Varroa & Resistance

[Stonefly7]

Mike Bispham, thanks for posting and sharing your thoughts. There are alot of lurkers here who will appreciate and gleen from information you shared.
Some folks can apply organic type keeping, some can't or won't. Paradigm's are hard to change.

I can only speak for myself. Started bees in NY in early 80's, moved them to the midwest, moved them to the south, then moved them to the high plains about three years ago. No chemicals of any sort, ever. Same bees from same stock, breeding strong queens from strong colonys. Kept only what I could manage at any one time, most being 28. Least being 4. Mentored by an old beek who is 88 now and still manages 80 hives.

I enjoy Mr. Palmer's site and have gleened some of his idea's that have been sucessful for him. I enjoyed reading Mr. Conrad's study and results of his experience. Mr. Tecumseh has had some interesting points that he has shared as well. My point is, there is a buch of interesting techniques out there that folks are willing to share, and I for one appreciate it. If someone puts out, what I think will not work for my application, I just don't use it. I don't slam him for being different than myself.

Sorry, some of the earlier post got my grey beard shaking. For the first time, next spring my job will allow me to expand at a faster rate than my splits will allow. I will be purchasing some nucs from a TX beek for faster expansion. I will let you know how it goes with the new stock, and share the results. Im sure the strong will survive and the weak will pass.

Thanks for listening.

[mythomane]

I think deknow is way overthinking this... You are going to wait for your populations to be stable? Man, they are never going to be stable! Keeping bees is like patching the holes of a leaky ship all the time. This is husbandry, not math! There is always another curve ball around the corner. Palmer knows what he is doing...(I am not so sold on his "wintering nucs" idea, but he still brought in 50T last year)...All this "planning for the future" will glean you nothing. The time to make honey is now. You build your foundation every season and then build up as high as you can. There is no prize for 3 years without treatments. Honey is the prize, buddy! Golden sweet honey! I gives me pleasure to fart around with my bees on a nice spring day and work them, but that is only part of it. Good management is a good thing to do, but not a thing in itself.

[Michael Palmer]

I am not so sold on his "wintering nucs" idea...

Well, your in Texas.

[mike bispham]

Keeping bees is like patching the holes of a leaky ship all the time. This is husbandry, not math!

All other fields of husbandry involve securing the future health of the stock through selective breeding. That is the foundation of organic husbandry. (And actually, genetics is very much math!) Husbandry is only like 'patching the holes of a leaky ship all the time' when you are going about it an amaturish way. The idea of husbandry is to take as much of that out as you can by having the strongest stock you can get your hands on.

All this "planning for the future" will glean you nothing. The time to make honey is now. You build your foundation every season and then build up as high as you can. There is no prize for 3 years without treatments. Honey is the prize, buddy! Golden sweet honey!

A lot of fine beekeepers would take a great deal of satisfaction from managing to go three years without treatments. There is a good deal to be said for 'make hay while the sun shines'; but there is more - life is not all about the gold you can amass - there are deeper satisfactions. Playing your part in securing the health of future generations is something many people find worthwhile.

(BTW, Did you ever have the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper read to you when you were small?)

Best wishes,

Mike

[John Bee]

A 2nd year keeper, so I don't have the depth of experience and info others do. I read these exchanges with great interest and all I wanted to add is that I appreciate the debate, the point - counter point exchanges. Reading these exchanges really helps round out for me as a new keeper the knowledge I am building and gives me options to consider and implement. Appreciate it.

[mythomane]

As far as saving the bee for "future generations" -- bees have been around millions of years without our "help" and I have faith they will continue on. I realize there are "deeper satisfactions" but if bees did not provide us with the basic benefits of pollination, honey, wax and income I strongly doubt that many people would keep them. It would be like owning an ant farm. Genetics may be complicated, but it is not math just because it is analytical in nature. As far as 3 years being impressive, I do not really think so, especially if you look at the number of hives we are dealing with here and when they were acquired. You think a short time span like that says much about his stock? Nope. You could have bought nucs from any major supplier and still have results like that with a little luck. Though I believe in selective breeding, half a lifetime with these girls tell me that a "firm foundation" is illusory. I know keepers with 40+ years of experience that woke up one morning and lost most of their (thousands) of hives. It has always been so, and it is not because these men do not know what they are doing. Nature is going to take her toll with any pandemic. Mites, CCD, Foulbrood, etc. You ready for Tropilaelaps? I would like to see a strain resistant to that.

Your parents ever read you The Journal of a Plague Year as a child?

[mike bispham]

As far as saving the bee for "future generations" -- bees have been around millions of years without our "help" and I have faith they will continue on.

I agree. However it is clear that at the moment the community of beekeepers is not making things as easy as they could. While we are certainly protecting the bee from the worst of modern agriculture, we are also - mostly inadvertantly - undermining the health of future generations by all too often ignoring the factor of genetic inheritance.

We have, I think, a responsiblity to stop acting in such ways. The animal in our care should be taken care of - both for its own sake and for the sake of future beekeepers and those future generations that will benefit from the presence of health bees, or suffer from their lack. Beekeepers should be encouraged in the art of true husbandry, not simply shown how to 'work' bees for short-term gain.

I realize there are "deeper satisfactions" but if bees did not provide us with the basic benefits of pollination, honey, wax and income I strongly doubt that many people would keep them. It would be like owning an ant farm.

I think I disagree. I think many people keep bees these days for mostly the fascination of doing so. How many hobbyists actually turn a profit once all costs - including labour - are taken into account? The odd few jars of honey are a bonus for most, not a primary reason for keeping bees. And such hobbyists outnumber commercial beekeepers by orders of hundreds (at least here in the UK they do - I haven't seen figures for other parts of the world). For the great majority of beekeepers it is a hobby, an interest, not a business; and what interests us is, in good part, learning about the wonderous complex inter-relatedness of nature, and her magical mechanisms.

As far as 3 years being impressive, I do not really think so, especially if you look at the number of hives we are dealing with here and when they were acquired. You think a short time span like that says much about his stock? Nope. You could have bought nucs from any major supplier and still have results like that with a little luck.

Ok 3 years is not long - but the points are still good. Such things depend almost entirely on where you are - and what the local genetics are like. And that... depends in turn almost entirely on what the local beekeepers have been up to in recent years. In the UK, where in most places wild bees that are varroa-tolerant to any significant degree are in very short supply, and there are no suppliers of resistant nucs or queens, any beekeepers managing to maintain say 10 hives for 5 years would I reckon have cause to be pleased. In parts of the US, where the wild bees supply healthy genes, that would be a piece of cake.

Though I believe in selective breeding, half a lifetime with these girls tell me that a "firm foundation" is illusory. I know keepers with 40+ years of experience that woke up one morning and lost most of their (thousands) of hives. It has always been so, and it is not because these men do not know what they are doing. Nature is going to take her toll with any pandemic. Mites, CCD, Foulbrood, etc.

You are right that the next outbreak is always just around the corner, and it will take its toll. As long as people are allowed to transport bees willy-nilly this is likely to be an ongoing problem. But it takes nothing away from the idea that well-bred stock will outperform badly bred stock a lot of the time, and that selective breeding must occur continuously just to prevent stock becoming ever-weaker. We must attend to the genetics in order to simply maintain the health and resistance of our stock; and that means understanding the way treatments fatally undermine the process.

Those beekeepers who do nothing to improve the resistance of their stock will always be more vulnerable that those who do. This is where your idea of 'this is not maths' comes in... we can't calculate the future precisely, but we can certainly shift the odds in our favour with the 'firmest foundation' we can arrange.

Mike

[mythomane]

Well, I appreciate a thoughtful rejoinder...
Why are mite-resistant bees in short supply? You cannot import queens or semen into the UK?

[sqkcrk]

The various options for control for varroa work for a while and then no longer, as the mites develop resistance. And in using them you prevent your bees developing their own natural resistance. You keep weak bees alive and allow them to send their defective genetic material into the local environment, undermining any resistance there.
Mike

Steve Taber basically stated this idea some 22 years ago. To paraphrase him, since I don't know the exact quote, "The best thing to do to defeat varroa is to not use any miticides in our hives. And in about 35 or 50 years we will have bees that are naturally resistant to varroa. We won't have any Commercial Beekeepers, but we will have mite resistant bees."

Some have tried it. Many have failed. But I'm sure that it can be done on a small beekeeping scale.

[mike bispham]

Well, I appreciate a thoughtful rejoinder...
Why are mite-resistant bees in short supply? You cannot import queens or semen into the UK?

I appreciate hearing your side too! To be honest I haven't looked into the situation properly yet. I've been optimistic about about finding local wild bees to try to work with, thinking that i important for a variety of reasons. But that might require perhaps more patience than I have, so I'm starting to think about buying in. If I take that decision I'll be looking harder in the spring. As far as I know, nobody in the UK supplies varroa resistant nucs or queens - but I could easily be wrong. I haven't really thought about importing at all, and if it turns out to be possible I'd have to give it a lot of thought. In general terms I like the idea of trying to restore our historical stock.

Mike

[mike bispham]

[...] Some have tried it. Many have failed. But I'm sure that it can be done on a small beekeeping scale.

If you explore from the links page on my website Mark you'll see the effort is well advanced, and highly successful - although it works best on a larger scale. It is now clear that we could all move away from health regimes based on reactive treatments to health regimes based on selection - and that until that happens we ourselves will continue to perpetuate the problem of ill-health in bees.

Best,

Mike

[tecumseh]

mr palmer writes:
Well, your in Texas.

tecumseh:
I is too....

following your suggestion I will be 'overwintering' various sizes of nucs (baby nucs, 5 frame mediums and 5 frame deeps) which I made up this past season. I am doing this with the hope that it will make the spring season a bit less frienzied. I will let you know how it goes.

at this time I think this little experience has educated me as to when I might expect the drone population to fall off enough to make rearing new queens fuitless.

[mythomane]

End up overwintering all kinds of stuff due to chance down here. Especially this season with nothing but rain. I am still getting swarm calls. They get thrown in a nuc box with gallons of feed over their heads. I checked the weather reports from the past ten years, and it looks like there are 10-15 days each month Dec-Jan that they can break cluster easily and get to it. Hopefully I can nurse some of these weak ones through. My attempt at intentionally splitting up into nucs a la Palmer was a disaster as they were robbed out almost immediately. I know, I know, I should have put them in an outyard...I am toying with the idea of just jump starting early with australian package or florida nucs. This last year I started a lot of hives small and late and they never got off the ground. These are the perils of fresh clean comb, but hopefully it will pay off later. Following in others footsteps I scrapped my old operation and started over fresh a few years ago. All new everything, no chemicals, etc. Anybody read E.W. Alexander? He uses this great phrase: "Start Right." and then follows with "Do not move slowly." Well, I have to boil up some more syrup. Good ol Wal-Mart had the 1.50/4 lbs sugar sale last week. Did you know you can fill one of those shopping carts up to 500 lbs no problem?

[jean-marc]

Mike:

Once you get some bees, I wish you as much success with them as your apparent web page success. Experience has shown me that success with a webpage does not necessarily translate into success with the bees out in the field. My bees are not too computer savvy but when it comes to nectar look out!!!

Jean-Marc

[JonEdangerousli]

Did you know you can fill one of those shopping carts up to 500 lbs no problem?

Those riding ones hold even more, if you count the rider...