Gee Bob,
Seems the biggest problem assaulting beekeepers today is an
inability to keep bees alive. Using methods of natural selection (Ex.
Hives busting at seems, able to requeen selves easily, quick rebuilding
up, etc.) seems to me to be reinforcing traits necessary for survival.
Perhaps the loss of season's productivity seems a waste to you.
There are those of us conderned with being successful beekeepers in the
long term, and not just maximizing profit in the short term. We who wish
to grow instead of dwindle away benefit from the added natural pressures
placed on the bees for survival.
Beekeepers who have queens that are cousins and aunts and 2nd cousins
have a much higher chance of making it through hard times when disaster
hits. New genes are constantly included in a open breeding pool, and yes
beekeepers benefit from the occasional inclusion of good breeding
stocks. Having a whole operation sourced from a single line of breeding
though are at risk for total loss when the disaster that hits exploits a
weakness the entire "sisterhood" shares.
It is entirely misunderstood by many how natural selection takes
place. Allow me to quickly summarize the basics. Weakness is filtered as
nature places pressures on "life". A colony displaying weak traits is
either not going to survive or will not often have the strength to
divide. The presence of weakness is therefore eliminated or its
expression severely limited. Strengths are reinforced as stronger
specimens divide more frequently and therefore issue more genetic
influence in the pool in the form of drones. Eventually, strong
displayed traits will simply overrun the weaknesses by sheer population
numbers.
Now having said that, you must understand one thing. This is
"Natural Selection", not "Manual Selection". What you get may not be
YOUR perfect bee, but who are you going to argue with? Mothernature has
a whole heck of a lot more experience in development of lifeforms than
we do. It is awefully arrogant of us to think that we know better than
nature about what makes for a better bee. Sure our bees might produce
more honey on a flow, sure maybe we can select for hygene. On the other
hand perhaps there is a LOT more to the honey bee than observeable
traits. Perhaps natural selection has a lot more to do with species
survival than how much honey a colony can produce.
Then again, this thread was about the mechanics of doing
walk-away splits and not about eugenics.
Now to address a few comments that stem from misunderstanding.
> The method was common practice 100 years ago with all but the most
knowledgeable beekeepers.
Who is this? Most likely just the people who happened to chose to write
about the subject.
>the walk away split will have shrunk to nuc size.
And somehow this is bad? Adding pressures, or more correctly speaking,
not relieving pressures allows stocks to prove their mettle in times of
adversity.
>Not even practiced by the old masters Miller, Alley, Smith & Doolittle.
The Doolittle method has stood the test of time and is the most used
method by queen producers around the world after over a 100 years.
I don't know about the rest, but Miller? If you read his books as much
as I have then you will understand that he has pretty much written about
trying all sorts of things only to discover and finally come to the
conclusion in the end that the bees know what they are doing better than
we do.
Funny though that you chose the 100 year time period. Its within the
last 100 years that beekeeping changed from traditional to modern and
modern beekeepers are having all the problems that the old time
beekeeper did not have. Large cell foundation development, inhive
pesticides, antibiotics, chemical treatments, etc, etc.
In conclusion also I find it funny that while most beekeepers are afraid
of loosing their bees and watching them dwindle without refreshing
stocks and replacing whole beeyards of deadouts that those of us who
keep bees the way we do more naturally are having trouble finding places
to put our bees because they are doing so well and bursting the corners
of our hives. My operation is growing rapidly, and so are most of the
others of our group. My walk-away splits from april are already ready to
be split again AND I got my crop from them. Why is that? Maybe its
because we refuse to think that that we are better at keeping bees than
the bees and nature.
Keeping bees successfully for us isn't producing the largest crop this
year, its ensuring that we will always have a crop to harvest.
Scot Mc Pherson
McPherson Family Honey Farms
http://linuxfromscratch.org/~scot/
http://beewiki.linuxfromscratch.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/OrganicBeekeepers/
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