Lessons from the NE Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference

During the NE Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference (which I am now going to call the NETFB to save typing), the emphasis was on healthy bees.  I learned a lot about balance in the hive, nutrition on every level, and respect for nature and evolution.

Michael Bush set the tone in his first talk about healthier bees.  He discussed microorganisms in the hive.  There are 30 kinds of mites, 30 kinds of insects and some 8000 microorganisms in the bee hive.  When we treat we affect the hive ecology.  Everything that is put in the hive as a treatment - whether "natural" or not - kills microorganisms.  Dean Stiglitz and Laurie Herboldsheimer (hosts of the conference) have done a small experiment just to show the influence of oxalic acid on yeast in general.  Their point is that whatever we introduce into the hive, we are affecting the ecology of the hive.

If you take the "no treatment" approach, then you are inviting the bees to experience selective pressure to evolve stronger bees who can withstand the varroa mite or whatever the next bee scourge might be.  What happens with treatment is that we strengthen the mite who becomes more virulent and prolific.  If we don't treat, according to Michael, the pressure is where it should be - on the pest/parasite to be in balance with its host.

So Michael advocates (and you can read what he talked about on his website - click on Four Simple Steps to Healthier Bees on the left side column)

1. No Treatments of any kind
2. Breed local survivor queens
3. Only natural food (honey and real pollen)
4. Use natural comb

To the point of only feeding natural food, Michael pointed out that the Ph of sugar syrup is 6 vs. that of honey which is 3.2  A lower Ph is more acidic and all brood diseases thrive more in sugar syrup than in honey.  

He has a PowerPoint on his website on natural cell size which you can also find in the left column on the linked page.

Dean Stiglitz, seen below, gave a talk on raising local queens.  I own but have only leafed through his book written with Laurie:  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping, and this conference and meeting him sent me home to pore over it.  He is the consummate researcher and researches other people's research.  He also gave a talk at the conference on how to read a research study to know if the results are something to rely on or not.

Again, in his queen-raising talk, the emphasis was on bee health.  To be a well-developed queen, the queen must be fed well.  So a hive must have stored food, pollen, and young worker bees to make a good queen.  He encouraged a walk-away split as one way to encourage the bees to make their own queen.  The queenless side of the split will be the cell builder.  If you put that half of the split in the old hive's location, then the foragers will return to it, adding to the food in the colony.

Another interesting talk for me was by Dee Lusby.  Dee and her late husband Ed raise bees in Arizona.  She was a little difficult to understand - I expect one learns more from visiting her at her apiary than hearing her speak, but I learned a lot from her about Housel positioning.

She pronounces it "HOO sul" - I've been calling it "How sul" so I am mending my ways going forward.  What I understood about Housel positioning is that when you put foundation, a foundation strip, or drawn comb into a hive, it's important that the inside of the cell have the "Y" at the bottom of the cell facing up on the frames from the center to the outside of the hive.  In the center it switches and the "Y" should face up going toward the nearest side.

I just thought that for some reason that was better for the bees, but instead there is an explanation that again has to do with balance in the hive.  If the "y" is facing up, then the bees use that upper "v" of the "Y" as a guide for the beginning of their comb.  And for the honey, for example, to stay in the cell, the slant of the cell has to be downward toward the center.

If the cells are not set that way, then it confuses the bees' system and their balance in the hive.  This is also why it is so important to put a frame back into a box in the same orientation in which it was originally.
Jeff and I do all of our hives this way, but only because I thought we were supposed to - now I understand why it is important.



Dee also talked about opening up the brood box in a pyramidal way by placing capped brood in the center of the box with a full frame of honey on either side of the capped brood (for insulation of the brood and for food provision).   She had a complex system of numbered frames to explain this to us.



There were other good speakers - Kirk Webster talked about overwintering nucs, but I'm not going to try to cover that in this post.  And Michael gave another talk on what he calls "Lazy Beekeeping" addressing issues I already talk about in this blog all the time:  8 frame mediums, foundationless frames, etc.  Paul Arnold who anchors the Young Harris Institute was also there, but we missed his talk on Thursday night and on Sunday.  It was fun hanging out with Paul, though, and Julia, Noah, and I ate several meals with him.

BTW, here's a picture of the Atlanta contingent with Michael Bush in front of his table of books that he was selling.  We left a space in our line-up so that his books might show up in the picture, but they don't really.





So I came away resolved to try to succeed at splitting my successful colonies, to forget feeding even bee tea, and to try to emulate my natural beekeeping mentors and heroes.

Thursday's Almost Here!

I am beyond excited.  All of you know how much I admire (and often refer to or quote) Michael Bush. Well on Thursday, Julia, Noah and I are going to Leominster, Massachusetts (home of the the manufacturer of all those food grade plastic buckets we all use at honey harvest) to the NE Treatment Free Beekeepers Conference!

And guess who will be there:  Michael Bush!!!  I've wanted to meet Michael Bush for seven years!



Not only will Michael Bush be there, but also Sam Comfort, whom I love and love to hear speak (I first met Sam when he and I were both speakers at the SE Organic Beekeepers Conference a couple of years ago and then I saw him again that year at  EAS - he's always a trip); Dee Lusby, the queen of treatment free beekeepers; and the host of the conference:  Dean Stiglitz who wrote the Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping.  (see below)



I plan to listen well, take lots of notes, and bask in the presence of these masters - people for whom I hold intense hero worship.

I will be completely happy if Julia takes a photo of me with Michael Bush, or better yet if someone else takes all three of us with him.  Actually I am realizing there are no photos of Michael anywhere - not even on the book he wrote.  He's from Nebraska - maybe he's part of an Indian tribe that believes you lose part of your soul if someone snaps your picture.  So whatever it is, I'll be glad to meet him, but not press for a picture, unless it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

The conference includes a lot of hands on stuff this week, but I couldn't leave work so we are going for the main conference which starts on Friday.

IPM and the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Meeting

Tonight the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' meeting centered on IPM (Integrated Pest Management). Jennifer Berry from the University of Georgia's entomology program talked to us about studies she is involved in about the varroa mite.

Although she did discuss some chemicals, I am not planning to use chemicals in my hive, so I won't report about that part of her talk. She did talk about research showing that the screened bottom board is essential to effective IPM. At UGA the screened bottom board stays open on the hive all winter long. She discussed three non-chemical ways to manage the varroa mite (all in conjunction with the screened bottom board):

1. Using hygenic stock such as the Minnesota Hygienic bee or the bees raised in N Georgia by the Purvis Brothers Apiary

2. Killing drone brood. The drones are in the capped state longer than house bees and so the varroa mite likes to lay her eggs in drone cells because the mite has a greater chance to grow up. So you put drone foundation in a frame in the hive and when the cells are capped, remove the frame and put it in the freezer. This kills the drone larvae (and thus the mite can't grow). Put the dead drone frame back in the hive and the bees clean it out and start again.

3. Doing the powdered sugar shake (as I did this year). Take a flour sifter (now why didn't I think of that?) and sift the powdered sugar over the brood box. Put a sticky board under the SBB to catch the varroa which fall as the bees groom each other and the mites fall off. Then you can count the fallen mites to get an idea of how many mites are in your hive. If you do a powdered sugar shake every 10 days for a month, you should significantly lower the mite count.

I asked her about small cell bees and she said that the UGA lab is just beginning a study on small cell. One major beekeeper, Bill Owens, in Georgia has all of his hives regressed to small cell and she talked about his successes. With 800 hives, he has only lost 3 hives this year and not to varroa.

On the other hand, she mentioned that while Dee Lusby is going around talking a lot about small cell, she didn't feel convinced because she noted that Dee lives in Arizona and all the bees there are African honeybees - which have a shorter developmental cycle anyway and are varroa resistant. Jennifer's point was that the bees that Lusby has regressed to small cell would be small and varroa resistant because of their genetic heritage (African) and that the cell size didn't make a difference. She also talked about how long it takes to regress bees and how hard it is.

Jennifer is sampling honeycomb which Cindy Bee finds in her bee removal business. So far the "wild" comb is about 5 mm and doesn't support the theory that bees in the wild naturally build 4.9 mm comb. If you'll scroll down this link, you'll find a short write-up about both Cindy Bee and Jennifer Berry.

In spite of all of this, I am ordering small cell foundation this winter to begin regressing in the spring.

Housel positioning for the honey super

I’m interested in being a good landlord to my hives. If I am to do this, I should imitate nature as much as possible. Dee Lusby has written and spoken about a way to build the foundation for the bees to better imitate nature.

In nature, the bees may hang a feral hive from a branch and build their comb out from there. When Michael Housel studied the feral comb, he found that the center of the cell has a “Y” in it. In natural comb on either side of the center the “Y” faces up toward the outside of the hive.

When foundation is in a frame, you can turn the frame from right to left and see the "y" facing up on one side and the "y" facing down on the other. Here's a link
to see the Y positions.


When I added the super to Destin today, I marked the frames for Housel Positioning (HP) with an indicator of the "Y" up or down position. See how the up "Y" is on the outside from the center outward in each direction.

We'll see if the bees take to this more eagerly than they have with my previous random foundation placement