Beekeeping In Ireland with Dara Scott (317)

317 - Beekeeping In Ireland with Dara Scott

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors who support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episodes transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com.

Hey everybody, welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast. It's a brand new year, Becky. I mean, it's couple weeks in, but I still happen to remember to write 25 instead of 24 on everything.

Becky: Right? 25. That's a good number though. So far so good, right?

Jeff: [laughs] Yes

Becky: You haven't made any beekeeping mistakes yet. I know I haven't.

Jeff: No. I haven't, but give me time.

[laughter]

Jeff: It's been a fun year. We had North American Honeybee Expo. We've talked about what we want for 2025. What really are you jumping at?

Becky: That's a really big question. I will say my goals are separated. I've got podcast goals and I've got beekeeping goals. My beekeeping goals are to really work on queen health this year. I've mentioned it earlier, but I've always either grafted my own queens or done walkaways. I'm still interested in bringing in more diversity into my system. That's one of the things that I'm looking at. Podcast goals, honestly, Jeff, I love talking to beekeepers about their operations and getting insight for what they're doing because even if it's in a different location, we can learn from each other. Those are two broad goals. How's that?

Jeff: That's good. That's good for this time of year. January, that's excellent. We have a big show lined up for us today talking about beekeeping techniques in different areas. Today we've asked back Dara Scott from HiveAlive, he's not here, talk about HiveAlive. When he was here last fall, he talked a little bit about his management styles and there was a couple things that really intrigued us.

Becky: I don't know if you noticed, but the conversation we talked about before involved queens and it aligns with my beekeeping goals for the year. We're going to talk to a beekeeper about management and about maybe some interesting information that he has about how he manages queens in his operation.

Jeff: It'll be a fascinating discussion. We have a lot to cover today with Dara. Before Dara, we have Dr. Dewey Caron's back talking about communication. He has a little audio postcard for us and I think he's going to be talking to us a little bit about Africanized honey bee, which is a fascinating topic that was big way back in the '90s and he has some experience with that. We'll hear from our sponsors and we'll welcome Dewey to the show.

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Dewey Caron: Hi, I am Dewey Caron. I come to you today from Cochabamba, Bolivia, in South America. I present another audio postcard on communication. It's a continuing series for Beekeeping Today Podcast. On today's podcast, we have the pleasure of hearing about beekeeping with a different lineage of Apis melliferabees. For my topic, I want to share some information on the Africanized honey bee, yet a different lineage. Here in Bolivia, family members keep Africanized honey bees where I will be spending the next four months. I and family members manage these bees, at least when I'm here, and we are now in the season where they are producing some honey.

For this podcast, I have been discussing communication on three levels, bee scientist to beekeeper, beekeeper to bee, and bee to bee. Today's communication of bee scientists to beekeeper is about Africanized beekeeping. Commentary on how, via introduction of bees from one location to the Americas, bee scientists have attempted to find a bee better suited to American beekeeping. The bottom line, although well-intentioned, it has not paid off. 70 years ago, the beekeepers in Brazil asked their top bee scientists to look at honeybees in different parts of the world toward improving their beekeeping.

They were following North American beekeepers who had asked their USDA scientists to look at the bees of Southern Europe in the late 1800s. In both instances, beekeepers were seeking to improve their fortune with honeybees. However, in both instances, it did not pay off. The Africanized honeybee that we have to deal with here in this part of the world, in the southern US, our distinctive lineage of Apis mellifera, our bee, resulting from the mixing of the African subspecies stock, what has been labeled Apis mellifera scutellata or simply scutellata, with the resident European stocks of honeybees previously introduced into South America.

The bee hybridized and selection of the most suitable Africanized bee stocks continues today just as we are in the US seeking to find the best bee. In other words, think like hygienic bees or the Pol-line bees, Hilo bees, and the efforts of many to develop locally selected stock. What we're doing is developing bee from the stock that is already in the US, and among Africanized bees, we're doing essentially the same thing. Following that introduction of the Africanized bee into Brazil as a better-adapted ecotype, the new stock which was termed the Africanized honeybee spread within Brazil, changing the existing previous bee stock.

That stock that had been introduced from Europe. To the surprise, yes, I think that word is appropriate, the Africanized honeybee eventually spread and to all of the countries except Chile and South America, and into Central America by the Isthmus of Panama, and eventually into, yes, the arrival was pegged in South Texas as coming in 1990, number of years ago. The spreading history was a surprise and not initially anticipated. Currently, it occupies all the southern border states and has moved northward into the next tier of states. Although movement northward has not been continued to be studied or has not been as rapid as the movement of the bee in South and Central America.

The only studies really lately of the bee have been those from people at Purdue looking at the DNA markers, and the studies in California continued northward spread of Africanized honeybees. While in colonization where the Africanization has occurred, the defensive behavior of honeybees has increased. AHBs, as we call them, Africanized honeybees compete and displace honeybees of European descent in areas where they co-occur. It's impossible to keep Africanized and European bees side by side in the same apiary. The Africanized bees simply out-compete European bees and the European colonies go downhill rapidly, eventually die.

Along with their heightened defensiveness, swarming and/or absconding behavior, it's hard to tell sometimes which is which, are notably increased in this Africanized bee population. These traits are certainly considered less desirable for commercial hobby use or hobby used by beekeepers. It is not all negative. Quite notably, and thankfully stinging incidents involving humans have been relatively insignificant, although initially they were higher in South America. Honey production has likely decreased but records before and since are not reliable to be able to say definitively they are less or they're the same or perhaps have increased.

The Africanized honeybees have contributed to pollination of major economic crops, which has not been negative certainly, and also they have not been negative to the native bee fauna, on some of the studies that have been done. Africanized honeybees are generally the preferred honeybee among South and Central American beekeepers. That is what my nephew manages here, where we are in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the largest of the Andes Valleys, a roughly 8,200 feet elevation, so we're way up there. It's a region of dairy and fruit culture, so it's also a very good area for bees.

Africanized bees also occur in Puerto Rico, where they are notably gentler than the Texas Africanized honeybee population. This gentle demeanor has not been documented in other Africanized honeybee populations in Americas. For some reason, Puerto Rico seems to be a different story. Regulatory authorities in many states within the United States consider the Africanized honeybee an unwanted race or stock of honeybee, and thereby seek to prevent its movement into a given state or its management within the state. The best post-Africanization study is a comprehensive study conducted in Mexico by Ernesto Guzman-Novoa of Guelph University and his colleagues.

The pollination of agricultural crops there has not been seriously affected by the arrival of Africanized honeybees. In fact, cultivation of some insect pollinated dependent crops has increased. However, there have been considerable effects on beekeepers, including reduced honey yields because the bees produce less honey than European bees, fewer colonies due to this elevated absconding swarm behavior, and certainly higher worker wages. Aggressive bees are harder to deal with.

Beekeepers have been combating these effects with new approaches to beekeeping, such as queen mating with European bees, feeding sugar syrup, constantly dividing colonies and moving colonies at night to decrease aggression, and of course, absconding. Things have changed, Africanized honeybees. For my beekeeper to bee, I'm going to say on the same main thing of Africanized bees. Africanized bee management needs to change. As you communicate with your bees, feeding and stimulation become important messages from beekeeper to bee.

We need, as beekeepers, to continually reduce bee colony size to keep swarming to a minimum. Otherwise, we have colonies too weak for nectar collection. During favorable nectar secretion, absconding is not an issue, but it quickly becomes one when sources begin to decrease. Balancing feeding and division helps keep the bees together at a reasonable population level as they navigate through spring buildup and nectar secretion time. We need to euthanize the most aggressive colonies to keep those drones from being in the drone congregation areas, dividing colonies, taking a developing box of brood.

These bees, the Africanized bees are incredible brooders. Dividing them three ways brings them back to a developing stage and away from that brink of swarming. Watching whether we need keep on top of feeding. If your area has a queen producer, you keep buying queens, often as queen cells, and you put a mature queen cell in each division. Of course, one division will have the old queen, the existing queen, which will then kill the queen cell that you then add. The other two will usually accept the queen cell and the splits will quickly develop as they brood up.

Obviously timing is everything as it is with European bees. Skillful beekeepers can communicate with their bees with one-half to two-thirds of the colonies producing some surplus honey, but it will always be less than it might have been with European bees. The final communication of bee to bee is that response to alarm odor. We as beekeepers are well aware of the ability of colonies to spread the word regarding a colony disturbance.

Tests of defensiveness, a four-stage behavior that includes initially alerting, focusing on smells, movement towards smells and movements, are started by hitting the side of a hive, which can be accompanied by waving a piece of felt for a short 10-second period or add or close to the colony entrance. Anita Collins, while studying populations of Africanized bees initially in Venezuela, has been able to quantify and determine Africanized honeybees respond a whopping 30 times faster to a moving target after they've been alerted after hitting the side with greater intensity and in greater numbers, and they continue defense over a longer time period.

Once Africanized bees have been stimulated, they are also much more likely to respond in group attacks. During such attacks, they will sting anything in sight that is moving and may pursue a source of disturbance for up to a kilometer. That is powerful bee-to-bee communication. The end notes include much more information on Africanized bees. I thank you. I hope your bees are doing well so far this winter and most of your colonies still survive. Best to you and your bees.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome back. We really appreciate our sponsor support. We want to welcome back to our show today, Dara Scott. He's of HiveAlive. Dara was with us back in September on episode 294 and he talked about his company, HiveAlive. Today we invited him back to talk about his honeybee management practices. He has a wealth of information that we want to share with you, our listeners. Dara, welcome back to the show.

Dara Scott: Thanks a million. It's great to be back. It feels like I was just here.

[laughter]

Becky: Wait, does that mean you missed us or didn't miss us?

Dara: I missed you.

Becky: Good. We had so much fun talking in the breaks about how you manage your bees that it really deserved a full episode. We are just very grateful that you came back and you're willing to go through your operation with us. Thank you.

Dara: I'm excited. I think I've never done this before, so it's interesting. Hopefully it goes well and hopefully it's stuff that's interesting for people to think about.

Jeff: I think so. Everybody likes here to learn about new management techniques, management styles. I think for beekeepers who are further along in their journey, tinkering with different approaches is a good thing to learn about honeybee biology and learning about management practices for their location. I've been looking forward to this show. Dara, for those who haven't heard our September episode with you, can you just give us a real brief background of who you are and your experience with bees?

Dara: I'm the founder and managing director of HiveAlive. I've been keeping bees for, it's like 25 years now or something like that. I live in Ireland. We keep a different bee from what you have in the US. It's Apis melliferamellifera, which is a darker bee, a smaller bee than what you get in the US, a little bit more aggressive. We can probably talk about that at some stage. Come from a physics background, degree in physics. I worked for medical industry, medical diagnostics. I worked for 10 years with the Wood Oceanographic Institute in the US with the deepest robot in the world. It's research robot in the world. At the time, the deepest robot in the world.

Jeff: Did you say you had experience in New Zealand? You worked in New Zealand?

Dara: I spent time in New Zealand. That's where I got the bug for the beekeeping. In Ireland it's much more hidden. New Zealand was everywhere. You couldn't miss it, and that sounds pretty cool. I heard about with the varroa thing and the fact that it's symbiotic. You help them, they help you and all the works. I like that.

Becky: I think we should start with Apis mellifera mellifera. First of all, let's call them defensive, not aggressive.

[laughter]

Becky: A little twist. They're just defending themselves.

Dara: I like that.

Becky: Besides their defensiveness, could you share a little bit more what is the peak colony size. Maybe I think they have a reputation of-- do they fly at cooler temperatures or am I making that up?

Dara: They do. Did we talk about that last time? I can't remember. Apis mellifera mellifera was originally across the whole of Northern Europe down into Spain, into Italy a bit as well. I think into Italy. Basically it's being bred out of Europe for the more popular strains. It was never really selectively bred in Europe. It's only in the last 20, 30 years it's been selected bred. I think that's one of the main reasons why it's more aggressive. It's a different bee. It's quite dark. The queens are quite dark. It flies more in the rain and flies more in the wind. It's more frugal with stores because it's more used to--

At least the ecotype that we have here in Ireland is more frugal with stores. It doesn't build up as quickly, but yet it doesn't consume its stores as quickly then at the same time. Despite people bringing in different strains of bees all the time in Ireland, there still is quite a very, very distinct, I hate to use the word "pure" but I don't know what the right word for it is, strain that hasn't been introgressed that much yet. Part of the reason for that, they think, is because the bees, the queens and the drones of AMM will fly in worse weather conditions than the ones brought in.

Plus also probably if the ones brought in are building up really big and then running out food, they're probably starving themselves out and Darwinian extinction is kicking in there. The AMM, there's a society in Ireland called NIHBS, Native Irish Honeybee Society, which is promoting AMM. Ideally we don't want to bring imports in. We don't need to bring imports in and there's a risk of bringing in disease. Then there's the whole fact that what happens is if you get a hybrid, AMM with a Buckfast or AMM with a Caucasian or whatever different type of bee, Carniolan, that the offspring becomes-- Not as the first generation, the second generation can get really, really aggressive. I've come across that before. It's not pretty. It's super aggressive. Crazy.

Becky: Boiling Bees ready to get you.

Dara: Yes. You're half a mile down the road and they're following you aggressive. It's just not nice. That's another reason why. Plus it's a bee that was spread across the whole Europe. It's been pretty much bred out, and I think it's worth preserving just for that alone, and the fact that they've shown genetically their own ecotype has adapted to Ireland specifically because it's so wet and so windy it is different. It behaves different and it survives differently, which I think as well is special as well.

Becky: I'm pretty sure Apis mellifera mellifera was the bee that came over first to the continental United States.

Dara: They still find them.

Becky: Do they still find them? Oh, I didn't know that.

Dara: Yes. The famous bee scientists,-

Becky: Seeley?

Dara: -Cornell. Huh?

Becky: Tom Seeley.

Dara: Tom Seeley, yes. Tom Seeley has found them in woods in forest, which is quite mad when you think about it. Still fairly pure as well.

Becky: Fascinating.

Dara: You can still find them. That's remarkable.

Becky: The colony populations, I'm guessing they're not our 60,000 Italian bee populations in the peak of the summer, but they're smaller, or am I wrong?

Dara: They generally are smaller. Part of that is because of the weather in itself. You're not going to get as longer foraging season here. Certainly they're bigger the more east you go in Ireland because the weather gets better. You can get super big colonies but in general they're much smaller. Productivity wise, it's not so much the bee, I think it's more the environment, to be honest, and the season, the short season and the weather, just makes it very difficult. I would have guessed that they are less productive.

Jeff: The Ireland weather, and you've stated it's wet and windy, and cool, the AMM has adapted to that. Do you have warmer summers? The summer weather or do you have a hot, dry period?

Dara: No.

Jeff: Not at all.

[laughter]

Becky: No. That's it.

Jeff: I've drawn comparisons to the Pacific Northwest and our location on the western side of the Cascade Mountains, and it's just always wet and rainy. We do have basically three months of hot and dry or warm and dry.

Dara: I've been there in the winter. I've been there in the summer because I used to work out of University of Washington. You got lovely summers. You don't know how good you have--

[laughter]

Jeff: Well then, I wish you hadn't said it. Now I'll be corrected every time I walk around talking about how miserable the weather is here.

Dara: You've no excuse now. You don't know nothing.

[laughter]

Jeff: I've heard that.

Becky: If we're going to do a Beekeeping Today Podcast tour of Ireland and their bees, what month would we show up?

Jeff: Oh, that's a good question.

Becky: Would we need our rain gear?

Dara: You need to bring every night rain gear any month. Dryer months tend to be around May. We can get a nice dry spell around May. Generally it's awful because there's your high school, your exams, high school whatever, the finishing exams, we're the same thing here. Always around the exams is the best weather Ireland gets. It's only two weeks of it. Then late August, early September can be all right as well. The middle of summer, July, can just rain all of July sometimes. Not always. It's changing. What's happening now is because of climate change and all that is that the rain is getting much heavier.

It's much bigger downpours, more flooding in the summer than it used to get before. There used to be also the June gap, it's cold, where there'd be a month or so where there wouldn't be any forging before the blackberry kicked in. That's gone. Well gone. What's happened now, the blackberry kicks in much earlier and then it's after that can get quite blackberry. If you're not in your heather there, it can be very little food until the ivy kicks in, which can be September. You have a gap now between-- month of August really is, there's stuff there but not much.

Jeff: The blackberry and heather are your primary honey sources?

Dara: For me it's blackberry. I try not to get heather because I just don't like extracting it. It's too hard. It's thick, so tropic or something like that. You have to have a special way of extract-- You press it or you have to-- it's quite gloopy. It's a really thick gelatin. You can't just spin it out, it won't spin out. You have to either squeeze out with the press, means you got to cut the comb out, or there's these things that they're little tiny little pinheads that you put into-- that go into each of the cells and spin around. They make it more viscous and then you can spin it out. It's just too much work. It's really high value. They've done research recently on the Irish heather and they reckoned it was as good as Manuka honey.

Jeff: Oh wow.

Becky: Wow. That's impressive.

Dara: For what that's worth. It was full of antibacterials and all that stuff. [crosstalk] I actually try not to get honey at all, to be honest. It sounds a bit anti beekeeping, but it is just I spent so many years where I build up the colonies really, really strong for the blackberry flow and it will just rain. No, I'm not doing this anymore. Now I'm doing the breeding of bees more. I sell nucs and stuff in the spring. That's my main gig now, as a side gig or whatever.

Jeff: That's a great segue then. For the big interest there, no, I shouldn't say the big interest, but what really keyed it was you have a different approach or your approaches for managing your queen breeding program or your raising queens and managing your colonies for that queen production.

Dara: Where do I start? Start with the boxes first. Start with the boxes first. We use national boxes in Ireland. They are smaller than the US ones. We're just going through it there earlier before we start recording. Our honey super is, what, 25 pounds, and your guys is 35 to 40? They're smaller boxes. I think the main thing of that is between the weather and then the strain of bee, they don't build up as much. I've taken that to another extreme again, in the sense that I only use supers. I don't use brood boxes anymore. Lots of reasons for that. It works really well for me.

The idea behind it was, there's a guy called Tim Rowe who wrote a book called The Rose Hive Method. What Tim wrote did is he made a box that was halfway between the brood box and the super in size, and only used that box. It's a great little book. It's not particularly large. Lots of really interesting beekeeping styles and techniques in it. One of the things he does, which is really good is that he would overwinter in two of these rose boxes. I'll do the same thing. I'll overwinter in two supers. Then in spring time, well the first thing he'll do then is he'll swap boxes, which you can't do with normal brood boxes anyway.

Becky: Like a reversal, when you say swap?

Dara: Yes, because you got the food at the bottom or whatever. Then what he does is he puts the next box in-between the two boxes, which I think a lot of people don't do because they're all the same size. You can start doing this. What happens then is the bees very quickly go, hang on, we have o fill that space. They're very quick then to expand out of that space.

One advantage of me using supers is-- A, I had a stack of supers and I decided to change this method. That was a lot easier to do. It's worked out really well. I suppose I could explain that in a minute. One advantage in doing it with the supers is that in Ireland, if it's not a great spring, your colonies aren't particularly huge or strong. It isn't as big a gap for them to fill as it would be with the rose or obviously with the brood box if you just choose brood boxes.

Becky: You're breaking up the brood nest, but you're not giving them a huge geographic distance to overcome.

Dara: Exactly.

Becky: You couldn't do it with a deep, and even a medium here would be a little aggressive, but you're a little bit smaller than that. That makes sense.

Dara: It works really well and there's other advantages too, is that it means you're taking your bottom box, which is going to be the probably the oldest frame. That stuff is now on the top of the boxes so that when you go take your honey supers off, it'll be your top you'll be taking off and you can easily then cut out the frames you don't want, or we'll talk about that in a second, but replace the comb anyway, so you're cleaning out your comb all the time. That's a nice way of doing that.

Jeff: How often do you swap out your comb?

Dara: I'm lucky because I'm selling my nucs all the time. I'm swapping out all the time.

Jeff: Oh, okay.

Dara: I'm always going through comb. Every once in a while, I still have a couple of frames that appeared from when I started beekeeping. I know because of the wrong type of frames and they're really annoying. If you pump out every once in a while. The combs are long gone. I use poly supers. I use the polystyrene ones. I find them significantly better, especially because I'm bringing nucs over winter and then bringing them out. I want them to be as quick as I can after winter so I can move them on. It's night and day, the difference between using poly supers and wooden supers really, really is. They just build up so much quicker. It's so much less stressful for them.

I have an open mesh floor, and what I have on the top is I would have a normal crown board. I also have then this, it's about 2 inches of a fiber board. Actually, they're off cuts from when we built the house that went into the roof. It's insulated, but it's oiled. It will absorb moisture, but it's waterproofy at the same time. The great part about that is any excess moisture that's coming up from the hive, it'll absorb that, but still be insulating. I don't really have any issues with moisture in the polyhazards, because some people, if they're too close up, you'll have big issue with moisture. It depends on where you are too as well, of course, but it can be an issue.

Jeff: We have the same issue during our winters, especially as the buildup of condensation moisture in our hives. It's just so wet outside and so wet inside. There's just no way to mitigate that.

Dara: I suppose that the roof on top then has space so they can ventilate. The top of the wood fiber board can dry out. That works out pretty good.

Jeff: You're not heavily into the condensation hives at this point. You're still top ventilated at some point.

Dara: No, they're not ventilated. There's the crown board and the piece of wood fiber fits exactly on top of them, but the moisture is ventilating. The moisture is able to go up through the wood and up through the wood fiber board and out the top.

Becky: When you say the wood fiber board, I'm just wondering if that's the equivalent of the old built right here. Structurally, can you easily break it or is it--

Dara: Kind of. I never saw it in shops. Most houses in Ireland are concrete built, but our house is timber frame. I like the idea of it and eco-angle of it, and all that stuff, and it's lovely and warm. This is what they use for the roof. You can crush it a bit. It's hard to cut with a saw because it's so fibery, but I think it's being oiled or something like that to give it some sort of warmth. If you used it as a standard, one of those that it wasn't oiled, I think it would just disintegrate.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break and we'll be right back. We're talking with Dara Scott of HiveAlive about his honeybee management practices.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. We've got what the general hive looks like. Let's talk about the frames, Dara.

Dara: My frames, I've stopped using foundation. There's a couple reasons, there's a lot of contaminants in the foundation. Foundation was expensive at the time. I suppose it still is. I like the idea of them making their own foundation. The foundation you buy most of the time, it actually makes the bees make larger bee-- Of course, the bees make larger bees because the way it's printed is for a larger bee to make it-- It was just from day one, this is the way they designed them.

I've tried many iterations of going foundationless. I used to just have a piece of wax strip and I put that at the top. That worked okay, but a lot of times the wax would melt or come out or it wasn't so great. What I do now is I have a strip of, you'd probably call it a hardboard as well. It's only very, very thin boards, flexible. You might use it, say, to cover a cheap door with. You know what I'm talking about? It's a step-up from cardboard, but it's more rigid and harder than that.

Becky: It's like a, I want to say veneer, but something.

Dara: Kind of, but thicker again. I've made feeders out with it as well, the size of feeders for that. Anyway, it doesn't really matter as long as it's a thin piece of wood. I run that on the top, but I also want to run around the bottom of the board as well. I find that makes it big. Do you have the same frame where you have a gap, you have two pieces of wood at the bottom and you slide the foundation up?

Becky: The grooves?

Dara: Yes. In that gap at the bottom, I put that hardboard in there. I found that it's good for two reasons. If you don't put there, if there's wax moth around, they will get in that gap and the bees can't get at them. Two, it makes the thing way more rigid because if you don't do that, they tend to want to add, to bring the comb down to one of the other sides where you put the piece in the middle, it go right in the middle, it's way more solid. That's super handy. One of the most handiest things, it's super quick. It takes half the time. Once you do it once, you don't have to do it for every single--

If I come around, if I find that the frame's gone bad, it's gone moldy or whatever happened to it, I just come along, I get a knife, cut out the top, cut out the bottom, throw it, melt it down or whatever, but then put it back in the box again, done. I can do it there and then. I don't have to put a sheet of foundation in. I don't have to buy foundation, worry about it going stale or whatever. It just makes the process really quick. They're making the cell size they want to make.

There isn't chemicals in the wax, the wax will have chemicals from treatments of that that build up over time that don't dissipate, so that isn't in there as well. There are drawbacks to it. It takes a bit of work. You can't just put a bunch of frames on that. You've got to put them in between drawn-out frames to guide them where to go, and they do make a lot more drone cells, which I don't mind because I'm not really into honey production. I think I've maybe mentioned this before, but this funny thing that when there's a lot of drones at the colony, I feel like the colony is happier.

I don't know what that is, but they definitely do something warmth-wise, I'm convinced of that. This colony seems happier. Oh yes, and I get very little swarming. Part of that is because of what we talked about earlier, is we stick in the box in the middle, so they're busy. The other part of that is when I'm adding frames, I'm not adding frame and foundation, I'm adding in those strips, which means they have a lot more work to do, so they're busy. The bees are always busy. I think that's a big part of why I don't get that much swarming at all because they're just always kept busy.

Becky: The drone comb makes so much sense, especially if you're trying to support your own breeding program. If you have a breeding program, the more drones out there, the better. Building comb, I know that depending on where you are, in the US, you've got a window where you can do that in the colony. Do you have that same window?

Dara: It's the same time that I'm putting the frames in anyway. Do you know what I mean? It sinks in nicely anyway. Definitely, if you do it after the flows, they don't really do anything with it. I'll get a couple of windows. I'll get the spring flow, the dandelion and I'll get really all the way up until the blackberry. There's a gap if there's no heather. Then, even when the ivy comes in in September, they'll do it as well at that point. A good few opportunities.

Becky: Even if there's a flow later in the season, they have to be just maybe building honey supers. It's more the exception than the rule, but that's excellent.

Dara: They're definitely not as good at building in the fall as they are during the spring and early summer.

Jeff: We're talking about the little strips. I know a lot of beekeepers will use the paint stir sticks, put those in the top groove and bottom groove. Those seem to be sized just right.

Becky: Or tongue depressors.

Jeff: Tongue depress-- Yes.

Jeff: Popsicle sticks.

Dara: Tongue depressors, yes. I've started stapling them in now. I tried hot gluing them in that stuff. Staples are the job.

Jeff: Oh, staples [crosstalk]

Dara: That's the only way. It's the only way. It's so much faster as well than putting in sheets of foundation. So much faster.

Becky: Jeff's evaluating whether that's going to work for him.

Jeff: I was thinking I wouldn't want to do that for my honey supers, but for the brood side, that might be a way to go. Honey supers, I wouldn't want to put those into the extractor.

Dara: I do put mine in the extractor. That's the other thing as well, is because I'm using just supers, I have a-- I think it's a basket extractor it's called. It'll fit two supers in each basket. It goes one way half speed, then goes other way full speed, and then back the original way full speed. Especially when I have the strips in top and bottom, I get very little blowouts. Very few.

Jeff: That'd probably work in a radio extractor too. I'll have to look into that.

Dara: It has a couple of wires that the wax sits up against, if you know what I mean.

Jeff: Yes, in the basket.

Dara: Yes, the basket. Once it has that, it's fine. If it's one of the ones where it's not supported, then it will blow up much quicker.

Jeff: We were talking earlier about the incidence of varroa in all of this, because I would think that the increased number of drone cells, you might have more varroa. How does that work out? What's your varroa load there in Ireland?

Dara: It's interesting scenery. It's just dawned on me recently. I was talking to, I think it's Kirsty from Apis m., the Project Apis m. She was asking about varroa. I was going through and it dawned on me. We don't really have a problem with varroa anyway. Certainly not like we used to. How long ago? Maybe 10 years ago, I was involved in setting up the whole varroa monitoring and tracking your hives, and shaking sugar shake and all that stuff. That probably has made a difference. I've been thinking about it more. I don't have an issue with Varroa really, but I'm cheating because I basically start with new queens every year.

This is a brood break and there's an advantage. Every once in a while I'll do oxalic acid in the wintertime. In general, I don't have it. In general talking to beekeepers in Ireland, the issue is gone. There's a huge amount of them who are not treating at all anymore, and you just don't hear of people losing loads of colonies from varroa anymore. You don't hear of huge amounts of deformed wing anymore. It's still there, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was. Kirsty was saying that it's the same as it ever was in the US. I was thinking about that, and why would that be?

I was thinking, in Ireland, there's a lot of people who will make their own queens. From what I understand in the States, there's a couple of very large breeders who supply an awful lot of queens to an awful lot of the US. People aren't selective breeding at all. I think that could possibly be part of the problem, is that the queen breeder's incentive is to create queens naturally. Whether his strain is resistant or not, or works well in the northwest versus works well in the middle of the country, versus works well in the drier south parts. An example would be is that Ireland is not very big. It's, what, about less than 250 miles across.

I know a guy who breeds queens in the far west, even further west than me, another 60 miles west of me, another queen breeder in the middle of the country. They swapped queens. The weather's worse in the west of the country. Where I am it's much wetter and windier. The midlands are way better. Half the rainfall. The queen that moved to the west from the nice location, it started raising brood in the springtime way earlier than the rest of the guy's queens that were in the west. Vice versa. The one from the west was very slow to build up in the Midlands and just didn't. It's like that's only 100 miles of a difference. That locally adapted and yet queens would be sent around all around the US for different huge climatic regions.

Becky: I'm going to defend the commercial beekeepers. We do have quite a few of them raising queens and they are incorporating, for sure they're incorporating varroa-resistant stock. A lot of them use hygienic behavior as a selection. They're definitely working for that. When it comes down to locally adapted, I think that it's a lot easier if you're on an island and you don't have the massive beekeeper population where they're bringing in new bees. We also have a turnover that's very aggressive for beekeepers where they'll get the bees, they won't survive, and they might get out of it after a couple of years.

I remember visiting Wales a few years ago and hearing just that you don't get supplied with bees repeatedly if you can't keep your bees alive. That there's more pressure to be a much better beekeeper. We don't have that as much here. I will get queens from California. Those girls do a great job making it through our winter. In fact, I like the diversity. I like it if I've got bees who are going to raise brood despite the conditions, and then bees who are going to be very conservative and follow our weather. Where I am in Minnesota, sometimes I need extra brood. I need the bees to ignore the signals. It depends, but I think that your island really helps. If Minnesota was an island, we'd be better off here. [laughs]

Dara: I'm working with the same bees that I started with 25 years. They're obviously not the same bees, but I never died out and got new bee stock.

Jeff: That's nice.

Dara: Which is mad really.

Becky: Also, we have so many beekeepers so close to each other that how you manage your bees in the United States impacts your neighbors because your varroa problem becomes their varroa problem. We might have beekeepers who are busting their butts trying to manage varroa with other beekeepers not quite getting it, or choosing a management style that isn't supportive of their neighbor's operations. We are very far from where you are. We're all a lot jealous, Dara. A lot.

Dara: It just happened. It's weird.

Becky: I don't want put our commercial operations-- I don't want to blame them because they're literally supplying not just queens for backyard beekeepers across the country, but they're really supplying the queens that are pushing our pollination services that we do need, and our agriculture is dependent upon it. I'm just going to say that. Let's get back to Ireland bees. That was brought to you by the American queen producers.

[laughter]

Becky: I'm kidding.

Dara: Where was it? I was ranting about varroa. Varroa isn't currently-- It's not something I worry about anymore.

Becky: We're so jealous.

Dara: It's weird.

Jeff: That is encouraging, and to the point that it is possible to get to that point.

Becky: What are you worried about?

Dara: The weather, I suppose. Really, the weather is the big one. The foulbrood. I would hate to get one of the foulbrood. I've never got that. That would be. Here we have, in Ireland there's a policy that if you get it, you burn the stock and all that sort of thing. It's not generally a problem. Every once in a while, generally people bringing bees in from outside of Ireland, you get a spate of it in a certain area and it'll spread around for a while and they get under control again. All I need now is a neighbor to do that.

Jeff: Do you have to burn both types of foulbrood? European and American or just.

Dara: Yes, I think so.

Becky: That's one way to aggressively handle a pathogen.

Dara: We're not allowed to antibiotics or anything like that. That's not allowed here.

Becky: Is there a Tropilaelaps plan right now?

Dara: No. I've been trying to harp on about it in Ireland with the associations a bit about it because it's-- I don't know what they could do, but they're certainly aren't talking about it enough, I think. I think that's just awareness and I think that people be looking out for it or anything. Just something else to worry about.

Jeff: I know that the Asian yellow-legged hornet is a problem spreading across Europe. Is that an issue for you in Ireland?

Dara: Not yet. They did find one in Dublin Port at one stage, but I think it was just a single one. It wasn't a hive or anything that. I'm really hoping that the weather is just not too suitable for them here.

Becky: They're at the port going. You know what? Maybe not.

Jeff: Who put us on this boat?

Dara: I've been over with Richard Noel there in France. God, he's plagued by them. They're awful. They are really, really, really, really awful. You had them up near you, didn't you, in Seattle or something? Wasn't there one?

Jeff: We had the Asian giant hornet, which is the really big one, the size of your thumb, as opposed to the yellow leg. The yellow-legged hornet is growing in problems in the southeast United States, around Georgia and the Carolinas, and Florida.

Dara: Oh, it's established, is it?

Jeff: They're trying to eradicate it. At this point, it's a challenge.

Dara: That's not a nice one. They're just intimidating for yourself. Nothing else.

Jeff: See some of the pictures.

Becky: Bring this conversation up and talk about your queens. Everybody's excited to hear that you don't bring in new bees.

Dara: What I do is in the springtime as soon as I've-- What I've been doing recently, it's kind of cheating really, but I have my two supers. I overwinter with two supers. I will come along a couple weeks in advance selling them. I will put a queen excluder between the two supers. A week later I'll know which box the queen is. I don't have to look for that. Then I'll time it so that I'll be making queen cells in advance before I sell on the nucs. What I'll do is sometimes I do grafting, but more than often or not I will do the notching, which is by Mel Diss-- I still can't say his name. Don't know how to say his name.

Becky: We'll call him Diseslkoen and then we'll invite him to the show to tell [crosstalk]

Dara: Definitely. I'd love to do that, because he seems like a fascinating guy. His book is really, really cool. Really interesting stuff. He does this technique called notching, which I see most people-- a lot of people don't know, I would assume. Basically what you do is you get your frame of larvae and eggs. You look for the newly hatched larvae and you get your hive tool and two-thirds down into the cell, you get your [unintelligible 00:49:09] or sharp instrument and cut at a right angle to the frame. You cut in two-thirds down straight as far as the foundation and then drag down.

That leaves a space for the bees to make a queen cell that's vertically goes down on the frame. If you do that cut, it basically nearly dictates where they're going to make a queen cell. You can do that on multiple parts of a frame. If you wanted multiple queen cells, you might do a couple of parts and then cut out those queen cells or just have one queen cell or a couple queen cells on the one frame. Going back to the nucs that I'm selling in spring. I'll have queens fueler on, the queen will be in one of the boxes. I move off that box, sell the nuc as it is.

I'll get most of the bees into that box as it'll be full of bees. Then what's left behind, I will then add a frame with a queen cell into it, and off I go. That's job done. That notching thing is really nifty. See the trick for that, get his book if you're really into it, but the trick for that is you need to make your colonies really good and strong. You've got lots of brood frame. I'll have picked a breeder that I want to work from and I'll be building that colony up-- a couple breeders. It depends how many frames they're going to need. I'll build that one. I'll build that up.

You need obviously to pull the queen out in advance at the right time and then do the notching, and off you go. There's a bit of timing in it and that sort of stuff, but it works out fairly consistently. What I have done then is, depending, I'll sometimes put-- I overwinter multiple queens. I can have two or three queens on one box. It'd be two or three supers with a crown board, a sealed crown board between each of them. The only catch is the entrances have to be at different directions. They'll overwinter much better than if they were on their own, because they're able to keep each other warm, and they do well.

I'll also, in the springtime, if I had lots of queen cells, what I might do is have one super, a queen excluder, one super, a queen excluder, another super, and let them with differentials again. I'll definitely get one in the top and the bottom. Sometimes I'll get all three, and that works out well too. I don't have to worry then about, did they-- Especially if I'm going to be away for a while, don't worry about, oh, are we going to have a lane worker or something like that in one the boxes or that, because they'll take up the slack? The queen stays between them, they'll fill up with honey.

Becky: When you are doing, especially, let's talk about in the summer, when you're doing multiple queens in the same stack, are you starting with queens or raising those queens in the different boxes?

Dara: You can do either. Raising queens, putting in queen cells, I do-- I find if I put in, for instance, three boxes, generally at the top and bottom box, the middle one won't get made or gets killed, or something. I'm not sure. Sometimes it will. Thinking of, I have spare queen cell. I'll just put it in and see what happens, and it's maybe 50-50. That works out great. It's known that basically if you have multiple queens in one area and they're not killing each other, that there's more queen pheromone and the bees get way more active and way more productive.

That helps. Also the heat as well, because there's more bees in one box. What I have done as well is I've merged existing queens, made of queens, into one box. I've done it with two queens, I've done it with three queens. The newspaper method works. You put them in. Very quickly they get established, and they become extremely super productive. They're generally a bit more aggressive, and they're hard to manage, so I don't do it anymore, but you certainly can do it. It's fun to do just to see how quickly they grow and bring in honey. It's quite fun.

Becky: With that one, you're saying no queen excluders in-between?

Dara: I have a queen excluder between them as well. Yes, I do.

Becky: Newspaper?

Dara: Newspaper just initially, yes. Just initially.

Becky: Initially. The queens are operating in their separate locations.

Dara: Yes, exactly, but on top of each other basically.

Jeff: Just a single queen excluder, or do you use a double queen excluder?

Dara: A single. The key there is that the colonies have to be around the same strength. If one is a lot weaker, that one will be gone. I don't know if it's because more bees are surrounding her and protecting her or what it is, but it's interesting. They have to be around the same strength.

Becky: Do you mark your queens, so you know who's who?

Dara: Yes, I mark my queens. I've stopped clipping them recently. I read that bees feel pain if their wings are cut, so it just put me off it. It doesn't really offer a huge amount anyway, and it's way more hassle too, so I just figure I'm just going to stop doing it. Yes, I do mark them with the colors for the years or whatever.

Becky: Here's the big question. How long have you seen your queens live?

Dara: I've regularly had 5-year-old queens.

[laughter]

Becky: That's amazing. That's just so amazing.

Dara: Something today about, it'd be great to get to queen last two years in the US.

Becky: Oh, yes.

Dara: That's nuts.

Becky: I just love everything you're saying because your beekeeping style is done with such an understanding of the bee biology. Whatever you're asking the bees to do is either because you understand their biology or because you're taking advantage of the fact that this is what they will do or their limits. To be able to have that system and then also have such healthy bees, that's just-- it's so exciting.

Dara: What happens? Do you guys bring over queens from Australia and stuff? Do they last longer? Is it the bee or the environment? Is what I'm trying to--

Becky: I think the sperm is being brought over right now.

Dara: I don't think you're [crosstalk].

Becky: I don't know that-- I think that in order to get different genetics here, I think that it has to be collected from the drones. I think. I'm not the person to answer, but I know that--

Dara: I know definitely Canada brings over bees from Australia-

Becky: Are they able to?

Dara: -and from you guys.

Jeff: Canada.

Dara: I thought, be really interesting to see are there other-- The queen longevity internationally.

Becky: I picked up a European publication that was in-- I want to say, four or five years ago that even said it's not just the US but it's all over the world where especially commercial operations, who they're heavily focused on management, they are actively re-queening yearly because of queen issues and preventing queen issues. One of the big issues that we're having in the United States would be supersedure.

It's tricky because, I don't know what the pesticides are like in Ireland, but we've got some great agricultural pesticides that are used very widely. There are a lot of different issues that can be tied in with supersedure. It'd be very interesting, but just to hear that we always tell people the lifespan is three to four years. It's tricky. I don't think we should be telling beekeepers in the US to expect them to live that long.

Dara: I'm actually fascinated that someone hasn't done work on this. Be easy enough to pick some sort of nature reserve and bees are there, they are exposed to pesticides, and then to bring in a queen from somewhere else and see what happens. There must be easy enough ways to figure out which is-- maybe it's everything, but is it one thing? We definitely don't use the neo nucs as much.

Jeff: I think the first challenge is finding that isolated location.

Becky: It's got to be harder to bring in any kind of a queen now with Tropilaelaps. I'm surprised if we're still bringing them in.

Dara: I don't think we're bringing in actual queens.

Jeff: I'm sorry to be the party pooper here, but this is--

Becky: No.

Jeff: Yes. Every party needs a--

Becky: No.

Jeff: Dara, it's been fascinating, nearly an hour with you. Obviously we could keep going. Is there anything that you'd like to say in closing? We've covered so much space, and it'd be hard to wrap it up, but I'll give you the final word here because we do have to shut it down here.

Dara: As I think about, there should be more international conversations with beekeepers. I think there'd be a lot of learning there.

Becky: Low-hanging fruit as far as let's figure out why we're struggling and others are succeeding.

Dara: Vice versa. You guys are more productive. Maybe there's something that you guys do that we don't do and stuff like that, so there's definitely--

Jeff: Dara, thank you so much for joining us today, coming back. It's been great having you on.

Dara: Lovely. As always.

Becky: Thank you, Dara.

[music]

Jeff: I really enjoyed having Dara on the show talking about, I don't know, it just seems so foreign. Oh, wait, it is Ireland, but it seems all so foreign. It's really enjoyable.

Becky: I love it that it's beekeeping but different. I don't know. I learned stuff, and I'm really excited. That was just an excellent conversation.

Jeff: We look forward to talking to Dara. We saw him at Navi. We talked to him last fall. He's become a regular on the show, which is-- we appreciate. We like it.

Becky: Can't wait to have him back sometime.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books, for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[music]

[00:59:30] [END OF AUDIO]