"I gather you have a degree of resistance to mites and brood disease in your 
stock and are quite local to your pollination orchards?

If you don't mind my asking, is your experience in pollination similar to 
Bob's report in that the bees require routine and across the board 
treatment?

Are you surrounded by migratory beekeepers?"


I operate 100 hives and my stock is more resistant to varroa than 
unselected stock (I know because I always have a dozen or so pure 
italian hives in my program that are from packages that I buy from Bob 
Brandy, and I also catch swarms which are very susceptible to mites.)  
For the past two years my winter loss has been 10%.  The resistance that 
my bees have is not enough to make them survive completely on their own. 
I can overwinter the pure Italian hives but they generally need to be 
requeened first thing in spring to eliminate mite buildup.  I have also 
bred from queens that are selected from local stock, which I found to 
show the hygienic traits with the liquid nitrogen test.

My program is to move the hives 200 miles east to the almonds, then 
bring them back to the coast and make sage honey (only 1 honey flow per 
year here).  I do not do a spring mite treatment, except with maybe a 
few overwintered Italian hives.  After that the hives are prepared for 
almonds again next year and are not moved to other crops to pollinate.  
I remove drone brood monthly from March - July.  In August I use 
apiguard.  I feed pollen from August to January.   I observe the hives 
in October, and if there is a mite influx I will use apiguard again, 
otherwise feeding sugar and pollen is sufficient to have large hives in 
December.  The hives can be kept alive without doing the drone brood 
removal, but they perform better if it is done diligently.  I have 
never, over the past 3 years that I have operated used any pesticide 
other than apiguard to deal with the mites.

I am surrounded by migratory beekeepers mainly November through March, 
but get a respite during the spring and summer.  My hives do seem to 
pick up a lot of mites while in almonds, but they are removed when the 
frame of drone brood is cut out in March.

--Jeremy Rose
The California Bee Company

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