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 Fluvalinate 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.

Kurt Merrill
Merrill's Honeybees
North Charlestown, NH

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