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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Buzz kill! Is this 'bee Armageddon'?----serious problem for all.

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  • From: Richard Stewart <rstewart AT zoomtown.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Buzz kill! Is this 'bee Armageddon'?----serious problem for all.
  • Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 08:08:20 -0400

I do not think its "Bee Armageddon".  I've had a time to think about my reply a bit.  I am sorry to hear about the losses.  I know I would be devastated if that happened to me and from one beekeeper to another I wish you the best of luck recuperating.

I think there are some serious issues with insecticides and, it appears, fungicides (interacting with both the way bees handle food..stomach enzymes and its impact on both individual bee and colony macro immune system.

I we went into winter last year with 30 colonies and lost nearly 30%.  Which is high.  We also had an unusually cold winter.  Losses, normally for us are right around 10 to 15% which are easily replaced by swarm we catch and splits.  We are hoping to have 50 to 60 colonies going into winter of 2011.  Our losses were a result of freezing plain and simple.  The bees are clustered up, it gets so cold that they cannot move their cluster, slowly, across the frames and they die within an inch of stored food.  All but one of the colonies died with at least 30 pounds of honey.  The other was in an outyard I was unable to go to at the end of the season and it died from moisture dripping back down because I had forgot to cant the hive.  Dumb, but it happens.

Bee losses are most severe with the commercial beekeepers.  I honestly think that the some of these folks are their own worst enemies, feeding HFC and pollen substitute and trucking them around for pollen contracts to prop up unsustainable agriculture.  The fields the go into are some of the crappiest forage locations of mono-cropped (be in almonds, alf-alfa, rapeseed, pumpkins, or apples).  They are high chemical locations with a host of pesticides and fungicides.

Add to that a host of pests and diseases and viruses and a very crappy breeding program that relied heavily on what I consider chemical dependent bees.

Add on top of all of that the use of pesticides used to tackle, primarily, varroa destructor (mites) and you have a perfect storm of problems.  I listen to the conversations between beekeepers talking about this treatment and that, to get rid of mites, and its amazing they have any bees alive at all.

Locally with budget cuts, we have lost our county bee inspector so we now have several regions in the state, ours included that no one has any idea about in terms of honey bee health.  I live in Ohio...the birthplace of modern beekeeping and we cannot afford to pay some nice old retired guy 6500.00 a year to document bees.

So, now we have a bunch of folks saying they lost bees to CCD.  CCD is real, but anytime anyone looses bees these days, its CCD.  When we look back 150 years we see periods of great die-offs that have not been explained.  At least 9 since Langstroth (father of modern Beekeeping) was alive located in different regions in the country, but maybe the difference between then and now is that for the commercial beekeeping business there is no different geographical location.  They move all over.

We do not treat our bees.  We do splits from survivor stocks and we catch swarms and have begun raising our own queens (this is still in its infancy).  We no longer purchase packages from large scale apiaries or even nucs from out of state (we actually hope to be selling bees to local beekeepers in the future).  I also keep fairly good records on swarms, feral bee tree colonies, and colonies in homes.  Our region is filled with bees.  I just caught our first swarm of 2010 two days ago, a bit early for this region, but we've had a very mild spring.

I'm a glass is half full kind of beekeeper when it comes to the current problems in beekeeping.  In my region my bees are healthy and beekeeping, while not as easy as it was in the good old days when my great grand-father only had to worry about a harsh winter and foulbrood, I think its not too bad if you get a good system going.

The one things I will say about CCD and the problems with adulterated honey is that folks are willing to pay a premium for honey these days.

Richard Stewart
Carriage House Farm
North Bend, Ohio

An Ohio Century Farm Est. 1855

(513) 967-1106


  • Re: [Market-farming] Buzz kill! Is this 'bee Armageddon'?----serious problem for all., Richard Stewart, 05/01/2010

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