The New Beekeeper

Reader Contribution by Beeweaver
Published on October 30, 2011
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Image by edmondlafoto from Pixabay

As BeeWeaver gears up to take orders for spring 2012 bees and queens, I am reminded of how much beekeepers have changed in the last 2 decades. When I began answering phones and taking orders in 1994 nearly every customer had kept bees for decades, had 5 or more colonies, lived in rural areas, were well over 50 years old, and about 99% were men. Typically when a woman phoned the bee order in she was doing so on her husband’s behalf (‘he doesn’t like talking on the phone’ or ‘he can’t hear very well’ were typical refrains). Over the next 5 or so years that generation of beekeepers began to dwindle. Varroa mites caused some to give up, for others it was Small Hive Beetle, and still for others it was the hard labor of working bee colonies (lifting honey supers and honey extraction became too much for aging bodies). Y2K brought a dearth in the hobbyist and sideliner beekeepers. One season BeeWeaver’s packages for the following spring were sold out by Thanksgiving as commercial beekeepers raced to get replacement bees to cover losses caused by varroa mites, small hive beetle and other diseases those pests carried. Hardly any of our bees and queens went to smaller beekeepers.

We began leaving colonies without chemical treatment for varroa mites in the early ’90s hoping to cultivate varroa tolerant stock from the survivor colonies left behind. Many beekeepers and bee experts from places that had endured varroa for longer told us our dream of chemical free beekeeping was, well….just that a dream! But starting in about 1997 most of our hives were surviving without acarcides, and in 2001 the few remaining colonies we had enrolled in a research program to evaluate new compounds for varroa controls went organic too and we’ve never looked back. From the beginning of our chemical free commercial bee business we had beekeepers from all walks of life curious about our stock and willing to give them a try. Still, many of our customers came to us merely to get ‘generic’ bees and queens. Some didn’t understand our breeding program, others didn’t believe we were really keeping bees alive without chemicals and others were unwilling to risk their own livlihoods to learn if chemical free beekeeping would work for them too. Many of our customers bought our queens and continued to treat with chemicals; scared their bees would die if they didn’t.
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