#23. Bee Blogging Coast to Coast

Montauk Long Island hasn't always been my home.  Though my family and I have spent most summers here since the early 60's (and I've always known I would settle here eventually), up until a couple of years ago the S.F. Bay Area was my home of 30 years.

Of course, since moving to Montauk, I still keep in touch with a lot of my California crew.  My old friend Linda, who lives just south of San Francisco, in Belmont, CA, regularly sends me clippings from local papers about things she thinks I need to know.  Linda and I share a love of gardening, and she's been really interested in my beekeeping adventures.  Linda found out that a group of San Francisco Chronicle employees started keeping bees last year, around the same time I did.  They keep them on the rooftop of the Chronicle building, right in the middle of the City!  Through reading the Chronicle articles that have served as a diary of their project, I learned that Google, whose offices are located in Mountain View, CA (practically in my old backyard) also keeps bees.  They started their program about 2 years ago at the company's headquarters.  Eighty employees signed up to help tend the bees, and they extracted 400 lbs. of honey from 4 hives in their first year!  I freely admit to having felt somewhat envious.

Naturally, I started following the Google and Chronicle teams' exploits (for Google enter "hiveplex" in the search bar at http://googleblog.blogspot.com; the SF Chronicle is at http://www.sfgate.com/columns/honeybeechronicles/).  Recently, however, total admiration of what seemed to be runaway successes turned to consternation, empathy and fear.  It seems that one of the two hives on top of the Chronicle building has failed - the queen has absconded or died, leaving a few depressed, aimless bees to wander the empty combs; and 3 of the 4 Google hives have failed after the second year.

Interestingly, the one Google hive that survived had been prophylactically treated with antibiotics (to be used as a control group, I think).  Google wanted the hives to be managed in a natural way, without the aids (if 'aids' they are) of applied chemicals and medications.  The experienced beekeeper who is helping the Googlers has his own apiary, where he does feed antibiotics.  Google, understandably, didn't want to sign on to that protocol.  The suspected killer of the Google hives was varroa distructor.   My blog post #14 gives a full account of these horrible, death-dealing mites that have become the scourge of beekeepers globally.

This brings up the general question - perhaps the biggest one any beekeeper needs to face - about how to manage hives in the face of the myriad pests and pestilence that bees can fall prey to.  At the two extremes of the spectrum there is, at one end, those who believe that nothing should come in contact with the bees except hive parts: wood, wax, and maybe wire.  They do not believe in dietary supplements, plastic hive parts, feeding with sugar, or medications (whether preventative or curative), and many do not even wear protective clothing when they work the hives.  At the other end of the spectrum are beekeepers who throw everything available at their colonies - from artificial pollen patties, to prophylactic antibiotic treatments, to fumigants, to drugs illegally smuggled from foreign countries.

The impetus for the 'natural' end of the spectrum is often spiritually inspired, but it is probably just as often purely practical.  Master Beekeeper Ray Lackey, my instructor, has stopped all hive treatments in his 60 hives.  If I remember correctly, he said that the first year he lost 50% of his hives to pests and disease, but as survivor colonies replaced the lost populations his losses are now down to 5% annually.  That's pretty amazing anecdotal evidence suggesting that bees will breed for hardiness and hygiene (see my blog post #14 again) if given the chance.  In this scenario, by the way, bees are not brought in from other parts of the country - a universally common current practice - but are allowed to breed naturally from local stock.

The other end of the spectrum is exemplified by some commercial beekeepers who feel they cannot afford to lose hives, so they feed antibiotics to try to stem the tide of disease (much like in factory farming).  Of course then there is the problem of strains of pathogens and pests becoming resistant.  And when these chemically-dependant beekeepers are migratory (as many are), moving their apiaries all over the country, the diseases they may have been successful in suppressing in their own hives nevertheless spread to unprotected colonies in parts of the country where their bees visit, mate with, and infect, local populations.

Not surprisingly, hive management has been a huge topic of conversation among our South Fork Beekeeping group, a dedicated band of enthusiasts many of whom met through Ray Lackey's class.  I have developed my own strategy and we'll see how well it works:  I treated 2 of my 3 hives with an application of formic acid pads to kill varroa mites this past Autumn, after I'd taken the honey off the hives and egg-laying had slowed to a trickle.  (In nature, formic acid is a miticide produced by ants.  It's a powerfully pungent volatile compound - think smelling salts.)  To be honest, I didn't actually want to do even that.  But I panicked:  in September, at one of the last classes of our course at Cornell Cooperative Extension, samples were taken from the 6 hives in the Riverhead bee yard, and varroa infestation was diagnosed as moderate to severe.  (In one of the hives, the bees had been 'treated' with an 'natural' option of powdered sugar applications, which many say controls varroa.  The sample that later came from that hive showed just as large a varroa infestation as the 'un-sugared' hives.)

The bees at the Riverhead bee yard came from the same Southern suppliers as my own bees, so I had to conclude that my bees were similarly infested.  I made the decision that I was not willing to risk losing my colonies to varroa in my first season.  The prospect seemed just too demoralizing.  The one edgy decision I made was to not treat Team Purple - the swarm hive I collected in June (I describe the 'taking of the swarm' in post #17).  I would use them as a control group.  Also, because they were a younger (and therefore smaller) colony, I was afraid of what a significant population drop would due to them - the formic acid will result in some bee deaths along with killing varroa mites.

Had the formic acid treatment endangered the bees or the environment needlessly?  The jury is out.  What I can say is that the white plastic tray under the screened board at the bottom of my hive was loaded with varroa corpses at the end of the treatment period.  Would they have killed my colonies?  I don't know, but I now have the satisfaction of knowing that at least I disrupted the varroa breeding cycle for this coming season.  Next Autumn my plan is to treat all three hives with formic acid.  This will give me some indication of how heavily infested the untreated Team Purple was, compared to the 2 originally-treated hives.  If, after the next formic acid treatment, the varroa body count is down significantly compared to the past Autumn, I will consider stopping treatments in the coming years, or treating every 2 to 3 years.

Adopting a strategy for managing an apiary is a complicated issue, and one that I'm sure will take me years to develop.  I think the thing is to keep experimenting, learning, and doing research; have realistic goals and expectations; and use common sense.  I can say that I do not envision ever again 'importing' bees from another part of the country.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  I think I can breed all the bees I'll ever need right here in my own backyard.  Hell, I went from 2 hives to 3 in my first year, without even trying!

I will keep monitoring the Googlers and Chroniclers.  It's a great way to keep up on beekeeping news, including techniques, successes and failures, across the country.  And it's a terrific way to stay in touch with my beloved Bay Area.

Finally, speaking of California, when I drove across country a few years ago I brought with me some of my containerized fruit trees.  (I have to say that the ability to grow citrus in my own backyard was one of the thrills of living in CA that just never got old.)  One of the trees I relocated is a navel orange that is now bowing under the weight of ripe fruit. I keep it in my screened porch which is semi-winterized, meaning that the temp. never goes down much below 50°.  In the Spring I move it outside and then haul it back in when frost threatens, generally around late October/November.  It's kind of a pain, but well worth it when I have a sweet, juicy reward waiting for me at the end.

My other favorite containerized citrus is the variegated pink Eureka-type lemon.  The fruit (and leaves) are striped and the flesh is pink.  What a wonder!  I first saw it at COPA, the amazing - and tragically now-closed - food/wine/lifestyle complex in downtown Napa, California.  The outdoor edible gardens that were arranged in a tidy grid of raised beds was an inspiration the likes of which I had never before seen.  I just had to track down the pink lemon (which was actually pretty easy to do).  So far it hasn't fruited heavily, producing only a few ripe lemons a year.  But this year promises to be a bumper crop, I think.  And even if there were no fruit to be had, the heavenly scent of citrus blossoms wafting through the house in the depths of winter is intoxicating.