containers.

The conjugation of verbs of "beekeeping" often express nothing but the ego
of the speaker, as in "My bees are fine", "Your bees look a little weak",
"His bees are neglected", "Their bees are an utter nuisance to the entire
county".  This is non-productive, as there is no shame in knowing what is
going on with one's bees, and there should be considerable shame in engaging
in denial about problems widespread enough for long enough to become the
subject of presentations to beekeeping clubs and studies published in
peer-reviewed journals.

I'll repeat.  "Strange Days".


While I agree with the above somewhat,  The opposite is also true,  While
Certain academics and many  Shall we say less than experienced beekeepers
preach gloom and doom and the sky is falling from over pesticides,  a large
majority of beekeepers who have been doing the same for many years,
continue to thrive.

While it may be bad to bury ones head in the sand and ignore things,  it is
equally bad for some groups to try to "fix" problems for those without
issues.

Take the neonics issues as perfect example.  It seems some feel they are
ruining the world and need to be banned,  yet there are many for who things
just got a whole lot better.

THE BIP surveys and information show us without any doubt,  mites are our
number one issue,  from the damage they inflict to the residual pesticides.
And yet we as a group still struggle with the concept.  Just last week I
spoke to a group of hobbyist,  listened to them complain and guess about the
reasons they lost hives.  Only 2 actually had mite plans.

So back to the queen issue.  In MY experience,  queens are not a huge issue.
I have several that I suspect to be 3 years old Whats changed a lot is the
expectation of productivity of the queen,  with almost universal thought
pattern that if a hive is not doing as we as humans think it should,  it's a
bad queen  and as a result  the producer is at fault.  This concept is
propagated as a huge lie.  A very wise beekeeper taught me that when a hive
is doing poorly  you have to look a lot closer,  its usually NOT the queen.
I find a lot of truth to that statement in the last decade.


The other huge thing in that study was the "average" fertility rate was
something like 85% ( I forget the actual number)  I asked Dave about that in
Jan.  I asked him what the number was on feral "locally adapted" queens that
everyone brags on.  His answer was  they have no clue as no one has 20 feral
wild queens to send them.

Charles

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