APIS Volume 8, Number 7, July 1990
In this issue
- Beekeeper Registration in Florida
- FAVA/CA Florida Volunteers
- A Saga of "Sad"and "Bad" Bees
- Reflections on Protein Management
BEEKEEPER REGISTRATION MANDATORY IN FLORIDA
An article in the Florida Market Bulletin has brought in a good many new beekeeper registrations. The law says that all Florida beekeepers must be registered. It is illegal to sell bees that have not been inspected or to keep bees without notifying the Florida Department of Agriculture. The registration provision of the law is relatively new.
According to Mr. Laurence Cutts, Florida State Apiarist, virtually all commercial beekeepers are registered, but many part-timers and hobbyists are not in compliance. The importance of being registered is to establish better communication between regulators and beekeepers. This will be particularly valuable after arrival of the African honey bee which is expected to affect all beekeepers in Florida no matter how many colonies they manage. To register and/or have bees inspected, contact the Bureau of Apiary Inspection, Division of Plant Industry, P.O. Box 1269, Gainesville, FL 32602, ph 904/3723505.
FAVA/CA FLORIDA VOLUNTEERS
The spring newsletter of the Florida International Volunteer Corps (FAVA/CA), Communique, features a visit by Florida beekeepers Bob Tadeyeske and Ralph Russ to St. Vincent island in the Caribbean. Bob and Ralph spent two weeks consulting with beekeepers. They found conditions favorable to beekeeping, helped establish a demonstration apiary in the botanical gardens and instructed employees in a training center in beehive construction.
FAVA/CA is Florida's equivalent of U.S. Peace Corps. It provides volunteer short-term training and assistance to agriculture, health, education and business in the Caribbean. There is a great deal of interest in developmental apiculture in the Caribbean and FAVA\CA is always on the lookout for volunteers who are technically capable of assisting beekeepers. Should you be interested and believe yourself qualified, contact David Pasquarelli or Dave Schmeling at FAVA/CA, 1311 Executive Center
A SAGA OF "SAD" AND "BAD" BEES
Mr. Andy Nachbaur, a California beekeeper of 35 years, provided an interesting talk to those attending the last American Beekeeping Federation convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mr. Nachbaur also passed out a printed report on what he calls, "Stress Accelerated Decline" (S-A-D) and "Bee Immune Deficiency" (B- A- D) in bee colonies. Space demands of this newsletter dictate heavy editing of Mr. Nachbaur's full report. According to the document, reprints are available from Mr. Nachbaur by writing to him at 1522 Paradise Lane, Los Banos, CA 93635. The publication is quite long; a $5.00 donation is suggested.
SAD and BAD conditions have been reported in all parts of the world, Mr. Nachbaur says; they are not restricted to a specific area and may occur at any time without warning. They may also affect beekeepers large or small without regard to experience. And because SAD and BAD bees don't reappear in the same region season after season, these conditions are difficult to study.
In the past, beekeepers and scientists have called SAD and BAD bees many things, including Isle of Wight Disease; fall, spring and winter collapse or decline; and disappearing disease. The new popular cause, Mr. Nachbaur says, is tracheal mites (at that time California beekeepers were not reporting infestations of Varroa). However, he continues, "It is my opinion...that all of the above and every other natural or unnatural condition that afflicts bees, that can be identified as stressful can be made a scapegoat for SAD or BAD bees." SAD and BAD conditions are not necessarily confined to beekeeping, Mr. Nachbaur says (the parallel of "bee immune deficiency" to human AIDS is implicit). He also suggests that beekeeper management procedures might have an effect.
"These hives appear to be strong productive hives after a honey flow or extended broodrearing period," Mr. Nachbaur contends. However, he continues, they can lose population quickly, leaving boxes full of honey and empty of bees. Two symptoms of SAD and BAD bees Mr. Nachbaur describes are (1) increasing numbers of black, shiny or old bees and (2) numbers of dead, dying and crawling bees. Although pesticide use in California is heavy, Mr. Nachbaur has found SAD and BAD bees in areas where few pesticides are used and in some instances bees sent in for analysis showed no residues of toxic chemicals.
The symptoms described above, according to Mr. Nachbaur, could be related to viral infection. The realities of bee viruses, he says, are that there are no quick fixes or magic bullets. Mr. Nachbaur believes viruses are present in most bees, but don't become epidemic every year. He correlates viral infections with stress put on colonies by a number of causes. One is the extreme crowding of apiaries in California during almond pollination.
Nutritional resources also have much to do with SAD and BAD bees, Mr. Nachbaur says. "Bees reared on low quality diets may look normal and be in great numbers, but not have the ability to properly feed brood; or rear bees that have shortened longevity." Poor pollen sources, Mr. Nachbaur says, associated with SAD and BAD bees are those of grasses: rice, corn, milo. In California, pollen of two wild plants, tarweed and coastal manzanita, seem to be involved. In the case of tarweed, Mr. Nachbaur has observed that a great deal of this pollen will in fact stop broodrearing, even though other conditions appear optimal. Another source of pollen, almonds, is also suspect. As Mr. Nachbaur says, "The generation of beekeepers that I learned from did not regularly go to the almonds in the spring even though they lived close to the almond growing regions, because their bees did better elsewhere." It was only when cash rental became popular that bees were purposefully moved into almonds. Mr. Nachbaur's conclusion is that bees require a balanced diet and to get this almost always require more than one kind of pollen.
Sugar syrup feeding can also help reduce cases of SAD and BAD bees, Mr. Nachbaur says, if applied at certain times. These include the fall and/or right after bees are unloaded from being trucked out of summer pasturage. However, Mr. Nachbaur indicates that bees with advanced cases of SAD and BAD are unable to use syrup, which eventually may simply pool up on the ground. In Florida, bees under heavy stress have also been rescued by inserting a frame of emerging brood.
Poor diets, pathological viruses and subsequent reduced broodrearing take a great toll on colonies, according to Mr. Nachbaur, who says, "The stress of nectar collection is easy to understand when no broodrearing is taking place. The bees work themselves to death...the results may be full boxes of honey and knot heads..." The latter are colonies with small clusters of bees. This situation quickly leads to colony death. Mr. Nachbaur does not minimize the effects of other diseases, pests, predators and toxic chemicals which can lead to large numbers of SAD and BAD bees. As he says, "The results of so many BAD, SAD bees over the last few years has been a lot of SAD beekeepers looking for a quick fix to a very complex problem, keeping healthy, productive bees." Beekeepers need a laboratory that will examine bees for common pests, predators and also viruses, Mr. Nachbaur says, and the time has come to accept the fact that any single affliction may be of little harm alone, but in combination can be fatal to bee colonies.
Mr. Nachbaur describes two major constraints to successful beekeeping in the 1990s. These are finding high quality bee pasture and renewing colonies that die for whatever reason. Actually, it turns out the second constraint is also very much related to the first. That is, Mr. Nachbaur says, "The ability of beekeepers to renew or replace colonies that die out, or become so poor as to be a liability, is a serious problem that can be met by applying rule number one: keep your bees on high quality pasture." Failing this, Mr. Nachbaur says that dramatic loss of colonies, such as those experienced by California beekeepers in 1987-88, will continue. In addition, there may be even more frequent unexplained losses causing SAD and BAD bees in the future.
I was struck by the similarity of Mr. Nachbaur's remarks to what has been occurring in Florida in the last few years. Colony conditions in the panhandle and other parts of the state reporting unexpectedly large dieoffs are in many ways parallel to the SAD, BAD bees of California. Mr. Nachbaur's notions about a diagnostic laboratory, the importance of the pollen resource, experimental pesticide use in colonies, monitoring thresholds for pests, nutrition and other limiting factors have all been addressed in past issues of this newsletter.
This is not to say that all Mr. Nachbaur's ideas should be categorically accepted. Some are controversial and based on observations with little scientific data to back them up. Nevertheless, he has taken the time to write down what he has seen over the last three decades of commercial beekeeping. This is an important first step in determining how he and other beekeepers might begin to deal with SAD and BAD bees.
REFLECTIONS ON PROTEIN MANAGEMENT
The Florida panhandle feeding study is now in the hands of reviewers. When it is published, I will provide information on how to obtain a full copy. Like many scientific studies on honey bees, the results are not definitive and the causes of unexplained bee losses in that region remain controversial.
One of the major arguments I used to embark on a feeding study was that protein nutrition played a great role in the large-scale dieoff reported in the panhandle and that its manipulation was something the beekeeper might incorporate into a management plan. Much of what Mr. Nachbaur said, reported elsewhere in this issue of APIS, corroborates this idea. Practically every time the possibility of protein deficiency was broached as contributor to the problem, however, the hue and cry was raised that pollen was not in short supply. This may have been true, but the quality of that pollen not deemed to be a limiting resource by beekeepers in the area remained, and still remains, a mystery.
Beyond Mr. Nachbaur's concerns about almond and tarweed pollen elsewhere in this newsletter, other information exists showing pollen quality cannot be ignored in bee management. Study in Australia by G. Kleinschmidt and A. Kondos published in the Australasian Beekeeper has shown that colonies on high quality pollens maintain sufficient brood levels and can be moved to successive honey flows. On the other hand, when feeding on low protein pollens, colonies maintain large populations working light flows, but rapidly decline under heavy workloads which also leads to increase in nosema levels. In addition, under heavy honey flows, bees in colonies with a rapid decrease in body protein lived only 20-26 days, whereas those with 40% lived 46-50 days. Thus, colony reproduction was not able to replace bees fast enough when longevity was short, whereas populations remained large during a twelve week flow when longevity increased.
Given the above information, Mr. Kleinschmidt suggests careful management of the following factors to maintain optimum bee populations: A. A prolific queen. B. Brood movement and/or supplementation. C. Attention to nutrition (carbohydrate and protein).
Most beekeepers in the U.S. usually pay attention to all of the above, except protein nutrition. Here is what Mr. Kleinschmidt says concerning colony nutrition: "The use of sugar syrup will substitute for nectar, but current artificial pollens only supplement or extend natural pollens in the Australian environment, not replace them." Thus, he continues, natural resources can be more fully utilized by: (a) managing colonies to maintain body protein at pre-determined levels; (b) collecting and storing (freezing) pollen for later use; and (c) using supplements for the first one to two generations of buildup.
Mr. Kleinschmidt says that all of the above strategies require specific beekeeper action and continuing production costing to determine their suitability. Passive management previously practiced only permitted economic survival, he continues, because natural resources were abundant and production costs lower. He concludes that active management for a pre-planned specific purpose and crop is necessary for survival of Australian beekeepers, and that planning often begins nine months before the selected honey flow.
The quality of pollens is determined by Mr. Kleinschmidt and his colleagues using the Kjeldahl method, a standard procedure which shows how much nitrogen (crude protein) is present. Some 50 bees are taken from the brood nest and analyzed. This nitrogen or crude protein determination is another reason, besides detection of diseases and pests, for beekeepers to consider using a diagnostics laboratory.
In addition to crude protein, another technique used to determine nutritional status of bees is to look at their brood food glands. Dr. Christine Peng, University of California, Davis recently said at the Western Connecticut Beekeepers Association meeting that bees highly infested with tracheal mites had very poor glandular development. This indicated an inability to rear brood at all or if they did, the resulting bees were small. When Dr. Peng's remarks were reported by Dr. Larry Connor in his column, "Students of the Honey Bee," in the June, 1990 issue of The Speedy Bee, he asked the question: "Is intensive protein feeding part of proper management against mites?" It could be. Paying closer attention to protein management might be an important key in determining the reason for many of the SAD and BAD bees in beekeeping outfits today.
Malcolm T. Sanford
Bldg 970, Box 110620
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
Phone (904) 392-1801, Ext. 143 FAX: 904-392-0190
http://www.ifas.ufl.edu/~entweb/apis/apis.htm
INTERNET Address: MTS@GNV.IFAS.UFL.EDU
©1990 M.T. Sanford "All Rights Reserved
