Ron Miksha

Last updated
Ron Miksha
Born (1954-03-30) March 30, 1954 (age 68)
NationalityAmerican
Canadian
Alma mater University of Saskatchewan
Occupation beekeeper, scientist, author

Ron Miksha (born March 30, 1954) is an American-Canadian beekeeper, scientist, and Canadian author.

Contents

Biography

Miksha was born in a farm house in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, one of ten children in a poor rural family living along the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. The family survived by growing potatoes, corn, cabbage, and by keeping bees and selling honey. Miksha learned beekeeping from his parents and older brothers.

In 1975, at age twenty-one, he moved to Saskatchewan, Canada to keep bees. His popular book, Bad Beekeeping, describes the ten years Miksha lived and farmed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan, a remote prairie village surrounded by badlands and large cattle ranches. The area, part of the Palliser Triangle, is prone to extreme drought as depicted in Miksha's book. But Bad Beekeeping is more than a beekeeping narrative. It espouses a strong libertarian '"small government" philosophy and has been both condemned and praised by readers on opposite ends of that discussion. In Hivelights Magazine, Grant Hicks, Alberta representative to the Canadian Honey Council, claims "Bad Beekeeping is the most impressive piece of beekeeping information that has come my way." [1] The book has been influential abroad - the Norwegian heavy metal band Miksha (Half the Battle) derived its name from the book and its author. [2]

Following ten years of Saskatchewan beekeeping, Ron Miksha studied at the University of Saskatchewan, graduating with high honours in geophysics. His undergraduate research work, sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, investigated the atmosphere's effects on the Earth's inner core vibrations. [3] His research work and studies led to a business in Calgary, where Miksha now lives.

In 1998, Ron Miksha began The Beekeeper's Home Pages, one of the first, and according to Google, the most popular website for beekeeping. Dr. Tom Sanford, apiculture specialist for the University of Florida wrote "this web site gets a grade A for its effort to be the definitive web site for beekeeping." [4] Miksha is also a contributor to Bee Culture, American Bee Journal, and Hivelights.

In 2005, with his brother Don and other family members, Ron Miksha formed Summit Gardens Honey Farms Ltd., Canada's largest producer of comb honey. Summit Gardens is located near Milo, Alberta.

In addition to beekeeping, Miksha also works in Earth Science. In 2007, he made two trips to Lima, Peru, South America, for the Canadian International Development Agency to teach aspects of geophysics and wrote The Mountain Mystery, a history of plate tectonics theory, in 2014. [5]

Related Research Articles

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Beekeeper Person who keeps honey bees

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Apiary Place containing beehives of honey bees

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Horizontal top-bar hive Type of beehive

A top-bar hive is a single-story frameless beehive in which the comb hangs from removable bars. The bars form a continuous roof over the comb, whereas the frames in most current hives allow space for bees to move up or down between boxes. Hives that have frames or that use honey chambers in summer but which use management principles similar to those of regular top-bar hives are sometimes also referred to as top-bar hives. Top-bar hives are rectangular in shape and are typically more than twice as wide as multi-story framed hives commonly found in English speaking countries. Top-bar hives usually include one box only, and allow for beekeeping methods that interfere very little with the colony. While conventional advice often recommends inspecting each colony each week during the warmer months, heavy work when full supers have to be lifted, some beekeepers fully inspect top-bar hives only once a year, and only one comb needs to be lifted at a time.

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The European dark bee is a subspecies of the western honey bee, whose original range stretched from west-central Russia through Northern Europe and probably down to the Pyrenees. They belong to the 'M' lineage of Apis mellifera. They are large for honey bees though they have unusually short tongues (5.7-6.4 mm) and traditionally were called the German Dark Bee or the Black German Bee, names still used today even though they are now considered an Endangered Breed in Germany. Their common name is derived from their brown-black color, with only a few lighter yellow spots on the abdomen. However today they are more likely to be called after the geographic / political region in which they live such as the British Black Bee, the Native Irish Honey Bee, the Cornish Black Bee and the Nordic Brown Bee, even though they are all the same subspecies, with the word “native” often inserted by local beekeepers, even in places where the bee is an introduced foreign species. It was domesticated in Europe and hives were brought to North America in the colonial era in 1622 where they were referred to as the English Fly by the Native Americans.

Langstroth hive

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Ormond R. Aebi was an American beekeeper who was reported to have set the world's record for honey obtained from a single hive in one year, 1974, when 404 pounds of honey were harvested, breaking an unofficial 80-year-old record of 303 pounds held by A. I. Root. Together with his father Harry, the Aebi's wrote two books on beekeeping: The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping (1975) and Mastering the Art of Beekeeping (1979).

Moses Quinby

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C. C. Miller

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Charles Butler, sometimes called the Father of English Beekeeping, was a logician, grammarist, author, priest, and an influential beekeeper. He was also an early proponent of English spelling reform. He observed that bees produce wax combs from scales of wax produced in their own bodies; and he was among the first to assert that drones are male and the queen female, though he believed worker bees lay eggs.

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Bees for Development

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Urban beekeeping Practice of keeping bee colonies in urban areas

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Wax foundation

Wax foundation or honeycomb base is a plate made of wax forming the base of one honeycomb. It is used in beekeeping to give the bees a foundation on which they can build the honeycomb. Wax foundation is considered one of the most important inventions in modern beekeeping.

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References

  1. Hivelights, Grant Hicks, November 2005.
  2. http://www.miksha.net Official Website of the Band Miksha
  3. Geophysical Journal International, June 1992, Vol. 109 Issue 3, Page 488, Atmospheric pressure and gravity, J. B. Merriam.
  4. Bee Culture Magazine, January 2000, Tom Sanford.
  5. "BOOK: The Mountain Mystery". The Dispersal of Darwin. 2014-08-18. Retrieved 2018-01-07.