EFSA report on risks of spread of small hive beetle

[The Drone Ranger]

I'm not trying to make a point about pollination contracts mbc just that is being touted as a reason for colony imports
Here's what I don't get
You mention after disastrous season for losses when does that happen ?
If I lost 10% that would be a very bad result in my world
When colonies were being made up with imported carnie queens at the start of the season they were apparently marvellous productive colonies by the time they were moved to the rape
So when did it become essential to bring in packages of bees

If we are talking pollination then nucleus colonies are quite capable of doing that
So its not for that reason packages are being imported nor is it that farmers will go bankrupt if we don't import them this country is awash with bees and beekeepers

It's purely a matter of the people doing the importing because they want to do it, but its unpopular so they and have invented every reason under the sun to justify it

Personally I object not so much to what goes on, as to people trying to pull the wool over my eyes about why they do it
They should just come clean and say they are doing it because they want to, they cant get their bees through the Winter, and they don't give a flying fox what anybody else thinks
Fair enough then we will all know where we stand


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[mbc]

I'm not trying to make a point about pollination contracts mbc just that is being touted as a reason for colony imports
Here's what I don't get
You mention after disastrous season for losses when does that happen ?
If I lost 10% that would be a very bad result in my world
When colonies were being made up with imported carnie queens at the start of the season they were apparently marvellous productive colonies by the time they were moved to the rape
So when did it become essential to bring in packages of bees

If we are talking pollination then nucleus colonies are quite capable of doing that
So its not for that reason packages are being imported nor is it that farmers will go bankrupt if we don't import them this country is awash with bees and beekeepers

It's purely a matter of the people doing the importing because they want to do it, but its unpopular so they and have invented every reason under the sun to justify it

Personally I object not so much to what goes on, as to people trying to pull the wool over my eyes about why they do it
They should just come clean and say they are doing it because they want to, they cant get their bees through the Winter, and they don't give a flying fox what anybody else thinks
Fair enough then we will all know where we stand


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Lol.
I agree with much you say.
The point about the need for packages being made though, forgive me for reading between the lines and interpreting my own way, is that they conveniently step into the breach to keep individual businesses going where they might otherwise have failed.
I remember seeing a piece on tv about pollination quite recently where packages were being installed in an apple orchard because the beekeeper had lost a lot and" otherwise the pollination wouldn't happen". Quite obviously the argument being made didn't mention that no appeal will have been made to local beekeeping associations, buying in local bees would have been comparitively extortionate, and for a beekeeper with high winter losses the most expedient way to bring the empty equipment back into production is to sling in some cheap foreign bees and a bucket of feed, this sort of honesty doesn't make good press, but it's probably what happened to keep the pollination contract fulfilled and that individual beefarmer in business for another season.
I make the personal choice to walk a hard road where losses are absorbed and mitigated through my own bees, this requires sacrifice, and it doesn't mean the easy path doesn't look attractive or make sense, it's just a different philosophy. I don't think imports will be banned, so shrug, c'est la vie, and vive la difference !
Edit: also, good pollination units are strong overwintered colonies with a balanced population. Nuc's and packages don't really cut the mustard.

[The Drone Ranger]

Lol.

Edit: also, good pollination units are strong overwintered colonies with a balanced population. Nuc's and packages don't really cut the mustard.

I unreservedly take your word for that mbc
Excepting if there was any mustard around thats exactly where those bees would be

[SDM]

That might be true for US Almond deserts etc but theres no reason why apple orchards can't support plenty pollinating insects
Apples are not that attractive a prospect for honey bees
There is a general assumption that any time anything gets pollinated it must have been by honey bees
That is simply not true there are loads of other pollinating insects
Bee colonies being moved in are just a sticking plaster and a not very good one
The argument that if we don't import thousands of package bees every year nothing will get pollinated is just not credible

Do you really expect an abundance of wild pollinators around a fixed crop that gets sprayed with pesticides multiple times a year ? Then assuming your wild pollinators survive the spraying, what would you have them forage once the crop has flowered ? Their shorter foraging range makes this a a major issue.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi SDM
Check post 38 to save me just repeating posting

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[SDM]

I'm fully aware of what is needed to promote wild pollinators. But you can't seriously be recommending any of them for intensively farmed areas.
Broader range of available forage would reduce focus on target crops and reduce yield.
Reduction of pesticides would again reduce yield.
Smaller areas devoted to mono crops would again reduce yield and massively increase production costs.
How many people would you starve globaly through reduced production and hugely increased prices simply to avoid importing honey bees ?
What you seem to bee suggesting is akin to banning a lifesaving drug because it may give people a headache.

[The Drone Ranger]

What crops in particular do you have in mind ?
The discussion here begins with the danger of small hive beetle and bee imports from Italy
I don't know of any UK grown crop, which without imported colonies, could result in global starvation ?
Apples, raspberries, ?

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[Calluna4u]

Been out of circulation for a bit due to the death and funeral of my father, and have come back to check in on what has been going on for a couple of hours, to see some interesting ways my input has been interpreted. Please pardon me jumping about all over the place in this post, it addresses issues from several posters.

Firstly, you are all going to have to vote UKIP and/or to leave the EU if you think the UK govt is going to rip up the Balaii directive to protect honeybees. In particular to protect the amateur sector where *almost* all the anti import noise comes from.

We are TINY, and in a big and very valuable agricultural commodity market. Pretty well a nothing, so not worth the hassle of any kind of trade war with our EU partners over.

There is also no concensus in favour of an import ban. When you hold the vote at an open meeting folk feel they have to put their hands up for it so as not to attract the attention of the more vociferous members against imports, and then quietly order their bees behind the scenes. The anti lobby are also very divided as to what their motives are. Once you get up to BFA level there is probably a majority against a ban, and geographically it gets to be more of an issue the further away from SE England you are, where it is largely a non issue (with loud exceptions).

This makes for interesting conflicts between utopia and reality. Most traded nucs come from the parts of the UK where imports are not considered to be a major issue, and indeed are often derived or even sometime made up, from the very imported packages you seek to deny access to. Then the local beek has done the right thing by UK sourcing, all are happy, yet there is no material difference in the stock you get. Only difference is that the trail is lost to the inspectors in many cases and the beek has paid nearly three times as much as they should have for the same bees. (I told you all there was a large 'common good' component in what I do.) You can get the whole package from me with northern adapted bees and queens for 88 quid, but feel it better to buy the same bees divided into two nucs, built up to cover 5 bars, then pay 150 quid... or significantly more (have seen 280 each)....... each for the two halves but have a clear conscience that you sourced in the UK? You also then get bees with no health certificate except a vendor provided one.

Packages are in fact very effective short term pollinator units. As with a new swarm (which is what they are really) they forage voraciously in the first week or more to establish a reserve of pollen and to feed the first wave of brood. They do dip quite sharply then before taking off very fast once the first brood hatches. They are not behaving like normal overwintered colonies at the point of introduction, so you cannot judge them directly against that.

The bees do NOT leave the apples for OSR. As always they will go for a balanced diet, and even in a solid OSR block you will get bees bringing in a smattering of other pollens, esp dandelion which is very noticeable especially early in the OSR season. at the place in question you get a nice crop of delicious apple honey about one year in 3. There is OSR around and some sites go for it and some don't. The cider apples seem to be best for the bees. If you only have a few trees I am not surprised the bees largely ignore them as far as you can see and go to OSR, A single tree is only enough for about one Apidea. Even six trees will not suffice for a single decent colony. So yes, of course they are going to go far and wide. At Hereford, even with OSR nearby, the dominant pollen by a country

The tv piece quoted by mbc was of course my unit near Hereford, although I was not see apart from the delivery to Hilton Park services, where it was my own truck and staff that collected them. They had been let down badly by UK beeks for a considerable period and had suffered very considerable loss of harvest due to inadequate pollination. The last season before we went in there they had ordered and been promised 250 colonies for the cherries and apples. The beeks involved had delivered 56. This had gone on for some seasons and with a variety of UK based operators, and even an invite to local amateurs to ask for sites only yielded about 20 hives, not all full, and a whole raft of hassle about eachother objecting to the presence of others and especially the professional operators, as 'it is well known that they (which appeared to mean every other beek) are spreading disease'. They also got their heads severely nipped every time the sprayer was out without even waiting to see what was going on the crops.

Also, the package bees were for a single block of trees where not other bees were available, and it was only 30. The flowering was about to get going and was gone in two weeks from then. The grower was VERY happy with the results. But of course, on this thread we can see he was wrong.....as are all the other growers who seek bees and the agronomist who recommend them and all the other apple growers around the world who want them too......will add up to billions of wasted pounds each year.

The farm in question has very sound environmental policies (which I was given input into) and there is reasonable levels of forage apart from the actual orchards, and they plant over 50 acres of borage on unused plots within the farm, just for the bees and native pollinators. We have not seen any significant bee kill there. There is a good level of native pollinators around....but it really only builds up at a time after the flowering of the apples has gone, which is of such short duration per variety that the natives do not have time to respond.

I have also never said that you can buy in a queen from abroad, put it in a nuc or split, then have a full strength colony for the OSR. This is just impossible. You are actually not getting the queens until the OSR is in flower. What I have said is that you can often get a super of honey off them before heather time and that it is often late flowering OSR. The timings do not allow for the colony to be anywhere near mature during OSR time, and indeed the first bees from the new queen are not likely to be foragers until close to or even after the OSR is finished. This was not always the case but OSR varieties have been selected for some years for earlier flowering and shorter flowering period, and these days in southern parts it is often coming out at the end of March or mid April would be a later field and it is gone in three to four weeks unless the weather is bad. The crop is now often over three weeks earlier than it was 30 years ago and is too early for many colonies, even overwintered ones, to get a crop. Thus we now regard OSR as mostly a build up crop rather than an major honey source. Nice when you get it but the build up is what we seek more than anything else.

Who mentioned global starvation?? Is that not a bit hyperbolic? However, if you apple farm is losing 50K a season on average due to pollination deficiency (our guys say more than that), and there are several hundred apple farms, never mind ANY other crop, then you have a large sum that is lost to the economy. If you add in that OSR is supposedly a better yield by 8 to 15% with a good coverage of honey bees on it you start to get up to very large figures indeed. No-one with any grip on reality claims that without honeybees we would all starve, or that directly importing bees for pollination adds anything other than a minority amount to the pollinator pot. However even that amount adds a lot to the rural economy. (also forget that in the key growing areas MANY of the so called local bees are actually import derived). Is the suggestion that, to minimise the risk of SHB, we should just accept deficient pollination, therefore lower yields in terms of tonnage and quality, and invest heavily on building up other pollinators over several years? If honeybees are no use then it seems so. The noise from the orchards when the flowers are out and there are bees all over the trees suggests to me that the idea that we can do without the bees is inaccurate at best.

Snip here....post too long....continued on next one

[Calluna4u]

drat...lost the rest.....no time right now to redo it......will revisit this again later. Told the limit for a post is 10000 characters...mines was 10750. One or two typos in the above.....where I put billions I did mean millions...but it might even be billions.

[The Drone Ranger]

drat...lost the rest.....no time right now to redo it......will revisit this again later. Told the limit for a post is 10000 characters...mines was 10750. One or two typos in the above.....where I put billions I did mean millions...but it might even be billions.

Nice to see you back C4u
Sorry to hear the reason you were away was a sad one
I was beginning to think I had upset you

The apple growers themselves recommend not introducing honey bees to orchards until 20% of the crop is in flower otherwise the bees will fixate on something else and continue with it while ignoring the trees
What I have said is that losing so many colonies that you have to import replacements comes as a complete surprise to me
I thought the purpose of bee keeping was to keep them not lose them every winter
I am genuinely amazed that that could be considered "normal"
I appreciate that beekeepers in general have no say in where imported bees come from, its decided by the BFA and companies who have the ear of the Government (at the moment)
I just object to the arguments put up that its all for our own benefit or we will starve
Good to see you putting that to bed

I appreciate you are the only person prepared to admit that its a commercial decision based on what's good for your business
Can't blame you for that, but when Small hive beetle gets here I might (unfairly) be blaming you for that

I'm beginning to realise that I have been a bit blind to what really goes on and I'm not sure beekeeping benefits from real scrutiny
How would it all play out in the press compared to "help us to save the honey bee" etc