John was a 1950 graduate of Medina Senior High School, after which he attended Ohio Wesleyan University, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. Upon graduation, John moved to Texas where he served his country as a pilot in the United States Air Force, achieving the rank of Captain. In 1957, he completed his military service and moved back to Medina, Ohio with his young family. He became the fourth generation of the family business, The A.I. Root Company. John spent the last twenty years of his career at the Root Company serving as President & Chairman of the Board, officially retiring in 2008.

John was a true servant to his community. Most notably he cherished his time serving on the Medina City Council (1962-1976), the Medina General Hospital Board of Directors (1971-2008), the Board of Directors for Ohio Farmer’s Insurance & Westfield Group (1986-2004), the National Candle Association Board of Directors (1989-2010), and the Medina Municipal Airport Advisory Commission (1989-2004).

During his time at the The A.I. Root Company, John was the Executive Publisher of Bee Culture Magazine. He was President of the Honey Industry Council of America from 1962-1963 and 1976-1977, President of the Ohio Agricultural Council from 1973-1974, President and Chairman of the Board for the Eastern Apicultural Society of North America, Inc. in 1978 and Chairman of the Board from 1983-1984, as well as Key Advisory Commission of the Agricultural Technical Institute for nine years (1984-1993). There are numerous other organizations that John has served in over the years.

Early in his life, John garnered a deep love for aviation. This passion persisted through his entire life as a private pilot. During his “free time” John could be found at Medina Municipal Airport piloting his airplanes. A loving and kind man, John will be deeply missed by his family and friends.

John is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Elisabeth (Grotte) Root; children, Alan (Esther Morera) Root, Nanette (Harold) Waite, Brad (Kathryn) Root; grandchildren Meredith (David) Gilpin, Christopher (Ashley) Waite, Crystal (Jeremy) Doyle, Alex (Abby Araujo) Root, Kyle (Morgan Moritz) Root, Andrew Root, Emilie Root; great-grandchildren, Claire, Abigail, Evan, Samuel, Hank, Josiah, Owen, Oliver, Elijah, Amelia; siblings, Elizabeth Judkins, Stuart (Diana) Root. He was preceded in death by his parents, Alan and Emilie Root.

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The Stark Reality of Being a Long-Term Beekeeper

By: James E. Tew

Overall, beekeeping is enjoyable – but it’s not always easy
Readers, in several previous articles, I have danced to this tune with you. Yet, for personal reasons, I feel a need to try again. Though many of us feel it, it’s not easy to explain what we feel about our bee efforts. I am an entomologist and I do not have a deep background in human psychological issues. Clearly, I should stick with what I know, but sometimes I just need to write about what I feel. Even so, I struggle to word it for you. My core thought is – Though beekeeping is generally rewarding (After consideration, I have opted to use the word “rewarding” rather than the word “enjoyable.” Cleaning dead-outs is not enjoyable, but as I prepare the fouled equipment for future use, I feel rewarded.), it’s not always easy.

I’ve done this bee thing for a long time
Having a long history in keeping bees is a helpful attribute for any beekeeper. You remember “when” and you acquire a lot of personal bee-related stories. You learn a lot.

Through the years, I have learned that my bee interests will cool a bit during Winter months. So, I adapt to that reality. During those cold, quiet periods, I read about bees, or I write perfunctory articles about understanding more about our craft. I assemble or repair equipment. I plan for the next season. I just try to stay busy in my craft during this down time. While it is a useful time, this quiet period cannot be called true beekeeping. Rather, those times are “preparing for actual beekeeping.” Try as I might, my bee interest drops to a lower ebb during these slack periods. How could it not?

From experience acquired during many previous quiet Winters, I know this bee-related seasonal feeling is coming. I expect it. It’s a normal part of my beekeeping psyche. I also know that when Spring comes around, I will – just like my bees – once again awaken and heat back to a higher level of beekeeping interest. In my earlier years, I don’t recall a mentor telling me that my bee interest would naturally rise and fall – usually based on the passing of annual seasons.

Building a fire
Successful beekeeping is much like building a glowing bonfire. Fuel must be accumulated. Dates are set. A location is selected. All is made ready. The fire is ignited, it starts slowly and, as more fuel is added, it steadily grows until it reaches its capacity. Then, invariably, it begins to ebb. Without more fuel and tending, it will die out and extinguish. Interest in beekeeping is much like building a fire. It waxes and wanes. Unfortunately, for some of us, the fire goes out. The good news is that the fire can be rebuilt.

In the May 2023 issue of this magazine, I broached some of the feelings that I have about beeyards that I have now vacated. That was one of my most recent efforts to write about beekeeping feelings.

Figure 1. Part of my beeyard in better times.

In that piece, I described the upcoming fate of my oldest yard – my home yard – and how I will need to adapt to having new, near neighbors and a new street abutting my beeyard. I covered my feelings about that issue in my writings for that month. All things change, don’t they?

Then came the wind storm
In early April 2023, a significant wind storm, lasting three days, blew through my area. Trees and apiary damage was all about me. My bee equipment was scattered helter-skelter. On two consecutive stormy days, I had a fifty-five-year-old Colorado Spruce come down. These trees abounded my apiary.

Figure 2. It is not easy working these hives.

On one hand, I can’t complain too much. One tree fell away from my beeyard while the other precisely fell in the only place it could to cause the least damage. I still had three colonies that were crushed. The high wind apparently blew the bees away. There were only a few remaining bees in those obliterated colonies. They did not survive. However, the damage could have been worse. On one hand, that’s the good news. On the other hand, I now have a huge tree down in the middle of my home yard and I have bee equipment either destroyed or scattered throughout my yard. (You must know that I will not be giving any tours of my beeyard any time soon.)

What a mess
I confess that I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of clearing this chaos. I suppose I will select equipment that is still usable, or can be made usable, and form a burn pile for the remainder. But it gets even better. In the middle of all this confusion, I must move the living colonies from the area. Here’s why.

The tree removal people

Figure 3. Part of my beeyard challenge.

I had tree removal people come to view the situation. Being professional arborists, I had hoped they would be reasonably comfortable around flying, confused bees. That did not happen! As the tree company representative reviewed the scene – and the bees – from the blue, he asked, “If the bees are a problem, do you mind if we spray them?” Readers, I was truly astounded. I think that I probably gasped. Again, I must write that I was stunned. Within that scenario, I would have even more dead bees and a new category of mess. Now I would also have pesticide contaminated equipment to deal with. After a few seconds, I was able to form sentences and was able to tell this uninformed guy that, “No, I will move these hives to a distant location so his workers could go about their business of tree removal.”

Much like the old late night TV commercials, I now tell you, “But wait, there’s more!” Probably sensing that he had just mightily offended me, he tried to rebound by showing feigned interest in bees. He asked, “There’s a queen in that box and the bees surround her – right?” I felt as though I was having some kind of medical exam. I just wanted this whole encounter to be over. I responded that he was somewhat correct but having NO interest in trying to teach beekeeping, I immediately returned the problem of the downed trees. He gave me a fair price and left to attend to my neighbor’s downed trees.

This was all a new and unfamiliar reality, being a long-term beekeeper. I have never had my apiary so discombobulated. Then in addition, having people so unfamiliar with bees be so intimately associated with my colonies and with my stressed psyche was a new learning experience for this old beekeeper.

I’m still learning
As I have worked to clean and reorganize my apiary site, I have clearly learned that having a large coniferous tree in the very middle of your apiary is not a positive beeyard feature. As a younger man, I would have fired up my chain saw and removed some of the barrier to my bees. I’m not a young man and I am paying a professional company to clear the mess. Let them earn their money has been my feeling. So, I have been trying to work around the big tree as I gather equipment and rearrange bee hives.

I wear high-quality ventilated bee suits. As if to make bad things worse, the needles on the dead tree grab my bee suit and puncture me. At first it was surprising, then it was frustrating, but the stabbing and sticking progressed to being outright annoying. I can hardly move in my apiary without my suit being grabbed by prickly needles that are strong and determined.

But wait, there’s even more!
You recall that I have other issues beyond the downed trees. Remember that I will be having new neighbors located near my beeyard. With this reality in mind, last Spring, I had what I originally thought was a genius idea. I will allow Multiflora Rose, an invasive plant, grow to form an impenetrable barrier between me and my new neighbors. After all, that was the original intent of introducing this obnoxious plant into this country. It was to be a hedgerow plant. Unfortunately, the plant went derelict and is now nearly uncontrollable.

Figure 4. Multiflora Rose in full bloom. Photo credit: Leslie J. Mehroff, University of Connecticut

Multiflora Rose and ventilated bee suits
Being otherwise cut back, this mega-prickly plant now grows at the edges of my beeyard, but in the storm, confusion and destruction, the unwelcome plant has also been upset. Its tentacles reach here and there and, in some cases, snakes through the branches of the downed tree. As bad as it is to have pine needles grabbing my bee suit, Multiflora Rose is profoundly worse.

It is as though the plant is alive. In snake-like fashion, it grabs my suit and dearly holds onto me. I literally rip it off only to have it whip back and grab me again. On two occasions, I had to remove my suit to get the vine detached from my suit. I must wear bee gloves to deal with the thorny plant, not for protection from bees. I can only candidly write that this is not an enjoyable episode in my beekeeping journey.

The stark reality of being a long-term beekeeper
This month, I will be seventy-five years old and I will have been keeping bees for fifty consecutive years. Yet, I am essentially starting over again in my home yard. I’m either impressively dedicated or a very slow learner.

As traumatizing as it has been for me, I have begun to accept the reality that my most personal beeyard was going to change anyway. I was preparing to deal with that reality. Now, part of my tree barrier has vanished. Even more changes are coming.

While trying to make lemonade from lemons within this fallen tree situation, I admit that, in a bizarre way, the trees coming down will assist in additional future fencing that I would be needing anyway. I have already been forced to relocate the remaining colonies to another temporary location. I was going to need to do that task later this Summer anyway.

For the first time in more than forty-five years, I will (temporarily) not have any hives at this location. The yard will essentially be wide open. No trees, no bees and heavy construction nearby. I have a rare window to completely restructure my core yard into a “new and improved” location. I plan to electrify my little bee storage barn and install cameras for security and observational purposes. So, is this a disaster or an opportunity?

Yet another reality of beekeeping
Several of my local beekeeping friends have offered to help, but so far, I have politely declined their offer. Why? Because of “feelings.” These are my bees and they are my responsibility. If I can’t do the job, then I shouldn’t take on the job. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I’m on a lifelong apicultural journey and it’s my thing. I should not seek help from others for the occasional distasteful aspects of my journey in order for me to be able to enjoy the positive aspects of my journey. No doubt, I will get back to you if any of this situation changes in even more unexpected ways.

My lifelong good friend once said…
I once had a lifelong professional friend tell me that I only wrote “disaster” articles. It was a passing comment that he made in jest that I have never forgotten. In fact, I do write about stressful beekeeping events because, to me, those are the events, the episodes, that make me grow in my chosen craft. These trying episodes give me unwanted depth and forced understanding. Also, my trying experiences make me compassionate when other beekeepers tell me of their issues and concerns. Therefore, in this article, I choose to use the word, reality rather than disaster.

I will clean this situation up and I will reestablish colonies in my home yard. It will take a lot of work that is not particularly enjoyable and it will require me to take a lot of naps. It’s beekeeping. Overall, I enjoy parts of it immensely.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Co-Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com

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Found in Translation

City Bee, Country Bee
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

In Aesop’s fable, City (Town) Mouse, Country Mouse, a city mouse regales her skeptical country cousin with a rosy view of high density living. Sampling both, the country mouse prefers to stay put, largely because “the country mouse lives in a cozy nest at the bottom of a tree. Her home is small, but it is warm and comfortable.” Plus… no cats!

Beekeepers and bee scientists like to contrast the lives of bees under our care in apiaries (dense cities of colonies) versus those out on their own in trees. Aside from giving general insights into bee biology, these comparisons can predict the risks of managed and feral bees sharing disease while also showing how well ‘city’ and ‘country’ bees deal with various stresses. We have great data for the numbers of managed colonies, but how many country bees are we talking about?

I have discussed before the achingly beautiful (and hard) work by Tom Seeley and students assessing feral bees in a U.S. forest. Borrowing from those and similar studies, we can get a rough estimate of how many country bees there are in hollow trees and other cavities. My Sunday afternoon and small brain can’t grapple with honey bee density in deserts and the vast tundra, but considering four adjoining states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia) with decent land-use data from the USDA (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/maps-and-state-rankings-of-major-land-uses/), we can estimate ‘suitable’ acreage (fallow fields, pasture and forests) at around 58 million acres total (60% of the available land). Using consensus estimates of 2.5 colonies/square-mile (one colony/square kilometer, 0.004 colonies/acre), one arrives at 233,000 feral honey bee colonies in these four states. According to USDA (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Bee_and_Honey/) ,there were 67,500 managed colonies in these states on January 1, 2021, surveying beekeepers with five or more hives. Even doubling this number to account for backyard beekeepers and those who evade surveillance, there are still fewer managed than feral colonies in these regions.

So, free-living bees are likely to be important for their own sake, and for the environment. What’s it like out there? Taking a disease angle, several studies have compared the relative disease loads of managed and feral colonies in the U.S. Amy Geffre and colleagues from San Diego sampled boxed and free-living colonies (three colonies each) seven times over the course of a year to measure virus levels for three common bee viruses (Preliminary analysis shows that feral and managed honey bees in Southern California have similar levels of viral pathogens. 2023. Journal of Apicultural Research, 62:3, 485-487, DOI:10.1080/00218839.2021.2001209). Both colony types were remarkably similar in virus levels, changing with the season but hardly differing from each other.

In Persistent effects of management history on honey bee colony virus abundances (2021. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 179:107520, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jip.2020.107520), Lewis Bartlett and colleagues found similar patterns between free-living and managed colonies but noted that the style of management might play a role. Namely, colonies maintained in a larger commercial apiary (hundreds of colonies) tended to have the highest levels of most viruses, with feral and low-intensity ‘backyard’ colonies being about the same. As in most field studies, there is abundant variation for viral disease within each category, so these results will need even more sampling to see how viruses and bees fare under different management styles. Nevertheless, they suggest that beekeepers adopting a ‘country bee’ approach by spacing out colonies to reduce urban interactions will be doing their bees a favor.

In the most ambitious study to date, Chauncy Hinshaw and colleagues surveyed 25 colonies each from feral and managed colonies in Pennsylvania (2021. The role of pathogen dynamics and immune gene expression in the survival of feral honey bees. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 8, 594263. https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2021.2001209). They surveyed ample bee numbers per collection (75 worker bees), perhaps getting a better sense of average disease loads. Even better, they paired similar city and country colonies from a bunch of regions, which helps account for other factors that might change virus loads. In this study, managed colonies tended to have lower levels of mite-transmitted deformed wing virus, presumably reflecting mite treatments, and roughly similar levels of black queen cell virus and nosema. Perhaps reflecting pathogen exposure, feral colonies had higher levels of several immune response proteins as well. Given the higher number of sampled colonies, these researchers were also able to show how their measurements related to colony fates. As in prior studies, deformed wing virus, presumably alongside mite loads, was a good predictor of a bad colony outcome.

Colonies showing higher levels of two immune genes, once other factors were evened out, were more likely to survive the study period. Arguably, these proteins might be good predictors of genetic components that help bees survive in the face of disease.

More can be done to contrast the lives and successes of city and country bees. These comparisons can help improve bee management by those of us keeping bees in clusters of Langstroth high-rises. It is also fun to think of bees in the ancestral habits they have followed for thousands of years. Country bees almost certainly have more threats now than they did when humans were more scarce, and there has to be some level of contact between city bees and country bees that muddies all of these comparisons, but in many ways the presence of country bees at all is comforting. Left to their own care, they are making country homes work wherever they can, and that is a good lesson for beekeepers.

In full disclosure, the lives of country bees were not on my mind until a recent inquiry from British bee researcher Francis Ratnieks and his graduate student Ollie Visick. In their Laboratory for Apiculture and Social Insects (https://www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/), they are comparing the lives of free-living honey bees in their native range to their hived cousins. As ecologists, their studies will give insights into how honey bees used to live in the forests and fields of England. I thank them for the prompt (and welcome hot tips from any of you) and look forward to reading their results!

We all know that one of the greater challenges in beekeeping is shepherding bees through our variable northern Winters. But what other weather factors should we consider when we are planning our beehive inspections, splits, mite control or feeding regimens?

In my experiences with beekeeping, I have come to rely on signals from nature and the variable weather patterns in my own surrounding environment rather than reliance on specific calendar dates that follow the same schedule year after year. So in this article, I will relate some of the clues and weather events that signal the appropriate time to take certain actions that have resulted in my success in getting at least one hive through every Winter for the past thirteen years. My greatest result occurred several years ago with nine hives going into Winter and those nine hives successfully surviving through the following Summer. This result allowed me to sell a few nucleus hives (nucs), raise a few more queens and take another step toward being a self-sustaining beekeeper.

As the Year Starts
At the beginning of the year, shortly after Christmas, is when I briefly open hives to add a cane sugar food supplement to the hive. It seems that every so often around the Christmas/New Year’s holidays there is a day or two that gets above 45°F (7°C) that allow for both cleansing flights and the insertion of extra food supplies. There are various ways to supply additional food resources including hard candy boards, sugar patties or granulated sugar over newspaper. I hesitate adding any sugar source earlier than late December. Any form of cane sugar is harder for the bees to digest and if they decide to tap into the additional hard sugar source in the Fall, it can possibly result in a form of dysentery. Dysentery is often the result of bees not being able to leave the hive for cleansing flights and finding it necessary to relieve themselves in the hive. The February and March time frames are when most hives are lost over Winter due to a lack of food resources.

Winter sugar over parchment paper is nearly used up, the remains of a partial pollen patty at lower left of sugar.

Another Winter task is that every other month or so I will also use a bent ½ inch metal bar to clean out any dead bees from the bottom board. Once temperatures only occasionally drop below freezing at night, I will also remove my insulation sleeves that cover all but the bottom and top entrances to the hives. Some of my fellow beekeepers use blanket insulation and also remove them when temps begin to only erratically fall below freezing at night.

My next clue is the budding of maple trees in my yard. In some years, I have seen white pollen brought into hives in very early February; possibly from pussy willow shrubs, but not of sufficient quantity to support the needs of potential new larva. If one does see pollen being brought into the hive, this is a clue that the hive is most likely healthy and the queen has started to lay eggs, although in very small quantities this early in the year. In late March or early April there is one of a dozen maples in my yard that is always first to have the buds pop open. On a warm, sunny day, standing under the tree, it sounds like you are standing in a beehive. I use this as my signal to check the cane sugar supply once again and add a partial pollen patty to each hive.

The next pollen/nectar flow will not occur until a month later, in late April or early May. If they gather enough pollen from maples and other sources they will not use much of the pollen patty. But if rainy, cold weather precludes much pollen collection they may use most, or all, of the supplied patty and it may even need to be replaced before the dandelion bloom.

Heavy dandelion bloom is the next signal I use to know that Spring flowers and the dandelions are providing the first nectar flow. This is also my signal to do my first deep hive inspection and commence with any splits I may wish to do. Moving frames around, even if exactly replaced before dandelion bloom, can disrupt the hive in such a way that the cluster does not reform to provide the needed warmth for new eggs and larva resulting in the loss of the hive.

Bent metal bar used to clean out bottom board in Winter.

Opening a hive has a different meaning than inspecting a hive. Up to this point, I have only opened the top of hives to add sugar or pollen patties, while inspecting means to quickly examine each frame as it is removed and replaced or substituted if doing a split. The methodology of splits was covered in the April issue so I will not repeat my split techniques here. This is also the time where I will clean off the bottom board and remove excess old or pollen saturated frames.

Once May arrives, the beekeeping season gets into full swing here in SE Michigan. It is a good time to do the first mite check and initiate treatment, if called for. It is suggested that for the first few months of beekeeping the new beekeeper check hives once a week to every ten days. This is also a good recommendation for any new hives or nucs that have been started in order to monitor their progress. These do not have to be deep hive inspections looking at every frame. Often starting an inspection by pulling a frame or two from one side until eggs/larva are spotted is enough to see the hive is functioning well with an adequate queen without ever seeing the queen or looking at every single frame. As your comfort level and knowledge increases, hives may not need to be inspected for a month or more if things look normal with bees coming and going. Bees that are bringing in some pollen is a good sign there is a laying queen and larva to be fed.

Weather Affects Flying Time
Since beginning beekeeping, I find I keep a much closer watch of weather forecasts to determine the best times to work with my hives dependent on weather. As the Summer flowers start blossoming and nectar flows get into full swing, weather is the key factor in how much time bees can be flying and making collections of nectar, water, pollen or propolis. Any new splits or weaker hives can benefit from a feeding of one to one sugar syrup and an initial mite treatment if needed. I like to use a single Hopguard strip in five frame starter nucs just as a precaution. From this point on through the Summer, it is a matter of periodically checking hives to be sure the queen is laying, mite loads do not become excessive and no inherent diseases occur. When all but one or two frames in the top most super are drawn with comb and filled with brood or nectar and honey it is time to add another super. I prefer to keep my bee’s brood chamber in two ten-frame deeps with a queen excluder under any honey supers that are continually added through the Summer. I know of area beekeepers that work with eight frame medium supers and use three supers as their brood chamber with equal success. If I were to start over again, I would most likely choose the eight frame triple supers due to the weight factor of a ten frame deep super when full.

Taking weather into consideration, there are factors that come into play when the bees will be less agitated when doing an inspection. It is generally recommended that inspections be done on days when the outside temperature is above 55°F (13°C). On a warm, sunny day, most of the foragers will be out of the hive. If there is a front moving in or it is rainy out, the bees seem to be able to sense this and will be more agitated. Likewise, cloudy or windy days are not optimal times for inspections. The time of day that works the best seems to be between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., although on nice Summer days that are longer, inspections can stretch into the late afternoon or early evenings.

When opening a hive, listen to the noise of the bees. If it goes from a peaceful hum to a louder roar it may not be the best time for a deep inspection of all frames. I recall helping a new beekeeper several years ago who had a work schedule that allowed for inspections to only occur on weekends. Several months of rainy or windy weather made it quite difficult to inspect during optimal weather which made for a more difficult beekeeping Summer. The hobby beekeeper with other employment challenges may find it difficult to find optimal overlaps between good weather and their free time to inspect hives.

Most of my reading and research indicates that mite checks are recommended about every month to month and half with the most critical time being August through September. This is when the mite population is exploding just as the bee population begins to decrease in preparation for Winter. Mite population control is without question the current most important part of beekeeping to insure hive survival over the coming Winter. When doing splits, I insert drone frames which forces me to get into new hives in less than 24 days for their removal. This assumes drone comb has been drawn, capped and drone brood is present. Mites prefer drone brood due to the slightly longer 24 day period it takes for drones to emerge. Removing drone frames prior to 24 days precludes a mite explosion as drones emerge from cells. When mite counts warrant treatment, I follow with a formic treatment in late June or early July followed by another treatment in late August or early September and finally one or two oxalic acid dribbles in October and late November if needed.

Harvesting Honey
Fully capped frames of honey can be taken any time of the beekeeping Summer/Fall season. I have taken honey from remaining Spring hives where the bees did not survive the Winter. If doing this, it is easiest if the honey frames are warmed and checked for any crystallization. Extracting frames that are partially crystallized can quickly plug up the filtration screens and make it very hard to strain the resultant honey. I have found it much easier to feed any unused overwintered frames back to the bees or use them in new hives or nuc splits. Bees from active hives will soon find frames that are set out some distance away from the apiary and will remove the surplus honey to existing honey supers. I have also had some luck with a partial super of near full frames placed over an inner cover that is on top of the upper most honey super allowing bees to clean out the excess frames of honey. During my first few years of beekeeping I only collected honey once in the Fall. This sometimes resulted in very tall hives as supers were added to give the bees more space.

Three deeps and four full honey supers with a fifth added before Fall honey harvest reached over six feet and resulted in future harvests occurring twice a season.

I have since decided it is easier to make a harvest in late July followed by another in September. Any Fall flow is left for the bees to backfill the brood chamber for their Winter honey supply. If new nucs or hives are made from splits, those new starts may not produce any excess honey for the beekeeper in their first Summer. Taking too much honey from the bees in their first season is also a reason for Winter loss as this may result in Winter starvation.

The amount of nectar the bees collect that can be turned into honey is directly related to weather conditions. Continual rain and thunderstorms during a peak nectar flow can significantly cut down on flying time and wash away available flower nectar. Dearth periods where there is no rain for weeks also effects nectar availability, as the plants are using available ground moisture to sustain leaves and growth rather than producing pollen and nectar for flowers and seeds. Weather that is hotter than normal or nights that are colder than normal also impact the amount of nectar that plants produce. As the beekeeper learns to keep a close eye on weather and forecasts, they can better determine optimal times for inspections and if there will be a larger or smaller honey harvest.

Another aspect to consider is when to start nucs for overwintering. I have found that nucleus hives of four or five frames are best started in May or June but no later than the beginning of July. Four frame nucs started in those months may need a second or even a third story four-frame super added to make space for the increasing number of bees. The earlier the start, the more frames that may need to be added. In the following Spring, five frame nucs can be sold and excess frames used to begin new hives or nucs or simply used to increase ones hive count.

Fall Weather Clues
As Fall weather temperatures get cooler and daylight time gets shorter, the bees will be out foraging less and Fall nectar flows are sometimes questionable. Hives that have had their last honey harvest may benefit from Fall feeding of 2:1 sugar syrup. Any extracted honey supers can be placed over the inner cover and under the outer cover such that only the bees in the hive can clean out the honey supers for storage and reuse the following year. There is less chance of bees storing additional nectar/honey in the extracted honey super if it is placed on a different hive than that from which it was taken.

As the temperatures start to drop below 40°F (4.5°C) at night, it is time to combine hives or restrict hives to smaller spaces. This will also be when the Fall flowers such as golden rod and wild purple asters have passed their peak. If there are several weak hives they can be combined using the newspaper method between supers and pinching the weaker queen. Although, I have had very heavily populated hives come through the Winter in three deeps, I like to confine bees to only one or two ten-frame deeps as Winter approaches. New hives or swarms caught earlier in the Summer are usually best if confined to one ten-frame deep while established hives with a large population of bees may be better if allowed to have two deeps.

As stated earlier, August and September are critical months to keep mite counts under control. A day or two after doing a mite treatment, another test for mites is highly recommended to see if that treatment had an effect. If mite counts are still higher than recommended (3 per 100 in Fall) another treatment may be needed. High mite counts during these months are a strong indicator that the hive may not survive the Winter. As temperatures start to dip below freezing at night, it’s time to winterize the hives. I use a combination of a coroplast sleeve over the sides of the hive as well as Vivaldi style spacers for ventilation over the inner cover.

Coroplast plastic sleeves over hives.

There are other numerous ways to insulate a hive, such as using tarpaper or hive blankets if Winter temperatures can get very cold or are somewhat variable in your area. And this brings us full circle to the beginning of the next year.

As you become more experienced as a beekeeper, noting the changes in nature can lead to more efficient beekeeping dependent on your environments weather conditions rather than on calendar dates. I have found that keeping good notes has helped me improve from year to year. If you are not in a note taking mood, I have included a checkoff page (Download PDF) that can be copied and used as you inspect your hives. This is a slightly modified checklist obtained from a local beekeeper and used with permission from Jim Ford, who works with a Boy Scout troop to obtain various merit badges including beekeeping. Using clues from how weather patterns effect nature in your local environment can lead to a better beekeeping experience.

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The Plastic Legacy

Are the toxic chemicals in plastic affecting you and your bees?

By: Ross Conrad

Plastic has become ubiquitous in our lives and is clearly responsible for significant advances in fields as varied as medicine, sports, aeronautics, electronics, food packaging, textiles and construction. Agriculture has also come to rely heavily on plastic, and as beekeepers, we have come to depend on plastic for a multitude of beekeeping uses large and small. This includes every part of the hive in addition to queen excluders, smoker bellows, honey packaging, mating nuc boxes, feeders, support pins, hive wrapping and netting, propolis and small hive beetle traps, hive straps, bee helmets and brushes, extracting equipment and more.

Unfortunately, this incredibly useful stuff is also responsible for slowly and quietly inflicting widespread damage that seriously threatens human and environmental health, as well as the economy. This is well documented in a recent report by the Minderoo-Monaco Commission, and the harm includes illness and death resulting from every phase of plastic’s life cycle, and the damage is getting worse (Landrigan et al., 2023).

The report’s lead author, Dr. Phillip J. Landrigan is the director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College. Landrigran, who has spent decades researching the health effects of environmental pollutants, also worked on the first studies that looked into the dangers of lead exposure in children.

During the past couple decades, plastic hive parts and beekeeping equipment have become common and yet we know little about the impacts to bees that the chemicals that leach out of plastic can have on honey bee health.

Production
As the Minderoo-Monaco Commission report outlines, plastic is made from carbon-based polymers that combine many small molecules bonded into a chain or network. Polymers can be natural or synthetic. Natural polymers include rubber, hemp and silk. While synthetic plastics can be manufactured from plant materials, most synthetic polymers are made from fossil fuels and they include polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene (Styrofoam), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and a host of other materials of which over 400 million tons are produced annually and the amount is growing. Single-use plastics account for 35-40% of current plastic production and represent the most rapidly growing segment of the plastic industry.

Various chemicals are then incorporated into these carbon-based polymers to impart certain properties to the plastic being manufactured. Among the properties chemicals impart to plastic are color, flexibility, stability, water repellency, sterility, fire resistance and ultraviolet resistance. Unfortunately, many of these added chemicals are extremely toxic. They include cancer-causing compounds, neurotoxins that disrupt the cells that make up nervous systems, endocrine disruptors such as phthalates that play havoc with the body’s hormones, bisphenols, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (aka PFAS or forever chemicals), as well as brominated and organophosphate flame-retardants. These highly toxic chemicals are integral components of plastic. During production, these chemicals, along with plastic particles, leak into the air, water and soil polluting the landscape and sickening those that get exposed. Many of these chemicals are responsible for the majority of plastics’ harm to human and environment health.

Use
Due to their wide proliferation throughout society, plastic is present in almost everything we use in our daily lives. Consumers are exposed to toxic chemicals as they leach out of plastic; enter the environment, and cause pollution as a result of their normal use. Sometimes exposure occurs from direct contact with the plastic item, and other times it occurs through contact with a substance such as water or food that has been in contact with the plastic. Accidental and unintended exposures also occur such as when an infant sucks on a plastic toy.

Disposal
We have known for a long time that plastic itself does not decompose, and now we learn that some of the toxic compounds used in plastic (such as the PFAS family of chemicals) also fail to biodegrade which means they do not go away (hence the ‘forever chemical’ moniker). As a result, plastics are clogging our landfills, choking our oceans, and fouling our beaches. Additionally, some plastic chemicals undergo chemical transformation and form breakdown products and metabolites, that can be highly toxic and contribute further to the harm plastics create.

Unfortunately, our current patterns of plastic production, use and disposal occur with little attention to sustainable design or safe materials and a near absence of recovery, reuse and recycling. Plastic recycling systems are so inefficient and ineffective that studies have found that less than 10 percent of the plastic humans produce and use actually gets recycled and reused while the other 90 percent gets incinerated, or ends up in a landfill or the environment. Despite rising consumer awareness, government regulation and corporate attention, we are creating more single use plastic waste than ever before. Between 2019 and 2021 the world produced an additional six million metric tons of single use plastic waste, mostly from fossil fuels. The more plastic waste we create the greater the harm to human health, widespread environmental damage, significant economic costs and deep societal injustices.

In-depth research of advanced recycling of plastic (also called chemical recycling, molecular recycling or chemical conversion) in the United States finds this new technology is a lot of hype and not much reality (Denney et al., 2022; Singla & Wardle, 2022). These so-called advanced recycling facilities are themselves generating hazardous waste and causing environmental injustices under the false promise of recycling. Even worse, since the plastic we do manage to produce from “advanced recycling” is much more expensive than virgin plastic, much of the recycling output will likely end up as fuel for incinerators creating even more pollution.

Key report findings
The report points out that while manufacture and use of essential plastics should continue, the reckless increases in plastic production, and especially increases in the manufacture of an ever-increasing array of unnecessary single-use plastic products, needs to be curbed and their use greatly reduced. We also need to eliminate the migration of plastic into the biosphere across its life-cycle by embracing environmentally sound waste management.

Among the Minderoo-Monaco Commission’s findings are:

• Plastic causes disease, impairment and premature mortality at every stage of its life cycle, with the health repercussions disproportionately affecting vulnerable, low-income and minority communities, particularly children.
• Toxic chemicals added to plastic and routinely detected in people are known to increase the risk of miscarriage, obesity, cardiovascular disease and cancers.
• Plastic waste is ubiquitous and our oceans, on which people depend for oxygen, food and livelihoods, are “suffering beyond measure, with micro- and nano-plastics particles contaminating the water and the sea floor and entering the marine food chain.”

The Commission’s science-based recommendations include a global cap on plastic production instituted through a Global Plastics Treaty.

Plastic’s impact on our industry
So, what does the incorporation of plastic into beekeeping mean for our bees? Mostly, we don’t know. No one is looking closely to see how the myriad of plastic related chemicals impact honey bee health. No one appears to be researching the amount of toxins, like the PFAS forever chemicals, that may be leaching out of plastic and into honey from plastic containers, or leaching into beeswax from plastic foundation. What do the effects of these chemical have on honey bee larvae raised in plastic comb? How does the early exposure of queen bees to plastic (from being raised in plastic queen cups, to being shipped in plastic queen cages) impact their health and longevity?

We know from experience that bees do not like plastic. If a sheet of plastic foundation is not coated with enough beeswax, the bees will avoid the foundation, building their comb next to and parallel to the foundation rather than utilizing the hexagon-embossed plastic surface designed to encourage comb building. Are the bees trying to tell us something?

Thankfully, there are many alternatives to plastic available to us beekeepers. From leather smoker bellows, pure beeswax foundation, wooden hive components, glass jars and metal queen excluders, just about every beekeeping tool or hive part made of plastic has a non-plastic alternative available on the market. The only items I can think of that do not have plastic alternatives readily available are small hive beetle traps and large multi-gallon pails for honey. It’s not that these items could not be made from materials other than plastic (think wooden beetle traps or large metal tins for honey packaging like they used to use in the old days), it’s just that no one is currently making them and offering such alternatives for sale, at least not in the U.S.

It appears that long-standing concerns over pesticide chemical contamination of bees and bee hives has distracted beekeepers from plastic chemical contamination issues. I know I have not given the issue much thought in the past. The report from the Minderoo-Monaco Commission represents a wake-up call just as multinational fossil-fuel corporations that produce coal, oil and gas and also manufacture plastics are deliberately pivoting from fossil fuel production to making more plastic. As increased renewable energy production erodes fossil fuel use, the fossil fuel industry is looking to increased plastic manufacturing as one of the ways to help maintain a ready market for their global life-support system destroying products.

Ross Conrad is the Author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic approaches to modern apiculture, and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Denney, V., Brosche, S., Strakova, J., Karlsson, T., Ochieng, G., Buonsante, V., Bell, L., Carlini, G., Beeler, B. (2022) An Introduction to plastics and toxic chemicals: How plastics harm human health and the environment and poison the circular economy, International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN)
Landrigan, Philip J., et. al. (2023) The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, Annals of Global Health, 89(1):23 DOI: 10.5334/aogh.4056
Singla, Veena and Tessa Wardle (2022) Recycling Lies: “Chemical Recycling” of Plastic is Just Greenwashing Incineration, Natural Resources Defense Council, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/chemical-recycling-greenwashing-incineration-ib.pdf