Posts By: Peter Brezny

Another article worth reading from Randy Oliver’s scientificbeekeeping.com: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/does-the-crushing-of-bees-affect-colony-health/   He poses the question, found in the URL above, “Since I couldn’t find a single controlled study in which the effects of the crushing of bees in the hive was clearly determined, I decided to use some of your donations to run a trial…”  and… Read more »

When French Beekeepers first saw evidence of insecticide poisoning immediately after the release of neonicotinoid insecticides in the 1990’s (what we now call CCD in the US), rumor has it that the beekeepers took their empty hives to Bayer Crop Science headquarters in Lyon, threw them over the locked gate, and set them on fire… Read more »

The take home message in the article linked below: “The finding that individual bees with undetectable levels of the target pesticide, after being reared in a sub-lethal pesticide environment within the colony, had higher Nosema is significant.” Pesticide exposure in honey bees results in increased levels of the gut pathogen Nosema http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-011-0881-1 Authors: Jeffery S. Pettis,  Dennis vanEngelsdorp, … Read more »

We’ve got one hive with a queen that’s not nearly as strong as we’d like–spotty brood pattern, no VHS traits, progeny susceptible to deformed wing virus, etc…  Sticking with our chemical free, strong genetics, beekeeping plan we’ve started rearing queens from our strongest hive to replace her, and get a few nuc’s going to over-winter… Read more »