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Being Careful About What You Say

2K views 20 replies 8 participants last post by  Americasbeekeeper 
#1 ·
Here is a quote from the president (or former president) of my local beekeepers association on a forum to someone else. I'd written to him when I got my bees (2 swarms) with a question last week. Yesterday I learned that many people in the association are "extremely" (understatement) against the capturing of swarms, so much so that when a friend of mine, in requesting help with her 4H kids to do so, was blasted quite nastily. (It is, or was, still in the published 4H guidelines for kids she was given a year or so ago.) Anyway, in reading this, I clearly hear his disgust. I am not sure if I'm irritated, embarrassed, or just disheartened.

It would be helpful to know how you got your bees. Were they quality, healthy established European honey bees with marked and clipped queens of known origin (purchased from north florida, georgia, etc.)... or did you get them as wild feral bees from somebody trying to help you get started by playing around with our mean feral bees.
First of all, my bees are still very gentle and I can't imagine I'm the only one lucky enough to have this happen to. Twice. I'm the only one who's been stung, once, and it was my fault. The inspector said the hives were very clean. The bees looked very healthy. They were pulling comb on new foundation quickly. Maybe they aren't "quality", but they're certainly not "mean". I'll be requeening soon, so whatever qualities the brood will show, if negative, will only be temporary. Is this such an awful way to start a strong, healthy hive?
 
#3 ·
Don't rely on what any one person has to say about any subject. Get other opinions and make your own decisions. He sounds like one of Jerry's brain washed students.

Jerry made the statement to me that most extra large swarms in Florida were AHB, minutes after giving a group talk on how often AHB swarm, and that their hives seldom got large enough to give a good crop. He recommends killing all feral bees and swarms. Why Florida keeps him in the position, I'll never understand.
 
#4 ·
i got my bees that way....mine are very gental...all of mine now that ive requeened them are ferral stock...the carnys i got in march were much more pissy than my ferrals...to be sure you would be wise to keep an eye on their temperment for awhile in the area you live in...but you should do that anyways with any bees....half the beeks on here have stories of a hive in their yard that was bigtime nasty....way more than id put up with before the queen got the axe....i am on the northern end of AHB teritory in Sumter/hernando county...AHB ''is'' here...the bee inspector for this area had over half his bee traps from pasco/hernando to north of hommosassa test AHB positive...thats no reason to kill ''all of the ferral bees''....if your bees turn nasty....well....thats above my pay grade as far as AHB an the other guys would know best....me being me....if they did id suit up in my battle gear an go queen choppen...that would problly really tic em off...then id put in a new queen an use the nasty bees as slaves to rear my much nicer bees...i also live on 30 acres in the sticks an wouldnt have to worry about people around them....then i could play frankinbeek all i wanted....you live near people sooooo...again its above my pay grade :/ there...thats my buck fifty.
 
#5 ·
hankdog1 said:
Know of many beekeepers down in Florida that do it that way. Don't see anything wrong with it as long as you are comfortable with it. Scott lives south of Daytona and picks up swarms and cutouts all the time to expand his apiary.
So far I'm comfortable with it. ;) And, I'll bet that the guy who took me out to capture it thinks it's just fine, too. (He doesn't sell bees, though. Hmm... :think: Could there be a connection?)

Iddee said:
Jerry made the statement to me that most extra large swarms in Florida were AHB, minutes after giving a group talk on how often AHB swarm, and that their hives seldom got large enough to give a good crop.
We were specifically told in our bee class that AHBs swarms are generally much smaller than European swarms. (This was to explain why seeing a huge mass of bees was better than a small bundle.) So...hmmph. (Maybe he needs an Intro to Beekeeping class?)

2kooldad said:
i got my bees that way....mine are very gental
That's good to know! At what point did you requeen the swarms you caught? I was warned not to do it too early because any delay in laying and such (especially since they first had to draw comb) could seriously threaten their chances of survival. Meanwhile, I want to do it as soon as possible to limit the number of unknown brood hatching. :dontknow: What do I do?! SOMEONE TELL ME! :lol: (just kidding)

Oh, well. I totally enjoy this forum, btw. (But where do you keep your trolls?!)
 
#7 ·
is there no formal way to 'know' the disposition of swarms beyond some purely subjective evaluation (ie the swarm is large or small or whatever)? is there no testing facilities for 'knowing'. prior to our (Texas) current financial crisis we did have a lab here that could tell you yay or nay.

seem to me that some hard and fast and arbitrary rule of kill all or requeen all may be a bit like shooting yourself in the foot.

2kool writes;
the bee inspector for this area had over half his bee traps from pasco/hernando to north of hommosassa test AHB positive

tecumseh:
this suggest there is some testing facilities in Florida. half the bees in traps testing positive as AHB may mean little beside they tend to swarm a lot at this point in the season and they have choose those little boxes (sized because that the size africanized bee prefer).

lastly a qestion... since the genetics folks now tell us the european honey bee evolved in three major evolutionary waves out of Africa how could any European honey bee not contain some quantity of African genetic material?
 
#8 ·
Iddee is right....i requeened my carnys with good old florida feral bees....my first ferals have supplied all my hives with great queens...the carnys were good bees an had no real problems...they were not as gental as my ferals but they were not mean either...i just had to treat them diffrent....an i doubt that was bee race but just a diffrent set of bees with a diffrent personality...take away the queen an my ferals got fiesty....for three days they met me on the trail to the hives an stung me right through my gloves...queenright they are fine.....even queenless an mad semi on purpose they arent unworkable...i had a queen melt down in june
an lost almost all my queens....but my feral queen had a frame full of eggs so i gave them to a queenless feral hive an they made 15 new queens...thats what heads all my hives now...no carnys left.

AHB....im semi confused on a few things here...first i was informed that its a percentage of AHB genes...the more the percent the better chance they will pick up the defencive traits....if that is correct (id like to know if it is) then im guessing it would be the percent of present AFB genes in a virgin feral queen + the number of AHB drones she mates with that advances the bees towards being full AHB and that it works the oppisite way too...second i ''saw'' on TV (discovory)that AHB hives are quite cappable of getting very large....that said if they were not cappable of doing it then somebody oughta tell the folks down in South America their hives are to big....they run their apiarys a little diffrent according to ''first lessons in beekeeping'' but get as good or better honey harvests...after all thats why they bred them right :/ third an lastly....this again is hersay...ive heard they can have 2 kinds of swarms...with one extra queen its a normal swarm an with multiple queens several smaller ones...and that the smaller ones will land on the side of a established hive...send in a few bees at a time all sneaky like...then transpose the new queen an take over without a fight....first an thirdly i just heard from good sources an may have them partialy or all wrong by my own fault of too much interpulation....the secondly ''colony size'' i saw and is published in a book by Dadent.

From now on my posts gotta get shorter....i missed half my sons football game writting this on my cell phone...lol.
 
#9 ·
The state has been preaching AHB defense so long they actually believe it even though the scientific research debunks most of it now. All of Florida does not have AHB. Counties in Florida that have or had AHB are not saturated with AHB. Every swarm that I or the several hundred students I have taught at USF have not found a "hot" swarm or feral colony yet. I have seen managed hives superceded, not usurped, to AHB. Usurpation happens in less than 20 percent of AHB occurances.
Genetic percentage is not applicable to AHB genetics since AHB is a dominant trait and the biology and behaviors of AHB are such that it is all or nothing.
Florida does voluntary FABIS testing but it takes a while for the official results. Practically it only takes a few minutes with a microscope, meauring grid and a calculator to determine.
http://www.americasbeekeeper.com/Africa ... havior.htm
 
#10 ·
a snip from Mr Van Cleef's site..
You might wonder why Africanized bees have not spread farther in so many years. ARS entomologist José D. Villa at the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Research Unit in Baton Rouge, La., has found a correlation between rainfall of more than 55 inches, distributed evenly throughout the year, and an almost complete barrier to AHB spread. There is no idea why or how that works, but pray for rain and requeen regularly with marked EHB queens.

tecumseh:
the history of the introduction of africanized hives is somewhat incomplete. first it suggest that the africanized bee did not arrive in North America until the 1990 (I think perhaps the earliest indication of a known hive was in southern California in the late 1980's). It is known that Steve Taber distributed africanized bee semen through out North American much earlier (he was working on a means of shipping bee semen so that it might arrive intact). it was fairly commonly thought (by a good number of commercial bee keepers) that some africanized bees escaped the Baton Rouge station at about the time they were inadvertently released in Brazil. having worked some good number of bees up and down the Mississippi River I can say my experience suggest they did have some bad ass bees along the river (south of Vicksburg, Ms).

The Fabris score is based on a number of morphological measurements which are then plugged into a fairly complex statistical package to determine degree of hybridization. I think (it appears) the scale used is a logarithmic scale (each number is a factor of 10 much like the richter scale for earthquakes). there is also a genetic test for AHB if the Fabis score gives inconclusive results.

an Americanbeekeeper snip..
The state has been preaching AHB defense so long they actually believe it even though the scientific research debunks most of it now.

tecumseh:
science means nothing here... really what is playing the large hand is politics. a couple of bad incidents of new bee keeper rearing something that acts like or test out to be africanized bees will be all that is required and any kind of bee keeping will be extremely difficult. laws are not required... social displeasure is all that will be required.

some folks are minimizing the political fall out if things go south relative to this question.
 
#11 ·
(Information overload... :shock:)

tecumseh said:
some folks are minimizing the political fall out if things go south relative to this question.
That's partly why I'm trying to make the right decisions here. I have the bees. I even asked the inspector if I should move them, at least temporarily, until they are requeened and settled. He didn't say to, but didn't say not to. (However, I got the impression he just wasn't that concerned that there would suddenly be rabid bees in my yard.)

Americasbeekeeper said:
Counties in Florida that have or had AHB are not saturated with AHB. Every swarm that I or the several hundred students I have taught at USF have not found a "hot" swarm or feral colony yet.
Would this be why the inspector wasn't all that worried about my two hives? Since both now have eggs and larva (too early for capped brood) and some stores going, if they were going to exhibit the more defensive AHB trait, they would be doing so by now? Or is this still too soon?

The map and link are really interesting, btw.

2kooldad said:
Iddee is right....i requeened my carnys with good old florida feral bees....my first ferals have supplied all my hives with great queens...the carnys were good bees an had no real problems...they were not as gental as my ferals but they were not mean either...
Are you out of the AHB zone according to the map? Interesting that locals are nicer, makes me wonder.
 
#12 ·
ok...so...a bee is either AHB or its not....no percent.

They can usurp but dont do it very often...how do they normaly take over a hive ??

If they need 55 + inches of rain...then how are they taking over abandon houses in the desert ??

I am on the edge i guess....the line on the map says pasco has them an sumter hernando...on the map i saw.

This is what i think....there is so much stuff going around about AHB that untill my bees start chucken spears at me im not gonna worry about it....i love my ferals.
 
#13 ·
As with most new problems that come up, I think there is 3 times more hype than facts hit the media. Only experience will tell you for sure.

I will never forget the early 70's, when it came out that bacon will cause cancer. Bacon sales plummeted. Then someone did the research and found out that if you eat 250 lbs. of bacon daily for 350 years, you would get cancer. The bacon scare was over instantly.

I feel that much of the AHB news is similar. They are working AHB from Mexico to Chili and seem to be doing fine with them.
 
#14 ·
My friends in Florida catch swarms and do cut outs and have used that stock over the last several years. I have yet to have them tell me of any that tested positive for AHB.

Brendhan Horne, Sam Comfort, Scott (Hardwood) and Dallas are those I am thinking of.

My state verified them In Ruston, which is the upper north western part of my state in June of 05. I've had two tested (And I remove a lot of bee colonies) that were negative and to receive the results takes forever! Only a small handfull of AHB has been reported since their induction. Not spreading like wildfire as was believed.

That the state of Florida wants you to exterminate all swarms and feral colonies is a travesty!

As bee keepers I believe we know best.


...JP
 
#15 ·
2kool writes:
ok...so...a bee is either AHB or its not....no percent.

tecumseh:
absolutely incorrect.

the Fabris score give you a number for degrees of hybridization. since this score is fairly complex and requires considerable calculation any small error either in the collection of the data or the calculation will give you an improper determination.

the genetics... since the european honey bee evolved out of Africa and the two species can breed one to the other (unlike those from southeast Asia) they have much in their dna in common. differences in dna are commonly used by genetics folks to get some idea when the various sub species diverged to form their own sub species.

the real tragedy is the original set of african queens set to be imported to the new world were highly selected for their workability. sadly this set of selected queens was lost/killed. then a replacement batch was hastily assembled. so the end results of what we got is totally due to inattention to detail and haste. sad story, huh?

perhaps for different reasons I too (like Iddee) think the situation is highly over charged with the media natural tendency to spectacular being the primary culprit. the different reason meaning that I know 1) prior to the days of selective breeding the european honey bee was not so nice either and 2) the almost pure german black bees of my first mentor were just about as nasty a bee as anyone should tolerate and 3) even the most docile hive can turn on you in a heart beat <due to any number of perfectly sound reasons.
 
#16 ·
2kooldad, AHB are not sustainable where there is over 55 inches of rain distributed throughout the year not less than 55. Compare the maps of Africa rain and AHB, and North America rain and AHB.
I did not include all my research because it was for a short class at the Florida Bee College. The African genetics brought in decades ago is adonsoni not scutellata. The differences were not known or appreciated back then.
Hives normally, 80 percent of the time, develop AHB through supercedure, not usurpation (20%). The queen mates with local drones. AHB drones fly faster and farther. The queen selects AHB sperm 90 percent of the time after mating. That is why Florida BMP wants marked or clipped queens. You know when she is not who you thought she was. I also raise Cordovan bees. Cordovan produce the color change as you can see in the photo on my web page. The light bee is EHB. The dark bee is AHB. Appearance is not a good trait for comarison unless they both have the recessive Cordovan gene. I can see before I open the hive if they are the gentle Cordovan light golden bees or the dark bees I need to smoke and think about others around me to work.
 
#17 ·
I'll try not to stick my foot in my mouth.
Condensing what I think I know.
Iddee, you know my opinion of Jerry, but, he has his foot in the door and is "politically" connected and firmly believes that if we (Fl. Beekeepers) don't do everything we can to keep AHB media hype to a minimum the government will impose regulations that will make them look good. His published opinions are for that reason.
As far as the AHB map goes, throw it out the window. Not correct. By the way, Disney World has a lot of AHB. Hollow fiberglass rafters that they love to build in. Tested by FABRIS method. Do they want that in the media? All honeybees found are killed.
As Americasbeekeeper said, it is the drones that perpetuate the genetics, that is why we are supposed to requeen with a known non-AHB queen. Knowing that most local purchased queens are flight bred, what good does that do if you want local stock? I live and keep bees in a 5 mile diameter of 3 of Dave Miksa's out yards. As his son said, we swap drones and his are tested regularly.
Swarms retrievals are a nonevent. Cutouts are first approached with caution (full suit).
Thus far, the hottest hive I have had was some queenless Italians.
 
#18 ·
rast writes:
I live and keep bees in a 5 mile diameter of 3 of Dave Miksa's out yards.

tecumseh:
likely the best protection you are going to get is large number of hives in a commercial yard which have bee pushed and prodded for their bee producing capacity. most commercial folks are not going to tolerate excessively hostile bees especially in an environment where conflict between people and bees is an issue.
 
#19 ·
i thought id lost this post....just when i was learning stuff....kool.....ok over 55 inches....but im still a little confused....doesnt all of florida get over 55 inches of rain....an tropical africa also...you guys have done the studies so heres where i get schooled....''tropical'' africa sounds like tropical florida....arizona, where i used to live, gets like 4 inches rain a year and sounds like alot of the rest of africa....on the discovery program they seemed to be real interested in their ability to, or lack of ability to make a winter cluster....then they said something about finding them in flagstaff which is much colder than the desert part an took an AHB colony up there an found it was making a cluster....that suprised them...then they said at that they could go as far as canada in the next 20 years....O.O....canada !?!?!? Really....i got the impression that AHB was adapting to enviromental conditions rapidly....again you guys have done the studys....i have only read some stuff an (got half of that mixed up') saw that program on discovery....so what am i missing here...we have two compleatly diffrent ecosystems an AHB in both an thriving but at a hault....why not just point the stinger end south an fly till ya get tired.
 
#21 ·
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