Bees Naturally: What is Wrong With Modern Bee Keeping?
Well, from our point of view nothing is wrong with modern bee keeping methods. We can harvest a large amount of honey easily, manipulate the colonies, transport the hives and generally interfere with the bees with very little effort on our part.
We transport bees and queens all over the world, use selective breeding to produce better strains of bees (from our point of view) and manufacture chemicals and pesticides to prevent or cure diseases and pests that inflict our bees. Even the British Bee Keepers’ Association (BBKA) is sponsored by and endorses Bayer, a pesticide manufacturer!
So everything is wonderful? Well let’s look at it from the bee’s point of view.
I could probably fill a book here but I will try and keep it to the main points.
1) The design of the hive forces the bees to start at the bottom keeping their brood at the bottom then working upwards for storing their honey supplies. Supers are added above the brood box and as each one is filled another one is stacked on top. If the brood box becomes crowded then another can be stacked on top of it giving two brood boxes when the supers have been removed. Once the second brood box is added then the supers can be re-stacked on top.
The bee’s natural instinct is to build downwards moving the brood down as the hive expands then back-filling the old brood comb with the honey stores. They are also happy to build horizontally if they happen to make their nest in a fallen tree.
Their natural instinct to move down is the opposite to the beekeepers requirements!
2) A cornerstone of all modern hives is the removable frame. The frame enables the beekeeper to inspect the hive on a regular basis. It is recommended that the hive be inspected around every ten days or so during the spring/ summer to check every thing is OK. The beekeeper looks for signs of disease, correct laying patterns, healthy brood and queen, etc. The frames are also spaced to precise dimensions to enable the bees to move up and down the hive enabling them to fill the upper levels with honey.
So every ten days the bee’s nest is stripped apart by the well-meaning beekeeper. The precisely controlled temperature the bees maintain plus all the pheromone scents used to regulate the function of the hive are lost or diluted. With the precise spacing of the frames even lifting the box above can have the same effect.
The bees have had over 100,000,000 years practice and beekeepers feel the need to strip their nest apart every ten days to check they are doing things right??
I was reading a book the other day by an eminent beekeeper and he mentioned one of the things you have to look for during this inspection is laying workers. He goes on to add “..the queen has died or is unable to lay eggs possibly as a result of damage when manipulated by the beekeeper” So the beekeeper should be checking for something that is possibly caused by checking for it! Need I say more?
Next: What is Wrong With Modern Bee Keeping? Part Two
