When I first got bees, everyone wanted to know when I’d have honey. I patiently explained that I wouldn’t have any in the first year, and I didn’t know if I’d have any in the second. I was mostly focused on building healthy, strong, chemical-free hives.
Don’t get me wrong – honey is a nice benefit of beekeeping, and as a home brewer and mead maker, I look forward to any honey harvest I may get, but honey isn’t why I started keeping bees.
So why bother with the stinging insects and hive inspections and gear and the investment of time, money, and energy? For me, it’s really simple: Keeping bees, naturally and without chemicals, gently and without being greedy in my robbing, is a way for me to be part of the solution to one of the big-picture problems facing the human race in the early days of the 21st century.
I know that sounds grandiose, but in the years before I started keeping bees, as I read on the subject and followed Internet forums and beekeeping blogs, the magnitude of the pressures on the honeybee began to look overwhelming.
Urban Beekeeping to the Rescue
Colony Collapse Disorder is the one that grabs headlines, of course, and it’s a serious problem for commercial beekeepers, but less so for hobbyists, and (as far as I can tell) even less so for urban hobbyist beekeepers. Personally, I am persuaded by the theory that exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides is the triggering element for CCD, and while city bees will forage in trash cans if there are sweets there (and consequently, high fructose corn syrup from contaminated corn), the wooded city in which I live offers the bees a spring and fall smorgasbord with acres of white clover to forage in between.
So while CCD is what first got my attention, it isn’t the primary pressure on honeybees from a hobbyist’s point of view. The threat that I spend time and money addressing is the varroa mite – the disease-carrying ticks that infest beehives, pupate with bee larvae, and which, in sufficient numbers, can wreck the health of a hive and ultimately kill the colony.
Most beekeepers treat their hives once a year or once every other year with a miticide agent of one kind of another. I don’t consider this to be ethically problematic – it can save a colony from dying, and certainly save a beekeeper a lot of money and effort in replacing a dead hive – but I haven’t used one. My hives have varroa. As far as I know, every hive in the United States has varroa. My hesitation on this point isn’t because I have some unrealistic idealism or a moral absolutism ungrounded in reality. For me, to treat or not to treat is more of a practical consideration: There have to be options beyond medication, or else the honeybee is doomed to extinction except as a kept animal.
There is a general notion among natural beekeepers that we are working to develop honeybee colonies that can coexist with the varroa mite. I have read that America has no more wild honeybee colonies, no more free range genetics for bees to draw from in the natural course of things, because varroa is so widespread and so lethal to colonies.
My role then as a beekeeper is to support my bees, to ensure they have adequate nutrition and a well thought out, non-chemical pest management system. My current approach is a Freeman Trap to kill small hive beetles and varroa that drop, and powdered sugar dusting at inspections to encourage grooming and the mechanical removal of existing mites.
And because honey isn’t my primary motivator, I allow my bees to swarm. I can’t know whether the two swarms they cast last season “took” in my neighborhood, but I’m excited by the genetics that the creation of new queens allows. Last year, both hives swarmed, but only one succeeded in creating a queen, so I combined the two hives for overwintering, and in the spring will split them, creating another opportunity for genetic mixing among east side Atlanta bees.
Hopefully, as the seasons progress, my interventions (and the ones I choose not to make) will ensure that the colonies stay alive, that pest pressures remain at tolerable levels, and that the bees adapt somehow to the ravages of varroa, either by developing more hygienic behaviors or by becoming resistant to some of the infections that varroa carry – or both.
Varroa isn’t going anywhere, so if we want to give bees a fighting chance at existing as more than livestock, we have to intervene wisely to protect their health and promote diverse honeybee genetics.
So when people ask me about honey, I tell them how amazing my back yard honey tasted, and what great meads it made. And I explain that I only took a little, and I may not get any next year, because I don’t really keep bees for honey. I keep bees for bees. And that one act is something I can contribute not just to the survival of Apis mellifera, but a future for people that includes honeybees, wild and domesticated.
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