Inventor from Moscow developed a brand new technology for commercial beekeeping

[Ruben]

This was in our local beekeepers acc. newsletter this month, has anyone hear of such a thing?


We Don’t Need Bees – We Need Honey

Inventor from Moscow has developed a brand new technology for commercial beekeeping. He suggests removing a queen bee from the hive, which allows cropping as much as 20 kilos of the purest honey every month.

Beekeeping usually implies many difficulties, which prevent millions of amateurs from starting this interesting and useful activity. First of all, these difficulties are fighting bee parasites and diseases, forming new swarms, and the last, but not the least – the necessity of preparing the bee family for wintering. Alexander Kulinich, former fellow of the Institute of General Genetics (Russian Academy of Sciences) and current beekeeper, claims he has invented the technique for avoiding all mentioned difficulties. His innovation is based upon achievements of native geneticists and chemists – no science will make without standing on the shoulders of giants.

Common bee family consists of the queen bee, drones, which fertilize the queen, and working bees, collecting honey. Bees need honey to nurse their little bees. Alexander Kulinich suggests eliminating the stage of nursing bees, which is the main honey expenditure, from the hive lifecycle.

The bee family can be separated in time and in space. The queen bee should live in a special bee farm, where, under the professional guidance, it will lay eggs and nurse little bees. Adult working bees can be united in a so-called bee-pack and sold to any one, who needs them. We should, of course, work with peaceful bee species, like Carpathian or Caucasian bees, for example, to avoid any potentially dangerous incidents with people, says Mr. Kulinich.

The bee-pack is a light, weighing about 1.5 kilos, plastic hive with prepared wax plates, where bees are going to build combs and to fill them with honey. The customer places the bee-pack on a chosen site and opens the hive entrance. Within a month the hive is full of honey and gets empty due to natural death of the working bees, which usually live no longer than 25 days. All you have to do now is to cut out the combs and to extract honey from them. Another merit of the bee-packs is that you are absolutely sure that the honey you get is pure and comes from the flowers, not from refined sugar or some other honey imitation. The hive owner also knows what flowers the bees used for collecting honey – the special zoned beekeeper calendar tells what plant has bloomed most intensively during the crop period. The experiment, performed in 2005, showed that one bee-pack easily provides 20 kilos of honey during linden blossom.

But why should bees bring honey to an empty hive, where no queen lives, in other words, why should they work for nothing? Nevertheless, they would do it, because each bee-pack is equipped with a trap with queen bee’s pheromones. This smell deceives the working bees. As for bee breeding on a bee farm – it is promoted by the particular hormone, regulating insect growth. The source for said hormone is found in plants, which generate it for protecting themselves from insects by breaking their development cycle. However, correct and accurate use of hormones allows maturing of an insect in periods, when natural maturing doesn’t happen.

Many Russian amateur gardeners experience problems with garden pollination. Thus, there’s a market for the bee-packs, because they cost little during manufacture – about $17 (500 rubles) – the plastic hive included. The technique inventor suggests another curious idea – honey vacations. You take your bee-pack with you while traveling to some beautiful nature spots – meadows, mountains, etc. – where the plant chosen for honey cropping, blooms. As a result, you get a perfect vacation and a good deal of delicious honey.

Source: Russian InfoCenter: Anna Kizilova, 28 August 2006

[merops_apiaster]

Uf! Russia is different!

[jdb5949]

Kulinich claims to be a beekeeper.

a) The queen bee . . . will lay eggs and nurse little bees.
My queens are incapable of feeding themselves. Now they are going to feed "little bees" also?

b) The bee-pack is a ... plastic hive with prepared wax plates, where bees are going to build combs and to fill them with honey...as much as 20 kilos of the purest honey every month.

I wish I could get 40 lbs of honey every month from 3 lbs of bees.

c) The hive owner also knows what flowers the bees used for collecting honey.

Hives sitting beside each other still manage to work different blooms.

d) why should bees bring honey to an empty hive, where no queen lives . . .

This "scientist" claims to have all the queen bee pheromones. What about the brood pheromones?

[jdb5949]

Kulinich claims to be a beekeeper.

Those of you with outyards can conduct this experiment.

Shake 3 lbs of bees into a nuc with drawn comb and a swarm lure. Then take them at least five miles away from home.

Do they collect honey or abscond?

[ September 08, 2006, 10:02 PM: Message edited by: jdb5949 ]

[bourdeaubee]

Is it swarm lure that he is useing or something else?

[Jim Fischer]

This is nothing new - queenless "pollination units" have
been used on and off for years, but never really caught
on, given that the unit has a "shelf life" that is short, and
the entire idea of a "disposable" hive makes many assumptions
about the specifics of the weather, blooming crop, and so on,
with many of those assumptions being subject to massive
revision without notice once one deploys bees to the crop. smile.gif

It is well-known that a colony with a caged queen
certainly will do a fine job of more demanding tasks, like
making comb honey, as the task of brood rearing is
greatly reduced, given that the caged comb area is small.
The workers that would otherwise be raising brood are
freed to process nectar, draw comb, and so on. Also,
the lack of brood reduces the need for pollen, and
allows more foragers to be nectar foragers. I suspect that
every profitable comb honey operation considers this trick
mission-critical.

The results claimed by this fellow are just as easy to
achieve by caging the queen prior to a flow. This allows
one to take advantage of the real queen, cared for by
a real hive, rather than a lure, which is, at best, a
partial replacement for a queen. It also eliminates
the need for extra "mating nuc" like set-ups to care
for the queens back at the shop. Timing is critical,
as one wants to cage the queen before the flow,
but not too long before the flow. The colony is
going to "lose momentum" the moment you cage
the queen, so you also need to time the releasing
of the queen with care.

As far as "garden pollination", this is a perfect assignment
for a spring (or fall) split. One makes a split, tosses in a
new queen, and the moment she is released and found to be
"accepted", this smaller hive can be deployed, and provisioned
with a feeder and an extra box of undrawn comb. A single
placement of a split can at least pay for the queen,
but one can shuffle the splits around and get more than
one rental in a spring. It is a service business, but it
turns a non-revenue producing split into a revenue-
generating colony, if one admits that a split is not going
to make much of a spring crop, which is most often true.

[Michael Bush]

I'm sure they are using QMP (Queen Madibular Pheromone aka Bee Boost) not Nasonov Phermone (Typical swarm lure). I'm sure with just swarm lure they would absond.

The old ant farms were similar in that they couldn't rear brood because they didn't ship a queen or the means to make one, but people could watch ants work.

This way people can have bees and watch them work and make honey but they will die out every year. So you get to sell them more bees. Sounds like a great marketing scheme.

[BjornBee]

I am not really interested in the product mentioned but want to acknowledge the point of queenless hives and honey production. This is a management task that very few choose for maximizing honey production. Pulling a queen and open brood at the correct time can really increase yields. It is something that could be built into a system for increasing hive numbers, controlling mites, and honey production. I agree with Jim on the benefits and possible use. I see nothing wrong with this creative person wanting to amke a buck.

America consumes much more honey than the american beekeeper produces. For a commodity that could be produced almost anywhere by anyone, millions of pounds are shipped to this country every year. I wonder how much some of these people from other countries would kick our butts in business if they were sitting in the states somewhere, asking themselves "how can I make a buck?".

As for a marketing scheme, I applaude the creativity to market and sell bees in such a manner. Bumblebee units for greenhouses and hot tunnels are big business. I seen some this year sell for close to 300 hundred dollars for a thirty day bumblebee box. He probably got the idea from reading how much american farmers pay for such items.

It sounds as if the capatalistic and entrepeneur(sp) spirit is alive and well in russia.

[Bob Harrison]

Dr. CC Miller wrote about the value of raising comb honey over a queenless colony. A method I have used for years. Also no red bitter pollen in the comb honey which happens many times in Missouri when comb honey is produced over a queenright hive.

[Aram]

It doesn't sound like the method is new, what's new is the proposal to revolutionize beekeeping, to make this the new main way of producing honey. Same bottom line mentality "gave" us the modern poultry farm: we have egg laying machines and one breed of meat chicken (which can't reproduce or survive to maturity); and the modern milk cow, corn, etc. Just because it is possible does not make it right.

I'm new to beekiping but I have 21 years of experience with communism. Coming from an ex-comm country it is hard for me to wish it on anyone but some Russians, like tvarishchi Kulinich really deserve no better.


The bee family can be separated in time and in space. The queen bee should live in a special bee farm, where, under the professional guidance, it will lay eggs and nurse little bees. Adult working bees can be united in a so-called bee-pack and sold to any one, who needs them. We should, of course, work with peaceful bee species, like Carpathian or Caucasian bees, for example, to avoid any potentially dangerous incidents with people, says Mr. Kulinich.

Striking example of old dogmas die hard mixed with western entrpreneurship.

Aaaaaaargh,
Aram

[BjornBee]

;)