In message <[log in to unmask]>, Mike Bispham
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>My teacher (who was born at the beginning of the last century, and learned
>beekeeping from his father) simply replaced winter losses with splits made
>from his best hives to replace winter losses, in the knowledge that he was
>doing things right by nature.
I emerge briefly from the world of lurkers in the deep (due to work
pressure unfortunately, vast amount of comb replacement to do this
winter) as this lot has kind of poked me with a stick.
Withdraw all treatments for the better of the species.............
completely natural selection.......a web site which parsing makes look
like the selectivity of a conspiracy theorist ( I don't have time to
read it all..........but the section 'politics' was enough to get the
general drift)
OK, so completely natural. Your bit above veers off course right away as
the beekeeper chose which ones to divide. Why split the strongest
colony? Why not wait for the colonies to start swarm preps and use
those ones? Why split at all? Why not let swarms come into the empties
(without intervention for sure you will have plenty empties ), and those
swarms will no doubt be 'donated' by the very interventionist beekeepers
you plainly disapprove of.
Unless you live in the middle of a wilderness you are not dealing with
your Utopian notion of a fully natural system. Sitting in Kent you have
ZERO chance of that and your isolation, other than by rigorous II of
your queens with only your own drones, is a pipedream. Keep your gene
base as narrow as that and you are headed for serious problems. II is
not natural anyway, and if YOUR drones are so fit then nothing else will
get a look in at mating time, so just let them fly.
You are not sitting in a system where the full panoply of natural
selection can work as human influence impinges on you from every side,
From agricultural practices varying on short timescales, crops bred for
early season flowering, pesticide use, disturbance, and climate change
(irrespective of your views on the cause), all are things that can cause
serious stress on the bees. Helping decent stock cope with those
variables, many of which are by human hand, is NOT the rapid road to
ruin you portray it to be.
>Its worth saying once more: this is standard animal husbandry. Nothing
>more. In all other fields of husbandry this happens systematically, as a
>matter of course. Beekeepers never built a strong tradition of selection,
>because the they didn't need to - the wild population did that for them. Now
>we are too many, and too many of us are doing exactly the wrong kinds of
>things.
I think this must rank as one of the more wrong and, to some ( like bee
breeders of long standing), offensive and ill informed pieces I have
seen for a long time.
I wonder how much weight the readership of Bee-L might attached to the
writings of someone such as Susan Cobey........
a celebrated bee breeder and a person I hold in the highest
regard........and the armchair opinion of someone who has a few bees and
wants all interventions to stop.
Non intervention..................now there is a concept that is worth
wrestling with if applied in full ( and anything else does not allow
fully natural selection). 90% population reduction anyone?
Not even going near economics. Hundreds of folk would lose their
livelihood and possibly their homes as the trade collapsed in the
immediate aftermath of a 'treat for nothing and don't feed' regime being
imposed. .............to protect the purity of a handful of top bar
hives?
I suppose its winter time and we all have our dreams. Some of us just
happen to know Utopia, along with the unicorn and the tooth fairy, does
not actually exist.
--
Murray McGregor
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