I barely made it up to the VSBA Fall meeting, but am glad that I did. The two speakers today were Jerry Hayes (from the ‘Classroom’ in ABJ) and Nancy Ostiguy, a specialist in Entomology at Penn State. Jerry spoke about the problems facing both honey bees and mankind, focusing on Monstanto’s drive to feed an ever-growing world population while also looking at ways to reduce problems for our pollinators. Nancy, on the other hand, spoke about the problems facing bees and the different chemicals/treatments that are being used to deal with them.
The interesting thing about Nancy’s talk is that she readily admitted that folks in her profession have been urging Beekeepers to put all manner of chemicals into their hives to ward off the varying problems of the last few decades. Although she did not come right out and say to ‘STOP’, she was stressing the need to be more judicial in the application of treatments. The bottom line is that researchers are starting to see that treatments are not good for the bees, as a whole.
Again, this stresses something that I have believed long before I became a beekeeper. I am not someone who stresses about ‘organics’ or trying to keep bees a ‘natural’ way, for sure. I simply believe that it is best to do what has always worked and let the bees’ genetics work out the rest. It’s certainly not a strategy that today’s commercial beekeeper could take, but I definitely think it is the only strategy for the small-scale beekeepers. In time, I believe the commercial beekeepers will be forced to move in this direction too.
Last month, Michael Bush came to Richmond, Va. Unfortunately, a last minute disaster in my personal life caused me to miss the presentation=( Regardless, I had several folks report to me about his discussion and I was pleased to hear that he mirrored my constant droning on about about don’t feed your bees! It just encourages the weak! Not to be arrogant, but this mirrors the ‘always have a Nuc’ philosophy of mine being mirrored by another prominent beekeeper a few months back. In all honesty, this is not some reflection of my ‘great beekeeping skills’. It is simply a reflection of realizing that keeping bees is like managing a heard of deer on your property. It in no way, or in any way, is similar to keeping cows or chickens. Treating bees like a domesticated animal (in my opinion) is a surefire way to disaster. Don’t medicate. Don’t feed. Don’t requeen. Sure, plant some foraging plants (as you do with any wild heard of deer or maybe some geese), but take it no further. In my opinion, a domesticated bee is an extinct bee.
BUT, it just so happens that there is a caveat to this. Last week, I had a free evening and was able to read a recent ezine from Brushy Mountain and browse some sites from a few of the other beekeepers in the area (at least the ones that I respect.) In both cases, I found articles on feeding bees. I can’t speak for Brushy Mountain (they are, obviously, trying to sell feeders), but I do know that several of the local beekeepers that feed are very successful in their beekeeping endeavors. Although I do not agree with many of the reasons that they feed (and they probably don’t agree with the reasons that I don’t feed), it does make good sense to feed a young colony (or Nuc you plan to overwinter) or a colony that is otherwise strong, but is currently suffering from a big drought. Why?
Feeding now will encourage the queen to start laying a bunch of eggs. I have come to believe that most of your Fat Bees (those are the ones that are born with more ‘fat’ and live through most of the Winter – critical to the survival of any colony) are actually raised in early October (some would say late September, but I no longer believe that, due to things I have seen over the past few years.) When that laying starts (and it ends in November or sooner), you want to have a healthy population of nurse bees ready to help these juggernaut bees get their start in this world. The best way to ensure that you have a healthy population of nurse bees is to feed in late August and into September – but ONLY for the younger hives (my opinion).
Your younger hives (the Nucs for Overwintering) have a queen that was only born in the last month or so. With very little nectar coming in, she is unlikely to be raising many bees. I have actually tested this and it is true. I have two Nucs for Overwintering (out of 12) that I decided NOT to feed just to see. They are not raising near the number of nurse bees that the fed Nucs are raising (and, I only feed them a mix that equals 2 gallons of water to 10 pounds of sugar.) The fed Nucs are raising tons of bees and even drawing wax. I’m not sure if this will mean my ‘unfed’ Nucs will perish or not, but the experiment has started. I vote that they won’t make it, but the daggone bees have surprised me in the past.
What about the mature hives? If you have to feed a mature hive, it is definitely one to consider whacking. Every one of my mature hives (well, every one that I have checked in the last week) has ramped up egg laying. I have not fed them one drop of anything, but they know it is time to prepare. I believe this is part of how the bees with good genes make it – store enough honey to both raise a bunch of bees for the winter AND to eat on through the Winter. If your bees aren’t doing that, I’d whack them unless they were my only hive. If they are the only (or maybe 1 of 2) hive, then I’d simply feed them and whack the queen in late March. You don’t want those genes around, period. It not only will make your beekeeping more labor intensive (and risky), but you are propogating terrible genetics into the area around where you keep your bees – and that’s where your future queens will mate!!!
My goal in this beekeeping adventure is to end up with a bunch of bees that can survive in today’s environment. In the last post, I touched the basis of my current goals and one aspect of them, Drones. Today, I wanted to touch on another aspect to this plan, the Queens.
There are many folks that recommend re-queening every Fall. The basis for this approach is that you are tackling two problems with one action.
The Royal Lady
The first problem is genetics control/swarming. By putting a new queen into the hive in the Fall, the pheromones will be strong (from the young queen) and the hive is much less likely to consider replacing her this Fall or swarm next Spring. Bees typically look to replace aging queens when the pheromones become weaker. If they do it on their own accord, they will end up with a gene pool that is beyond your control. But, as per my last post, my goal is to populate the region with my drones. So, it is not a problem with me if they raise their own queens. But what about the second issue? The swarming issue is more complicated (as I will go into later, I am not so sure that it is beneficial to the bees to continually combat the swarm behavior, unless you are taking steps of simulate a swarm situation (like with a split)).
The second reason to requeen is for varroa control. By replacing an established queen with a virgin queen, the hive goes into an ‘egg-laying dearth’ as the new queen becomes accustomed to the new hive and goes out to mate. This might be a week or three weeks. During this time, the breeding cycle of the varroa mite is interrupted. It can set them back substantially, thus giving a hive a leg up on the cycle. I do believe that this is a valid strategy, as the bees in the wild swarm to create this same kind of scenario (when the old queen leaves, the hive waits for the new queen to hatch and goes into a dearth of its own.) So, if you are preventing your bees from swarming and raising their own queens, requeening is a way to replicate what nature would do on its own. But, this only works if you let them go through a dearth.
If you pinch the old queen and, 1 day later, give them a young, recently mated queen, you are not creating a ‘dearth of brood.’ The new queen gets started laying immediately (and probably stronger), allowing the varroa to continue their cycle. When I requeen in the Fall (actually, in early to mid-July), in the Richmond, Virginia area, I do so by simply killing the old queen. The bees are forced to raise their own queen and necessarily go into a healthy dearth. Ideally, my new queen is mated and laying on September 1, when the bees will be starting to groom the new brood for Winter survival.
Although I do plan to raise queens, it is not my current intent to requeen (definitely not every year.) Instead, I hope to do natural splits to replicate the swarming mechanics of nature. As to my queens, I initially plan to use them to start new Nuc’s and as emergency replacements for queen losses at my established hives. We’ll see how that works out…
As often stated in my musings (or are they gibberish’s of a madman?), I decided to go with a treatment-free bee management plan. In today’s environment, many beekeepers use various chemicals to treat or prevent a parasite/disease. There are many threats (both known and unknown) that face today’s honey bees. These threats can wipe out an entire hive in no time. As a new beekeeper, with all of your eggs in one basket, it seems only natural that you are going to do whatever you can to prevent or address these issues to prevent the loss of your only hive. I can also understand why you would be inclined to treat your bees with chemicals if you were a commercial beekeeper where every hive is a means of putting bread on your table. It’s easy to reconcile treatment in these cases. Even so, I have chosen to go treatment-free.
This is by no means something that I came up with on my own. There are many beekeepers out there who have been doing this for years or have started doing it recently. The underlying belief of the treatment-free strategy is based mostly on the theory of evolution. Basically, you assume that a few queens are born every year with a natural resistance to some, or many, of the threats that face the honey bee today. It is simply a genetic ‘roll of the dice’, where some bees are born with a greater resistance but most are born without it. In nature (without any beekeeper intervention), where no treatment is available, the ones born without it perish, while the ones born with it continue to thrive and produce more offspring. The ones with this superior genetic trait go on to produce more bees (and swarms), many of which will also be resistant to the pressures of today’s environment. Although one can call ‘Survival of the Species’ a theory (in truth it is), it is a theory that has passed the test of time. Many treat it like a Fact. Few treat it otherwise (excluding religious thinking.) Under this ‘natural plan’, the weak bee genes are slowly weeded out (they simply do not survive long enough to propagate – cast a swarm). Without any external intervention, one can imagine a ‘new’ bee finally emerging after many years where most of the bees (new queens) are resistant and doing well against the threats of today. They require no meddling by mankind. Unfortunately, we are not in a condition of ‘lack of external intervention.’
Every Spring, a large number of new queens are introduced into the natural system that are more likely to hold the weak genes then the strong. Why? Because many queen breeders still use copious amounts of treatment on their bees. They do not let the weak genes die, using treatment and feed to encourage an otherwise weak pool of genes to be dispersed to the next generation. Just think about it like this – a queen is born to a Queen Breeder with very poor resistance, but she survives because the beekeeper or queen breeder gives her medicine to help her live anyway. She goes on to spawn bees that also have very poor resistance to mites (tracheal and varroa). In addition, the bees do a very poor job of overwintering (perhaps the queen produces bees that require more caloric intake of carbs for each calorie of heat that it emits in Winter – thus requiring more food then the normal bee would require to overwinter.) In nature, this bee is unlikely to survive long enough to send its genes out into the wild. The hive may die before its first Winter and is very likely to perish in its first Winter.) This is a good thing. It is called ‘Natural Selection’ and it keeps a species strong. But, in a queen-rearing operation, this hive will be treated and copiously fed, preventing the elimination of these weak genes. Indeed, the weak genes are propagated and eventually sent around the nation in the form of virgin queens that the commercial operator sells.
So, every Spring, these Queens arrive to pollute the gene pool of the area they were sent to. A fellow purchases one of these queens (I call them genetic garbage) and sets her up in his yard. A neighboring beekeeper may have gone several years without treatment and feel that he is finally taking those first baby steps towards a superior bee. He has mostly gotten rid of the poor genes, letting his weak hives perish instead of treating or feeding. Then, out of the blue, he is once again knocked back several years when one of his virgin queens goes out and mates with a Drone from this new colony of genetic trash (that is full of poor genes from a queen that only lives today because of the intervention of man, ironically enough).
The main point to all of these ‘musings’ is that you need to try to control your drone pool to the best of your ability. This can only be done with quality queens (treatment free) nearby that are producing drones. The more drones ‘of good breeding’ that you have around your queens, the less chance that they’ll end up with an inferior breeding. You can never guarantee who your saucy young queen is going to go out and kiss on her maiden flights. But, you can certainly nudge the odds in your favor by making sure you are supplying the region with A LOT of good, solid drones. How do I think one can accomplish this?
make sure other local beekeepers buy local queens and nucs (supply them yourself if you can)
try to focus your outyards in an area, dropping 1,2 or 6 hives in areas about 2 miles apart (I am very focused on this aspect)
be happy when your bees swarm in April, as you have just added to the genetic pool of the feral bees in your area
never, ever, ever let genetic trash enter your selection pool through the Drones of an inferior queen
That’s it for now, more soon on other musings of my strategy.
