This week I am joined by Michael Bush, a beekeeper, speaker, and author of "The Practical Beekeeper, Beekeeping Naturally". This is a 2 part podcast episode where we discuss bees, comb design, natural beekeeping, studies, the experience Michael has in beekeeping, and the knowledge around how we as beekeepers can and should get off the chemical treatment "train".
So why are we having problems? We have a lot of recent pests and diseases that have made it to North America (and most other places in the world) in the last 30 years or so. As someone once said, "You can't keep bees like grandpa did cause grandpa's bees are dead." Most of us beekeepers have lost all of our bees one time or another in the last few decades and this seems to be getting worse. So part of the problem for beekeepers is the pests, but there are other issues.
We have a narrow gene pool to start with here and between pesticides, pests, and overzealous programs to control Africanized Honey Bees, many of the pockets of feral bees have been depleted leaving only the queens that people buy. When you consider that there are only a handful of queen breeders providing 99% of the queens, that's a pretty small gene pool. This deficiency used to be made up by feral bees and people rearing their own queens. But the recent trend is to encourage everyone to not rear their own queens and only buy them. Especially in AHB (Africanized Honey Bee) areas.
_______________________________________________
Show Notes:
Bush Farms Observation Hive Link
