Worldwide Beekeeping
Announcements => Welcome => Topic started by: Chip Euliss on July 09, 2015, 04:25:07 pm
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I'm Chip Euliss from North Dakota. Chip is a nickname since before I was born; my real name is Ned. I'm 63 years old and I retired from a Federal Research Biologist position a little over a year ago. My training is in wetland/wildlife issues and that was the focus of most of my research. Over the years, my interests shifted to the various ecosystem services that our contemporary landscape provides and how land use shifts affects the delivery of ecosystem services to humans. For those unfamiliar with the term, an ecosystem service is basically something that humans need and get from our landscapes. There are many different types of ecosystem services but things like habitat provisioning for wildlife, flood control, climate mitigation and even pollination services are examples. In the later parts of my career, I worked pollination services for honey and native bees into my research program. The work continues with folks I trained and the focus is still the same; quantifying the change in diverse ecosystem services over time and under proposed land use change scenarios. I'm still involved with a couple of graduate students but hope to get them finished up within the year. My interest in bees started years ago when a swarm moved into one of my wife's bluebird boxes. I hived them up and have been keeping bees ever since. From 1 hive 15 years ago to 700 last year. My plan was to build a small bee business that would give me something to keep me busy about half-time when I retired. I'm afraid I failed miserably because I now have too many bees to keep a comfortable schedule. My plan is to sell most of my bees in a year to give me more time to goof off. I hope to be at 200 hives in about a year; that should be a comfortable number to keep me busy. I also like to fish and hope to do even more when I reduce the size of my apiary.
So there you have my story. Poor fellow who wanted a few bees to play with when he retired but wound up with too many for the comfortable lifestyle he planned! It's always good to have a plan, but they sometimes spin off in an unexpected direction.
I look forward to hearing about everyone's interactions with their bees!
Chip
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Welcome aboard Chip. You picked the right forum for friendly interaction and to make friends.
Sounds like you will bring a wealth of knowledge to add to the group.
My name is Jim, one of many new friends you will find on this forum.
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Hey Chip. :welcome:
Like mentioned before, I will be reading your posts with great interest.
I am at around 70 something hives, mainly producing nucs for sale and honey, gave up on the pollination gig a couple years ago. Problem with it is you don't really set back the hives enough just pulling nucs and now I am endlessly dealing with swarms. I could split, but don't want to run over 100 hives.
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Thanks guys. Jim, my daughter is a hoosier too! She went to grad school at Purdue and now teaches at the University of Minnesota. She enjoyed her time there. Perry, I wish I had your constitution to scale back before I had more hives than I need! They are lots of fun and enjoyment. I've been doing the pollination gig for some time now. Mostly because it's easier and more profitable to send them to California to pollinate almonds than to wrap them for wintering here in North Dakota. In the past, they have been used for orange honey production after almonds and they come back very strong and ready to swarm; it keeps me busy getting them in control and ready for summer honey production. Next year, I have made arrangements to send them to a different beekeeper and I'll get them back earlier, just after they come out of almonds. Should be less hassle but we'll see!
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Hey Chip! Welcome! I can tell you will be a great resource to pull from regarding bees and wildlife in general. Looking forward to your 2 cents quite often. :)
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Welcome Chip, real glad that you join the forum for your input.
ken
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Welcome Chip!
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welcome chip! thanks for your intro and background! will be looking forward to reading your posts, thanks for coming! i like to keep a few bees, GOOF OFF, and did you say FISHING?!.............. :D
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welcome Chip. it seem you are smack dab in the middle of honey bee heaven and suspect we may know a few of the same people. I am a bit older than you (but not by much) and my own primary purpose in keeping bees is much the same as your own. 700 is a lot for one person and at the current time I maintain about 200 of my own and look over another 80+ at the Texas A&M Bee Lab working with Dr Juliana Rangel. I am hoping to trim my own number over the next year and have trained a couple of good assistance at the bee lab so that responsibility has become less pressing.
my wife shares your professional interest and in a bit less than two month will retire from the wildlife department at Texas A&M.
welcome aboard....
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welcome Chip. it seem you are smack dab in the middle of honey bee heaven and suspect we may know a few of the same people. I am a bit older than you (but not by much) and my own primary purpose in keeping bees is much the same as your own. 700 is a lot for one person and at the current time I maintain about 200 of my own and look over another 80+ at the Texas A&M Bee Lab working with Dr Juliana Rangel. I am hoping to trim my own number over the next year and have trained a couple of good assistance at the bee lab so that responsibility has become less pressing.
my wife shares your professional interest and in a bit less than two month will retire from the wildlife department at Texas A&M.
welcome aboard....
I suspect we do know some of the same people in both the bee and the wildlife profession. My degrees are in wildlife but I worked mostly on how habitats function to support wildlife (and other services), especially in wetlands. My first grad project was under Stan Harris at Humboldt many years ago. His daughter worked at A&M (Biology Labs I believe) but I believe she has retired. I've interacted with others at A&M but that was many years ago. My daughter interviewed for a position there but wound up taking a teaching position at the University of Minnesota instead--just got tenure so I suspect she'll stay there for her career. Much closer for us too!
Thanks for the welcome and good luck with retirement. I put my retirement off several years because I really enjoyed working at the research center so much but retirement is GREAT. I highly recommend it! Chip
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:welcome: Chip this a great site with wonderful people. You will enjoy the interaction and the humor. My eyes lit up when I saw your background because I am very interested in native plant habitat and have been working at transforming our little "piece of heaven" into a home for wildlife. I am sure it pales in size to projects you have worked on. I will look forward to your posts and the wisdom and experience I hope you will share. Oh, I forgot to mention I am a newbie......obtained my first two hives the end of March 2015.
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:welcome: Chip this a great site with wonderful people. You will enjoy the interaction and the humor. My eyes lit up when I saw your background because I am very interested in native plant habitat and have been working at transforming our little "piece of heaven" into a home for wildlife. I am sure it pales in size to projects you have worked on. I will look forward to your posts and the wisdom and experience I hope you will share. Oh, I forgot to mention I am a newbie......obtained my first two hives the end of March 2015.
Thanks Les. My wife and I did the same thing at our place many years ago and are now enjoying the native plants we established and the wildlife they attract. Have fun and enjoy your bees, they are a great hobby!
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Welcome, Welcome, Welcome! Look forward to reading your future posts!
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Welcome Chip! Like all the others, will be looking forward to your posts!
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welcome aboard
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Welcome Chip!
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Welcome aboard Chip, I see by your avatar that you are a perch fisherman. :D Jack
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Welcome aboard Chip, I see by your avatar that you are a perch fisherman. :D Jack
Yes Sir and any other fish that bites! Like to hunt too :)
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a perch???............LOL!
chip what is that in your pic and where were you?
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a perch???............LOL!
chip what is that in your pic and where were you?
Sorry River, I just noticed your question tonight and apologize for the delay. Wife and I have the house torn apart (remodeling) and about the only thing that's working at the moment is the internet! The fish is a Warsaw grouper and I caught it in about 400 feet of water in Louisiana. We take our family vacations there every year and tow a boat with the bee truck. Fish freshwater very little but plan to do more as soon as I get better control of my schedule. A friend invited us to fish in Manitoba a few days last week on Lake Winnipeg. It was slower than slow but my son caught a dandy 31 inch walleye that weighed 12 lbs--he is still on cloud 9!!
(https://worldwidebeekeeping.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs7.postimg.cc%2F9uxkdlqrr%2FAttachment_2.jpg&hash=350c4e63f83efa77c4c7c1194868bb152d2c42b5) (http://postimg.cc/image/9uxkdlqrr/)
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been there, done that on the remodeling thing..........we took a break from it last year, will start again soon.
nice walleye!
i caught about a 40-45 pound king salmon on a fly rod in alaska last summer! what an awesome experience!
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Kings are strong fish. Caught a few when I was in school in Oregon. They jump all the time except when you get a hook in their mouth!
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yes, they are strong fish chip, broke a few off in ak, but sure was treated to that nice big one. what a thrill though. used to fish for salmon in nw montana in the rivers and flathead lake, long before the fish and game made a decision and everything changed after that........now no salmon.
fishing is just plain fun!
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Yep and a good thing to teach kids. Both mine fish as does my 8-year-old granddaughter.
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It wasn't all fish and game. Dams for power production, flood control down river, and to save water for irrigation during the summer. the salmon can not get back to their original spawning beds. Not to mention the miles of spawning rivers destroyed due to now being bottoms of lakes.
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It wasn't all fish and game. Dams for power production, flood control down river, and to save water for irrigation during the summer. the salmon can not get back to their original spawning beds. Not to mention the miles of spawning rivers destroyed due to now being bottoms of lakes.
Very true and they are filling with sediment so also have finite lifespans. A few dams have been removed in places and the results for migratory fish, like salmon, have been positive. The natural process of transporting sediment downstream has also been compromised due a lack of sediment for critical deltaic processes like wetland development, etc. The area we fish in Louisiana looses a significant area of wetland areas that provide nursery habitats for fish each year. We've changed the world and won't know the full consequences for some time.
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"It wasn't all fish and game. "
yes it was keith..........montana fish and game decided they wanted more, and more tourist money so they introduced mysis shrimp to boost salmon population into flathead lake and whatever rivers (flathead watershed and other) the salmon were running in the late 60', early 70's i think, i don't remember now.
it backfired. flathead lake had a great population of lake trout, and other species. mysis shrimp also competed with and took over zooplankton (salmon's preferred food. it's complicated to describe but in short the introduction of mysis shrimp decimated the salmon population that we had and other native species, besides the salmon; the bull trout population. you can find many articles about this subject, and it has nothing do with dams or flood control.
just one of those things where montana thought they could expand the salmon population and by doing so, decimated it. or just one of those things where the fed/state gov thought they could 'fix' or 'improve'..........
i remember the last time i saw a salmon run in glacier park in the early 80's on a river.......very cool, eagles lined up in the trees, bears wandering around and kokeenee salmon running thick. i remember fishing for salmon in flathead lake and other rivers.............no more.........
sad but true.
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You are right it was in the 1920's & 30"s that they screwed up the Columbia with dams. They also introduced the shrimp in to valley bottom lakes in the Okanagan and found the same thing happening. Now there is a commercial shrimp harvest to keep them in check the fish for about a month in January the shrimp are froze and sold to pet stores and aquariums for fish food. A few years ago I heard the shrimp are worth 1.4 million annually.
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Humans have made lots of changes that have altered the way our contemporary ecosystems work and most have had unintended outcomes. There seem to be 2 basic schools of thought in the conservation community: 1) the group that wants to revert to pristine, and 2) the group that wants to maximize some outcome of some service like a fishery, flood control, etc. I don't fall in either since the first isn't achievable because you can never get rid of all the things that we've introduced or changed, plus things change all the time and restoring something to what it once was doesn't account for natural change. The second school of thought generally isn't sustainable (like dams, etc) because they eventually lead to an endpoint where it either takes tons of money to fix them or it is all but impossible to fix. I would like to see more focus on how best to sustain our contemporary ecosystems given the disturbances (physical and biological) we've introduced. I think the next generation of natural resource science and management will focus more on using natural processes to sustain ecosystems. Hope so anyway!
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There in lays the problem, the more people the more that will be taken away from nature to make life easy for those in the big cities. Most of us on this forum could live without elec, cars, trucks, tractors, indoor pluming,running water, ect. Take that away from city folk and? Well it would bed a night mare. The earth can only support so many living things. :o Jack
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Welcome Chip!
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Chip:
You are one of those people that just brings fresh air to the forum. We are fortunate to have your knowledge of life science and your beekeeping expertise on our forum. Your presence elevates us as a whole. Thanks for your ever courteous and knowledgeable posts on our forum.
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AMEN
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Thanks Lazy and Iddee! I'd also like to say that I've really enjoyed this site. I found it looking for someone with experience with a commercial size oxalic acid vaporizer and found a great bunch of folks instead--I've been enjoying the site ever since! I do tend to be frank at times, but try not to be Jesse or James!!!
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exellent post chip, so very true!
"Humans have made lots of changes that have altered the way our contemporary ecosystems work and most have had unintended outcomes. There seem to be 2 basic schools of thought in the conservation community: 1) the group that wants to revert to pristine, and 2) the group that wants to maximize some outcome of some service like a fishery, flood control, etc. I don't fall in either since the first isn't achievable because you can never get rid of all the things that we've introduced or changed, plus things change all the time and restoring something to what it once was doesn't account for natural change. The second school of thought generally isn't sustainable (like dams, etc) because they eventually lead to an endpoint where it either takes tons of money to fix them or it is all but impossible to fix. I would like to see more focus on how best to sustain our contemporary ecosystems given the disturbances (physical and biological) we've introduced. I think the next generation of natural resource science and management will focus more on using natural processes to sustain ecosystems. Hope so anyway!"