So if?

[Bridget]

So if I lived in Cyprus or South Africa where it's mainly warm all year round would my bees keep gathering pollen and nectar or would they take a break. In a warm climate do the bees keep gathering the honey or do they have a period of down time - no brood etc


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[Jon]

They keep going. The Cyprus bee breeders are getting queens mated at the moment.
Drought or heat can cause a brood break in the summer.

I am often in Mexico at the start of the year and the bees are out and about everywhere.

This was January this year.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BcfljjUyt0&list=UUue8V6a4fIYZX7rf9Pn1qLw&index=19

[Jon]

And a bee tree in February


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc45ns9slS4

[gavin]

So if I lived in Cyprus or South Africa where it's mainly warm all year round .....

I can imagine that these daydreams are frequent in Speyside!

US commercial beekeepers move their bees all over to keep them going much of the year, but I think that there is usually at least a brief rest of some kind.

[Jon]

They mostly have Ligustica in Mexico.
I think Ligustica keeps brood for most of the year in the UK as well.
A decent brood break is very useful for varroa control.

[Bumble]

How do beekeepers in those areas treat for varroa? Do they isolate the queen to make an artificial brood break?

[chris]

I used to live on the Riviera, and as in any region, the bees follow the local plant life. The*explosion* of activity was between March and the end of May. Already, in July, the local flora was mostly burned out by the sun, and the bees slowed right down, (though activity never completely stopped). They started up again in September, and according to the weather, continued most years to work through the winter. Winter bees were in place roughly between mid November and mid January.
At the time, the anti varroa treatment was thymol strips, and these went on between July and the end of August (varied according to weather). There was never a complete brood break.

[Poly Hive]

Jon if you read B. Mobus on wintering you may find that AMM broods rather more than you think. It is on the front page of my site.

PH

[Jon]

I have 30+ colonies of AMM so am pretty familiar with their brood behaviour.
Mine tend to have a brood break, or at least a brood reduction, in September and then they have a final fling of brood rearing with the ivy pollen in October/November.
last year when it was exceptionally mild they all had brood at the end of November but I doubt I would find much brood at the moment.
They never keep a brood nest right through winter and on average I would say there is a 6-8 week break.
They all seem to have started brood rearing again by the end of February.

[Poly Hive]

I would have said the same Jon and I ran more than double your numbers, and at that a good mix of timber and poly, this in the late 90's through the 2000's, pre v. But read Mobus yourself and see his thoughts as he opened the colonies all winter to check. I will mention that I had colonies with a Discoidal shift clean off the chart to the left. ;)

http://poly-hive.co.uk/?page_id=1753

PH

[Jon]

I had a quick look at the article.
I can't of course rule out small areas of brood but you can often tell what is going on by the debris you find on a tray below an open mesh floor.
I only monitor a few colonies but any I have looked at lately don't have any debris associated with brood cappings.

BTW, the jury is still out on how much you should read into wing morphometry and how it correlates to underlying AMM DNA markers.
I routinely do morphometry on my colonies and have bees with a very negative discoidal shift and low CI but I am not sure if it proves the bees are AMM.
It can certainly prove that they are not, if you have bees with a positive DS and a very high cubital index.

I did this chart with a set of Carnica wings and a set of wings from one of my colonies and the NZ Carnica wings could not remotely be mistaken for an AMM colony.

However that fact that my colony has all the wings in the correct area for AMM does not conclusively prove that they are AMM.

1336

I don't know if you have read the paper by Robin Moritz (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=40E944022B5FBCB674B52745189501 63?doi=10.1.1.69.393&rep=rep1&type=pdf) but you need to get you head around that with regard to the possible pitfalls of relying on morphometry proving that bees are AMM.

[Poly Hive]

LOL, off we go again.

I no longer have AMM courtesy of a pyromanic farmer. At the time I was measuring, it was pre computer proggies and pre DNA. I was if I say it myself not too dusty at doing it and I think my results were pretty accurate and that was backed up by the brief visit of the BIBBA boffins to Perthshire.

My point is and remains that there is more brood rearing in winter than many think. I suggest you read the whole thing and the swarming papers too.

PH

[Adam]

US commercial beekeepers move their bees all over to keep them going much of the year, but I think that there is usually at least a brief rest of some kind.

I read somewhere that US commercial beekeepers can get through three queens a year as they and the colonies are so hammered - going from mono-culture to mono culture. This doesn't seem to be particularly close to nature to me. No wonder they need to import so many packages!

[Poly Hive]

Interesting. Never heard of three queens though before, and normally a package would start one colony. The packages are usually needed to replace non over wintered colonies. The northern beekeepers often let the bees die out and restart in Spring with the packages rather than struggle with over wintering.

PH

[Jon]

At the time I was measuring, it was pre computer proggies and pre DNA. I was if I say it myself not too dusty at doing it and I think my results were pretty accurate

I am not doubting the accuracy of your measuring but if there happens to be poor correlation between wing morphometry and AMM DNA markers then the measuring becomes irrelevant. Did you not have a look at the Moritz paper to see what he found when he compared 'pure' (based on the wings) Carnica in Germany with the expected markers for carnica?

Is a colony with an average DS of -8 more AMM than a colony with an average DS of -2?
I doubt it.

The Mobus papers you directed me to seem to show that there is a substantial brood break in November and early December followed by a resumption of brood rearing towards the end of December.
In the 74/75 winter only 4 out of 14 colonies had any brood at all on 9th November but 11 of the 14 had brood by 28 December.
In the following winter only 1/14 colonies had brood on 1st December.
7 of the 14 colonies had no brood at all between 5 November and 28 December and brood was not recorded in 2 of them until February 15th which is a full 3 months without brood.
The brood break is earlier than I would expect to see in my colonies which may be due to that biting east wind which comes off the North sea.

[Bridget]

Whoops I'm sorry I asked the question!


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[Jon]

A good question stimulates a bit of discussion!

[Neils]

Whoops I'm sorry I asked the question!

Don't be! I'm not posting (aside from this) because I don't have anything pertinent to add to the discussion, but we're in a realm of stuff(tm) that I don't normally consider so am doing a lot of reading around this. It's the wonder of forums, sometimes what you think is a simple question takes on a life of its own... and now back to our regular discussion...