Summer 2005
Another busy summer has passed by. I didn't have the time to take all those pictures I planned this time either. I should not be too unhappy about that, I was busy extracting honey most of the summer.
I'm going to talk a bit about bee breeding this time. We all have different idéas about how to run beekeeping operations. When you ask 2 beeks the same question, you usually get 3 different answers.... That's part of the fun with this job, you can do it so many ways and still bee "right".
First lets look at the basics. I have found there are 3 factors to look at that are linked together. Those 3 factors has to work together if I want to be successful in my operation. If I change one of them, the result will change.
- The place I keep my bees. The environment sets the limit. The length of summer, amount of flowers etc.
- My methods of keeping the bees. If I split them to avoid swarming, how much space I give.
- The breed of bees I use. If I control it by changing queens or use the local strain.
I keep bees at lat 60 north, that means a very short and intense summer with only a few weeks of honey flow. But it also means that almost all flowers come at the same time with abundance of nectar for the bees. The fast change of daylight in the spring triggers the bees to build up fast, they "know" they have to build up to strong hives to take advantage of the short summer and store enough honey for the long coming winter. In mid summer the long days close to the polar circle gives many flying hours per day.
The method I use is simply to give the bees the best possible chance to build up in the spring. The first important thing is how I wintered the previous year. There has to be large colonies populated with young bees to get through the long winter and be strong enough the next spring. By using Styrofoam hives that is insulating they get help to keep warm in early spring and can keep a larger brood nest. I use two boxes for winter, even if the bees would make it in one box. This is to give them some "peace" so I don't have to disturb them early whith a new box.
By the time they have filled two boxes with bees, I make the spring check. By then they usually have cleaned up the hive and I reverse the boxes and change old and bad frames when needed. They get excluder and the first super at the same time. Of course I go around looking at the hives at least once in early spring before that, to find the dead outs and those queenless or weak needing to be united with another hive. I can see that by looking at the entrance. If they bring home pollen and behaves normally I don't open a hive before spring check. If in doubt about a hive, simply tip up the top box and look up between the bottom bars, I will see the brood pattern without having to take frames out. A lot of what I do is based on experience, there are many things to see without taking hives apart if you know what to look for. I avoid moving frames around, reorganizing brood nest, I believe the bees know better what is best for them than I do. Messing around with the frames only create extra work for them to sort out again after the beek been there....
After the first check in spring I only ad new supers when needed. This is important: super the hives after the amount of bees and brood, not according to how much honey there is in the spring! I always try to have one empty box on the hives when I leave the yard during the build up before the flow. The bees should feel there is too much room in the hive, they need to work harder to fill it.... Advantage is I don't have to look for swarm cells, disadvantage is I need more boxes than most other beeks. And the hives tend to get ridiculously high. This year I even brought a step ladder when taking off honey.... Another reason for many boxes is that the bees have many open cells to work at the same time. Nectar coming in is high in water content and need space for keeping until ripened. If the cells get full of wet nectar, the bees will have to reduce water content before the can go for more. Better they have enough space to continue bring home nectar during the day and wait until night with "indoor" jobs....
Breeding bees is the most important part for me. About 5 years ago I started selecting among my own bees instead of bring in material from other queen breeders. Before that I used to get frames of eggs and brood of suitable heritage from friends that were Buckfast queen breeders, or bought some queens to use as breeders. I was seldom unhappy with what I got, but had a feeling there could be some more to achieve with a different approach. The Buckfast bees, like others are developed and maintained through line breeding. This means inbred lines are kept pure and crossed with each other so the heritage can always be traced back decades. All breeding programs are based on inbreeding in one way or another. Line breeding is sustainable and can go on for ever if the geene pool is large enough to not loose genetic material.
I wanted to try a closed population system similar to what Laidlaw and Paige outline. But instead of keeping it closed, I would ad material I find interesting when needed. I'm not sure I can keep enough genetic material in the gene pool for so long time. When I use only around 10 queens to raise new queens from each year sex alleles might be lost too fast. Time will show.
The first years I deliberately mixed as much different stock into my bees as I could find. But it was all good bees, docile and diligent. I mixed Carnica, Ligustica, Mellifera, with my Buckfast strains that already contained Saharensis, Monticola etc. This resulted in a vitality increase, and when I was selecting from those bees I got an increase in honey crop of 30%. The first year I didn't believe it was my selection that did it, the second year I still doubted, but now after three years with the same result I'm starting to think I'm on the right way.
Unfortunately, there has not been so much time to properly take care of the system. When I suddenly had 30% more honey there were no time to work with breeding..... I had to spend all the time extracting honey! Now that was the reason for starting up the breeding program, but the result was way past my expectation. Last year I didn't even take the insem equiment out of the cupbord, there was hardly enough time get new queens with natural mating. So I lost one year there, but managed to inseminate 30 queens this summer. I'm not so happy with results from insemination, I loose sex alleles when using only drones from one line and that is a step backwards. On the other hand I need to keep/recreate some more "pure" material when I didn't have time for proper control last summer. Some of the insem queens this summer had semen from several different lines, I will see next year what difference that makes. Closed population breeding means using mixed semen from all drone lines to inseminate each queen. In reality that's almost impossible for me to handle that many drones, they only live for an hour outside of the hive.
My result is partly due to the larger number of bees I get with the genetic mix. All according to the old rule; fill a box with bees and they will fill it with honey. This is the easy way, it's more difficult to get bees where each individual produce more honey. That will be the next step, and will require a much better control and "bookkeeping" of all the hives. Unfortunately more selection means more inbreeding and we are back on square one. Or...?
Lets look at those three basics again.
Location
Methods
Bees
In my location I have fast build up to large number of bees in a hive. That means risk of swarming, and most people don't think they need so many supers when they usually don't get that much honey and there is time to extract and get boxes back on the hives if needed. So they cut the hives back by making splits in the spring, thus reducing the number of bees to avoid problems.
So instead of seeing a problem, I use this to my advantage, and let the bees build up as much as they can. Provide the space they need, top ventilation if it's hot so they don't have to hang outside doing nothing, etc. I can do this because I have bees that don't swarm. I have 2-3% swarming, usually the strongest hives I didn't get to in time with more boxes. Some also superseedure in the autumn, mating with local drones coming from swarmy stock. I breed from the hives producing most honey, usually the fastest and strongest in the spring.
I make my splits when the flow ends in beginning of August when most honey is taken off. There is still lots of bees in the hives then, with one super left above excluders. We are 3 persons when doing this, and it will take us 3 days to make 100 splits. We bring empty boxes with drawn comb, bottoms and lids. One man takes care of the new split, the other 2 go through hives. 2 frames of brood is taken from each hive and mixed in the split. If we see the queen, bees are following the brood frames into the box, otherwise the bees are shaken off so the queen is left in the old hive. Then the supers that were above excluder are shaken over the split and most of the young bees there forced into the new hive. You need to be fast this time of year to avoid getting a robbing started. Best done in a drizzle when all bees are at home... A mated queen is given them, and they are taken to a location with no strong hives near to avoid robbing. When mixing bees and brood from 2 or more hives the bees get disoriented and accept the new queen without problems.
Once you get used to this way of working it's faster than conventional splits in the spring. When making them so late, they will not get so strong next spring, but I have excellent wintering results.They contain only young bees that are better in the spring than old summer bees. I winter those smaller colonies in one box. I loose 2 boxes on the early flow compared to full strength hives next summer, but find it worth it. I hate going through hives in June to make splits when it's 7 or more boxes, many half full of honey, on them. Cleaner, faster, simpler than to do it in the end of season.
So hopefully you figured out now how I use those 3 factors, location, methods, and bees to my advantage. And how they are linked to each other. Maybe you also can do it, finetune your methods to get the most out of the bees you have in your location. Or adjust your bees to better fit location and the way you keep them. But remember to always listen to the bees. Let them tell you how it's best done, they know far better than most of us do.
This was written in the north of Thailand, by a temporary relocated Beek, Jan 2006, with the help of plenty of hot curry, uncounted bottles of Beer Chang, and the as sudden as unexpected need to find something useful to do...
