An ideal beekeepers' world

[peterloringborst]

unless you want to claim that this (or any other study) shows that there is no cost to the colony by trapping pollen, i'm not sure what the point is.

Hmm. Perhaps I failed to make myself clear. The point is: am I hurting the colony by stealing their pollen? This matters to me.

I may do it anyway, but then if the health suffers, I realize that it either is or is not related to what I did.

And I can choose to either: stop trapping pollen, introduce supplemental feeding, or chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

You see how it might be useful to know the in-hive dynamics of pollen regulation? Or not?

[WLC]

Dean:

You seem to be ignoring the fact that in order to select for survivor stock from untreated colonies, you need to go through a selection process that can result in the loss of up to 95% of your colonies.

You don't have that kind of selective pressure in effectively treated colonies. You certainly don't loss upto 95% of your stock when you treat.

Since viral pathogens are known to be a major cause of colony loss, it's obvious that you are, in fact, selecting for virus resistant colonies when you initially select for a treatment free regime. If 30% of our Honeybee colonies are virus resistant because of viral fragment inserts, then you can't help but to have a higher percentage of transgenic colonies in the resulting treatment free hives.

It's the selection process that's important, We already know that overt viral infections have multiple causes, and it's not just mites.

Nice try.

[Omie]

Wrong. Bees will collect honey as long as there is honey to collect. They don't stop when they run out of room nor start up again if there is. Unlike the regulation of pollen collection, honey collection is unregulated. If they can't get it by legitimate means, they will attempt to steal it. You won't see bees stealing pollen.

Bees make honey and collect nectar. Unless they were stealing honey from another hive or someone set some out as a free buffet. It's hard to make sense of your answer. If as you say bees don't stop 'collecting' honey after they've run out of room, where on earth would they put it then?
Are you saying bees won't attempt to make/replenish more honey if you take most of their honey away, leaving them too little?

[mike bispham]

The real wonder is how beekeeping has continued to allow some people to make a living, given how the rest of the ag industry has had to become so much more efficient.

Whether what it is able to 'achieve' is sustainable is a different question.

It seems to me that competiton and the drive for a best bottom line have turned comercial beekeeping into something that can only exist at huge cost to the stock. The bee - in the US anyway - seems to be on the way to becoming domesticated, in the sense that it is entirely dependent on humans for the medicines it needs to remain alive. This bee cannot escape - in the wild it dies. Wild bees cannot exist near it - their genes are the touch of death. It is a cog in a machine. It is likely that fresh genetic material will have to be imported from other countries on a regular basis, to make up for the consumption of genetic diversity the commercial machine devours. Scientists will have to be employed permantly to ensure the provision of a continuous train of functional bees.

This is not anything I want any part of. I cannot - or rather don't want to -explain why.

Mike

[mike bispham]

You seem to be ignoring the fact that in order to select for survivor stock from untreated colonies, you need to go through a selection process that can result in the loss of up to 95% of your colonies.

'Can' being the operative word here. If you do it sensibly you don't have to lose ANY.

Since viral pathogens are known to be a major cause of colony loss, it's obvious that you are, in fact, selecting for virus resistant colonies when you initially select for a treatment free regime.

Yes for selecting virus resistant colonies (but that is no problem): rubbish for your causal priority. The mite is a PRIOR CAUSE. It is only through the PRIOR opening of holes in the bees bodies that the virus is able to enter.

Try to learn something about the importance of TRAINS of causes. They are always chronologically sequenced, if that helps. That is; causes always precede effects; i.e:

First: mite makes hole,

Second: virus enters body.

It could have been any nasty organism - it really doesn't matter - the bee died beCAUSE a mite made a hole in its body. If it hadn't been this virus, another would have done the same thing a little later.

Mite activity is itself an EFFECT of interference in the selection system. Those mites are only there beCAUSE that bloodline has been artificially supported. If it hadn't been so supported, a different bloodline would be in its place, and its bees would be able to handle the mites. And the mites would be much less aggressive.

Without the mites there is no virus problem. When you select for simple survivablity, for health and vitality, you automatically select against those things that impact health and vitality most. In the modern environment that means varroa, and what will come to the fore will be - mainly - the hygienic behaviours.

If 30% of our Honeybee colonies are virus resistant because of viral fragment inserts, then you can't help but to have a higher percentage of transgenic colonies in the resulting treatment free hives.

And the problem with that is... (from the SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE please, not from the SALES 'literature'...)

Mike

[peterloringborst]

Bees make honey and collect nectar. Unless they were stealing honey from another hive or someone set some out as a free buffet. It's hard to make sense of your answer. If as you say bees don't stop 'collecting' honey after they've run out of room, where on earth would they put it then?

Are you saying bees won't attempt to make/replenish more honey if you take most of their honey away, leaving them too little?

Right, collect nectar, make honey. By stealing, yes, I meant stealing honey from another hive=robbing.

If they run out of room, they start building more comb. Haven't you seen colonies build comb on the outside of the hive? Lucky you!

Yes, I am saying that taking or leaving the honey has no influence on the colony whatsoever. If there is nectar to be gathered, they will gather it. Having a full or empty hive has no effect on this. They will build comb on the front of the hive, or under it if they are out of room.

Giving room is important, of course, because if you don't they may fill up the brood combs with honey. Taking too much is important, too, because they could starve.

It has to be done correctly, but whoever out there thinks that skinning the hive causes them to work harder: they don't know beans about bees.

[Omie]

It has to be done correctly, but whoever out there thinks that skinning the hive causes them to work harder: they don't know beans about bees.

And I never said that. I said: "Sort of like if you take most of their honey, the bees will attempt to replenish it." Replenish does not mean 'work harder', it just means to replace. If you take pollen from the bees, they try to replace what they have lost. Take honey from their combs by extracting, they will try to replace it/replenish it. I guess I don't see it as being that complicated. It's just common sense.

[WLC]

Journal of Invertebrate Pathology: Supplemental Issue on Diseases of Bees

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...da355efc47291b

Let me park this reference here. Someone might actually try and read it.

[peterloringborst]

Take honey from their combs by extracting, they will try to replace it/replenish it. I guess I don't see it as being that complicated. It's just common sense.

Not true. That was the whole point of my discussion. It has been determined through careful study that bees regulate pollen storage while they do not regulate the storage of honey. There are distinct biological reasons for this. And yet you seem to prefer to substitute what you call "common sense" for the actual facts.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein

[kiwiBee]

Peter
are you saying that you can take all the honey off a hive and the bees will sit back and not bring another drop in?

where on earth did you come across this?
kiwi

[peterloringborst]

Peter
are you saying that you can take all the honey off a hive and the bees will sit back and not bring another drop in?

where on earth did you come across this?
kiwi

No, I didn't say anything remotely like that. I said that whether you do or do not take off the honey does not influence whether they gather nectar. If there is no nectar, they will not gather it! If you take off all the honey when there is no nectar they will die! If you leave the honey on the hive, they will not stop gathering nectar just because the hive is "full"! If you remove the honey they do not rush out in attempt to "fill it back up"!

The gathering of nectar is primarily based upon environmental conditions. Two things that take place internally that will affect nectar gather would be: preparations to swarm. Nectar gathering slows down, although some nectar gathering goes on even while the swarm is in transit. Queenlessness generally depresses all the activity of the colony. It is a grave error to impute a higher level of consciousness to bees than they have. Some things they know, some things they do not know.

Scientists attempt to separate out these two categories.

[Omie]

Not true....It has been determined through careful study that bees regulate pollen storage while they do not regulate the storage of honey. There are distinct biological reasons for this. And yet you seem to prefer to substitute what you call "common sense" for the actual facts.

I disagree with your discussion methods. (not that you care, I'm sure) In my life journey, I find that sometimes the 'actual facts' are just not what they are advertised to be. They so often become filtered and bent into different desired results depending upon the person using them. In such cases my common sense has usually stood me in good stead as I slowly build on my knowledge and beliefs.

[peterloringborst]

This is a treasure trove of up to the minute information, on par with the Journal of Apicultural Research's recent efforts.

This special issue of the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology on bee health aims to collect state-of-the-art knowledge on various bee pathogens in order to provide a solid and up-to-date background for those interested in honeybee infection biology. Only if research in the field of honeybee pathology is conducted at the cutting edge of science will we be able to address the pressing questions for sustaining honeybee health and preventing colony losses due to disease.

See also:

[QUOTE It has been unclear what has caused recent global declines of honey bees. The Journal of Apicultural Research Special Issue focuses on the latest evidence-based explanations of the extent and causes of honey bee colony losses. These peer-reviewed reports of current scientific thinking aid our understanding of recent eye catching headlines proclaiming the dramatic demise of the honey bee, a world pollinator crisis, and the spectre of mass human starvation.

Issue 49(1) of the Journal of Apicultural Research, published by IBRA will contain a comprehensive mixture of evidence based review articles, original research articles, and reports of colony losses in many partner countries of the COST funded COLOSS Network. This issue is edited by Dr. Peter Neumann, the Chair of the global COLOSS network "Prevention of honey bee COlony LOSSes"; and Norman Carreck, Scientific Director, IBRA, and the University of Sussex, UK. [/QUOTE]

[kiwiBee]

Peter,
thanks for putting me straight on what you were saying about the collection of honey I was starting think you were crazy!

What is your opinion on hives that become pollen clogged?
by that I mean hives that have entire frames of pollen and not a whole lot of brood to feed it too?

and this quote of yours

[QUOTE It has been unclear what has caused recent global declines of honey bees. The Journal of Apicultural Research Special Issue focuses on the latest evidence-based explanations of the extent and causes of honey bee colony losses.

I'm not getting the global thing what countries are affected by colony collapse?
As far as I'm aware Australia and New Zealand have not had any incidence of colony collapse and I'm sure there are many other countries that haven't either.

As I said before on this thread alot of what you are talking about is way over my head but I'm sure I will be put right if I get it wrong

kiwi

[peterloringborst]

Peter,
thanks for putting me straight on what you were saying about the collection of honey I was starting think you were crazy!

That's OK, I am used to that by now.

Too much pollen. This can be a problem at times, although if in fact, bees regulate pollen storage, the excess pollen would probably point to a different problem: a failing queen. Typically a colony tries to have about 1 kilo of pollen on hand. This would be the amount a really good colony could go through in a week or two, if the weather turned bad. But if the queen is not up to par, then there would be far less brood, and the pollen would not get consumed at the normal rate. At this point, the colony would be expected to slack off on pollen gathering. Of course, a hive of bees is not a machine, and the regulation of each colony tends to be individualized. We are talking about generally bees do this or that. A particular colony could break all the rules.

But apart from that, the reason that bees tend not to store large quantities of pollen and they tend to store huge amounts of honey is: pollen has a higher tendency to spoil. Also, it is the honey that they will survive on if during the long term dearths such as winter in cold climates, or long dry summers in hot climates (these amount to the same thing to bees, inasmuch as there is little to keep them alive beyond what they have stored). During these dearth periods they tend not to raise brood, and actually, they can produce brood food using some of the stored fat in their bodies.

Look, I have spent most of my life trying to learn as much as possible about bees. I don't believe that common sense garnered from ordinary life has anything whatever to do with beekeeping, for the simple fact that bees are neither plants nor animals in the broad sense. The colony is a living being made up of thousands of smaller living beings, and eusocial insect colonies are not "like" animals, or cities, or computers. They are quite their own thing, and each eusocial species has special features ranging from the honey bees, ants, wasps, all the way to termites which are actually more closely related to cockroaches than ants.

If any of this interests you, I suggest getting hold of E O Wilson's book "The Superorganism" or Tom Seeley's "Wisdom of the Hive"

According to COLOSS:

So far, elevated colony losses have recently been reported from Europe
(Crailsheim et al., 2009), the USA (vanEngelsdorp et al., 2009; 2010), the Middle East (Haddad et al., 2009; Soroker et al., 2009), and Japan
(Guttierrez, 2009), but not from South America, Africa and Australia.

There are reports now of new problems in Brazil and other parts of South America

For details on individual countries please refer to papers in this Special Issue:
Austria (Brodschneider et al., 2010); Bulgaria (Ivanova and Petrov, 2010); Croatia (Gajger et al., 2010); Denmark (Vejsnæs and Kryger,
2010); England (Aston, 2010); Greece (Hatjina et al., 2010); Italy (Mutinelli et al., 2010); Norway (Dahle, 2010); Scotland (Gray et al.,
2010); Switzerland (Charrière and Neumann, 2010).

Journal of Apicultural Research 49(1): 1-6 (2010) © IBRA 2010

[kiwiBee]

Peter,
Do you think colony collapse could have anything to do with the amount of time varroa has been in a region?
My knowledge on things scientific is minimal and I dont know all the countries that have varroa or colony collapse so I'm looking at it from my small part of the world Australia dosn't have varroa or colony collapse New Zealand has recently got varroa but has no colony collapse.
Just wondering if the two might be related?

Kiwi

[peterloringborst]

Peter,
Do you think colony collapse could have anything to do with the amount of time varroa has been in a region?

Well, yes and no. When the whole colony collapse thing hit the news, I thought: "that's not new, bees always collapse if you let the varroa mites build up too long." When I worked at the Bee Lab, we were studying varroa so we let colonies get really heavily infested in order to have a ready supply of varroa mites at all times. Sooner or later, the hives just crashed.

One season we bought twelve hives from a guy, supposedly mite resistant locally adapted bees ( I've been around this stuff for decades, heard it all). These bees were a little edgy, built up fast, made a lot of honey, and at the end of the honey flow (September, around these parts) the populations just plummeted, like leaves dropping from the trees.

In a few weeks the bees were just gone. So, I think, varroa equals colony collapse. But evidently, what they started seeing in 2006 was different, inasmuch as the bees just cleared out leaving apparently healthy brood. To a scientific mind, this sounds like virus. I have read almost everything written on honey bee viruses, and it is quite clear that viruses can and do cause this sort of symptom. Virus builds up in the bees' brains and they either get confused and can't find their way back, or else they go off some where to die. With no way to get inside a bees brain, we can't know which it is, really.

Then, nosema ceranae appeared on the scene and the story coming out of Spain was that they were pretty sure N. ceranae was causing colonies to collapse in Spain. The weird part is that colonies are just collapsing everywhere, but the real CCD that was discovered and named in Pennsylvania and Florida in northern winter 2006-2007 seemed to have symptoms distinct from the other collapses, due to varroa, deformed wing virus, sacbrood virus, or nosema spp.

Now, one could argue that it doesn't matter what killed the bees, the hive is dead. Get new bees. But there are a lot of us who are interested in sustainability. By that I mean, not having to replace the bees every year. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Plenty of crops get replanted every year. However, we in the north -- rightly or wrongly -- feel a lot of our problems come from the southern beekeepers, upon whom we depend for bees to restock our hives.

A lot of folks who don't know the history of beekeeping don't realize that large scale losses are not new. That annual restocking of hives was a common affair in Canada, before they closed the border to US bees. Many beekeepers learned to split their hives into 5 or 6 nucs each in order to get their numbers back up. None of this is new. What is new and serious is hives not being able to hold up for even one season!

Varroa and viruses are two sides of the same coin. Without varroa, viruses probably would seldom kill a hive, just like hardly anybody ever dies of a cold. But with varroa, the immune system of the bees is compromised and virus replication gets out of hand. It's very much like AIDS. AIDS patients are very vulnerable to all sorts of opportunistic infections that wouldn't hurt a healthy individual. Same thing with people on immuno-suppressant drugs: they can get taken down by minor germs.

So most of the scientific community recommends keeping varroa under control. All of those out there that do not have varroa, this doesn't apply to you. If you can keep bees without having them get overrun by varroa, for whatever reason, lucky you! It may not be workable in every area and with every colony. To forgo varroa treatments is a sort of religion in some circles. I don't belong to that religion. In fact, I don't belong to any religion, for the simple reason that I don't want to be told what to do.

In spite of what some folks say, I don't tell people what to do. I want to find out what to do, what works, what doesn't work; and most importantly, the reasons why. For those who don't think this is the way to go, fine. Go your own way! I salute you! But get off my case.

[Allen Dick]

I said that whether you do or do not take off the honey does not influence whether they gather nectar. If there is no nectar, they will not gather it! If you take off all the honey when there is no nectar they will die! If you leave the honey on the hive, they will not stop gathering nectar just because the hive is "full"! If you remove the honey they do not rush out in attempt to "fill it back up"!

That is interesting. I don't have proof of this, but in practice, I have discovered that hives with less than a sufficient amount of honey in the hive will fly themselves to death in fall trying to provision themselves. At the same time, well-fed hives hardly venture out even when feed is available in the open. The former often die before Christmas; the latter usually winter well. I realize this may be a special case.

I recall that there was a talk about adding and removing pollen from hives to judge the effect on gathering presented at Apimondia in Vancouver and that it came from Nick's lab -- if I remember correctly. Were you involved in that study, Peter?

[peterloringborst]

I recall that there was a talk about adding and removing pollen from hives to judge the effect on gathering presented at Apimondia in Vancouver and that it came from Nick's lab -- if I remember correctly. Were you involved in that study, Peter?

Yes. During most of the seven years I worked at the lab, we were working on ways to study the effects of pollen quantity on pollen foraging, how it was that bees were able to judge the quantity of pollen and adjust the foraging.

There were many theories as to how bees might "know" how much pollen is in the hive. No one has really nailed that one. But consider the way nectar is moved into the hive: basically the foragers just go and get it, and deposit it into the brood nest. House bees then move it up into the supers.

One school of thought believes the best place for empty supers is right above the brood nest. Others feel it doesn't really matter that much, that if there is storage space at the top of the hive, the bees will use it just as readily. I am sure it depends on the strength of the hive and the strength of the nectar flow.

But see, the foragers don't go into the supers, so how would they know whether the hive is full or not? Whereas water and collection seem to be tied to supply and demand, the bees' instinct seems to be that if there is a honey flow on, they have to take advantage of it while they can.

Again, this is not surprising. Typically, there may be only one or two really good nectar flows in an area, and there may be several seasons in a row where there aren't any really good nectar flows. We are used to studying bees in good honey areas. Beekeeping doesn't do that well in a marginal area.

However, bees have not always depended on people to get them into good areas. You look at the mediterranean climate where bees have thrived for millennia. The weather is decent enough, but if you have a long drought, there is nothing to collect for months or even years. Similarly, in cold zones, bees can be shut in for months in winter and then have the bad fortune of crappy cold wet weather all summer.

So it pays them to gather and store as much nectar as possible and turn it into a product that will keep for years. Pollen doesn't keep that well and is not anywhere near as hard to obtain as nectar with a high sugar content. There again, tropical bees do not possess the hoarding instinct to the same degree as cold climate bees, because they don't need to. Their strategy is much more to live day to day and migrate from flow to flow.

I am pretty well convinced that honey bees are highly stimulated by concentrated sugar. So when there is a super honey flow on, they pretty much go nuts over it. Almost all other work ceases when a really big flow hits. There is never this sort of reaction to pollen.

[mike bispham]

It is a grave error to impute a higher level of consciousness to bees than they have. Some things they know, some things they do not know.

Scientists attempt to separate out these two categories.

Bees have consciousness? Is that a scientific fact?

Mike