BREEDING

In addition to invasive manipulations, the beekeeping industry, to make profit, has demanded “better bees.” Artificial queen raising over the past 120 years has selected from the “best” – the same queens that take risks and make brood at an opportune time before a honey flow who would starve the following year when said honey flow never arrives. The result is queens that lay eggs all the time to lead hives that can be constantly split – this is needed today to support a farming system that demands so much from our bees. Exposed to pesticides and malnourished, individual bees do not live long and must be replaced. These hives go backwards without artificial stimulation – usually corn syrup for carbs and soy flour for protein – and chemical treatments. Welfare bees. Sinking sinking ever more.

The overwhelming majority of bee breeding occurs in the southern states or Hawaii, where late and early flows allow more time for queen mating and hive growth. The queen bees in this country come from perhaps a dozen large queen producing companies, who all exchange their genetic information in a pool of about 500 breeder queens. These production line queens are then shipped up north to hobbyist or commercial beekeepers who requeen all their hives (to keep at peak production). Local feral hives breed with the imported drones and the wild gene pool is compromised. Decades of this practice has lead to a terrifyingly shallow gene pool.

With the lack of genetic diversity, no adaptation to northern climates, and more aggressive bees in the south, it makes a lot of sense for EVERY beekeeper to not be importing strange queens into the apiary.

It is very simple, and I believe essential, to induce hives to raise their own queens (even if it's by letting them swarm). The standard commercial way is by grafting – transferring larvae from the breeder queen to a strong queenless colony. This practice provides the most control over timing for commercial queen production, but it takes choice away from the bees, overall quality is suspect, and it is too much work for humans in a task that bees have always done by themselves.

The beekeeping literature of 100 years ago is full of observations of disease and prophesies for the bees to come. Perhaps the earliest prediction of the collapse we are seeing saw by early queen-raiser Henry Alley in the 1880s when he said one day inbreeding will cause all breeding of bees to cease.

Today, breeding bees is big business. Artificial insemination of virgin queen bees, under microscope, with semen from select drones, provides a tool used for a totally controlled mating. This is used to augment research of testing for things like hygienic behavior or resistance to certain diseases. With the infinite variables of the hive, how can we acknowledge any such test results? Results are impossible to always repeat with bees. What works in California may not be suited for the northeast. We must act on the patterns we see in our own circumstances. I don’t see how entomological rape can be justified, especially as I and others have observed that the methods are more at fault for hive mortality rather than not having the “super bees” derived from a lab. Various breeds of bees do well handling mites with smaller comb once the balance is reached. The continued linkage of the bee family in its own area helps them to adapt. If you like the bees you have now (and they are surviving), you have nothing to gain by importing foreign genetics.

FOLLOWING THE HIVE’S LIFECYCLE

If you have a hive that overwintered well, carefully check them every week during swarm season (here in the Hudson Valley that’s anywhere from mid May to the end of June, though I’ve caught em in October). When you see that drone production is full on, the hive is getting closer to swarming. On a nice afternoon, before or as they begin swarm cells, find the queen and move her with a frame (or bar) of brood and a frame of honey to a new location. Add two shakes of bees (literally shake the bees off the comb, they don’t get upset!) if you will seal this split and move it three miles to a new apiary site, OR leave this split in the same apiary and add three to four shakes to bees. (Many of the bees will gradually fly back to their original home.) I find the latter the least energy intensive and usually do not move my splits, though the methods of splitting bees are numerous and each has its advantages. Look at bushfarms.com.

The now queenless hive in the mother position will begin to raise cells. You can let the best cell hatch and this queen will kill the others and go mate, or you can inspect a week later, cut out extra cells and use them for other splits. I find the bees chew down the inferior cells before hatching and the resulting queens are the highest quality. The main thing is this bulk of bees has perhaps almost three weeks of no open brood, so the mites are not reproducing as well. A period of queenlessness is like fasting for the hive. Certain organs are resting and being cleansed. The broodnest is backfilled, and when the new queen mates and lays eggs, the hive is inspired like you would not believe, soon catching up and surpassing hives that did not interrupt their cycle. If the new queen fails to mate after three weeks, the old queen can be reintroduced with her own entourage, some smoke, and exposure to light. I do this to every hive I have, sometimes once again in the summer. I cut out cells from the hives I really like for “bust ups” – making as many nucs as possible from the weaker hives in the yard. I keep track of which families excel and keep hives of each family in each yard. From my few years of observations of treatment-free beekeeping, I believe that a hive that does not fully interrupt its brood cycle at least once an active season will not be able to cope with varroa mite levels.

A hive naturally wants to swarm or raise a supercedure queen when their current queen is in her second season. At this time the hive is at its most vigorous and can raise the best queens. The breeders I select from my own stock, what I call the Anarchy Line, are always three years old (tested for two winters,) so to ensure excellent cells from these queens I boost the bee population as follows.

RAISING QUEEN BEES FOR PRODUCTION

In addition to having queens mate in all the outyards in the way described above, I have three queen production yards where I'm bringing in the most exceptional families. I use three to six frame (or bar) mating nucs. At any time, around 20 different breeder queens are in some of these nucs, marked with pushpins. The breeder queens are constantly shuffled around in the cellraising process.

Method:

1. go to a strong, nonbreeding nuc and cage the queen for sale or a later split. Remove two of the frames (with bees) from this nuc and set them aside. Leave open larvae here as much as possible. Use smoke and allow the remaining bees to be exposed to the sun to calm them (assuming no robbing is taking place - do this during a flow).
2. go to the nuc with the breeder queen. Using no or as little smoke as possible, remove the frame with the queen and transfer it with the bees on it into the other queenless nuc, leaving the gap between the original bees and the queen's bees who will protect her. Make sure most of the eggs and larvae stay in the original position where the breeder queen was (transfer the breeder queen onto a capped frame if necessary). Where the breeder queen was is now our cellraiser.
3. We have two frames of brood and bees from the other nuc. We shake the bees from one frame into the cellraiser. We return this frame with no bees to the center of the nuc where our breeder queen now resides. The other frame with bees on it is added to the cellraiser. With some experience, you will note the bee strength and food required and rate the quality queen cells.
4. In 8 to 10 days, the cells are ripe and ready to be cut off the frames and given to other queenless nucs, taken along with the frame of brood to boost a small nuc, or left to hatch where they are if no extra cells are needed. Cutting cells out with a knife is more difficult and sometimes impossible on comb with wires and always impossible on plastic foundation. Time of hatch is more unpredictable than with grafting, though these queens mate more reliably and show more vigor and longevity. Handle cells very carefully. If no flow is on, the bees are more prone to chew down a few cells every time they are checked. They will also chew down or keep inferior cells as they see fit. Have your splits made or other nucs de-queened the day prior (at least several hours of queenlessness is a must to ensure cell acceptance - best acceptance is when the cell is transfered with some of the bees that made it). Pin wax around the queen cell to the wax of a central comb in the nuc.
5. You can carefully check for a virgin queen in a week, though you often need a fast eye to see her. I have only seen virgin queens fly away if the hive is very disturbed or if she is touched. More patient beekeepers would check in two weeks for a laying queen. Then wait AT LEAST another week to cage the queen at three weeks emerged. Studies show that acceptance, performance, and longevity all increase if the queen is not stolen away too soon. Pushing these limits to save costs is not a way to steward life.

The cellraising nuc can be small, 3 frames, and still start and finish a few excellent cells as long as it is packed with bees. Basically, I am boosting the cell raiser with extra bees and cutting back the nuc where I shuffle in the breeder queen. In another week the brood where the breeder queen is will hatch, the young larvae will be her own, and she will be ready to transfer again.

This system allows the bees to choose who becomes a queen and how many cells to start. I’ve seen an average of about 7 usable cells per three-four frame nuc, sometimes 2 and sometimes 15, depending on the weekly conditions. Sometimes cells are attached to each other and cut out as a group. Empty frames or bars are given to the breeder queens as their nucs grow very strong and the main flow comes. It is wonderful to induce the cells just as the breeder queen has laid eggs in brand new comb. It is important to only use combs made from either your own clean wax foundation or what the bees make. Wax foundations bought from companies contain detrimental miticide residues. I wouldn’t want this wax to be close to developing queens or drones.

During the flow, this system provides abundant young bees, plenty of feed, and other open larvae to draw mites away from the queen cells, which does happen often in a system where no other larvae are present. Though not a huge amount of cells are obtained, since I am shuffling 20 breeder queens every week, the genetic diversity is maintained in each batch of queens with less work than grafting from 20 separate combs. In using the number of high quality cells each family of bees wants to build, I am promoting the bees that make more cells well this way. Full sized hives are not taken out of production to become the cellraisers. Ideally each nuc becomes a cellraiser during the season and gets a long queenless period which dramatically breaks up the mite reproduction cycle. Knowledge of the flow in your particular area can help predict when the nucs benefit from the greatest field force. This method can be fine for larger-scale queen production as long as many nucs are used. It takes less than a minute and requires only one trip to the cellraiser per batch of cells.

At times I still graft larvae to quickly incorporate new genetics into the program. I’m good at it after years of practice, it is a relatively easy method for the quantity produced, and it can provide excellent queens if the cellraisers are strong. The thing is, I can’t justify it when the bees do it so well themselves.

GENETICS

Genetic makeup is a key for hive health throughout the year, and fundamental for bees to survive winter and times of dearth. A queen is believed to mate with twenty or more drones, on one or more mating flights in her first week of emerging from a queen cell. These drones are from hives within miles all over and congregate in certain mating areas. Because of this great amount of uncontrolled genetic diversity, the mass breeding of bees was not organized until about 100 years ago when someone, you guessed it, realized they could make a buck from first generation hybrid vigor.

Putting our commercial interests aside and not going beyond our methodology being in tune with the hive’s life cycle, how well the bees do is a matter of their adaptation to our area. The goal is to have hives that can survive without chemical treatments or artificial feed, deal with New York winters, be easy to work without a veil, and also at times make serious honey.

All bees are good, and I am not a fanatic about any particular breed of bee. I generally stay away from “Italians,” as they have often been overbred for commercial pollination. The darker Russian bees do well in the cold. Really, there are black bees, striped bees, tan bees, red bees, yellow bees, these are honey bees we are talking about here. The names are just political. Every hive is different. I keep track of my 18+ bee families with colored pushpins. Though I do saturate the mating areas with my own desirable drones, I am not as interested in controlling the genetic makeup of the drone pool as much as I want to ensure the drones were raised on healthy, chemical free comb.

- Bloodlines –

2008 feral cut outs– Hudson, NY Barn – 3 year survivor, north side, good hygiene. Cheese Plant, Pine Plains, NY – the “Cheese” line - very hygienic – 20 year history of bees in the house.

Russians - my own Anarchy Line I’ve had for four years, a Carniolan line (now mixed with Russian genes) originally brought into Canada from Slovenia (smuggled in underwear).

- select Russian breeder queens obtained from my good friend and mentor Kirk Webster, Middlebury, VT, likely the most important bee breeder in this country.

- select breeders from Old Sol Apiaries, Oregon. These are a mix of Russian, Carniolan, Buckfast, and feral stock.

- black queen from a six pound swarm (!) caught in “squirrel house” – July, 2008.

- Ontario Buckfast – overwintered in NY, originally from Bjorn Apiaries, PA.

- Carniolan- from Mike Palmer, VT.

- Nebraskan Leatherback - from guru Michael Bush.

- abandoned mamas- I have obtained several abandoned hives, one that is Russian and has survived for four years without any human intrusions in Tivoli, NY, and another in Red Hook that has gone 6 years without any treatments, artificial feed, or manipulations.

If you think you have met the REAL DEAL in one of your hives, I’d be happy to invite her family into the program.