Sorry, couldn't wait Look forward to reading about your journey.

 

THE LAW

https://www.llh.hessen.de/downloads...cht_Hinweise_für_den_Einsteiger_bbk_2007-10_Grundwissen_fuer_Imker_11-01-01.pdf

This is a summary of what we have to heed when we keep bees.

If you are not able to read with a google translator here are some duties:
- you have to registrate your hives
- you have to pay tax if you have more than 25 hives because then you are a commercial
- you have to protect your neighbors from your bees
- you need a special health certificate to migrate with your bees
- you have to call the bee inspector if you see brood disease, especially AFB which means your hives are eliminated ( you may keep the bees to start new)
- swarms belong to the beekeeper they came from, they are not yours
- you are not allowed to feed your bees in the open field
.........

 

good morning sibylle! (actually it is late at night here)

thank you for your willingness to share your story.

is it mandatory by your laws that all beekeepers are required to use mite treatments in their hives?

 

It´s regarded as mandatory if you have a high downfall of mites ( more than 10 mites daily).
But it´s not controlled by the institutions per se.

It´s your own responsibility.

 

i see, i think i misunderstood about that. the translation is challenging sometimes. thank you for clarifying that for me.

and i may be mistaken about this too, but i thought that if a beekeeper wants to practice treatment free there you have to get special permission and allow for periodic inspection?

 

You can registrate like this and work together with institutions for example. You will be supported with money working with institutions, but not always.
Maybe a time will come when I will try to get this permission. But I want to be independent.

As long as you have no dangerous brood disease and don´t let your hives die of mite infestation in summer you have no problems with the bee inspector.
So that´s one of our strategy to prevent this states with our bees.

Therefore we need to have a place which is our "hospital". Bee colonies, which are not resistant and dwindle are placed there and treated or the capped brood is taken out.
This hives will never again been used in our tf apiaries.

 

2014 - MY FIRST HIVE

My husband watched me for years working with solitary bees.
Doing a part time job as gardener in a wildlife park I built nesting places and planted for the bees.
My own garden is a solitary bee`s paradise.

He decided it was not a whim and presented me with a gift coupon to join a bee class.

The teacher was keeping bees in an organic way which meant natural comb, no queen excluder, no foreign queens introduced, treatments with formic and oxalic acids, multiplying via splits and artificial swarms.
The honey was completely taken and sold as organic, the bees were fed with sugar syrup.

We worked without protection clothes until one day we opened a hive with laying workers.
The result:
12 people stung and one in hospital with acute circulatory collapse.

Despite this the bees got me hooked and I acquired my first hive from him in July.

 

i think i now better understand your circumstances, motivation and strategy. thank you for answering.

I will start this weekend with summaries of the last two years, so please wait with your comments until I reach the present time.

my apologies sibylle. please tell your story in your own way. i'll hold further comments and questions until you reach the present time.

guten nacht

 

Thanks for helping and mentoring me here, squarepeg.

Please feel free to clarify my contributions with your questions.

 

THE FIRST COLLAPSE

Two weeks after the purchase I realized that my colony was very sick in spite of having a health certificate.
My teacher told me what I saw was NORMAL!

I observed:
waxmoth larvae
chalkbrood
hygienic behavior
mites on bees
30 mites falling down onto the varroa board per day
DW- Virus present

He recommended another formic acid treatment so I went to our local bee equipment shop and bought formic acid 85%.

But when I opened the hive wearing rubber gloves and protection goggles I could not do it.
I just could not.

So I went to internet and googled until I found a tf forum:
www.resistantbees.com

I read about the sugar treatment and decided to try this.

I treated the hive 12 times. 10 times every 2 days in a row and 2 times again later.
This reduced the phoretic mites to 3-5 per day.
The bees tolerated this very well.

But there were still many mites in the brood and the virus present.
The bees were now in a stasis.

In october they suddenly throwed out all chalk brood mummies and much brood infested by varroa disease.
I had some hope because they were still having a good density of bees.
I fed 25l of sugar syrup and closed the hive for winter.

 

MY EDUCATION TIME 2014-2015

I joined the forum and started my education going treatment free.

The method which is propagated there is oriented on Dee Lusby.

I purchased small cell foundations made of organic wax from a swedish company.
I read every text about tf I could find.
I started a scorecard record and was mentored by Stephan Braun, who is an experienced tf beekeeper.
Most important was that I learned about how tf bees handle their hives and what to look for.

I got some friends which were treatment free for 2 years.

End of january my hopes to overwinter my colony crashed.
We had a very cold spell and they had already started to breed but the bee density was not enough to keep them warm and they died.

I had found a mentor in the forum who offered me a tf hive.
But those were AMM, the queen coming from LaPalma, canary island.

Stephan warned me about them, they would be not easy to handle.

I was not willing to wait for another offer, so I was going to try them.
End of april we brought them home.
Before the transportation my mentor checked them to see if the queen was there.

This bees were different. Opening the hive they attacked, but my mentor and I were not stung because we kept calm.
My husband was not so lucky and got stung 5 times through his clothes.
I took them home that night with mixed feelings.
But they taught us how to handle them and now I´m fascinated by their feral ways.

In may my mentor asked me if I would want to have more colonies. He wanted to reduce his hive numbers or give up beekeeping because he lives in an area with much spraying.

These were 3 colonies of carnis and I was very happy to get them.
They were descendants from queens coming from Christian Wurm, who is a commercial tf beekeeper in Austria. One queen was an original pure bred queen.
I installed a second apiary on my property for them.

My mentor helped me to manage the hives and mentored me.
I learned much this year.

I splitted every hive, the AMM mother I splitted twice, the pure bred carni I did not split, because my mentor wanted me to have one honey production hive. I went into winter with 8 colonies.
Since my mentor had harvested I had to feed sugar syrup again.

Pictures of this work you can see on the 3 sites, but they are from 2015 and 2016:
http://www.vivabiene.de/g20-Arbeitsweise-SiWolKe.html

 

Cannot wait your suspense is killing me and my bees!
Hurry up! Hurry with your story here. I have many to contribute to yours.
So what's next?

 

Mmmh....now I´m making breakfast.....take a nap....

 

2016 REFLECTIONS

After my experiences 2015 I reflected about my way of proceeding.

Jealousies between my mentor and Stephan Braun made me leave the forum and go on alone.
The friends were loyal to me.

When I told my mentor that from now on I would not want to go for honey production but start an expansion model, he cancelled mentorship.

I was lost.
My husband saw this and filled in the blank.
He worked with me from now on.

I started to approach Michael Bush and Erik Österlund via e-mail.
I needed their answers to help my self-assurance and to go on.
They were most helpful and I got many new informations and links to support my strategies.

All hives survived winter and surprised me with their strength in spring. It had been a warm winter and they had not made a brood brake.
They were able to fly for pollen in early march and had much stores left.
In may I had one hive which had 16 brood combs dadant size and one with 12.
The average is 6-8.
I splitted again every hive except one AMM colony which had superseded their queen in september 2015.

Since I was not able to find my unmarked queens in the strongest hives I just splitted those two in half, careful to give both of them enough eggs.
Ten minutes later the sound of hive told me where I had put the queens.

My method so far was splitting in half, the queen`s split with mostly capped brood, the queenless with open brood.

Then came the first setbacks:
- The pure bred queen`s hive died of a local paralyze virus end of may.
- 3 out of 4 queens were lost on mating flight at my carni beeyard
- one of those had many laying workers and built no queen cells

I lost patience with the laying worker hive and tossed them into the grass.
They were accepted into the hive nearby.

One was very strong in density.
My young friend from bavaria, with whom I started VivaBiene , offered me two elgon F1 queens, mated in his apiary ( crossover carni-elgon).
I splitted the queenless hive in two and introduced the elgon queens. Both were accepted but one colony I had to strengthen with a brood comb donation because the queen needed some time to start big brood areas.

One of the queenless hives lost their new queen again and once again raised a new one. They had been without a queen for two and a half months and the bees left were very old.
The new queen started to lay 5 combs Dadant in one day. When the brood was capped I saw the bees doing VSH, so I decided to donate to them a brood comb with capped brood from my strongest hive to try to help them to survive winter.

I closed up 14 hives for winter after feeding half of them a small amount of honey syrup.

 

WINTER 2016

Last month one hive was dead. I found no sign of varroa disease, in fact, this was the hive which looked the most healthy when going into winter. No mite sassafras in the cells, no brood, no bees, a small dead queen, maybe unmated and a handful of dead bees left.
The reason could be queen failure or me killing her on my last check.
I stored 30kg of honey for spring needs.

Ah, I forgot: harvest in june was 40kg surplus from 3 queenless hives. 15kg of that I used to feed or donate.

And now I invite you to comment and ask your questions!

 

:applause:

please do not get mad at me sibylle because i am going to compliment you.

first, you did a very nice job telling your story so far, and i know that isn't easy when not using your first language.

second, it is clear that you studied very hard to learn everything possible about keeping bees in general and utilizing a tf approach in particular. this was time very well spent and i believe greatly increases your chances for success.

third, it's too bad that personalities got in the way with respect to the other mentors. the information that they can provide is the closest to home and usually the most meaningful. that you are able to rise above that says a lot about you.

fourth, i have more but i am sure there are others who want to comment so i'll save it for a later post. many thanks once again for taking the time to share your experience here.

 

Many thanks for your kind words, squarepeg.
You are right, I live and breathe bees right now and my husband hopes we will talk about other things once again...

I want to thank those on Beesource too, who talked about their beekeeping and provided me with many new insights to managements.
You know, SP, how much I enjoyed your thread, even if I am not able to do the same approach to beekeeping.

 

PLANNING 2017

If I have survivors:

- I want to do my own expansion model and stop at 25 hives because I don´t want to pay tax
- my expansion model will be: still to do strong splits but of another kind, more natural, imitating swarming. A change will be not to give all mites into the queen´s hive.
- no feeding with sugar
- no donating of brood comb ( except eggs for the queenless)
- mite monitoring
- breeding four new queen colonies in nucs from 2 of the best, the others will raise their own queens

I will go on with my workshops. The goal is to distribute tf drones as much as possible in our area.
http://www.vivabiene.de/g26-workshops.html

 

The goal is to distribute tf drones as much as possible in our area.

perfect. dar's story is similar in that he started with just one resistant colony from a swarm he caught only a few miles from where i live back in 2005, (please correct me if i'm wrong dar and fill in the blanks).

his strategy was to make splits from this one and then allow those to swarm for a season or two in order to populate the area with ferals. he also made colonies available to others in his area to help increase the genetic foot print of these resistant bees.

it appears that allowing bees to swarm in your area is prohibited by the regulations, so this may not be an option for you. your plan to bring in other beekeepers, propagate from the best of the survivors, sharing drone yards, ect. makes very good sense.

i was told that there are some beekeeping clubs here in the u.s. that are taking an approach like this, but i haven't yet been able to communicate with anyone personally about how it is working out.

 

You're off to a great start, Sibylle. Looking forward to more!

 

:applause:i am looking forward for more, keep up the good work.

 

There may be a benefit in terms of mite resistance from using small cell, but I can't show it from my bees. They survive equally well on large or small cell combs. My bees may be mite resistant enough that small cell is not needed. That said, I still like the benefits of small cell in the spring buildup. The bees can cover more total brood area and tend to build up faster than bees on large cell combs. Combining small cell combs with narrow 32 mm frames adds up to about 20% faster spring buildup in this area. This is an advantage for the early fruit bloom flow, but it means the colonies reach swarming strength much sooner. What I am pointing out is that small cell has benefits even if there is no advantage for mite resistance. Also, that 32 mm frames may have advantages depending on local conditions.

The genetic background of my bees derive from a single queen that I caught in a swarm in 2004 that showed very good mite resistance. They survived the winter of 2004/2005 with less than 20 pounds of honey and the next spring were the strongest colony I had. The traits they displayed were strongly tilted toward the old German Black bees (A.M. Mellifera) that were present here until varroa decimated colonies in the early 1990's. They were more likely to sting, foraged in very cold conditions down to 40 degrees, overwintered with a cluster the size of a softball, and still blew away the other colonies in the spring buildup. At that time, Dann Purvis had selected bees that were highly resistant to varroa. He developed a "gold" line with traits more like Italian colonies. I purchased 10 queens from him and used them as drone source colonies with which to mate queens raised from my single mite resistant A.M.M. queen. The combination is highly mite resistant but has a significant swarming tendency.

Sibylle, I'd first like to ask a question about you. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Based on your posts, I suspect an introvert.

Does having neighbors who treat for varroa affect your bees? if so, how?

When are you coming to the U.S? I'd like to see what you think of bees on this side of the pond!

 

Hey, I´m sticky!
Thanks, Barry!

After reading Dennis Murrell I believe the best possible arrangements in a hive are small cell central broodnest with 32mm spacing between frames, bigger cells around and above and all build naturally.
I will try this with one or two hives if I have enough survivors.
For now I´m happy they are still alive on their sc foundations.

After the wax scandal in germany I´m glad they have their own wax.

My experience is still limited enough to be ignorant about things like build up, overwintering and swarming.

Sibylle, I'd first like to ask a question about you. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Based on your posts, I suspect an introvert.

I´m introvert, but like to be social. I`m wicca but practicing without a community. So you are right, FP.

Does having neighbors who treat for varroa affect your bees? if so, how?

I can´t say, really. My first treated hive robbed others. In 2014 a beekeeper had his nuc beeyard 400m near me but he is gone now. I´m isolated 3km (AMM), 2.5km (carni) except one or two hives.
My queens meet the drones. I can't tell you yet about the influence.

When are you coming to the U.S? I'd like to see what you think of bees on this side of the pond!

Thank you! I would love to visit. For now I´m not able to leave my old mother in law and my old dogs. If you are inviting me to be an apprentice...mmh!!

 

After reading Dennis Murrell I believe the best possible arrangements in a hive are small cell central broodnest with 32mm spacing between frames, bigger cells around and above and all build naturally.

I never counted mites, but watched for virus damaged bees.

I will do a sugar treatment then to shake down the phoretic mites.

I have a neighbor with 10 hives treated bees near, I don´t want him to have my mites.

Since I believe the worker bees genes and learned behaviors are a part of resistance, too, or a part of non-resistance in this case, I will change the queen and wait until there is a new generation if I ever put them back.

I had a discussion with Erik Österlund about that. He ( and I) believe the older resistant worker bees will teach the others the defense.

I´m more the practical kind, not very much a believer in such research and the artificial circumstances they are done with.

I believe in science, not much in other miracles.

 

[QUOTE=SiWolKe;1492569

I will start this weekend with summaries of the last two years, so please wait with your comments until I reach the present.

opcorn: !!!!

 

Hey what are you waiting for? I´m ready to answer your questions, red! Be welcome.

 

Hey Sibylle,

Are your bees urban or more out in the country?

 

I´ve never been to the US but my husband often works there for his company. What he tells me it´s not possible to compare the landscapes or towns, cities with our circumstances.
So I would say, they are in the middle of being urban and country since all beekeepers I know including those the bees come from, are not living in big cities but near small towns.

 

My hives have the LWs (laying workers) too along with a mated laying queen.
I had once saved a LWs hive by caging the laying queen in an entire empty
drawn cells frame with the young nurse bees inside. I use #8 window wire screen to cover
the entire frame for this purpose. After awhile all the LWs are gone and the queen saved
this LWs hive. Patience is the key here!
My question for the future is once you have reach 25 hives and not going to treat.
What if some hives have the mites in them? Will you treat or just let them die or infected your
other hives as well?
This season I did not treat any of my mite infested hives since late Jan. Their mite levels peaked in
July and August. All the virgin queens were mated and returned to the same mite infested hive. The
ones that did not show signs of the mite fighting ability I did not treat them either. Some queens did not
survive this ordeal. The ones that did continued to expand their brood nest despite the infestation until the present. We're in the middle of winter now. I posted 2 you tube links on the video gallery forum today of their orientation flights. I already spot another queen rearing operation here that their bees genetics might be compatible to mine. All mite resistant too!
So do you plan to keep all dark, gray color bees or have any interest to keep the lighter color bees also?

 

I had once saved a LWs hive by caging the laying queen in an entire empty
drawn cells frame with the young nurse bees inside.

I didn´t find a queen but this is a good idea if the laying queen`s work is destroyed by LW.
...but how to distinguish between young nurse bees and laying workers....? Not easy for me.

What if some hives have the mites in them? Will you treat or just let them die or infected your
other hives as well?

My hives have had many mites for years now. So my difficulty is to know the level I have to act on. I never counted mites, but watched for virus damaged bees. If I see more than 5 of those crawling on the combs I will take the hive to my "hospital" place at home, far away from my apiaries and take out all capped brood. If I have more than one hive I take out the capped brood and combine the hives. I will do a sugar treatment then to shake down the phoretic mites. I have a neighbor with 10 hives treated bees near, I don´t want him to have my mites. Since I believe the worker bees genes and learned behaviors are a part of resistance, too, or a part of non-resistance in this case, I will change the queen and wait until there is a new generation if I ever put them back.

I had a discussion with Erik Österlund about that. He ( and I) believe the older resistant worker bees will teach the others the defense. So if the hive is infested, but not much, it is possible to change places and let the bees be teachers.
But in the end the genes are a part of the resistance so this is no solution without queen renewal. I want to observe each hive separately if it is resistant.

So do you plan to keep all dark, gray color bees or have any interest to keep the lighter color bees also?

My bees are already hybrids except of the mother AMM. They are mixed with buckfast and elgon, one elgon queen is golden.
The color is not of interest to me. To have genetic diversity is more.

 

Great thread, Sybille!! Thanks for sharing. Having to rise above more than our every day world of tf & your strength to stay committed & focused says much about you desire to succeed at tf & renews the determination of newbees like me. So you've got it pegged (no offense,sp as letting the bees maintaining the mites levels. If I understand correctly, you no longer have neighbors with treated bees near you. Have you been able to determine where your queens are mating & the type of drones, as in tf or treated?

 

You're off to a great start, Sibylle. Looking forward to more!

Great thread, Sybille!! Thanks for sharing.

Many thanks Nordak and Redhawk!

The neighbors with treated bees are not very far away. In my area beekeepers harvest their hives in June to July before using formic acid to treat. Often they do not feed immediately after this. This starts robbing.
I have to reduce entrances then, as I found out. I get an e-mail from the local bee club telling me when they treat and that´s the moment I reduce the entrance to 2 cm.
My own bees do not rob, because all have good stores this time of year. I only take surplus and if some are without food I donate honeycomb.
I see robbers at my entrances but my bees defend their hives against foreign bees. ( I have one that let wasps in but no bees ).

All queens will maybe mate with foreign treated drones. If I split early there are not many of those drones around because the first drone frames are cut out by most beekeepers here. I hope my sc not treated drones are more agile and have better chances, but I don´t know.