Stop Supporting Commercial Beekeepers

Dear treatment free beekeepers,

Please stop buying bees from commercial treating beekeepers.

It's like refusing to buy cheap plastic Chinese junk. Most people are still going to do it because it's cheaper and They are going to get cheap plastic junk. But I know there are many in this group who are much more conscientious than that.

When you buy packages from treating commercial beekeepers, you do one or more of the following:

You waste your money.

You perpetuate the problem of weak bees.

You show that the Commercial Beekeepers are right, that you're just a beehaver buying replacements for dead bees because you don't have any idea what you're doing.

You prop up a system of beekeeping which is bad for the environment.

You prop up a system of agriculture which is bad for the environment.

You prop up a system of beekeeping which is bad for the bees.

If you think you're "helping the bees" you're actually doing the opposite.

You feed a beekeeping philosophy which is intellectually bankrupt.

You hold this movement back by supporting its opponents.

You slow the progress of adaptation and evolution.

Look, we're gonna win. One day I will change the name of this group to "beekeeping" because treating won't be a thing anymore. But we need your help.

STOP SUPPORTING TREATING BEEKEEPERS.

Buy only TF bees.

Better yet, don't buy bees at all. Invest in swarm traps.

Let no swarm call go unanswered.

Split from your own stock. Split early. Split often.

This movement requires we change the status quo. The last time I bought commercial treated bees was 2003. I will never do it again.

Most of all, do your job as a beekeeper and mentor someone. Tell them not to buy packages or queens from treaters. Show them how to catch swarms. Teach them how to split, raise queens, make new hives.

This is happening. You can push us forward or you can hold us back. I am one person. The ball is in your court.

The Commercial Conundrum

If you're familiar with my work, you know that I am strictly against "magic bullet genetics." One of the things that bugs me about all the so-called research is that they never seem to actually consult those of us that are already doing it. No stock available? Hardly, just not widely accepted by the scientists. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-science or anti-medicine as is admittedly common in this group. But when for instance, I read studies on small cell foundation, I can see almost instantly that these people not only have no idea what they're doing, they obviously hasn't asked for help from anyone who does!

This is a huge point of frustration for many of us in this movement. Bee scientists and commercial beekeepers absolutely refuse to do anything differently. They just apply our methods half heartedly and point and laugh when they fail. Of course they fail! You didn't actually do what we suggest!

I actually have made the point that commercial migratory beekeeping may be impossible due to the fact that bees are fundamentally not meant to move and be exposed to that much disease that often. But commercial stationary honey production absolutely is and there are already a handful, if not dozens doing it.

Breeding bees with specific traits like ankle biters and VSH is ultimately a futile effort. I have been saying for years that the only ultimate solution is to stop treating and let it work itself out. And it does. However, few if any commercial beekeepers can actually let that happen or they go bankrupt. I get that.

We have a major problem with newbees making a mess of things on the forums. But there are a lot of us doing this. And there are parts of this country where almost everybody is TF. The commercial conundrum is something that is going to have to be worked through for many years to come.

Freshman Beekeepers Dispensing Advice

There is something I've been thinking about lately.

I recently had to boot somebody from my Treatment-Free Beekeeping group who kept making incessant mentions of the fact that one might do something about one's problems, but one couldn't mention it because this is the treatment-free group. That's trolling.

At any rate, he (or maybe she) complained once booted that he/she had followed the rules, "I answer the questions on the page correctly when people ask about how you accomplish your mission, by brood breaks and selective breeding etc."

Here are the issue I have with this sentiment:

1. If you do not practice what you preach, then you are not answering correctly, unless you put with your statement a disclaimer that you actually don't know what you're talking about.

2. By advancing ideas that you do not practice, you are subtly introducing error into these ideas. You don't know what you're talking about so you don't know when you are in error.

3. Others will undoubtedly see these pronouncements and take them to heart, not knowing that they are actually forming an unknowing link in a game of Telephone.

4. The end result is that people go forth with ideas that are not quite correct and may end up with failing results.

You can see that as an educator who focuses on new beekeepers, this is absolutely the last thing that I want, people going forth with incomplete or erroneous information and having a bad time beekeeping. I don't want your hives after you've given up after one season of unsuccessful beekeeping (especially if they are 8-frame).

The fact is, I do not accomplish my treatment-free beekeeping practice through brood breaks. I just don't. It's not part of my program. And while I believe it can be very helpful for many beginning beekeepers, it should not be considered a long term strategy. The long term strategy should be building up hive numbers (either as an individual or as a collective) so that when losses come, they will push you back to a number you're more comfortable with rather than drag you back to a number from which is hard to recover.

When you listen to my podcasts, you may notice that I am very careful to buttress my remarks on topbar hives with disclaimers that I do not keep topbar hives and that the information I am passing on is gleaned from more knowledgeable and experienced beekeepers in that area. And this is incredibly important. It is vital that experienced beekeepers pass on accurate information to new beekeepers.

So when a treating beekeeper offers advice like this to this group, realize that they are just as inexperienced as any other freshman beekeeper. They are not qualified to dispense information. And I ask those of you that are new beekeepers and just learning this stuff, please do not offer advice to those asking if you have not likewise already done the things you are talking about. I know you are eager to share what you have learned, but please please, be eager instead to share what you have done.

I have seen countless examples of first year beekeepers trying to tell seasoned commercial beekeepers that they are doing it wrong. This is unfathomably counter productive. Please don't do it. It really puts our movement in a very bad light, and galvanizes opponents to our cause.

Thank you for your time,
Solomon

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.