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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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  • From: friedjf AT verizon.net
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [ocba] Follow-up comments to Hmmm-hmmm
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 06:37:26 -0500 (CDT)

As the title of my post indicated (Hmmm-hmmm), I was wondering about bee practices, not pontificating.  My proposals were what makes common sense to me. Here are some responses to your questions, but, remember, I'm not anywhere close to being an expert on bees.
 
Regarding whether my proposals were science-based, in the 18 months that I've been reading about, watching videos, listening to speakers, viewing posts, attending bee demos, watching our hive, and volunteering with my beekeeping wife for various bee events... I've heard much contradictory information... even from science-based people.  I wondered why and concluded that some "science-based" research recommendations were intended to advance commercial beekeeping interests.  In contrast, my proposals are based on leaving nature to its own devices in the amateur's hive and coexisting with the bees rather than heavily manipulating them. I know that man can't eliminate problems, like varroa mites, for the bees, but the bees are likely to find ways to sustain, over many generations, if left to evolve past and successfully coexist with the problem.
 
My proposals would not work for commercial keepers because those people make themselves (and their hives) vulnerable to disastrous die-off whenever any new variable (like neonics) arises. They are businessmen and women who bend bees to their will by frequent re-queening, moving hives often, exposing hives to many threats and calculating what die-off rates are acceptable.
 
Other science-based recommendations (such as it takes more bee energy to restore foundation than to place extracted foundation back in the hive) seem counterintuitive to me. If we consider a hive to be a super-organism, wouldn't extracting most of a hive's contents upset the daily operation of that hive... and each of its inhabitants, more than replacing foundation on one frame? To me, it is not just the economics of how much energy is utilized in process A versus process B. It is sustainability through bee-centric thinking.
 
John


  • [ocba] Follow-up comments to Hmmm-hmmm, friedjf, 06/11/2015

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