Therefore if you want to contribute to the well being of your country, yes, even your planet and yourself, be involved in beekeeping. Become a beekeeper, if you aren’t already! It’s a good hobby as well as an occupation.

This was a part of my message at the Northeast Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference at Leominster, Massachusetts July 31-August 2, 2009. This was one of two beekeeping conferences in Northeast U.S. focusing on getting away from chemicals in the beehive, at least such put there by the beekeeper. The other was the EAS conference in the beginning of August with the theme Toward Non-Chemical Beekeeping.

It’s no coincidence that the two conferences had these themes. Chemicals have been identified as playing a big part in the problems beekeeping is facing today. Both chemicals put in the hive by the beekeepers and chemicals used as plant protection for crops and in gardens.

It was good to see what great interest there is to become a beekeeper. A big part of the 120 participants in the Leominster conference had quite recently begun as beekeepers. And many were women. I recognize the same trend in Sweden. And many, maybe most of these new beekeepers are idealistic. They want to make a positive contribution to the environment, and they clearly think it’s cool to be a beekeeper. And they’re right. They are not interested in producing big honey crops initially. Rather, they want to help the bees have somewhere to live while they’re doing their good work pollinating the plants in the neighborhood. These idealistic beekeepers want to help nature to be natural.

Therefore it’s natural for many beginners to go for top bar hives (TBH), where the bees draw their own comb on just top bars. Or they use ordinary frames but without wax foundation, like before the days of commercial foundation that started in late 1870s. One way of helping the bees to build combs in the frames is to put popsicle sticks in the top bars as a starter strip, a tip Dean Stiglitz shared with us.

One idea behind letting the bees draw their own comb is that bees in the wild draw different size cells in different parts of their nest and there is probably some reason behind this. Yet another idea is that you are certain you get rid of contaminated wax that way.

When investigating cell sizes in feral bee nests built by bees not from beekeepers’ hives, many observers report the cell sizes in the core of the broodnest are smaller than those found in wax foundation you purchase from bee supply companies. That’s one reason many use foundation with a smaller cell size today, especially in the broodnest. Small cell size foundation is available from many sources, even including plastic foundation with small cell size. Plus, there’s fully drawn plastic combs to make conversion of your bees to smaller cell seize easier. They are called Honey Super Cell (HSC).

There are ongoing discussions regarding the importance of small cell size for fighting the Varroa mite, and how small the cell size in the broodnest should be. Some, like Dee Lusby, are convinced cells that are 4.90 mm should not be exceeded. This is for the latitude of southern U.S., since the size of bees and the cell size they construct, like many animals, depends on latitude.

Oh, one thing that is often forgotten when discussing cellsize, is drifting which can be enormous between colonies in the same apiary, but also substantial even between apiaries that are close together. This is a caution when comparing different treatments. A paper, published in 1991 by Walter Boylan-Pett and Roger Hoopingarner in Acta Horticulturae 288, 6^th Pollination Symposium, showed that ‘The percentage of foragers originating from different colonies within the apiary ranged from 32 to 63 percent’.

One thing everyone agrees on is that small cell size alone is not the answer for bees to stay healthy on their own. The theme of this conference focused on the importance of getting rid of alien chemicals, and chemicals in alien concentrations.

Plus, living creatures need good food with all the essential nutrients. Pollen is the best source of protein for bees, and be sure the bees have honey to feed on when a flow is absent. Use as little sugar for feeding as possible, if any.

Of course those bees with genetic characteristics we do not want should be avoided when producing splits, so in some ways we have to be able to recognize those. That doesn’t mean that we should only allow the best colonies, and bees, to reproduce. We have to keep as many genetic variations available as possible, to give the bees every possibility to adapt to changing environments. Therefore it’s good to let many hives produce their own queens.

In summary, bees are exposed to many different stress factors, and as beekeepers we should minimize these as much as possible, as well as reduce the genetic influences of those bees that are not performing well. You do that by letting the colony raise their own queen. There is an easy, but time consuming way to requeen. You can accomplish this by killing the queen and let the bees make a new one. Of course the success of such a method is dependant on the quality of the drones that fly in the area.

Neither all of the speakers or all of the participants in the conference have totally stopped using treatments. But they are all focused on getting there and helping others in doing so. The topics varied from hands on practical tips for small as well as big operations, to discussions about the interacting microbes in the bee colony and what Africanized bees really are.

After the conference a group of us went on a study trip visiting Kirk Webster and Michael Palmer in Vermont and their commercial operations. They are both dedicated sincere beekeepers that want to share and help the beekeeping industry recover and prosper.