Gonorrhea and the Varroa Mite

Today in my iPhone news source this article appeared. I read the whole article with interest because of my interest in the varroa mite and the "treatment" that is regularly recommended - no, pushed with great guilt-induction down new beekeepers' throats.

The title of the article is

Wherever you are in the world, time is running out for treating gonorrhea

The point of the article is that bacteria that cause gonorrhea are growing increasingly resistant to all drugs available for treatment. In the United States, the article says, cases of gonorrhea rose 50% between 2006 - 2015. And at the same time, the bacteria are growing more and more resistant. The future does not look good for new gonorrhea cases.

Beekeepers keep treating the varroa mite and it doesn't go away. Instead, we are developing a stronger and stronger varroa mite. As we proceed to treat the varroa mite ineffectively, we are in grave danger of finding ourselves with a SuperVarroa Mite. And the varroa mite will be just like gonorrhea with NO EFFECTIVE TREATMENT.

As treatments are tried, the varroa mite gets stronger and the treatment no longer works. So now everyone is encouraged to use oxalic acid. It's bad for bees (the only truly safe time to use oxalic for the bees is when the hive is broodless - and do you know any beekeepers who actually only treat in December?) and bad for the varroa mite (everybody loses - including the beekeeper who has to be extremely careful with the toxic "treatment"). Meanwhile, the varroa mite gets stronger and stronger as it lives through these efforts to obliterate it. 

I have bees that survive without treatment. Mind you, all of my bees do not. My bees that die are usually swarms I catch or bees I purchase (which I do rarely) from beekeepers who treat. I do lose hives when they don't go into winter strong enough - that may be caused by varroa. I don't have confidence in the survival of a hive until it has lived through two winters. But when my bees die, it's usually beekeeper error that I can trace and tell you what happened. I am only interested in my bees that do survive because that means they have the genetics to live WITH the varroa mite.

I have kept bees since 2006 without treatment. However, I lost bees when I moved in 2011 and they didn't get moved well. I lost my very best survivor hive last summer when I made mid-summer splits too late; the splits were robbed out the day I made them and the queen was accidentally killed in the original hive. Beekeeper error, not varroa, caused the loss of that, my best hive.

Right now I have bees from a swarm I caught four or five years ago that are thriving, surviving every winter and producing honey. I made a split from that hive this spring and I hope it does just as well. I have two hives on the roof of an Atlanta elementary school that were previously kept by a beekeeper who did not treat and are now my bees. Those two hives are overflowing with bees and have been alive for at least four years with no treatment. I made splits from those bees and gave away queen cells to a friend of mine so we can have continued treatment free bees.

I also have a swarm in a top bar hive. The swarm came from a hive that had not been opened, much less treated, in four years. I have great hopes for them. If they make it through the winter, I'll make a split from them next year. 

At Young Harris last week, I went to a very good presentation by Geoff Williams of the Auburn bee lab. His subject was "When chemicals and pathogens collide." My favorite part of the lecture (maybe because I answered a question and won a t-shirt!) was when he explained the relationship between chemicals and pathogens. There are many relationships - he had an entire chart. The relationships are defined by who profits in the relationship - the pathogen? the chemical? neither? both? 

But the relationship that seems most functional to me when I think of the varroa mite and the bee is mutuality (number one on Geoff's chart). We need a bee who can live with and tolerate the varroa mite and a varroa mite that can't destroy the bee, but can still reproduce itself. That is not going to happen as we continue to help breed a stronger and stronger varroa mite. 

I wish the universities would focus on how treatment-free hives manage to survive. I wish they would work on developing the strong genetics of those bees and that they would quit engaging in a process to develop the SuperVarroa mite, which is what they are doing now.

But you and I both know where the money comes from for university research. It's from Big Ag and not the backyard beekeeper. So the focus of university research is on bee survival for pollination of the almonds and other crops at whatever cost, rather than looking at balance in the beehive.

I went to another talk at Young Harris entitled The Top 10 Best Practices in Modern Beekeeping. The speaker began talking right from the start about varroa mites. More than midway through the talk, he never had moved into whatever the other nine practices were. 

I left when he did what many speakers do today - blame the treatment-free beekeeper for the strength of the varroa mite. I've heard so many people say that the treatment-free beekeeper has hives that are bringing the varroa mite into the hives of those who treat through a "varroa bomb" and we should be strung up on the highest tree (or at least that is implied). 

It would be encouraging if interest were expressed in why surviving hives make it through the winters rather than employing shaming toward people who are trying to take care of their bees in a way that works for them and for their bees. 

Instead, the top ten practices of modern beekeeping that are encouraged are 1. Treat varroa; 2. Treat varroa; 3. Treat varroa; 4. Treat varroa; 5. Treat varroa; 6. Treat varroa; 7. Treat varroa......I don't know what 8, 9 or 10 are because I walked out.

Winter, Summer, It's All the Same in Atlanta

OK, it's not unusual for me not to break out my winter coat until January and our worst winter months are February and early March. As a matter of fact, the two hardest snowstorms we have had the entire thirty-seven years I've lived in Atlanta were in March 1993 and in February 2014. In the March snowstorm the temperatures were in the teens and we had tons of snow (relatively speaking) and no power for over a week. In February 2014, I got home just fine in each of the two snowstorms two weeks apart, but many people were stranded on the Interstates since in Georgia we get layers of ice under the snow on the streets and driving is impossible.

But in all of those years, in November and December, while my winter coat remained in the closet, I would on many mornings put on my fleece jacket or vest. We did have one cold week here in 2015 during early December, but it only warranted a jacket in the early morning. By afternoon the temperature had risen up to the high 60s.

This Christmas week takes the cake. Yesterday the thermometer read 79.5 F - couldn't quite get to 80. I mean, really, it's DECEMBER.

So the bees are confused and this is bad news. Every day they are flying, using up energy and needing to consume their saved stores. There is an illusion among the hives that spring may already be springing - is the queen laying at her pre-spring rate? Or is she slowly increasing as of December 21 which is her usual procedure?

Right after the actual cold winter week, I saw evidence on one hive that they may have nosema.

But that was several weeks ago and the bees in that nuc hive continue to fly as eagerly as the others.

I worry because I didn't feed my bees this year - I rarely do. Instead I harvested relatively little, leaving lots on each hive for the bees. The nuc in the photo and a sister nuc are from splits I made in late July after the nectar flow had long ceased. I gave each of those hives two jars of honey, harvested from another hive.

So in giving them that honey did I transfer nosema from the other hive to them?

I don't know, but we can only hope for the best.  I won't feed them anymore and cross my fingers that they make it through the winter. The two nuc overwintering hives are splits from my strongest survivor hive so hopefully they will have traits to endure their way through nosema or whatever else the varroa mite dishes out over the "winter," such as it is!

Genetic Consciousness at Work

Today I checked the hives at Stonehurst Place (doing fabulously well) and my backyard hives.  The Stonehurst hives each needed a new box - we've had great weather throughout May after the wettest April in years and years.

The bees are having a great opportunity to bring in nectar.

When I checked my backyard hives, I was particularly interested in the nuc split I had made several weeks ago.  They appear to be doing fine, but I didn't want to go into their bottom box in case I might destroy a queen cell about to emerge.

Michael Bush says it never hurts to add a frame of brood and eggs to a hive when you have any question about the queen.  So I have taken that approach with this nuc.  I made the nuc because it's good to have a nuc in your bee yard as a resource - it can provide bees or eggs or a boost to any hive in your yard once it is established.

I am trying to be conscious of genetics.  So this year I have only added frames of brood and eggs from hives that survived the winter and did not bow to the dreaded varroa vectored diseases.  So I took a frame of brood and eggs from my survivor neighborhood swarm hive from last year and added it to the nuc hive.  This is the second frame of brood and eggs I've added to the nuc.  The first frame came from the nuc hive that overwintered (now in a full sized hive).

The nuc hive is a medium nuc, currently consisting of two boxes.  I added the frame to the upper box so as not to disturb any event in the bottom box.  I think the added work force will help the nuc and the eggs on the frame will give them the ability to make a queen if they have not yet been successful with that endeavor.

Whatever queen they make, she will come from survivor stock since both hives where I have pulled frames of eggs survived the winter.

Analytical Thinking about the New Dead Hive

So the hive that appears dead today (it rained and was too cold to open it today) needs some careful thought and I have not been able to get it out of my mind today.

First it originally was my Northlake swarm hive - a swarm from a hive of bees that had been living "for years" in a column in a business condominium complex.  So potentially these were feral survival bees.  They lived through the winter of 2013 and I was thrilled to have a survivor hive.

But this year, as my son-in-law called it, was the Year of the Foot.  I dealt all through bee season with my injured leg (now all better after a YEAR) and it really hampered my beekeeping attentiveness.  I have to acknowledge that my hives were neglected more than they were cared for in bee season 2014.

So the Northlake Swarm hive went queenless some time midsummer.  Because I was not in my hives every week with a cast on my leg, I missed the queenless situation until it had probably gone on a while - not long enough to develop a laying worker problem, but still long enough.

When I recognized the queenless problem in the hive, I didn't have any swarm survival hives, so I gave them a frame of brood and eggs from the Sebastian hive (the one that we moved from the yard of the GSU professor in spring 2014).  I did that three times before they made a queen.  Two frames came from Sebastian and one from my Morningside hive in the community garden.

So the queen that developed in the Northlake hive was no longer a survivor queen.  She had been made from eggs with a less clear history.

I just grabbed a frame of brood and eggs from a hive that seemed to have a lot and didn't give the genetics much thought.

This year if either my nuc that has overwintered or my neighborhood swarm hive that has overwintered go queenless, I'm using each of them to provide brood and eggs for the other.  That way they will still get survivor genetics.  I am resolved to be a much more involved and careful beekeeper in this year of NON-INJURY - crossed fingers that that remains true.

Tomorrow I'll check on Stonehurst and see if it survived - it's not a feral hive - it came from Mountain Sweet Honey last year, but it may have made it.

My ongoing goal should be to use survivors to make queens for any queenless hives.  If Tom's hive which came from Bill Owens and also appears to be a survivor hive made it through this cold period, I will split it in late March for the same reason - it's a survivor.  The nuc currently alive in my backyard came from that hive as a split in 2014.

Winter Bee Deaths - and Still a Strong Hive

The bees that go into winter are not the same as the bees who live in the summer.  The summer bee has her work cut out for her.  She progresses through jobs in the hive, beginning with housecleaner and nursemaid and ending with forager.  Each job prepares her for her next assignment and each wears her out a little more.  Old summer bees have ragged wings and if you see one who looks like that, she is close to death.

Winter bees are different.  First there are no drones in the wintering hives (sometimes one or two) because they are a drain on the hive resources; contribute nothing during the winter; and  the queen can create them from unfertilized eggs as spring approaches.

Winter bees live longer.  Summer bees live about six extremely active weeks.  Winter bees in cold temperate climates may live for 150 days (Winston, p. 215).  In an area like Atlanta where we typically are not a cold temperate climate, the winter bees may live a slightly shorter amount of time.  In the hive during the winter, bees do die and their bodies are cleaned out when the temperatures are warm enough to fly.

Here's what it looks like around my surviving colony in my backyard:

 As you can see around the base of the hive, it looks like an enormous bee graveyard.  The ground has been littered with bodies like this every time we have a cold snap.  In the interim, the yard guys show up and blow them off so this pile is purely from the ice storm last week.

Yet there are still thousands of bees in this hive.  I have a "Billy Davis" robber screen on the hive and there are bees massed under the screened wire, just enjoying the sunshine.  

Here's a closer view or two of the dead, lying en masse outside the hive.

The bees who are flying into the hive have packed pollen baskets.  You might notice that some of the dead bees also have packed pollen baskets.  

I am amazed at the strength of this hive and the numbers of bees who have lived here through our extremely cold winter.  In Atlanta we often have a week of snow in March, so it's not over yet.

Survivor Bees - Hallelujah

Yesterday all of my bee friends were posting on FB and other places that, as the snow/ice was melting, their bees were flying.  My strong little hive in the backyard - my only remaining home hive - was silent all day long.   This hive was a swarm that I retrieved near Northlake Mall in Atlanta.

The people told me that the bees had lived in a column of this condo/office complex for years.  This was the first year they had observed a swarm or called a beekeeper.  I figured this would be a survivor queen.  Nobody had treated these girls in any way for years and that's how I like it.  I didn't take any honey from them and have watched them with growing confidence in their survival over the year.

I hived this swarm in a box with a closed off screened bottom board and I have never pulled out the insert to open the screened bottom.  I don't know if that is helping them make it through the winter or not, but I have hitherto breathed a sigh of relief after every time the temperature returns to the 50s F, and I see that they are flying.

We have had a very cold winter for Atlanta - a week or two of temperatures in the teens and twenties; the Snowjam at the end of January, and now an ice storm of rather scary proportions.  But every time these bees have stayed the course.

Before the sun went down yesterday (it actually came out for a change), when the snow blocking the hive entrance finally melted off around 4:30 in the afternoon, I braved the ice-slick that is my concreted backyard area (a basketball court) to walk up to the entrance .  I saw a couple of bees, but only a couple, and thought that these were the only remaining live bodies.  So I went to bed last night with a heavy heart because my bees were silent.

Today I had a distracting day with my grandchildren.  We made Valentine's cookies (two different kinds) before we went to lunch.

Dylan and Lark and their beautiful cookie creations

My third grandchild, Max, who is 2 was also there, but he was more interested in playing with toys than making the cookies so he isn't in the photo.

After all the baking we went to lunch and at lunch I was telling them that I felt so sad that my bees had died.   I told them that it was warm enough according to the car thermometer that the bees, if they were alive, should be flying, but I had not seen them and I was sad to see that survivor hive go.  

When we returned from lunch, my granddaughter RAN to the back window and looked into the backyard.  "Grandma," she yelled, "the bees ARE flying."  I couldn't believe it and was moved to tears to find that this hive is still going strong.  

My backyard is down in a deep area and it probably was colder than 50 back there for all of yesterday and today.  When the car said 54, they probably finally had a temp by the hive just at 50 and decided to come out to go to the little bee's room (as Dean Stiglitz would say).  

I AM HAPPY.  What a Valentine!

So celebration isn't the meaning of this song, but it is about the difficulties of how we love - and loving the bees isn't much different in the challenges of it.  I love this rendition as do so many others, so I'm embedding this video because my bees are alive today:

Bees as Pets vs. Survivor Bees

I've now heard two talks at bee meetings in which the speakers say something to the effect of this:  "The bees are our pets.  Would you let your dog or cat starve to death?  Of course not, so why would you let your bees starve?"  Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture, said this last year at the GBA annual meeting.  Then last month Jennifer Berry said pretty much the same thing at the Metro Atlanta short course.

It's an effort to encourage new beekeepers to establish the practice of feeding their bees.

I don't know how to think about this.  My inclination is to go with leaving honey on your hives so that the bees go into winter with enough to make it through until the nectar flow starts.  Of course if we keep have earlier springs and nectar flows that happen out of sync with the bees buildup, then the bees won't have enough to go through the winter, regardless of whether you leave honey on the hive - there won't be honey to leave.

That's the way it was this fall.  The nectar flow last spring (2012) was early and concentrated so that the bees only had about three weeks to collect their entire supply.

In the Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping, Dean and Laurie say (p.85) about feeding sugar syrup, "these are not acceptable substitutes for honey as bee food.  Their nutritional values are not equivalent.  They also do not have the same pH as honey and so alter the microbial culture of the hive.  Many bee pathogens grow more readily at the pH of sugar syrup than at the pH of honey."

The previous winter I fed all of my hives bee tea going into winter.  I still lost about half of my hives.

In 2012 I only harvested from two hives.  I left all the honey on the other hives.  I still lost hives.  I lost the second biggest hive in my backyard to fierce robbing (see video on this blog).  And we lost a hive at Stonehurst and at Sebastian's house each to robbing.  I think the terrible robbing this year was due to the climate change-induced early spring and crazy short nectar flow, so many bees were short on stores.

I lost a couple of hives who absconded because they knew they didn't have enough honey to go into winter.  I fed honey to the hives who remained.

I fed honey to the hive at Chastain, but even though I could see bee activity and the hive felt light, they didn't take the honey.  I fed honey to Sebastian's remaining hive but they also didn't take the honey.  When I say that, I mean that the rapid feeder still was full of honey the next time I looked under the telescoping cover.  I haven't checked on Sebastian's bees to see if they are still alive.

In my own backyard, I lost a hive that I didn't feed with honey still in the hive but not by the cluster.  The cluster was so small that I think it's more accurate to say I lost that hive to queenlessness going into winter than to say it starved, although that was the immediate cause of death.

At the Morningside community garden, one of my hives is alive and active (I didn't feed it) and the other is dead .  I haven't opened it to see what the cause of death was.  The Boardman on the front of this hive was for water in the heat of summer and I just never took it off.

In my own backyard I have two vigorous hives.  At Jeff and Valerie's house where I kept the bees on the deck, I have at least two live, strong hives and possibly one other.  I lifted the top cover of Five Alive and saw a live bee walking around although no bees were flying out of it.  The fourth hive appears dead.  Those bees (all four hives) were full of honey going into winter.

At Rabun County, the last time I looked up there, the one hive was still going strong.  I fed them but they didn't take the honey.  You'll remember the other hive was knocked over and destroyed.

I would rather take these hives that made it through the winter and split them to make two strong survivor hives.  These are hives that stored enough and fought off the varroa vectored diseases.  Jennifer Berry said to me at the short course that while that was fine, I wouldn't know WHY the hives survived.  She's right about that.  But I'd still prefer to try this and go for bees that don't need me to feed them.