We're fortunate in Southern Ontario to live in a bee-keeping community centered on the University of Guelph. It's striking that these days there's more emphasis on pest/disease detection and control, and relatively less emphasis on cultural practice.
RE pest/disease detection and control, obviously small bee-keepers like ourselves must be knowledgeable and vigilant so as not to become the bee-keeper equivalent to Typhoid Mary; and it's equally obvious that optimum sanitation procedures and applied TLC are a lot easier for someone with two hives than someone with 600.
Just to take one example, if a hive with a single brood box should be sent into winter having processed four gallons of sugar syrup subsequent to honey harvest, it's a whole lot easier for us to feed with optimum sanitation in-hive with a bottle feeder made from a quart Mason jar, having calculated we'll fill it eight times, than to fill a barrel with sugar syrup and stuff the top with straw and tilt the lid so bees can gather the syrup without drowning--and who knows whose bees and how much each hive is consuming?
For another example, because Varroa mite females prefer laying in the bigger drone cells on the drone larvae, if in the spring when the queen begins to lay in earnest and the Varroa mite females get the same idea, you insert into the brood box a frame containing drone foundation, which induces workers to raise drone-comb and the queen to lay therein drone eggs, and you remove this frame after 24 days, which is to say, before the drones hatch, and freeze that frame to kill the mites (which also kills the drones therein, of course, but you don't need many drones anyway) you will have dealt a very telling blow to the mite life-cycle without using a drop of medication.
Great procedure for two hives with a Junior Bee-Keeper, but if you have 600 hives which you're trucking around to this or that orchard and etc. etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment