“It used to be a beekeeper would expect to lose 10 to 20 percent of colonies in a year, mostly over the winter,” he says. “And now the colony mortality can be 80 percent.”
Combating the virus starts with getting bees that have good genes, Seeley says. “What hobby beekeepers are taught is you get your hive in the winter and nail it together and paint it. And then in the spring, you order a package of bees from Florida or Georgia, and those bees are just junk,” Seeley says.
In the end, you want to raise a colony with a good queen that can survive winters. Without a queen, a colony can’t survive for long; she lays the eggs to produce the bees in the colony. Hobbyists have long modeled their ways after the practices of commercial beekeeping, such as housing bees in large hives close to other colonies, to maximize honey production. Seeley is seeing a shift in that mind-set, though.“There’s an admiration for [commercial beekeepers], that they can manage so many, but there is this growing interest in hobby beekeepers for a kinder and gentler beekeeping,” Seeley says.
What about supporting native pollinators? European honeybees are an introduced species, we're only priming ourselves for more ecological turmoil down the road.
There's a climatic upheaval headed our way and like a tidal wave at a distance out at sea, its only seemingly unforeboding until, its right up to the shoreline and then it's too late! The climate waits for no man!
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