Kirk Webster : Commercial Beekeeping Without Treatments Of Any Kind – Putting The Pieces Together Part 1

(I post these because Kirk’s ideas are totally counter to the ideas of mainstream bee keeping and very important knowledge that I fear will be lost if his website goes down. If Kirk or his family has an issue with me reposting this stuff I will gladly take it down. Just reach out to me.)

Right at the beginning I have to say that I don't have one bit of interest in proving or disproving anyone's theory or trying to show that my methods are better than any others. My goal is, and has always been, just to have a nice life in the country centered around farming, gardening, and especially keeping bees. A great deal could be written and argued about what it rea1ly means to pursue these goals. For now, let's just say that I pursue them in a very old fashioned way, and have viewed with great dismay the absorption of rural life into the brutal, abusive and self-destructive economic system that prevails in the rest of our country I try to work outside of this system as much as I can. In order to succeed, commercial beekeepers, like all farmers, need to solve their own problems, in their own locations and circumstances. In the current situation, when farms and apiaries keep growing larger and consume each other like bass in a farm pond, I know that many people wouldn't consider me a commercial beekeeper at all. But I'm afraid I do have to be included, if only because I've had no other income of any kind for many years; and my apiary, from the time I had 50 colonies, grew entirely out of its own resources and production. Even during these times of mite related losses, there was only one year when I couldn't pay all my expenses out of the current year's income.

In beekeeping today, the problem of varroa is just part of a whole series of problems, including other pests and diseases, the lack of bright young people entering agriculture, and recurrent low honey prices.

These low prices in turn are part of a larger movement towards the globalization and absentee ownership of the entire world's food production system. This process has been devastating to farmers of all kinds, in all countries, rich and poor. To achieve genuine success, commercial beekeepers need to create apiaries with the stability and resilience necessary to confront all these biological, social, and economic problems in a comprehensive way. From the beginning, this is what I've tried to establish, and build on in my own apiary.

Over the years through 1997 I published a number of articles in this magazine chronicling the origin and development of an apiary based year round in Vermont that focused on selecting, breeding, producing and using locally adapted stock. I described how the simple practice of making up nucs in mid-summer and overwintering them outdoors on just four or eight combs was the missing link in establishing really productive bee breeding, queen rearing and nuc production in this climate. Even though I only know of one beekeeper who has seriously followed up on this, I'm still completely convinced that the northen states could not only be self sufficient in bees and queens, but could supply nucs to the rest of the country available any month of the year. I am still using basically the same system I described in detail in the ABJ February July 1997 with a few changes I'll mention later. Several people who visited during that time advised me to borrow money and expand this into a large business. But I need to do most of the apiary work myself in order to stay healthy and happy. So, my own definition of success and health dictates that the apiary remain small by American standards, though I do have helpers now and then. And even though Apistan was still working fine in 1997, I was also acutely aware that a showdown with varroa was coming down the pike for all of us sooner or later; and I decided it was much more important to use the great productivity and resilience I had built up in the apiary to work on a good long term solution to varroa. I couldn't see any way of going through this process without a serious loss of colonies and income, so I tried to prepare as best I could by getting in a good store of supplies and paying off my debts. The size of the apiary was reduced as well-so I could spend more time with each colony. I knew this was going to be diffrcult, and I was not disappointed!

Even in the early days, when I was a dumb kid working for Charlie Mraz, the world-famous Vermont beekeeper and apitherapy pioneer, I could see that the backbone of any successful apiary was a good locally adapted strain of bees that could survive and thrive on their own with minimal attention and no medications. Now everything I've learned about using bee breeding to combine tracheal mite resistance with cold hardiness, productivity, and the other economic traits is being used to breed an apiary full of untreated bees that can thrive in the presence of varroa as well. But varroa is a pest that is still way out of balance with its new host- European honey bees. Those parasites are far more destructive to our bees than most parasites are to their hosts. What this means in practical terms is that both selection and management will have to be used together to maintain the economic productivity ofan untreated apiary so that breeding can make its slow and steady progress over many years. This slow process is the way stability and resilience are gradually built up in any natural sys- tem. Let's look at the breeding side of this equation first.

BREEDING
Part of the reason why I located my apiary here was because this county was thickly populated by a genuine local strain of bees. In semi-isolation for many decades, they had become very hardy and had in many ways combined in one skain the strengths of both Italian and Camiolan bees, without the weaknesses. They were also being propagated in a way that preserved a large gene pool. Then, when the tracheal mites first arrived, it seemed like the end of the world, and all of us in this neighborhood experienced winter losses far in excess of anything we had seen before. But the sur- vivors retained their vigor and productivity and when we filled our empty equipment with bees and queens derived, one way or another, from those survivors, the problem very quickly subsided. Having no previous experience with this pest, we continued to worry about it for years, but the actual economic damage was very small, and few or no treatments were ever attempted. By contrast, there are a couple of beekeepers in this area who buy all their queens from outside, and who continue to treat their bees for tracheal mites today, and who claim they can't get good enough wintering success without it. Our "native" bee population had the basis of tracheal mite resistance already within it, and in just a few generations the valley was largely refilled with bees very little troubled by this pest.

But when valroa came, and I first experimented with leaving some colonies unprotected against them, my bees were almost completely defenseless. Looking for varroa resistance in the honey bees we had here 10 years ago was very difficult. That's the way it was leave 100 colonies untreated, and 98 or 99 of them would perish without even a struggle; one or two would be left, coughing and sputtering, precariously clinging to existence for a little longer. Raising daughters from these one or two survivors yielded equally disappointing results, and I was afraid there might be some truth to the ominous prediction from Europe that we all had heard: "Breeding bees resistant to varroa is going to be likebreeding sheep resistant to wolves." Happily, this prediction has been proven untrue, and there are now in the U.S. and Canada at least a few and maybe several, stocks derived from European bees that are building up good varroa resistance. However, all of these programs, as far as I know, are dependent on countless hours of peering into microscopes and counting mites on hundreds or thousands of sticky boards. Unless this is your favorite leisure time activity, it's beyond the means of most of us who make al1 our living from bees in the ruthless American economic setting. We can all purchase and try out stock coming from these programs. I have, and will certainly continue to do so but what I am most interested in is more of a "wild type" bee with several different defenses against varroa and a broad enough gene pool so that these defenses can be intensified without damage from inbreeding. A few beekeepers in Texas and Arizona have obtained this type of varroa resistance from the Africanized bees. I wish I could try it, but winter hardiness and gentleness are so important here that I've left this for a last resort. Fortunately, there is a good alterna tive for those of us who stay year round in the north.

THE RUSSIAN BEES
As far as breeding stock goes, the most important and positive thing happening in this apiary has been the availability of bees from eastern Russia, imported and further developed by Tom Rinderer and his team at the USDA Bee Breeding Lab in Baton Rouge. LA. I will describe my experiences with this stock in some detail because these have been by far the most useful bees in my system to date, and also because my initial experience with them during the disastrous weather of 2000 was not very good. But now, after a few years for both the bees and myself to adapt, I've been completely won over and I consider them to be an extremely important part of a good solution to the varroa problem at least in areas where bees must endure long winter confinement.

Before I go any farther, I have to revisit an article I published tn the ABJ, January 1993, page 57, containing this little gem: "Waiting for the research community to provide us with the bees we really need is going to be like waiting for hell to freeze over." Well, it is my enonnous pleasure to eat those words here in public and thank Tom and all his co-workers for an enormously important piece of work. This was really well done. We desperately needed bees with broad based varroa resistance along with good economic performance, and Tom went right to the place where these characteristics would most likely be found together a place with abundant nectar resources, semi-primitive beekeeping, and where mites and European bees had lived together for the longest time, perhaps 100 years. They brought back enough stock to create a viable gene pool, and committed themselves to further development and release of the stock over many years thus assuring access and the ability to establish large populations to allinterested beekeepers. In fact, my only criticism is that the program should be expanded to import and test other promis- ing stocks as well; especially the bees of Madagascar and the high altitude bees of East Africa, Apis mellifera monticola. But that's a discussion for another day.

The Russian bees are not perfect for us in North America. And why should we expect them to be, coming from a completely different culture and economic setting half way around the world? I had trouble dealing with them at first, but now it seems amazing to me that they have so many strong points here, given their origin. Their list of positive attributes is quite long. First, we have to put varroa resistance, though this is not perfect by any means. But they have a deeper and more heritable resistance than anything I have tried here so far, including SMR bees and survivor colonies from my own and other apiaries. (I test this by seeing how many open-mated daughters of a good breeder can also resist varroa without treatrnents.)

Next comes their extreme winter hardiness. They can fly at lower temperatures and cheerfully endure colder and longer periods of confinement than my old, well adapted bees could. They winter with small clusters and consume very little food. (Every fall I wish the clusters were bigger, but the bees are so successful with them, I guess I can't complain.) These traits make them very well adapted to my system of raising nucs in mid summer and wintering them on just 4 or 8 combs. These bees are a pleasure to work with very gentle and quiet on the combs. Best of all, they have an incredible desire and ability to gather nectar, especially on a per bee basis. I'll stick my neck out and say they are capable of producing bigger crops of honey here than any other bees I've seen.

But now comes the rub their only serious flaw, and the reason why they are not going to be adopted wholesale by commercial beekeepers: They're much more likely to swarm than Italian type bees, and are capable of throwing off a swarm at almost any time during the late spring and summer. They sometimes will display what I used to call "normal" swarming behavior building many cells in late spring or the first half of summer after a rapid build up or the onset of a flow. But often during the summer a few cells, like supersedure cells, can be found scattered in the brood nest. Sometimes they'll go for many weeks without using any of these cells-tearing them down and then starting new ones. It's as if they like to have them on hand, just in case they need them. But at any moment they can and sometimes do throw off a swarm, and can count on having a virgin ready to hatch. For a honey producer or queen breeder used to Italian bees, this behavior can drive you right up the wall. But this is also part of the way Russian bees defend themselves from varroa. By interrupting the brood cycle in this way, both the swarm and the parent colony put a damper on mite reproduction, and have a chance to regroup and reduce the adult mite population before fuIl scale brood rearing begins again. Russian colonies that swarm can still gather a respectable crop before and or after the swarm emerges because of their remarkable abilify to gather nectar on a per bee basis. Together with the very large averages secured by non- swarming colonies, I've so far found the overall average to be quite acceptable, if not amazing. Even with this swarming propensiry I now consider the Russian bees to be a very acceptable compromise, given the breadth and depth oftheir varroa resistance, and their long list of other outstanding characteristics.

There were two other negative, or potentially negative traits. In the first couple of hybrid generations, (the Fl and F2), the Russians seemed more susceptible to chalkbrood than my old bees. But, this was easily overcome by selection in a couple of generations. (I should stress here that all of my other comments have been about bees that are at least 75% Russian, and have been selected and then grown out again here for at least two generations. First gen- eration (Fl) Russian hybrids are extremely variable, as you would expect.) Another potential disadvantage is the slow start to brood rearing in spring, compared to Italians. This is actually an advantage for me there's always lots to do at the beginning of the season, and this helps spread out the work better and it also seems to be a time when the bees work to reduce their mite load before fulI scale brood rearing begins.

Also, this discussion needs to recognize right here the excellent work done by John Harbo and J. W. Hanis who, with the SMR and PMB traits, have apparently found a way to develop varroa resistance in our existing "native" stocks. Marla Spivak and her friends in the "East Texas Cartel" may be the first to use these traits and hygienic behavior to create a really large population of commercial, European bees that don't need any treatments. I'm still somewhat skeptical of the long term value of these programs based on endless testing for single traits, in breeding and artificial insemination. But, I'm trying some of these bees myself, and if proven wrong, I will gladly adopt them in a wholesale manner. The important point is that now with Russian, Harbo/Harris, Spivak and other privately developed semi-African or other strains, there is a large and growing pool of unrelated varroa resistant stocks. We have enough varroa resistant genetic material available in the country now to develop and maintain diverse, resistant populations without suffering irrevocable losses from dilution or inbreeding depression.

We've got the raw materials, but now comes the very daunting task ofhow best to use them on the ground, in the real world with all of its known and unknown mitigating factors. How do we move from this low point in beekeeping history to create apiaries that arc genuinely healthy, stable, and ready to withstand new biological, social and economic challenges that are sure to arrive sooner or later?