Kirk Webster Commercial Beekeeping Without Treatments Of Any Kind – Putting The Pieces Together Part 2
I believe something like this will always be based on vigorous and hardy colonies that can produce good crops of
bees, queens and honey with minimum attention and no treatments. After several years with varroa, having access to mite- resistant stock identified and developed by otherbeekeepers has been critically impor- tant. But I have made far more progress toward my goal on the management side of the equation, and it's here that I really do have some things to report that can pass the "Bil1 Mraz test" that I mentioned at the beginning of Part L
Indeed, I don't believe that really healthy bees and apiaries will emerge in the future unless breeding and manage- ment are worked on closely together.
In the real world of commercial bee- keeping, having a few colonies that can cruise merrily along without varroa treat- ments is only a small part of the answer. They need to be propagated into hundreds and then thousands of colonies, many of them having only minutes of attention each year. Mites don't just build up within each hive; they also come from other apiaries where colonies are crashing or shed- ding mites for some reason. In addition to mites, they have to withstand other pests and diseases. Both bees and beekeepers have to endure and work around unpre- dictable and extreme weather conditions. Swarming and supersedure have many effects, which must be taken into account. Who knows for sure when the next good
honey flow will occur, and how many unknown factors there are in Nature that affect the health and well-being of the bees and ourselves? And finally, econom- ic and social conditions have an enormous bearing on beekeepers, and what they are able and unable to do. All these things need to be considered, and the problems overcome in a comprehensive way.
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Since varroa arrived, and until the last couple of years, I've found most of the beekeeping industry's talk and direction to be very dreary and depressing. Everyone seemed ready to step forward to say what needed doing, and then stepped back, expecting someone else to do the work.
Chemical companies provided stop-gap solutions, and most beekeepers looked no fuither in their own apiaries, and didn't lift a finger toward finding a long-term solu- tion. The combination of varroa and low honey prices accelerated the consolidation of the industry allowing beekeepers with more good fortune and/or leverage to feel successful by swallowing up the assets, territory and markets of their neighbors.
This path of increasing farm (apiary) size,. and decreasing number of farmers (beekeepers) has been self-destructive to every civilization or empire that has fol- lowed it. A healthy solution to our bee- keeping problems has to take this into account as well.
ln my own search for a healthy beekeep- ing future, I have found the world of Nature herself, the old beekeeping books and joumals, and the original accounts of the pioneers of modern organic farming to be far more helpful and inspiring than most of what has been published, talked about and done by the beekeeping commr.rnity during the last 8 or 10 years. Here were people who worked hard to solve their own problems in a creative way, often with veryfew resources. They looked deeply into the world of Nature searching for examples of balance and stability, and always gave their crops and livestock the last word.
Especially helpful to me has been the advice and guidance of my oldest mentors, who were not beekeepers, but were among the early pioneers of organic farming in the U.S. after World War II. They taught me that all pests and diseases, weather disas- ters; indeed setbacks of any kind must be made into friends and allies, showing us where our work is unbalanced or poorly adapted. I used this approach with the tra- cheal mites, and I'm now trying to use it with the far more destructive varroa as well.
Out of my initial struggle with these tra- cheal mites came my present system of rapidly propagating new colonies during mid-summer; first used to replace mite losses, then for sale when winter survival rates retumed to normal. What grew out of
this was an apiary of three distinct parts, each supporting the others, and also pro- viding products for sale. Let's call them Honey Production, Nuc Production, and Queen Rearing.
My scheme for Honey Production is pretfy straight forward; producing extract- ed honey above overwintered 2-story colonies. The brood nests are equalized one time, and only need minimal attention thereafter. What's different from most northem, non-migratory apiaries is that all replacement bees and queens come from the other two parts of the apiary.
In Nuc Production, a portion ofthe over- wintered nucs are retained to provide brood and bees for the new crop of nucleus colonies. These nuc mothers are allowed to build up onto 20 or 30 standard combs, and then in June and July each one is broken up into 5-10 four-frame nucs and provided with queen cells or mated queens from the isolated mating yard. Some of these nucs are later allowed to grow onto 8 combs, or provided with excluders and honey supers,but all of them are overwintered on 4 or 8 combs. I used to overwinter them on top of the honey-producing colonies, but now they spend the winter in yards of their own, on pallets with four boxes pushed together and packed as a unit. I made this change to keep them from picking up extra mites from the honey-producing colonies.
The Queen Rearing part of the apiary consists of strong colonies in standard equipment used for raising cells, and mat- ing nucs utilizing fulI depth, half length combs; run in deep boxes with standard outside dimensions. These boxes are divid- ed in half intemally, and with their special feeders and bottom boards can hold 2, 3, or 4 nucs in each box. These boxes can be stacked, with bigger clusters wintering side by side, but most of them are overwintered as nucs on pallets as described above. The extra queens are harvested in spring and used for requeening or making nucs from overwintered honey-producing colonies. The now-queenless brood is stacked on top ofthe remaining queenright baby nucs, and these tall stacks are shortly broken down into the new season's supply of 4-way mat- ing nucs, ready for the first round of cells.
At the moment, about 2/3 of my queens are mated in isolation apiaries in the Green Mountains. One of the original reasons for locating my apiary in this part ofVermont was the close proximity of good dairy-type honey-producing locations and isolated mating sites. The Champlain Valley is a good production area, overcrowded with commercial bees owned by several differ- ent individuals. But the Green Mountains rise up like a wall on the eastem side of thevalley, marking the edge of a huge area very inhospitable to year-round bee sur- vival. With honey flows limited to a couple of weak ones in mid-summer, it makes a good place to mate 2 or 3 rounds ofqueens during that time. The bees are brought up in the late spring, and then retrieved at the end ol the breeding season, A relatively small number of drone rearing colonies can supply all or almost all of the drones available to mate with the virgins. I some- times wish I could do all my work in an area completely saturated with my own honey-producing colonies-so that the swarm and supersedure queens would be mated to other survivor colonies. But that's impossible here, and the set-up I'm using now has the advantage of allowing closely controlled crosses of a few outstanding individual colonies.
I first developed a couple ofthese isolat- ed mating sites for working on tracheal mite resistance. But a few years ofexperi- ence showed that the extra work involved in maintaining the isolated sites was unnecessary-the local bee population in the valley quickly developed enough tra- cheal mite resistance to solve the problem. But with valroa, some sort of mating con- trol is absolutely essential, whether it's sat- uration, isolation or instrumental insemi- nation. Most of the bees in the country now have very little or no defenses what- soever against varroa, and the resistance present in a few exceptional colonies is quickly lost ifthe daughters are allowed to mate randomly. I am, howeveq still mating 1/3 of my queens with the loca1 bees in the valley as a basis for comparison; to test the strength and heritability ofthe resistance in different families; and because I have found a way to make productive use of the resulting colonies, even if they are not
treated.
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In 1997, I decided it was time to stop being terrified of every little mite; to leave some colonies untreated and leam more about the mites instead of always trying to kill them all. Were there some points of leverage in the apiary that could be used to help tip the balance in favor of the bees? My first experiments showed very clearly that my bees had very little in the way of behav- ioral or physiological defenses against the mite, but also that the three sections of my apiary were quite dffirent in their suscepti- bility to varuoa damage. In all the years since then I have never observed anl.thing that would contradict this observation.
Honey production colonies were the most susceptible. At the other end of the scale were the bees on the "baby" combs used for mating nucs. The bees used for nuc production on standard combs were somewhere in the middle. In other words, honey production colonies, with a large brood nest for the entire season, were the first to succumb when left untreated. The bees in nuc production, where one large brood nest is broken up into several small-er ones in mid-summer, could stay alive and function normally for a longer period of time. The baby nucs, where the brood cycle was intemrpted 3 times each year, were in turn even more difficult for varroa to gain a foothold. In fact, this part ofthe apiary has been able to maintain itself without treatments or other bees added to it since 1998.
Once stock with at least some degree of varroa resistance became available-from Russian bees, my own survivors, and a few other survivors sent to me by other bee- keepers-I began to "work them up" through the three apiary departments. Each summer the new crop of queens was creat-
ed by crossing the best untreated survivors together in the isolation apiary; and treat- ments were gradually withdrawn over a period of years as each section became strong enough to stand on its own. Thus, the last treatments were applied to the baby nucs in 1997 and 1998; to the nuc produc- tion colonies in 2000 and 2001; and to the honey producers in 2001 and spring of 2002. I may have pushed this process along faster than I really should have, and should stress that I had heavy loses at sev- eral points during this process, resulting in a significant loss of income. Even now that queen rearing and nuc production have apparently stabilized without treatments, many of my honey-producing colonies are still vulnerable at the end ofthe season. Itwas quite a thrill to produce a really good crop of honey tn 2004 with bees that had last been treated 2,3 and 4 years earlier. But by the end ofthe second wet and cold season in a row, many of theseltoney pro- ducers were found to be failing by the first week in October. However, the situation is still like night and day compared to the early years of my selection process. At first, the brood combs in dying colonies would be completely filled with pollen and dead PMS brood, and contain little honey. Noq even the declining colonies continue to gain weight during the fall; most of the brood combs are clean, and the remaining bees are making a normal, quiet cluster. The bees are too old, and the cluster is too small, but they are going down swinging, and I salute them. I may have lost bees and income from withdrawing treatments as fast as I possibly could, but this was how I identified good breeding stock, built up adiverse breeding population constantly tested against varroa-and prevented the contamination of combs.
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Ifhealth and stability are to be regained, and built up again in our apiaries, I consid- er it essential to move as quickly as possi- ble to the point where the entire apiary is left completely untreated, and all colonies are continually tested for their ability to co- exist with mites and other pests. This is the
only way that real breeding success can be achieved, and maintained over the long run. Because of the enormous reproductive capacity already built into my apiary I can tolerate much higher winter losses than a non-migratory operation based on honey production, pollination, imported bees and queens, and limited splitting in May. The Russian bees have added to this advantage. Because oftheir enornous capacity to pro- duce honey on a per-bee basis, they can be equalized in the spring with smaller brood nests, and still produce a good crop-thus providing more extra brood for an increase of colony numbers. If you count all of my colonies in late July-honey producers, nucs, mating nucs, cell builders and drone rearing colonies-I can still function eco-nomically the following year if only 40- 50o/o of those colonies are still alive and healthy. Once that number reaches 70%, I consider the economic potential ofthe api- ary to be fully restored. I first reported on the enormous potential, for both produc- tion and bee breeding, ofthis type ofa sys- tem over 10 years ago. This potential is still almost completely untapped by bee- keepers in the northem states. Over the last seven years, I've tried to invest the extra energy of this system into new bees and new methods that could bring an apiary back to a state of health and balance.
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And now I have another terrible confes- sion to make. Not one as bad and un- American as passing up short-term gain and investing in the future-but still horri- ble: I have never yet counted even a single sample of mites fiom any of my bees. I consider counting mites as a way of evalu- ating varroa resistance to be fraught with all sorts of shortcomings and diffrculties. It's very time consuming and hence the size of the apiary the number of colonies tested, the gene pool, and the income avail- able all start to shrink. It's also very easy for the results to be skewed by mites migrating from other colonies or bee yards. And it doesn't show which colonies are more resistant to secondary infec- tions a tralI I consider very important.
Other valuable traits can be lost by focus- ing too much time and energy on just one or two parameters. I also don't enjoy employing people to do work I'm not will- ing to do myself. And let's face it-this is a boring job. I'd rather spend that time propagating more colonies from untreated bees, and test them for survival and per- formance in the real world. I've always maintained that for a commercial beekeep- er to profitably breed his or her own stock, the work of testing must somehow be built into the income-producing apiary work. Starting the new queens in nucs during mid-summer, and then wintering them on 4-10 combs is a good way to combine test- ing, selection and production. Winter elim- inates the weakest ones, and the relative value ofthe survivors is easily assessed in the spring. The best candidates can then be moved into honey production for the final test before being considered as breeders. By wintering the new queens on a small number of combs the first year, the number of "dead" boxes in spring is kept at a rea- sonable level.
Bees that combine genuine hardiness, mite-resistance and productivity can only be maintained in the long run by having many hundreds of colonies constantly exposed to mites-and all the other known and unknown shesses in the real world, commercial beekeeping environment. This is the only way the bees can be tested for all the characteristics they need in order to thrive. And this testing and selection must continue year after year-to keep building up their resilience, and help the bees adapt to a changing world. When varroa first arrived, all colonies had to be treated in order to protect the productivity, indeed the existence of the apiary. But after a few years and a very limited start on selection, the bees devoted to mating nucs became self supporting without treatments. Stock with some real resistance to varroa became available in 2000, and another milestone was reached tn 2002 when 150 queens were introduced into nucs with brood
untreated for 18 months. This brood had a normal outward appearance when the nucs were made up, but four weeks later about half of them were starting to decline with PMS-type symptoms. But after another three weeks, almost all of these colonies appeared normal and healthy again. It was quite a thrill to see this happening for the first time and over TjYowere still alive and healthy looking the following spring. Now that nuc production has apparently stabi- lized without treatments, the focus shifts to the honey-producing bees-the acid test of mite resistance. The results here are still not good enough to be really excited about, but it's very encouaging to watch the overall system become strong enough to function with treatments. Now there are many hundreds of colonies untreated for 2, 3, and 4 years, and a really good supply of unrelated breeding material is becoming available. The methods used are allowing selection to work in a steady, step-by-step fashion. Any gains made by selection are
quickly capitalized on and added ro pro- ductivity and potential income. Breeding and management are working closely together and what's emerging is that nebu- lous thing where the whole becomes greater than the sum ofthe parts. And this, I believe, is the real basis for health, stabil- ity and real success for any kind of small farm. It's difficult to achieve on a large, in- dustrial scale.
I've set down all my major points, but there are two others I should touch on that might help other beekeepers trying to move down this path of non-treatment and greater resilience for their bees.
The first concems wax and combs. The combs are, after all, the liver ofthe colony, and the bees depend on them to detoxify contaminants that make their way into the hive. I went to a lot of trouble, and sacri- ficed many colonies, to apply the absolute minimum amount of miticides that were necessary, and to discontinue their use as
soon as possible. In the short term, some of my decisions looked foolish. But now the pendulum is swinging back the other way, as more beekeepers are experiencing prob- lems with combs contaminated with too much coumaphos, fluvalinate or other chemicals. Both of our former two legal treatments have been shown to disrupt honey bee reproduction-queens and drones. The comerstone of my whole scheme is the rapid reproduction of a newgeneration; and so I was very uneasy about using both of these chemicals. I never applied either of them at more than half the recommended dose, and I managed to squeak by using coumaphos on just two occasions-and then to less than half of the apiary. To keep my "liver" functioning well in the future, I have started making foundation from my own wax. I have to admit I used up an entire large bottle of aspirin trying to set up a simple system that could make 2-3,000 sheets each year in a reasonable time. But once I had the svstem
working, it suddenly became interesting and very satisfying. The foundation seems to be of very high quality, and even with- out vertical wires I saw no signs ofstretch- ing. But 2004 was a cold summer, and I'11 have to report again later when I have more experience. Equipping frames with this foundation is, of course, horrendously more time consuming than snapping in plastic foundation. But, ifit helps the bees regain their health and contributes to a total larger than the sum of the parts, I think it will be r.rorthwhile.
My final point concems raising queen cells and drones with untreated coionies. I never had any trouble raising good quality cells and drones this way-the trouble was keeping the rearing colonies alive at the end of the season. In my system, these bees were the most susceptible of all to vaffoa damage. They both had extra bees, brood, (and hence, mites) added to them in spring, and the drone rearing colonies had lots of drone comb in the brood nest all summer. I still haven't found a good way of manag-ing the drone rearers-partly because I don't have time to deal with them during early August when extracting is getting started. Most of them wind up being sacri- ficed; though over the last two winters I've been encouraged to find 25-30% of them surviving the winteq and with healthy clus- ters in spring.
With the cell building colonies, I seem to have hit on a scheme that restores at least some of their former productivity. You can find a detailed description of my cell-build- ing method in the ABJ, April 1997. Here, with an abbreviated description, I'll describe the changes I made to discourage valToa:
I used to raise multiple batches of queens in each cell builder. These were strong, 2-story colonies at the beginning and end ofeach cycle ofcell building, and provided with supers if necessary. To raise a batch of cells, two-thirds of the brood nest was shaken down into one box with sealed brood, pollen and honey. The queen, open brood and remaining bees were taken away to another bee yard. The gra{ts.were started and finished in the queenless unit on the original stand. As soon as the cells were sealed, the queen and young brood were returned to the original stand, with an excluder and the box with the cells placed above them. Ten days after the ripe cells were removed, the process would be repeated.
Now I am raisingjust one batch ofcells in each cell builder; so cell building moves gradually through an apiary of32 colonies. The grafts are placed in the same queen- less, shaken colonies as before, with no open brood. But the boxes containing the queens, open brood and remaining bees are now taken to a new location and placed on pallets where they will stay and spend the following winter-just like my other nucs. After a week or two, when they have become crowded again, the queen andjust a few bees are removed and set aside in a small nuc box. The now queenless colony is provided with an excluder and super, and allowed to raise its own queen from scratch.
Meanwhile, back to the cells in the graft- ing yard: Two days after starting, I put a frame ofbrood about to be sealed into the cell builders, so that varroa mites will have a place to go besides the queen cells. (I know that valroa are not supposed to go into queen cells, but I have found some in my cells when I don't do this extra step.) When the ripe cells are removed, one cell is left in each colony, to provide a new queen. This way both halves ofthe original cell building colony have had their brood cycles intemrpted, with at least a short period of complete broodlessness. And most of these colonies go into the fall showing little or no damage from varroa. Honey production in the cell-building yard has been curtailed in my new scheme, but this is offset by the new colonies created in the process, and the overall strong productivity of this yard has been restored. Again,
both resistant stock and management had to be used together to move toward a good solution.
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Sometime in the near future, there may be a really sensible control for varroa mites in the form of a fungus that can live inside the hive, and gradually colonize and de- stroy most of the mites. I may use it myself if I need to. But, I would use only enough to bring the apiary up to a decent level ofeconomic potential. With or without it, my intention and efforts will stay the same-to continue propagating new generations of bees that are continually exposed to all the known and unknown factors in the total environment, so that these bees will con- tinue to have stability and resilience in the future.
And, this brings up one last point that's perhaps the most important of all for developing a healthy beekeeping future: The beekeeper's attitude. We all need and enjoy learning from others. But, real progress is only made by individuals solv- ing their own problems in their own loca- tions; not by waiting for others to solve the problems for you.