From the top, the story goes like this:

I do not use hard chemicals in my hives but, since mites are a problem, I use one of the so-called “soft” or “natural” products. Although I’ve tried formic acid-based products, I prefer the thymol-based ones, either Apiguard or Api-Life Var. I used them according to package directions and had excellent results. As far as I know, I never lost a hive to mites in the many years I used those products.

Like all treatments, however, they should be rotated with other treatments to lessen the chances of building resistant strains. When HopGuard came on the market I was ecstatic: here was a product that was easy to use, had an active ingredient other than thymol, and didn’t require the dreaded “fumigation chamber” in hot weather. I read everything I could find about it and wrote extensively about it here at HoneyBeeSuite.

When it came time to treat for mites last summer, I read the directions carefully and watched HopGuard’s own video several times. I calculated how many strips to use per hive based on the number of brood boxes and the number of frames covered with bees, and I staggered the strips in the pattern they recommended. I followed every last instruction from the package insert and the video to the letter.

I was happy with the way the bees reacted to the HopGuard and, although it was messy, I was happy with the ease of use. The insert said I could use the product up to three times per year, but I always treat for mites in August only, so I just crossed that chore off my list. Job done.

Everything was fine until, months later, I saw a post on BeeSource about “progressive” HopGuard treatments. Curious, I read the series of posts. The gist of the thread was that, since the HopGuard strips tended to dry out in the hive, they didn’t continue to kill mites after the first few days. As a result, beekeepers were adding a new set of strips every week for three weeks. According to the thread, Mann Lake, the company that sells HopGuard, was advocating this procedure.

I had trouble wrapping my mind around this. It sounded like an off-label use, something a reputable company would never advocate—at least not publicly. I re-read the label. It says that a treatment is one set of strips and that the treatment may be repeated up to three times a year. To me that meant maybe spring, summer, and fall . . . or something similar. No rational person reading the instructions would conclude it meant three weeks in a row.

I didn’t believe it, so I wrote to John I Haas, the parent company of BetaTec Hop Products. I received an answer that reads in part, “. . . the HopGuard strip does dry out over time in the hive which reduces its efficacy. In using only one round of strips when there is brood in the hive, the mite phoretic load will be reduced and this could help the beekeeper keep his hives healthy enough to get them to a time later in the year when other treatments and/or HopGuard can be used more effectively. . . . Tests by the USDA and by a number of commercial beekeepers have found the [sic] several consecutive applications do in fact reduce the overall mite load and have saved hives that would probably have died. The label does allow for multiple applications . . . up to 3 times per year. . . .”

But again, I ask you, how was I supposed to know that “up to three times a year” meant “three weeks in a row?”

By the time this little gem of wisdom came to my attention, I had already lost many of my hives. I’ve lost more since then . . . and all the post mortems indicate mites. After successfully wintering year after year by using Api-Life Var according to package instructions, I’ve now lost most of my hives by using HopGuard because I didn’t know that “up to three times per year” means “three weeks in a row.” You have no idea how hopping mad I am.

Furthermore, many of the good things I said about HopGuard in previous posts aren’t really true. For example, it’s not more convenient than other products if you have to apply it three times instead of just once, and it certainly isn’t cheaper. But more than anything, it seems unconscionable that a company would go to market with—and write instructions for—a product that they themselves didn’t know was going to dry up in three days. Didn’t anyone do field trials?

The makers of HopGuard cost me a bundle of money. Worse, I was an enthusiastic advocate of HopGuard. I promoted it, recommended it, and my posts about HopGuard have received much traffic. The boondoggle caused me to let my readers down. How many of them lost hives due to lousy instructions?

So that’s my story. I will rebuild my apiary, although not all at once. I’ve learned my lesson about trying new products. I apologize to any of my readers who lost their bees. To be fair, HopGuard appears to be an effective product, but the obfuscatory language is just plain unacceptable. So to BetaTec I say re-write your materials. Fix your website. Say what you mean. Get real.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Screen shot from Betatechopproducts.com, captured 2-8-2012.

It all started when my husband and I decided to sell a rental house we owned in downtown Olympia. The house was built in 1906 and was completely remodeled by a VA finish carpenter in the early 1980s. We purchased it in 1997 and kept it in rental service until September of this year. The house had been a great investment, but we were tired of being landlords and decided to get out.

We told our real estate agent in advance that we did not want to accept offers based on FHA loans, but he assured us it would be “no problem” so we reluctantly let him check off the FHA box. Sure enough, the first offer that came in was from a first-time home buyer seeking an FHA loan.

The problems started almost immediately when the certified pest inspector crawled under the house and photographed what he called an anobiid beetle infestation. Although neither of us had ever heard of such a creature, we studied the photos and decided he was crazy. When the carpenter re-built the house in the early 1980s he apparently found some weak joists under the floor, some of which had beetle holes. At the time he “sistered” these with new lumber. This simply means he installed new joists alongside the old ones to add strength and minimize distortion.

The photographs clearly showed the old wood with the beetle holes and the “new” (1980s) wood without a single hole or any other damage. We reasoned that if there were active beetles down there, they would have started boring into the “new” wood by this time. After all the “new’ wood is now thirty years old. Furthermore, an associate of my husband assured him that if anobiid beetles were active down there all these years there wouldn’t be a house left to sell.

Instead of listening to logic the bank was adamant. The spray had to be completed and the beetles “certified” dead. I couldn’t—and can’t—believe that a branch of the federal government would require us to spray poison in a dwelling as a condition of sale—a poison that will seep through the floorboards and into the home—a poison that isn’t necessary—a poison that the new owner will get to breathe and live with for who knows how long. I asked how this was ethical. But no one seemed to care. “Just do it and get it over with,” I was told.

So I did. It was the last thing on my list because I didn’t want to go back into that house after it was sprayed. I choose an exterminator—the $250 guy—who I liked better than the $500 guy, who I liked marginally better than the $600 guy.

Turns out, I really did like the $250 guy. He was a large man who arrived wearing a bushy gray beard and knee pads. He had a hand sprayer that he filled from a big tank on the back of his truck. I eyed him doubtfully but he managed to marshmallow himself into the tiny crawlspace opening. He spent all of fifteen minutes under there and then reappeared, spanking thirty years of dust from his fleece vest. “I’m done,” he said, “but there ain’t no beetles down there. Never was.”

I asked about the holes in the old wood. “Them’s exit holes,” he said. “No entrance holes. Dry as a bone down there.”

He went on to explain that in the old days, before wood was kiln dried, the lumber might contain anobiid beetles that entered the wood while the tree was still standing in the forest. If the wood was used in a damp environment, the beetles could thrive and you would see entrance holes and sawdust where the larvae bored back in. If you see only exit holes, the environment was too dry to support them and they died. End of story. Kiln drying kills the beetles, which explains why they are no longer a common pest.

I wrote a check and received my precious “pest certification.” As I walked back to my truck I could smell the pesticide seeping from the crawlspace. I thought of those molecules landing in the soil, washing away in the coming rains, and racing through the storm drains to pool in the estuaries where fingerling salmon try to survive their first year—all for a pest that doesn’t exist and never did. It’s so sad I wanted to cry.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Yesterday an urban beekeeper told me that, unlike rural honey, his honey was pesticide free. He went on to explain that he was miles from the nearest cropland and the concomitant pesticide abuse.

Now this really took me aback. I’ve studied pesticide use and abuse most of my adult life and such a thought never—ever—occurred to me. In fact, just off the cuff, I would guess there is greater abuse, greater variety, and higher spot concentrations of pesticides in urban and suburban settings than in rural ones.

So I did some poking around on various urban beekeeping sites and discovered that “pesticide-free” is a popular assertion among urban beekeepers.

While I’m not a fan of conventional agriculture, I know some things about it. For starters, most farmers are in an economic stranglehold due to a bunch of factors that I won’t touch here. But farmers need to watch every penny, and agricultural chemicals on a conventional farm are a big-ticket item. Farmers go out of their way to get the most for every pesticide dollar spent—and that means not applying more than necessary.

Chemicals on large farms are usually applied by licensed pesticide applicators, and the applicators most skilled in applying pesticides at the recommended rate without over applying will win the most contracts. For farmers, the slogan is “As much as necessary but as little as possible.” It’s a simple financial necessity.

Homeowners are a completely different story. On the first warm day of spring take a folding chair into your local home improvement center, drug store, or hardware store. I’m serious. Make yourself comfortable and watch the pesticides fly off the shelves. Poisonous powders, granules, sprays, gels, and aerosol cans are hard to keep in stock. Stores sell truckloads of this stuff and there’s at least one such store on every block. You can even buy pesticide at most grocery stores: just throw it in your cart along with bread, lettuce, and baby formula.

People take these preparations home and douse their precious flower beds under the assumption that if some is good, more is better. I once saw a woman empty half a can of insecticide on a single hapless spider. She just kept spraying and spraying and spraying until the poor creature keeled over from the sheer weight of the stuff. The really sad part is that insecticides are designed to kill—you guessed it—insects. Many of these products just annoy the spiders.

The problem is that homeowners are not trained to use these products and usually don’t bother reading the label. And even if they do read the label, they often can’t identify the thing they are trying to kill. The whole system is flawed.

It turns out that homeowners are not the only culprits. Several studies have shown that golf courses use 5 to 7 times more pesticide per acre than the most intensely managed farms. Other big users include highway departments, park departments, utilities, cemeteries, city and county governments, apartment complexes, and office parks. These are mostly urban and suburban entities. I would love to know the average pesticide use per acre in the urban versus the rural environment. I have a hunch it would be shocking.

Now, for those urban beekeepers who think their honey is pesticide free, I ask you: How do you get your bees to avoid lawns, planting beds, flower pots, hanging baskets, planter boxes, and gardens that contain these things? Remember that a bee during a nectar dearth may forage within a five-mile radius of the home hive. That is 78.5 square miles or 50,240 acres. Do you have any idea how many households or other entities can fit in that area? And how many of them are working overtime to keep the pesticide industry in business? The amount of pesticide use in urban and suburban areas is nothing short of staggering.

So which honey truly has more pesticide contamination? I don’t know. But I think it is unfair to assume that urban honey is purer than rural honey, and I think it’s even more unfair to promote it that way. Until someone has the time and financial wherewithal to make a detailed scientific study, it is irresponsible for either side to make such a claim.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Recently, a rash of stories have appeared in the news media about a paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Apidologie. The popular headlines tell us that cell phones are causing the death of bees, they cause colony collapse, they cause bees to get confused, fly away, or die.

I have read the paper in question, “Mobile phone-induced honeybee worker piping” by Daniel Favre. As usual, the press has totally distorted the findings. The paper itself is very much like most scientific papers in that the author tells how he designed his experiment and reports on what he found. He doesn’t make sweeping generalizations from his data. The press does that all by itself.

Our understanding of the natural world comes from many, many such scientists. Each one looks at a tiny piece of the puzzle. Once the work is published, it helps other scientists design their experiments. They may build on the work, refute the work, or confirm the work. Science does not happen in a vacuum. So, no, you can’t fault the author of the paper or the journal that printed it. Fault the press.

Basically, the author put cell phones in beehives and compared the bee’s activity to the activity of bees with no cell service. He found that when the cell was in standby mode the bees behaved like other bees, but when the cell was in communications mode the bees became agitated, especially after about 30 minutes.

The worker bees exposed to the phones emitted more piping sounds, a behavior that is seen when bees become agitated—as when they are about to swarm or when the hive is jarred, intruded, or exposed to excess noise. He also found that, after prolonged phone calls, the bees remained agitated for as much as twelve hours.

All this is interesting and relevant information in the search for how electromagnetic fields affect bees, but it doesn’t prove that cell phones cause colony collapse disorder. Favre summarizes his own work like this:

The present study suggests that active mobile phone handsets in beehives noticeably induce the rate of worker piping.

He then goes on to suggest what research is needed in the future. One obvious short-coming that he points out himself is that this study needs to be repeated using phones that are various distances from the hive. After all, how many people keep their cell phones in a beehive?

Rusty

It all started Wednesday afternoon. As soon as the journal arrived, I scanned the table of contents and quickly settled on an article entitled, “Managing Varroa Part 1.” I turned to the page and hunkered down to read.

My first warning of trouble occurred in the second paragraph with the use of the word “irregardless.” Well, that’s not actually a word. In fact, Garner’s Modern American Usage calls it “semiliterate.” The construction the author was looking for is “regardless,” but he probably got confused with “irrespective.” Doesn’t ABJ have a dictionary?

Later in the article the author uses the word “Phorectic” with a capital P. Why? Phoretic is not a proper noun. Phoretic is not the name of a deity. It’s just a plain old adjective describing an organism that hitches a ride on another. My guess is the writer didn’t know what it meant, didn’t bother to look it up, and decided to capitalize it “just in case.” Doesn’t ABJ have an editor?

But the clincher—the paper airplane maker—occurred in the sixth paragraph. I quote:

In addition to being ineffective for Varroa control, screened bottom boards are also detrimental to spring colony management. For those operating in areas with a well defined (sic) winter season, followed by a cold erratic spring weather pattern, screened bottoms have the potential to cause considerable harm. I base the majority of my case on the following human analogy. Imagine for a moment that it’s mid March (sic) and you’re in Northeastern Ohio. Nighttime temperatures usually average between 25 and 35 degrees. Daytime averages range between 40 and 50 degrees. Under those conditions, would you as a homeowner open all the doors and windows in your house and leave your thermostat at its normal setting until the weather warmed to the point where the furnace was no longer required? Seriously, how many of you would opt for this course of action? Then, why would you ask your bees to do the same thing?

This paragraph implies that, unlike hives with screened bottoms, human abodes are buttoned up tight so that warm air is not allowed to leave and cold air is locked out. It implies we are doing a disservice to bees to allow them some fresh air. And the basis all these implications is how the author thinks houses work.

If the author lived in a cave, I could understand where he’s coming from. But my hunch is that he lives in some kind of more-or-less contemporary North American housing. If so, he probably has a furnace or a wood stove to keep him warm—either of which vents to the outside. He probably has some exhaust fans that are ducted to the outside as well—maybe a fan in the laundry room, the bathrooms, or over the kitchen range—all of which remove warm, moist air from the home.

You cannot vent air to the outside without replacing it with new air—trust me on this. If you could expel air without letting in new air you would create a vacuum and your house would implode sometime after you died of asphyxiation.

He also implies that he keeps his windows closed all winter. Maybe so. But what about the doors? I’m guessing he has at least one door and more likely two—a front door and maybe a back door, a side door, a garage door, or a porch door. Furthermore, I’ll bet he uses them. And every time he uses one, air is exchanged between the inside and the outside.

Air exchange in human dwellings and work spaces is an important health consideration. For example, air inside commercial buildings is now routinely exchanged with outside air at the rate of 15 cubic feet per minute per person in order to provide a healthful environment for humans and to prevent “sick building syndrome”—a term referring to health problems linked to indoor air pollution. That’s one huge gust of air. For more information on sick building syndrome see this EPA site.

Standards are also written to keep homes and residences well-ventilated and free from environmental contaminants. It is recommended that homes that don’t have enough natural leakage be fitted with mechanical devices to actively remove residential pollutants including moisture. For more information on indoor air quality in homes and residences, see this EPA site.

I certainly don’t mind an author expressing a viewpoint different from my own, but it bugs me when the science is left out of the argument. The author clearly states that he is basing his case on analogy–a fine thing as long as you have your facts straight. The fact here is that human homes are anything but air tight.

In the end, I will reverse his final question and ask: “If we don’t live and work in polluted, moisture-laden, poorly-ventilated spaces then why would we ask it of our bees?”

Rusty

• When I’m beekeeping I’m not at my computer and vice versa. I like to take a small notebook into the field with me, jot down notes, diagrams, and to-do lists, then go on to the next hive. No way do I want to transcribe this into a computer later. Life’s too short.

• The hive diagrams don’t have a lot of the equipment I use—so when I’m clicking on the components trying to “build” my hive, I have to do without internal frame feeders, double screen boards, Cloake boards, moisture quilts, and triangle escape boards. They have “entrance reducer”—but only one size. They have “honey super”—but no way to distinguish a section super from a Ross Round from a plain framed honey super. There’s no way for the diagram to show whether your Varroa tray is in or out.

• There are no hive components specifically for top-bar hives or Warré hives.

• There is nothing in the diagram to indicate whether the frames are plastic, wax, or foundationless, although, you can indicate some of this under “Hive Condition”—which I don’t really understand. Once of the choices under foundation type (which is under hive condition) is “drone cell.” You can check this off, but you can’t say 2 frames, or 1 frame—you can only check it off, which doesn’t really tell you much.

• Also the check boxes indicating hive condition apparently pertain to the whole hive. It’s just not that way in real life. Some boxes are going to be in better condition than others, but you can’t indicate that unless you write it in the description of the hive which is in a different section.

• There is a place to add links to photos and videos, but there was no way to add sketches or hand-drawn diagrams to your notes. You could scan them and add links, but how handy is that? I like to stand behind each hive with my diagram and to-do list in hand—and then do it. Why make it so complex?

• Worse, there is no place for a to-do list. When I’m doing a hive inspection, for example, I’m making a to-do list, right? You can add notes under “description” in a few places, but I don’t think of a description as a to-do list.

• You can check off various boxes indicating diseases, treatments, feeds—but all you can do is check them off. So if you check off MegaBee, does that mean it has it or needs it?

• Oddly, the program has my correct latitude and longitude, but couldn’t figure out what time zone I am in, and I couldn’t find a way to change it.

• “Frame count” apparently means “frame count per box.” I tried to put in 30, but it wouldn’t take it.

I apologize if I sound cranky, but this program wound me up tight. Within 30 minutes I was ready to give up beekeeping and become a cattleman–but then, they probably have equally irritating software . . . and I’m not particularly fond of cattle. I like to think “outside the box” as they say, but I felt this program tried its best to stuff me into the tiniest crate it could find.

The best thing for you to do would be to go ahead and try it. Decide for yourself. Like I said, it’s free (a clue) and readily available. Here, I’ll even give you the link.

Rusty