The Sustainable Apiary
We all lose bees in the winter, and replacing those bees can get expensive. Expensive in dollars, if we have to go to the package bee and nuc dealers for our new bees, or expensive in bee resources and/or lost honey production if we have to divide our best colonies in the spring. I suggest we use the brood and bee resources in our non-productive colonies to make mid-summer nuclei, which are over-wintered, becoming our replacement bees come spring. I then take it one step further, by showing how we can use over-wintered nucleus colonies as the brood source for making additional nuclei, and strong cell builders for raising the quality queen stock we need in our apiaries. The presentation includes theory, history, and management of nucleus colonies.
Queen Rearing in the Sustainable Apiary
Brother Adam said many times, “Let the Bees Show You”. No truer words have ever been spoken. Let me show you how I use a variation on Brother Adam’s cell building method to grow quality queen stock in my sustainable apiary.
As a child, Michael Palmer spent most of his spare time outdoors, fascinated by the plants and insects and animals living in his suburban New York City environment. He escaped the city by going off to the University of Vermont, where he fell in love with the countryside, his future wife, and eventually the little bugs that we all hold so dear.
The first colonies of honey bees arrived in 1974 as packaged bees, and over the following twenty odd years, he built French Hill Apiaries into a farm of nearly a thousand colonies. About 1990, Acarine mites and then Varroa mites arrived in his bees. The result was not pretty. Beekeeping became way more difficult, and way more expensive. With ever increasing losses, the wisdom of buying in replacement bees came into question. Splitting strong colonies reduced the honey crop and pollinating the local apple orchards caused the whole operation fall apart with failing colonies, broken equipment, and one thoroughly exhausted and one frustrated beekeeper.
In 1998, Mike tried raising a few queens, wintering them in nucleus colonies. The results changed his beekeeping forever. Not only did the bees winter more successfully and store larger surplus honey crops, the fun level rose to new heights, far above the clouds.
Believing that quality should always trump quantity, a decision was made to cut back on the total number of production colonies in the apiary, and focus on raising the best queens possible. With a thousand nucleus colonies of various configurations to help support the seven hundred honey producing colonies, French Hill Apiaries produces, on average, some twelve hundred queens and thirty to forty tons of honey annually.
Michael lives in St. Albans, Vermont with his wife Lesley, a cow named Meat, and Wilson, their Maremma Sheepdog. When not helping his crew manage the honey production colonies, or spending countless hours in the queen rearing apiaries, Mike travels the world teaching sustainable beekeeping to anyone who will listen.