http://www.sugarcreektownship.com/Farmers-Market-220.html

December 17, 2011 - Ray Alley of Chris' Honey selling his raw, local honey at West Chester Farmers MarketJ

December is upon us and boy was it chilly at the West Chester Farmers’ Market. The customers that braved the weather were met with wonderful options for those last minute Christmas gifts, as well as stocking up for winter, should snow ever touch ground this year. Nancy of Wooden Shoe Baked Goods husband came this Saturday and was selling a very tasty bloody mary’s mix, you should defintely try it the next time he’s there! Many others included Dale at Morning Sun Farm, the Jam and Jelly Lady, Millbranch Farm, Twin Creek Farm Seasonings, Bill of Intarsia (who makes all the beautiful wood inlay works), and a many others.

A big thanks to all of you readers and/or honey advocates. This past year hasn’t been too bad, all things considered.  The bees continue to struggle while the beekeeping commununity tries to figure out a solution to the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Don’t forget we have a farmers’ market once a month until May. So come out and say “HI!” anytime between 2-3:30pm on Saturday; February 11, March 10, April 7, and April 28, 2012.

I will not be at the West Chester Farmer’s Market on June 19 as I have an Ohio State Beekeepers meeting to attend in Piketon, Ohio. I will be attending to learn more information about our wonderful honeybees and hopefully better ways to preserve their existence. I will be back at the market on June 26.

Fruity Frozen Yogurt Pops

• 1 cup fresh, ripe nectarines, pineapple, or strawberries, chopped
• 1-1/2 cups plain yogurt
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 8 paper cups (3 oz.) and popsicle sticks or plastic spoons

In a blender, combine all ingredients; mix well. Pour into eight (3 oz.) paper cups; insert popsicle sticks or plastic spoon in center of each. Freeze 4 hours or until solidly frozen.

This recipe, Fruity Frozen Yogurt Pops, comes compliments of Honey.com

Writer:

Mauricio Espinoza
espinoza.15@osu.edu
(330) 202-3550

Source:

Sherry Ferrell, Honey Bee Laboratory
ferrell.6@osu.edu
(330) 263-3684

WOOSTER, Ohio – “Modern Beekeeping: New Ways of Doing Old Things” is the 2010 theme of America’s biggest one-day beekeeping workshop, which will take place on Saturday, March 6, in Wooster, Ohio – with an additional March 5 evening program thrown in for good measure.

The 32nd annual Ohio State University Extension and Tri-County Beekeepers Association of Northeastern Ohio Spring Beekeeping Workshop will include sessions for both experienced and beginning beekeepers and for both adults and children. The event will be held at Fisher Auditorium and Shisler Conference Center at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster.

Last year, 675 beekeepers from Ohio and neighboring states attended the workshop, and a similar number is expected to swarm this year.

Pre-registration is due on March 1 and costs $35 per person. The fee for participants 17 years of age and younger is only $5. The walk-in registration cost is $45 per person. The fee includes materials and refreshments. Lunch can be purchased with pre-registration, or at local restaurants nearby.

For those spending the night in Wooster, a block of rooms has been set aside at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn, 959 Dover Rd., Wooster, at a cost of $89 per room plus taxes. For reservations, call 330-202-7701 or log on to http://www.wooster.stayhgi.com (mention the code name “OSU Bee Meeting”).

Friday evening activities begin at 6 p.m. with tours of the OSU Beekeeping Museum, located in OARDC’s Administration Building. Following the tours, at 7 p.m., participants can choose between two presentations: “Good Bees in Bad Places,” by Jim Tew, OSU Extension apiculture specialist, and “Bee Culture Through the Years,” by Kathy Summers, A. I. Root Co.

The Saturday program features a keynote address, “Colony Collapse Disorder and Africanized Honey Bees: Not Everything Is All Bad,” by Dewey Caron, professor emeritus, University of Delaware, at 9:20 a.m.

The presentation will be followed by 18 breakout sessions, divided into three workshops. Sessions include “Beekeeping Without Chemicals – Can It Be Done?”; “Urban Beekeeping”; “Cooking with Honey”; and several sessions designed for beginner beekeepers.

There will also be sessions for kids, a baking contest and vendors exhibiting their products.

Get the full list of breakout sessions and speakers at http://beelab.osu.edu/PDF/10_PRegistration_Packet.pdf; or contact Sherry Ferrell of Ohio State’s Honey Bee Laboratory, 330-263-3684, ferrell.6@osu.edu.

OARDC and OSU Extension are the research and outreach arms, respectively, of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

Not reprinted with permission; follow “‘Modern Beekeeping’ Show Set for March 5-6 in Wooster: Register Now ” see original article

1 3/4 cups flour
1/4 cup quick cooking oats
1/4 cup wheat germ
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup water

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°. Combine 1 cup of flour with remaining ingredients in a mixer at low speed. Knead in additional ¾ cup flour until dough forms a ball. Lightly flour surface and roll out dough until ¼ inch thick. Cut dough, using dog bone-shaped, or any cookie cutter. Re-roll scraps and continue cutting biscuits. Bake for 20 minutes on ungreased cookie sheets until biscuits are golden. Store in airtight container. Yield: approximately 30 bones.

Claim:   Albert Einstein predicted that if something eliminated bees from our planet, mankind would soon perish.

Status:   Undetermined.

Examples:

[Higgins, 2002]

Berry stuck up a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.”

Origins:   One tried-and-true method for getting people to pay attention to words is to put them into the mouth of a well-known, respected figure whom the public perceives as being an expert in the subject at hand. To make a point about whether our current political leaders are taking us down the right path, dig up an analogous quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Or, to comment on the nature of war (e.g., when it should be fought, how it should be fought, or the consequences of fighting it), find a relevant example credited to Robert E. Lee or George S. Patton.

Thus is it that recent concerns over a significant and mysterious decline in the population of pollinating
honeybees (a phenomenon attributed to everything from global warming to insecticides to radiation from cell phone towers, and now thought to be the result of a fungus) have seen a resurgence in repetitions of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, citations claiming the noted scientist once said “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

This truly sounds alarming: Bees are disappearing for reasons we can’t yet explain, and a certified genius such as Einstein noted long ago that if all the bees disappeared, we’d soon be following them into extinction. If the intent of propagating this quote is to get our attention, it’s certainly been working. Did Einstein sagely foresee an environmental crisis we’re only just now beginning to notice?

To answer that last question (without denying the importance of the honeybees), we have to consider the related question of “Did Einstein really say this?” First off, searches of Einstein’s writings and speeches and public statements, as well as of (scholarly) compilations of Einstein quotations reveal nary a reference to the “four years” phrase or any other statement mentioning bees (save for a brief comparison between humans and colony insects such as ants and bees). The compiler of The New Quotable Einstein also found no Einsteinian source for this quote and lists it as “Probably Not by Einstein.”

Secondly, even though Einstein died in 1955, assiduous searching of a variety of databases of historical printed material (e.g., books, newspapers, magazines) has so far failed to turn up any mention of this quote (attributed to Einstein or anyone else) antedating 1994, when it suddenly started popping up in newspaper articles reporting on a protest in Brussels staged by beekeepers:
A pamphlet distributed [in Brussels] by the National Union of French Apiculture quoted Albert Einstein. “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”
 
The beekeepers’ warnings had some heavyweight expert support. A pamphlet distributed by the National Union of French Apiculture quoted Albert Einstein. “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live,” Einstein was quoted as saying. “No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”
Finally, Einstein was, of course, a physicist and not an entomologist or botanist (or any other form of biologist). It’s puzzling to imagine a context in which he would have made the statement about bees now attributed to him, or why he would have been perceived as saying something noteworthy that was unknown to his fellow scientists.

The best answer probably lies in examining the context in which the earliest citations of this putative quote (that we’ve found so far) appeared: a January 1994 political protest staged by European beekeepers over the issues of competition from lower-priced honey imports, artificially high prices for sugar (used as winter feed for bees), and a proposed reduction of tariffs that would make imported honey products even cheaper. A key part of that protest was beekeepers’ issuing dire predictions that as beekeepers go, so go the bees — and as bees go, so go the food crops and other plants on which we depend:
The beekeepers claimed that if they were forced out of business, the honey bee could be eradicated in Europe since wild hives were already being decimated by a parasitic mite called varroa.

So far Scotland has escaped the devastating pest, but the threat elsewhere remains.

“Within a few years all the wild colonies will die out,” warned John Potter from Norwich.

“The honey bee is threatened with a rapid decline.”

If the bees became extinct, the protesters said the impact would go well beyond the livelihoods of the EU’s 16,000 full-time beekeepers and the some 430,000 part-timers.

Crops such as apples, pears, beans and oilseeds need bees for pollination.

British beekeepers estimate that 85 per cent of Europe’s wildflowers are pollinated by bees and the death of the flowers could have a major impact on wildlife.

“It’s going to be a chain reaction,” said Mr Potter.
All in all, this looks like a classic case of a useful quote’s being invented and put into the mouth of a famous person for political purposes.

Sightings:   Political comedian Bill Maher used the Einstein “bee” quote to begin his closing essay on the 20 April 2007 episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

Last updated:   21 April 2007

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp

Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2010 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson.
This material may not be reproduced without permission.
snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.
    Sources Sources:

    Ames, Paul.   “Life’s Not So Sweet for Europe’s Embattled Beekeepers.”
        Associated Press.   24 January 1994.

    Fitzgerald, Jay.   “‘Colony Collapse’ Worries Bee-Devil Farmers.”
        Boston Herald.   18 April 2007.

    Higgins, Adrian.   “Honeybees in a Mite More Than Trouble.”
        The Washington Post.   14 May 2002   (p. A1).

    Calaprice, Alice.   The New Quotable Einstein.
        Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.   ISBN 0-691-12074-9   (pp. 294-295).

    McLaughlin, Chris.   “Fearful Beekeepers Plead for Curbs on Honey Imports.”
        The Scotsman.   25 January 1994.

Not reprinted with permission; follow “ Einstein on Bees ” see original article

When it comes to bee stings, most of us react somewhere between Smithers on The Simpsons—for whom one sting nearly meant death—and Jon Quinn, a beekeeper I visited recently, who was once stung more than 40 times and still had the wherewithal to count as he extracted the stingers. (Quinn’s decade and a half of beekeeping had desensitized him to the venom.) For most, a sting means aching and swelling accompanied by a maddening itch.

All of which I had forgotten until this past Fourth of July, when I was stung on the back of my arm. Surprised by the sudden pain, I slapped the bee off my arm, dug the stinger out, and went inside to ask for treatment advice. Everyone had a different answer. Ice! Tobacco! Benadryl! Butter! Ban Roll-On! I tried a handful but did so in such a haphazard way—sometimes applying two remedies at once—that I gave none of the remedies an opportunity to be effective. Or, if any were effective, I had no way of knowing which had worked. The symptoms finally died down after four and a half days, but the experience left me wondering: How exactly are you supposed to treat a bee sting? To find out, I went back for more.

The Remedies
First, I looked into treatments. I consulted mainstream medical manuals (signified, below, by “med”) published by Merck, Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical School, the American Medical Association, and the Mayo Clinic. I thumbed through a stack of family-health guides like “Symptoms: Their Causes & Cures,” by the editors of Prevention (“diy”). I polled local beekeepers (“bee”), a few pediatricians (“doc”), a gaggle of pharmacists (“rex”), an entomologist in northwestern Massachusetts (“bug”), and my own family (“mom”). To track down more obscure home remedies, I poked around gardening and health Web sites (“web”). I decided to stay away from herbal soups that called for, say, a dram of lavender oil and a tablespoon of bentonite clay. (I assumed, maybe rashly, that most of you don’t stock a vial of lavender oil in the medicine cabinet.)

Once I had my arsenal of remedies, I was ready to be stung.

The Stings
I visited Jon Quinn, the beekeeper who runs North Forty Apiaries, in Woodbury, Conn. Quinn held a bee with tweezers, shook it a little to anger it, and placed it over the area where I wanted to get stung. On my first trip, I received two stings, one on the top of each hand. Four days later, I returned for two more, which I took on the top of each forearm. A week later, I still had several remedies to test, so I went to another beekeeper (Quinn was out of town) and got another on my right hand. After each sting, I scraped out the stinger. All stings were equally painful and the symptoms developed at about the same rate.

I kept a running log of my symptoms—pain, swelling, and itching—quantifying the severity on a scale from 0 (asymptomatic) to 10 (severe). I logged a symptom score every half-hour, except while I was sleeping, of course. This allowed me to look back at the arc of relief each remedy provided (or failed to provide). I left the remedies on the sting areas for 25 minutes to 45 minutes (depending on suggested use), then (as gently as possible) cleaned the sting area. On average, I tested two remedies per day on each of the stings, spacing the applications at least five hours apart (a frequency based on the maximum number of times—three or four—you’re supposed to use an antihistamine or anti-itch cream in one 24-hour period). However, I used the remedies on an as-needed basis: If a remedy worked so well that the symptoms went away for longer than five hours, then I waited that long to apply the next remedy. I set my symptom score threshold at 7, the point at which symptoms became so severe that I had trouble concentrating on anything else. So if it had been at least five hours since I’d used the last remedy and my symptom score had returned to 7 or higher, then I knew it was time to apply the next remedy. Once a sting’s symptom score no longer returned to at least 7, I quit testing on that sting area. On average, I treated each sting for two and a half days.

Some of the remedies I came across were supposed to “cure” the sting, either by breaking down the toxins in the venom or suppressing the release of pain- and itch-causing agents in the blood. Other remedies were only supposed to “soothe” the sting by relieving the symptoms. I was interested in symptom relief, especially since the effects of a bee sting usually last only a few days and don’t pose any long-term problems. I judged the remedies on how well and for how long they relieved the swelling, pain, and itching. I also considered their appearance, aroma, ease of preparation, and price—though honestly, when it comes to bee sting remedies, all that really matters is what stops the itch.

I broke down the remedies into two groups: pharmaceutical remedies and home remedies (with their endorsers in parentheses). My findings, from worst to first:

Pharmaceutical Remedies

Worst
Skeeter Stik (endorsed by web), $1.99, and Survivor Gel Stick, $1.99.These two insect-bite/sting “relief sticks” contain benzocaine, the anesthetic that powers toothache medicines like Anbesol. Benzocaine deadens nerve endings, so that the symptoms aren’t transmitted to your brain. These remedies come in compact tubes that would be perfect to pack for fishing or camping trips. They would be perfect, that is, if they worked. The sticks immediately knocked Category 9 symptoms down to around 5. But a quarter of an hour later, the symptoms were back up to 9.

Ban Roll-On (endorsed by diy/doc), $2.99/1.5 ounces. This was endorsed by two pediatricians, though neither would speculate why it supposedly works and, say, Right Guard Sports Stick doesn’t. Both questions would be tempting to pursue … if the Ban had worked. Instead of soothing the itch, the Ban displaced it: A small circle around the sting was calmed, while the surrounding area surged to Level 8.

Bad
Benadryl Extra Strength Itch Stopping Cream (endorsed by med/diy/doc/rex/mom), $5.59/1 ounce. Antihistamines are supposed to work by suppressing the symptom-producing agents, called histamines, that are released in the body during an allergic response. After ice, Benadryl cream was the most-suggested remedy (though several of my sources—including a pediatrician—insisted that it was useless). It did decrease my symptoms from an 8 to a 5 for around 30 minutes. Benadryl also gets points for being nearly odorless and for drying invisibly, with no flaking. After one hour, though, my symptoms shot back up to 8, where they hovered until I used the next remedy.

Good
CVS Maximum Strength Hydrocortisone Cream (med/diy/doc), $3.29/1 ounce. The smell and consistency reminded me of kindergarten paste. The cream dried visibly white on the skin but reduced the symptoms from 8 to 5 for the first hour and kept them sub-7 for three more hours, at which point they bounced back to 8.

Excellent
Caladryl (med/diy/mom), $6.49/6 ounces. Calamine lotion with an analgesic, this pain- and itch-killer calmed my symptoms with a soothing tingle. I applied it while my symptoms were raging at 9, and, within 45 minutes, they had sunk to 2. Four hours later, the symptoms suddenly flared up to 10, but I found that I preferred this dramatic seesawing to the gradual return of symptoms I experienced after using other remedies. It felt honest, like the Caladryl was confessing, “OK, I’m done. Time for another dose.”

Home Remedies

Worst
Slice of raw white onion (diy/web), $1.49/pound. Of all the home remedies, the onion had the most stirring testimonials. (Even Ann Landers once passed the tip along in a column.) It was odd, then, that this was the only remedy that seemed to make my symptoms worse. I tried it twice, thinking that I had somehow—how though?—misapplied it. But both times I had similar deleterious results, and I was left trailing a pungent stink in my wake.

Tobacco (doc/mom/web), $5.03/pack Marlboro Lights, $5.79/can Skoal Long Cut Mint. I was pulling for the tobacco. It was even endorsed by the medical establishment. And of all the home remedies, it seemed the most likely to be available at outdoor parties and barbecues, where bee stings often happen (and where smokers are used to doling out cigarettes to moochers). I tried dampened tobacco from cigarettes as well as a few pinches of dip, and alas, neither affected the symptoms, which remained at 9 for the duration of my treatment.

Not Bad
Honey (moi), $5.50/1-pound jar of Jon Quinn’s honey. This was my own home remedy, and it seemed like an obvious one, since honey is a folkloric favorite for anything and everything. I thought maybe I’d stumble upon a great curative miracle—that a bee’s sting can be healed by its honey. No luck, but the cool and soothing honey did alleviate the symptoms (from 9 to 5) for 30 minutes, which was at least as good as several other remedies.

Excellent
Paste of vinegar/baking soda/meat tenderizer (diy/doc), $2.59/16.9 ounces vinegar, $2.79/2.25 ounces meat tenderizer. Due to the acid/base interaction of the vinegar and baking soda, the concoction fizzed like an Alka Seltzer on my arm. The symptoms raged on at Level 9 for the first 20 minutes but then began to subside. An hour later, the symptoms had gone down to Level 2, and they stayed that way for several hours. Chalk one up for the meat tenderizer, which contains papain, an enzyme found in papaya that supposedly breaks down the toxins in bee (and other) venom. (Though the meat tenderizer and vinegar made me smell like an antipasto sampler.)

Best
Toothpaste (diy/web), $3.99/tube Crest Advanced Cleaning. Like the Caladryl and meat tenderizer potion, the toothpaste tingled. This not only made it seem medicated, it felt like I was actually scratching the itch, which was both psychologically and physically satisfying. One doctor I spoke to suggested that the glycerin found in most toothpastes dries out the venom concentrated under the sting area. But several others I asked said the tingle was a result of the alkaline toothpaste neutralizing the acid in the bee’s venom. Either way, the toothpaste knocked Level 10 symptoms down to 0 in 15 minutes and held them below 7 for more than five hours, one of the only two remedies I tried that did so. The other was the winner of the experiment …

Ice (med/diy/doc/rex/bee/web/mom), universally cheap. Almost every source I checked mentioned ice as a top remedy. And they were all right. Ice works. A 20-minute application knocked out the symptoms almost immediately and kept them subdued for half the day. Ice reduces swelling by constricting vessels and slowing down the flow of venom-tainted blood. By numb force, it also cancels out pain and itching. Its flaw, of course, is its temperature; it can become uncomfortable without some kind of buffer wrapped around it (which, you know, is simple to do). Then again, ice is very easy to find and it’s also super cheap. You can even make your own with very little equipment.

Conclusion
So, how did the home remedies stack up against the pharmaceutical offerings? It depends on the home, I guess. The worst home remedies were worse than the worst pharmaceuticals, and the best home remedies better than the best pharmaceuticals. The Caladryl was the sole pharmaceutical remedy I’d use again. If I had to leave the house to go get it, though, I’d buy the meat tenderizer instead and use it in the vinegar/baking soda paste. Yet why bother with either of those when you already use, on a daily basis, the two best bee sting remedies? The winners: toothpaste and ice.
Chip Brantley is the author of The Perfect Fruit, a book about pluots.

Not reprinted with permission; follow “ Sting Operation ” see original article

BY RICHELLE THOMPSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

LEBANON — Ray Alley has two “honey-do” lists. For the first, he occasionally needs a little prodding from his wife. The second requires no reminders.

For 18 years, Mr. Alley has filled out his own list: Check the hives. Medicate the bees. Pull the honey. And talk to his girls, as he affectionately calls his honeybees.

One of 3,000 registered beekeepers in Ohio, Mr. Alley operates five apiaries — or bee yards — with about eight hives at each. Some are on farms to help farmers with pollination. Mr. Alley also manages an apiary in his back yard, just north of Lebanon.

Mr. Alley, who serves as director of the Ohio Honey Festival and is a member of the Warren County Beekeepers Club, mentors new beekeepers, helping them start hives and teaching the tricks he has learned over the years. This year, a record five new beekeepers have joined the 50 members of the county’s club.

He suspects many people are drawn for the same reason that attracts him: The bees have so many lessons to teach.

He has learned patience and gentleness. The bees have given him an appreciation of nature.

Beekeeping is not Mr. Alley’s only hobby. He cultivates 110 varieties of irises in a front-yard flower bed and fires muzzle-loading black powder weapons.

But at 52 years old, the Delta Air Lines worker has found beekeeping to be the most interesting and challenging.

Mr. Alley sells the honey at the Waynesville Farmer’s Market, but estimates he earns a nickel an hour after expenses. This year, because the drought has wiped out many nectar sources, Mr. Alley expects the beekeeping won’t pay for itself.

His collection of honeybee paraphernalia, stuffed bears and handmade honey pots has crept from a corner of the kitchen into the living room. He’s hoping his wife, Chris, won’t notice.

And he is one of the few homeowners who loves to see dandelions pop up “because then I know the bees will make it through the winter.”

For information about beekeeping, call Ray Alley at (513) 932-8139.

Not reprinted with permission; follow “Lebanon man sweet on bees” see original article