New episode of the podcast is up! Listen over on Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Homestead news:
I sold my last pink tongue skink baby 2 weeks ago! Baby season stretched longer than usual this year due to shipping delays caused by the pandemic but keeping the babies longer seems to have benefited my business as I had my best year so far. I am very grateful to all my customers for their patience and care, and it makes me so happy that many have chosen to stay in touch and send me updates! I also was contacted recently by someone looking for care advice, which I’m always happy to help with regardless of whether someone got their skink from me or elsewhere. Apparently, she was recommended to me by people on Tiktok!! Isn’t that nuts? I’ve never even looked over there and it’s so amazing that word of mouth is sending people my way.
The chickens continue to moult. Agatha looks especially shabby, bless her heart, but she is my fluffiest chicken so she has a lot to lose and regrow!
Bubbles, one of my special needs hens, is not doing so well. Her abdomen is very swollen and she seems uncomfortable. I have a vet visit scheduled but I am not optimistic.
One of the ginger hens in the big flock was acting very oddly last week. I found her sort of hunched up with a vacant expression. She was responding to me as if she couldn’t actually see me, just hear me approach. I was instantly concerned that she was going blind as that was one of the first symptoms Ginger had before things progressed to the point that I had to have her euthanized. Since she was still ambulatory, I left her alone for the afternoon, just checking that she went into the coop at night (she did and was even up in the nest box). Next morning, I went out early to check on her and she was back to normal! Phew! Now I am thinking that maybe something scared her and she was in a state of shock? Cracker, my boss hen, was keeping close to her and seemingly being supportive, which is weird in itself; usually, if she senses weakness, she attacks. So maybe something scared them all and this hen was just taking longer to recover? Either way, I am very glad she is back to normal! Crisis averted.
All my corn cobbs ended up being tiny, and I fed them to the chickens (who loved them!). Disappointing but I feel like I know what went wrong (planted too close together) and will do better next year.
I have a bean plant with a handful of beans on it! So exciting.
Definitely realising that I am not a great gardener and need to do more reading up on the subject.
My big news is my stupid fall. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen my latest wound that will surely leave a scar. Long story short: I was holding my hive tools in my left hand, a bee flew at my head (no veil as I was just hanging on my deck), I stepped back, tripped over a dog, and while trying not to land on said dog, landed badly on my left hand. This caused my hive tools to slash open my wrist and I panicked when I saw the blood. Thankfully, nothing is broken and 4 stitches sealed the wound. Recovery has been faster than I expected and I am ready to get back out there and cause more trouble!
Hive news:
I have 2 more weeks until I’ll be retesting for mite levels. So far, I’ve seen a lot of dead mites on the bottom board of all the hives, which is a good sign. Sadly, my Saskatraz mother-queen hive does not seem to be responding as well to treatment. For the first time ever, I have found varroa just hanging out on the adult bees. The population is smaller too. I am definitely worried about them.
I expected to see an increase in brood production but all the hives have almost no brood and are clearly focused exclusively on the Fall flow; lots and lots of honey wherever they can fit it. I’m adding empty comb where I can so they have room, removed feeders off the hives that are almost honey bound, and generally monitoring them as best I can. I am very anxious to see so little brood but I have to assume the bees know what they are doing (and it might help with the varroa issue, too).
Thinking ahead, if things don’t improve, I’ll definitely be sacrificing the newly mated queen in nuc #2 and installing the Sask mother-queen in there instead. I think I will have a better chance of keeping her colony alive in a smaller set up, and I need 2 nucs to overwinter together so they can share heat.
Hope to have more answers soon!
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On to the book review!
Chapter 11: Darwinian Beekeeping
Beekeeping today is still as it has always been: the exploitation
of colonies of a wild insect; the best beekeeping is the
ability to exploit them and at the same time to interfere
as little as possible with their natural propensities.
-Leslie Bailey, Honey Bee Pathology, 1981.
The first 10 chapters of this book reviewed the honey bee colony as a whole, from its annual cycles, reproduction, nest building, food collection, thermoregulation, and colony defense. It also provided an overview of beekeeping from a cultural perspective as well as one of management. As these topics are delved into with greater detail, it has become clear that beekeeping as a form of animal husbandry often comes into direct conflict with the natural life cycle and rhythm of the honey bee.
Seeley notes that the intention of this final chapter is to integrate these two themes by applying what has been learned about the honey bee towards our management practices. He intends to respect the natural cycle of honey bees while also being able to benefit from their hard work as producers of honey and as important pollinators. He addresses this goal in two stages; first, to directly compare the ways in which a wild colony lives compared to a managed one; second, finding ways that beekeepers can effectively manage their practices to reduce stress on our beloved honey bees, which will in turn lead to greater health for the colony.
“We will see that the essence of doing this is to manage colonies of honey bees in ways that enable them to live, as much as possible, under conditions like those in which they evolved and thus to which they are adapted. We will also see that this often requires putting the needs of the bees before those of the beekeeper.” Pg. 278.
Wild Colonies vs Managed Colonies
Throughout this book, we have seen how differently we keep our bees compared to the way they live in the wild. The honey bee environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) is vastly different to how we have come to house and work our managed colonies, and sadly our way of doing things has caused undue stress on the bees and affected their overall health. This section will clearly list out the ways in which living conditions between the two (wild and managed colonies) differ, and give a summation of each point.
1/ Colonies are genetically adapted vs are not genetically adapted to location.
There are 30 subspecies of Apis mellifera and each are uniquely adapted to their climate, season, flora, predators, and diseases in their native regions. These adaptations occurred as part of natural selection, resulting in bees that are uniquely capable of thriving in their native location. Within these subspecies, we also see ecotypes, which are populations that are “fine tuned” to their local conditions. A prime example of this geographical adaptation can be seen in the ecotype of A.m.mellifera (the dark European honey bee) that lives in the Landes region of southwestern France. Their annual cycle is centered around the prolific bloom of ling heather (Calluna vulgaris) in August and September. To meet the needs of their bountiful forage, these colonies have a second peak of brood rearing in August. When colonies from outside the area were brought in and examined, it was found that the difference in their brood rearing was indeed genetic. This shows us that the common practice of shipping queens all over the US, as well as moving colonies hundreds and thousands of miles away for pollination contracts is likely forcing colonies to live in environments for which they have not adapted and are thus ill suited for.
2/ Colonies live widely spaced in the landscape vs crowded in apiaries.
Beekeepers keep colonies close together for our own benefit but now it’s clear that such close living is hurting our bees. Crowded apiaries experience such stressors as greater competition for local forage, high risk of robbing, and even problems in reproduction (swarms combining if leaving at the same time; queens entering the wrong hive after mating flights). But the greatest risk to our colonies is how close proximity fosters the transmission of disease, viruses, and parasites.
3/ Colonies occupy small nest cavities vs large hives.
This modification profoundly affects the ecology of bees. Beekeepers moved to larger and larger hives because it allows us to maximize our honey crop; more bees means more honey! But in doing so we have inadvertently affected natural selection by preventing swarming, which is the honey bees natural reproductive process. Only strong, healthy colonies swarm in the wild and we purposefully hinder that. Even worse, large colonies suffer greater problems with varroa in part because more brood means more hosts for varroa to reproduce but also because swarming helps manage infestation by removing mites on the adult bees and causing a brood break. By changing the way in which honey bees live, we have directly affected their ability to fight off parasites.
4/ Colonies live with vs without a nest envelope of antimicrobial plant resins.
The importance of propolis to the colony cannot be understated, IMO. Honey bees living in nests without a propolis envelope have greater immune system activity, which can weaken them over time. While their little bodies are using up energy to fight off various infections, they are not as energetically able to attend to the everyday life of hive management and brood rearing. The propolis envelope clearly provides profound pathogen protection to the colony.
5/ Colonies have thick vs thin nest-cavity walls.
Thick walled nest cavities provide greater and better insulation, which lowers the colony cost of thermoregulation. The optimal brood nest range is 34.5-35.5C/94-96F, and that narrow temperature range means that the colony must work to cool or heat the nest as needed. Therefore insulation plays a vital role in thermoregulation cost. In a thick-walled tree cavity, the rate of heat transfer is four to seven times lower than for a managed colony living in a standard, wooden hive.
6/ Colonies have small and high vs large and low nest entrances.
Larger entrances are harder to guard, making a colony more vulnerable to robbing and predation. Lower entrances are also more likely to be blocked by snow, causing airflow issues, as well as preventing bees from going on their cleansing flights. Low entrances also increase the chance of a sluggish winter bee crashing to the ground and becoming too cold to move.
7/ Colonies live with vs without plentiful drone comb.
Beekeepers often inhibit the ability of their colonies to produce drones in order to boost their honey crop and as a form of integrated pest management. However, this inhibits natural selection for colony health because it prevents the healthiest and strongest colonies from succeeding at passing on their genes via drones. We tend to think of drones as largely superfluous to a colony but they are an essential component of overall health and survival.
8/ Colonies live with vs without a stable nest organization.
When we rearrange comb to expand the brood nest or prevent brood congestion, we are affecting the bees natural nest organization structure. Honey bees organize their nests with a consistent, three-dimensional spatial structure: a dense brood nest that is surrounded by pollen with the periphery regions used for honey storage. This positioning enables efficient feeding of the brood as well as assisting in the thermoregulation process of the colony. It is still not clearly known how much we are hampering our bees by rearranging their nests.
9/ Colonies experience infrequent vs sometimes frequent relocations.
Migratory beekeeping can stress colonies by forcing the bees to learn new landmarks, as well as discovering locations of nectar, pollen, and water. One study found that colonies moved overnight to a new location had slower weight gain in the following week than those in stationary control colonies.
10/ Colonies are rarely vs frequently disturbed.
Although we cannot know how often wild colonies are disturbed by predators (such as bears, skunks, wasps, etc), we can assume that it is far less than managed colonies where we inspect them frequently in order to monitor and effect their progress throughout the year. One study compared the weight between groups of colonies that were and were not inspected. Those that were disturbed gained 20-30% less weight than the control colonies.
11/ Colonies deal with familiar vs novel diseases.
Human intervention (and arguably carelessness) has led to the transmission of many of the honey bee’s fiercest threats: varroa from eastern Asia, small hive beetle from sub-Saharan Africa, chalkbrood fungus and tracheal mite fro Europe. Before our meddling, honey bees evolved side by side with various parasites and pathogens, locked in a natural arms-race of sort. Our introduction of these foreign parasites has decimated unprepared colonies, resulting in the deaths of millions of honey bee colonies, both wild and managed.
12/ Colonies have diverse vs homogeneous pollen sources.
A number of studies have looked at pollen diversity and its effects on honey bees. Nurse bees fed on monofloral pollens have shorter lifespans when exposed to Nosema (a microsporidian parasite) than those fed a polyfloral blend of pollens. Many managed colonies are placed in situations were there are forced to consume almost entirely one single source of pollen; from almond orchards to fields of rapeseed. This single source diet leads to poor nutrition for the colony.
13/ Colonies have natural diets vs are fed artificial diets.
Beekeepers will feed pollen substitutes in order to stimulate colony growth when natural sources are not abundant. This is often done to meet the colony size requirement needed to fulfil pollination contracts, and to produce a larger honey crop. But studies have shown that colonies stressed by a lack of pollen, as well as those fed a predominantly artificial diet, have shorter lifespans, early onset foraging, and a shortened period of functional foraging.
14/ Colonies are not exposed vs are exposed to novel toxins.
Honey bee colonies (whether wild or managed) are now exposed a wide range of pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides but they have not had time to evolve detoxification mechanisms. We are still learning how this ever-increasing number of products affect the honey bee and its health.
15/ Colonies are not treated vs are treated for diseases.
“When we treat our colonies for diseases, we interfere with the host-parasite arms race between Apis mellifera and its pathogens and parasites.” Pg. 283. In our attempt to assist our colonies, we are inadvertently weakening natural selection for disease resistence. Miticides and antibiotics might interfere with the microbiomes of a colony’s bees, and we are still learning the cumulative effect of various treatments. It is no surprise then why most managed colonies have shown little resistance to varroa mites, whereas completely untouched/wild colonies have managed to produce stable populations despite the virulence of varroa.
16/ Colonies are not managed vs are managed as sources of honey and pollen.
In order to produce large amounts of honey, we need a big colony, which means lots of space in part to prevent swarming. But this interferes with natural selection, as well as increasing the risk of varroa infestation by providing lots of brood to be parasitized.
17/ Combs are not moved vs are moved between colonies.
Moving combs between colonies is a common practice among beekeepers as it provides many seeming benefits (boosting or combining weak colonies, distributing honey needed for winter, queen rearing, nucleus colony production, etc). However, it is also vastly increases the spread of disease and pathogens.
18/ Honey cappings are recycled by bees vs are harvested by beekeepers.
The energetic expense of producing wax cannot be overstated. Approximately every kilogram (2lbs) of wax taken from a colony costs about 5 kilograms/10lbs of honey; honey which is now no longer available to feed the colony, get them through the winter, or assist in brood rearing. Bees spend a certain portion of their life producing wax, which takes a toll on their bodies (think of it as ‘wear and tear’ of factory machinery that needs to be taken into account when considering the cost of production). The most energetically burdensome honey harvesting involves removing the entire comb, such as in cut-comb or crushed comb honey. Extracted honey removes just the wax cappings, allowing a beekeeper to return the empty comb back into the hive. (Side note: extracting at a lower speed is supposed to decrease comb damage.)
19/ Colonies are allowed vs are not allowed to choose the larvae for rearing queens.
For those beekeepers who raise their own queen, one-day old larvae are chosen at random/by convenience. Honey bees, however, have been shown to prefer larvae from certain patrilines (male ancestor genetic line) when rearing emergency queens, which seems to indicate that the bees are choosing larvae based on factors that could indicate larval health as well as genetic strength.
20/ Drones are allowed vs not allowed to compete fiercely for matings.
In a natural environment, drones fiercely compete against hundreds of other drones to succeed in mating with a virgin queen. This means that only the strongest and fastest drones are successful in passing along their genes. When beekeepers use artificial insemination, the drones selected for their sperm have not proven their vigor via competition, and thus genetics are being passed along based on beekeeper choices or convenience, as opposed to health and flight ability.
21/ Drone brood is not removed vs is removed from colonies for mite control.
Seeley refers to removing drone brood from colonies as partially castrating them as it interferes with natural selection by removing the male reproductive aspect of large, healthy colonies that have the resources to rear and support drones.
Suggestions for Darwinian Beekeeping
This is it! This is the nitty-gritty summarized to make it all accessible to beekeepers who want to try applying what we now know about the natural life cycle of the honey bee to our own management practices.
Seeley points out that honey bees have lived independently of humans for millions of years, their biology being fine tuned by natural selection to favour two things: colony survival and colony reproduction. Once humans began to keep bees for our own purposes, we have inadvertently disrupted the way in which honey bees interact with their natural environment. The main contributing factors of this disruption are migratory beekeeping practices (moving bee colonies to geographical locations for which they are not naturally adapted), and hive management that modifies the colony in order to maximize their production of those things we value (honey, beeswax, pollen, royal jelly, pollination, etc).
Seeley also mentions that establishing a beekeeping method that is kinder on the bees and better supports their natural life cycle and health is easier for those backyard beekeepers with a few hives, which are kept for pleasure and in support of the bees (with honey as a nice side bonus). For commercial keepers, whose very livelihood relies on honey production and/or pollination contracts, they have fewer options for pursuing a gentler approach to beekeeping.
He stresses that the following are suggestions, and suggests viewing them as ingredients for a personal recipe of Darwinian beekeeping. We all need to be realistic about what we are capable of achieving so view the following through that lens. Perhaps, right now, you can only adopt a few of these suggestions and practices. That’s okay! Revisit the list and consider how you might be able to incorporate more over time. Personally, I think the best we can all do is keep an open mind and do our best to support our colonies with the resources we have available to us right now.
1/ Work with bees that are adapted to your location.
Find local queen producers to source your queens from. Choose your best survivor colonies and make queens and/or nucleus colonies from them. Set out bait hives and catch swarms. The goal is to source your genetic lines from colonies that have adapted to survival in your geographical location.
2/ Space your hives as widely as possible.
In Chapter 10, we learned how important it is for colonies to be distant from each other. In Ithaca, Seeley has found that wild colonies average a distance of 800 meters or 0.5 miles between each other. Thankfully for us, Seeley discovered that spacing colonies just 30-50 meters or 100-160 feet apart greatly reduces the risk of bee drifting and thus reduces pathogen transmission between hives. Although even this distance might not be possible for all of us, we should consider the space we have when positioning our hives and establishing our apiaries. I find myself wondering, is more colonies in a crowded apiary that puts them at risk of greater disease and reproductive issues really better than a few, less at risk colonies spaced widely apart?
3/ House your colonies in small hives.
Seeley suggests aiming for one deep hive body for the brood nest and one medium honey super over a queen excluder for your honey crop. Although this will naturally result in a much more modest honey harvest, it also reduces the colony’s risks of parasites and pathogens, particularly varroa. This is particularly true if you allow your colony to swarm, as this removes some of the adult mites and provides a brood break.
As a side note, you can either allow your colonies to swarm and set out bait hives to catch them, OR you can ‘artificially swarm’ by removing the mother queen and 50-70% of the worker bees when you notice that swarm cells have been created. By moving the ‘swarm’ to a hive elsewhere, you are allowing the natural life cycle to continue while also maintaining control over the swarms final location.
4/ Roughen the inner wall surfaces of your hives, or build them of rough-sawn lumber.
This is to stimulate the colony to create a propolis envelop, which provides important antimicrobial benefits.
5/ Use hives whose walls provide good insulation.
Options include using thick lumbar or plastic foam. Seeley notes that an important area of future study is just how much insulation is best for colonies in various climates, and how we as beekeepers can provide this.
6/ Position hives high off the ground.
Obviously, this one is going to be trickier for many of us but could be possible for those with a porch or a flat roof where colonies could be safely established. Since hive height relates directly to entrance height, it’s my personal suggestion that we always allow an upper entrance on our hives such as many of us already provide over winter.
7/ Allow colonies to maintain 10-20 percent of the comb in their hives as drone comb.
Rearing drones is energetically expensive and so it’s only the strongest colonies that will do so. When we allow them to do this, we are supporting the genetic health of honey bees in our area. Since we know that drone comb is preferred by the varroa mite, allowing an increased amount of drone brood means vigilantly doing mite checks and therefore monitoring infestation levels in our colonies.
8/ Minimize disruptions of nest structure so the functional organization of each colony’s nest is maintained.
Refrain from inserting empty comb between brood frames in order to inhibit swarming, and be careful to replace each frame back in its original configuration.
9/ Minimize the moving of colonies.
Moving colonies affects not just the foragers ability to find new sources of food and water but also disrupts the colony’s regular functions, including thermoregulation and brood care.
10/ Locate your colonies as far as possible from flowers that are contaminated with insecticides and fungicides.
This is likely something many of us are already doing. By housing are colonies far away from treated plants, we help reduce the risk of foragers bringing contaminants back to the colony.
11/ Locate your colonies in places that are surrounded as much as possible by natural areas: wetlands, forests, abandoned fields, moorlands, and the like.
These areas are less likely to have been contaminated by pesticides and fungicides, and also offer a diverse source of pollen and nectar, as well as fresh water and propolis.
12/ When you need additional colonies, acquire them by capturing swarms with bait hives or by making “splits” from your strong colonies and letting them conduct emergency queen rearing and natural queen mating.
This allows your bees to choose the larvae for future queens, and ensures that the strongest and fastest drones in your areas mate with the virgin queens.
13/ Minimize pollen trapping and honey harvesting from your colonies.
These are valuable resources for our colonies and, by taking them, we lower their success by reducing their survival and/or reproduction.
14/ Refrain from treating colonies for varroa.
We have now seen that colonies can eventually, through natural selection, acquire resistance mechanisms to varroa within about 5 years if left untreated by miticides. We also know that this process will involve heavy losses (80-90%), leaving just a few colonies alive that have are able to survive and eventually self-sustain.
Seeley points out that this can only be done if you commit to extremely diligent beekeeping practices. You must test for varroa to monitor the infestation levels in your colonies. By not doing this and simply not treating, you will create a situation that favours the varroa mite, not your bees. To avoid this, you must kill colonies who are experiencing uncontrolled infestations before they collapse and spread varroa to surrounding colonies.
You have a responsibility to the colonies that live around you both wild and managed. If you are unwilling to euthanize a hive before they can cause damage then it is your duty to use a miticide and prevent that colony from becoming a ‘mite bomb’. It would also be advisable to replace the queen with one from a mite resistant genetic line.
I cannot stress this enough. People who do not treat their colonies and do not monitor for mites are not helping any of us, and aren’t helping the bees either! If you cannot responsibly allow for your colonies to select for resistance, please treat. I am just as responsible to my bees as I am to my neighbour’s. Please think of your community of beekeepers and wild colonies.
Closing Thoughts
I’d like to break from my tradition of summarizing Seeley’s words and quote this section of the book directly; it’s only 2 pages but I think it’s important to hear the author’s own words here.
“I hope you have enjoyed this review of what we know about how honey bees live in nature. We have seen that Apis mellifera remains an untamed creature and that the step from a beekeeper’s hive to a tree’s hollow remains a short one for these small beings. We have also seen that a honey bee colony is a marvelously integrated living system that has been shaped by natural selection to meet the challenges of getting rooted in a carefully chosen homesite and then surviving and reproducing there for several years. In looking at how a wild colony builds its nest, acquires its food, keeps itself warm, rears its young, defends itself from intruders, and passes on its genes by casting swarms and rearing drones, we have learned that a colony of honey bees presents us with countless mysteries. How does it control the type of comb it builds - at first worker comb but eventually also drone comb? How does it control the emptying and filling of its drone-comb cells with honey in relation to the seasons? How does it know when to switch on its brood rearing in midwinter and then to switch it off in early autumn? How does it decide when to swarm? And then, when it decides to do so, how does it control the proportion of bees that leave in the swarm, the swarm fraction? And why does a colony seal up its nest cavity with propolis so tightly at the end of summer? Is it so that moisture will condense on its cavity’s walls and thereby provide its members with drinking water all winter long? These and countless other questions about the lives of colonies living in the wild remind us that the behaviour and social life of honey bees still holds many secrets.
If you are a beekeeper, then I hope, too, that this tour of the astonishing natural history of honey bees has inspired you to consider pursuing beekeeping in a way that focuses less on treating a honey bee colony as a honey factory or pollinating unit and more on admiring it as an amazing form of life. More than any other insect, the honey bee has the power to capture our hearts and connect us emotionally with the wonders and mysteries of nature. We love these beautifully social bees, we want them in our backyards, and many of us cannot bear the idea of living without them.
All of us who admire honey bees are seeking ways to improve their lives. This is of vital importance because, as the human population approaches a billion, we need the pollination services provided by honey bees more than ever before. A recent, and authoritative, study of the crop production values of different species of bees has concluded that the honey bee provides nearly half of all crop pollination services worldwide. This means that Apis mellifera contributes to agriculture almost as much as the hundreds of other crop-pollinating bee species combined. It also means that the honey bee deserves special care. One way we can conserve Apis mellifera is to protect forestlands, for these provide habitat for wild colonies. The persistence of honey bee colonies living in woodlands in the Americas, Africa, and Europe, despite the spread of the deadly mite Varroa destructor, shows us that honey bees are remarkably resilient. It also shows us that if we conserve forests and other wild places, then we can be confident that wild colonies of honey bees will thrive and provide an important reservoir of this species’ genetic diversity.
A second way that we can improve the lives of honey bees is to revise our treatment of the millions of colonies that live not in the wild but in our hives. This is the goal of what I have called Darwinian beekeeping and others have called natural beekeeping, apicentric beekeeping, and bee-friendly beekeeping. Whatever the name, the aim is the same: to put the needs of the bees before those of the beekeeper. This happens when a beekeeper’s manipulations of the bees are done with bee-friendly intentions and in ways that harmonize the bees’ natural history. Conventional beekeeping, however, continues to develop along a trajectory that disrupts and endangers the lives of honey bee colonies. Therefore, to truly help the bees, we must do more than just keep the world healthy for them; we must also build a new relationship between human beings and honey bees, one that promotes the health of the millions of managed colonies that we depend on to produce our food. Darwinian beekeeping, which combines respecting the bees and using them for practical purposes, seems to me to be a good way for us to be responsible stewards of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, our greatest friend among the insects.”
And that's it! I hope you enjoyed this series and found it useful. I definitely have a lot to think about, and I'll be doing my best to incorporate some of Seeley's suggestions into my own beekeeping practice.
Stay safe out there! And, always, hug your hens and then wash your hands. Take care!
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