Monday 23 September 2019

A lecture from Dylan Elen about 'Breeding locally adapted honey bees'

Hello Readers,

Today I bring you the contents of a lecture I’ve attended.
The lecture was given by none other than Dylan Elen.  The president of Zwartebij.org. 
A scientist/researcher that works with bees every single day.

Zwartebij.org, is trying to bring back and preserve
the local bee that used to be here before we humans
hauled over all sorts of other bees simply because
those other bees had traits we liked better.


We have to put the bee first, and forget about what we
want for a moment.  When you put the bees first, you
will see that working with the black bee is common
sense, as it has adapted to its local environment by
nature it is therefore better equipped to deal with
whatever we, as beekeepers, or nature throw at it next.

So if we want traits in our bees that aren’t there, we
have to select from the local bees that show signs of,
or are most promising towards, what we want.

Alongside that we have to preserve the wild bee;  We need to keep in mind that when we
start tinkering with the natural selection process, we might make mistakes and breed out
some needed qualities in order for the bees to survive, and in doing so we are actually
killing the wild bees and are making them dependant on human intervention to keep them
alive.  This is not what we want.
Nature has only one trait that is rewarded in every species and that’s survival.  So whatever
genes work best are passed on. Therefore we need wild bees as a backup for when we
screw up.

So the lecture was trying to explain how we can repopulate Belgium (and the Netherlands
and Luxembourg) with the native bee. (It was touched upon that France also had an interest
in the project and would like to participate.)

I hope you enjoy Dylan’s way of thinking; Here’s what happened:

Breeding locally adapted honey bees
The key to sustainable beekeeping - Dylan Elen
Why work with the apis mellifera mellifera
a history of the bees spreading around the mainland.
Dylan touched on the different bees that can be found all over the world, and how they spread
and evolved locally.
He then zoomed in to Belgium and the local species of AMM (apis mellifera mellifera).

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor spreading of bees over europe

The diversification of bees is a local process; some genes that are useful here aren’t
elsewhere, and vice versa.  Therefore it’s wise to start working with local bees and
select from there the bees that show traits that we want.
He stressed out that there is no ‘best’ breed of bee.  The best is a subjective noun.
What is best for me isn’t best for you.  So the bees I like might not be the bees you like.
But you can tell me, and I you, what I like about the bees we work with.  And as long
as we select our bees and breed them locally with whatever traits we like best we
shouldn’t have any major issues.

Breeding locally doesn’t have to be with the native bee, as The ‘Kirchheim’ Carnolian
line proves.  This beebreed exists for an amount of 40 years, and in the beginning
they were bred by means of artificial insemination.  One could say they are local now,
even though they didn’t start out that way, for breeding no longer needs to happen
artificially.
To get some local adaptivity into their Kirchheim Carnolian line they did however use
drones from local bees for their artificial insemination.  That is why they could sustain
themselves and move away from artificially breeding their line. Many queen breeding
stations do not practice this and import pure-blood drones, as such there is no local
adaptation, and only 1 or 2 generations show the traits you associate with that typical
beebreed..

The flemish bee breeding program is now looking at moving away from breeding
stations that import drones, but in reality the program is not accepted by the beekeepers.
They want the ‘pure-bloods’, the bees that already have the traits they want.  Moving away
from those traits and reselecting for those traits is not what they want, for the beekeepers
don’t want the setback or do all the work for selecting the right beehives to breed from
locally. It’s easier for them to let the selection take place elsewhere and then take the
queens they want mated to the selected drone populations..

Dylan also wants resilient bees, so that no treatments are needed.  Accomplishing that
means the bees can survive and do well without human interference.

To start breeding bees with those terms means you’ll always end up with the local (the ones
that got there by themselves, not the ones that the beekeeper shipped there) bees as your
base pool For Belgium that’s the AMM.

Selection is still needed, as beekeepers prefer working with docile bees that don’t tend to
swarm and yield a honeycrop.  But this needs to be done next to bee-preservation in the wild. 
Keeping in mind that the ‘defensive’ trait is a dominant trait found in the genes, selecting bees
to breed with is something we will need to keep doing;  The cross breed of local wild bees and
local bees kept by beekeepers, will mainly get the ‘defensive’ trait, se we need to keep
selecting the most docile ones.

Sidenote

The audience wanted to know the difference in genetic structure between Tessel black bee
and Chimay black bee, for they heard that Dylan was using both lines to preserve the black
bee with his Zwartebij.org.  So Dylan explained in short that hybrids have a different
genetic structure. As an example he used Ireland. There were black bees that showed
small differences genetically, from other black bees from elsewhere.  But there came a time that
the Irish Black Bee was in trouble. To make sure the beekeepers kept some bees they
imported bees from the netherlands. So now you can see that in Ireland there are 2
different species at work and that can be seen in the DNA of the bees.  Those 2 lines must
be from the original local adapted bee, and the imported Dutch bee.
For the black bee in Belgium, since the genetic pools are bound to meet each other as the
species grow and pan out, Dylan wanted to know now what that bee would end up like. 
Were there any problems we needed to anticipate? To answer that question he crossed
both species from Chimay and Tessel. The results are in the making but don’t show any
major problems as of jet.
As specific traits for the Tessel bee Dylan pointed out the running on the comb (as an
undesired trait) vs the hygienic behaviour (a desired trait).  I must have been distracted,
or Dylan didn’t mention any specific traits for the Chimay bees.

The concept of breeding programs

When you start to select bees to breed from you start out with X number of bee colonies. 
This is your base population. Out of those you select the ones you like ‘best’ and define
the traits you want to select for.  The minimum amount of bees to start such a selection
is 4 hives, and we’ll use that amount to start an example of how to select bees from there.



In our example we selected 4 colonies with a good
survival rate.
We then need to divide the selected colonies into
Drone lines (1) and Queen lines (3).
The drone line is best chosen one year in advance,
so you can create a lot of splits from that hive to
increase the amount of drones when doing your
queen breeding.  The apiary with the drone lines
will become your mating station.
For each Queen line we need 6 mated queens,
make sure you have plenty.
Now divide the new queens equally over 3 regions,
(after mating flights on the mating station) to see
the impact of the ‘local environment’.

If you are going to keep more, keep in mind that they
need to find enough resources in the regions you put
them in.  So don’t overdo it, or you’ll end up killing your program by overpopulating your area.

Next step is to monitor your beehives per region, process the data - preferably through available
software - and then select 4 hives from the suitable hives to restart the process.

Dylan stressed that this is a selection process, so in order to keep the variables at a minimum
there is a protocol to be followed, the guidelines of which are yet to be laid down.  But one of
the prerequisites is to not split these hives! As you want to monitor how they do with as little
interference as possible. You’ll be interrupting the natural process enough by monitoring for
desired traits like VSH (varroa sensitive hygiene) whilst opening the hives as it is.

Steps

  1. Step 1
  • Find beekeepers to cooperate with
  • Find 3 regions, relatively isolated, with good forage.
  • Find at least 4 colonies to breed from (see example)
  1. Step 2
    • Setup the test case hives with mated queens (use the same frame-sizes, and hives throughout the project, or at least per region) in a non-linear way.
  2. Step 3
    • After 8 weeks (all bees are now from the newly mated queen) the first test can be done (taking samples for DNA - wings - …)
    • Through the year; keep track of the gentleness, calmness, honey production, any traits you want to select for.
      If you want to, this is how you keep track of hygienic behaviour:
      1. cleanup of brood [destroy (freeze, puncture, …) 50 brood cells and monitor cleanup]
      2. Take note of the natural mite drop (during first flow)
      3. Count the mites on the living bees within the brood nest (sugar shake, alcohol wash, …)
  3. Step 4
    • Collect and process breeding data into values (preferably by bee breeding software) to select hives from your project that look most promising and repeat. 




Meta population

When enough beekeepers keep their own AMM and enough local bee breeding locations exist, we need to find a way to connect them (give them the means to breed amongst themselves) and treat them as a meta population.
To replicate this, once the bee breeding program is operational, and as a go between,
since not all beekeepers will want to step into this program, we need to move colonies
from one area to another.  This will ensure the diversity of the genes whilst still selecting
for the desired traits.

Backup population

Keeping the wild populations alive as backup is a necessity.  Selection programs lead
by human input can go wrong, as we have a more narrow selection process that filter out
‘undesirable’ traits.  It might just be the case that those -for us humans- undesirable traits
turn out to be vital for the survival of the bee species.

To keep the bees in the wild you need 
  1. a conservation area, (in Germany there are several with a 10 to 12 km radius).
  2. an agreement within that area to only work with local bees and to let them swarms
  3. (or at least have beekeepers that do not work with local bees cut the drones out of
  4. their hives to minimize pollution of the gene pool)
  5. supervision of the population in the area
  6. provide nesting cavities (with or without the option to monitor the hives)


Darwinian black box selection (dbss)
The idea here is to stop treating and let the bees
deal with outside pressures themselves.
In nature one hive throws swarms (splitting the
varroa population in 2 or more ways) preventing
the varroa to grow out of control.  This process is
recreated in the following concept :

  • In May we add a full brood box for the hive to expand.
  • As soon as both boxes are full, we split the hive 5 ways.
    • 1 with the mother queen, 
    • 4 others with open brood or queen cells from that hive.  
Practice shows that 2 of the 4 splits will not make it.

This concept has shown it is viable and after 4 years the bees were still alive.  The bees
themselves did not develop in the same way though; there were 3 different developments
for dealing with varroa.
  1. is mainly grooming
  2. is VSH 
  3. has some of both.

Dylan told us there is a beekeeper in Belgium, Kamthout region, that has made a deal with a
professional beekeeper to recreate this project with 40 hives. They remain the property of the
professional beekeeper, so there was no cost for the person conducting the experiment.  And
so far the experiment is working… No details were given, but the news makes me happy as
there is merit in my own project.

After all this theory, Dylan opened up some hives to show us what traits to look for. 
Calmness, defensive posture, … he allowed the people to puncture some cells with a
needle so they could get the feel of how it’s done.


That’s all for today folks,

Bob Out

Monday 16 September 2019

What's going on lateley?

Hello Readers,

Today will be a snippet of what is going on in my beekeeping life as of late.

Helping out the government

First off, I'd like to inform you that I was contacted by the local government through the FAVV (The Federal Agency for Food Safety).  The explanation I received was this: One of the ministers of the Belgian government has asked to do a study with beekeepers to find out what is going on with honey bee health in general.  Why is the bee health drastically dropping, is it the varroa, or is there something else going on?
The idea is to follow some hives through a longer period of time.  What the inspections will cover or what they’ll be looking for, I have no idea.  But as I firmly believe we have to help eachother out I see this as the government reaching out to do it’s part, even if they’re a bit late in doing so…  I know with that comes the danger of laws that take away certain freedoms, but let’s not jump the gun and trust our government to do the right thing…
I am going to welcome the federal inspector when he chooses to visit my home and give him access to 3 of my hives. 

The MC2018 F1 Buckfast bees, the colony I started out with.


The LL2019 that was left behind by the black bee I got from Luc Lamon who swarmed.


The ZP2019 a swarm I collected this year in Waregem.


I hope to be able to talk about how I think helping nature in general would be a major step in the right direction for more than just the bees.  In time, if there are larger and older forests, the bees will take up residence there and resume their life in the wild. Since in Belgium it is, amongst other things, the shortage of habitat for them to live and the shortage of forage that is keeping them from doing so now.


Taking a class to see a provincial apiary for educational purposes

Did I mention on here already I’m starting a beekeeper class for 3rd and 4th grade students in one school in my region Waregem?  It’s a Freinet school and I was asked to place a beehive there. I responded: ‘sure, but why not make it a project so the kids get to know what’s going on?’

One thing led to another and now I’m scheduled for 2x 10 classes of beekeeping.  I’ll have to adjust myself since I’m talking to youngsters with a short attention span, and some of them might not even be into beekeeping.


So now I have to lay out a lesson-plan for those 10 lessons, the first of them is tomorrow already…


We took the classes to see an active educational apiary, operated by the province of East-Flanders, thanks to one volunteer.  (also a member of the local beekeeping club in Deinze)


The visit there showed me a couple of things, but these are the most important that I can remember:

  • The kids are easily distracted.  I was hoping to support the volunteer by anticipating and grabbing some stuff he could use, like drone comb and a drone.  But as soon as I moved there was always a group more interested in what I was up to, instead of listening to what was said.

  • The attention span of kids is indeed very short.  They are full of questions, and it’s best to answer them with short answers, even though the truth is a bit more complicated.  They tend to jump from one topic to another and are easily triggered by what they see. I’ll have to find an individual approach for each kid and give them something to do that they actually want to do.

  • Even though some of the kids were afraid at first, the curiosity gained it in almost all cases.  Nobody getting stung helped a lot!


Overall I think the kids enjoyed the visit, and I hope they are keen on helping me out in building an apiary and a beehive for their school.

Apis Centric Beekeeping

The Lecture

Jef Wynants

This Sunday I attended a lecture by Jef Wynants. About 20 people attended.
He talked about what beekeeping actually means and that greatly depends on the beekeeper.  He focused on a natural way of keeping bees, putting the bees and their health first and stressed that he believes that any form of treatment is a step in the wrong direction.  The bees have to be able to deal with whatever is thrown at them by themselves. It is our task as humans to support them, not treat them.

He started off with a song: 

Based on the texts of  Kahlil Gibran where both flower and bee profit from eachother. 

He concluded that beekeeping doesn’t have a set of rules to follow and that it is the beekeeper that makes his own rules.

He then continued by drawing a parallel between beekeeping and agriculture and the different ways of committing to those tasks.

Classical way (monoculture/honeycrop)


Biological way (respect for nature, no pesticides)


Biological Dynamic way (greater respect for nature and support for the natural way of life)

Biodynamic beekeeping does have a set of rules, those can be found in a charter by demeter.

Jef also touched upon the difficulties the bees, and the world in general, are facing.
We have reached the limits of what we can throw at nature. His idea is that we have to go with a hands off approach and let the bees tackle their own problems as much as possible. Rather than stretching the rubber band further by introducing forren produce (chemicals, or organic acids) into the hive.

Jef states that bees, like nature, strive for a balance within the hive, as such we have to treat the colony as one (super)organisme.  In this respect he advises the work of Jurgen Tautz (the buzz about bees).
Respecting the bees is following their pace in life.  To create bees, we need to wait for them to swarm, as it is only at that time that they are ready for it.  Time is working against us humans, as we have to go to work and can’t sit around to wait for them to swarm.
Respecting the natural residence the bees choose is another pillar we need to look at.  Here the work of Thomas D. Seeley is put forward (Honeybee Democracy) He points out that all work written about bees, apart from this book, does not look at the bee living in its natural habitat.
Looking at the moisture and temperatures within a natural beehive has been studied by Torben Schiffer, who states that no man made hive trumps the hollow tree.  A tree keeps the inner temperature at an almost constant number, where outside the cycle of day and night shifts quite a bit. Keeping the temperatures inside the hive warm enough for the bees is done by themselves.  To do so they burn sugars, honey, and by doing so, they create moisture. A reserve of 15kg honey creates 10l of water. So isolating with styrofoam is not good, for it traps the water, solving this with a screened bottom deteriorates the insulation value, causing more honey te be needed to bridge the gap towards better weather conditions during winter.
Moisture is a breeding ground for fungi, and it is said that not the varroa, but fungus is killing bees.  In a good hive bees are able to create a micro-climate that allow them to keep their home more pure and clean than an OR! ( Study Revolution of beekeeping )
And whilst this environment is used by thousands of other organisms they live with the bees in harmony.  A normal hive does not allow for those other organisms to find a home. A skep however did provide a home for a lot of these organisms.  One of those organisms is a pseudo scorpion, that can be found in every colony living in the wild.

Another concern is what kind of bee to work with.  Normally Jef would choose for the local bee, but, as there are very little black bees to be found and he’s not keen on introducing a black bee queen into another colony, he prefers working with swarms from bees that survive in this local climate, no matter the origin.

Practical issues when choosing for biodynamic beekeeping

Flowers and local food supply for bees


method of keeping bees:


Honeyhunter instead of keeping bees, zeidlerei, hollow trees


as little interference as possible


Allowing swarms


no feeding sugars


only take away the excess of honey (after the winter is over, and you didn’t feed sugar… all that is left is yours.  So as soon as the cherry blossoms bloom, it’s harvest time)


when feeding is needed, do so with honey


natural selection (opposed to insemination or artificial queen rearing)


No wax-sheets to allow for natural building of comb


distance between hives


No cutting away drone comb.


No travelling with bees.


Materials used within the hive


Natural materials


better insulation


attention for moisture within the hive


Different hives

To finish his lecture Jef showed us some of his hives.  Some designs are based on the sunhive. Others are experiments he came up with by himself.  One of those is a double simplex body, with comb from top to bottom, so no frames. The body is encased with peat and then finished with a wooden outer layer.  The bottom has a board with straw to allow other organisms to live in the hive. And the roof is insulated with natural materials and allows for a honey super to harvest from.
Another hive was a hollow tree trunk with windows, the bottom was filled up with mulch from leaves and other natural materials.  A project he finished out of interest in a course he followed.
A home made design is what he calls the Langstroth TopBar Hive was also showed.
His designs show that Jef is as much an artist as he is a beekeeper.

That’s it for today guys and girls

Bob Out

Sites to visit - Nine Lectures on Bees - lecture one.

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