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There's a lot of weird assumptions in the article. "Normal" beekeepers try to breed varroa resistant bees as well, but still trying to keep the non-resistant on

There's a lot of weird assumptions in the article. "Normal" beekeepers try to breed varroa resistant bees as well, but still trying to keep the non-resistant ones alive too. It might be faster to just let nature deal with the issue, but that means losing an insane amount of hives. It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals or the forrest, or that dairy farms don't care about their cows. All beekeepers want the same thing, health bees, being able to go out and just watch them, it's not like we have some weird need to open a hive every week and inspect 30 frames for bad signs... That's the boring part. Most of the bees being kept by beekeepers aren't natural as such. One of the most common types is Buckfast and that's a cross between a number of different species. So is the suggestion that we kill 75% of the bees in apiaries to "keep it natural"? Normally you also only buy one or two colonies, the rest of you apiary will be made from those original colonies and you only buy new ones in case of disease or if you want to build a larger apiary faster. So I don't get the negativity towards "buying bees online". While I do think swarm catching is great, I'd recommend getting the swarm checked for disease before placing it in any apiary.

giantg2 3y ago
Unless you're doing AI, all your subsequent stock will be mutts anyways.
- JacobAldridge 3y ago
  I think I just realised why no farmers trained in Artificial Insemination are opening my “Detailed” and “Visual” Artificial Intelligence tutorials…
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    Thank you for the belly laugh
Jedd 3y ago
Yeah, lots of questionable assertions made there by author and/or interviewees, eg: > “I don’t think anybody contests that free-living bees have a better, easier life,” This feels wrong - supplemental feed, internal space that grows and shrinks with their colony size, well insulated & single-entrance (easier to defend) home, a mesh base they can push their detritus through, pest / predator control, etc. The bit about wild colonies: > The bees lived in smaller groups, relatively far apart, which made it harder for varroa to spread. They swarmed every year, which broke the reproductive cycle of the mites. (If a colony swarms, the nest is left without bee larvae, which is where varroa mites take hold.) The relatively far apart thing isn't a natural consequence of wild colonies, unless there just isn't food to sustain them. (If there is, then bee / nest population would increase.) Swarming every year isn't guaranteed - I suspect even new 'wild' queens don't get itchy feet until their second birthday. But even if they do, swarming doesn't mean there aren't larvae in the original nest. A normal swarm process means the original colony is without an egg-laying queen for maybe 10-14 days. However, assuming the departing queen was laying up until departure, you've got ~8 days of larvae in that nest, and that means a further ~13 days those exist as pupae (which I understand are also vulnerable to varroa). At that point your new queen's progeny are already into their larvae stage. I do get the pastoral idyll being painted by some of the people involved here, but I'm unconvinced.
- rob74 3y ago
  Where I feel they do have a point is that traditional beekeepers are meddling too much with systems that are more complex than one might think. At the start of the article, they mention the routine clipping of queens' wings to prevent swarming. And then, at the end, they mention that queens used to "last" several years, whereas nowadays they are rejected by the hive after only 1-2 years. Maybe there was some natural selection going on there which beekeepers are hindering by preventing the bees from swarming?
pell 3y ago
>or that dairy farms don't care about their cows If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.
- Retric 3y ago
  Farmers want less stressed cows because they produce more milk. The underlying economics means they have other concerns, but even “factory” dairy farms will tend to optimize more for cow comfort than you might think. People also overly focus on density without understanding cows are herd animals. They form dense herds even in empty fields.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    I’ve spend the last 2 week visiting a friend working in a “estive”, a altitude fields designed for cow grazing in summer. They roam freely 24/7 in a mix of forest & grass. It take a solid hour to go around it by foot. It’s maybe 30 of them ? They do stick together, true. But they have a lot of space.
  - rob74 3y ago
    There are a lot of cow pastures around where I live, and trust me, the herds are not as dense as the density in a cow barn - you could fit at least two more cows between two cows on the pasture. Maybe they would stand closer together if they saw a bear or a pack of wolves, but that rarely happens around here...
- BbzzbB 3y ago
  That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
  - marliechiller 3y ago
    what about disbudding, premature parent/calf separation, artifical insemination and harvesting of male calfs?
cryptonector 3y ago
Strong, no-chemical-treatment hives with "good genetics" in low-pesticide environments have low loss rates. Even the loss rates we see advertised (38% or whatever) are not existential problems for beekeeping because you can split hives (i.e., reproduce) at a higher rate anyways. So the switch to no-chemical-treatment plans is not that hard. Honeybee colonies are mainly stressed by a) pesticides (in the pollen and nectar that they gather, in the wax that beekeepers give them to accelerate comb building, in the water they drink, and in the mite treatments they are subjected to), b) the varroa mites that have inadvertently been bred to be strong while the bees have been inadvertently bred to be weak.
- kurthr 3y ago
  As an urban beekeeper I find this argument a bit odd and not matching my experience. I'm not trying to optimize for growth rate or monocrop pollination and frankly find that the hives grow quite fast and can swarm multiple times per season (late spring early summer). However, they seem to swarm most WHEN they start being stressed by varroa! I haven't seen a clean hive go a year without developing varroa so it's endemic in my area. I treat the hives once a year (after honey harvest) to protect other native pollinators. It's easy to know when mites boom just by looking at viral infection effects (deformed wings etc). That starts in mid-early summer (not when most people would be treating with insecticide) and builds into fall. Yes, I can count mites on sticky paper, but once you get to know the hive cycle for an area it's rarely necessary. My queens/drones mate with the local population, but I don't see significant queen/brood changes in them so they're as "natural" as a european honey bee is in the US. I prefer to alternate Apiguard ("natural" thymol) and Apivar (miticide) to minimize tolerance effects and they both work quite well (100x reduction). However, going a year without mite treatment is often a death sentence for the winter hive, and I haven't had a hive fail since I started annually treating. Winters are mild and there's barely a month without pollen so there's really no reason for a healthy hive to fail. When untreated hives do survive they are very weak going into spring and have huge mite load in summer.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    Have you tried oxalic acid treatment instead of apiguard/apivar? Way more effective and cheaper for me. Also there's a strong argument its more 'natural' Overall I agree with your points completely. Honeybees are not native to North America and we're doing animal husbandry and farming on what's basically an invasive species. There is no such thing as doing it "naturally"
000ooo000 3y ago
>It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?
- caput770 3y ago
  You clearly have little idea of what you're talking about if you think hunters kill animals for fun and leisure.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    I know many hunters, and they do.
  - riversflow 3y ago
    I know a lot of hunters. Fun and leisure is exactly how I would describe it. Do you really think most hunters kill animals out of necessity? There are exceptions of course but, lol. There is certainly a place for hunting and there are certainly hunters who care deeply about ecology. I don’t see how it’s not a combination of fun and leisure though.
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    You're probably right. I might be reading too far into them posing for photos with the dead animal, or them having the animal's head mounted on a wall in their home, or travelling to far away places to hunt a particular type of rare animal. These are no doubt very important parts of maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Yes... I mean you probably won't shoot the family dog if it's sick, you'd take it to the vet. Arguably hunters don't think in terms of single animals, unlike farmers, they care about the overall welfare of the ecosystem so that it may support sufficient number of animals to allow for hunting. I don't know how it works elsewhere, but I'd bet that Danish hunters do more to protect nature than any vegan or vegetarian organisation and they almost always work with nature preservation organisations.

giantg2 3y ago

Unless you're doing AI, all your subsequent stock will be mutts anyways.

JacobAldridge 3y ago
I think I just realised why no farmers trained in Artificial Insemination are opening my “Detailed” and “Visual” Artificial Intelligence tutorials…
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Thank you for the belly laugh

Jedd 3y ago

Yeah, lots of questionable assertions made there by author and/or interviewees, eg: > “I don’t think anybody contests that free-living bees have a better, easier life,” This feels wrong - supplemental feed, internal space that grows and shrinks with their colony size, well insulated & single-entrance (easier to defend) home, a mesh base they can push their detritus through, pest / predator control, etc. The bit about wild colonies: > The bees lived in smaller groups, relatively far apart, which made it harder for varroa to spread. They swarmed every year, which broke the reproductive cycle of the mites. (If a colony swarms, the nest is left without bee larvae, which is where varroa mites take hold.) The relatively far apart thing isn't a natural consequence of wild colonies, unless there just isn't food to sustain them. (If there is, then bee / nest population would increase.) Swarming every year isn't guaranteed - I suspect even new 'wild' queens don't get itchy feet until their second birthday. But even if they do, swarming doesn't mean there aren't larvae in the original nest. A normal swarm process means the original colony is without an egg-laying queen for maybe 10-14 days. However, assuming the departing queen was laying up until departure, you've got ~8 days of larvae in that nest, and that means a further ~13 days those exist as pupae (which I understand are also vulnerable to varroa). At that point your new queen's progeny are already into their larvae stage. I do get the pastoral idyll being painted by some of the people involved here, but I'm unconvinced.

rob74 3y ago
Where I feel they do have a point is that traditional beekeepers are meddling too much with systems that are more complex than one might think. At the start of the article, they mention the routine clipping of queens' wings to prevent swarming. And then, at the end, they mention that queens used to "last" several years, whereas nowadays they are rejected by the hive after only 1-2 years. Maybe there was some natural selection going on there which beekeepers are hindering by preventing the bees from swarming?

pell 3y ago

>or that dairy farms don't care about their cows If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.

Retric 3y ago
Farmers want less stressed cows because they produce more milk. The underlying economics means they have other concerns, but even “factory” dairy farms will tend to optimize more for cow comfort than you might think. People also overly focus on density without understanding cows are herd animals. They form dense herds even in empty fields.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  I’ve spend the last 2 week visiting a friend working in a “estive”, a altitude fields designed for cow grazing in summer. They roam freely 24/7 in a mix of forest & grass. It take a solid hour to go around it by foot. It’s maybe 30 of them ? They do stick together, true. But they have a lot of space.
- rob74 3y ago
  There are a lot of cow pastures around where I live, and trust me, the herds are not as dense as the density in a cow barn - you could fit at least two more cows between two cows on the pasture. Maybe they would stand closer together if they saw a bear or a pack of wolves, but that rarely happens around here...
BbzzbB 3y ago
That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
- marliechiller 3y ago
  what about disbudding, premature parent/calf separation, artifical insemination and harvesting of male calfs?

cryptonector 3y ago

Strong, no-chemical-treatment hives with "good genetics" in low-pesticide environments have low loss rates. Even the loss rates we see advertised (38% or whatever) are not existential problems for beekeeping because you can split hives (i.e., reproduce) at a higher rate anyways. So the switch to no-chemical-treatment plans is not that hard. Honeybee colonies are mainly stressed by a) pesticides (in the pollen and nectar that they gather, in the wax that beekeepers give them to accelerate comb building, in the water they drink, and in the mite treatments they are subjected to), b) the varroa mites that have inadvertently been bred to be strong while the bees have been inadvertently bred to be weak.

kurthr 3y ago
As an urban beekeeper I find this argument a bit odd and not matching my experience. I'm not trying to optimize for growth rate or monocrop pollination and frankly find that the hives grow quite fast and can swarm multiple times per season (late spring early summer). However, they seem to swarm most WHEN they start being stressed by varroa! I haven't seen a clean hive go a year without developing varroa so it's endemic in my area. I treat the hives once a year (after honey harvest) to protect other native pollinators. It's easy to know when mites boom just by looking at viral infection effects (deformed wings etc). That starts in mid-early summer (not when most people would be treating with insecticide) and builds into fall. Yes, I can count mites on sticky paper, but once you get to know the hive cycle for an area it's rarely necessary. My queens/drones mate with the local population, but I don't see significant queen/brood changes in them so they're as "natural" as a european honey bee is in the US. I prefer to alternate Apiguard ("natural" thymol) and Apivar (miticide) to minimize tolerance effects and they both work quite well (100x reduction). However, going a year without mite treatment is often a death sentence for the winter hive, and I haven't had a hive fail since I started annually treating. Winters are mild and there's barely a month without pollen so there's really no reason for a healthy hive to fail. When untreated hives do survive they are very weak going into spring and have huge mite load in summer.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  Have you tried oxalic acid treatment instead of apiguard/apivar? Way more effective and cheaper for me. Also there's a strong argument its more 'natural' Overall I agree with your points completely. Honeybees are not native to North America and we're doing animal husbandry and farming on what's basically an invasive species. There is no such thing as doing it "naturally"

000ooo000 3y ago

>It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?

caput770 3y ago
You clearly have little idea of what you're talking about if you think hunters kill animals for fun and leisure.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  I know many hunters, and they do.
- riversflow 3y ago
  I know a lot of hunters. Fun and leisure is exactly how I would describe it. Do you really think most hunters kill animals out of necessity? There are exceptions of course but, lol. There is certainly a place for hunting and there are certainly hunters who care deeply about ecology. I don’t see how it’s not a combination of fun and leisure though.
- 000ooo000 3y ago
  You're probably right. I might be reading too far into them posing for photos with the dead animal, or them having the animal's head mounted on a wall in their home, or travelling to far away places to hunt a particular type of rare animal. These are no doubt very important parts of maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
mrweasel 3y ago
Yes... I mean you probably won't shoot the family dog if it's sick, you'd take it to the vet. Arguably hunters don't think in terms of single animals, unlike farmers, they care about the overall welfare of the ecosystem so that it may support sufficient number of animals to allow for hunting. I don't know how it works elsewhere, but I'd bet that Danish hunters do more to protect nature than any vegan or vegetarian organisation and they almost always work with nature preservation organisations.