It was another rough season for many of us at SIBA with regards to keeping varroa mite populations knocked down to a safe number. Some in the club who have never treated before resorted to trying ApiVar for the first time. Others, such as myself are rolling the dice again seeing if our season’s management is going to pay off.

The last mite counts on my hives revealed that half my hives were in the green zone, but half are questionable. Since all these hives were started this year, I decided to let things go, winterize and see what the spring will bring me. I’ve told a few people in our club that if I suffer heavy losses again, that I may resort to chemicals myself. Afterall, we can’t be beekeepers with dead bees. That’s a tough thing to swallow. My reputation at the farmer’s market is “chemical-free” beekeeping and pure, raw honey. It’s even on all my signage, cards, and banners. It’s definitely what makes the honey sell and I don’t want to let my customers down. Equally, it’s just as important to me.

A breath of fresh air came when we listened to Michael Bush speak at Clifty Falls. I’ve spent a good deal of time on Michael’s site and even set up a couple 8-frame medium hives when I got into beekeeping around 2009. But what I failed to do was go foundationless. This is a key point that Michael Bush points to as part of his success. Michael makes the case that adding anything un-natural into the hive knocks other things off-balance. When we add chemicals, we not only kill mites and bad bacteria, but we also kill necessary good bacteria, and introduce other things that cause unforeseen problems later. He even shows through his state apiarist hive inspection reports that varroa mites are the least of his problems. He makes a compelling case. Regressing hives down to natural cell takes some time and patience, but the payoff could be grand.

For me personally, it adds some excitement by presenting another challenge I plan to meet next season. During the winter workshops, I plan to alter the frames I have to go foundationless, at least for a couple hives. For me, beekeeping is a personal journey that requires me to test everything and see for myself what works. The notes I keep seem to be disparate and make-shift at best. But it’s beginning to form a basis on my personal style of beekeeping that has yet to come. When we hear our peers like Michael Bush, Randy Oliver and Mel Disselkoen talk about the processes they employ, we wonder sometimes if they’ve found the magic bullet–the answer to all our beekeeping problems. In reality, it is ourselves who have to take these ideas and test them… put them in to practice and ideally, create a process that works for us, in our area, with our own bees. This is what holds my attention, and keeps me excited about the next season. 

This series of videos is posted in the same spirit Michael has about beekeeping–they are free and accessible to all to do what they want with. I hope they charge you up as they have me. Enjoy.

• Why Go foundationless?
• Beekeeping Naturally
• Swarm Prevention and Splits
• Lazy Beekeeping 

I helped my dad with bees for a small period of time in the 80’s… when I was a teenager, and I even had a hive of my own. I don’t really count this as much experience but it was enough to make me want to pick it back up in 2009. Since then, I’ve never experienced my own deadout until this winter (2012-2013). One might suggest beginners luck, but I submit that from delving in, and getting as many mentor experiences as possible, along with doing a lot of reading, and writing about bees, I hit the ground running. It’s significant to note that I was also miticide-free and doing as much “natural” beekeeping as possible. I did feed sugar as needed up until this last season… when I decided that I was going to let the bees fend for themselves. Whether or not this contributed to my deadouts is still undecided, as you will see.

On the last warm day, it was apparent to me that I lost several hives as only one hive had bees out flying. So, I cracked in to them to find what I expected… the sad sight that all beekeepers will eventually experience. All the bees, frozen in time… with the queen right there in the center… in each hive. There was still plenty of honey left to eat too, so what happened?

Here is a serious learning opportunity for any beekeeper. One must rise above discouragement, take the lumps and do a little detective work to find out what went wrong. At last hive check (before winter) I had concerns about a number of my hives. Particularly, the populations just weren’t there. We like to see queens laying eggs later into the season and a good amount of bees when were taking supers off and preparing for winterization. Several of my hives just didn’t have that. I think I was maybe short on a good pollen supply too. We like to know that weve been proactive in dealing with SHB (small hive beetle) and varroa but I was battling SHB in all my hives in one yard. However, at another yard, one hive whose populations were great, and had no beetles also became one of my deadouts! This is the video that follows. 

I recorded this deadout because it’s tough to see the cause of this one. It wasn’t starvation, it wasn’t moisture/wet bees… I didn’t suspect varroa (but this was the cause, as you’ll see) There is another hive right next to this one doing fine.

I run screen bottoms on all my hives and have since 2009. Haven’t lost any hives until now, so I don’t think having these screens wide open was a contributor. I thought I OK on keeping varroa under control but still didn’t rule it out. I’m sure there are mites in all my hives, but nothing suggesting the populations were enough to overrun. There looked to be traces of guanine on a few cell ceilings. We dusted probably 5 times over last season, once every 1-2 weeks apart and stopped to allow them to work on their winter cluster.

Since we don’t know everything about CCD yet, I tend to research all I can before settling on this still-mysterious problem. The latest research on CCD suggests there is the presence of a virus and a disease. The presence of both means their doom. Here is SE Indiana, most of us don’t move our hives to provide pollination services and our bees forage on much of the same stuff. We generally do what we can to keep the bees happy and healthy. Sure, we know there are pesticides used in our foraging areas, and since I can’t test for virii or diseases, I’m sending samples to the Beltsville Bee Lab and will update back when I get results.

Take a look over this hive with me.

UPDATE 3-1-13: The results came back and it was varroa. No trace of nosema nor tracheal mites. Varroa was 10.5 per 100 bees! Proof that varroa can take them out right under your eyes!

UPDATE 4-12-13: Take a look at the alcohol washes I’m doing now to test deadouts for varroa.