Back in ye Olden days beekeepers had it made, at least from my perspective. Sure their life expectancy was about 36 and they did not have air conditioning but I can imagine they had an easier time managing their honeybees. The golden age would probably have been just prior to the 1980’s before the Varroa mites were first introduced into the states. Yes, there still were the tracheal mites but at least honeybees existed, such as the Buckfast variety, that could tolerate them. Most of the beekeepers alive prior to the 20th century did not have to deal with the myriad of chemicals to treat all of these internal hive beasties.
Outside of the hive was a different matter. In the 50’s through the early 70’s DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan) was being sprinkled around like water along with a hoast of other chemicals to kill the pests of agriculture. Today one almost needs a PHD to understand the molecular makeup of the chemicals being used inside and outside of their hives. As of 2009, beekeepers have the following options on their menu:
What does this mean for the beekeeper? From my perspective it looks like a recipe for disaster. These chemicals are nothing but temporary solutions to a problem that requires some long term readjustments. The bees that exist now are more dependant on human beings than ever before. This can be seen with the population of “feral” bees in the United States. Feral bees are really nothing more than kept bees that have swarmed out into the wild. With the coming of the Varroa mite, feral populations have crashed. This can also be seen in our bee yards too where the Varroa mite, among other beasties, have decimated our hives. These pests weaken our bees and allow them to succumb to other diseases ending with the eventual collapse of the hive.
What is our solution? Pump our hives full of toxic chemicals instead of relying on natural selection to do the job for us. As a result we have a weaker bee population that will never be able to propagate themselves on their own and survive. I am not against the use of science per se to help fix our problems. I for one am a living example of better living through chemicals with my Symbiocort Asthma steroid. I am just trying to make the point that the more we rely on quick fixes to solve our problems the harder it is going to be to dig ourselves out of this expanding trench. The more we use these chemicals the weaker the colonies will become over the long term.
How to fix this problem? We must rely on Friedrich Nietzsche’s sage advice when he said “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” We need to let the honeybees resolve the issues affecting them using biology rather than chemistry. Nature has the wonderful ability of adapting to new circumstances when given the chance. I can already hear what many people are saying right now at their keyboards. How can a commercial honey producer just let honeybees exist on their own without the use of chemicals to protect them? It would be financial suicide!
Have you ever heard of SETI? It stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI has millions of signals that they must filter through and process. For any one computer, even a CRAY, it would take endless amounts of hours considering there are always new signals to process. So the scientists at SETI came up with a neat solution. They made this processing software available to anyone who wanted to download it onto their computer. The user would install the program and let it run in the background. The program automatically downloads a signal from the website. It then might take 2 hours to process the single signal on the users PC. Once done, it uploads the processed signal back to the server and downloads another one. Big deal you might say, 12 signals out of millions are processed a day. Whoopdeedoo. But it is not just one user, there are hundreds of thousands of users running this program on their computer. By this collective effort, massive amounts of processing can be done through machines 1/100000 as powerful as a CRAY. This allows the researchers to avoid the expense of purchasing a large number of super computers to process signals.
How does this relate to beekeeping? Well the commercial beekeepers are the CRAY computers of the world and the hobbyist, the small laptop PC. If a large group of volunteer hobbyists could agree to stop using all of theses chemicals and just let the bees deal with these issues on their own, for good or ill, eventually a honeybee might appear that is resistant to a particular issue. That honeybee would then have an advantage over the other honeybees and more likely be able to propagate successfully. I am not sure what scale of effort or time would be needed to do this. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years possibly to yield a single mutation trait that could benefit the species. However, with hundreds of thousands of colonies, maybe this long time span could be reduced to only a decade. I am not an evolutionary biologist so I can not say for sure. Despite this, I see three benefits to doing something like this.
1. The honey you harvest will be as organic as honey can be. Although you cannot control the pollution honeybees get into when looking for resources you can at least know what you are putting into the hive.
2. You are taking part in a process to help build a better bee for the future. One that does not need to rely on human efforts to survive.
3. Commercial beekeepers could continue using traditional management practices as they provide pollination and honey to the general public as the volunteers put their bees on the line.
The downside to the hobbyist is that it could get expensive continually replacing hives year after year with new packages, little honey yield, and the allowing of bees to become weaker in the short term. This last negative could really be bad especially if the stress on the hive, from not using chemicals, allows the bees to develop American Foul Brood. AFB is a bacterial disease easily passed from one colony to another in the bee yard through spores. Often the hive has to be burned to prevent the spread.
These are just all ideas. Food for thought. I would like to know what bee researchers think of this kind of possibility.
Beekeeping is not an inexpensive hobby by any means unless of course you want to do beekeeping using traditional means of practice. When I say “traditional” I mean “Little House on the Prairie” traditional. When Pa and Half-Pint would venture out into the great big woods and find a hive lodged in a tree hollow. Half-Pint would set fire to the tree while Pa cut it down with his double bladed axe like Paul Bunyan. Together they walked home with 180 pounds of comb on Pa’s back while Half-Pint lovingly looks up to Pa and says “I love you Paaaa!.” That worked during 1880’s but now a days there are not many wild hives in the woods due to the mites and as folksy as this sounds it is a lot of work.
Most modern day beekeepers like to do things efficiently with as little mess as possible so that our spouses won’t clobber us over the head with grief. This being said we arrive upon our most expensive purchase when it comes to being a hobbyist bee keeper. The extractor. Careful consideration must be given when searching for the right extractor. For my part, I made a poor choice. But knowing what I know now, I know what to look for the next time I buy a new one in 2024.
An extractor is an essential part of your operation. In days past people used to put the honey comb in cheese cloth and press it out the honey. This was effective however it made it hard practice beekeeping as you destroyed the essential structure of the hive. Using an extractor it is now easy to put frames into a rack and spin out the honey with little or any damage to the comb. Empty frames are then put back into the hive to be filled again thus restarting the cycle.
One sad fact about beekeeping is that it is a dying art. As it goes by the wayside, so do the manufactures of beekeeping related wares. As a result there are far less choices than there used to be. Doing a quick online search I only found 2 manufactures of extractors and that was King Honey and Maxant. The other extractors I see sold in most of the catalogs today are made by the Chinese and sold generically. Maybe making your own is not such a bad idea.
Messy Leia.
This afternoon I was watching my toddler, Leia, eat her lunch. I was amused to see that she chose her food using a most honeybee like system of selection. Leia would first eat her grilled cheese sandwich, move on to the cheese blocks, and lastly follow up with some fried zucchini. It seemed to follow the path of least nutrition. Priority was given to the tastier food although definitely not the more nutritious foods. Honeybees follow a similar methodology when selectively choosing nectar sources.
On a given day there are thousands of honeybees scouting around for the raw materials of honey, nectar. Nectar from plants fall into a wide range of water concentration, 8 to 50 percent sugar. So it behooves the honey bees to find the most sugar during a nectar trip. This will later translate into a lesser amount of work for the house bees in the hive. Scouts will fly around and find the richest source of nectar. Taking it back to the hive they will preform a little wagging dance that will tell the other field bees the directions, distance, and quality of the nectar source. This passing of information will allow the colony to then focus on harvesting nectar plants that are yielding the greatest amount of concentrated nectar.
Once brought back to the hive and regurgitated into the comb, several thousand worker bees will then fan the honey creating an airflow within the hive. Not only will this cool the bees but also reduce the water concentration of the nectar into what we call honey. Roughly 80% sugar and 18% water, and 2% proteins, pollen, and vitamins.
This selective process also allows for distinct flavors to exist within honey. Alfalfa, apple blossom, dandelion, fire weed, manuka, orange blossom, clover, and wild flower among some of the flavors. All because bees will concentrate on one flower variety at a time.
So watch your child or grandchild next time they eat and see if they are mono-selective eaters.
The Buckfast Honeybee
When I first ventured into solo beekeeping I used the same bee breed as my mentor, the standard Italian. Don’t get me wrong the Italian is a nice bee which I will go over in another article but I wanted to experiment and see what other choices there were for me. After doing a little research I arrived upon the Buckfast honey bee.
The Buckfast honey bee was developed by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in the early 1900’s. During that time honey bees were going through
Brother Adam
a crisis as the tracheal mite “acarapis woodi” was wiping out many of the colonies, then called the “Isle of Wight” disease. The tracheal mite is a very tiny mite, about 80 microns large, that settles into the tracheal tubes of the bees and feeds off of their blood while the female lays eggs. The honey bee colony will become weakened by this pest and become more susceptible to other diseases.
After travelling over 100,000 miles around the world, Brother Adam was able to collect pure strains of other honeybees and over several years combine them into a breed of honeybee now known as the Buckfast Bee. The Buckfast Bee is known for many of its good traits including:
If one were to list a downside to them it is that they like to use propolis around their hive liberally. Propolis is a tree resin that honey bees use to to seal up the interior of their hive. Sometimes it can make opening the hive very difficult. I have broken a few frames and hive entrance spacers because of all of the sticky goo they placed around the hive.
Despite this I found the Buckfast bee to be the most hardy of all of the breeds I have worked with. In eastern Virginia we often have cold wet winters and the bees actually did very well for having such a lousy climate to live in. This year I will probably order three packages of this honey bee breed and see how they fare in the mountainous area surrounding Charlottesville.
As a side note to their hardiness. One year that I had the bees, for some reason the Buckfast swarmed late into the season. At the time I only had about three spare boxes with frames so I captured the swarm and placed them into a fourth hive next to the others. I gave them as much honey I had on hand and also fed them some concentrated sugar water of a 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. This did not amount to much and I figured they were going to die out in the winter. Every month or so during the winter I would go out to the bee yard and check on their status. I would place my ear next to the hive and tap a few times on the wood with my hand. Every time I did that I would hear a faint buzz from within. Come early Spring they were still alive and I was able to build them up again into a full fledged hive.
On another positive note concerning the Buckfast Bee. Because they are naturally resistant to the tracheal mite, you do not have to buy Menthol to treat them. The use of Menthol can only be applied during the early and late season and not soon before a honey extraction. Honey containing Menthol is not fit for human consumption when in honey. Treating mites is another article we will talk about later.
Links to breeders of Buckfast Honey Bees:
I was surprised how many calls my ad generated. About 6 people left messages for me expressing interest in having hives on their property. The site chosen though is beyond ideal. It is a beekeepers fantasy come true. The site sits on a piece of property owned by an earthy couple that encourage all sorts of activity related to nature. They have three organic farmers currently using the property, lease free at that, and now I get to join the club. The property itself is about 15 acres and is comprised mainly of fallow farm land, an old barn, an old house being fixed up by the current owners and plenty of seclusion for my bees. I have already chosen the location at the farm along the western edge of a tree line to an old farming plot. In the morning it will get the early sun and have plenty of shade in the afternoon when heat is at its peak. It is about 150 yards from a small stream, is protected from westerly wind, and has plenty of pollen and nectar resources near by. In addition I will be able to use my vehicle to get to the site. I will just have to use a lawnmower every two weeks to keep the path way partially clear.
The only down side is that I will need riot gear to fight off all of the ticks. Not a big deal. Dealing with natures itchy volken is part of being a beekeeper. With a site chosen now I can begin the process of researching new equipment since I will have left most of my other equipment with my uncle to use on his small homestead. Basically I will need enough boxes for three hives in their first season, a new suit, new gloves, and a new smoker. Pretty big expense considering I probably will only cull enough honey to pay for the smoker since I seem to give most of it away. Maybe this year I will become a capitalist.
As soon as I can I will publish some pictures for all.
