The following recommendations are based on personal experience and extensive reading on the plight of the honey bee. As a new beekeeper you will soon find out that every beekeeper has his own experiences and opinions. As a new beekeeper you will need to sift through all of this advise and come up with a plan of your own for raising and maintaining your bee colonies.
Potential new beekeepers often enter the hobby with
altruistic goals. Most have heard of the
plight of the honeybee and after reading various articles think that they can
immediately become successful beekeepers.
Many potential beekeepers become enthralled with the idea that left
alone the bees will naturally develop mite and virus resistance and that
everything will be wonderful. This
sometimes, but rarely, happens in isolated areas where an apiary is free of
outside influences. It also takes years
of dedicated effort for this to occur. In the beekeeping community this approach to
beekeeping is sometimes called the “Live or Let Die” or “James Bond”
method.
Every beekeeper knows that the European honeybee is beset by
varroa, tracheal mites and viruses. In
combination these three factors can cause the demise of a colony of bees during
the additional stress of winter. New
beekeepers will quickly be taught this lesson by the school of hard knocks when
they lose the majority of their bees the first winter. Ideally it would be in the best interest of
the bees to allow them to develop via natural selection the ability to
effectively neutralize these pests. Natural selection has the nasty habit of
killing of the weak. The double whammy
of varroa and viruses if left uncontrolled frequently results in 30 to 100%
hive loss over the winter. Such
horrendous losses are not necessarily in the best interest of beekeepers who
are interested in honey production and selling pollination services. Several approaches have been developed by
beekeepers to hopefully end up with the same end result; honeybees that can
survive without chemical intervention.
The key to helping the bees survive is understanding the
relationship between the bees, varroa mites and the viruses. The honeybee has developed good natural
defenses against virus transmission in the colony. However, the recent arrival of the varroa
mites has upset the equation. The mites
feed on both the adult and larvae bees.
In addition they move between bees. Therefore any virus infection in the colony
gets transmitted from bee to bee by the varroa and can kill a colony if the
mite infection rate is too high. Controlling the level of mite infestation is the
key to controlling viruses.
The first thing to be said in a discussion on bee
survivability is that 99% the queens received with packages are raised from
long established genetic lines. These
genetic lines were developed to maximize honey production and the docility of
the bees. These established genetic
lines have NOT shown the ability to withstand the assault of the three pests. Also to date most major queen breeders have
NOT been motivated to change their breeding stock to more resistant types. So
every time you purchase a package to replace your winter’s losses you are
simply getting more of the same inferior genes.
If your beekeeping philosophy trends towards the “live or let die” approach
you will probably be purchasing packages every year until you give up and quit beekeeping
due to the expense of buying packages every year. Also, when you purchase these inferior queens
you are importing the poor genes into not just your apiary, but also into your
neighbor’s apiaries since bees tend to mate with drones from other areas. Sad,
but true.
There are various approaches to giving your bees a fighting
chance against varroa. First is to
provide them with a little aid in their fight with their antagonists. This involves the use of chemicals (either
natural or artificial) in an attempt to control the mites. History has shown that the mites have
repeatedly developed resistance to artificial chemical treatments. Over the last 30 years several chemical
treatments were the silver bullet for controlling mites for a few years until
the mites via natural selection developed resistance to them. There are currently 4 or 5 treatments that
are still effective, but the efficacy of these may also decline in the
future. New beekeepers should consult
with experienced beekeepers in their area on the use of chemical treatments. Chemicals
that kill mites can also kill your bees and also do harm to you if not applied
to the proper manner. Also remember that the continued use of
chemicals to control mites will not aid the bees in developing a natural
resistance to mites. Most hobbyist
beekeepers, who are mainly interested in honey production, will probably end up
using a chemical approach for controlling mites.
Other less invasive methods include screened bottom boards
for the hive, drone brood trapping of varroa, and temporarily caging the queen;
all of which can also aid in the fight against varroa. A new beekeeper needs to understand the pros
and cons of these approaches and also understand their limitations.
The next (and more difficult) approach is to develop genetic
lines of European bees that can control the mite level themselves. Other types of honey bees (Asian) have
developed the ability to coexist with the varroa mite. There are many reports of beekeepers who
have not chemically treated their hives of European bees for many years and
their bees have also developed resistance to mites. Only very dedicated
beekeepers are likely to succeed in developing resistant bees because the
selection process is long and difficult. The time frame for those who have been
successful is on the order of decades. However, hobbyist beekeepers can take the step
of procuring queens that have these resistant traits and getting these genes
into their apiaries. Varroa resistant
lines include Varroa Sensitive Hybrids (VSH), USDA Primorski Russian, Buckfast,
and Purdue Ankle Biters. The VSH,
Buckfast and Purdue Ankle Biter strains were developed by beekeepers or
scientists performing slow and meticulous data gathering, analysis and then
long term breeding programs. The
Primorski Russian bees were a line of European honeybees that were exposed to
mites in the Primorski region of Siberia and over a period of 100 plus years
underwent natural selection and finally only resistant bees survived. New beekeepers should read up on these resistant
strains of the European honeybee either by doing internet searches or reading
about them in one of the bee magazines; such as American Bee Journal or Bee
Culture. Users of these specialized
strains have reported varying degrees of success.
It is recommended that new hobbyist beekeepers should NOT
follow the “live and let die” philosophy for two reasons. The first is that you will most likely lose
your bees in the winter do to the varroa and virus effects. All beehives in the US now contain varroa
mites; your new hive isn’t any different despite your wishful thinking. You can’t see them (the varroa), but they ARE
there. The second reason is that the
varroa from your hive will migrate to your neighbors’ hives. Bees inherently drift between hives;
especially the drones. Varroa use this
phenomenon to expand their territory and populations by hitching a ride on the
drones. Also when your hive dies (as it
most likely will) robber bees will come to loot the stored honey. In doing this they will pick up mites and
return them to their home hives. Thus
you are unknowingly infecting your neighbor’s hives with varroa.
In summary every new beekeeper should remember:
1)
Every time you buy a bee package to re-stock
your hive you are importing same inferior genes into your apiary.
2)
Following the “live and let die” philosophy,
although altruistic, will most likely result in high colony losses in your
apiary and is harmful to your neighbors’ bees also.
3)
If truly interested in being helpful to the
honey bee you should incorporate varroa resistant genetic lines into your
operation; the sooner, the better.
4)
Unless you have unlimited financial resources
for purchasing replacement packages it is wise to understand and apply a mite
control program. After you have become
more knowledgeable and are successful in getting your bees through several
winters you can then begin experimentation.
That was easy, all you had to do was write my story! LOL! That's exactly how I started out, and talking with new beekeeper after the last meeting, that's exactly how he's starting out. I warned him that his "Live and Let Die" approach with a colony started from a package would end in "Die", if not the first winter, then the second for sure. And with this long warm spell and late brood rearing, I'd bet this winter.
ReplyDeleteI think it's good information to pass to along. I started treating in my third year, after total losses my first two years, but still had to learn in my fifth year that even large colonies with low mite counts can die out if not treated. I didn't know about mite resistant strains until my third or fourth year and I started requeening with them in my fourth year. But. as you stated, the offspring is open mating with my neighbor's drones which alters the genetics uncontrollably, and bees with mites drift in. So as Meghan said, unless you live on an island (at least 5 miles from the mainland), and have only mite resistant bees on that island (or flooding the mating areas with MR drones), there's not much chance of keeping bees without treatments.
You might want to add using an Integrated Pest Management strategy that would include screened bottom boards as well as resistant stock.
Good article. Brings a lot of information together. I wonder if it would have helped me earlier on or if my "I'm different" attitude would have had me learn the hard way anyway. It usually does.