Just held our annual beekeeping Short Course yesterday. We had a great and surprising turn out of 27 when only expecting maybe a dozen tops.

Question: How hard do you slap the bright-eyed and bushy tailed wannabes with facts of this is how it is and what has to be done vs all is great, dont worry just jump right in?

Beekeeping is work just like any other type of agriculture. Sadly we see a high rate of failure with new beekeepers. They jump in and do great the first year but face the inevitable crash in year two if they don't have a plan to treat for mites.

We had the usual mix in the class of a couple walking out mid way when they started tallying costs. We recommended starting with two colonies not one. A couple others diligently taking notes and asking the right questions and a couple others adamantly focusing on the failures and foreseeing nothing but disaster.

Over the years of doing this I've come to the conclusion that we get better survival rates if we hit them with the facts and get them plugged into the club with continuing education and mentorship at the monthly meetings. It's that second part of getting them plugged in we as a club struggle with.

I love to garden and have had many people come to me throughout the years wondering how to in ground garden. Equal numbers have come to me with a plan and asking what I thought. I would give them the whole spiel about what they need to do. How most of our soils are acidic and need lime, what plants do well here and which ones take more babying. None, not one of the ones wanting to start a garden with no previous plans, have ever done an in ground garden. None, not one of the ones who had a plan and wanted my opinion, ever took my words to heart to fix the issues they were going to experience. I’ve stopped wasting my breath and just tell them “sounds good” now to whatever they say. I think it all just boils down to a numbers game. Some people are going to listen to what you say to a T. Others are gonna blow it off and do what they want anyways. Discernment between the two types of people is all you can hope for. Teaching a class just prepare a spiel and give resources to those who want to pursue it more in depth

Better to show them upfront the amount of work it is and the amount of money it can require. But dont do it in a way that crushes their enthusiasm, more of here is what real life owning bees requires. And getting them to attend club meetings. Having a solid knowledgeable mentor is probably the best. They have to understand its more than dump some bugs in a box and in a few months get buckets of honey. Mite treatment is a must, even more so now with the risk of Tropilaelaps mites making it the US. People do treatment free bee keeping, but they also buy a lot of new bees every year.

Being taught in advance is better than learning the hard way when you walk out and that $200 dollar nucleus colony that you dumped in a $150-200 hive has swarmed or absconded or worse dead.

I just posted this to our club page.


Club leadership is like herding cats, lol.

Just curious, not a bee keeper, and won't be, but is there an effective mite treatment now?
Everything I've read is mites have gotten "immune" to the current treatments.

Currently there are many treatment options and new ones coming to market as they can get epa approval from each state. Apivar is the treatment that mites have shown resistance to, believed mainly due to its overuse. Now there is a new 2.0 version of it that claims to be better and time will tell. It seems to me the best thing to do is use various methods to treat varroa mites to lessen the chance of resistance. Some treatments only kill mites on the bees while others can penetrate the wax cap and kill the mites that are sealed in with the developing brood. Which is where mite reproduction takes place. I use oxalic acid vaporization to treat in the spring but it doesnt penetrate the wax caping and therefore you have to treat once every 7-10 days 3 or more times, in the late summer when temperatures allow I use apiguard which is a gel placed under the hive cover that the bees then try and remove from the colony, between the gel off gassing and the bees carrying it through the colony it helps control the mites on the bees and those under the wax cap with the larvae. There are many others but those are the 2 I have used.

Yes, there are several effective treatments on the market and quite a few cultural techniques that can be implemented to reduce mite reproduction without the use of chemicals, plus stocks of bees that show resistance are being identified and used in breeding programs to spread resistance traits into the general population.

The key though for any treatment to be effective is the willingness to do it with effective mite monitoring to determine the most effective timing of treatment and most importantly that it is actually working.

The immunity you speak of is our fault as beekeepers in not doing the post treatment monitoring and assuming that treatments were still working. That and using the same treatment products and protocols over and over. Even the best of the treatments only kill 97-98 percent of mites under the very best of circumstances and if that 2-3 percent were to survive due to a genetic anomaly guess what the next generation of mites are going to look like?

That last is what's most bewildering as a keeper needs to use multiple different tools and be ever vigilant to stay ahead of the mites.

It's really not difficult just requires extra labor and a willingness to research the treatments available and fit the treatment to the need.

The big ugly truth in the room is the facts of mite reproduction. They can only reproduce and grow in numbers on bee brood, aka baby bees.

And the old beekeeping truism that in order to make honey you've got to make bees still holds true.

So every time your bees are making bees they are making mites as well.

The key to successful mite management is timing those periods of high brood production so you can treat to reduce mite numbers just before the brood production occurs.

Low mite numbers going in means lower mite numbers coming out.

Idk when I training deckhands I do a mix. I tell them that there is a set proven way to make stuff work and just certain rules we HAVE to follow . I'm my case there are company procedures. Tell them we're gonna try it like that for a bit and work from there.

Usually we have to adjust stuff so it works for them better but we still follow a base line of say : when loading the barge you have to have 18 rounds open som how some way to avoid blowing out a hose and it has to be level at the end . Or you HAVE to not cross a certain point on the barge to stay safe with tossing a line . But I always tell them that we can always try other stuff and not to be afraid to ask. Gets a little frustrating sometimes when someone doesn't have the basics down and wants to try and improve stuff....but honestly I rather have that then to kill someone's enthusiasm and just just do exactly what I say with questions or desire for improvement.

Now at the same time if there just dead set on trying something that's gonna fail....lotta times I'll let them if it's something that won't be you know , a major issue

More then a few times though I've had a deckhand do something and try it and it worked better then I'd thought it would ..just couldn't see it because I'm so used to my way

But one big thing I nag about is , your gonna fail. Point blank end of story, your gonna fail at some stuff and honestly that ok because if your not failing your not really trying very hard most of the time

Thanks for those explanations

That's it exactly. If you ain't making mistakes you ain't learning and failure isnt the end of the world. It's just learning how not to do it.

I try to encourage them to use the methods that are proven to work as training wheels but ultimately they will gain the knowledge to be able to take off the training wheels.

Unfortunately today alot folks think youtube has them ready to run right out the door.