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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 fran
by 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 agoHave 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"
- lostlogin 3y agoHow are you giving the Oa? I’ve done it with paper strips - they aren’t ideal over winter as they hold moisture at a damp time, but I did have quite good results.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoI built a vaporizing device from a diesel engine glow plug, some scrap aluminum, and an old car battery. Did some practice runs to time how long i needed to apply current to get to vaporization temperature Then i do three sessions 5 days apart (to account for varroa lifecycle) starting mid september
- cryptonector 3y agoI hope you wear a respirator.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoI did for the first few years but with the hive sealed up, and a breeze where you stand upwind, im not sure its super important
- cryptonector 3y agoI've overwintered once. So far so good. No treatment. I've hives that have zero mites, and hives that have moderate mite load. We'll see what happens this coming winter.
- lostlogin 3y agoHave you got other hives within 5km? Other hives/overstocking seem a major source of varroa.
- cryptonector 3y agoI'd have to ask the county.
- omniglottal 3y agoAre you not concerned that your practices are breeding bees who survive only with medical treatment while empowering the genetics and miticide resistance to reinforce endemic condition of your region? It would seem some others are breeding bees successfully with zero miticide while you're building a Sardaukar force of mites, bred to tough conditions that even the healthiest of bees cannot survive without help.
- kurthr 3y agoNot really because of the number of generations (12 months is ~50 generations of mites and the miticide is every 2 years) between treatments and the effectiveness of the treatments. It's like breeding cockroach resistance to stomping with a foot (the kill is almost completely total and I remove the miticide before concentration drops). It would need to be really incremental and this is not. I go over 6 months without noticing any (which may mean the hive was actually clean before it was reinfected by an external reservoir). The real breading of deadly mites is leaving your hives thronging with them and bees covered in mites spreading them to every other population of bees/pollinators in your neighborhood. It's like putting SARSCoV2 in an AIDS patient and keeping them alive on a ventilator for months spewing novel viruses with minimal isolation... and that's where we likely got the really virulent strains of COVID. p.s. I take care of 2-3 hives with about 5mi of separation. So I don't really have many local captive hives nearby, but my queens seem to breed pretty true anyway. I'm not a pro, but I've got 10 years of experience in my local area.
- filthy-animal 3y agoMy girlfriend has this nice little book on managing an orchard, published in the '20s. It has modern orchard management tactics in there, like spraying with lead arsenic to reduce pests, and regular cultivation to destroy all nearby plants so there's no competition. ..of course, this was just before the dustbowl era. You sound like that book.