"North East USA" Ladies & Gentlemen, "Start Your Engines"

I think that strain of bees just wasn’t hardy. I’ve had colonies that no matter what I do they just don’t measure up to others. I will take them and use them as resource hives for splits, culling the queen of course

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2nd year. I know that losses are more likely to occur in the 2nd-3rd year, and I am prepared for that, however my mentor has kept bees going on 40 years this year and has never treated. (My colonies came from his swarms he graciously allowed me to capture.) He of course has losses, but his losses compare equally with the losses of those who do treat from my own personal research. I am taking the approach of “keep/breed locally adapted bees and let the bees adapt”. My view is that if we do not let the bees adapt they will never survive in the long run. I started keeping bees with the mindset of “save the bees” so in my opinion not treating is the best approach. I could be wrong, but with the way things have been going for the bees for the last 20-30 years my approach can’t hurt them anymore…

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Interesting blog entry from @Rusty Rusty Burlew today. I am not beating you up, just saying, please monitor even if your bees seem to be doing OK. :blush:

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Might you have Apivar resistance? Everything I have learned says that rotating the treatment type is important to avoid mite resistance. In medicine, we see the same thing with bacterial resistance. Some patients require long term antibiotics, and if that is the case, it is important to rotate which antibiotic they take so that the chosen treatment remains effective.

I am considering rotating oxalic acid and formic acid, with Apivar as a last resort if those don’t knock down mite counts or I still see DWV and crawlers. I might try Thymol, but it seems tricky to handle. Just thinking out loud. :blush:

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One could argue that if the mites are adapting to the treatments and prevailing, (which is what happens to ALL species when given “treatments”) what is happening to the bees that they do not or are not allowed to? Can anyone produce evidence that bee species can NOT ever adapt to mites as the mites CAN adapt to treatment?
Also, if we use multiple treatments in a colony, what is happening to all of the beneficial bugs and organisms? A colony is a just that. A colony. We tend to forget that there are hundreds or thousands of other beneficial organisms that also make up the colony and if we kill those off we have damaged the colony as a whole. Something to ponder…
I hope I do not sound mean or defensive because I mean no ill-will to anyone. I’m here to learn as well, but I do feel the need to remind us all, including myself that beekeeping is a science as well as a hobby and maybe some other approaches should be presented to other beekeepers. I am not telling anyone how to keep their own bees, just tossing ideas out there…

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We all keep bees our own way and that is actually a good thing. We can compare notes and regions and better our practices.

I think I’m in year 7.

I choose to treat because I’ve been down the treatment free road twice. The first time it was from watching youtube videos about how treating is bad. In year two, I lost 7 out of 12 hives.

I started treating and winter losses decreased tremendously. The year before last, I wintered 41 out of 41. This past year, life got in the way so no treatments until February of 2017. Losses to date are 27 out of 51.

I’ve already started splitting and queen rearing and have no doubt I will make up those losses and sell a dozen or so nucs by mid-May or sooner.

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I say, let the mites be mites… Kirk says it very well (emphasis is mine):

http://kirkwebster.com/2005scan2.pdf

“And now I have another terrible confession to make. Not one as bad and un-American as passing up short-term gain and investing in the future—but still horrible: I have never yet counted even a single sample of mites from any of my bees. I consider counting mites as a way of evaluating Varroa resistance to be fraught with all sorts of shortcomings and difficulties. It’s very time consuming and hence the size of the apiary, the number of colonies tested, the gene pool, and the income available all start to shrink. It’s also very easy for the results to be skewed by mites migrating from other colonies or bee yards. And it doesn’t show which colonies are more resistant to secondary infections–a trait I consider very important.”–Kirk Webster, ABJ April 2005, pg 314

http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/whats-missing-from-the-current-discussion-and-work-related-to-bees-thats-preventing-us-from-making-good-progress

“We’re trying to ensure the failure of modern beekeeping by focusing too much on single traits; by ignoring the elements of Wildness; and by constantly treating the bees. The biggest mistake of all is to continue viewing mites and other “pests” as enemies that must be destroyed, instead of allies and teachers that are trying to show us a path to a better future. The more virulent a parasite is, the more powerful a tool it can be for improving stocks and practice in the future. All the boring and soul-destroying work of counting mites on sticky boards, killing brood with liquid nitrogen, watching bees groom each other, and measuring brood hormone levels—all done in thousands of replications—will someday be seen as a colossal waste of time when we finally learn to let the Varroa mites do these things for us. My own methods of propagating, selecting and breeding bees, worked out through many years of trial and error, are really just an attempt to establish and utilize Horizontal breeding with honeybees—to create a productive system that preserves and enhances the elements of Wildness. My results are not perfect, but they have enabled me to continue making a living from bees without much stress, and have a positive outlook for the future. I have no doubt that many other beekeepers could easily achieve these same results, and then surpass them.”–Kirk Webster, What’s missing from the current discussion and work related to bees that’s preventing us from making good progress.

http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/a-new-paradigm-for-american-beekeepers

“I’ve thought a lot about how in the world to describe what’s really happening in an apiary that hasn’t used treatments of any kind for more than five years; where mites are now considered to be indispensable allies and friends, and where the productivity, resilience, profitability and enjoyment of the apiary are just as good as at any time in the past. I wouldn’t dream of killing any mites now, even if I had an easy and safe way of doing so.”–Kirk Webster, A New Paradigm for American Beekeeping

“…when 150 queens were introduced into nucs with brood untreated for 18 months. This brood had a normal outward appearance when the nucs were made up, but four weeks later about half of them were starting to decline with PMS-type symptoms. But after another three weeks, almost all of these colonies appeared normal and healthy again.”—Kirk Webster

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So my queenless hive still is not laying. They are calm and no signs of making queen cells with the eggs given last week. I gave another frame of eggs to be sure. I have yet to see the new queen so I guess she is still mating.

The strong hive that I keep stealing frames of eggs from continues to make swarm cells. They are aways empty and always at the bottom of the same frame. I moved the frame from the top brood box to the bottom and they still made them. It is still early in the season and there is lots of brood making space. I am hoping it is just practice and not them making travel plans in the near future. Their numbers are not high enough this early in the season in my mind to swarm. Plus I keep stealing frames of brood out of it. We shall see. I may put the super with flow frames on next weekend. This hive had a lot of left over honey from winter.

It is amazing how different queens can be. In my other 2 hives, the one queen has 5 full frame of brood layed (laying everywhere she can) and the weak hive beside it has 1 1/2 layed. She will be requeened in May.

Honey is coming in in most hives. I don’t think the big flow has started yet.

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If they are empty I believe they are not queen “cells” but “cups”. Many hives keep cups on hand throughout the brooding season. I’ll find some of my pics of the differences.

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Grafting Day! I have a super productive, really calm hive that I took the graft from. Hopefully I can get 20 queens :slight_smile:

This is the youngest larva I’ve ever been able to get so I’m hoping for good results. I had the cell bar with cups in the hive for 2-1/2 days and the bees some type of liquid in the bottoms, hopefully royal jelly, and started drawing wax on the rim of each cup.

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Fascinating Ed. Please keep me updated if you have time - I love seeing this kind of stuff.

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They say everyone is an expert beekeeper during a honey flow because no matter what we try, the bees fix it. They are really taking to these mini-frames.
Once the queen comes up to this box and lays eggs, I’ll start a colony in the big horizontal bee sanctuary.

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The queens from the March 25th splits emerged on Friday. I’ll leave them alone because they are in their mating flight window and the weather is very good for it. I’ll check in a week for eggs.

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Could be a plan!

more characters more characters ok got 20!

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A dozen swarm cups inside but luckily no larva inside those cells. Swarm preparations are being made so I split them. Hopefully I’m not too late :neutral_face:

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These are old, slightly damaged hive bodies full of BT treated old combs. I use them for swarm traps.

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My hive failed the first attempt at requeening. It now has 6 more emergency queen cells made from the eggs I gave last week from its neighbor hive. Kind of stinks that this hive will go 5-6 weeks without a queen right during Spring build up (assuming this time they succeed). not sure what happened to the first virgin queen. Never saw her after she hatched and it was cold the week she should have been mating. Maybe she never made it back.

Is it me or do the hives smell really good? I first thought it was all the uncapped honey but I wonder if the pollens smells good as well?

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Hive smell is one of the reasons I am addicted to beekeeping. :blush:

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Happy Easter!

Well, I’m supposed to be checking for mated queens, making more splits, and setting up queen castles:
Instead, I’m spending last night and all of today at the hospital with my daughter (15) while she has an emergency appendectomy. Thankfully my wife knew all of the signs and they caught it very early. It took a cat scan to confirm it after the ultra-sound was inconclusive.

Surgery went well and she can come home tonight if she feels better, eats and drinks a little, and uses the restroom.

I’ll worry about the bees tomorrow.

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Good choice :+1:

Hope she recovers quickly. Happy Easter.

Joe

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