pesticide free beekeeping

In the August issue of Bee Culture, Dr. Malcolm Sanford, columnist and editor of the Apis newsletter http://apis.shorturl.com/, makes the shocking confession that he doesn’t actually keep bees. This is like learning that Dr. Spock didn’t raise his own children and almost as bad as learning the truth about Santa Claus.

Dr. Sanford’s reason for giving up bees: he doesn’t like dispensing pesticides to keep his colonies alive and to keep bees today it’s just too much work and expense.

Good news! Not everybody uses drugs in their hives or even practices labor intensive control measures to keep their colonies alive. I’ve kept bees drug free for four years (sort of). No, it’s not the same as before mites. I spend most of my bee work propagating colonies that survive the winter rather than making lots of honey.

Five years ago, I manned the honey bee exhibit at the county fair with Dan King, a stubborn eighty something year old beekeeper. We talked about our own beekeeping practices during lulls in the crowds. He “never used Ap’stan”, never “seen a mite in any of his hives” (the inspector claimed there were plenty of mites), and had nothing good to say about “them perfessors over t’Cornell that don’t know what they’re talking about.” Dan suffered big losses for years, but kept propagating bees from the surviving colonies. He medicated with wintergreen oil and was sure that killed the mites. I suspect Dan was practicing natural selection.

If Dan kept bees without pesticides, I thought I’d try. By the second year, all my colonies died of American Foulbrood. I caught several swarms and divided them in year three. All but two died the third winter, again with foulbrood. This spring a bear tore up one of those. I grafted queens and split the strong hive into seven small hives. That’s not usually a good idea, but 100 years ago, beekeepers frequently set aside a small number of colonies and split them to increase their stock or replace winter losses. In 1899, C.C. Miller split 9 weak hives into 56 without feeding (Fifty Years among the Bees). I improved my chances by early feeding. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to split a hive evenly 7 ways. Some started with only a few hundred bees, and not all queens were equal.

Will they survive this winter? We’ll see. I’m hoping global warming pushes us into USDA zone 5 from our current zone 4.