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benign beekeeping?

32K views 162 replies 25 participants last post by  Tyson Kaiser 
#1 · (Edited)
consider these frequently touted 'isms:

well, the bees have been taking care of themselves for millions of years......

or,

look at the feral colonies, they are getting by just fine without any intervention......

or,

i'm just letting them sort things out on their own.....

ect., ect.


these points of view are usually offered up as part of the (groan) treatment vs. (groan again) no treatment discussion.

i am interested in your opinion as to how much or how little man keeping bees in a hive affects the colony.

when compared to a feral colony (assume living in a tree), a kept colony (assume the hive gets inspected ocassionally and honey is harvested):

1. has a less insulated space to deal with
2. is torn apart from time to time
3. might have comb, brood, and/or resources taken from it
4. might have increased competition from more hives nearby
5. might have increased exposure to diseases and pests from more hives nearby
6. might have less than optimal nutrition if it is fed
7. might be moved from time to time
8. you get the idea

any thoughts?
 
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#103 ·
interesting ian. so i would assume that a lot of your management time is spent checking out your hives. for efficiency, and assuming no overt signs of a problem, is the alcohol wash on each hive the gold standard?
 
#108 ·
yes, every round we work the hives, we expect the yards to be performing at a certain bench mark. We are always measuring the hives, thats what hive management is all about. That is the beekeepers job.
Then we manipulate the hive accordingly so that they all meet that bench mark. But it can drive a man crazy trying to meet the "gold standard"
So I work on averages, I expect certain amount of hive to be meeting a certain benchmark at a given time of the year. Some are over, some are under. My job as a beekeeper is to keep those averages in check.
and when you make that comparison between a hobby and commercial, that is actually what your referring to.
A hobby beekeeper can manage his averages much closer than a commercial can, well feasibly anyway lol
 
#106 ·
I agree totally Joe. I agree totally with your entire statement.
We as beekeeper have to look at how bees naturally survive to be able to understand how we can keep them in a managed state. In my opinion there is no in between sence of beekeeping. Either the bees are keep "all natural" or they are kept in a "managed" sense. And if managed, the beekeeper must follow through to keep the bees from being subject to the wrath of nature herself. Because that is what managed mean, keeping them in an un natural state, even though it looks like are allowing them to live naturally.
Otherwise the beekeeper might as well just keep the "all natural".
 
#109 ·
A great example of the optimization I'm talking about is Mike Palmer's method of creating a sustainable apiary. He creates nucs the time of year when a hive would be swarming. He makes these splits from hives that aren't producing and adds queens from proven genetics that thrive in his region.

Who would have thought creating lots of little colonies before a honey flow would result in more colonies the following year? Nature figured that out a long time ago.
 
#112 ·
yes, here is one of my pillars for this area, and described simply

3-4 frames of brood third last week of May
2 or 3 frames of feed at minimum
mite counts under 1% infestation

and if those benchmarks are not meet, the hive or operation is managed accordingly
Strength manipulation, queen replacement, feeding, hive treatment and such
 
#113 ·
many thanks ian. and if i may...

strength manipulation - adding frames of brood from stronger hives?
queen replacement - appears straightforward
feeding - i assume before honey supers are placed
treatment - you may have already touched on this, but what is your treatment of choice for mites?
 
#116 ·
I usually dont boost smaller one, in those cases I will requeen and if all else is good they will catch up. I will use stregth from the larger to make up new hives. No use wasting strength resources on failing hives, right?
To replace queens you need to know if your old queens are meeting your expectations, so you need to have targets in place, so that when she fails to meet those targets, you can quickly replace her.
Feeding is an act of the beekeeper to keep the queen laying to ensure a constant bee emergence as the honeyflow comes on. If the keeper gets his timing right, and keeps the hive going through a derth, a hive can enter into a honey flow with 100000 bees plus and reap an outstanding crop while avoiding the loss of the bees to swarming. So you have to know how much honey to expect to see in the hive through out the year to be able to react positively with feed pails. Feeding hives at the wrong times can decrease your overall performance.
And for treatments, I have been using Apivar. This is a huge area of discussion also. There are so many ways to keep bees using a whole array of different mite control options. Apivar is by far the easiest, but if a beekeeper gets creative, chemical treatments can be avoided
 
#114 ·
another is 5-8 frame of bees entering winter with mite counts under 3%

By using these targets we are able to manage our bees more efficiently and have a better sense of whats ahead. Otherwise how would you read and react to your hives yearly behavior routeens

How do you measure your bees performance on an annual basis squarepeg? How do you what manipulation needs to be done throughout the year? What is it that tells you to work the colony a certain way? Are you a reactive beekeeper or a proactive beekeeper?
 
#117 ·
good questions ian. i try to be proactive, but sometimes find myself being reactive.

this was my second full season with bees. i had to be careful about moving frames around because i had a afb loss right at the beginning of the season.

most of my colonies were started last fall or this spring. i started with 10, lost one to afb, (my fault for not knowing better to buy old treated hives), lost one to laying workers, (my fault for not getting around to my outyard often enough), and lost one to mites, (my fault for not sampling).

i have learned how to do mite counts and plan on doing them on all of the hives next year.

i have also gained a little experience in recognizing a strong vs. weak colony, and hopefully that will help me be more proactive in the future.

i appreciate your willingness to 'mentor' here.
 
#119 ·
>>most of my colonies were started last fall or this spring. i started with 10, lost one to afb, (my fault for not knowing better to buy old treated hives), lost one to laying workers, (my fault for not getting around to my outyard often enough), and lost one to mites, (my fault for not sampling).

Key words right there, you just told me the diagnosis of your hives failures. You obviously know enough to be able to recognize the issues that took the hives down. Alot of the time these things are out of our control, but how you act on the problems and hopefully in a proactive sense will determine the success of your overall beekeeping year
 
#120 · (Edited)
Nature has benchmarks and she measures the performance of hives on an annual basis. Ifthey do not meet her standards, she kills them off.
Same thing with keeping bees, we set our targets, and if they dont meet those targets actions are taken to meet those targets, and ultimately Mother nature decides if we fall within her parameters

So when I chuckle when I hear a beekeeper claim colony loss due to starvation inches away from the honey, Im chuckling because it was not the starvation that killed the colony . . . it was the other factor/s
 
#127 ·
i get not propagating dinks, but why let the whole hive die, get sick, robbed, load up your good hives and the feral bees with whatever, and let those poor bees die in imaginalbly horrific death....

when all you have to do is take care of the problem and the genetics?
 
#138 ·
Bob Harrison, Missouri beekeeper on Bee-L uses the term "dink" when referring to weak colonies.

While I don't use weak colonies, or dinks if you prefer, to make up my mating nucs, I do use "non-productive" colonies to start my regular nucs for wintering. While I still sacrifice these colonies for nuc making, I'm moving toward making all my nucs from over wintered nucs. I think I used about 20 colonies to make somewhere near 100 of the nucs this year, but the rest of the 450+ came from nucs. In 2013, all will be made up from nucleus colonies. My mating nucs are 4 way on mini-combs. These I make up by expanding the winter survivors onto additional mini-combs.
 
#150 ·
are you leaning toward using all nucs for your nucs because you are having less non-productive colonies?

and, what will be your approach to dealing with (if any) non-productive colonies?

i c d bz 2!
Sacrificing non-productive colonies for making nucs means less production colonies to make a future honey crop. The tradeoff is acceptable, when you have no other resources with which to make them. Might as well use what resources you do have in the best way you can. I would rather manage a production colony, boosting it with a nuc in the spring, or set it up with a second queen to boost population and re-queen. Keeps my numbers up for honey production. Now that I have so many nucleus colonies coming out of winter every year, I keep back a hundred, expand them up onto additional combs, and use them to produce all the brood and bees I need for cell building and nuc making.
 
#155 ·
Sacrificing non-productive colonies for making nucs means less production colonies to make a future honey crop. The tradeoff is acceptable, when you have no other resources with which to make them. Might as well use what resources you do have in the best way you can. I would rather manage a production colony, boosting it with a nuc in the spring, or set it up with a second queen to boost population and re-queen. Keeps my numbers up for honey production. Now that I have so many nucleus colonies coming out of winter every year, I keep back a hundred, expand them up onto additional combs, and use them to produce all the brood and bees I need for cell building and nuc making.
i was guessing that you would be requeening those colonies michael, but i did not want to be presumptive again. :)

that's more or less the route i have found myself taking, since i have a fixed number of slots in my yards for production colonies.

so far, overwintering losses have been few. sustaining, or filling in the empty slots, is easier done by splitting my best queens into a 3 frame nuc to start a colony, and using swarm traps.
 
#134 ·
never heard mike say 'dinks'. i was refering to his use thereof for mating nucs and starter colonies. culling the less productive hives in favor of getting rid of the potentially bad genetics and ushering in hopefully better.
 
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