 50 individuals. Bumblebee nests may be found within tunnels in the ground made by other animals, or in tussock grass. Bumblebees sometimes construct a wax canopy (“involucrum”) over the top of their nest for protection and insulation. Bumblebees do not often preserve their nests through the winter, though some tropical species live in their nests for several years (and their colonies can grow quite large, depending on the size of the nest cavity). In temperate species, the last generation of summer includes a number of queens who overwinter separately in protected spots. The queens can live up to one year, possibly longer in tropical species.

Endangered list…

Bumblebees are in danger in many developed countries due to habitat destruction and collateral pesticide damage. In Britain, until relatively recently, 19 species of native true bumblebee were recognised along with six species of cuckoo bumblebees. Of these, three have been extirpated,^[21][22] eight are in serious decline, and only six remain widespread.^[23] Similar declines in bumblebees have been reported in Ireland, with 4 species being designated endangered, and another two species considered vulnerable to extinction.^[24] A decline in bumblebee numbers could cause large-scale changes to the countryside, leading to inadequate pollination of certain plants. The world’s first bumblebee sanctuary was established at Vane Farm in the Loch Leven National Nature Reserve in Scotland in 2008.^[25]

Some bumblebees native to North America are also vanishing, such as Bombus terricola, Bombus affinis and Bombus occidentalis, with one, Bombus franklini, that may even be extinct.^[26]