By: John Miller
“The best-known insect on earth.”
—Thomas D. Seeley.
“Arguably the most beneficial insect on earth.”
—Hannah Nordhaus.
This marvelous insect with whom we are in love never ceases to amaze us; never ceases to engage us. It’s how we engage with bees; where the art of beekeeping is often lost with the business of beekeeping.
Lately, I’ve been tagging along with a professional beekeeper who takes care of other people’s hives. Each month, Sandy Honigsberg keeps a route with both bee-havers, and beekeepers.
In some cases, the bee-havers are not capable of keeping bees, but want to have bees on their property. These people sometimes witness, but do not participate in hive management. In some cases, the bee-havers are absent for long periods of time. Hives will perish without husbandry provided by Ms. Honigsberg.
In some cases, aspiring beekeepers do participate – and this participation is preparation for becoming a beekeeper. One-on-one mentoring, beekeeping classes, hive consultations, Varroa management, these and other services are available to folks lucky enough to have a professional beekeeper – providing professional services to keep their hive(s) alive. With each visit, hive conditions are noted. The worksheet for each hive contains a lot of information. This is micro beekeeping, as opposed to macro beekeeping. There is a huge difference and opportunity between micro and macro beekeeping.
And it no longer surprises me that a gulf exists between earnest, professional micro-beekeepers and bloodless, ‘industrial beekeepers’, a term coined in 2006 by Hannah Nordhaus in a piece for the High Country News. The meticulous record-keeping of individual hives by Ms. Honigsberg is an intimate observation of a hive’s condition. Valuable information resides therein. For example, in a recent visit to a Grass Valley, CA hobbyist beeyard, four beehives were worked. One of those hives is pitching zero Varroa destructor mites per alcohol/soap wash; has been for nearly a year. Is this hive, this queen, this hygienic behavior a huge opportunity to advance Varroa resistance?
Hobbyists practicing micro beekeeping, or hiring professionals to micromanage their hives may be a great hive-health resource beekeepers large and small could tap. It is a resource; undiscovered, undeveloped. How to develop this opportunity? Each year, the Bee Informed Project conducts a hive-loss survey. Participants have the opportunity to share their experiences. The Bee Informed Partnership, as envisioned by Dennis van Englesdorp over a decade ago, was great original thinking. Could we enhance that great idea? If you participate in the annual Loss and Management Survey, consider for a moment how much more additional, micro detail professional and hobbyist beekeepers could provide. What if these hives now pitching zero Varroa, now undiscovered, made it into a breeding program? What if a hundred of these outlier queens became contributors to North America hive health? We don’t know where these mutt queens came from; the other day I saw a BLUE queen. That queen is four years old. Paint does not lie.
What if the Loss and Management Survey became an annual success story. I know good news does not sell – we focus on things lost, the house burned down, the earthquake savaged province, the hives lost – but what if these professional micro beekeepers, these passionate hobbyists – this undeveloped resource began to influence North American hive health?
I believe Ms. Honigsberg is one of perhaps a hundred, maybe several hundred professional beekeepers providing services to bee-havers and hobbyists who themselves are wise enough to know they cannot yet, and maybe won’t, become proficient hobbyist beekeepers. Probably in every region of America, there are beekeepers – who really want to strengthen the beekeeping community by mentoring, consulting, teaching and ultimately empowering hobbyists to keep their hives alive.
How does our beekeeping community link these professional micro-beekeepers? How does, for example, The Bee Informed Partnership find these professionals?
I believe that no commercial American beekeeping operation of greater than 5,000 hives is doing micro beekeeping at a micro beekeeping level. Some outfits are practicing a sort of Darwinian beekeeping, funneling down hundreds of hives to a couple dozen hives in an effort to rear better queens. It’s good, but it isn’t micro-beekeeping. I’m not saying these big commercial outfits are wrong, or bad beekeepers – not at all. Commercial beekeepers are aligned with commercial poultry operations, cattle operations, dairy operations, swine operations, fish operations. Husbandry occurs in order to contain pathogens, parasites, disease – to enable our flocks, our herds and our hives to thrive. It’s how commercial scale agriculture obtains the beneficial pollinators, at scale, to pollinate millions of acres of almonds, apple orchards, cranberry bogs, vine crops, it’s how ag gets done to feed a hungry planet.
What I suggest is we develop the professional micro beekeeper, who as part of their business model, accumulates valuable data on valuable hives hiding in plain sight.
