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.
