End of January Update

It's 35 degrees right now and I was heading home from a meeting and decided to stop and check on my north yard.  I set up this yard about a year and a half ago and it has gone through two winters.  Only last summer did I discover that it is actually within spitting distance of a commercial (ish) queen mill. 

I like to do quick checks on hives when the weather is cold.  I can look down in the hive and see how much honey is left and the size of the cluster.  It's cold so the bees don't fly out and the propolis is brittle so it breaks loose pretty easily.

Turns out, four of the six hives at that location are dead.  The other two have very small clusters and I expect them to be dead in the next month.

I'm not disappointed and I'll tell you why.  First, due to what I expect is the queen mill down the street, these bees were mean.  I visited the queen mill and his bees are mean.  My bees are not mean and I breed against meanness.  I replaced most of these queens last summer.  Second, it was a bad location for the reasons above.  The hives didn't make much honey due to over saturation of the area.  Third, I'm in the process of moving and don't need a plethora of hives to take with me.  Fourth, as I did not feed at all this past fall, the process of losing hives not adequately prepared for winter is actually a positive.  It is selection for hives which store a lot of honey and which are frugal with it.

I've also lost two more hives at my home yard which I am slightly bummed about.  One of them was an old queen I purchased from Zia several years back, and the other was my oldest hive, one continuously alive since I purchased it, 11 years ago.  So it lasted about 10.5 years.  It was however susceptible to robbing which is not very helpful, so there's a positive to that as well.

So that's six down out of 25, a 24% loss.  I expect I'll lose a couple more including the remaining two at the north yard.  If I get down to 18, I can fit them all on my truck and trailer and move them all at once.

As some of you already know, I am not able to raise queens and nucs this year.  As I said, I am in the process of moving and all my queen rearing equipment is in storage.  Any makeup splits I need to make will be with walkaway splits, with the goal of covering equipment and maintaining no more than 18 hives for the time being.

Paring Down for Winter, September Snapshot

Last Saturday, I undertook to combine some hives I had left over from summer nuc production.  Several five frame nucs survived the summer, however, only one was packed out with honey and a little brood like I’d expect a good nuc to be, so I saved that one and mooshed the rest.  That leaves me working with a total of 27 colonies.  I’d be comfortable losing around seven this winter, however, if the trend keeps up, the chances are pretty slim.

What this did was allow me to get rid of less desirable stock (probably lowering my winter loss rate) and enlarge hives that I want to keep but that are unable to build up sufficiently during our long summer dearth.  In doing this, I’m accelerating natural attrition and accelerating my selective process to produce better bees for human uses.

This is also one of the benefits of having a larger number of hives.  You can operate more like a population rather than an individual.  There are many more possibilities to achieve success and many more things you can do to affect that success.

Furthermore, it goes counter to the idea that every hive must survive.  That’s not how it works in nature, why should we try to pull it off in agriculture?

I am also finally coming into full utilization.  Right now, I only have two empty deeps that are not being used.  I think with the exception of a couple new medium hives that all hives are of the size of three deeps or bigger.  The only hives that will be fed granulated sugar only in an emergency would be the medium ones, they are new and I want the medium hives to make it because I’m making a partial switch to mediums.  Nobody else will be fed under any circumstances.

There’s my September snapshot.  During a time when many beekeepers are treating or thinking of treating, this is the sort of thing a treatment-free beekeeper is thinking of.

Survey of Mites in Capped Brood Cells

So I was out working the bees today and I was removing some deep frames from a medium hive.  The bees had built comb hanging from the bottom of the frames.  It was the only way I had to get a deep nuc into a medium hive last year.

I took the best of the brood comb and tied it into a foundationless frame:

However, a lot of the comb was drone and so out of curiousity I started pulling out the drone brood and counting and separating them by which ones had mites and which didn't.  Then out of more curiosity, I did the same with the last little bit of worker brood there was on a similar piece of comb. 

Here are the results:  Of the drone brood, I uncapped 56 drones, finding 15/56 (27%) infested with at least one varroa, and two with two mites for a total of 17 mites.  Of the worker brood, I uncapped 73 and found 5 infested with a mite (7%) and one having successfully reproduced, showing multiple mites in the cell, in the typical ages of a mite lifecycle in a honeybee cell (1.4%).  I did not find any reproducing mites in the drone cells, but as you can see in the picture above, the drones were all recently capped whereas many of the workers were near emergence.

What does this demonstrate?

First, I have mites.  No surprise there, I have been saying that for years.

Second, I have plenty of mites.  No tiny insignificant population here.  This is not a hive that has demonstrated hygienic traits, yet survives nonetheless.

Third, the mites obviously prefer the drone brood, infesting at a rate of one in four while worker brood was only infested at a rate of one in fourteen.

Fourth, some hives are capable of handling a substantial mite load without crashing or even showing detrimental effects.  This hive is about the fourth strongest in this yard of nine.  I used it as my cell builder this year.

Five, if these numbers hold out, mites are not terribly successful at reproducing in worker brood in this hive, only about 1 in 71 worker cells result in mite reproduction.

And for some background data, I measured the cell size of this piece of nearly perfect free form comb and found the cell size to be a consistent 5.2mm.  The rest of the comb in the hive is 4.9mm wax or 4.95mm plastic.

Update: A Little Dissapointed

This spring has been pretty disappointing for my little beekeeping operation.

Did a bunch of hives die? Outbreak of AFB? Bear attack? Skunks? No, no, no, and I just found him dead on the road this morning. RIP, neighborhood skunk. Skunks are territorial by the way.

No, it's the weather. The weather sucks. Last year, I grafted queens near the end of March, meaning nucs were ready for sale in mid May. Also, then I was in college and had a pretty flexible schedule. This year, I have it worked out so I would graft on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, and make up mating nucs on the next Saturday.

A few problems:

Number one was the weather. Virtually every Thursday was nasty weather. Not a good time to go mucking around in hives, grafting into queen cups and getting cell builders going. By the time I did have a free Thursday, it was mid April.

Number two: Last year, I made a huge mistake and grafted from the wrong queen. She was nice enough, but her hive likes to keep some queen cups around (meaning swarmy) and her parentage was a little mean (meaning her progeny have a higher chance as well.) When the nucs came out, I realized my mistake and rather than selling any of these queens, I kept them. I sold the good ones. I had to fall on my sword or some goofy analogy like that. So this year comes around and none of the hives in my home yard are of the configuration, strength, and genetics to graft from and to serve as a cell builder as I like to do. One was correctly sorted to serve as a cell builder but it is mean and will be requeened. Long story short, I need a bunch of my own queens to requeen a bunch of my own hives from this line. I did save a number from the other line last year and several of those are good breeders, but they're at my outyards, an inconvenience.

Third, weather again. As you may have noticed reported, we are having a cold spell. Mating nucs are already made up, virgins are in, and these hives have no way to be fed. They could starve in a few short days. Today is one of those days. This is the latest it has ever snowed in recorded history in NW Arkansas. It is May, and it is snowing. It's not freezing necessarily, but it has been snowing. No bees are flying.

Hopefully, all or most of these mating nucs will survive this mess. And due to prior commitments I am not going to be able to start another batch of queens until next week. Fortunately for this area, someone has predicted a cool wet summer. However, I have a theory about predicting the future. Humans suck at it. And I don't mean "hypothesis," I mean theory, as in "explains the data."

I am doing what I can and will do what it takes to make good on my queen and nuc reservations. But this is one of those years where things don't work like you think they ought to.

That all being said, my established hives are doing well. Only lost one this winter, one absconded this spring. As usual, I will miss neither.

Snow in May!

Get a load of this!

I don't recommend having snow in May at all, especially after you've already grafted and have mating nucs out and all the rest.  This is no good.  Don't do it, you wouldn't like it.

Anyway, that's the news.  I have reservations to fill and hives to be requeened after that, so there is a bunch of necessity to get these grafts and mating nucs moving and the weather has been extremely uncooperative.  I can only hope for a long and moist season or there won't be any honey this year.  I will deliver on nucs if at all possible.

John Kefuss: Keeping Bees That Keep Themselves

Who came up with the Bond Method, the Bond Test, or the Bond Hypothesis?  I'm not sure, but it may have been this guy, John Kefuss.

Take a few minutes and read this article.  It will be worth your time.

Expansion Model Beekeeping

Do you ever get that feeling when someone puts something you have been thinking about in to a nice neat concise terminology that makes sense and summarizes your thoughts into a cogent concept?

I do, all the time.  It’s okay though, I don’t have to put a name to everything I think about.  But I can innovate and modify it.

The same thing happened recently at NEOBA’s Big Bee Buzz.  I was enjoying a presentation by Sam Comfort, a beekeeper of some renown who keeps bees in a bit of an unconventional way.  His current push is for box hives.  He is also big into topbar hives and even calls himself a bartender. 

Hilarious, you had to be there. 

I have been suggesting for some time that to succeed in treatment-free beekeeping, one needs to understand how to increase, growing one’s own queens and though I don’t use the term “outbreed the mites,” it does work.  I have found that it takes several years of outbreeding the mites and then at some point, the bees quit dying in large part.  Don’t confuse outbreeding the mites with causing brood breaks, I don’t rely on brood breaks for mite control.

So my idea is to focus on perfecting rapid expansion methods rather than spending time studying about what treatments to use, how to use them, and burning money on them.   And I’m going to call it Expansion Model Beekeeping.  Sam thinks it’s a good idea too.  He said it first.  Full credit to that.

What are the tools?

A far better investment than any treatment is a queen castle.  I have been promoting queen castles since I found them.  They are hives where one essentially divides a full size box into two or three frame nucs and then uses those nucs, with full size normal frames, to raise queens, either as traditional mating nucs, or as a place where one can put a swarm or supersedure cell with its frame and bees to hatch out and mate and found a new hive.  Small hives like this are machines, excellent at rapid expansion, comb drawing, brooding, and growing.  They can quickly be moved into a larger nuc or used to requeen a lackluster hive whose main problem may be disease issues.

If caught in the right time, a hive preparing to swarm can yield as many as a dozen new queens and nucs, but only if you have the equipment to put them in.  If managed to produce queens, a hive can produce dozens at a time, every few weeks.  Queen castles can turn all these queens who successfully mate into new hives.  These new hives draw comb and expand at an amazing rate.  At the same time, you are placing firm selective pressure on these hives to deal with and survive mites and other maladies.  In just a couple generations, diseases are no longer a major problem in your day to day management of hives.  With more selection techniques applied to the resulting queens, you can do the same thing with gentleness and productivity.

But this isn’t a quick ‘take two and call me in the morning’ solution.  It’s not a treatment, something you can toss money at and expect miracle results.  Treatments don’t produce miracle results anyway, but that’s a topic for another day.  This is something that takes learning and as I’ve said often enough before, you gotta jump right in.  Timidity at the beginning often ends in failure.  We’re working with bees who’ve for the most part not been bred for survival, instead relying on treatments to keep them alive and focused almost solely on production.  Furthermore, mass numbers of bees, queens, and nucs, are shipped out of the south every year because people demand early queens and packages and nucs.  But these bees are not accustomed to your climate.  Their mothers just survived a winter that looks more like your Halloween than the proper winters you’re accustomed to.  And this is the case for just about everyone north of 35 degrees latitude which is a major portion of the population.

If you’re getting bees from the South, your bees are not accustomed to your conditions.  This leads to common problems like when bees starve to death inches from capped honey.  For some ridiculous reason, this common problem is pawned off on mites or some other disease.  I had it happen a fair number of times and always to bees originally raised in climates with milder winters like California or Georgia.  It’s an unacceptable condition and it can be avoided for the most part by maintaining bees well adapted to your conditions.

Catching local swarms is another excellent aspect of Expansion Model Beekeeping.  Sam Comfort mentions that he puts up 100 swarm traps every year.  Swarm traps are a good way to enhance your collection with new and varied genetics, whether they are from local feral swarms or from other local kept hives.  Concerned about watered down genetics?  Your winters and diseases and mites will take care of those issues for you.  Use selective pressure to your benefit.  Allow the natural selective pressure to weed out the weakest hives for you.  Remember, your focus is on out-breeding the problem and adapting to it, just like Nature does.  We have a strong and virulent organism in the honey bee.  It has an incredible ability to adapt and survive in all sorts of conditions and pressures.  But it needs some time and new generations

The idea behind this whole philosophy is operating, at least for now, like you want to be a commercial beekeeper in five years.  The focus is increase.  Pretty quickly as I’ve found out, the bees quit dying out so much.  Now I’m at the point where I have the number of hives I want to have.  I have the volume of equipment that I can sustain.  So what do I do with the extra bees?

The first thing you can do is continue to develop strong, gentle, and productive bees.  You can do that by continuing to breed or split from your best queens and requeening poor performers.  If you have extra at the end of the year and don’t want to overwinter a certain number, combining is easy by killing off the less favored queen and placing her hive on the better hive.  There are various ways to do that, newspaper combines and the like.  You can keep some hives as nucs and they can be used to draw comb without feeding, or keep queens in reserve.

Another thing you can do is use your bees to make a little more money or give gives or use them as trade.  You can do this by raising queens, selling nucs, or selling packages or shook swarms (packages with their original queen).  Maybe you don’t want to ship or sell out of town, but you can help your friends and neighbors get started.  Form small cooperatives where you can rely upon your neighbors to provide you a frame of brood to restart a hive with a missing queen, or market your honey together.

It would be fantastic if more beekeeping associations were able to provide the packages, queens, and nucs that their members need without needing to have them shipped in.  If a handful of members were able to provide even limited numbers, it would be enough to get their friends started or help associates sustain their hives and replace their dead outs.  The focus needs to be on local production and adaptation rather than buying bees seemingly ‘off the shelf.’

The ultimate goal is beekeepers whose bees don’t die in large numbers and who have a strong support group to help them grow and learn how to keep bees without resorting to medicating them or expending large amounts of energy trying to keep them alive.  They should stay alive on their own and leave you the beekeeper to do the things you started beekeeping to do.

Big Bee Buzz, Closing Thoughts, Where do I Go from Here?

The Big Bee Buzz put put on by NEOBA was again a fantastic event.  This year's festivities were a substantially treatment-free themed affair.  It was so much fun, I got to meet and hang out with Sam Comfort, got to hang out with Michael Bush, and got to know Ed Levi (former Arkansas State Bee Inspector) better.  So what did I take away?

Some context.  Everything I say is from the perspective of someone who is a Bond method beekeeper, and quite evangelical about it.  I believe people should raise their own bees.  I firmly dislike monoculture and the migratory beekeeping that enables it.  My focus is pretty strictly on small beekeepers, backyard beekeepers, hobbyists, avid hobbyists, and sideliners.

The new name I am using for my philosophy which I got with permission from Sam Comfort is Expansion Model Beekeeping.  My twist is this:  As a beekeeper, rather than spending a load of time learning about all the treatments, what they do, how to use them, all the mechanical and cultural methods of controlling mites, brood breaks, screened bottom boards etc., rather than putting energy into learning and internalizing all that stuff, learn how to breed and expand and to outrun the mites.  And the thing is, outrunning them is only necessary for a relatively brief period of time.  Once your local and localized population becomes sustainable, the mites are not a problem at all.  Focus on creating and maintaining a population from which you can lose a few and not have coronaries about it.  It's no big deal because you'll just raise some more in the spring.  The last two years, I've only lost a single hive.  That's after three years in this location with some higher losses, but a no point was it unsustainable.  And with the methods that I have discovered and implemented now, I could have done it without buying new bees or queens.  Run your operation, whatever size, on an expansion model rather than trying to maintain some certain benchmark.  Hives are much easier to reduce in number than increase.

A handy trick I learned from Mike Bush was when a queen flies off, to dump some bees on the topbars of the hives.  They will begin scent fanning and she'll have a better chance of making it back to the right hive.

Something I have been convinced to do is register my bees.  I had been concerned that some inspector was going to tell me that I had to treat them.  Ed Levi calmed my fears and said that they can't do that.  The only thing they can do in Arkansas is burn them if they have American Foul Brood.  I'm not so concerned about that.  I've never had foulbrood and if I did, burning them is probably a good idea even though every deep box costs about $30 and every medium box costs about $25.  It could get not cheap but it would be even more not cheap if it were allowed to spread.  Anyway, the biggest benefit of registering and getting inspected is that I can ship queens and bees around.

I'm also going to start going to the Northwest Arkansas Beekeepers meetings.  I need to learn more about my area and get to know the local beekeepers.

Sam thinks I should move up to 100 hives, but I doubt that's going to be happening any time soon.  There's other things I like to do too you know.  From talking to him I will also try putting my entrances somewhere in the middle of the hives to hopefully keep the brood and pollen separated a bit better from the honey.

Ed Levi - Continuing Travels

Ed does a talk every year about his travels.  He travels the world consulting with NGOs about expanding beekeeping in mostly third world countries.  Again I can't do it justice here because it's mostly pictures, but there were a couple very interesting points. 

Our modern high production methods of producing honey and bee products have not yet reached many of these places.  They tend to have been in traditional methods, robbing and destroying hives to get the honey and drastically reducing production possibilities. 

These methods self select for bees that produce as little honey as possible, swarm constantly and are mean even though the African bees they were talking about were not particularly mean at all.  That was Ethiopia. 

Next he talked about Ukraine.  He was a consultant for Heifer Project International, an NGO which I use to give beehives to people in the third world. 

The most interesting thing about the next trips is that he took some beekeepers to visit a beekeeping village and they thought the whole thing was a front, a fake put on as propaganda.  They did grow up under the USSR so I guess that can be forgiven for the time being.

Michael Bush: Natural Comb, Importance of Cell Size

Small cell comb is recommended for experienced beekeepers.  Oh yeah?  I'm not sure if anyone told me at the time but I started in on it wholesale.  What was I thinking?  I don't know, but I'm glad I did.  A lot of what I do goes like that, don't think too much about it, go on your intuition and sort it out afterwards.  I wanted to be successful and Dee Lusby was successful, so I did what Dee did and I still do.  Here's a concept that Sam introduced me to this weekend: maybe it's not the cell size that does the mites.  Maybe it's the stress that is the cause of problems and reducing it is the solution.  Severide's Law:  The leading cause of problems is solutions.  Foundation is a solution to bees building comb willy nilly, but it also causes its own problems.  Mike reports natural cells as small as 4.4mm to 5.1.  In my own hives I have seen with my foundationless frames 4.9 to 5.2.  The bees intent is what they draw.  They biologically need to have a certain proportion of workers, drones, and honey.  And the proportion changes at different tiimes of the year.  Manipulating the spacing can encourage the bees to draw a different size comb.  Standard frame spacing is a compromise between honey and brood spacing and ends up being about drone spacing.  Larger foundation they draw just fine because it's a bit larger than worker and smaller than natural drone.  Regressing takes time and several steps.  Iregressed from packages and didn't ever start out with large cell comb or contaminated comb.  I've never treated ever.  In natural hives, there is no single cell size.  Any chosen size will be a compromise between something and something else.  Reducing the capping time reduces the number of mites that breed in a cell.  Natural bees have more hygienic behavior.  How much does small contribute?  No one knows.  There is nothing UNnatural about small cell.  Conventional cell size is certainly too large.  Queens prefer natural comb to anything else.

Sam Comfort: Expansion Beekeeping Model

This is a great term and description for a philosophy  behind treatment-free beekeeping.  Remind me to write about it later.

Sam Comfort: The Creation of Anarchy Apiaries

Sam has a great story.  I can't do it justice here and there's no way I'm going to try to translate the whole thing to to text.  He has given this presentation before, and  you can find it around the internet.  I will try to find a link to a video of it and post it here.

Four Steps Continued

Wax absorbs a bunch of chemicals because it is lipophilic.  Here's a nifty tip:  if your queen flies away, which happens occasionally, pick up a frame and dump the bees off it.  They will start fanning with their Nasonov pheromone which will be like a beacon.  People talk about how they had bees and they did everything they could and treated and everything.  Maybe you killed them!  The only workable solution is breeding to replace losses rather than trying to prevent losses.  In the long run, you will lose fewer.  Breed your own queens!  The only way you are going to get bees that survive your winters is to breed bees who survive your winters, not bees from Alabama and California.  If you can get queens this time of year, it means they will be from the south and they won't be adapted to your conditions.  By not trying to get bees early, you can raise them with proper timing and with with proper nutrition so you get a good quality well mated queen.  You have time to make a quality queen and not pull her out of the mating nuc too soon so that she doesn't develop properly.  Save money!!!  Spare queens, i fyou need one, she's there.  Most importantly, it contributes to maintaining the overall diversity of the species.  The kick test:  If you walk up to the hive and kick it and they come pouring out, requeen them!  Sugar syrup off balances the pH and microbial culture in the hvie causing more brood disease.  It's ntot worth the effort anyway.  Robbing, drowning, work, travel, etc.  Forget the pounds per hive, figure your pounds produced per hour of work.  Fourth step:  Natural comb.  Bees have been enlarged.  It's better to let them build their own size or put them on a more natural size.  Killing drone comb selects for varroa that likes worker.  Fantastic talk, full of practical information.