Scottish Honeybee Restocking Programme 2013-2014

[lindsay s]

On BBC2 at 9pm tonight What's Killing Our Bees? A Horizon Special.

-------------------------------------------------------

This series of posts started under the 'Neonics are killing our bees' thread but as the discussion has since focussed on the SG-subsidised 'restocking' issue - and due to the importance of this issue - I've moved it to a new thread here. This area, 'Scaling up and marketing' was originally intended for commercial beekeeping issues. On you go ...

Gavin

PS I should add that Lindsay wasn't the one taking the discussion to the current import issue - he just pointed us to the BBC Horizon programme as something of interest regarding bee 'die-offs' and I've given this thread its current title in its new home.

[gavin]

On BBC2 at 9pm tonight What's Killing Our Bees? A Horizon Special.

Should be interesting. There is a clip here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01dl1cj

No responsible journalist should ever claim things like 'dying in their billions' without checking the facts with people like those at the National Bee Unit. Last I heard they were estimating a 20% increase over some period of time I forget now. But everyone (except many beekeepers) says so, so it must be true. Strictly, dying in their billions they do - given that colonies produce huge numbers of short-lived workers every summer.

I was lucky enough to see those transponders in action one summers day on a visit to see a colleague at Rothamsted. They were following butterflies that summer which was a little frustrating as they tended to flop into the grass whenever the sun went in.

[gavin]

Quite a good programme I thought. Worth catching on iPlayer if you missed it.

[Jon]

Must have a look then. I assumed it would be the usual ill researched sensationalist tripe extrapolating from US beekeeping.

[lindsay s]

I thought the programme was balanced and informative. The bumble bee research will hopefully reveal the quantity of pesticides that are picked up in their natural environment. I agree with Drone Rangers post in the queen cage thread about the Italian bee imports that were featured in the programme and I wonder how many seasons they will last in their new environment.

[gavin]

Totally agree Lindsay. It is a pity that the results of the study on the effects of Varroa on navigation are not yet available - could add some perspective to the stuff on bee disorientation with pesticides.

This morning I caught up with the start of the programme on iPlayer having missed the start last night. Hasn't helped the blood pressure to see all those Italian packages being shaken into empty hives (partially filled with new foundation but also old comb too - I thought that it was a condition of the funding that the comb was new?). These could be the very workers that drifted into my and the association's hives earlier in the summer .... along with their Italian strains of Varroa and other pathogens. And no doubt the workers emerging now from the queens mated this summer will have some yellow individuals amongst them.

The local association will discuss this on Tuesday. We really need to make our voices heard on this. As does the SBA membership.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b037y0zf/Horizon_20122013_Whats_Killing_Our_Bees_A_Horizon_ Special/

[The Drone Ranger]

Hasn't helped the blood pressure to see all those Italian packages being shaken into empty hives
Hi Gavin
as I said on another thread it's a strange choice
If they are NZ Italians they won't do much good
They are lovely gentle bees but up here they won't build early enough for rape
Also they will lay like crazy through summer and use up any surplus
They won't stop brood rearing early enough so will need about 25Kg of feeding/hive
Most of the Italian blood here at the moment comes from the influence of Buckfast
Anecdotally they make the worst tempered crosses
I know folk say the same about Carnie X but I think they are mostly OK
At least they are well suited to the job in hand (cold climate fast build up bees)

[drumgerry]

Hasn't helped the blood pressure to see all those Italian packages being shaken into empty hives (partially filled with new foundation but also old comb too - I thought that it was a condition of the funding that the comb was new?)........

The local association will discuss this on Tuesday. We really need to make our voices heard on this. As does the SBA membership.

I couldn't agree more Gavin. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad. Just spent the last hour writing another letter to the Scottish Beekeeper responding to the BFA guy in this month's edition. He asks that we all work together. Seems a bit of a joke when all the bee farmers do is work for their own commercial self interest.

Re the programme. Thought it was a decent attempt. Didn't like that they let the imports of those bees pass uncriticised especially when Bill referred later to varroa having coming in on the back of imports. I also wanted to know more about the dosages of neonics being fed by the German researcher to the bees who got lost. Glad that at last it's being acknowledged as a multi-faceted issue.

[gavin]

Hi Gerry

Yes, also keen to hear more of the detail from the German study. There was a paper out last year from a German group - before the French one on the same topic - that suggested that 'field realistic' levels don't seem to have much effect (I think!). Don't recall whether the guy on Horizon was involved.

It is going a bit far to say that all bee farmers work for their own commercial self-interest. Certainly the writer of that letter is definitely not in that category. I got to know him very well when we were trying to help get a bee cooperative established in Scotland - and prior to that in meetings on the EFB crisis - and he worked hard for the bee farmer community. He also puts in a lot of hours helping the local beekeeping association in Dumfries. That cooperative failed, for a variety of reasons. Murray spends time helping the broader beekeeping community too. Bear in mind that they are running businesses, several of them making all of their income from bees and also employing staff. They have to be focused on making enough profit otherwise their businesses go under, especially in years that have been difficult in beekeeping terms.

His letter alluded to some moves in the direction you and I wish - he wasn't explicit because he can't be, and he can't be because it isn't his business to say. It isn't mine either, and I don't know whether what is being considered would please or displease me anyway.

However he has campaigned hard on behalf of the bee farmers for 'restocking' funding, and I'm at odds with him just as much as you are. I think that it is a massive mistake for public funds to be spent importing Italian bees to go into empty Scottish bee boxes. Truly crazy stuff, and I don't understand why the senior people in the SBA didn't object when they had a chance. This afternoon at our association apiary the members who came had another chance to look into the boxes, including the splits from ESBA1 some of which still have quite a number of pure Italian workers drifting in from who knows where no doubt carrying some of their burden of pure Italian Varroa with whatever adapations to Varroa treatments they come with. They're poorly adapted bees for Scotland and will probably make wintering less successful for all of us by spreading unsuitable genetics where they haven't been requeened. They're coming into areas the bee farmers have privately said are already over-stocked. They could be bringing new or variant pathogens to add to the mix we already have. It seems likely to me (but I'm not sure) that some of the imports will keep people in beekeeping that should really be doing something more suited to their skill sets. It is wrong on so many levels.

[The Drone Ranger]

I think they will be from New Zealand Gavin
Perhaps not though because the chap said they had been travelling a couple of days ?
Not sure about varroa I think they will be clear of those.
Always a risk of other problems though.
Package bees must be very stressed

One of the big bee farmers was involved in a project to dust the bees with fungicide as a delivery mechanism to tackle botrytis in strawberries
Hardly something I would want to be associated with
Bees are a means to an end for some

[drumgerry]

I appreciate what you're saying Gavin about some bee farmers helping out in the wider beekeeping community. But as bee farmers their businesses are their priority. I don't personally know any bee farmers and can only go on what I can see is happening. And what's happening is that they and their umbrella organisation have campaigned for and got funding for a short term, arguably destructive solution to a long term problem which affects us all. I sincerely wish we and the bee farmers were on the same page as we'd get to where we need to be a damn sight quicker.

I don't want their businesses to fail. I want them to operate on a sustainable footing. In the same way that every other business has to.

We hear them complaining about how there's not enough queens produced in the UK to meet their demands. Well maybe they should get up off their backsides and rear them themselves. Perhaps they need to set aside a portion of their operation to doing that. And another portion to splitting into nucs for overwintering with their newly raised queens. Then they'd have colonies suitable to build up for the rape and they wouldn't need their packages and imported queens. What they seem to prefer to do though is throw everything they have at the honey and import bees to replace their losses. It's a business model which can't succeed in the long run. They need to adapt or give up and get a job in a call centre.

[gavin]

Gerry, that's pretty much what went into our local association's response to the consultation on the EU Apiculture programme. And you can guess who drafted it :).

Droney - the packages are mostly (or maybe wholely) coming in from continental Europe, this year anyway. I have been told by someone who definitely knows what he's talking about that the package he saw, freshly arrived, had a Varroa problem. Straight off the truck. If that package was in any way typical, this year there was a mass importation of continental Varroa, and the East of Scotland Beekeepers Association bees will have them already given that we saw scores of Italian drifters today.

[The Drone Ranger]

Gerry, that's pretty much what went into our local association's response to the consultation on the EU Apiculture programme. And you can guess who drafted it :).

Droney - the packages are mostly (or maybe wholely) coming in from continental Europe, this year anyway. I have been told by someone who definitely knows what he's talking about that the package he saw, freshly arrived, had a Varroa problem. Straight off the truck. If that package was in any way typical, this year there was a mass importation of continental Varroa, and the East of Scotland Beekeepers Association bees will have them already given that we saw scores of Italian drifters today.

Well that's a bit bleak then Gavin
I thought the might be they type KBS import into the deep south of England where they do fairly well and are popular in gardens because they don't molest the neighbours.
They would most likely go down in the first winter not least because they need a double brood box(I won't link to their site for obvious reasons)

Italian bees coming just over from Europe they might do better up here but I doubt it.
They will just be a blinking nuisance.

I can't see me sponsoring a hive with them in it blooming cheek
I like to get along with the rest of the beekeeping fraternity but appeasement doesn't seem to be working
I noticed on another thread somebody mentioned drifting accounts for up to 30% of the bees in some hives
I think that's a bit high but you will be able to spot the little devils and make an estimate
substitute any cuss word you like :)

[Jon]

If this was happening in my backyard my response would be unprintable.
I am not in any way anti commercial as I have the greatest respect for several commercial beekeepers I know - people like Dan Basterfield.
The deal has to cut both ways though. If commercial beekeepers are getting taxpayer funded subsidies there is no way they should be allowed to jeopardise every other beekeeper in the area by flooding it with potentially novel pathogens.
The oft quoted 'health certificate' stuff much mentioned by Murray and other importers or queen sellers on BKF is nothing but a technicality, a complete red herring, as that will not cover virus, nor variants of existing known pathogens such as varroa mites.
This programme sounds like it is completely ill conceived and god only knows why the SBA seems unperturbed by it all.

[The Drone Ranger]

I think they are worried but in a Neville Chamberlain kind of way
The Bee farmers have a disproportionate influence on The Gov and the EU

[Jon]

I think they are worried but in a Neville Chamberlain kind of way


I have in my hand a piece of paper - an EU Bee Health Certificate.

[The Drone Ranger]

I watched Horizon again carefully and Mark of Heather Hills does say the bees are are direct from Italy sorry Gavin I missed that first time round :)

http://www.heather-hills.com/adopt-our-bees.html

and then history repeats itself
http://www.heather-hills.com/heather-hills-bees/our-history.html

Although this time only half the bees died out

[gavin]

They're using the Horizon exposure to push their adopt a bee thing hard. https://twitter.com/heatherhills999

That isn't a recommendation by the way.

[gavin]

If this was happening in my backyard my response would be unprintable.
.......
This programme sounds like it is completely ill conceived and god only knows why the SBA seems unperturbed by it all.

I had a better look at lunchtime after being distracted by the ESBA members helping yesterday. The daughters of ESBA1 and ESBA5 (and probably others) have not only Italian drifters but are now spawning young hairy slightly darker Italian lookalikes. Our virgins have been given an Italian Job! We moved one more (probably one last) set of five virgins into Apideas yesterday. I'll now take them to a distant glen where the commercial guys don't - as far as I know - operate. It will be hard to monitor them at that distance (absconding or starvation risk .... ) but I'll try. We may need them to requeen some of this year's queens. The drones will be our own, and those of three local association members elsewhere in the glen who have a (mild) preference for Amm-leaning local mongrels. As far as I can tell, but who knows really. And of course our own colonies might now be hosting drones of the eastern races anyway given that they wander around.

Big rethink required for next year if we are going to be able to continue with Amm-mongrel breeding. The current lot are remarkably gentle bees and well worth trying to preserve against this tide of totally unsuitable genetics.

The contaminated stocks can be used as drone producers. We still have all the original queens - I'd best keep a close eye on them (at that long distance) to intervene in case they try to supersede.

[lindsay s]

I was going to spend a tenner so I could adopt one of heather hills bees and it was even going to send me a birthday card in two weeks’ time. But I had to change my mind when I remembered I can’t understand one word of Italian.:( On a more serious note just before I started beekeeping Italian bees were brought into Orkney and they only lasted for a couple of years much to the relief of my mentor.

[gavin]

Just for everyone's interest, here is what happened to the daughters of ESBA1, our colony from our five survivors than seemed the best fit to both close to pure Amm and gentle. The bees were all dark earlier in the spring, then the mother colony had a few Italian drifters. Now the daughter queens are showing a large amount of Italian blood in them, so we can now look forward to thoroughly mixed-up genetics and some hard to handle progeny.

We have five virgins more from this stock in Apideas that will not be let out until they've been driven far away tomorrow morning, and two others that might or might not have been mated yet but weren't laying on Sunday.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/italian_job1.jpg

There are images elsewhere of the uncontaminated mother colony ... and here is Jon's plot of the wing data: http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?153-Your-gallery-of-2D-plots/page30

G.

[Bridget]

The commercial bees arrived this weekend on the heather - about 1/2 mile from us in a bee line. I checked my three hives this week for varroa and all were clear. We'll see how long that lasts. Luckily queen in apidea was mated before they arrived.

[The Drone Ranger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_bee
quite a good description of the Italian bee
They are nice bees
But like they say in gardening a weed is just a flower(plant) in the wrong place
http://www.beeworks.com/morphometry/index.html
There is a small overlap in italian amm morphometry workers
The drones don't overlap in CI index

[mbc]

If this was happening in my backyard my response would be unprintable.


It is happening in my back yard too, same source as the Scottish imports, and there's not a thing I can do about it, barring re doubling my efforts and giving the natives a fighting chance by weight of numbers. Such is life.

[The Drone Ranger]

would it make any sense just to do wing morph on a drone taken from above a QX
that would select from your queens
I found that when I gave them fishing line with starter frames they made mostly drone cells and that was quite early in the season

[greengumbo]

I watched this last night on aye player. Pleasantly surprised at the balance shown. I would love for someone to give an accurate account of colony numbers and losses over the past say 20 years. Bill had a figure from 2002 - 2005. I mean that's 8 years ago now ! I still struggle to find accurate numbers for this and the NBU are hard to pin down as well. Those transponders on the bees were brilliant.

[gavin]

On the BKF Murray related NBU comments from a BFA meeting (too many acronyms!) that since 2005 (I think) there has been a 20pc increase.

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

[Trog]

'aye player' - love it, great name! :)

[fatshark]

I watched this last night on aye player. Pleasantly surprised at the balance shown. I would love for someone to give an accurate account of colony numbers and losses over the past say 20 years. Bill had a figure from 2002 - 2005. I mean that's 8 years ago now ! I still struggle to find accurate numbers for this and the NBU are hard to pin down as well. Those transponders on the bees were brilliant.

BBKA have 12/13 figures for England ... an average of 33.8% (see http://www.bbka.org.uk/files/pressreleases/bbka_release_winter_survival_survey_13_june_2013_1 371062171.pdf). This also has figures for all winters from 07/08. Why didn't they include Scotland? Northern England were higher, mid forties. Remember that this was a straightforward poll of members so - a bit like Amazon reviews - might reflect an average of responses from "Doris Disaster" who lost all her colonies and "Stevie Smug-Git" who lost none and wants the world to know what a good beekeeper he is.

With apologies to Doris and Steven. You know who you are. No offence intended ;-)

I too thought the programme was reasonably well balanced but was disappointed that it dwelt overly on the fancy machines - harmonic radar and electron microscopes - rather than significance of the results obtained from using them. I would have liked more detail on the stuff from Simon Potts, including practicalities and the impact on farming methods.

However, it's clear from the opening of the programme that the evidence supporting the statement that bees are in decline is so well accepted by everyone - beekeepers, scientists and the public - that it no longer needs to be presented. At all.

[gavin]

BBKA have 12/13 figures for England ... an average of 33.8% (see http://www.bbka.org.uk/files/pressreleases/bbka_release_winter_survival_survey_13_june_2013_1 371062171.pdf). This also has figures for all winters from 07/08. Why didn't they include Scotland? Northern England were higher, mid forties. .....

Ah well, the question may have been rhetorical, but I'll bite. The BBKA is of course the English BKA, being a federation of English LAs plus one Welsh and one slightly odd NI association too. That name 'B' is misleading. OK, it accepts and has members across the UK but it is constituted to vote via delegates that come from the overwhelmingly English LAs. That's why the BBKA have no data (or very little) from Scotland. The B is a misnomer.

The mid 40s figures from the NI group surely reflect the quality of the beekeeping in the NI group that has affiliated itself with the BBKA, that's all. I don't know if the Ulster BA runs its own winter loss survey, but it should. Or the NI local associations. Here, in the heart of the bee farming armageddon that requires government support for massed imports, the local losses of full colonies were 20%. Include the little ones and the figure is similar to the BBKA one for (mostly) England.

Saw this on Facebook today. What a wonderful initiative. It is high time we had some action in Scotland to promote native bees in a similar way. Shouldn't we start by discovering what the SBA membership feel about the current position of the SBA hierarchy on native bees? The comments by the President in his letter in the magazine this month were not encouraging - disparaging comments on native bees, can't buy them off the shelf, no mention of the need to breed for the traits required.

http://nihbs.org/?page_id=896

Controlled use of this label purchased from the NIHBS (this image comes straight from the NIHBS website):

http://nihbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/label.jpg

[Jon]

I don't know if the Ulster BA runs its own winter loss survey, but it should. [/IMG]

It's run by Agri-Food & Biosciences Institute (AFBI) every year and we send in our data online or via printed form.

There is a link to it on the NIHBS site (http://nihbs.org/?p=702) as well.

We have been discussing the native bee label since the start of the year and I think it is a really good idea as a lot of people will be attracted to the idea of supporting a native species via the purchase of local honey. NIHBS will be keeping a close watch on the use of the labels.

Like a choice to buy red squirrel honey or grey squirrel honey!

We also have the University of Galway on board via the new Ireland varroa Monitoring project and this will involve DNA microsatelite analysis of bee samples so we will have data to show who has native or near native bees. Grace McCormack, The head of the zoology department was at out last meeting in Portlaoise in August. When a colony is sampled for varroa using the shaker method, a sample of 100 bees is taken at the same time. The mite count data and the samples are then sent to Galway. I sampled ten of my own colonies and the Galtee people have already sampled about 150.

[gavin]

So the mid-40s NI figure was the official one then? 43% the report said.

Then these sensible words from Mervyn in the press report:

However, it is hoped that the recent good weather may help the situation. Mr Eddie stated that “the improved summer has enabled many beekeepers to rebuild colony numbers and the situation is now more or less back to normal.”

[Jon]

Last winter was a disaster especially the East side of N Ireland comprising Down and Antrim.
Losses to the west were much less severe and before anyone suggests it, we don't have an oil seed rape area in the east!
The common consensus is that 3 months of rain in summer 2012 followed by a cold autumn without ivy pollen, followed by the longest and coldest winter in 50 years was what did the damage.
For most of us the year was about consolidation and getting colony numbers back up to where we want.
A lot of us have achieved that although we are struggling to prepare enough nucs for the new beekeepers.
The bright spot was about 3 weeks in July where all you had to do was put in a queen cell to an Apidea and find a mated queen 8 days after emergence. I got about 50 queens from my 30 apideas and the members of the queen rearing group had good success as well. It really brought home what an advantage the Southern European queen producers usually have over us northern folk, although getting back on topic, that is no reason to swamp the place with Italian queens at the start of the season.

[The Drone Ranger]

Shouldn't we start by discovering what the SBA membership feel about the current position of the SBA hierarchy on native bees? The comments by the President in his letter in the magazine this month were not encouraging - disparaging comments on native bees, can't buy them off the shelf, no mention of the need to breed for the traits required.


In fairness Gavin I haven't read the article
What I will say is that F.C. Pellet (an American) writing in his book "Practical Queen Rearing" (from the 1920's or around then) says that "Mr John Anderson of The North of Scotland College of Agriculture.writing in The Irish Bee Journal,October,1917 says of them that they have some very desirable characteristics........He mentions the case of a beekeeper who depends soley on honey production for a livelihood (which is unusual in Great Britain),who increased forty colonies to four hundred an two an one half tons of honey in one season without feeding any sugar.
Mr. Anderson regards the ***** bee as worthy of more attention than it has received.

What is the missing ***** ??
Well its not native or AMM or black it is Punic and for those who wonder what the heck is that ?? it is the bee native to Tunisia or there abouts
They are black and hail from Africa as indeed AMM are supposed to

So it may be that all the natives are friendly on this island and some of them are not really natives at all
I don't want to be provocative here
I would take AMM if they were on offer as my local bee
I am pro trying to improve the bees and stabilise local population with better behavior and so forth from what we have
I can see that you can select for AMM type traits etc. but--
At the end of the day selecting tall people with long hands and feet gets us a group of folk that look like Anglo Saxons but they are not the real Anglo Saxons of yore :)
So perhaps getting everyone on board needs compromise and just breeding from the best of what we have now

I'm with you Gavin I find it's a bit of a nuisance when large quantities of imported bees turn up and undo the good work of the dedicated few

I find that once you get used to how your bees behave beekeeping gets a lot easier, but if some new element is introduced you are back on a learning curve -- when will they swarm? -- how much stores do they need? etc etc

[Jon]

They are black and hail from Africa as indeed AMM are supposed to

AMM do not hail from Africa but it is thought that all honeybees evolved from a common ancestor (http://www.life.illinois.edu/suarez/publications/Whitfield_etal2006Science.pdf) in Africa.

[The Drone Ranger]

AMM do not hail from Africa but it is thought that all honeybees evolved from a common ancestor (http://www.life.illinois.edu/suarez/publications/Whitfield_etal2006Science.pdf) in Africa.

I stand corrected
Actually to be totally accurate about it I am sitting at the moment
So I sit corrected

[Poly Hive]

first of all the BBKA (bless them) are an English organisation polluted badly in my opinion by instutional arrogance. This is an ongoing situation and I have tried to discuss it wth them but got brushed off by a very offensive letter. and yes I was paying them cash at the time. Anyway.

Bee farmers are making a living, and work damn hard to do so. When one is desperate then straws are what work for you. Yellow bees have a very odd trait in northern climes, they over some three years change colour. Not noticed it? Well tis true. Ask Murray or Hamish. They go black. Or certainly darker.

I can also say with some certainty that yellow bees have been brought into Scotland for many years. The circle revolves but not a lot is new.

Commercial bees arrived and we tested for Varroa... curious juxtaposition of events. No varroa found.... (LOL) try next year and see for a more reasonable result. More varroa is not the end of the world. I would have thought in reality that the commercial bees were more likely to be disease free than not given the standards these guys work to.

AMM is a good bee when it is good but a horror when it is not.

Q for you then. How many stings are reasonable when working 40 boxes? One, 100 or 10,000? Given a reasonable day and no flow.

PH

[Jon]

Yellow bees have a very odd trait in northern climes, they over some three years change colour. Not noticed it?

It is a process known as hybridization.

Dark bees exposed to an influx of Italians will also be yellower after three years.
Lose lose situation.