Herbicides


To this day, the highest producing, strongest colonies, I've ever seen in the US were managed by a commercial beekeeper in eastern MT - he's no longer with us.  150-200# per hive, 3500 colonies.  He used a 1" high entrance opening.  He fenced with apiary yards.  And he wiped out all vegetation inside the fence, under, and around his hives using herbicides.  His rationale was that the honey flows came on fast and hard.  He wanted every forager bee to be working at maximum efficiency.  Wide entrances  made sure that the entrances had plenty of room for bees coming and going.  Killing all vegetation made sure nothing blocked their flight.


Anecdotal - sure.  But at the time, I had a 5 year study where I sampled lots of his bee yards, as well as those of all other commercial beekeepers over an area easily larger than some states.  No one had even close to his production yields (he shared the records with me), and no one had the huge bee populations that his colonies had.  


There was one other important factor - he grafted his own queens in MT, favored Italians, and selected for large fall populations.  He also set aside supers of honey.  In February, he'd go in to every yard on a snow mobile with a snow shovel.  Pop lids, and add a honey super to any that were heavy with bees but light on honey.


He figured (correctly) that our spring weather came late and fast, and he wanted every bee he could get ready to go to work as soon as bloom occurred.  You may agree or disagree with his practices, but it was clear that if there was any down-side of making his bee yards vegetation free, it wasn't shown  in colony size nor yield.

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