Organic Bee Keepers Not Losing Their Bees

I've been reporting all along that we have been haveing no problems with our hives. We keep four hives that feed either off the greenhouse or the orchards all organic. I think one of the other problems is most commercial bee keepers rob to much honey from the hives and supplement with sugar water when you add that stress with transporting the hives you get bee loss.

wow...

Non-organic bees going crazy from watching too much television!

I heard about recently, too.
[link to lib.store.yahoo.net]
Organic Bee Keepers Not Losing Their Bees
14-May-2007

Organic Beekeepers Report No Losses While Conventional Operations
Report Massive Colony Losses

No ORGANIC Bee losses
05 06, 2007
Straight to the Source

Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time
organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a
seat in Ottawa's House of Commons, making strong showings around 5%
for Canada's fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the
provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

"I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly
Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including
commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The
problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in
their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics
to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to
make more money with pollination services, which stresses the
colonies."

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site
< [link to bushfarms.com] , where Michael Bush felt compelled
to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

"Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy
to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through
the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from
lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to
natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a
long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees
than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of
natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most
people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter.
If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one, it
produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By
letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually
eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is
shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by
one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa
reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell
us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax
into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef
industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem?
Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world
at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action
in dealing with this issue?"

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held
opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems
to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering
agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been
crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast
approaching this limit for some time.

We've been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate
professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in
Ontario, told the CBC. And we're starving them out by feeding them
artificially and moving them great distances. Given the stress
commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by
parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or
pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's all of the
above...