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Sustainable Beekeeping - 2006/04/17 11:31
So what is Sustainable Beekeeping?
As many of you know, like many agricultural trades American beekeeping is struggling. Bee diseases and the devastating effects of honeybee parasites, overuse and misuse of miticides and resulting chemical resistance, as well as a glut of cheap Chinese and Argentinean honey flooding the US market have all had their effect on American apiculture.
To survive, we decided to take an old school approach to raising honeybees, not learning as much from ‘current research’ rather lessons learned about nature and sustainable agricultural and organic practices. We have never used ‘hard’ chemicals such as Fuvalinate and Coumaphos to control mites and have instead implemented a diverse integrated pest management strategy. The long-term survivability of apiculture depends on our ability to manage pests through better management practices and breeding genetic traits into our honeybees.
In practice, we have begun to raise our own northern bred ‘survivor’ queens. This approach is nothing scientific, just solid genetic selection based on honey production and winter survivability – pure and simple. Conversely, we eliminate the weakest colonies by splitting them up or combining them with stronger colonies.
Last year we began a practice of making summer nucleus colonies. We take the least productive colonies in mid-late July and split them into five 4-frame colonies introducing a queen that we have raised from our most productive and healthy colony. We then let them grow large enough to winter-over as a very small colony. In the spring, instead of purchasing packaged bees or making splits from the best colonies, we raise new colonies from these small nucs. In essence, we have moved to a completely self-sustaining system that focuses on three parts, honey production from our large over-winter colonies, queen rearing from our northern bred survivor stock, and nucleus colony production to replace winter loss and to increase the number of producing colonies in the spring.
If you’re interested in learning more… visit us at www.merrilland.net or drop me an e-mail.
Sincerely,
Kurt Merrill
Merrill’s Honeybees
North Charlestown, NH
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