Allen -Might we add "Careful and appropriate manipulations" to that list.Seems to me that many of the ills beekeepers experience have to do with rough and careless handing, removing too much honey, thoughtless and excessive splitting, bad timing of operations, and providing hives that are too big or too small, too tight or too breezy.-             


Biggest thing that I've seen since 2006 concerns those beekeepers who experienced high CCD losses in the first years.  They tend to separate into two groups.  1 ) Beekeepers who dramatically improved their overall management plus adding better varroa and nosema control have reported best bees in years.  2 )  Beekeepers who did little to change management practices and/or decided to attribute all of their problems to pesticides continue to have problems.  In the 60s-80s, all things wrong with bees were blamed on pesticides.  Then, the mites hit and until mid-2000s everything wrong with bees was due to varroa mites.  Now, we've split into different camps, each with their favorite scapegoat.

I intensely dislike the term PPB for piss poor beekeeping.  I haven't found the appropriate term - I'm open to suggestions.  What is now needed is not the difference btw PPB and good management, but recognition that in a much more complex set of factors affecting bees, what was good management a decade ago is now barely adequate.  Good management in today's context requires establishing a higher order set of Best Practices.  One almost needs to be a SuperManager.  

I'd really like to find an appropriate term to characterize the type of bee management practiced by beekeepers like Randy.  I'm not ready to call him a Super Hero, but he does go a step farther with his monitoring and management than most.  And as Randy points out, we've large scale beekeepers - honey producers, pollinators, queen breeders who do not experience periodic catastrophic losses.  From my experience, all of these have one thing in common - rather than BLAME some single factor, they work hard to do a better job.

Jerry







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