[oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
- From: Gareth John <gj.garethjohn@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 11:37:24 +0100
Paul says: “Prof Tom Seeley did fascinating DNA analyses on his local wild
survivor population, having samples from before and after varroa arrived.
Turns out the way the wild populations adapt is, they turn up the expression
of many different traits in parallel, a bit. This turns out to breed true.”
Years ago, when I still treated, albeit to a recipe of my own making, I was
keen to understand the dynamics of varroa in an attempt to minimise the amount
of treatment. I developed a spreadsheet model based on the work of Stephen
Martin. By tweaking the variables in the model (ie the traits of the bees) I
was able to obtain a remarkably close fit to observed mite counts. I asked
myself whether further tweaks could eliminate the need for treatment. What I
found was that tweaking any single trait did not achieve balance between the
colony and its varroa but tweaking them all, just a little, did. This is
exactly in line with Tom Seeley’s observations. And we now know that there are
way more traits involved than were present in my model.
Gareth
________________
Gareth John
On 25 May 2022, at 23:49, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If Gareth's explanation is unclear, search YouTube, for terms like "running
bees into a hive". People sometimes say "walk them in."
The BBKA News article is about the POL line of selectively bred bees. The US
Dept Agriculture has been trying to breed these for decades but the varroa
resistance trait they select for is not stable. Basically they select for one
super intense trait (grooming mites or whatever) which they can measure. As
soon as the next generation breeds with drones from a different line the
trait is diluted and has little effect.
Prof Tom Seeley did fascinating DNA analyses on his local wild survivor
population, having samples from before and after varroa arrived. Turns out
the way the wild populations adapt is, they turn up the expression of many
different traits in parallel, a bit. This turns out to breed true.
Which is why using local bees gives varroa resistance almost without trying.
Helps that our gene pool in the UK is huge, unlike America where one study
reckoned almost every colony in commercial apiaries was grandchildren or
g'grandchildren of just 200 "breeder queens" (the ones the queen rearers
raise Qs for sale from).
I posted some other stuff about varroa resistance in an old post, here
Paul
On Wed, 25 May 2022, 22:37 Gareth John, <gj.garethjohn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
“by 'run them in', do you mean literally dump the second cast into the hive
where the first are, or something a bit more subtle?”
I mean place a board with a cloth over it in front of the hive and tip the
swarm onto the board in exactly the same way as one would with any swarm.
The only difference is that the hive already has a swarm in it rather than
being empty. Do NOT just dump the bees in. The second swarm needs to go
through the procedure of gaining entry via the entrance so as to acquire
permission to be in the hive.
EVERYTHING with bees is subtle!
Gareth
________________
Gareth John
On 25 May 2022, at 22:20, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
thanks yet again! i should just ask you guys every time i get stuck on
something, shouldn't i? trouble is, theres so much of it, & i'm often not
sure whats important & what i'm just over thinking.
anyway, thats about the most useful thing about varroa i've ever heard. one
of my books has some tables of exactly what different levels of
daily/weekly mite drop mean for the colony, which i shall now feel much
happier about ignoring.
by the by, my latest issue of BBKA news has just arrived, with a short
article about varroa resistant bees that someone has just spent decades
breeding, including the observation that 'honey bees of all types express
it (VSH) at some level'. not the impression i'd been under before!
if i'd thought of it, i'd have definitely merged those casts. by 'run them
in', do you mean literally dump the second cast into the hive where the
first are, or something a bit more subtle? also, would this be ok with
casts from different hives too? sort of assuming ones from the same hive
still smelll the same & accept each other for a bit as a result...
its been 13 days since i hived mine now, & i'm torn! i didn't want 2 extra
colonies just now, but i'd love to see how they get on now they're here.
the first one just looks like a normal, bustling hive, second is a bit
quieter...& the parent colony has gone quite quiet too, i guess theres a
chance they could lose, or have lost, their new queen since i saw her. i'm
also thinking i've a fair chance of more swarms, casts & possible princess
losses later this year, & maybe i'll leave this lot for now, see how they
do & merge them with another weaker colony later in the year if applicable.
does that sound sensible?
.
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 10:49 AM
From: "Gareth John" <gj.garethjohn@xxxxxxxxx>
To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
I have read that if you merge 2 casts in the evening it is straightforward
- by choosing bad flying weather you force the bees to choose the best
queen themselves.
I invariably merge small (and even not so small) casts. Simply run the
second cast into the hive which contains the first cast. I do this for up
to 10 days after the first cast was hived and have never seen a problem. I
would hesitate with a prime swarms as they have a much greater sense of
identity.
The point about mites is exactly as Paul says. You are looking for evidence
of a dynamic balance. A decade or more ago I spent many hours counting mite
fall. I learnt two things: 1) it is variable, going up and down about an
average (indicating a stable balance) and 2) when mite numbers do take off,
because the balance has been lost, the increase is dramatic. One could be
seeing first hand the effect of exponential population growth, or it could
be because the bees are having a clear out. In the latter case numbers
begin to fall again. In the former, not. Ultimately there is only one
metric that counts and that is colony survival. Accepting this is the point
at one gives up treating and gives up counting.
Gareth
Sent from my iPad
On 24 May 2022, at 09:46, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would consider merging that 3-tennis-ball sized cast with its parent
colony on a day with poor flying weather. That's because I find really
small casts often struggle and fail, and you have Langstroths which are
much bigger than my hives and need more bees to keep warm (especially with
open mesh floors). I have read that if you merge 2 casts in the evening it
is straightforward - by choosing bad flying weather you force the bees to
choose the best queen themselves.
Gareth taught me that there's no threshold above which mite drop is a
"problem", the question is does it suddenly increase which signals it is
out of control. So let's say you see 5 / day or 35 / week. That's not
great, but if it's always 30-40/week they are adapting and controlling the
mites. After a couple of years it seems to drop to much lower levels. But
the bottom line is do they survive without treatment? Making mite counting
somewhat obsessive and unproductive, although it's educational in your
early years.
Paul
On Mon, 23 May 2022 at 22:48, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
thanks all!
thanks gareth for the mating swarms info, that explains some of my
bees'recent goings on to perfection, specially if a princess or 2 has gone
off & then not made it back. i did spot a very nippy young queen in the
first hive that swarmed, had about 2 seconds to go, i think thats a....,
then she was off buzzing round my head. at which point i stopped that
inspection, having realised there was nothing i could possibly find that i
was going to be able to do anything useful about.
my thought with the one queen cell was, if i leave 2, current form
suggests i might get another cast, which might again ignore my bait hives
& go off to bother the neighbours. i figured it'd be quite bad luck to not
get a viable queen from either that cell or any of the ones i moved out, &
if only one succeeds i've left the 2 colonies next to each other so i can
just recombine them. i'm quite happy if they stay as one colony, & i
daresay if they have strong feelings to the contrary they'll try again!
i did read somewhere about this unhelpful practice of resealing queen
cells, so i gave the one i left a little gentle poke on the end with the
hive tool, & it seemed solid. though as always, i'm only guessing how much
force you'd need to dislodge a resealed end without damaging a full cell...
good to have a size benchmark for swarms too. i think my second cast
probably wasn't much over 3 tennis balls' worth, so it'll be interesting
to see how they do. up to now i've resisted merging colonies unless one
of them had lost its queen. would you kill one of the queens yourself, or
leave them to fight it out?
i'm aware i'm opening my colonies much less than conventional beekeeping
recommends, & often having to guess whats going on within as a result. if
i was living my best life i'd probably do a lot more looking in for a year
or 2 just so i had a sense of what different behaviours meant, prior to
leaving well alone in the future. to be honest, it is sometimes a bit
harrowing going through them though. the biggest one, & occasionally one
of the others, tend to ignore the frame spacings & just build straight
from one super down into the next, so the process of getting frames out
involves ripping the tops off a load of drone brood. i'm always astonished
by how well the bees put up with this, but i still feel bad about it. i
had wondered if going in more often would discourage them from joining
frames top to bottom, but not enough to actually try it.
i think we're done with swarming for the moment. yesterday was very warm,
still, overcast & humid, which i understand is quite swarm inducing
weather. all my colonies were acting like they wanted to swarm, even the
ones i know for a fact haven't started making queen cells yet, but none of
them actually did it. my lady, lou, was wondering whether a hive might
swarm with a princess from an adjacent hive? ie where i've moved all my
queen cells to a new box next door, the bees might still consider
themselves one colony?
lynne, i think you're probably right, with the addition that most
beekeepers are making their interventions with the intention of getting
more honey rather than helping the bees to thrive. i abandoned that
approach before i'd really started, because i'm not ruthless enough, & i
do think we modern western humans are doing well enough at the moment that
we don't need to define our relationships with everything else by how much
profit we can wring out of it. i do want honey acquisition to be part of
the equation, & i'm not really in a position to eschew all though of
profit & just help the bees, especially if they're going to keep
multiplying at their current rate, but currently my more important issue
is, i don't have sensible, locally adapted bees that can be trusted to
know how to behave. i've got buckfasts, which might easily keep making
casts all year in a way that might work well if they were in italy, & have
never had any need to sort out their own varroa, to name 2 things i can
think of, & there are probably many more. i know a lot of you guys' advice
on natural beekeeping would probably be 'start with something else', & if
i was starting again i'd do exactly that, but i am where i am, & i
wouldn't feel right about just standing back & letting these bees take
their chances. i hope they'll mate with local, wild bees, & pick up enough
acumen from them to get by, but i've no idea how long it might take. or
how to check, really. i'm guessing locally adapted bees won't swarm & make
casts more than is useful for them, so i can look for that. i'm also
starting to suspect that the famous varroa sensitive hygiene isn't that
deeply buried after all- one of my hives had varroa quite badly in autumn,
& i did treat for it, but this spring i was seeing evidence of partly
uncapped brood with nothing obviously wrong with it (although this colony
does/did have chalkbrood too), which on the one hand, i've seen in books
as a last, desperate sign that the hive is about to collapse due to
varroa, but also i think is the same behaviour that all varroa resistant
bees have adopted. so i'm trying to keep an eye on mite levels & colony
behaviour ( not very successfully. this is why i'm still using mesh
floors, which neither i nor the bees like, & they don't even work at the
moment, they're full of ants & the bees have been dropping stuff on them
so fast this spring, i've no idea if theres mites in there or not. or what
it signifies if there are, since lots of dead mites might signal a really
high population...or that the bees are getting rid of them as fast as they
emerge). ..where was i? so its not just that i have to get used to low
intervention, my bees have too, & neither of us are expert enough to guide
the process confidently.
so, thats my feeling on low intervention at the moment; its a journey i'm
on rather than a destination i can go straight to. & thanks again to
everyone for all the many useful bits of advice on what bees will
naturally do, what their actions might mean, etc. all helping me get there
quicker!
cheers
rich
Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2022 at 11:20 AM
From: "Oxnatbees" <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx>
To: oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [oxnatbees] Re: unexplained swarming
Hi Rich
To add to Gareth and Pauly replies, I can relate to your desire to take
action here. I know we all like to know what's going on and to reduce what
we see as a "problem" with our bees. A very natural human perspective.
My personal philosophy is that the key thing about low-intervention, more
natural, beekeeping is to try not to interfere with the bees' natural
behaviours and processes, or only as little as possible.
It is a great human trait to want to understand and "help", but we rarely
can really do so, mostly our actions result in us tending to "interfere"
and try to control. Our understanding is necessarily limited as we are not
bees and their 30 million years of evolution has produced lots of
epigenetics, mechanisms and behaviours tuned to things of which we are
only vaguely or not even aware.
For me, enabling a colony to thrive is really best done by by providing a
suitable environment then largely standing back, so they can pursue their
own needs, like making their own choice of which is the healthiest
best-placed princess to take over (not something we can determine).
So even if there are 12 queen cells left, following natural beekeeping
principles rather than conventional ones, I would not remove any. I've
often seen a prime followed by one or two casts, the greatest number of
swarms I've seen from one hive is 4, others may have seen more, but that
was notably unusual. The multiple queen cells are insurance, the bees do
not allow all princesses to successfully hatch and take a cast, they
control it and will determine the end point for themselves given the
balance of their competing drivers.
Of course, in taking this approach things can still go wrong, princesses
may not mate successfully, may prove defective down the line, or may be
lost, but the risk probability only goes up when we don't leave it to the
bees and try to "help" by limiting their choices
I always try to remind myself to relax and ask if my taking action is
really going to be helping anything or just disrupt. I find the drive to
"do something" while coming from a positive place is often more about
making me "feel" like I'm helping while really I'm not.
For me, being a low intervention beekeepers means trying to resist the
temptation of being all too human!
Lynne
On Sun, 22 May 2022, 09:57 Oxnatbees, <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rich,
some similarities with this:
yesterday we inspected one of the hives at Jane's to determine if
something was wrong with it. It is a swarm from one of her hives which
has been grumpy ever since she hived it 14 days before. Every comb -
about 9, not full size yet - was being used for hone / nectar / pollen
but there was a very noticeable absence of brood. In other words, not
queen-right. Maybe she disappeared on a mating flight.
Previous to that, the hive it came from had tried to swarm several times
but gone back in to the hive. This is characteristic of a colony that is
trying to swarm, but the queen can't fly. They eventually swarmed after a
few days, maybe with a princess, who has now died. The colony should be
savable by merging with another swarm or colony, or possibly by giving it
combs of brood from another colony (though Gareth has previously said
that needs to be repeated a few times and just weakens the donor colony).
Generally speaking you are opening your hives more than I would, but I
opened mine a fair bit in my first 2 years and the upside was, it taught
me a lot. And as you have framed hives it is less disruptive than opening
TBHs. But, you will probably find their temper is more relaxed if you
open them less.
I think most beekeepers don't remove ALL extra queen cells because there
is a reasonable chance (15%) that a given princess will not be successful
on her mating flight, so best to leave 1 or 2 spare heirs in the hive if
you do decide to remove or kill some.
If you catch a swarm which is just 3 tennis balls in size, that's too
small to be viable - very high risk of dying after a few months - merge
it into another colony, ideally the one it came from. Luckily your small
one returned to the hive.
Paul
On Sat, 21 May 2022 at 23:19, rich tetlow <rich.tet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
just wondering if anyone can suggest a reason for a recent behaviour of
one of my hives. i've already had one lot swarm out, missed the prime
swarm then had 2 biggish casts, which i caught. a few days ago the next
biggest hive issued a swarm, i'd say about football size. they sat in a
tree for about an hour, then just as i was going to get them picked
themselves up & disappeared into the distance. so quite sprightly, &
purposeful, given the last few have emerged & then hung around for a day
checking out my bait hives. to my shame, i don't actually know if this
was a prime swarm, or if i missed that & it was a very big cast. i
suspect the latter because i immediately looked through the hive,
finding about a dozen sealed queen cells, one in the act of hatching &
another with a hole in the side- ie they'd clearly been there for a bit,
& one but not all had been killed, presumably by another queen. although
we didn't see any hatched queen cells.
anyway, i moved all the frames with queen cells on except one, along
with their bees, into a new brood box. not sure if this is standard
practice, but i've about had enough of casts this year & figured the
foragers would mostly go home, the young bees would stay & rear the
princesses & other brood, & the new colony wouldn't have anywhere near
enough bees to swarm so the princesses would have to sort it out amongst
themselves.
the new colony, next to the first, has stayed very quiet, the old one
carried on as before, then a few days later they swarmed again. got a
front seat view because i was working in the greenhouse right next to
them, it was only a little swarm- maybe 3 tennis balls' worth- & they
went & sat on a post about 20 yards away, on top of which i then put a
cardboard box. they immediately started walking up into it, so i went
away for half an hour, but when i came back the weight of bees had
dislodged the box & there was a lot of flying about again. i wedged it
back a bit more firmly, noticing in the process that they'd secreted a
lot of wax scales in their brief stay on the post, & tried again. when i
got back this time the box was empty, & my observation in the interim
was, they'd all gone back to the hive, with a lot trying to rejoin the
new brood box initially, then by the end of the day everyone back in the
old hive.
slightly reluctantly i disturbed them again the next day, thinking maybe
there was a queen or princess we'd missed, & expecting the queen cell to
be either hatched or torn down, but no, we had a good thorough look this
time & could find no queen, or princess, & the cell still intact. we
did, embarrassingly, find another one we'd missed previously, which i
moved across to the new box with the rest.
so, this is the second time this year i've had a swarm come out, sit for
a bit then go back in. first time i thought their queen had suffered
some accident, but i thought that was a bit tenuous then, & i refuse to
believe its happened twice. i wonder if they sometimes follow a princess
out when shes off on a mating flight? it occurs to me as well that
princesses must surely do a bit of hanging around outside before they go
off or they'd be very hard put to find their way back...
anyway, seems like all i can do with this hive currently is leave it
alone. if they swarm they swarm, & if they don't have a laying queen in
a month or so i'll join them to the new colony, assuming one of their
queens makes it. but the trouble with being all hands off is, i don't
know whats actually happened & am basically guessing, which is why i
wondered if anyone else could shed any light?
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