College Media Matters
Guilt-free MLK ad riles up Rice Thresher readers
A satirical ad on the Backpage of the Jan. 10 Rice (University) Thresher in Houston caused a flurry of publicity and tweets encouraging violence again Thresher staff, demanding parents remove their children’s college funds from the university, and accusing the newspaper of racism.
The ad read: Hey, there, white people! We know. You have a day off to celebrate someone who managed to beat your system. Don’t despair – for the low price of eternal shame you can spend these 24 hours doing something productive like beating off into a sock and wondering whatever happened to your 8th grade girlfriend. You’re disgusting.
In reply to the University’s response to the ad, Sandy Sutton tweeted: “So this is acceptable writing? We notice you didn’t Change the whole staff at the paper. No more donations from my entire family.”
In contrast Estevan Delgado retorted that “As a Rice Alum (and a POC) – god forbid we tempt people to ponder the past. I’ve seen worse back pages. What side of history are you on?”
The University responded to the ad by suggesting readers forward comments to thresher@rice.edu.
“The student-run Rice Thresher has a history of satire on its backpage. Rice does not manage the content but is disappointed w/this offensive attempt at satire, which is contrary to our values. We support a free press, even if we don't agree. Comments can go to thresher@rice.edu,” the University tweeted.
Publication of the ad was covered by Fox News, College Fix, Inside Higher Ed and Nation One. Adviser Kelley Lash said her students were “super chill” about the incident in spite of the death threats aimed at the editors.
In its Jan. 12 response to the backlash from the ad the newspaper’s editorial board described the Backpage as “consisting of advertisements that poke fun at different events going on at Rice and in the world at large.” The purpose of the ad, the editorial stated, was to encourage students to reflect on the meaning of the holiday rather than use it simply as another vacation day without classes.
“The reference to masturbation, of course, is crude, as much of the Backpage’s humor has been in its several decades of existence,” the editorial said.
Much of the hostility towards the ad seemed to focus not so much on the masturbation reference but in what appeared to be the newspaper calling white people disgusting. Twenty-nine percent of the student population at Rice University is white.
The editorial staff argued that the “you’re disgusting” statement referred to white people beating off into a sock not to white people in general.
“Which we realize may have been unclear,” the staff editorial stated.
The ad gave the staff the opportunity to address the fact that while progress has been made since 1963 that “we still live in a system designed to favor white people at the expense of others.” Racism exists in the context of generations of oppression and slavery suffered by one population at the hands of another, the editorial said. The ad’s satirical reference to white behavior does not compare, in the staff’s opinion, to that tradition.
“We do not ask the university to stand with our editorial content on every occasion, but we are disheartened that Rice’s administration finds a part of a Backpage intended to target issues of institutional racism and general apathy to be “contrary to the values of the university,” the editorial said.
Guilt-free MLK ad riles up Rice Thresher readers
A satirical ad on the Backpage of the Jan. 10 Rice (University) Thresher in Houston caused a flurry of publicity and tweets encouraging violence again Thresher staff, demanding parents remove their children’s college funds from the university, and accusing the newspaper of racism.
The ad read: Hey, there, white people! We know. You have a day off to celebrate someone who managed to beat your system. Don’t despair – for the low price of eternal shame you can spend these 24 hours doing something productive like beating off into a sock and wondering whatever happened to your 8th grade girlfriend. You’re disgusting.
In reply to the University’s response to the ad, Sandy Sutton tweeted: “So this is acceptable writing? We notice you didn’t Change the whole staff at the paper. No more donations from my entire family.”
In contrast Estevan Delgado retorted that “As a Rice Alum (and a POC) – god forbid we tempt people to ponder the past. I’ve seen worse back pages. What side of history are you on?”
The University responded to the ad by suggesting readers forward comments to thresher@rice.edu.
“The student-run Rice Thresher has a history of satire on its backpage. Rice does not manage the content but is disappointed w/this offensive attempt at satire, which is contrary to our values. We support a free press, even if we don't agree. Comments can go to thresher@rice.edu,” the University tweeted.
Publication of the ad was covered by Fox News, College Fix, Inside Higher Ed and Nation One. Adviser Kelley Lash said her students were “super chill” about the incident in spite of the death threats aimed at the editors.
In its Jan. 12 response to the backlash from the ad the newspaper’s editorial board described the Backpage as “consisting of advertisements that poke fun at different events going on at Rice and in the world at large.” The purpose of the ad, the editorial stated, was to encourage students to reflect on the meaning of the holiday rather than use it simply as another vacation day without classes.
“The reference to masturbation, of course, is crude, as much of the Backpage’s humor has been in its several decades of existence,” the editorial said.
Much of the hostility towards the ad seemed to focus not so much on the masturbation reference but in what appeared to be the newspaper calling white people disgusting. Twenty-nine percent of the student population at Rice University is white.
The editorial staff argued that the “you’re disgusting” statement referred to white people beating off into a sock not to white people in general.
“Which we realize may have been unclear,” the staff editorial stated.
The ad gave the staff the opportunity to address the fact that while progress has been made since 1963 that “we still live in a system designed to favor white people at the expense of others.” Racism exists in the context of generations of oppression and slavery suffered by one population at the hands of another, the editorial said. The ad’s satirical reference to white behavior does not compare, in the staff’s opinion, to that tradition.
“We do not ask the university to stand with our editorial content on every occasion, but we are disheartened that Rice’s administration finds a part of a Backpage intended to target issues of institutional racism and general apathy to be “contrary to the values of the university,” the editorial said.
Dakotafire Magazine
http://dakotafire.net/firedup/helping-pollinators-helps-the-whole-system-advocate-says/9072/
What do youth want from communities? Ask them.
by Susan Smith, with additional reporting by Wendy Royston
Angie Baszler recently realized a good way to engage youth in their community, and make them want to live there as adults, is just by giving them a great place to grow up.
“Just letting them be kids and giving them a good childhood is what we’re doing right.” Baszler
The realization came to Baszler, who recently left the economic development field to pursue a secondary education degree, during a Prairie Idea Exchange event. A student from Webster talked about wanting to move back to that community because young people are so supported there. When their athletic team went to state adults in the community sent letters, flowers and “lots of support” to the team.
“The community supported them and surrounded them and really looked out for them. She said, ‘I want to live in a community like that,’” Baszler said.
By showing up for students - sending them letters of encouragement and support, attending athletic games and communicating that while they may be students they are still part of the fabric of their community, town’s like Webster and Baszler’s community in DeSmet, unconsciously develop youth.
Many times local communities want something from their youth – they want them to come home and live there or work in their businesses and participate in community activities. But Baszler thinks perhaps the town leaders should be asking how the community can serve those young people.
“These students have a lot on their plates,” she said. “They are in school all day long. Then, they’re in sports afterward. To find additional time to get involved in the community afterward … what if their involvement revolves around being good students and being in extracurricular activities? How can we support them in that?”
Once those students graduate they might take that good experience out into the world, learn more and bring their experiences back to their town.
The DeSmet guidance counselor sent a student to Baszler, to discuss the college experience. Baszler told her to go off into the world. Move to a city. Start a career. But bring those experiences back to DeSmet.
“That messaging is hard to get across when students are jumping from science to social studies to math,” she said. “There’s not really an open forum to do that, and I’m not sure community leaders understand that.”
Baszler said changing the way in which adults engage youth is a growth process for not just the teens, but also adults.
Baszler has initiated a follow-up discussion about youth engagement during one of her subbing jobs, asking students in DeSmet whether they’d move back to town if given the chance. Only 25 percent said yes. The rest claimed there was nothing for kids to do there.
“I find this interesting, because kids in Omaha say there’s nothing for them to do (there),” she said. “I don’t buy that.”
Baszler confronted the statement by trying to find out what students did want to do.
They said they’d like “a place to go.” Their parents told stories about dances at the No Name when they were in high school. The students wanted the same opportunity to create a place they could use to build memories and develop their generation’s identity and experiences.
“They were trusting adults, and saying, ‘We want to have this,’ and, yet, my initial reaction was out of fear that they would behave inappropriately,” she said. “What if (we) said yes? How could our community support finding chaperones and giving them community support and letting them remember that the young people in our town put on a dance for us once a year?”
Allowing students to have an impact on community decisions - and access to those decision makers - is exactly the kind of thing Craig Schroeder, a senior fellow of New Generation Partnerships at the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, is working to develop.
Like Jason Baszler, Schroeder returned to his hometown in Nebraska as a young, professional adult, bringing with him a wife and children.
When one person decides to return to their hometown they often bring one to two people or more with them in the form of a spouse or child. That’s a huge asset to a community. Rural communities are not as isolated as they were previously. Technology has made it possible for the spouse of someone returning home to work anywhere and to have access to more amenities.
“You can do a lot of things from rural places you couldn’t 20 or 30 years ago,” Schroeder said.
Youth need to tell the adult leaders in their hometowns what they want that community to be - much like the students did in DeSmet, Schroeder says.
When Schroeder returned to his rural community, the economy was tight. Farming operations were shrinking due to fledgling market prices, and the need for other services was dwindling as well. In the 1980s, rural economies relied on the livelihood of farmers and their ability to support other local businesses. Rural America, in a sense, was a world of its own.
The 21st Century ag economy has shifted, and so has the need for rural people to rely only on their neighbors for businesses successes. And young people want to take advantage of these shifting economies while raising their children at home.
“It’s important to make youth aware of these opportunities and train them in leadership and entrepreneurship to give them an opportunity to direct the course of their communities,” he said.
Over the past 10 years, 40,000 high school and junior high students in rural areas were surveyed about what would make them want to stay in their hometown. Often the number of students surveyed made up 80 percent of the student body at their schools. The survey asked about the students’ connections to their communities and factors that would make those places attractive. Over half the students surveyed said they’d like to return to their hometown.
“That’s happened without a lot of adults being aware of it because they haven’t been engaging young people because there was an assumption that they didn’t want to come back.”
Schroeder said it’s up to the adults in these communities to help guide students - developing their skills and capitalizing on close family connections and desire to raise a family in a safe environment with good schools. Students surveyed believe that’s possible in their hometowns, Schroeder said, which indicates an existing strong emotional tie to their communities.
“This is very much about an attraction and engagement strategy,” Schroeder said.
Some students still want to leave at least for a time, and he thinks they should. Like Baszler, Schroeder said that young people should have time away by going to college or experiencing a different place. But then they should return and bring that new knowledge with them.
He think there’s a prevailing mindset now that if you grew up in a small community you might want to continue living in one. Some rural communities have seen a 25-percent increase in population. It’s important for rural leaders to figure out what students want.
“What would make them want to stay?” Schroeder asked.
His research developed three key interlocking concepts community members can use to develop youth:
1. Entrepreneurial education and career development
2. Youth involvement and leadership in the community
3. Community support of youth enterprise.
Schroeder advocates getting to know young people, involving them in decisions about the community and sharing the information gained with decision makers.
“If young people are involved in improving their community it causes them to have a greater investment in their community,” Schroeder said.
This is something Baszler is already putting into practice. While she has left the “official” field of economic development, she feels teaching high school students will prove to be a way to continue that work.
“I really want to have an impact on students while they’re still moldable and (teach them) that it’s important to be involved in your community, and it’s important to know how to speak your opinion, and speak it respectfully, because if you have logical opinions and they’re educated and they’re important and you present them in the right manner, you can really affect change positively.
College Media Review
http://cmreview.org/fundraising-efforts-lead-to-strong-student-experiences/
http://cmreview.org/combatting-stress-on-the-job/
cmreview.org/south-dakota-state-university-students-resurrect-yearbook/
http://cmreview.org/the-future-of-the-venerable-yearbook/
South Dakota Rural Electric Cooperative Connections
Scientific process helps South Dakota beekeeper build better bees
By Susan Smith
Jon Kieckhefer, a former agronomist for South Dakota State University’s Cooperative Extension Service, now spends most of his time raising bees west of Volga. But unlike most beekeepers the Brookings native’s primary goal isn’t to produce honey.
“I’m not like other commercial beekeepers,” he said. “Most do it for pollination and honey production. For the most part I raise and sell queens.”
Kieckhefer’s interest in honey bees began when he was 12 years old and a dead tree on his family’s property turned out to be the home of a bee colony. His father, an entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, helped Kieckhefer move that bee colony from a birdhouse to a glass-covered box. The bees were successfully relocated. A drier vent hose allowed them to come and go and the glass cover on the box allowed Kieckhefer to peek in on them when he wanted.
“I was like any kid fascinated with insects,” he said. “I wanted to save them. I wanted to have them and be able to watch them.”
That fascination caused him to start keeping his own bee colonies during graduate school at the University of Kansas. Several of his friends raised bees as a hobby. He began doing the same. When he moved back to South Dakota the bees came with him. Demand and economics pushed him in the direction of breeding and selling queen bees. A colony costs $100 to $200. A queen costs $20 to $25. His bees wintered well, which attracted the attention of other beekeepers.
“More and more guys wanted to buy queens from me because I kept my bees in the winter,” he said. “I didn’t do anything special – if they survived they survived and if they didn’t, they didn’t.”
He keeps 500 hives and harvests 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of honey from them per year, which he sells to wholesalers. And if he can help pollinate a local field he does. But he primarily breeds and raises queens that have specific genetic traits he can guarantee by tracing their pedigree. They aren’t big honey producers but they survive cold northern winters better, resist mites that decimate a hive when they get inside, or make them more hygienic, which also cuts down on the mite problem. And it makes it possible for beekeepers to use fewer pesticides. When his bees are paired with bees that have a high production value, it’s like the best of both worlds.
He uses a process of instrument insemination with his queen bees so that he knows which males, with which traits are used in the fertilization process. Bees are everywhere in South Dakota, he said. Without the insemination process, Kieckhefer said it’s difficult to know which males the queen mates with. He marks male bees with paint so he knows their original hive and the day they hatched. The average honey beekeeper is not going to pay for a queen with a specific genetic makeup. But people who breed queens to sell to those producers do see the value in being able to guarantee bees that winter well or have other genetic benefits.
“The value is in the known genetic trait,” Kieckhefer said.
That trait can then be used in other stock. The worker bees in a hive create a queen by feeding a female egg more protein – called royal jelly. This causes the ovaries to develop early, creating the queen. Worker bees short of a queen in their colony will choose one or a few cells with eggs inside to feed more of the royal jelly. People think a queen controls a colony of bees, Kieckhefer says, but that isn’t completely true. Once the queens stop producing eggs they are dethroned, so to speak. They will mate shortly after hatching and then keep that sperm for their lifetime – usually two to three years – some live longer. Once that sperm runs out so does their productive life.
“The queen is there doing the egg laying for the hive,” Kieckhefer said. “As soon as workers get upset with her they just kill her and make a new one.”
Kieckhefer sells a couple of different grades of queen – a production grade that can mate with whomever it wants because it is not going to be useful to produce queens with specific traits. Some of those queens go to South Dakota or Minnesota and mostly to hobbyist beekeepers. The pedigreed queens all go to queen breeders on the east or west coast.
Currently there are more managed honey bee colonies than any time since the 1970s. Honey beekeepers lose bees every year to death from natural causes, disease and not withstanding the winter. Beginning in 2006 Colony Collapse Disorder decimated a fair amount of hives. The cause is still unclear. Some blame the mites, some think it’s related to pesticides and some even blame cell phone towers and power lines, Kieckhefer said.
“No one has come up with a satisfactory explanation of the vast loss,” Kieckhefer said. But beekeepers are a fairly resistant bunch and make up their losses quickly, especially with new bees hatching every day in the summer months.
“Honey bees aren’t in great danger of extinction,” Kieckhefer said.
There are no native honey bee species in the United States. Colonists brought them all in from Eurasia for the purpose of producing honey, which is still the main attraction of keeping bees.
“Everyone’s after that sweetness,” Kieckhefer said.
According to the South Dakota Department of Agriculture, South Dakota typically ranks in the top five states for honey production, ranking third in 2008 with 21.3 million pounds. The state’s bees produce a “highly desirable, mild-flavored and light-colored alfalfa and sweet clover blend.” The value of the state’s honey crop in 2008 was $28.6 million. Pollinating South Dakota’s cash crop is another major component of beekeeping. It’s something a producer typically gets for free via the natural process the bees go through to produce honey, but it adds $10.7 billion in value to state crops.
Kieckhefer continues to keep bees – enduring daily stings, sometimes in uncomfortable places like inside the nostril or ear drum – because of the addictive quality of the work. Most people who try to keep bees either stop right away, he said, because they hate being stung or become addicted and collect more and more hives.
“There’s nothing more relaxing than working with bees,” he said. “You stop thinking about yourself, and focus on the bees. It’s kind of a meditative experience to do that. You’re working in their world rather than your own.”
http://dakotafire.net/firedup/helping-pollinators-helps-the-whole-system-advocate-says/9072/
What do youth want from communities? Ask them.
by Susan Smith, with additional reporting by Wendy Royston
Angie Baszler recently realized a good way to engage youth in their community, and make them want to live there as adults, is just by giving them a great place to grow up.
“Just letting them be kids and giving them a good childhood is what we’re doing right.” Baszler
The realization came to Baszler, who recently left the economic development field to pursue a secondary education degree, during a Prairie Idea Exchange event. A student from Webster talked about wanting to move back to that community because young people are so supported there. When their athletic team went to state adults in the community sent letters, flowers and “lots of support” to the team.
“The community supported them and surrounded them and really looked out for them. She said, ‘I want to live in a community like that,’” Baszler said.
By showing up for students - sending them letters of encouragement and support, attending athletic games and communicating that while they may be students they are still part of the fabric of their community, town’s like Webster and Baszler’s community in DeSmet, unconsciously develop youth.
Many times local communities want something from their youth – they want them to come home and live there or work in their businesses and participate in community activities. But Baszler thinks perhaps the town leaders should be asking how the community can serve those young people.
“These students have a lot on their plates,” she said. “They are in school all day long. Then, they’re in sports afterward. To find additional time to get involved in the community afterward … what if their involvement revolves around being good students and being in extracurricular activities? How can we support them in that?”
Once those students graduate they might take that good experience out into the world, learn more and bring their experiences back to their town.
The DeSmet guidance counselor sent a student to Baszler, to discuss the college experience. Baszler told her to go off into the world. Move to a city. Start a career. But bring those experiences back to DeSmet.
“That messaging is hard to get across when students are jumping from science to social studies to math,” she said. “There’s not really an open forum to do that, and I’m not sure community leaders understand that.”
Baszler said changing the way in which adults engage youth is a growth process for not just the teens, but also adults.
Baszler has initiated a follow-up discussion about youth engagement during one of her subbing jobs, asking students in DeSmet whether they’d move back to town if given the chance. Only 25 percent said yes. The rest claimed there was nothing for kids to do there.
“I find this interesting, because kids in Omaha say there’s nothing for them to do (there),” she said. “I don’t buy that.”
Baszler confronted the statement by trying to find out what students did want to do.
They said they’d like “a place to go.” Their parents told stories about dances at the No Name when they were in high school. The students wanted the same opportunity to create a place they could use to build memories and develop their generation’s identity and experiences.
“They were trusting adults, and saying, ‘We want to have this,’ and, yet, my initial reaction was out of fear that they would behave inappropriately,” she said. “What if (we) said yes? How could our community support finding chaperones and giving them community support and letting them remember that the young people in our town put on a dance for us once a year?”
Allowing students to have an impact on community decisions - and access to those decision makers - is exactly the kind of thing Craig Schroeder, a senior fellow of New Generation Partnerships at the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, is working to develop.
Like Jason Baszler, Schroeder returned to his hometown in Nebraska as a young, professional adult, bringing with him a wife and children.
When one person decides to return to their hometown they often bring one to two people or more with them in the form of a spouse or child. That’s a huge asset to a community. Rural communities are not as isolated as they were previously. Technology has made it possible for the spouse of someone returning home to work anywhere and to have access to more amenities.
“You can do a lot of things from rural places you couldn’t 20 or 30 years ago,” Schroeder said.
Youth need to tell the adult leaders in their hometowns what they want that community to be - much like the students did in DeSmet, Schroeder says.
When Schroeder returned to his rural community, the economy was tight. Farming operations were shrinking due to fledgling market prices, and the need for other services was dwindling as well. In the 1980s, rural economies relied on the livelihood of farmers and their ability to support other local businesses. Rural America, in a sense, was a world of its own.
The 21st Century ag economy has shifted, and so has the need for rural people to rely only on their neighbors for businesses successes. And young people want to take advantage of these shifting economies while raising their children at home.
“It’s important to make youth aware of these opportunities and train them in leadership and entrepreneurship to give them an opportunity to direct the course of their communities,” he said.
Over the past 10 years, 40,000 high school and junior high students in rural areas were surveyed about what would make them want to stay in their hometown. Often the number of students surveyed made up 80 percent of the student body at their schools. The survey asked about the students’ connections to their communities and factors that would make those places attractive. Over half the students surveyed said they’d like to return to their hometown.
“That’s happened without a lot of adults being aware of it because they haven’t been engaging young people because there was an assumption that they didn’t want to come back.”
Schroeder said it’s up to the adults in these communities to help guide students - developing their skills and capitalizing on close family connections and desire to raise a family in a safe environment with good schools. Students surveyed believe that’s possible in their hometowns, Schroeder said, which indicates an existing strong emotional tie to their communities.
“This is very much about an attraction and engagement strategy,” Schroeder said.
Some students still want to leave at least for a time, and he thinks they should. Like Baszler, Schroeder said that young people should have time away by going to college or experiencing a different place. But then they should return and bring that new knowledge with them.
He think there’s a prevailing mindset now that if you grew up in a small community you might want to continue living in one. Some rural communities have seen a 25-percent increase in population. It’s important for rural leaders to figure out what students want.
“What would make them want to stay?” Schroeder asked.
His research developed three key interlocking concepts community members can use to develop youth:
1. Entrepreneurial education and career development
2. Youth involvement and leadership in the community
3. Community support of youth enterprise.
Schroeder advocates getting to know young people, involving them in decisions about the community and sharing the information gained with decision makers.
“If young people are involved in improving their community it causes them to have a greater investment in their community,” Schroeder said.
This is something Baszler is already putting into practice. While she has left the “official” field of economic development, she feels teaching high school students will prove to be a way to continue that work.
“I really want to have an impact on students while they’re still moldable and (teach them) that it’s important to be involved in your community, and it’s important to know how to speak your opinion, and speak it respectfully, because if you have logical opinions and they’re educated and they’re important and you present them in the right manner, you can really affect change positively.
College Media Review
http://cmreview.org/fundraising-efforts-lead-to-strong-student-experiences/
http://cmreview.org/combatting-stress-on-the-job/
cmreview.org/south-dakota-state-university-students-resurrect-yearbook/
http://cmreview.org/the-future-of-the-venerable-yearbook/
South Dakota Rural Electric Cooperative Connections
Scientific process helps South Dakota beekeeper build better bees
By Susan Smith
Jon Kieckhefer, a former agronomist for South Dakota State University’s Cooperative Extension Service, now spends most of his time raising bees west of Volga. But unlike most beekeepers the Brookings native’s primary goal isn’t to produce honey.
“I’m not like other commercial beekeepers,” he said. “Most do it for pollination and honey production. For the most part I raise and sell queens.”
Kieckhefer’s interest in honey bees began when he was 12 years old and a dead tree on his family’s property turned out to be the home of a bee colony. His father, an entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, helped Kieckhefer move that bee colony from a birdhouse to a glass-covered box. The bees were successfully relocated. A drier vent hose allowed them to come and go and the glass cover on the box allowed Kieckhefer to peek in on them when he wanted.
“I was like any kid fascinated with insects,” he said. “I wanted to save them. I wanted to have them and be able to watch them.”
That fascination caused him to start keeping his own bee colonies during graduate school at the University of Kansas. Several of his friends raised bees as a hobby. He began doing the same. When he moved back to South Dakota the bees came with him. Demand and economics pushed him in the direction of breeding and selling queen bees. A colony costs $100 to $200. A queen costs $20 to $25. His bees wintered well, which attracted the attention of other beekeepers.
“More and more guys wanted to buy queens from me because I kept my bees in the winter,” he said. “I didn’t do anything special – if they survived they survived and if they didn’t, they didn’t.”
He keeps 500 hives and harvests 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of honey from them per year, which he sells to wholesalers. And if he can help pollinate a local field he does. But he primarily breeds and raises queens that have specific genetic traits he can guarantee by tracing their pedigree. They aren’t big honey producers but they survive cold northern winters better, resist mites that decimate a hive when they get inside, or make them more hygienic, which also cuts down on the mite problem. And it makes it possible for beekeepers to use fewer pesticides. When his bees are paired with bees that have a high production value, it’s like the best of both worlds.
He uses a process of instrument insemination with his queen bees so that he knows which males, with which traits are used in the fertilization process. Bees are everywhere in South Dakota, he said. Without the insemination process, Kieckhefer said it’s difficult to know which males the queen mates with. He marks male bees with paint so he knows their original hive and the day they hatched. The average honey beekeeper is not going to pay for a queen with a specific genetic makeup. But people who breed queens to sell to those producers do see the value in being able to guarantee bees that winter well or have other genetic benefits.
“The value is in the known genetic trait,” Kieckhefer said.
That trait can then be used in other stock. The worker bees in a hive create a queen by feeding a female egg more protein – called royal jelly. This causes the ovaries to develop early, creating the queen. Worker bees short of a queen in their colony will choose one or a few cells with eggs inside to feed more of the royal jelly. People think a queen controls a colony of bees, Kieckhefer says, but that isn’t completely true. Once the queens stop producing eggs they are dethroned, so to speak. They will mate shortly after hatching and then keep that sperm for their lifetime – usually two to three years – some live longer. Once that sperm runs out so does their productive life.
“The queen is there doing the egg laying for the hive,” Kieckhefer said. “As soon as workers get upset with her they just kill her and make a new one.”
Kieckhefer sells a couple of different grades of queen – a production grade that can mate with whomever it wants because it is not going to be useful to produce queens with specific traits. Some of those queens go to South Dakota or Minnesota and mostly to hobbyist beekeepers. The pedigreed queens all go to queen breeders on the east or west coast.
Currently there are more managed honey bee colonies than any time since the 1970s. Honey beekeepers lose bees every year to death from natural causes, disease and not withstanding the winter. Beginning in 2006 Colony Collapse Disorder decimated a fair amount of hives. The cause is still unclear. Some blame the mites, some think it’s related to pesticides and some even blame cell phone towers and power lines, Kieckhefer said.
“No one has come up with a satisfactory explanation of the vast loss,” Kieckhefer said. But beekeepers are a fairly resistant bunch and make up their losses quickly, especially with new bees hatching every day in the summer months.
“Honey bees aren’t in great danger of extinction,” Kieckhefer said.
There are no native honey bee species in the United States. Colonists brought them all in from Eurasia for the purpose of producing honey, which is still the main attraction of keeping bees.
“Everyone’s after that sweetness,” Kieckhefer said.
According to the South Dakota Department of Agriculture, South Dakota typically ranks in the top five states for honey production, ranking third in 2008 with 21.3 million pounds. The state’s bees produce a “highly desirable, mild-flavored and light-colored alfalfa and sweet clover blend.” The value of the state’s honey crop in 2008 was $28.6 million. Pollinating South Dakota’s cash crop is another major component of beekeeping. It’s something a producer typically gets for free via the natural process the bees go through to produce honey, but it adds $10.7 billion in value to state crops.
Kieckhefer continues to keep bees – enduring daily stings, sometimes in uncomfortable places like inside the nostril or ear drum – because of the addictive quality of the work. Most people who try to keep bees either stop right away, he said, because they hate being stung or become addicted and collect more and more hives.
“There’s nothing more relaxing than working with bees,” he said. “You stop thinking about yourself, and focus on the bees. It’s kind of a meditative experience to do that. You’re working in their world rather than your own.”