AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

Short Course: Beekeeping

Vasiliy Osadchuck

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Beekeeping- Part 1

I was raised in a small town, and my grandparents had a farm in the Ukraine on the border of Romania, a little town, oh, mid-sized town of Cernauti or Cernivci.

And that town is in a beautiful area with fertile lands, plenty of rain, beautiful forests.

You can grow plums, apples, walnuts, you can grow anything.

Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and you could have bees.

So I always worked on the farm every summer, going to school every summer, going to grandparents' work on the farm.

And when I was 16, I took a summer job on a queen, bee queen rearing farm, and I fell in love with bees at the age of 16.

I didn't fall in love with any girl, anything like that.

I fell in love with beekeeping, and I loved bees ever since.

Their world is such intricate world with interaction between all the species within the hive.

It's like a small city or like a small country with its laws, its government, and it's such exciting event to see the colony develop from small, grow, separate, start new colonies.

And the byproduct of it is wonderful Fruits and nuts that we eat and you will ask why?

Because of cross pollinization Absolutely.

Somebody tell me which 1 Food that we eat almost daily could not be on your table if it went for the bees?

Most other fruit and nuts can be produced there, fruit and nuts, just right, even without bees.

The crops will be not as good, you will have fewer fruit, you will have fewer seeds in your seeds, you know, if you are raising sunflowers, for example.

But almonds, if there's no honeybee, won't have a single almond on it.

They are 100% relying on the honeybee pollinization.

So if you have almonds or almond milk or almond anything, you have to thank bees because without the honeybees there won't be almonds at all.

Therefore, all the almond growers in California or anywhere else, they entice and invite the beekeepers from all over the US to bring their bees for the almond blossom season.

So today we'll talk about pollinization, we'll talk about honey production, we'll talk about organic beekeeping, we'll talk about honey plants or nectar producing plants, we'll talk about how to manage bees without chemicals, without pesticides, We'll talk about things like ABCs of beekeeping.

I don't know how many of you are beekeepers.

Some of you may be beekeepers, which is great.

If you are not, we'll start with ABCs so we all understand what we're talking about.

Now before we do that I'll introduce you to my family.

But every morning I wake up, I walk on a farm, I go to see my bees right there, and I see this beautiful Carpathian mountain look.

If you've ever been to Europe, there's Alps, and there's Carpathian mountains, and there's Tatra mountains, and This is the kind of mountains where my grandparents live in the region where I was born.

Every day I walk, I pray as I walk through this farm.

Sometimes I see a bear eating honey there, you know.

Sometimes I find a few pieces of comb on the ground, but I say, hey, if God wants to feed the bear with my honey, that's all right.

I just come and put the box back together and put the frames in and that's how it goes.

I have a wife and 2 children, Eric, my wife, Keris, my daughter, Melissa, and I also enjoy my other family, which is bees.

My kids know that I love bees, my wife know that I love bees and those of you who are beekeepers know what I mean.

It's like a passion when you know that you have bees, you have the call of the wild.

You want to go and see your bees every day.

So we'll start with the life of a bee colony.

And the Latin Greek word for the bee is apis mellifera.

Miel in Spanish means honey and miere in Romanian means honey and myod in Russian and Ukrainian and Bulgarian med means honey.

Fero in Greek means carry or bring so mellifera it's honey that brings I mean bee that brings honey.

So honeybees is the only social bee that actually stores Honey.

Most other bees, there's hundreds of varieties of other bees, they are good kind of helpers in agriculture.

They bring nectar for every day, but they do not store for the winter.

There are many other bees that hibernate.

They don't eat in the winter, they don't use food, they just sort of semi, only the queen is semi-alive in the winter.

And then In the spring, she lays a few eggs when it's warming up, and then they start a small colony, a few, maybe 10, 20, 100 bees in a colony.

Then they bring food enough for the day, enough to feed the babies.

And then, as it gets colder, all the babies die out, you know, and the queen hibernates for another winter, you know.

Honeybees bring enough food for at least 2 years ahead, and they store it in the colony.

If you imagine, this is the first story of the colony, and normally in the wild, bees grow, bees live in hollow trees, let's say, or in a wall of a building.

And they start at the bottom and start building, come up, up, up, up, up, up, up, and they would have babies or brood in the bottom.

Then they will have some honey supply, some pollen supply.

Just like we humans, we need carbohydrates, and we need proteins, right?

Very little fat, a little protein, and more complex carbohydrates.

What is, what is carbohydrates for the bees?

They condense it, evaporate water out of it, and it becomes honey.

So pollen also contains some fat, very little fat.

So they get all 3 major nutrients, right, for their, macronutrients I should call them, for their life.

And they also get multiple, multiple micronutrients from the pollen, because pollen is very rich in micronutrients, various salts of metals, various compounds that we call them phytonutrients, or nutrients found in the plants.

So pollen is very important, honey is very important, and the colony that does that is only the honeybee.

Now humans use the surplus honey and pollen sometimes, and the honey bee colony is just fine because they store enough for the next few years.

So the beekeeper can collect full year's supply for himself, right, and share with others, right?

You are not only helping the agriculture in cross-pollinization, you also have the byproduct, The honey and the bee pollen.

Short Course: Soil Health

Whitmar McConnell

Soil Health- Part 5

And the anions, which are positively charged, I mean negatively charged, I apologize, negatively charged as opposed to the positively charged cations, are actually held in the soil differently.

Nitrogen, sulfur, and boron are all anions, and they're all highly leachable in the soil because they're not attracted by that charge.

The way the anions are stored in the soil is in organic matter.

Now there are some ways that they are tied up in compounds, but by and large their reservoirs are in organic matter.

And so again, your goal is to create the conditions where you can have as much life, as much growth as you can, with optimum levels of these materials in your soil so that you can ultimately build them in to that organic matter, in humus, as a storage reservoir in your soil.

Because they are, if you were to do soil tests on an almost yearly basis, sulfur levels go down, boron levels go down, you have to apply them again because there's no, There are some positive sites on the colloids, the humus colloids and the clay colloids.

But the anions are actually chelated or surrounded by organic compounds.

They're kind of held in the compound rather than on the surface of it.

So we're going to touch on nitrogen first.

Nitrogen actually occurs in 2 forms, 2 usable forms.

In NH4+, it's actually a cation, has a cation form and it has an anion form, NO3, which is nitrate, and NH4+, which is ammonium nitrogen.

Ammonium nitrogen, because it is a plus charge, can actually attach to the colloids in the soil.

And so it holds in the soil better than nitrate.

Nitrate is highly soluble and highly leachable.

1 of the things, when people over-apply nitrogen in this form, it never leaves the soil by itself.

It always takes something else with it, and what it typically takes with it is calcium.

And so you lose calcium levels in the soil.

Nitrogen is the largest amount of material in plant material.

And its primary role is particularly vegetative growth.

In other words, framing the plant, building the plant, growing the stems and the leaves so that you have the factory built that can produce the fruit.

All proteins have nitrogen in them, And enzymes are just a form of protein.

And if those enzymes are not built right, they don't function right.

It's also involved in chlorophyll production.

Again, so that affects photosynthesis and the growth of the plant.

This is probably the most overused fertilizer there is.

And the lakes and the streams and the groundwater and everything can testify to that, that it is.

Like I said, when it's converted, when it breaks down out of organic matter, it primarily comes out as ammonium nitrogen.

And then it's converted by the microbes, the bacteria, and the soil into the nitrate nitrogen.

But like I said, it's highly leachable once it's in there, and it's generally applied in a highly soluble form.

The problem is that the plant needs it over time.

And so your real objective here should be to get the natural nitrogen cycle functioning.

There's tons and tons of nitrogen above every acre of soil.

And if you have the natural systems functioning, all the nitrogen you would need should be easily accessible from out of the air.

But the conditions are not such that that happens very well.

And 1 of the interesting things that happens with nitrogen, when you apply it to the soil, the bacteria get lazy.

And the rhizobium bacteria, and there's free living nitrogen fixers in the soil too.

Zodobacter, blue-green algae, they all fix nitrogen.

But when you provide the nitrogen to them, then they don't bother.

In a commercial, in a highly soluble, yeah, we're gonna get, when we get to the other, the materials there, we're gonna talk about the organic sources of it, which can be just as big a problem.

Well, ammonium, it's like a, Yeah, because, yeah.

You put your hand in the bag of fertilizer.

Well you just brought up, why did farmers, farmers never used to use outside nitrogen sources other than, you know, organic sources.

But how did that all come to be, since you brought that up?

Well, yeah, when we came out of World War II, we had a huge bomb-making industry.

And they didn't need bombs anymore, Not to the extent, at least, that we did.

And so what are they gonna do with all this nitrogen?

Well, they looked around and said, plants use nitrogen, let's sell it to the farmers.

And They started using the nitrogen, you know what happened next?

What happens when, yeah, we're gonna go over here.

What happens when you apply too much nitrogen, you get soft growth, you get too rapid a vegetative growth.

There's not enough Complementary materials in there to finish building.

It's like building a building when you don't have the full facade Structure there and it gets up, and it's getting kind of wobbly because it's too soft.

And so the crops, we were just talking about the wheat and what happened to all these tall wheat, old varieties of wheat.

They grow wheat, those old varieties of wheat over in England and Germany.

They produce 200, 250 bushels a acre of wheat with them.

But what happened in here with them is they all fell over.

So the farmers said, well, this is great, but we're losing our crops because we can't harvest them.

Say, okay, well, let's stop doing this because that's not working out really well because we're imbalancing it.

No, they came back and they said, well, the reason is, is because you don't have enough potassium.

You're not getting enough stock strength because you don't have enough potassium.

And so they started selling potassium fertilizers to do that.

And that looked great for a while until the animals stopped reproducing.

And they said, well, this looks good, this looks great and everything, but the animals can't reproduce anymore.

And they went back to the lab and looked it over and everything.

Instead of anybody thinking, let's go backwards here and let's start rethinking this whole thing.

They came back to him and said, oh, it's because there's a phosphate deficiency.

That's why you're not getting the reproduction anymore.

You're creating 1 imbalance after another, and it's been that way for a long time where you just come in and you create 1 more imbalance and exaggerate 1 more thing in order to compensate for the fact that you did the other and so next thing you're selling them phosphate fertilizers and from there they still they still continue to develop the problems And so the next solution was not, let's back up and let's figure out what the right...

They knew at that point in time, by the way, what the right balance in the soil was.

Instead of backing up, the pharmaceutical industry came into it and said, well, we just need to give them drugs to help them to do this and to keep them from being sick with this and that and everything else from all the imbalances that were created.

And you're on down to where we are today.

It was just creating an incomplete and imbalanced system.

If they would have implemented a complete and balanced fertility situation in the soil, we would have been in a totally different world right now, an entirely different world.

Soil Health- Part 4

Father in heaven, after the refreshing of a good meal and fellowship, we just pray now that we can continue in our learning and our understanding and we just pray again that your presence would be here, that we would have a correct understanding of your word in Jesus' name.

Okay, so we're going to do calcium and magnesium together after we kind of go look at each of them individually in these different aspects, their roles, and their sources, and their deficiencies and excesses, what their indicators are.

I tried to put the things in there that I thought were the most beneficial.

There are other sources of materials available, like in industrial byproducts, there's paper, sludge, when the manufacturer of paper, you can get calcium out of that.

Some of those things can be beneficial, and if you have them close to you, not everybody kind of has those things.

But sometimes people ask me, well, is this, will this work, it's calcium?

And we just had to evaluate it, How clean is it after it's gone through whatever process it's gone through?

Like if it's been through a scrubber in a coal-powered plant, you're going to need to check for some heavy metals to determine whether or not that's something you wanna put on your ground.

But anyway, these are the ones that I think you're pretty safe with if you have them.

There's 2 types of lime, high calcium lime and dolomitic lime.

The difference is you can see in the content.

High calcium limes are usually about 30% to 38% elemental calcium with a minimal amount of magnesium in them.

It can be as high as 5%, but usually it's even lower than that.

And then the dolomite lime or dolomitic lime is a combination of calcium and magnesium carbonate.

The high calcium lime is calcium carbonate.

The dolomitic lime is a combination, typically falls in the 20 to 24% calcium, 10 to 12% magnesium content.

I've seen those numbers higher than that and lower than that on both sides.

Depends on the quarry that it's coming out of and the analysis of the material.

But this is kind of the textbook expectations of what you would get in that material.

What I mean by that, when I say it's a liming material, it means it will neutralize acidity.

And so it's the carbonate, part of the calcium carbonate or the magnesium carbonate that reacts with the hydrogen ions, which are acidic form.

They're cations, but they're acid forming.

Reacts with that and produces water and carbon dioxide.

So the liming material, when they call it a lime, it's because it has that carbonate in it that can react with the acidity, the hydrogen ions, and neutralize the acidity.

Your priority is not just having the right pH.

Your priority is having the right nutrients in the right quantities.

And when the pH is low, when you have an acid pH, it's just telling you that you're missing cation nutrients.

And so then you have to figure out, well, which ones am I missing?

If you use pH as just your measure, you can use either 1 of those, and it'll raise the pH.

But the consequences are very different depending on which 1 you use.

If you continue to use a lime with a lot of magnesium in it and your soil doesn't need it, your soil's just gonna get harder and harder over time.

You might have a good pH, but now your soil structure is terrible.

But gypsum is calcium and sulfur, calcium sulfate.

So it doesn't have a neutralizing effect on the soil.

And it's about 20 to 24% calcium and 15 to 18% sulfur.

Again, I've seen those numbers different than those on different materials, depending on the source.

But this is the general ballpark of where those percentages are going to be as far as content goes.

When I'm doing recommendations for people, if they don't tell me what their sources are, If I don't know what their sources are, like with these numbers, for example, if you have a limestone quarry in the area, you can go to the limestone quarry and they have an analysis.

So it's going to tell you what this content is.

And it's generally going to tell you what the fineness of the grind is as well.

And the fineness of the grind is important because the more surface area that it is, the faster it breaks down.

And so it's not critical that you have a certain fineness of grind, But it depends on how much material you have to put on in order to bring the levels of those nutrients to the place that you want them.

When you apply all the materials and the amounts that they need to be, the pH will land right where it needs to be.

It should be somewhere between 6 and 6.5.

If you have woody crops you're growing, you're going to have potassium levels a little bit higher, so it might be a little bit higher, 6-4, or something like that.

And when the nutritional content is correct, the pH will be fine.

Is all this, everyone, we have to mix it in or salt?

Yeah, you get other things with some of them, like magnesium with that, sulfur with that.

And it's a very good source if you have access to it.

Because it does have some other minerals in it that can be beneficial.

Are there any handouts that would have this information online or anything?

Yeah, you can usually just look it up and look at it.

Like if you went and searched for calcium sources, fertilizer sources, You can usually find that.

You can find about anything you want now on the internet if you know what you're looking for.

We're going to talk about when you can use gypsum and when you cannot use gypsum when we talk about the percentages that are required on these.

Because there are conditions which when you put gypsum on thinking you're going to add calcium, you're going to lose calcium.

Because you have to have a minimum saturation of calcium before you can use gypsum.

You have to have at least 60% saturation of calcium before using gypsum will work.

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All Teachings

Beekeeping- Part 1

48m

Soil Health- Part 5

56m

Soil Health- Part 4

51m

Soil Health- Part 3

29m

Soil Health- Part 2

47m

Soil Health- Part 1

57m

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 6

42m

Gardening 101- Part 4

51m

Gardening 101- Part 3

45m

Gardening 101- Part 2

39m

Gardening 101- Part 1

38m

Beginning Market Farming- Part 6

46m

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