By: Pablo Montesinos Arraiz
Unlike what happens with other farm animals, honey bees have traditionally been exploited with the criterion that they are animals that do not need much attention and that their use from the productive point of view is achieved with little effort and technical assistance to hives (Whitehead, 1948; Bartolini Crespi, 1992; Sepulveda Gil, 1980; Mace, 1974; Harrison et al., 1976).
This pattern of work that prevails in the way most beekeeping operations are carried out is reinforced because honey bees obtain their food from flowers and can reproduce and perpetuate themselves without any human intervention. Hive inspections in traditional beekeeping are notoriously seasonal. The beekeepers inspect the hives three to four times in each season of the year, always depending on the response of the colonies to the environmental conditions and the handling performed in the last inspection, increasing the number of inspections in Spring and Summer due to the intensity management required by the hives in those months (Cale et al., 1976).
However, the widespread phenomenon of hive collapse and the problem of the presence of the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), has forced beekeepers to increase the frequency of visits to apiaries to try to control and prevent these problems. On the other hand, in those countries where Africanized bees were established, beekeepers had to implement other techniques and ways of working with bees in order to carry out their beekeeping operations. These management characteristics that are complementary to the traditional ones used in Europe and the United States of America (Michener, 1975; Wiese, 1977; Taylor and Wlliamson, 1975; Winston, 1977; Taylor and Leving, 1978; Rinderer, 1985) as a matter of fact, are not different regarding the way to evaluate and analyze the hives as from the inspections of routine.
The beekeeper’s work has traditionally been to provide their bees with adequate and safe hives to help the growth of the bee population so that they can accumulate sufficient reserves of honey, the main product of the hives, to be harvested. Thus, much of the work with the hives is devoted to placing or removing frames with honeycombs or stamped wax in the brood chamber and/or in the supers, depending on the conditions of the hives and the season of the year (Root, 1976). There are beekeepers who also obtain the by-products of the hives: pollen, propolis, bee nuclei, and even poison; and very few breed queens for their own use or for sale.
During the flowering months, beekeepers usually only inspect the supers to specify the disposition in which the bees are distributing and storing the honey. They usually only go to the brood chamber if the supers have little or no honey, or if they see few bees on the combs or going in and out of the entrance of the hives. They do this to see if there is a queen, egg laying and brood. On the other hand, the rest of the months, in which there is no entry of nectar and pollen or this is not significant, the inspection of the supers is discretionary. The beekeepers inspect the brood chamber to observe egg laying and if possible to see a queen; assess the number of combs with open and/or sealed brood and also to remove the damaged combs and clean the bars of the frames.
When the nectar flow is abundant it is very important that hives have enough supers. The first supers can have empty combs or frames with stamped wax which will be carried by the bees to combs that will fill up with nectar (Root, 1976; Cale et al., 1976).
Furgala (1976), points out four fundamental principles of beekeeping management: each colony must have a young queen of proven genetic quality; it must have an adequate reserve of honey and pollen; must be disease free; and must be protected from extreme weather conditions and inhabiting a well-built hive. And so, depending on the beekeeping management carried out with the hives and the observations of the beekeepers during the routine inspections and according to the season of the year, the beekeepers will implement the necessary techniques and/or management methods.
It should be noted, however, that in the traditional beekeeping management carried out by beekeepers, there is perceived lack of strategies in the way of collecting the information that comes from the hives during routine inspections. As a consequence, beekeepers reached wrong conclusions about the conditions in which the hives are, applying inappropriate techniques and beekeeping management. When inspecting hives, beekeepers do not usually follow a protocol of action; they tend to do it messily and randomly. Beekeepers lack of proper ways to collect what they see in hives during inspections, also lack a frame of reference to help them to analyze and evaluate the information collected.
What do beekeepers look at first when they start to inspect a hive and how do they interpret it? What succession of actions are performed so that the information collected in the inspection of the hives is structured in a logical and orderly manner, so that it can be analyzed with the certainty that it has been well processed in obtaining it, and can lead to a right beekeeping management?
Just as it is necessary for beekeepers to follow a protocol and have a reference procedure when they inspect the hives, they must have a homogeneous criteria that allows them to assess everything that happens in the hive in the same way.
Ordinarily, during routine hive inspections, beekeepers check for the presence of the queen either by direct observation of her and/or her egg laying. They inspect the combs in the brood chamber, especially the central ones, to see how many are occupied by egg laying, open and/or sealed brood. To estimate the quality of the queen’s egg laying, they use terms such as “very good”, “good”, “regular” or “bad”. However, the same egg laying of a queen can receive a very different assessment depending on which beekeeper it is; thus the egg laying can be very good for one, regular for another or even excellent for a third beekeeper.
Now, what does “very good egg laying” mean? What is “a regular egg laying”? What is “a bad egg laying” or “an excellent egg laying”? On what criteria are beekeepers based to make such assertions? When beekeepers observe egg laying, do they quantify it? If so, how do they do it? Under what principles? Are beekeepers basing it on the number of eggs in a comb? How many combs with eggs correspond to a good or regular egg laying, for example? How do they determine all those measurements? What methodology do beekeepers use?
When it comes to describing queens, beekeepers often characterize them using terms such as pretty or ugly; good or bad; young or old; black, very black or yellow; large, medium or small. Likewise, these definitions of aspects or qualities, ages, colors and sizes of the queens, which can be found as a result of a routine inspection of hives, show a great variety in their conceptualization, according to the criteria of each beekeeper.
Consequently, as beekeepers do not have defined sustainable and commonly used reference frameworks in beekeeping to classify the egg laying, race, age and size of queens, is not possible to achieve rigorous reproductive and phenotypic valorations of the queens. This is the reason why the evaluations carried out by different beekeepers, when considering the same queens, do not usually coincide.
Other evaluations that beekeepers make when they check their hives have to do with the population of adult bees, the number of combs with open and/or sealed brood and the store of honey and pollen. Aspects that lead them to determine how a hive is in general at a given moment.
Knowing the general conditions of the hives is of the utmost importance, since it shows how the colonies are responding to the prevailing environmental conditions at a certain moment of the annual cycle; especially from flowering changes, if there is a shortage or enough nectar and pollen in the field. They are also an indicator of the management that has been applied to them, as a result of decisions based on previous inspections.
To assess hives for general condition, beekeepers often classify hives using various terms such as “excellent”, “superior”, “very good”, “good”, “regular”, “poor” and “very poor”. This classification is carried out according to the number of bees that are observed on the combs at the time of the inspection, the number of combs with egg laying, sealed brood and open brood and the combs with pollen and honey in the brood chamber and the supers.
Regarding the open and/or sealed brood, how does the beekeeper assess this biomass? Based on what criteria do they calculate it? What method do they use? Do they quantify the open and sealed brood, or do they estimate it subjectively? And how does the beekeeper determine if there is a balance between open and sealed brood, and if it is in proportion to the egg laying? With what do they compare the hives or what reference values do they have to affirm that they improved or worsened or that they remain the same as the last inspection performed on the hives? A beekeeper can estimate that a hive is in optimal conditions and for others, it may be in good or regular condition. From this, it follows that beekeepers have disparate estimations of the general condition of the same hive due to the obvious differences in the evaluation criteria.
How does the beekeeper know if the population of bees in a hive has increased or decreased? How do they quantify the number of bees to know if they have increased or decreased? How many combs do the bees occupy? On the combs, can beekeepers estimate increases or decreases in the population of adult bees at a given time? So, there are notorious differences in appreciation and evaluations of the parameters that are fundamental to evaluate the behavior of the colonies from the zootechnical point of view.
It should also be mentioned that beekeepers do not usually identify their hives with numbers. The purpose of the identification is to know with certainty which hive it is at any time that the beekeepers are in the apiary, or even outside it, when they read the registers to know which hive it is in each circumstance. A hive can not be referred to as “the one with the brood chamber of this or that color, or the one with the stone in the center of the lid is the one that is orphaned or the ones with two small stones are the ones that are going to be harvested.” This way of identifying hives, in addition to contravening professional zootechnical management, makes routine work with bees difficult. Likewise, it brings with it confusion when wanting to implement beekeeping registers and is out of keeping with the rigor and seriousness that beekeeping operations must have.
From what has been stated in the previous paragraphs, it can be concluded that the evaluations and analyzes of the hives carried out by beekeepers based on routine inspections of the hives respond to personal and subjective criteria that are so different and at the same time so individual and specific for each beekeeper; that it is very difficult to find points of agreement that support these evaluation criteria. Consequently, it becomes evident that beekeepers do not have reference frameworks that allow them to compare their observations and estimate the veracity and degree of normality of the biological behavior of the colony.
All the traditional beekeeping management described in which beekeepers perform routine inspections of hives has, in summary, the following characteristics:
- Imprecision and vagueness in the definition of the terms, situations and development of honey bee hives for production purposes.
- The routine inspections of the hives and the analysis and evaluation of the information collected is not based on rigorous zootechnical criteria and biological principles that allow them to be contrasted with the normal functioning of the colonies, lacking organization, hierarchy, scientific reasoning and uniformity of criteria in the way of collecting and evaluating information.
- There is an absence of a common beekeeping language, written and oral, clear and simple, that facilitates technical communication among beekeepers, and is used in beekeeping registers. The beekeeping language must be understandable by anyone who works in beekeeping and facilitate a more precise and real vision of the general and particular conditions of the hives.
- Beekeeping registers kept by the beekeepers differ in the information they contain and the nomenclature used; since each beekeeper expresses it in their own way, without following codified and permanent drafting rules. Therefore, the information in these registers can only be read and interpreted by the beekeeper in question.
References:
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