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In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare
by byron_fast 10y ago
In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare few who overwinter their bees use sugar syrup and store the bees in a cool warehouse designed to keep them dormant during winter.
From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of different problems for decades, but I doubt there is something extraordinary about the current state of beekeeping.
Killing the makers of your livelihood and dealing with catastrophic problems is usually known as "farming".
- beardicus 10y agoWhere is this common practice? I've heard of warehousing bees, but not gassing them to death.
- byron_fast 10y agoThis was common in central Canada in the 90s, where I worked for a beekeeper. I don't know if cyanide use is still common, but the majority of the dozen or so beekeepers I knew back then all did this and I understood it was common practice in our region. If you don't winter your bees, you have to kill them somehow. And most beekeepers with any kind of scale do not have a way to overwinter. Overwintering has since become more popular because of diseases and queen availability, but judging by the existence of the queen industry I'd guess many are still killing their bees.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoWhere do they get new queens in spring? And where do the new queens get workers?
- byron_fast 10y agoFrom places that sell queens, usually by mail these days. The last I heard they were only buying queens from New Zealand because American bees were getting too aggressive; not sure if that's still true.
- yawz 10y agoI'm a beekeeper and I cannot disagree more... about gassing, and about the recent disorders. I'm not old enough to talk about beekeeping in the '70s and '80s, but our losses are much more important now than 10-15 years ago. CCD is probably a combination of various pressures such as Varroa mites, pesticides, mono-culturing, destruction of natural resources, etc. But these days, one has to work (often hard) to get one's colonies survive... unlike before, when you could let them do their thing most of the time.
- byron_fast 10y agoI've heard this recently as well, but I've also read that the current difficulties we read about were also the case over a hundred years ago, but obviously with different causes. It's hard to know what's new and what's part of a cycle.