Reflecting on Spring Losses with Anne Frey (239)

Episode 239 – Reflecting on Spring Losses with Anne Frey 

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners. It's Jim, so it must be Thursday morning for us. I'm here with Anne Frey from Betterbee. Hi, Anne.

Anne Frey: Hi, Jim.

Jim: She's visiting with us today, and she has a wealth of information. Anne and I were chatting before we started recording about what a strange winter it's been. I think you're the one who brought that up, Anne.

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Anne: It's on everybody's minds. When you just start to chit-chat this spring, got to say something about this winter.

Jim: I can understand that. It was a long winter for me too. Hey, listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I try to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping. Today is special because Anne is here with me.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you are a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: Anne, from your perspective, what was up with the winter season and the bee die-off and whatever? How did that affect your bees at Betterbee?

Anne: It was confusing mostly. The impulse was to say, "Oh, no, that was just those commercial beekeepers who went to the almonds, and we're fine." Then it seemed like after a short delay, that the same symptoms were showing up in our colonies in New York State in Greenwich. It was just bees that had made it through the winter in little small clusters, and you'd think, "I'll beef them up with a frame of brood and a piece of a pollen patty," and that's all was what would turn a little colony around in the past.

For some of them, it worked, and for others, they just kept spiraling down the drain. You gave them a frame of brood, which is 6,000 potential bees, plus all the bees clinging to that frame, and it didn't turn them around. A frame of brood plus all the bees clinging is virtually the same as a whole package of bees. A package is-

Jim: Yes, it is.

Anne: -10,000?

Jim: Yes.

Anne: It was just stunning to see them continue to go downhill, and then possibly die out, or we just decided you've amounted to nothing, we're crushing this queen, and taking this equipment. Once you've tried to save them two times, three weeks later, you go back, you're saying, "You're not saved. I'll give you another frame of brood and another bit of pollen patty." Three weeks later, they still haven't turned themselves around, that's the last chance for me.

It's harsh, and it sounds terrible if you're a hobbyist to give up on a colony, but we have to just cut it short after two attempts to save them, and wasting the brood and bees that we put into trying to save them. It's depressing.

Jim: What percentage of your bee colonies are we talking here was it? How many of your colonies were afflicted?

Anne: This description that I just gave was not all of the ones-- a lot of them died in the fall. They had tons and tons of honey left, so it was apparent they died early. Altogether, it was 40% death. Of that 40% death, the strange not recovering with a boost was probably 10% to 15% of those bad ones. What's that? 10% of 40%? 4%. [chuckling] In general, it was dying in the fall, which gave-- and it gave the symptoms that it was a classic varroa mite deaths, small cluster, formerly giant colony, and just very, very frustrating.

Strangely, one of the frustrating things on top of all the dead bees dying is that you've got all of this honey to deal with. It's crystallized in combs, and not enough bees to consume it and use it up in the spring.

Jim: I don't know how to pitch in with this, but I hadn't even thought about it. It was a long winter for me for a whole list of reasons. I had one colony that I thought was dead. I just thought they didn't make it on their own because I was not much of a beekeeper last year, but it was alive. It was just barely alive. It hang on. I thought, "If it gets to the spring--" I did what you said. I put a little pollen patty on it. They had plenty of honey, but that colony still hasn't recovered. You see, then I went to the bad queen routine. "I must have a bad queen. Here are--"

I justified why that colony was small and stayed small, but now, I'm wondering if I had my own minuscule event in just one colony, but the others back in the yard, I only had about 10 hives there, most of those were either good to blistering. They did well.

Anne: Oh, that's good.

Jim: Except for those that died. Of course, I had my own 30% die-off.

Anne: I wish it was 30% here. I know some people were way more than our rate of loss here. It was pretty stunning for us to lose that many. I think sometimes when they get such a small cluster, that they can get-- it's like a family that's never quite getting ahead. They work and they work, and they bring in the money, and maybe every teenager in the household has its own job. They're trying to increase, but they're always just level. They never thrive, this family. I think that the bees that came through winter, like you described your little colony, are like that.

That's why I always want to give them a frame of brood with workers clinging to it. I wonder if that just wasn't enough sometimes. In other cases, we pulled out frames of honey because it seemed like the queen had a small patch that she was trying to lay eggs in, and her pattern was dense and good and solid, but she was surrounded by solid honey all around her. She couldn't be all she could be if you know what I mean. We expanded that area around the brood nest by yanking out some honey and putting in some empty combs.

It just turned them around sometimes, but sometimes, they just didn't. They just kept going downhill. I've heard other people that have talked about these winter problems mention that too, but I had not heard them discussing that when I mentioned it to David, and he goes, "That's what so and so said too." I was a little bit, I don't know, vindicated. I felt a little better when I heard that somebody else had seen that too. It's still a mystery to me.

They say it might be widespread resistance to amitraz, which is the active ingredient in Apivar, but quite a few of the colonies we lost, we didn't use Apivar on them. We used Formic Pro on them. I'm not trying to put down Formic Pro. I'm just saying it's still confusing because I do love Formic Pro.

Jim: Anne, you keep saying they. They said, they did, they.

Anne: They.

Jim: Which they are you talking about? The USDA or some university?

Anne: Yes, there's a lot of theys. Recently, the USDA did put out an article that said they had tested a lot of samples, and they detected amitraz resistance in the mites that were in those samples. They detected high viruses of deformed wing virus and acute paralysis virus. People saying stuff, they, they, they. I was referring to people like Randy Oliver or--

Jim: I know the USDA always has professional and academic opinions on this, but is any other university personnel or any other accomplished beekeepers working on this concept of what causes die off?

Anne: Jim, I got to say that it seems like back the same as when we had CCD pop up. It seems like everybody was working on it during February, March, April, and then the hubbub died back. As far as names, off the top of my head, I don't have names, but I know they were collecting bees, mites, comb, honey, everything from everywhere. They jumped right on it. They were collecting from commercial beekeepers, hobbyists, every different state they could. It was spearheaded by the USDA, but I know that other universities were also looking into it. I'm just waiting for those papers to come out.

Jim: I'm cautiously protective when I say this, but there has to be just a degree of fatigue here. We just go through these bee die-offs all the time. One more year, one more die-off. All those years ago, AI Root said in his magazine then, that comes the spring, the mania passes. It's just like before, you can get this work done, whatever it was that was doing it seems to have cycled on. I don't know what I'm trying to say, but I can see where it would be hard to jump on this bandwagon because the bandwagon's moving so fast.

Anne: It's true. It's like the sadness and tragedy of the very end of winter. It's all swept away with the quickness of spring and how quick the people can make increase with the ones that lived. It's just like, "We got to move on. We got to keep working." Nothing ever stops at Betterbee, and I've been mostly working on training my new assistant and chugging on with all of our other tasks. The worries of February haven't not entered my mind until today when we started chatting.

Jim: Let's take a short break here for our sponsor, and let's talk about how you're going with this trainee and how that program's working for you.

Anne: Sure.

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Jim: You've got some new personnel and some new initiatives going on that give you some help there.

Anne: Yes, we've got a new helper for me in the bee team, as we call it. You may have heard of the A team, but this is a bee team. Em is my helper, and they never did bees before but used to be in farming. I think that that helped a lot when they started in with the things that we have to do with weather and dealing with a creature that's growing, but these colonies that grow. You have certain rules in the early spring about what you want to see in a hive, and it changes. By three weeks later, it's changed, and you're like, [onomatopoeia]

At first, we wanted to see at least five frames of bees. Now we're not happy with five frames of bees. We are worried if we see one that's five frames of bees, and we want to see 20 frames of bees plus bees in the super. It's all changing. That's something that a beginner may not catch on to at first. It's like you feed at first, and then you stop feeding. You have a bit of comb at first, and now you're not satisfied if they've only made one comb in a week. It's just always going on. It's always progressing and changing.

What we were looking for before might have been simply, is this queen right? That meaning, are there eggs? We'd pull up just one frame quick because it was cool, it was cold even. If we saw eggs, we were satisfied, and we'd say, "Close that up. Now it's a little more intense, and we're looking more deeply, and we're saying, "How many frames of brood altogether are there because we want to take a whole bunch of that brood and make some nukes, and we're going to leave that colony with four frames of brood." The end, close it up. It's constantly changing, depending on what your purpose is.

Making nukes is a big part of what we do here. That's why I just swung right into making nukes in my topic. I was going to chat with you about the things I've shown Em as a total beginner, though Em was thrown straight into the lake, as you say, and taught to swim just like that. Whenever I see anything unusual in this relationship, which is basically a student and a mentor, though, I work Em like a dog. You don't want to treat your students like that every time.

Jim: No, you don't. It's got to be a lot of job satisfaction for Em.

Anne: Oh yes, sure. Getting really strong now. I might say, "Oh, here's a queen cell. This queen cell, the queen emerged from, and it looks like this with a ragged circle at the bottom because the nibbling jaws of the queen bit through that, and she walked out. Look at this queen cell, it's capped at the bottom, but it's not all knobby. It's smoothed off. This queen's going to come out any hour now. Look at this queen cell. It's really stumpy and wide and thick. It was last year's, and they've just smoothed it over and added more wax to it. It's just a big like acorn-cap ugliness now." There's so many little details and clues that looking at a lot of hives you can find to add in when you're teaching a beginner.

The other day Em said, "Here's a queen, I think, but it looks weird. Is this a queen?" It was a virgin queen. I said, "Oh, good eye, good eye."

Jim: Good eye.

Anne: That is a queen, but she's acting like a crazed squirrel. She's dashing around and fluttering her wings and just not acting all deliberate and searching and thoughtful like a queen usually acts. She's just skittering around like a manic chipmunk. Her waist looks different. It's like her angular edges of her waist and abdomen are different than the big plump, chubby abdomen and hips that a mated queen has. It's all these little nuances. I don't know. I love seeing that stuff and showing it to a new person.

Jim: I was just listening to you talk. It's pressure on both of you, isn't it? It's pressure on you to give pertinent information, but not too much.

Anne: Not too much.

Jim: Then the student has the responsibility of maintaining a sense of hopefulness about an ever-changing environment they're working in. What was right in February, what was right in April is not right here in June and July.

Anne: Oh yes. Spring is just so fast. Everything goes so quickly in spring. I think that's where beginners who aren't constantly with another experienced beekeeper can fall behind so quickly. They may have been told, "Fill that feeder once a week, see how they're doing," whatever that phrase means. That's all they've been told. To have the idea that the colony is supposed to increase steadily from-- say it was a nuke, the nuke should increase steadily all the way through mid-July, probably, and then be a big booming monster for the rest of the summer.

A package will be a little behind that, but it will increase. It's like when I was a beginner, my bees didn't increase. They always just struggled along and looked about the same size as when I got them. I didn't know that was a bad thing. I just had one hive, and these were bees, and I watched them at the entrance, and I thought everything was fine. I didn't understand the big picture.

Jim: Do you remember your early years? Do you remember? Are you able to bring back personal memories of--

Anne: Yes. I remember when I was in kindergarten, Jim. I'm cursed with a good memory. [laughs]

Jim: Oh, I was not meaning to go that far back. Not that you're that old, but I had a guy say one time, very interestingly, that experienced aged beekeepers with vast knowledge didn't make good mentors for beginners because they overlooked too much. That you needed someone who'd kept these about four to five to six years to mentor someone brand new because their early beekeeper memories were still fresh.

Anne: That's a good point. I think because I actively try to think of how the beginner student feels that I've avoided that pitfall because I do teach a lot of beginners, and I have seen teachers who seem to forget what the beginner mindset was. I do actively try not to teach like that. It's an easy thing to slip into though. Like you said earlier, not saying too much, not teaching too much, and flooding a person.

Jim: I've always thought about those bee books. I thought it might be the wrong thing to do to hand those beekeeping tones to a beginner. Give them the simple books with the condensed version of beekeeping and leaving out so many of the situations that could develop. They just stay on the basic elements rather than handing them the 600-page book and saying, "Here, read this."

Anne: It's hard to know what to do in those cases because if they get the very simple condensed story, and they never go any deeper, then they'll feel like that's the story. They'll be in kindergarten every single year of their beekeeping. They're always a kindergartner. That's tough because some people, they don't do well with books or they think that this must be the end of what I have to learn. After they've done one year they feel that's a success and that's that and then the end. That will be the same thing next year, and it's like, no, it's going to be different next year. You got [unintelligible 00:21:37]

Jim: The next, and the next.

Anne: The next. I don't know why people would fall into that mindset though, because nothing in life is the same every year or every season.

Jim: That's a perfect point to end on. Our time here is just about up. I always enjoy talking with you, and I'll be sitting here while you were talking, remembering my earliest years.

Anne: Good.

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Jim: Thanks for the time. I know you're keeping bees and you got all this going on and nukes, and divides and splits. You come in on a nice day and talk to us and the listeners. Thank you.

Anne: Jim, I was glad that you chose today because it's 87 degrees here today, which to us is deathly, deathly hot. We're such wimps in New York.

Jim: I'll open a window. Until we can talk again, I'll tell you bye, and I'll tell the listeners bye too.

Anne: Thanks, Jim. See you.

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