Beekeepers like to talk about bees and read about bees, and the list of thorny topics and good books does nothing but grow. A couple of weekends ago a road trip took us, after several stops, to Sunnyside Bee Supplies in Middlefield, Geauga County, Ohio. Sunnyside has everything a small-scale beekeeper could ask for, in particular a very nice owner. We talked about bees for a while, and inevitably the topic turned to mite control. The area has plenty of wild bees, and in a very short while a local queen producer was able to select for a strain of bees that he maintained without any varroa treatments. As in, none at all. This news is so welcome, and the story is becoming increasingly common. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks sampling for mites and have identified several colonies here on the farm that made it through the season without treatment, maintaining low counts all by themselves.
Mite resistance exists! whatever its mechanism. With care and attention to detail and good records, progress is astonishingly quick. The Geauga County producer, sadly, met with a setback when a nearby beekeeper brought in non-resistance package bees. His resistant stock mated with the package drones, and he was back to the beginning.
The take home story is not don’t buy package bees, but do encourage the package industry, however you can, to breed resistant stock.
With the mite topic covered, the owner told us he’d been reading a really good book that just happened to address the problem of overwintering nucs, the next pressing topic. He pulled out of his desk. ‘Stories of the Hive: Successful Beekeeping Methods Explained’, by Joseph E. Garber, 6398 Avoca Wheeler Road, Prattsburgh, NY. 14873. Full of information delivered with gentle humor, this is a book to come back to whenever something stumps you.
Joseph lives on the west side of Lake Champlain, a region that seems rich in independent minded and innovative beekeepers, Kirk Webster and Michael Palmer to name two of note. The climate and flower crops are just similar enough to ours (barring their snowy winters) that this little book makes a handy and reliable guide to managing hives all season long. It also offers some surprising and no-nonsense alternative methods for tackling all kinds of nagging problems. A very good beekeeping book.