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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

From the moment we start our hive inspection, the thrill of searching for the queen consumes us. It’s a grand adventure, a quest for the ages, and the longer we look without success, the more determined we become to find her royal highness. When we come up empty-handed, we can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment and concern for the well-being of the colony. Has she vanished? Will they survive without her?

Yet, the moment we finally lay eyes on our queen, a wave of relief washes over us, and we are reassured that all is right in our little apiary, if not the world at large. The satisfaction of this ultimate discovery is a feeling that never grows old. But let’s ask ourselves: is finding the queen really so vital? For a novice beekeeper, locating one bee among 40-60,000 can seem an impossible task.

Most inspections do not require that we see our queen. Instead, evaluating her laying pattern is often all we need to confirm that all is well. Do we see a sufficient number of eggs, larvae and a good brood pattern of capped over larvae? Once we confirm the brood looks good, there is really no need to spend more time trying to find the queen.

However, there are certain situations when it becomes necessary. For instance, when the queen’s offspring display aggression or she’s producing a subpar brood pattern, it may be time to replace her. We can’t risk introducing a new queen without first finding and removing the old queen. During the Spring season, I typically create one or two splits from each colony, and this involves removing and placing the original queen in the new split to mitigate swarming behavior in the original hive.

While filming a recent YouTube video, I found myself needing to create a split by removing frames of brood and resources, while also relocating the original queen. However, there was one major issue: the hive was extremely aggressive. To describe it aptly, this colony was what beekeepers refer to as “hot”. Unlike other hives that I can manage wearing just a hat and veil, working with this particular hive necessitated the use of a complete bee suit and sting-proof gloves.

In colonies like this, you can limit your time searching for the queen by only looking for her on frames of open brood. Rarely will she be spotted on a frame of nectar, honey or pollen. Once you see one-day-old eggs, standing straight up in cells, the queen is likely to be in close proximity.

Need to find the queen in a hot hive? These tips might come in handy.

1. Wear More Than Enough Protective Gear
This is no time to earn bragging rights of how you work your bees in sandals, shorts and a tank top with no hat or veil. Keeping a defensive colony calm is tricky and if you take one or two stings, the alarm pheromone can attract more stings. The alarm pheromone’s main component is isopentyl acetate, a similar odor found in bananas. Even accidentally smashing a bee can release the alarm pheromone. So, avoid stings by suiting up, and carefully try not to kill any bees.

2. Work Your Defensive Hive Last
If you have several hives that are tolerable, but one is very defensive always work your defensive hive last. If you work it first, these defensive bees will follow you and can attract higher than usual defensive responses from your other colonies. You will want to end your time in the apiary with your defensive colony.

3. Lots of Smoke
Not only do I have my smoker going at 100% capacity, but I have spare burlap smoker fuel in every pocket of my bee suit. Of course, more smoke can keep the queen on the run making her more difficult to find, but there is no choice. These bees respond well to smoke.

4. Work in Slow Motion
Honey bees possess incredible visual capabilities. In fact, a single compound eye of a worker bee contains approximately 6,900 intricate facets or miniature lenses. This remarkable feature allows them to seamlessly integrate mosaic images and effectively detect swift movements. As beekeepers, we can use this knowledge to our advantage by handling the bees more cautiously and minimizing any sudden actions. This becomes an absolute necessity when dealing with a defensive hive.

5. Carry Parts of The Hive Away
When working a very defensive hive and I must continue inspecting 20-30 frames to find the queen, I find it is best to carry one deep hive body twenty feet away. Once I remove it from the hive location and the other hive box, the bees become calmer to work. Moving the boxes apart also prevents the queen from walking up or down into the other hive body.

Finding the queen in a hot hive can be a challenging task, but once located, it brings a sense of satisfaction, especially when it’s time to replace her with a queen that produces gentler offspring. After approximately 45 days, the aggressive bees will perish naturally, making room for a new generation of bees with a more docile temperament. These tips will not only be helpful when working a defensive colony, but can also help every inspection go much better, even in gentle colonies.

If you’d like to watch my YouTube video of this inspection visit: https://www.honeybeesonline.com/davids-youtube-channel

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Beekeeping’s Future

Despite enormous environment challenges facing the honey bee and beekeepers, there are a number of reasons to believe that the beekeeping industry is better able to withstand the uncertain future than other agricultural industries.

By: Ross Conrad

Much has been written and said about the numerous pesticide, pest and pathogen issues beekeepers are wrestling with, as it should be. What has gotten somewhat less attention is the threat that impacts all beekeepers and honey bee colonies everywhere in the world because it threatens everyone, everywhere: the climate crisis. Across the globe, climate-induced temperature extremes, droughts and floods have in some cases had a positive impact on crops. Unfortunately, the general effect of climate destabilization has been an overall reduction of crop yields (IPCC, 2022). Reduced yields lead to increases in hunger, and the resulting malnutrition related diseases, poverty and dislocated populations of climate refugees worldwide.

Climate impacts are predicted to be most severely felt throughout South, Central and much of North America. As well as Africa, Australia and parts of Asia.

Bees sip rather than gulp
To date, beekeeping and honey production has proven itself to be more resilient to climate disruption than other agricultural crops. Of course apiaries can be devastated by floods that wash away hives, or wildfires that turn colonies to ash, but bees handle drought better than other agricultural pursuits. This is because they simply require less water than most crops and livestock.

For example, farmers in Zimbabwe have found that honey production is proving to be relatively stable even while crop production in general has decreased, or in some cases totally failed (Mambondiyani, 2023). This has led to an increase in beekeeping in parts of the African continent. A side benefit from the proliferation of beekeepers is that African apiaries are helping to conserve precious vegetation in arid regions, as villagers avoid cutting trees near apiaries out of fear of the bees.

Diverse forage
One of the reasons beekeeping is proving itself to be more resilient to our changing climate is because bees often forage on wild plants and are not totally dependent on agricultural crops. This is an important trait since feral and native vegetation are often more drought tolerant than cultivated crops. Wild and indigenous plants can make up for decreased foraging opportunities when agricultural crops suffer reduced nectar and pollen production from a lack of water. The wide foraging area that honey bee colonies utilize (over three miles in every direction) helps ensure that any plants within foraging range that do have access to water and are in bloom, will be discovered by the bees.

Modest land requirements
Compared to other agricultural endeavors, beekeeping activities require the least amount of land, so farmers are often able to add honey production to their farm plan without sacrificing space for other crops. Apiaries can also utilize infertile land, or areas otherwise not suitable for other forms of agriculture.

Since beekeeping doesn’t modify or permanently alter the area in which it is carried out, it is fairly easy for an apiculturist who doesn’t own property to find land owners that are happy to provide apiary accommodations on their property. This helps make beekeeping the most accessible of all agricultural efforts, especially in third world countries and among populations with modest incomes since land ownership is not a necessary requirement to keep bees.

The pollination dividend
Through the act of pollination, honey bees increase crop quality and yields, an attribute that often causes landowners to seek out beekeepers willing to place bees on their land. Instead of being accused of stealing from neighboring farms, beekeepers receive praise for the pollination services they provide. The pollination action of bees also helps ensure the presence of wild and native species of plants and trees, which indirectly benefits wildlife as well.

Climate destabilization is making things harder for farmers, especially in arid regions like Africa.

A model of sustainability
Beekeeping is not only proving to be somewhat more resilient in the face of climate destabilization, but it can be part of the climate solution. Depending on how it is carried out, the perennial nature of beekeeping provides the potential to have one of the smallest environmental footprints in all of agriculture (Mujica et al., 2016; Moreira et al., 2019; Pignagnoli et al., 2021). The bees do most of the work. The biggest energy demands of beekeeping are in traveling to and from apiaries or migratory pollination sites. Significant energy is also required for extracting, bottling and processing of honey and beeswax. By keeping beeyards close to the honey house or farm that need pollination services, using renewable energy sources for processing, and non-plastic packaging, many of the negative climate and environmental effects of apiculture can be reduced, if not eliminated.

Since every beekeeping operation is different it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact ecological footprint of beekeeping in general. Much depends of the variety of practices such as feeding regimens, treatment practices, honey yields and shipping and transportation distances used by the beekeeping operation. Migratory beekeeping operations for example have been shown to have greater disease problems and results in bees more likely to have compromised immune systems, all of which increases the need for treatments and expensive inputs (Brosi et al., 2017; Simone-Finstrom et al., 2016; Gordon et al., 2014; Jara et al., 2021). Generally speaking, the ecological footprint of backyard beekeepers is more than three times as small as your standard commercial beekeeping operation (Kendal et al., 2011).

Unlike most agricultural activities, the very nature of the beekeeping business model provides the potential to be more sustainable. Vegetable, grain and fruit farmers typically need to buy new seed, fertilizer and agrochemicals annually, while providing tilling, irrigation and weed control. Beekeeping is a perennial activity. Beekeepers can use the same hives season after season, and as long as they are able to keep their bees alive, the need to purchase expensive inputs on a yearly basis is minimized.

It is easy to focus on all the challenges and fall into a “Woe is me” attitude considering the constant flow of bad news facing our industry. While I am not saying that things are going to be easy, there are plenty of reasons to believe that the future of beekeeping is more secure than other agricultural industries, many of which are profitable only because they are being propped up by government subsidies and taxpayer dollars. Beekeeping has the potential to provide one of the most stable and sustainable agricultural business models during the uncertain climate future that threatens to destabilize much of agriculture as it is practiced today. While beekeepings’ ecological footprint is already better than most other forms of agriculture, we can improve the current carbon footprint of the industry by finding ways to reduce emissions by minimizing transportation and shipping distances of bees, increasing the adoption of stationary beekeeping practices and by localizing, or at least regionalizing our business models.

Many beekeepers initially get involved in this ancient craft out of a concern and desire to benefit the natural world, a world that is rapidly changing and not always for the better. Thankfully, beekeeping appears to be better situated than most of agriculture to weather the unstable and uncertain future that is envisioned. Despite the numerous very real and serious threats to honey bees, there is good reason to think that beekeeping, and therefore honey bees themselves, will continue for as long as the planet’s ecosystem can support it and us.

Ross Conrad is author of Natural Beekeeping: Revised and Expanded, 2nd edition, and The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Brosi, B.J., Deleplane, K.S., Boots, M., De Roode, J.C. (2017) Ecological and evolutionary approaches to managing honey bee disease, Nature Ecology & Evolution, (1)1250-1262
Gordon, R., Schott-Bresolin, N., East, I.J. (2014) Nomadic beekeeper movements create the potential for widespread disease in the honey bee industry, Australian Veterinary Journal, 92:283-290
IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Food, Fiber and Other Ecosystem Products
Jara, L., Ruiz, C., Martin-Hernandez, R., Munoz, I., Higes, M., Serrano, J., De la Rua, P., (2021) The effect of migratory beekeeping on the infestation rate of parasites in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies and on their genetic variability, Microorganisms, 9(22)
Kendall, A., Yuan, J., Brodt, S.B., Kramer, K.J. (2011) Carbon Footprint of U.S. Honey Production and Packaging – Report to the National Honey Board, University of California, Davis, pp 1-23
Mambondiyani, Andrew (2023) Why farmers in Zimbabwe are shifting to bees, Yes!
Moreira, M.T., Cortes, A., Lijo, L., Noya, I., Pineiro, O., Lopez-Carracelas, L., Omil, B., Barral, M.T., Merino, A., Feijoo, G. (2019) Environmental Implications of honey production in the national parks of northwest Spain,
Mujica, M., Blanco, G., Santalla, E. (2016) Carbon footprint of honey produced in Argentina, Journal of Cleaner Production, 116(10): 50-60
Pignagnoli A, Pignedoli S, Carpana E, Costa C, Dal Prà A. (2021) Carbon Footprint of Honey in Different Beekeeping Systems. Sustainability. 13(19):11063. https://doi.org/10.3390/su131911063
Simone-Finstrom, M., Li-Byarlay, H., Huang, M.H., Strand, M.K., Rueppel, O., Tarpy, D.R. (2016) Migratory management and environmental conditions affect lifespan and oxidative stress in honey bees, Scientific Reports, 6(1):32023

Lots of colony losses once again in 2023. There are three words I want you to remember: Varroa, Varroa, Varroa. And disappointingly, the majority of the beekeeping industry is still not using the Honey Bee Health Coalition vetted, accurate and usable Tools for Varroa Management Guide.

Varroa mites and the Varroa Virus legacy will KILL your honey bees.

In order to be a good manager of your honey bee colonies and reduce/stop losses from Varroa/Virus you, the beekeeper, need to be on your ‘game’ and be a Beekeeper not a Bee-haver.

The Honey Bee Health Coalition (HBHC) has the developed the key educational outreach tool for Varroa control titled, Tools for Varroa Management, A Guide to Effective Varroa Sampling & Control. The latest edition can be found at https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/HBHC-Guide_Varroa-Mgmt_8thEd-081622.pdf. It is based on Federal and State registered, legally approved products which require beekeepers to ALWAYS following label directions. This is all you really need to successfully manage for Varroa control in your colonies. To get you started, we will share some overview of what you need to think about and actually do.

In the Tools Guide each product will have the following individual points in a table: Name, Active Ingredient, Formulation, Route of Exposure, Treatment Time/Use Frequency, Time of Year, Registrant-reported Effectiveness, Conditions for Use, Restrictions , Advantages, Disadvantages, Considerations and a link to a Use Video.

Here we are only going to share Name, Active Ingredient and Conditions for Use, to get you started.

INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT (IPM) is a set of proactive, control methods that offer beekeepers the best “whole systems approach” to controlling varroa. See Tools Guide, pages 6-12.

ESSENTIAL OILS
Tools Guide pages 19-20

Name – Apiguard and Thymovar
Active Ingredient – Thymol
Conditions of Use – Temperature range restrictions: Apiguard – above 59°F and below 105°F (15°C to 40°C), Thymovar: above 59°F and below 85°F (15°C to 30°C).

Name – ApiLife Var
Active Ingredients – Thymol (74.09%), Oil of Eucalyptus (16%), Menthol (3.73%) = camphor ( essential oil)
Conditions of Use – Divide wafer into four pieces and place each piece in a corner of the hive on the top bars. Use between 65°F and 95°F (18°C to 35°C). Ineffective below 45°F (8°C).

NON-CHEMICAL / CULTURAL CONTROLS
Tools Guide pages 26-30

Name – Screen Bottom Board
Conditions for Use – Replace hive bottom; leave space below for trash (‘garbage pit’).

Name – Sanitation (bee biosecurity) comb management
Conditions for Use – Possible negative effect on bee population if five or more combs are moved at one time.

Name – Drone Brood Removal (Drone Trapping Varroa)
Conditions of Use – Only applicable during population increase and peak population when colonies are actively rearing drones.

Name – Brood Interruption
Conditions of Use – Need a queen or queen cell for each split or division created.

Name – Requeening (Ideally with varroa resistant stock)
Conditions of Use – Works best with proper queen introduction methods.

SYNTHETIC CHEMICALS
Tools Guide pages 16-18

Name – Apivar
Active Ingredient – Amitraz (formadine acaricide/insecticide)
Conditions for Use – Place one Apivar strip per five frames of bees. Place strips near cluster or if brood is present, in the center of the brood nest. Only use Apivar in brood boxes where honey for human consumption is NOT being produced.

Name – Apistan
Active Ingredient – Tau-fluvalinate (pyrethroid ester acaracide/insecticide)
Conditions for Use – Temperatures must be above 50°F (10°C). Do not use during nectar flow.

Name – Checkmite
Active Ingredient – Coumaphos (organothiophosphate acaracide/insecticide)
Conditions for Use – Wait two weeks after use before supering.

ACIDS
Tools Guide pages 21-25

Name – Mite-Away Quick Strips
Active Ingredient – Formic Acid (organic acid)
Conditions of Use – Full dose (two strips for seven days) or single strip (seven-day interval then single new strip for an additional seven days) per single or double brood chamber of standard Langstroth equipment.

Name – Formic Pro
Active Ingredient – Formic acid (organic acid)
Conditions of Use – Both treatment options can be applied per single or double brood chamber of standard Langstroth equipment or equivalent hive or equivalent hive with a cluster covering a minimum of six frames. There should be a strip touching each top bar containing brood. Use when outside day temperature is 50°F to 85°F (10°C to 29.5°C)

Name – 65% formic acid
Active Ingredient – Formic acid 65%
Conditions of Use – Use when outside temperatures are between 50°F to 86°F (10°C to 30°C) and leave hive entrances fully open

Name – Oxalic Acid / Api-Bioxal
Active Ingredient – Oxalic acid dihydrate (organic acid)
Conditions of Use – Mix 35 grams (approximately 2.3 tablespoons) of oxalic acid into one liter of 1:1 sugar syrup. With a syringe trickle five milliliters of this solution directly onto the bee in each occupied bee space in each brood box; Maximum 50ml per colony of oxalic acid in sugar syrup; fumigation of two grams per hive in Canada and one gram per hive box in the U.S.; follow label and vaporizer directions.

Name – HopGuard 3
Active Ingredient – Potassium salt (16%) of hops beta acids (organic acid)
Conditions of Use – Corrosive—use appropriate clothing and eye protection. Might stain clothing and gloves.

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Found in Translation

Teaching Bees New Tricks

By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

Bees have innate (think ‘robo-bee’) and learned (‘show me, sister’) behaviors. Recent work with bees has explored the boundaries of these two forms. While it is dangerous to put our own biases on animal behaviors, the complex behaviors measured seem to include ‘play’, ‘puzzling’ and ‘dancing’. Oh yeah, and they can count as well, even showing an awareness of ‘zero’ things, but that was yesteryear’s news from Scarlett Howard and colleagues (Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees, 2018, Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4975).

What is fascinating about work coming out just this year is that not only do bees show complex behaviors, but they seem to get better at those behaviors by watching their nestmates. Bee dances will be familiar to most beekeepers and students of animal behavior. Successful foragers often tell their sisters where the good stuff is after finishing their foraging flights. Specifically, foragers signal both direction and distance to flower sources using the waggle dance. True to its name, and shown graphically to the right, this dance involves a bee streaking across the comb and shaking its abdomen for the edification of sister foragers. The angle of this dance on a vertical patch of comb signals the direction of a good food source relative to the current position of the sun relative to the hive. The length of each dance streak provides an estimate of the distance to flower patches (or to sugar baits planted by curious naturalists). By repeatedly dancing, they drum up interest and lead future foragers to a better understanding of how far they might have to fly to get these rewards. The discovery of this dance language is decades old, and justified a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for Austrian bee researcher Karl von Frisch. The recent work ups the game by showing that much of this behavior is learned by watching older, more precise, dancers.

Shihao Dong and colleagues set out to study Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees (2023, Science, DOI:10.1126/science.ade1702). Specifically, they judged the dancing skills of self-starters relative to those of bees that were mentored by older, experienced, dancers. To produce a swarm of naïve dancers, they established colonies comprised solely of like-aged bees, so that all bees reached foraging age together and were therefore less likely to benefit from matching the skills of a senior dancer. Bees from these ‘Animal Farm’ colonies were compared to marked bees of the same age which had grown up gazing at the dances of experienced dancers in colonies with a typical age profile. Naïve bees consistently over-stated the distance they had flown to flowers, in effect telling nestmates to fly right past suitable food sources. They also showed more ‘Dance Disorder’ than both older bees and bees that had been exposed to older dancers. Dance accuracy for all dancers improved over time, it just improved much more quickly when bees had older mentors to watch. So what is the lesson here for beekeepers? No, you can’t force your teenager to watch you dance and expect them to get it, but you CAN see how bees in colonies with an abnormal age structure, thanks to rapid premature death of foragers, might continue to slide by spending unnecessary time looking for food. Long-lived bees are those free of chemical stress, raised with adequate protein nutrition, and arguably bees that have avoided mites and other disease. When you protect your bees from these stresses, just think of how their dance lives will improve.

In a study that, for me, deserved two SMH’s, bees were trained to take on puzzle behaviors, or behaviors that simply don’t present themselves to bees when scientists aren’t around. Working with bumble bees, Alice Bridges and colleagues first taught their bees to open small food boxes by pushing on colored (red or blue) tabs. This a behavior I am not sure I could teach my dog, but she is a bit slow. They then checked to see if bees could follow the lead of a nestmate who had already figured out the box trick. While self-learners emerged in the control colonies sometimes got the knack for opening boxes, bees who observed a nestmate open a box were more likely to successfully mimic that behavior. Over time, bees with a teacher opened more boxes, faster, and were rewarded with more sugar treats. Honey bees and some other bee species are known to spontaneously ‘rob’ flowers by chewing directly into nectar pools when those pools are too deep in the flower for their tongues to reach. It would be neat to see if such nectar robbing is also a learned trait, passed on by adventurous foragers who had to learn the trait the hard way. If so, can such teachers target their lessons to their nestmate sisters?

All of these studies push the known boundaries for bee awareness and behavior, showing all the more how lucky we are to have formed bonds with honey bees and other insects. Clever behavioral scientists will no doubt continue to discover profound, and maybe a bit unsettling, awareness by insects. This awareness is likely to be most evident in the highly social honey bees and bumble bees. What’s next, spelling bees? Stay tuned. In the meantime, get out, find a friend and improve your dancing.

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Honey Bee Cannibalism

And some other quirks of our beloved bees

By: James E. Tew

I don’t know how to start this conversation
A question came to me that found me unprepared and uneducated on the queried subject. This is not an uncommon situation for me. I have an abundance of bee questions for which I have no answer, but my interest in this question lingered far beyond its derived answer.

Becca F., a beekeeper friend from north Florida, phoned to ask me, “Why are some of the bees in one of my colonies eating some of its brood?” The colony in question was from a cut-out (A “cut-out” is a colony that originated when a beekeeper relocated it from a natural nest site, such as a hollow tree or the wall of a house, to standard hive equipment.)  from late last season. Other than some destroyed brood, all other biological characteristics of the colony seemed in good order. You should know that, at the time of the phone call, the 2023 Spring season was well underway in Becca’s area.

From nearly nine-hundred miles away, I really could not say what was causing this disappointing behavior in her distant colony, but I felt that we could, at least, narrow the possible reasons. Narrowing the issue is not the same as answering the issue. If there is a food shortage (probably protein) or if a perceived pathogen is present, I surmised that nurse bees sometimes eat larval brood. I proffered a guess that if all other brood stages seemed healthy, and copious food stores were present, and a pollen and nectar flow was still yet to come, this mysterious issue would most likely resolve itself.

Figure 1. Small Hive Beetles, the cause of brood destruction.

Indeed, it did. Apparently, a Small Hive Beetle (SHB) population had grown within the colony to the extent that some of the bee brood was damaged. Selected bees were striving to regain control of the situation and were eliminating damaged or dead brood. Providing some beetle traps and some microfiber cloths seemed to help the bees regain control in the afflicted colony.

From afar, I was able to do nothing that was helpful. The beekeeper and the bees had seemingly won this battle, but the situation lingered in my thoughts. That some of the bees from one of Becca’s colonies was actually killing and eating some of its brood was a curiosity that stayed with me. Such cannibalism is documented colony behavior in the beekeeping literature. You and I both know that fact, but exactly how does it work? When and why does it work?

Through the decades
Through the passing decades, many times I have alluded to the fact that bees will, at times, “eat” some of their young. With superficial confidence, I have told audiences that these cannibalistic bees are selecting older larvae first. Why? Older larvae are the colony’s major food consumers. Younger larvae seemingly would be on the short list and would be consumed as the older larvae were eliminated. Honey bee eggs will have not yet become food consumers and developing pupae have already completed the eating stage. They are reasonably safe. However, larval stages would be in serious trouble if food stores were stressed.

For hygienic reasons, bees will also remove diseased brood from the colony. At this point, I have few answers, but many questions. Will nurse bees intentionally consume the larval contents as they dispose of their diseased brood? If so, are they re-purposing the larvae’s fluid contents as food or are they removing the contents to expedite getting the dead brood member to the colony entrance? Or both? I have more comments on this concept later in this piece.

Mature honey bees
Let’s just get this out of the way. I cannot recall of an instance where it was documented that an adult bee consumed another adult honey bee. Maybe – and completely hypothetically – I suppose that under specific undocumented situations, if a nectar-ladened worker was killed (i.e., crushed, mashed or just died) and the contents of her honey crop was somehow available, that sweetness could be of interest to other living house bees.

Yes, that scenario is a wildcard, but a scenario like that one is the only incident in which I can envision an adult bee having an interest in cannibalistically eating some of the contents of another adult bee. So again, adult honey bees do not see other adult bees as a food supply.

Maybe for another time, and on a different subject, birds, toads, spiders and other insects certainly do view adult honey bees as food sources. Adult honey bees are readily eaten by these animal species.

Laying workers
When lauding the productivity of a beautiful queen, I have sometimes stated to audiences that, “Nurse bees will police any defective or incorrectly placed brood by eating/removing it.” In effect, this has the effect of making the queen’s output look very good because the workers corrected her mistakes. Well, in a way, she is good at her genetic job, because her offspring had that innate ability. But what about defective queens or even laying workers?

Though I feel a bit shaken, I still support the concept that healthy workers will eat/remove laying worker eggs when they find one. Just exactly how the worker perceives the defective egg is far beyond my knowledge. But I again write that I have lost some of my nerve. Are the workers eating the haploid egg or only removing it? I have been told, and I have re-stated to others, that viable workers truly eat the defective egg.

Indeed, I have read, and subsequently repeated to others, that to a greater or lesser extent, laying worker eggs are commonly found even in healthy colonies – especially when the brood and adult population are high and healthy queen pheromone levels are stretched across the large population. During those times, viable adult workers are constantly removing these sly, worker-laid eggs. Then again, I would boldly say to an audience, “They eat them.”

Whereas, I was once confident in this statement, I have recently grown more reticent. In my fifty plus years of beekeeping, I have never seen an egg anywhere but in a cell. Are these undesirable eggs really being eaten or did I simply not notice a tiny, white egg laying outside on the landing board as it was being discarded? I don’t know. Maybe I just missed it. I will try to be more observant.

Immature queens and drones
I feel that you and I could agree that immature queens and drones are “eliminated” when they are no longer needed. Queen cells are frequently torn down and contents removed if such cells are unneeded.

Figure 2. Dismembered drones at the colony entrance.

As have you, I have seen partially dismembered drones that were being removed from cells. Were they dismembered to ease the removal process or were juices and cellular fluids consumed? I don’t know. I offer this thought at this point; I dangerously assume that liquid contents would be eaten – if for no other reason that nest cleanliness.

Hygienic behavior
Where would honey bees be without this cleanliness behavior? Queen breeders select for this attribute. Scientific careers have been built on this concept. We wish all our queen stocks exhibited this characteristic. But there are instances when the process turns negative for both the bees and their keepers.

For instance, while removing infected brood, nurse bees’ brood food glands may become contaminated with bacterial spores of American foulbrood (AFB). Those nurse bee carriers then feed susceptible young larvae along with pathogenic bacterial spores that perpetuates AFB within the colony’s young brood population. In many presentations, I considered it humorous to tell audiences that nurse bees did not have small stainless-steel buckets and cleaning cloths. Therefore, the only way they could remove the diseased larval debris was to eat it. In retrospect, this may not have been as funny as I thought.

There is abundant published literature (2Posada-Florez, F., Lamas, Z.S., Hawthorne, D.J. et al. Pupal cannibalism by worker honey bees contributes to the spread of deformed wing virus. Sci Rep 11, 8989 (2021). https://rdcu.be/c8o25) that explains how hygienic cleaning spreads deformed wing virus. At this point, I am left with nothing to write. If the colony does not keep itself immaculate, the viral disease spreads. If it cleans itself and keeps colony conditions immaculate, the viral disease spreads. This is a true conundrum.

This spread occurs because bees are in direct contact with virus particles as they clean/eat the diseased brood. I sense that the best solution is to prevent varroa-vectored viruses from gaining a hold in the colony; therefore, the alert beekeeper should constantly suppress varroa populations. At this point, I am forced to admit that if I don’t manage varroa first, I will have much greater problems managing my bees later. This too, is a topic for another time.

Seasonal adjustments
It’s harsh. As humans, we are nearly unable to tolerate the concept, but to bees, brood is potentially food in a form other than bee bread or honey. At this moment, as I write for you, my Spring season is just beginning. Maple is in bloom as are other early season food sources. So, of course, the weather swings between being nice and warm to absolutely wintry.

If my bees have been on time, there is a significant brood population being developed within my colonies. Suddenly, due to cold weather returning, there is no pollen coming in. Not only must the brood be fed, but it be kept warm. What should nurse bees do? It seems that they heartlessly cut their losses. If they perceive that protein is in critically short supply, they stop feeding the oldest larvae, consume them to re-purpose their body fluids to power their nurse bee brood-food glands, and await the restart of the seasonal pollen flow. Such seasonal fluctuations occur everywhere, not just cold climates.

During serious dearths, using brood as food is a brutal but logical thing to do. Could it then be written that bees’ diet is honey, pollen and in trying times, its own bee brood? Yes, this seems harsh to human beekeepers.

Honey bees eating process
Through the years, I have spent significant time trying to understand the “chewing-lapping” mouthparts system that bees use to consume their food. While I think I understand the basics, I readily admit that I do not grasp the finer details of this complicated process. Lacking typical chewing jaws and essentially only consuming a liquid diet, how do bees actually eat a larva? Indeed, how does a bee eat pollen or anything else solid?

Figure 3. The complex honey bee mouthparts (Snodgrass)

While searching a plethora of complex literature on honey bee mouthparts, I stumbled across a very old pamphlet from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections by N.E. McIndoo (3McIndoo, N.E. 1906. The sense organs on the mouthparts of the Honey Bee. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collection, Vol 65, No. 14. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/23540/SMC_65_McIndoo_1916_14_1-55.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y). This author reported that bees, using enzymatically reducing saliva, convert some solids to liquid forms thereby allowing the bees to “drink” the heretofore solids. Alternatively, if the solids are small enough, other supporting mouthparts, “in crane-like fashion” lift the small particles to the bee’s mouth where they are subsequently swallowed. For the hyper-interested reader, in clearer description, this bit of information was deeply buried in the fifty-five-page document and can be found on pages 39-41.

An aside…
Through the years, I have admonished honey bee enthusiasts to understand and respect all insect and animal life – not just honey bees. All species have some astonishing characteristics and abilities that seemingly make them stand above their other animal peers. Ergo, honey bees are amazing, but so are many other animal species. But I want to get sappy for a bit. The function and complexity of honey bee mouth parts astound me. Admittedly, I am not a honey bee anatomist, so I struggle to understand this complex system that honey bees whimsically use. I suggest that these hidden mouth parts and their functions are every bit as elegant as the dance language behavior and orienting capabilities of honey bees. In my opinion, bees’ mouthparts deserve more respect than they have gotten.

So, are honey bees vegetarian?
Under dire conditions, some bees will eat some of the colony’s developing brood. Can we agree on that point? If that is true, then can it be stated that honey bees are vegetarians? Maybe not. In fact, things are even more complicated. When bees gather and store pollen, they also collect microbes that live on and in pollen4. Those microscopic animals are also eaten by bees. Some researchers feel that this “meat” is an important overlooked food nutrient for honey bees. As you would expect, this is causing some consternation within scientific circles, but the concept seems to have a toehold at this time. So, are honey bees truly vegetarian? Maybe not.

Just one more thing – robbing behavior
I am out of space, but just one more thing. If robbing bees are maniacal for any food from anywhere, why do they not murder all the larvae in the colony being robbed and imbibe their body fluids? Do they? Honestly, I have never looked. Those large larvae are certainly a potential food source in the weakened colony.

As you know, a robbing episode is NOT the best time to pull all brood frames out of the robbed colony to have a look at whether larvae have been killed, but maybe I should have a look just one time. Please let me know if you see something in your robbed colonies.

Thank you.
To Becca and her bees, I offer a thank you for spurring me to think. To the readers who struggled through this piece, I thank you for your time and dedication to our bees.

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

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

Successful beekeepers track numbers throughout their colonies and apiaries over time. Knowing varroa mite loads might help explain colony death. Honey production yields can reflect habitat quality around your apiaries. Photo credit: Rebecca Masterman

Managing bees is kind of a numbers game. Not in the illegal gambling sense, but instead in the measuring bee health and business sense. New beekeepers are warned about the importance of counting varroa mite numbers in their colonies and hear stories about high percentages of colony loss. Long time beekeepers and many commercial operations remember stories of high honey yields and market prices that are impacted by imports. Whether you are new to beekeeping or a long-time participant, keeping track of key numbers could be good for you, the bees and beekeeping.

It has been said often that beekeeping is local, so your beekeeping numbers should be too. Honey yields per colony vary greatly from state to state (and apiary to apiary within a state and hive to hive within an apiary) as do the pounds of honey that bees need to get through Winter or dearth periods. Tracking key numbers within your state each year can serve as a bee health conversation starter. Let’s hope that the conversations continue each year and are about lower colony losses and higher honey yields.

Here are some numbers that we think are important.

Varroa Mite Loads
Let’s get the mite talk out of the way and address it right away. Varroa mites and the viruses they vector are still one of the greatest threats to the health of your honey bee colonies. Successful beekeepers keep on top of the latest management recommendations and know the threshold where intervention is key to maintaining healthy bees. This threshold might be different than what you think and the threshold changes depending on the time of year. Monitoring mite loads is important. Keeping up on the latest research-based recommendations is also critical to successful beekeeping as your management will change over the years as the threats to your bees change (anyone remember tracheal mites?). This excellent update from the Bee Informed Partnership will bring you up to date on mites as well as provide a link to the latest free edition of Tools for Varroa Management from the Honey Bee Health Coalition. While you are there, we suggest signing up for updates from the Bee Informed Partnership (https://beeinformed.org/2023/03/01/the-importance-of-spring-mite-loads).

Colony Loss Data
Let’s also get the colony loss data out of the way. Following significant colony losses across the U.S. in 2006, the Bee Informed Partnership has been tracking colony losses across the U.S. You can contribute to the survey each year in April by reporting your losses. Reported loss data by states is available all the way back to 2008 (https://research.beeinformed.org/loss-map/).

Honey Market Numbers
The National Honey Board compiles honey data from multiple sources on their website and you can easily spend some time looking at the numbers (https://honey.com/honey-industry/market-overview). For a monthly regional report, Bee Culture’s detailed guide will provide everything you need to know (https://www.beeculture.com/monthly-regional-honey-price-report/).

Honey Yields
If you want to explore your state honey data, the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service has a searchable database for all things honey and bees, including reported honey yield per colony. You can search national as well as state data across more than 30 years (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/).

Measuring available habitat for your bees is difficult but doing so might inspire others to increase floral resources for pollinators. These bees are enjoying the blooming mountain mint planted in the apiary. Photo credit: Rebecca Masterman

Because honey bees are managed pollinators, it is easier to track the numbers described before. One other number that is more difficult to track, yet very important, when talking about honey bee health is Acres of Pollinator Habitat.

How much pollinator habitat is available for bees in your state? It is a difficult number to track as counting the flowers on trees, shrubs, prairies, conservation land, cover crops and more (bee lawns, gardens, roadside habitat, etc.) is not easy, but we love those who are trying to do just that. Please visit Homegrown National Park’s website and spend some time appreciating their efforts to support grassroots conservation with a way for all of us to map our native plantings (https://map.homegrownnationalpark.org/Dashboard/Country).

Becky Masterman led the UMN Bee Squad from 2013-2019. Bridget Mendel joined the Bee Squad in 2013 and has led the program since 2020. Photos of Becky (left) and Bridget (right) looking for their respective hives. If you would like to contact the authors with your number stories or thoughts, please send an email to mindingyourbeesandcues@gmail.com.

Knowing the status of food for your bees is important. Beekeepers usually work backwards, as they place their bees and measure the honey. If honey production is low (compare yours to the average honey yield), then it is possible that there are not adequate resources for your bees. If honey production is high, then you are in luck. If you planted flowers specifically for your bees to make honey on, then it isn’t luck, but good planning.

Should we be measuring some of the pollinator habitat in our states? We think it is a great idea and good to know if the numbers are going up or down. Some numbers, like acres planted in CP42 Pollinator Mix in the Conservation Reserve Program are being measured. Is it possible for state or federal agencies to keep track of the habitat they have installed without too much of a record-keeping burden? We don’t know but think we should ask.

Acknowledgments and suggestions:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Marla Spivak for helpful edits and suggestions.

As late Spring moves into Summer and the bee numbers in the hive begin to increase, it is not unusual to have a hive release a swarm. I have seen swarms in our area of SE Michigan begin in mid-May and continue as late as late August. The most frequent occurrence of swarms seems to occur from early June to late July. During my first few years of beekeeping, I would have insisted that these swarms were not coming from my hives. As I have become more aware of the causes for swarming I now believe that in those early years that at least some of the swarms I was catching did indeed come from my hives. But what would cause this natural tendency to swarm and how can it be minimized? The most probable cause for a hive to swarm is overcrowding. Although I knew some of my earlier year hives were strong and felt they had not swarmed, I have now changed my opinion on this point. Just because there still seem to be a lot of bees in the hive after a swarm is not a good indication that the hive did not swarm. An overcrowded hive after a swarm may look, to the new beekeeper, very similar to the pre-swarmed hive even though ⅓ to ½ of the hive may have departed. If a hive is not examined the day before and the day after a swarm it will be very hard to tell if the hive has swarmed. As the hive begins its late Spring and early Summer build-up it experiences a large population increase. By late June or early July, this huge increase may be the precursor to a swarm. If something is not done to preclude this there could be a loss of a significant honey crop later in the season. This is because it has been found that up to 75% of the hive foragers may leave with the swarm. This large decrease in the bees that have reached the forager stage leaves most of the new bees to still go through the nurse bee and internal hive job stages before becoming foragers. This makes sense, since the swarm needs foragers to supply the nectar needs and comb building of a new hive while the bees remaining in the original hive serve as nurse and house bees to support the care of newly emerging bees before becoming foragers. I once had the privilege/misfortune to watch a swarm emanate from a hive and it is an exhilarating and exciting sight to see and at the same time very disappointing. I was about to inspect my hives around 11:30 in the morning. As I was inspecting my most western hive, there seemed to be a lot of activity at the hive entrance of the next hive over. I initially chalked this up to orientation flights as these also exhibit a lot of activity in front of the hive for a short time. But suddenly there was a massive exodus of bees from that next hive as wave after wave of bees marched out the reduced hive entrance and circled around the calm air in a thirty to forty foot circle in front of my hives. After about ten to fifteen minutes the bees coalesced into about a five to six foot diameter circle and departed to the south about ten to twelve feet off the ground never to be seen again. I checked the hive and there were still many bees present. Had I not seen the swarm depart with my own eyes, I would have been none the wiser that this hive had swarmed. It was then I realized some of my earlier year swarms may have been from my own hives. The propensity to swarm is not to be viewed as a bad thing as it indicates the hive was strong to begin with. Hopefully, it will regain its strength as it rebuilds, although this can be a time consuming process. Before I get into some steps that can mitigate a swarm, there are a few other conditions that may be reasons for swarming.

A captured swarm from a backyard pine tree began my beekeeping adventure with no previous knowledge or equipment.

Reasons for Swarming
In addition to the crowding previously mentioned, swarming may also occur due to a heavy mite infestation. As the bee population increases, the potential for mite increase is also present due to the availability of many more capped brood cells in which to reproduce. If the mite population gets out of hand, the bees could decide to swarm to find a better location only taking the phoretic mites with them. Phoretic mites are those riding around on the bee’s backs or thoraxes. Mites in un-emerged cells will be left behind in the hive. Not initiating some type of mite mitigating protocol on one’s hives is the greatest reason for hive losses. Likewise, some method of mite treatment management should take place with a captured swarm to assist the success of that swam in becoming a productive hive.

As mentioned before, not enough space can be a reason for swarming. This is not only true for the crowded double deep hive, but can also happen in as small as a three frame nuc. Small three to five frame nucs need to be watched much more carefully and given added space sooner to preclude the possibility of all frames being filled with nectar and brood almost requiring the nuc to swarm if there is not enough room for more eggs and brood or honey storage space. Over time, brood frames become old and minimally smaller with the pupae cocoons of repeatedly raised new brood in those cells. Additionally, those continually reused cells may retain slight bits of the agrochemicals used in pesticides, which leads to near universal contamination of beeswax in the bee colony. Wax contaminated with these pesticides negatively affects the reproductive quality of queens, drones and the overall quality of worker bees. When the bee’s tolerance of the contaminants in the reused wax brood cells exceeds an unknown threshold the bees may decide to swarm. Therefore, it is a good idea to replace old brood foundation with new frames on a regular basis. I have read that every four to five years is a good time allowance for replacing brood frames but have also seen some respected beekeeper researchers let this reach to an eight to ten year replacement cycle.

Another reason for swarming is the internal hive climate. If the temperature is continually getting too hot or the bees do not have the capability to provide proper ventilation, this may also induce swarming. The bees spend a great deal of effort keeping the internal humidity and temperature at the ideal state around the queen, brood and nectar stores. If drainage or ventilation needs become too severe the bees could decide to swarm.

Yet another reason for the hive to swarm is that there is a problem with the current queen. She may simply have exhausted her ability to lay or fertilize eggs and the hive senses it is time to move on with a new queen.

One final reason for swarming is that it is a natural tendency for all living things to have a propensity for procreation. The simple desire to continue ones genetic stock in future generations can best be accomplished by Apis mellifera with swarming. This inherent drive is almost impossible to identify in order to preclude a swarm by even more experienced beekeepers.

A swarm in flight getting ready to depart the hive area.

Swarming Symptoms
There are a few things the beekeeper can look for in hive inspections that may indicate a precursor to a hive’s potential for swarming. That first, late Spring hive inspection becomes very important in determining a hive’s swarm probability. We all hope for a strong cluster to survive the Winter and become a thriving hive as the first nectar flow begins. If within a month of that first strong hive inspection and there are more than five to seven frames of brood in a double deep Langstroth hive, then it is most likely time to do something to manage that hive. I have found that adding another brood deep or honey super when all but the last frame or two are filled results in a less likely potential for swarming with first time overwintered hives.

The presence of open, unused queen cups along the bottom of frames is normally nothing to be concerned about. These are usually only present for an emergency response if needed. But if those cells become fully developed queen cells, or start to contain larva, the hive may already have decided to swarm.

Significantly reduced activity can be a sign of potential swarming as bees are not bringing much into the hive. This can be hard to ascertain by the new beekeeper and may be caused by lack of space for more nectar or pollen brought into the hive. I find I often need to remove a frame or two of older pollen filled frames as there is such a wealth of pollen sources here in SE Michigan. Often, more frames than needed become nearly saturated with pollen using up valuable space for more brood or nectar stores.

Another indication that a hive is getting ready to swarm is that the hive has had no weight gain in a week or so period. I have to admit that I do not monitor my hive’s weights until the early Winter weight check, if at all. But research has shown that if a hive does not gain much weight during a nectar flow week, it is almost a sure sign of swarm preparation to come. As I became more experienced as a beekeeper, I found that more careful monitoring of my hives could give a good indication of swarming potential. From there I have found that splitting a strong hive early on is the best way to avoid the swarming instinct. In a previous article, I went into the elements of how to split a hive so I will not repeat those steps here.

Mitigating a Swarm
There is a lot written about removing queen cups to preclude the swarming instinct. The thing to remember is that by removing queen cups you are not changing the bee’s instinct to swarm if it already exists. The bees can build new queen cups in a matter of days so removal must be a continual process every two to three days, not an objective most beekeepers prefer to try. The destruction of queen cells has never proven to be a successful method of swarm control. I have seen eggs laid in cells for worker bees that appear to be only ⅓ of their final size. The bees continue to build the cells even as the egg and larva begin to grow. The bees may use this same technique for new queen cells and if an unfound queen cell that was missed emerges the hive may swarm earlier in the normal development of the replacement queen. Destroying queen cells on a second try runs the risk of early swarming and no new queen left for the remaining hive to develop. This could also result in the initial swarm being even larger than if you had not interfered with the removal of queen cells.

The best way to curtail the possibility of swarms is to do a split as soon as a hive is perceived to have swarm characteristics or seems strong enough for a split. A split is actually akin to creating an artificial swarm and the best known way to minimize the possibility of swarming. If developed queen cells or queen cups containing larva are found, these are perfect frames to move to starter nucleus (nuc) hives. A year ago, I split all six of my hives that came through Winter in a strong state with plenty of bees in each. That is the first time that I did not see or catch any swarms during that following Summer. Even if the hobby beekeeper does not desire to increase their hive count with splits, there is plenty of interest among new beekeepers to purchase nuc hives. Or the beekeeper could marry the queenless part of a split to another weaker hive in the apiary.

The swarm gathers around the queen in or on a bucket.

Capturing a Swarm
The capture of a swarm may be as simple as shaking them into a hive from a hanging branch or have the complexity of extracting them from an enclosed building cavity. When a queen leaves a hive with a swarm she usually will land within 100 feet or so of the originating hive. Most of my early swarm catches have been within several 100 feet of my own hives. This might be an indication that they were coming from my hives. Although six large swarms within about two weeks coming from the only two hives I had one Summer seems a bit implausible.

Bees surround the queen to keep her warm, dry and safe until scouts find a new location for their new home. This could be any sort of building or tree hollow that the scouts agree upon. Although a swarm can be intimidating in appearance, they have engorged themselves on honey before leaving the hive and have no eggs, brood or stores to protect. As a result the swarm is relatively unlikely to sting and can be quite docile. The one reason bees tend to sting is if some are getting squeezed or feel threatened. The swarm may move off in a matter of hours or stay in the initial swarm location for several days depending on weather and how soon the scouts find a new home. So it is wise to capture a swarm as soon as possible to avoid their eminent departure.

The steps to capture a swarm are relatively easy. It is advisable to wear a bee suit and veil as the disturbance of the swarm may be enough to make them feel threatened. You will need some sort of container for transport, if it is not convenient to drop them directly into a new hive. A five gallon bucket will work well, particularly if it has a ventilation screen on the top or a cardboard box with ventilation screened holes in a few spots works equally as well. Once the container is under the bee swarm, a quick shake will drop nearly all into the container. I have seen a five gallon bucket fastened on the bottom of a ten foot pole that was used to reach a swarm a bit higher in a tree. Shaking the branch caused most bees to drop into the bucket. If they are on a non-shakable surface a bee brush may be necessary to gently sweep them into the container. Some beekeepers like to spread a bedsheet or tarp under the spot where the bees will drop to better contain those falling outside the container. If the queen fell into the container, most of the remaining bees will join her. If she has not gotten into the container, the bees will return to her and reform a new cluster around her location following her queen pheromones. You will need to give them a little time to resettle down after which the process can be attempted again. If able, leave the container sit until nightfall or dusk to give the remaining bees time to congregate in and around the container. After dark, the bees will have settled down and the ventilated container can be closed and taken to the new hive location. Within a day, they should be moved into their new hive. If you are not interested in capturing a swarm there are eager beekeepers that can likely be contacted through local clubs, government Ag or environmental agencies who will come to get the bees. Feral swarms are most desirable because they are genetically suited to the local area and tend to be less disease prone than those raised in the hundreds by commercial apiaries which are shipped as packages to beekeepers.

A ten frame deep on a barn mounted platform used as a swarm trap just prior to strap down.

A 40 liter swarm trap mounted on a barn stand just prior to strap down.

Swarm Traps
I have made it a practice to set out a swarm trap or two early in each season of beekeeping. I have attached two hive stands to the rear of a hip roof barn at about eight feet off the ground. A bit higher would be nice but that is the height of an inner beam that made a good attachment point. Nearly every Summer, I have had a swarm move into one of these traps. On occasion, I have simply set a single ten frame deep hive on a stand and occasionally a swarm moves into it. I think the empty drawn comb frames inside are a good draw for the swarm. My homemade swarm traps hold five deep frames with another five or six inch open space below the frames. Research has shown that 40 liters of space seems to be the ideal to draw in a swarm. The open space below, along with the five frames, works out to almost exactly 40 liters. In addition to the five drawn comb frames, I will add a plastic perforated baggy at the bottom with an inner paper towel that had some lemongrass essential oil drops added to it.

The plastic baggy is perforated in a dozen spots by poking a sewing needle through the baggy. Only a few drops are necessary and this seems to attract bees that are in a swarm state. My most unusual swarm catch occurred one Summer when I failed to remove an empty hive to storage. Sitting in the middle of my row of hives I had left it there for the other bees to clean out, a small bit of the remaining honey still inside. Every so often I checked it to see that no hive beetles or wax moths had moved in, but always failed to move it to storage. One day, I noticed bees carrying pollen into the hive which I thought a bit unusual for an empty hive. Come to find out, the bees coming and going, which I thought were just gathering the remaining honey, were actually a swarm that had moved in with a new queen that was laying a nice pattern of eggs and already had larva in surrounding comb. Nothing seemed to be missing from any of my other hives. That hive is now coming into its third year and still seems strong.

So, by managing your strong overwintered hives with splits and observance, you may be able to avoid losing much of your bee population to swarms. Use an increase in hive space and/or splits as a swarm management tool to increase your hive count and/or nuc resources for personal use or sell-able nucs. Your swarm experience could vary based on your conditions, environment or state of your overwintered hives.

In 2008, I began making beekeeping videos on YouTube. At first, it was only a way for me to share what I was learning. Over the years, I have learned to enjoy sharing beekeeping especially with new beginners and one way is by helping beekeepers learn to enjoy inspecting their bees. Over the years I have gathered a wealth of knowledge on the common difficulties, mistakes and inquiries that beekeepers encounter during hive inspections. I’ve taken this information and have simplified key elements to a productive hive inspection.

1. Plan the Frequency of Your Inspections
Typically, inspecting your bees twice a month is sufficient, with one of these inspections being brief and focused on specific aspects, such as the queen’s productivity and the need for additional space. This focused inspection should take no more than ten minutes. The second inspection can be conducted two weeks later, during which you can devote more time to observing potential issues. By striking the right balance and tailoring your inspections to the needs of your hive, you can ensure the health and productivity of your bees without causing undue stress or harm.

2. Bring Focus & Specifics to Each Inspection: The Brief Inspection
To ensure an efficient and productive hive inspection, it is crucial to have a well-defined plan in place. Instead of attempting to inspect all twenty or thirty frames, identify specific elements to focus on during an inspection. For instance, you may prioritize a mite inspection or assess your queen’s productivity. This allows you to streamline your inspection and reduce its duration significantly. Not only will this approach be more enjoyable for you, but it will also be less disruptive for your bees. Ultimately, having a clear plan and defined objectives for each inspection can save you time and effort, while helping you achieve the desired outcomes.

Another single focus inspection may be to evaluate the need to add boxes. It’s crucial to assess whether the colony has sufficient room to expand and grow. As a rule of thumb, when one box is filled with five to seven frames of drawn comb, it’s time to add the next brood box or super. This ensures that the bees have ample room to continue building and developing their colony, ultimately promoting a healthy and productive hive. By keeping a close eye on the space requirements of your hive and making adjustments as necessary, you can help your bees thrive and prosper.

3. Learn To Spot Trouble Quickly & Simply: A More Thorough Inspection
Discovering issues within our colony, such as a mite infestation or disease, is something that no beekeeper wants to encounter. However, it’s crucial to remain vigilant and not let our reluctance to confront problems impede our ability to identify them. For instance, when I inquire about mite counts, I often hear responses like, “I didn’t see any,” which may indicate a subconscious reluctance to detect any potential issues.

A thorough inspection should take place every four to six weeks, dedicated to observing critical issues such as pests and diseases. When conducting this inspection, the first pest you should be on the lookout for is the small hive beetle. As soon as you lift the top, these pests will scatter and can typically be found on the top cover or the tops of frames. Be sure to take notice of their presence, and if you spot an alarming number, it’s time to take action by placing beetle traps between the frames. These traps can help slow down and contain your beetle problem, ensuring that your hive remains healthy and protected.

As you make your way to the brood frames a quick inspection of the open brood can quickly reveal any issues. The larvae should be swimming in a glistening pool of royal jelly and each larvae should be pearly white in color. The bacterial brood disease, European foulbrood, causes the larvae to be discolored, darkened and their spericals to be visible. From just a ten second glance of the larvae, this problem can be diagnosed.

Moving on, take a moment to observe the capped brood – the sealed pupae can provide valuable insights into the health of the brood and the queen. Healthy brood should appear smooth and even, with very few empty cells. This is known as a solid brood pattern and is a positive indication of a thriving hive. However, American foulbrood – another bacterial brood disease – can cause sunken and perforated brood, often accompanied by a foul odor. Keep a sharp eye out for any signs of irregularities, as early detection can be critical in preventing the spread of disease and preserving the health of your colony.

I have a video you may enjoy on YouTube that may help you enjoy your inspections and be better able to assess the condition of your colony.

How To Inspect & Evaluate Your Hive: https://youtu.be/iEEhkJ2Qzx0 or go to YouTube and search for “David Burns Beekeeping.”

Beekeeping can be a rewarding and fascinating hobby, but it also requires careful attention and diligent management to ensure the health and productivity of your bees. By following a few simple guidelines and adopting a focused and well-defined approach to hive inspections, you can minimize disruption, avoid harm to your bees and quickly detect any potential issues before they become more significant problems.

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Found in Translation

Bees have an increasing say in soybeans

By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

Farmers and scientists debate the extent to which one of our country’s favored crops, the soybean, benefits from honey bee visits. Nor are they sure that having bees visit soybean crops is a net positive for the bees. Despite research documenting strong benefits to soybeans from honey bee visits (dating since the youth of former Bee Culture editor Kim Flottum, https://www.beeculture.com/found-in-translation-19/), a perusal of thousands of studies related to soybean farming shows little emphasis on how and when bees should be deployed. As one metric, a March 2023, Google Scholar search of papers mentioning “soybean yield” and “honey bee” provided 276 references. The same search excluding the term “honey bee” provided 62,200 references. This overall trend has not improved in recent years; papers mentioning soybean yields that do not mention honey bees number 5,110 since 2022, while only 32 papers mention honey bees. Fortunately, those 32 papers provide some really important advances. The upshot is that bees can greatly improve soy production, while potentially gathering a resource for themselves and their keepers. What remains to work out:

1. How can beekeepers practice safe soy?
2. How can growers choose varieties and management practices that harness bee visits to boost production of a vital row crop?
3. How can the two sides meet up to work out deals that benefit both industries and the environment?

On the soy side, honey bee pollination impacts were described this month in a freely available paper from Decio Gazzoni and João Paz Barateiro (Gazzoni, D.L. & João Vitor Ganem Rillo Paz Barateiro. 2023. Soybean yield is increased through complementary pollination by honey bees, Journal of Apicultural Research, DOI:
10.1080/00218839.2022.2161219). These authors showed that, with the right conditions and soybean varieties, honey bees increased soybean yields in controlled environments by 8.5-18.2% in four trials across three years. This increase is not as dramatic as other studies from different cultivars, but still reflects a lot of beans. Hannah Levenson and colleagues at North Carolina State University also showed recently that supporting bees merely by expanding local non-crop habitat led to a significant difference in soybean seed (bean) weights. In an exhaustive survey of 7,000 bees in the field, they found that 30+ bee species had collected soybean pollen but honey bees tended to be more faithful than others for soy versus alternatives (Levenson, H. K., A. E. Sharp, and D. R. Tarpy. 2022. Evaluating the impact of increased pollinator habitat on bee visitation and yield metrics in soybean crops. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 331:107901, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880922000500).

If bees are generally good for soybeans, are these visits doing bees any good? Chia-Hua Lin and colleagues at The Ohio State University have been on that story for some time and recently published a complex study asking whether bees 1) make it to abundant local soybean fields and 2) bring home resources for their colonies (Lin, C.-H., Suresh, S., Matcham, E., Monagan, P., Curtis, H., Richardson, R. T., & Johnson, R. M. 2022. Soybean is a Common Nectar Source for Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in a Midwestern Agricultural Landscape. Journal of Economic Entomology, 115(6), 1846-1851. doi:10.1093/jee/toac140). In a citizen-science twist, the scientists asked members of the Ohio State Beekeepers Association to bring honey collected by bee colonies from across the state to their Fall meeting. This honey was screened for the presence of different pollen types under microscopy. As indicated by the title, soybean pollen was commonly found in Ohio honeys. More than half of the screened honeys held soybean pollen, and this increased for honey derived from foraging in July and August, when soybean flowers were most common. Finally, the authors used the waggle dance, the signal bees use within their colonies to direct nestmates to good foods, to show that returning bees are eager to tell their nestmates about soybean rewards. For medium-distance flights, returning bees were more likely to ‘dance’ that they had visited soybean fields than other fields, complementing the pollen collection data and saying that bees preferentially target soybean fields over the alternatives. Dr. Lin has backed up this work with some truly remarkable studies covering the attractiveness of dozens of soybean cultivars to bees in common gardens (e.g., https://ohiocroptest.cfaes.osu.edu/soy2022/2022_OSPT_pollinator_report.pdf) and is working relentlessly to improve cross-pollination between beekeepers and soybean growers.

Team B & B (Bees and Beans) collecting flowers in soybean plots last Summer. The white stakes are Karlan Forrester’s audio recorders. Photo provided by Chia-Hua Lin from the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Lab at The Ohio State University

In ongoing work, graduate student Karlan Forrester (working with Chia-Hua Lin and Reed Johnson at Ohio State), has worked out innovative methods for tracking bees as they zero in on soybean flowers, while also confirming that certain soybean varieties are more rewarding, and hence attractive, to discerning bees (Forrester, K. C., Lin, C.-H., & Johnson, R. M. 2022. Measuring factors affecting honey bee attraction to soybeans using bioacoustics monitoring. BioRxiv, 2022.2011.2004.512777. doi:10.1101/2022.11.04.512777).

In looking for soy-bee stories that describe ways to enhance this partnership, I came across a series of fascinating works from the other side of the world. Dr. Dolapo Bola Adelabu, a researcher from the Free State of South Africa, and his colleague Angelinus Franke, found remarkable increases in soybean yields that can be attributed to visits by bees and other pollinators (Adelabu, D.B., Franke, A.C. 2023. Beneficial Role of Pollination and Soil Fertility for Soybean Production in Mountainous Farming Conditions. In: Membretti, A., Taylor, S.J., Delves, J.L. (eds) Sustainable Futures in Southern Africa’s Mountains. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15773-8_5). These yields were greater than 50% when combined with optimal fertilizer supplementation of crops (Nitrogen and Phosphorous), with less striking increases under poor soils. Farming in this region of southern Africa, in a rugged corner of the Free State, is distinguished by “smallholder” farms, where farms are interspersed with homes and natural areas. This farming scheme allows for both wild bee habitat (honey bees are not routinely kept in hives here) and presumably a range of alternate food sources for bees when soybeans are not in flower. In conversing with Dr. Adelabu, the studies did not distinguish Apis mellifera from other bee species, but it seems likely that honey bees were a major member of the pollinating community. Thanks to this research, the services bees provide in terms of local soybean yields, among other crops, justifies the work needed to keep healthy bee habitat. The two scientists in this work are also more broadly interested in schemes to provide healthy nutrition to a fairly dense human population, while maintaining a sustainable environment, ( e.g., https://www.ufs.ac.za/aru/aru-team/aru-team/prof-angelinus-franke). Hannah Levenson phrases it well in her article, “As such, pollinator habitat should be designed to provide resources across the entire active season to help these important pollinator populations, especially since many crops have short bloom durations.”

One hope from all this research for the U.S. will be improved dialogue between beekeepers and soybean farmers, ideally driven by profits on both sides. This dialogue will help bees collect soy flower resources while minimizing collateral damage from agricultural practices, including the need to treat for crop diseases and insect pests. In the meantime, what are the best practices for beekeepers around soybean farms? The Honey Bee Health Coalition has focused on this issue, leading to a draft of guidelines led by Adam Dolezal at the University of Illinois showing how management practices, from pesticide applications to habitat, can be more bee-friendly (https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/resources/soybean-best-management-practices/). Making more food on fewer acres is good for the planet and the economy, and it is great that scientists and farmers on both sides are tackling the soy-bee system in a rigorous way.

A cold, February sunrise in Winnipeg. The backdrop of the annual Manitoba Beekeeper’s Association conference.

Why would any sane person leave their home on a rare, 70 degree February morning and travel to Winnipeg where the highs are zero degrees Fahrenheit? Yes, beekeepers are crazy, but I had a good reason. I was invited to present some mite control data to the Manitoba Beekeeper’s Association at their annual conference. I had done this before, about five years ago, and this remains one of my favorite beekeeping meetings. The two-day meeting is a relatively small gathering of commercial beekeepers, the provincial Apiarist, provincial Ag officials, members of the Canadian Honey Council and honey bee researchers. All the necessary people to dig into the state of the industry.

The agenda of the meeting was driven by the horrible mortality rates that Canada, in general, and Manitoba, in particular, experienced over the 2021-2022 Winter. Mortality rates for the whole of Canada were around 47% and in Manitoba were over 60%. This is for a province that averaged 20% or less mortality for the last eight years or so. Discussions with beekeepers and the report from Derek Micholson, the provincial apiarist, indicate that these losses were caused by the “usual” suspects. A drought in 2021 impacted nutrition, mites and nosema brought disease and weather extended the Winter up to two months beyond their normal extended cold. It’s one thing getting your bees through six months of Winter, but try extending that to eight months. One beekeeper told me how he took his bees out of Winter storage for about a week and had to put them back in due to back to back weather fronts that came. In general, the talks/discussion can be classified into two topics: how to get better queens and how to reduce colony stressors. The latter category was heavily focused on varroa.

Pests, Pathogens and Other Stressors
The tone of the meeting was set with the first talk, Industrial Bees – Is High Density Beekeeping Bad for Bee Health. This was a talk presented by Lewis Bartlett from the University of Georgia and gets to the key question, “are commercial beekeepers shooting themselves in the foot by having large apiaries?” Lewis is akin to a honey bee epidemiologist and his data indicated the answer is “no.” In fact, managed colonies are healthier, in general, than feral colonies. Basically, all bees are exposed to all diseases and there are other factors that influence the severity of the disease that you see. I asked him about the advantages of isolated apiaries and keeping diseases out. His response was that the density of hives is so high, that it’s almost impossible to have a truly isolated yard. It’s okay to place the maximum number of colonies in an area that the forage can support.

Rob Currie, professor at the University of Manitoba, presented one of the few talks on bee stressors that was free of varroa. The presentation, Virus, Pesticide and nutrition interactions in honey bees in Prairie cropping systems: Death by a thousand cuts described the work he and several other researchers did to evaluate different stressors in the cropping systems common to the prairie provinces. The study looked at bees on canola used for oil production, canola used for seed production and soybean, and compared them to colonies in the same region but away from those crops. The data represented the “tool development stage” of a more long-term attempt to understand the interaction between stressors on honey bees. Samples were taken pre-flowering, during flowering and post-flowering. Pesticide prevalence in the hives were higher during flowering and post-flowering in all three cropping systems. This same trend held for sacbrood virus and deformed wing virus in colonies on the edge of soybean fields. Interestingly, sacbrood was high at all timepoints in colonies next to canola fields and deformed wing virus started high in canola and dropped as the season progressed. It will be interesting to see how consistent these findings are and if they are able to find interactions within these cropping systems.

Mite control and preliminary survival data for a novel, RNA-based mite treatment being developed by Greenlight BioSciences. Assessment 1 was at the start of the trial with the chemical control treatment lasting six weeks and the vadescana treatment happening at week zero and week three. Assessments were done six weeks apart. The yellow line represents the untreated control. The red line shows mite data from hives that received a 42-day Apivar treatment at the start of the trial. The light green line shows mite data from hives treated with a high dose of vadescana. The dark green line shows mite data from hives treated the low dose formulation of vadescana.

There were several talks on varroa control. Here I must disclose a potential conflict of interest. I was one of two scientists representing Greenlight BioSciences to discuss the new varroa product they are developing. Greenlight is developing an RNA-based product, vadescana, that directly targets reproducing mites. Brian Manley showed data from several trials indicating that vadescana can keep mite levels below threshold levels for more than 12 weeks. He also showed some preliminary data from an overwintering trial where Vadescana-treated colonies had twice the survival rates as Apivar-treated colonies. The overwintering trial also showed how effective rotating modes of action (i.e. Vadescana in the Spring and Apivar in the Fall) can be for mite control and colony survival. Pending approval from the PMRA, Greenlight will be doing trials in Canada this year.

Steve Pernal, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, talked about a new miticide that he is working on. The miticide, 3C(3,6), is a plant based compound that has a similar structure to Thymol. It is not as volatile as thymol and it is not clear how much activity comes from fumigation vs topical exposure. The lack of volatility is an advantage over thymol, in that they have not seen brood kill or queen issues with 3C(3,6). Efficacy ranged from 42% in 2021 to 94% in 2022. The difference reflects product development as they are working out appropriate dosing and application methods.

Amber Leach, of Veto-Pharma, spoke on Apivar. She acknowledged that there seems to be pockets of amitraz (the active ingredient in Apivar strips) resistance and talked about the dangers of off-label amitraz use. Following the Apivar label and rotating different miticide treatments is the best way to combat this resistance. One of the beekeepers pointed out a potential flaw in the design of the Apivar strips. When you use the tabs to keep the strip in place, one side of the strip is pinned against the frame. Thus, you are only treating with half the dose that you should be. It may be more effective to hang the strips using toothpicks, matchsticks, etc. so that both sides of the strip are accessible to the bees.

Breeding for Better Mite / Stress Resistance
Last year in Bee Culture (Bee Driven Mid-Life Crisis Part 2: What’s in a Queen? https://www.beeculture.com/bee-driven-mid-life-crisis-p2/), I talked about the difficulty of queen breeding. Uncontrolled mating and the lack of easy trait selection has resulted in very little improvement in queen quality over the years. There were a couple of presentations that showed we are making baby step improvements in our ability to breed.

Steve Pernal gave a talk entitled Colony phenotypes for breeding and insights into Winter losses. He showed the drivers for colony survival were sealed brood, colony weight and cluster size and showed that hive weight increase from 29kg to 30kg resulted in a 30% increase in probability of colony survival. He also showed that varroa and DWV levels were predictors of mortality. The critical piece to this presentation for me, was that he successfully used marker assisted breeding to increase hygienic behavior in three generations. Marker assisted breeding is where you have a molecular marker, either a protein variant or DNA variant, that is closely associated with a trait of interest. It’s a technique widely used in the rest of agriculture but lacking in honey bees. Steve has a panel of proteins (many are antenna proteins) that are related to hygienic behavior. Steve successfully used these proteins in a breeding strategy to increase hygienic behavior. He compared using no selection, marker assisted breeding and the freezing brood kill assay (liquid nitrogen). After three generations of selection, marker assisted breeding produced the highest level of hygienic behavior, followed by the freeze kill selection. To me, it just emphasizes the need for a good molecular map if we really want to breed honey bees.

In the absence of a molecular map, Kaira Wagoner, of the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, has developed an assay for hygienic behavior that appears to be better than the traditional freeze kill assay. The problem with the liquid nitrogen assay is that it kills the pupae. Therefore, it is selecting for bees to recognize dead pupae. Are the signals produced by dead pupae the same signals that are produced by sick pupae? We want hygienic behavior to target sick pupae. Kaira spent several years identifying 10 chemicals that are elevated in unhealthy bees and developed the correct ratio of these chemicals to mimic what she calls the “unhealthy bee odor” (UBO). She has developed a two-hour assay, where she sprays capped brood with UBO and counts the number of uncapped cells after two hours. She showed that 60% uncapping in this assay was enough to control mite levels. The hygienic bees (those doing the uncapping) had high virus levels, but the hygienic colonies as a whole had lower virus levels than non-hygienic colonies. The system is not perfect. New queens can only be tested after seven weeks past emergence. As with all multigenic traits, maintaining the trait will be difficult. However, the assay is relatively simple, so for people willing to put in the effort, it will be feasible to select for hygienic behavior.

Queen Quality
In the absence of true queen breeding, what can be done to increase queen quality? Medhat Nasr, working for the Saskatchewan Tech Team, assessed queens from several Saskatchewan queen producers and four queen producers from California. This is important to Canadian beekeepers because they import a lot of queens. He looked at queen size (head and thorax), nosema counts and sperm counts. On average, he found three million sperm in the Saskatchewan-made queens and 1.8 million sperm in the imported queens. To put this into perspective as to what this means, he did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. A queen produces 2,000 eggs a day and each egg induces the release of three to four sperm. Therefore, the queen needs about 1.1-1.4 million sperm per year. When the sperm runs out or gets low, you either get a drone layer or supercedure. When he showed the data for individual queens, 20-50% of the imported queens (depending on producer) had less than a million sperm, indicating they could not last a year. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he felt it was due to the mating yards being too dense without sufficient drones.

Provincial Apiarist Report
Manitoba’s beekeeping industry suffered in 2022. Over 60% losses over Winter had several effects. The number of beekeepers declined for the first time in about 15 years (from 925 to 905). The number of colonies dropped from around 115K to 103K. Honey production dropped 15-20%. The saving grace was an increase in honey prices, which greatly buffered the impact of the losses.

Manitoba’s Knowledge and Research Transfer Program (KRTP) did some testing for amitraz resistance. They used both the four hour Apiarium test and the 24 hour Pettis test. They found that amitraz efficacy ranged from 15% to 100%. There is definite evidence for pockets of amitraz resistance.

Derek also reported on the priorities of the National Industry-Government Bee Sustainability Working Group. This is a large group made up of both government and industry representatives. Their top priorities are to support the Tech Transfer Programs. These programs are in every province and they perform locally relevant, applied research as well as extension services. They are also coordinating at the national level to work on common beekeeping issues. Top priorities of the working group also include accelerating the development of new varroa control solutions, actions to maintain and increase domestic bee supplies and actions to address long-term challenges to importing bee supplies. Their secondary priorities are to improve the overwintering of queens (which will ease the need to import queens), business cost analysis of the industry and the opening of the U.S./Canada border to package bees.

Opening Up the Borders
Opening the U.S./Canada border to package bees is a hot topic. I had a few conversations with beekeepers over this. In the U.S., beekeepers in the northern states buy nucs, queens and packages from the southern states. Some beekeepers are concerned where their bees come from. For example, the bee club I belong to only orders queens from Northern California, because of a concern of bringing in Africanized bees. (I, on the other hand, get queens from TX, LA and GA). The same holds true in Canada. They need bees and queens, just like the Northern U.S. states do. But the U.S./Canada border has been closed to bee traffic since tracheal mites in the 1980s. Canada brings in bees from Australia, New Zealand, and now Italy and Ukraine. They do get some queens from HI and CA, because they have established safe zones where there are no Africanized bees within 100 miles. In CA, this safe zone was recently reduced to 50 miles due to the detection of Africanized bees within the 100-mile zone.

So, do we bring in bees from across the ocean and potentially bring in a new pest or pathogen from there? Or do we treat North America as one isolated domain and move bees within that domain knowing there are Africanized bees in the south? The Canadians worry about Africanized bees and about antibiotic resistant AFB in the states. The U.S. is worried about viruses and don’t allow the importation of Canadian queens.

The Canadian Honey Council has provided the CFIA with the data necessary to redo a risk assessment for the importation of packages from the U.S. This issue now rests with the CFIA. Whether they act on this will likely depend on the pressure they get from both Canadian beekeeping organizations and the U.S. I am sure this issue is as much political as it is biological.

What does Canadian beekeeping have to do with me?
Having attended beekeeping meetings in both countries, I realize that beekeeping is a global industry. We are all dealing with the same beekeeping issues. I’ve learned a lot about beekeeping from both Canadian colleagues and U.S. colleagues. I take the best of both worlds and apply them to my own operation. A case in point is Lloyd Harris. I bet most beekeepers in the U.S. have not heard of him. I met him about five years ago and he changed the way I think about bees. He closed out the conference with his presentation The Winter colony and its formation. The talk was based on his graduate work he did back in the 70s. He painted cohorts of newly emerged bees every 12 days throughout the year to determine their longevity. From this data he draws incredible insights into the dynamics of the hive throughout the year. Is this data still applicable and useful? Of course it is! If any of you have heard Randy Oliver or Ian Steppler talk about beekeeping, they both show a graph of the colony age distribution throughout the year. It’s Lloyd’s graph. It doesn’t matter how long ago or where he did the study. We have a lot to learn from each other.

One aspect of the Canadian industry that I really like is how closely tied the Canadian Honey Council is to the beekeeping problems of the industry. They don’t just lobby for funding and legislation but get into the weeds to help solve problems. For example, the CHC owns the registration for formic acid and Fumagillin. Currently, the CHC is working with the Ontario Tech Team to get Oxalic Acid/Glycerin strips registered. By doing this, they ensure the beekeepers get the tools they need. The path to registration is expensive and complicated. Unless you are a company with millions of dollars to invest in the product, you won’t be able to afford the registration process. And the beekeeping industry is too small for it to be an incentive to large companies. Once a company does go through the process, they need to charge a lot to recover the costs. Because the CHC owns formic acid, the beekeepers can mix their own treatments (probably a double-edged sword), and likely, will make their own OA strips as well. I wish our beekeeping organizations took a similar approach.

To go even further, wouldn’t it be nice if there was international cooperation between our beekeeping organizations in this regard? Registration packages are relatively similar in various countries. By sharing resources and costs, a path can open for special cases; emergency needs, individual discoveries, etc. We wouldn’t have to be dependent on Randy Oliver doing all the work himself or we wouldn’t have to worry if Steve Pernal’s product would ever get registered because he doesn’t have the funds. I think there is an opportunity here. We can get a lot more done by working together on common problems.

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Tropilaelaps

Part 2

By: Ross Conrad

Last month, we looked at the Tropilaelaps mite and its potential impact on North American beekeeping. While Tropilaelaps has yet to appear on the shores of North America, it can be found in the middle of a spat between the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF) and the Canadian Honey Council (CHC) over package imports.

A Warning Issued
On February 1, 2023, the ABF released a statement issuing a call for American beekeepers to encourage their congressional delegations to support the opening up of the Canadian border to honey bee package importation from the United States (Winter & Miller, 2023). The ABF letter notes that “the threat of the T mite (Tropilaelaps) being found in a southern hemisphere package and introduced to Canada is a real threat to all North American beekeepers.” The letter goes on to say, “This would be devastating to the North American beekeeping industry and production agriculture.” Furthermore, “ABF believes a new expedited risk analysis is needed” for both U.S. packages and those from other countries currently approved to export bees to Canada, in order to properly assess the current risk of a possible Tropilaelaps infestation.

Tropilaelaps’ need to access uncapped brood in order to feed every two days or so is the primary reason why it has not spread around the world so rapidly and extensively as the Varroa mite.

So far, Tropilaelaps has spread among South Asian countries including India, China, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Afghanistan, S. Korea, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea. New Guinea and Australia are about 150 km (93 miles) apart at their closest shores: roughly the distance between Cuba and the U.S. mainland. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) currently allows the importation of honey bee packages into Canada from Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Ukraine and Italy. Queen imports into Canada are allowed from the same five countries as well as from the United States, Denmark and Malta. Given the close proximity of Canada’s Australian source of bees to a known Tropilaelaps infested country (New Guinea), the ABF is sounding the alarm concerning the risk of the mite making its way to Canada and then to the U.S.

Canada Weighs In
On February 22, 2023, the Canadian Honey Council responded to the ABF with their own statement (Scarlett, 2023). In it, the CHC called it “unfortunate that the American Beekeeping Federation, the American Honey Producers Association and those Canadian operators having an interest in importing American packaged bees are attempting to capitalize on the fear of introducing Tropilaelaps mites.”

The CHC goes on to say, “last year, Canadian beekeepers from most areas in the country experienced devastating losses and the demand for stock increased dramatically. Calls to open the border to U.S. packages intensified… The Canadian Food Inspection Agency put out an open call for additional research to see if there were any changes to the risks that had been identified in a 2013 risk assessment of U.S. packages.” The risks identified in 2013 were: Amitraz resistant mites, small hive beetle, American foulbrood resistance to antibiotics and Africanized bees. “The CHC has indicated that if the science supports the decision to open the border, the border should open,” the statement emphasized.

The CHC went on to note that since U.S. beekeepers can import bees from just two countries, Canada and New Zealand, and “New Zealand is just as close or closer to where Tropilaelaps is found…” they suggest that the U.S. could also import bees with the potential to harbor the mite. The CHC statement concludes by stating, “a North American concern is justified but it is far more likely that the mite will arrive by ocean liners than it is by packaged bees. The U.S. has 162 ocean freighters arriving every day and many of those are from China and Japan, two countries much more likely to have unwanted ‘visitors’ aboard. That is why calls in the USA for sentinel hives at ports have increased… This is not a trade issue, and it is always looked at as an animal health risk issue.”

Reality or Hype?
There is a high demand right now among Canadian beekeepers for packaged bees to replace heavy losses. Meanwhile for the first time in decades, almond production is contracting due to low almond prices and water issues aggravated by prolonged drought, and U.S. beekeepers are looking to replace some of this lost income. Opening up the Canadian border to U.S. package imports could help replace lost almond pollination fees.

American beekeepers certainly do not need another stressor on their bees, should Tropilaelaps make its way to America. However, as I pointed out last month, the T mite’s impact is not likely to be as devastating to the beekeeping industry as Varroa was in its initial years. Unlike the situation when the Varroa mite first arrived in North America, today we have approved mite treatments available for Varroa that are reported to also work on Tropilaelaps. We also know more about the biology of the T mite and its critical vulnerability of having to have constant access to its primary food source (uncapped brood) or they starve to death. These facts make the dire warnings spelled out in the ABF letter appear exaggerated.

Real World Impact
So how likely is a mite infestation into Canada from packages or caged queens really? Since no combs of brood are shipped within packages or queen cages, the chance that T mites will infiltrate North America through a bee shipment is slim. As numerous researchers have all pointed out, any mites that make it into the package or cage when it is initially populated with bees, are likely to be dead within two to three days at the most (Woyke, 1984 & 1987; Koeniger & Muzaffar, 1988; Rinderer et al., 1994). This is primarily why Varroa, which also originated in Asia, has spread to the four corners of the earth while Tropilaelaps is still largely confined to its native range.

There are a couple theoretical possibilities where mites could survive importation in packages and queens. If there are package producers or queen breeders that are super efficient and ship orders out the same day that they are packaged or caged, it is possible that the receiving beekeeper will install their shipment into a hive the same day that it arrives via overnight airfreight. Thus, any mites that happen to be riding along in a package or cage would only be without food for a day or so and could survive the trip. To protect American beekeepers, a simple requirement that bee shipments must be held for a minimum of 48 hours before they are introduced into hives containing uncapped brood, would help ensure no Tropilaelaps mites that hitched a ride along with the bees are able to survive the journey. This would mostly affect queen imports since packages are usually installed into hives with foundation or empty frames of drawn comb, or perhaps combs containing some honey and/or pollen. It is rare that packages get installed into hives in which uncapped brood is already present.

The other possibility is that there are occasional reports in the literature of Tropilaelaps being observed sitting at the base of an adult honey bee’s wings. This is significant since the base of the wings is one of the few locations where the hard exoskeleton of the bee is soft enough for the Tropilaelaps mite to be able to pierce it with their mouth parts and feed on hemolymph (Khongphinitbunjong et al., 2012). Thus, it appears that sometimes a T mite figures out that it can feed on an adult bee.

While it is certainly a possibility that Canada will become a Tropilaelaps host country and spread the mite to America, the availability of approved Varroa mite treatments that are also reported to work on Tropilaelaps means that should such an infestation take place, is unlikely to cause a major catastrophe for American beekeepers.

The Scofflaw Factor
Unfortunately, we beekeepers are notorious scofflaws. This tendency exposed itself clearly after Varroa arrived and many beekeepers turned to off-label (illegal) uses of pesticides to control the mites. Since there are likely to be some beekeepers that cannot be trusted to honor a 48 hour delay before installing bees into hives that contain uncapped brood, Canadian bee breeders that supply the U.S. could also be required to wait 48 hours after packaging or caging bees before shipment. This way if one person in the supply chain “bends the rules” the other acts as a backup to ensure the mites are unlikely to survive. Of course, the extensive border between our two countries would almost guarantee that should Tropilaelaps make its way to Canada and spread throughout the country, at some point natural swarms will carry the mite across the border into the United States. However, unless a Canadian swarm usurps a U.S. colony and replaces the mother queen with their usurping queen (a highly unlikely situation), natural swarms are not expected to cause Tropilaelaps to spread across the border. The extended broodless period when a swarm emerges from a hive and when it begins raise new brood in a new location also prevents swarm castaways on an ocean liner from carrying the mite far.

There is always the possibility however that the mite could be smuggled in illegally. Some people claim that back in the 1980s, Argentina was getting bees from Asia, breeding queens, smuggling them into Florida under the radar and ended up bringing the Varroa mite to the U.S. Folks worry that something similar might happen should Australia end up getting the mite, and export the mite to Canada. Please note, all this is still theoretical. As far as anyone knows, while Varroa has recently arrived in Australia, Tropilaelaps has not yet made its way to the island continent.

You Catch More Bees with Honey Than You do With Vinegar
Rather than point fingers at our Canadian neighbors and make them out to be the “bad guy”, U.S. beekeepers would do better to focus on the positive impacts Canadians can expect should they open up their border to U.S. honey bee packages. The main one that comes to mind is an improved environmental footprint.

The American beekeeping industry is very fossil fuel intensive. Regularly transporting bees throughout the country on 18-wheeled, diesel powered trucks and shipping bees overnight by airfreight creates a lot of green-house gas emissions. Dramatically reducing the distance that packages must travel by air, will greatly help the beekeeping industry start to address the festering issue of heavy fossil-fuel reliance that has mostly been ignored to date. This means doing exactly what the ABF recommends, localizing and regionalizing industry so we no longer are relying on extensively long supply chains. The global COVID pandemic exposed the serious drawback of relying on products and supplies that have to be shipped from overseas and the global climate crisis is exposing another. Relocalizing as much of society as possible will be required if we are to successfully reduce energy use and GHG emissions, prevent global ecological collapse, save our bees and maintain organized human existence. An additional benefit is that reduced shipping distances should result in lower overall costs, allowing U.S. bee producers to compete competitively with bees from down under while allowing Canadian beekeepers to enjoy lower prices.

I get the ABF’s concerns. Declining almond prices and a lack of available water from increasing droughts out west is causing many almond producers to pull their older trees from production. For the first time in well over a decade, almond growers will be requiring fewer hives for pollination, not more. For those beekeepers that fell into the economic trap of relying on almond pollination fees for a large percentage of their annual income, the severe economic hit they are going to receive will be challenging. The greater the share of their annual income from almond pollination, the more difficult it will be for the beekeeper to stay afloat. Opening up a new market in Canada for U.S. packaged bees, while certainly not enough to entirely replace the lost almond pollination income, will help take some of the sting out of the loss. Efforts to use the fear of Tropilaelaps to facilitate such a trade agreement is a weak approach.

Ross Conrad is the author or Natural Beekeeping: Organic approaches to modern apiculture and the Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont. Ross will be teaching a beginner organic beekeeping class the weekend of May 20-21 and an intermediate class June 4th in Vermont. For more information visit: www.dancingbeegardens.com

References:
Khongphinitbunjong, K., de Guzman, L.I., Burgett, M.D., Rinderer, T.E., Chantawannakul, P. (2012) Behavioral responses underpinning resistance and susceptibility of honey bees to Tropilaelaps mercedesae. Apidologie 43: 590–599 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-012-0129-x
Koeniger, N., and Muzaffar, N. J. J. O. A. R. (1988) Lifespan of the parasitic honeybee mite, Tropilaelaps clareae, on Apis cerana, dorsata and mellifera. Journal of Apicultural Research 27(4): 207-212.
Rinderer, T.E., Oldroyd, B.P., Lekprayoon, C., Wongsiri, S., Boonthai, C.,Thapa, R. (1994) Extended survival of the parasitic honey bee mite Tropilaelaps clareae on adult workers of Apis mellifera and Apis dorsata, Journal of Apicultural Research, 33(3):171-174, DOI:10.1080/00218839.1994.11100866
Scarlett, Rod (2023) Canadian Honey Council letter, https://honeycouncil.ca/
Winter, Dan & Jay Miller, (2023) American Beekeeping Federation letter, https://www.beeculture.com/abf-statement/
Woyke, J. (1984) Survival and prophylactic control of Tropilaelaps clareae infesting Apis mellifera colonies in Afghanistan, Apidologie, 15(4):421-434
Woyke, J. (1987) Length of Stay of the Parasitic Mite Tropilaelaps Clareae Outside Sealed Honey Bee Brood Cells as a Basis for its Effective Control, Journal of Apicultural Research, 26(2):104-109, DOI:10.1080/00218839.1987.11100745