OK, so I've been treatment free for a while and its becoming apparent that something needs to change. Most of my hives get through the first year, but in the second year they die out. Example - I had six hives this year. Two of them were survivors from last year and four of them are new this year. This fall the two year old hives collapsed. One week they are full of bees and looking healthy a week or two later they are gone, with very few dead in the hive. (This happened in late October in Oregon where the temps have been freezing at night)
Both of the two year old hives were from "survivor" stock. One was a nuk purchased at Old Sol and the other was a split from a local hive that has been around for a number of years. I simply cannot get a hive into year three, no matter how what I do. The hives had excellent stores and I even fed pollen patties (from Mann Lake) just to help out. (first time I have done that)
I have no doubt the bees are leaving because of high mite loads but since I don't treat with chemicals I'm not sure what I can do. My hives are made up of a mixture of small cell boards and foundationless frames.
Open to suggestions as I'm very near going back to treating my bees with a miticide.
Ok now I have a bit more time to reply. It's amazing to find out when you think you have a new idea poof someone else has thought of it "several years ago". Thanks for sharing OT!!! One difference here to consider. If you introduce that frame too soon then there may still be capped brood with mites in the hive that will emerge once your "sacrificial" frame is capped. So you will get some, but not all or perhaps not "most". So if you let them rear a queen on their own and put that frame in at the time the new queen should be going on mating flights that I think would work the best. What I don't know is will the disruption of the hive cause damage to the new queen? I have read that you want to leave her alone for a good solid 3 weeks from emmergence. OT and others what do you think about that? Would it be better to put a frame of eggs / young larva in the day before the queen is set to emerge? Doing this you'll have about 9 days which should be enough time for the other capped brood in the hive to emerge right? The other question / thought is if you take that single frame from your newly created nuc (The one right next door with the original queen) you'll have brood in all stages on that single frame. The queen will be looking to lay in every cell possible so as soon as one is available she'll lay in it. Will this be a problem? You will have some brood that hatches out the the same time that the open brood is capped. So it doesn't seem like a perfect system, but it does definitely seem good. I want to try this this year. At least with my production hives. Perhaps I'll leave the nucs alone, but it does make great sense to do this with those hives.
delber, you are correct, I got my timetable wrong. It would be better if I waited until all the brood in the original hive hatched out (which would be about the time a new queen would start mating or about 8 days after the queen emerges) before I introduced the "sacrificial frame" of young brood. I have also heard that it is better not to disturb a hive for at least a week or so after a new queen emerges, so quite possibly I may have to go back to the drawing board on this. You're right, this isn't a perfect system, and I know that this idea is not completely new, variations of using brood breaks and drone combs are in use by many today, I'm just trying to refine it a bit if possible, not trying to reinvent anything. I appreciate all the responses so far, it is helping me find the errors in my thinking if nothing else.
rhalridge, yes I could certainly do it a bit earlier in the main flow and not hurt my honey production at all. It would be like doing a cut down split, which I have done before with much success. I just figured doing it later would put me closer to fall and winter, therefore reducing mite load at a time when mites normally explode in relation to queen laying.
Treat for mites sounds like this would solve your problem.
Api Guard and fogging with mineral oils would be a great start.
Try to get a more mite tolerant bee stock.
Sounds like your doing ok on everything else.
Wish you a great year with your bees.
pure speculation on my part jmgi, but an all natural diet (assuming you are in an area with adequate forage) may increase the bees' natural resistance against viral infections.
in the absence of adequate forage, a quality pollen sub in spring and fall would be a next best 'treatment'.
my basis for this is that in the small universe of successful treatment free beekeepers, leaving enough honey so as to not require syrup seems to be a common denominator. i would guess that not many are using pollen sub either, but it's the protein in the pollen that forms the basis of the bees' natural immunity against pathogens.
randy oliver is looking hard at this in his new experiments.
Ok I've got another thought. . . What if you make them hopelessly queenless by removing the queen and few frames as you menitoned, then once they've started queen cells go through and destroy them all and wait another week. Then put in a frame of eggs and a week later when they have queen cells and capped brood on that frame take it out and freeze it at the same time as giving them a ripe cell? This may take care of that queen issue as well as capped brood that's needing to emmerge. What do you all think? It may not be good because those weeks may cause the hive to be too weak after that.
delber, there are definitely methods out there as you suggested to reduce mite load, the problem is it becomes more and more labor intensive, and the timing of all these manipulations is ever critical. I realize that no method, even treating, eliminates all mites. I want to stay treatment free as long as possible and still keep the greater percentage of my hives alive and productive from season to season. I know I'm going to continue to lose hives to mites, but I can make increases with nucs to help offset those losses, like Mel Disselkoen suggests. I'm looking forward to carrying this discussion forward and hearing from more people on their ideas, and in the meantime I'm going to keep my thinking cap on.
jmgi - the only treatments I do are timed splits/breaks, a little spearmint and vinegar in the syrup, and occasionally some creosote bush smoke (a little known Mexican soft treatment). That's really all I do. My bees are basically all "survivor" bees or outright ferals. I run foundationless broodnests too, and leave at least one box of honey for them to winter on. They need about 13-14 frames of bees/brood here to make it. I have 20 hives going into winter this year, and at last check (today) they are all doing just fine. I winter my langs with a single 8 frame deep and a medium full of honey (or syrup). If they are light I give them some dry sugar too.
My oldest hives are on their 4th season at this point. I no longer have any hives from the packages I used to buy. None of them survived the bears or anything else that came their way. My goal is self sufficiency, and I seem to have reached it. Not sure why it works, but it does for me so far. I am pretty sure my methods are not conducive to large scale operations. I have placed a 25 hive limit on myself, because I can't keep up and work my day job too (which makes me more money). I still collect bees, but am very picky about the removals I do. I run swarm traps in the surrounding national forests to catch bees with the mountain survival traits that I seek.
As far as the splits go - I usually split in Spring and again after the main flow ends (around Summer Solstice). Sometimes I have to split again in late Summer if the bees are doing really well and get overcrowded. I tend to break up my oldest hives into splits when their production drops. I have a couple I have left running because they just haven't quit yet. I want to see how far they will go.
Paul M., I used to have 80% of my hives survive for 3-4 years not that long ago, totally treatment free. Now, I can't get 20% of them to survive 1 year treatment free, so its time for another strategy.
Not sure my methods would work anywhere else with different bees. I think the environment, the beekeeper, and the bees all play a part, more so than any one single influence.
What bees are you using jmgi? Is there anything in you environment that might be a factor? There is a whole host where I live, from African DNA to natural selection to adapt to the desert environment, etc. Anything that lives around here has to be naturally hardy or they just don't make it.
I really like the split method as Disselkoen describes, and have modeled a lot of what I do in a similar manner, with a few variations of my own. Most beekeepers in NM don't split after Midsummer, but I typically do. Those end up being my starts for next season.
Paul M., I have to admit I have not done anything special as I have gone along treatment free. I use just basic Italian stock either from packages or purchased nucs, with the one exception of last year when I bought nucs that supposedly were VSH, however, 90% of them collapsed and died 6 months later in November or December after producing exceptionally good honey crops. Most of my severe losses have come from yards located in heavy agricultural areas of corn and soybeans, so yea, that could have played a part, but how do you really know for sure if it is the chemicals.
I only have one small yard located near agriculture, mostly for fear of chemicals. They are near a large alfalfa farm raising hay for racehorses. All of the others I previously placed near ag sites all had problems. I hope this one will be different, but just in case I put my riff-raff bees there.
Every package I ever bought succumbed to various fates. I get the impression a lot of packages are what I would term "used" bees and have been through quite a bit before you get them. I never plan to purchase another. I will go out and catch African hybrids and requeen them before I buy another package. That's how strong I don't care for them at this point. I do realize that for many, they are just about the only option.
Now a good nucleus colony of good bees, that is a different story. I don't mind getting them on occasion if they are from a local provider.
one exception of last year when I bought nucs that supposedly were VSH, however, 90% of them collapsed and died 6 months later in November or December after producing exceptionally good honey crops
jmgi, did you not give these colonies any brood breaks? In my location our main flow ends about the same time as yours. To get around the mites with any consistence I need to put my colonies through 2 brood interruptions, one in spring and then another in summer. Some colonies I only remove the queens, rather than break them down into nucs, in May and then again in July. A few times I have waited until just after harvest in Aug and have shaken a few maybe 3 pounds of bees with the queen from hives mention above into new hives. They have wintered well but I do need to feed them up in preparation for winter as there is very little out there to forage on at this time. The first mentioned usually most of the time don't need feeding.
The times that I have not stuck with a double brood interruption usually makes it difficult for the colony. Although the later brood interruption seems to be of more benefit compared to a spring interruption when used on their own. I don't see why your thought on removing the frame of brood as a mite trap wouldn't be beneficial.
There are many variations available with Mel's OTS system that can be adjusted to ones goals and expectations. These two things become important when working with Mel's strategy.
These interventions have exactly the same effect on the suppression of developing resistance as chemical treatments. Why people think they should be part of tf beats me. They are treatments.
Unless, of course, they are part of a managment system that simultaniously, urgently and systematically seeks to raise resistance through selective propagation.
When brood raising resumes in the hives why does the first brood get heavily infected thus killing the mites like in Mels theory. If he is right our hives should be mostly mite free every spring.
Dave
Excellent point Dave, and in fact I think there is a lot of merrit to that answer. Yes, the number of mites is much smaller in spring on an hive, than it was in the fall. But the number is still high. and it grows that much faster. The mites grow expotentialy. so starting 3 months early gives the mites about 5 more brood cycles. (think compound interest)
question for you all. . . If say in the instance of a fungal disease, we would naturally treat to get rid of the fungus coming out of there the bees will be stronger. Would they build up natural immunity if instead of (to use a human intervention) using antibiotics that aren't natural we could use herbs, teas, oils and other types of things would they come out stronger? I know that antibiotics ruin our guts and gut floura so it makes sense to me that certain treatments would do the same to bees. What do you all think?
I think your wrong. Yes some antibiotics can wipe out good bacteria FOR A FEW DAYS.. not forever. Herbal stuff for the most part has proven to be nothing more than time to allow things to run their course. (not all by any means)
What your doing is making a reason to follow your idea, not looking at the reality. Lets take cancer (a lot like Varro cause it will kill you) do you ignore it? do you try to breed out of it? do you drink herbal teas?? for most the answers are easy. use the science that will extend your useful life.
Mike, after reading your response I realize I should have just thought a little more about what you previously said, now I understand more what you're talking about.
My science is pretty simple. I let my bees handle mites on their own since 2005. They are alive, thriving, and making honey. But just so newbies won't think this can be done by anyone, please remember that I took steps to get highly resistant stock before jumping off the treatment bandwagon.
whether we are talking about bees or humans, there are always the potential costs, risks, and benefits to treatments. weighing them is sometimes straightforward and sometimes more conflicted. the relative merits and drawbacks are made by the decision maker(s), and this is generally guided by the importance of the goal or outcome that is being sought. it's not surprising that we have many different choices represented on this forum as we have differences of opinion in how to weigh those merits and drawbacks, as well as differences in our goals and desired outcomes.
after joining beesource i became a classic keyboard beekeeper who was very outspoken against the 'hard' bond method. my primary criticism of was that it set the stage for the robbing and spreading of mites and pathogens and that amounted to irresponsible beekeeping.
i also maintained that it was easy enough to stop poor genetics in their tracks by simply pinching the queen of a nonresistant colony and replacing her with a queen from proven genetics, (rather than let a colony die out).
after a few seasons under my belt, my position has evolved on these matters. i still maintain that it is irresponsible to let a colony collapse and allow it to get robbed out, but i have found that i am able to monitor my bees well enough so that robbing after collapse has been prevented in all but one instance, and that one could have been prevented if i had been keeping a better watch on my small outyard.
regarding requeening, i found that most of my colonies that collapse do so at the time in the season when i don't have any spare queens, nor are any that i would want available. so while good on paper, the approach isn't practical. it could be practical, if a tf beekeeper was diligent in taking mite counts and was able to determine what level infestation was a sure predictor that the colony wouldn't survive winter. i had planned to do just that, but due to time constraints have not got it done.
so here i am pretty much what could be labeled a hard bond beekeeper. losses are low enough and well below what is possible to make up with increase. my apiary is more than sustaining itself, honey production has doubled each year, and i am to the point where there will surplus bees this year.
i still consider myself a novice, especially compared to many of you veterans out there. i realize that past performance is no guarantee of future results. i am not stuck on treatment free for treatment free's sake, and i would implement an ipm approach before i would allow losses to threaten sustainability. but for now it seems to be working.
i still consider myself a novice, especially compared to many of you veterans out there. i realize that past performance is no guarantee of future results. i am not stuck on treatment free for treatment free's sake, and i would implement an ipm approach before i would allow losses to threaten sustainability. but for now it seems to be working.
Sometimes being a novice isn't so bad, there are novices out there who are having success keeping the majority of their bees alive and healthy year after year, regardless of whether they are TF or treating. With all my years of experience I'm still having trouble keeping the majority of my bees alive for more than 1-2 years, I am TF as of now, but I am opening up to other ways out of necessity to stop the losses.
Mike, make no mistake I don't equate my bees to humans. and to a point I agree were propping up bad genetics. A small point. I don't think our problem is a genetic one. (Ignoring FP cause if hes half as good as he says he is he would be rich selling queens.) no one else so far has been able to genetically fix the issue. I think were trying to breed gazelles that outrun leopards.
There are some pockets and claims of successes, but so far anecdotal at best. Don't get me wrong I wish it were so. but the brood breaks and sugar rolls are NOT resistant bees. there a bit more tolerant. nothing more. We like to fool ourselves into thinking we solved it. and we haven't
As for mite counts,,, been there done it... 2 brood breaks a year keeps them manageable.. nothing more. Good treatments knocks them so far back it it takes a full year to get back to pre treatment levels. I am really getting tired of moving queens around, and buying this and that "perfect queens" Its easy with a small yard and 30-40 hives. Brood breaks to manage 300 is a whole other story.
Mike, make no mistake I don't equate my bees to humans. and to a point I agree were propping up bad genetics. A small point. I don't think our problem is a genetic one. (Ignoring FP cause if hes half as good as he says he is he would be rich selling queens.) no one else so far has been able to genetically fix the issue. I think were trying to breed gazelles that outrun leopards. There are some pockets and claims of successes, but so far anecdotal at best.
Why do you say that? Many many beekeepers have fixed the problem. You hear from some of them here, and about others.
Is it because you think a permanant genetic 'fix' is possible - one in which all descendents would be varroa proof? Surely you know better than that?
The 'fix' is the adoption of proper population husbandry (having first secured bees with a healthy measure of resistance).
Is it because you think of the 'fix' as something that's either there or isn't? Surely you know that resistance is something that is present to a degree - it might be no degree, an insufficient degree, a useful degree, a healthy and sufficient degree....
The aim is to continue to raise and maintain a sufficient level of resistance. Not to somehow magically switch it from 'off' to 'on'.
Some people may think its possible to raise resistance to the point where current intensive practices can function. I doubt it somehow - though dialling back the intensiveness might allow it. It would be an improvement on creating millions and millions of utterly unresistant bees for sure. But I wouldn't call that the arbitor of the 'fix'. The will always be pressure to improve margins that will always drive such operations to act in ways that harm the rest of us - until there are laws to prevent it.
Is that it? There's no magic fix for people like you? No-one can sell you queens that can hold their own in your apiary, and you can't get it together to raise your own (someplace else)?
Don't get me wrong I wish it were so. but the brood breaks and sugar rolls are NOT resistant bees. there a bit more tolerant. nothing more. We like to fool ourselves into thinking we solved it. and we haven't
That's _my_ point! I doubt there's any resistance building at all going on under that sort of managment, any more than there is under chemical treatments. That's why it shouldn't be regarded as tf beekeeping.
As for mite counts,,, been there done it... 2 brood breaks a year keeps them manageable.. nothing more. Good treatments knocks them so far back it it takes a full year to get back to pre treatment levels. I am really getting tired of moving queens around, and buying this and that "perfect queens" Its easy with a small yard and 30-40 hives. Brood breaks to manage 300 is a whole other story.
Brendan Hunt has interpreted the noted recombination rate as an artifact of the creation of the worker caste in honey bees. Queens and workers are genetically identical (viz grafting), the evolution of true sociality with a non-reproductive sister caste required "reprogramming" the development of worker larvae by selectively turning on and off genes during development. This required enormous gene plasticity -- and the current honey bee genome simply reflects the inertia associated with that enormous shift in organism development. Consider Apis capensis which is undergoing a backwards transition to fully reproductive workers as evidence of the fundamental role of caste determination in genotype recombination.
The Kent and Zayed paper found drone-associated gene regions did not have high recombination rates. This can be explained by drones as "flying gametes" -- they are haploid and have single alleles. Poor recombinations are negatively selected since they can't fly -- and indeed the whole impulse to recombine is negatively selected. This points out the fundamental role of haploid drones in pushing adaptation in bee breeding systems.
"Relaxed Selection" is the general term for allele effects that were responsive to a previous evolutionary condition (the development of social colonies) that has now become irrelevant or deleterious.
Remember the fundamental characteristic of honeybee is genotype conservatism. Honeybees are not evolving so much as accumulating an enormous portmanteau of variation. The higher the colony variation, the higher the fitness. Rather than diverse worker castes, they have phenotypically identical workers with internal genotype differences within a colony -- leading to complex behaviors. The higher the population variation, the lower likelihood of a single dominant genotype founding a new race/species/lineage. Bee's resist evolutionary drift at every turn.
Clement Kent and Amro Zayed (the authors of the cited paper on recombination rate) have done very interesting work on the role lethal diploid drones (due to honey bee's complementary sex determination) on extinction of local populations. I find this relevant to the amateur armchair experts pronouncements/discussion on this thread -- Zayed has found that small local inbreeding populations are at extreme risk of going extinct due to sex incompatibility. Backyard breeding advocates should take note of Zayed's other work-- little colonies of inbred lines are likely doomed.
Zayed has a great paper on evidence for positive selection in honeybees, including finding that South American AHB have differentiated from their putative A. mellifera scutellata.
Contact me if you don't have University library access.
A Genome-Wide Signature of Positive Selection in Ancient and Recent Invasive Expansions of
the Honey Bee Apis mellifera Author(s): Amro Zayed and Charles W. WhitfieldSource: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,Vol. 105, No. 9 (Mar. 4, 2008), pp. 3421-3426Published by: National Academy of SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25461250 .
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