A year on from day-one in the family beekeeping business in Bay of Plenty, Aimz reflects on having gone full circle as a full-time beekeeper for the first time.
If you asked my girls how life was right now, they’d tell you it was pretty sweet.
The honey season.
Right back where I started my beekeeping intro – the year has flown by.
Welcome to the New Year. The bee jobs are caught up on for the mean-time and I have enjoyed a well needed break, with a few days off over the silly season.
Christmas came early with a cracker pre-season honey crop. Having so much brood and hives around, our usual pollination racket has seen us up to our armpits in the sticky stuff. Our target harvest is yet to begin, but I have done hard time in the extracting room, barred from the outdoors by thousands of frames of honey.
It’s a toss-up between that, or bee-ing in a bee-suit. Beaten by the sun and drowning in sweat. I think my favourite beekeeping season may be winter. Crisp mornings and handfuls of bees, not crispy skin and sky-scraping towers of bees. Cruisy feed runs a distant memory as we plough into summer.
Saturated with smoke and stings, this time around I have climbed the ladder from honey box runner and stacker to (almost) chief disease inspector as the honey is being taken off.
Earlier in the year I attended and passed an AFB recognition course. At about this time we were fortunate enough to find a clinical case on one of our sites (incidentally, it was the same hive that had been tampered with by thieves some months back). I say fortunate, as our company had not had AFB detected in the last five years or so, and real-life training goes deep.
After destroying the first AFB hive, we found it also present in the next-door hive, so another fire ensued. It was pretty exciting to me, going through the site as foulbrood detectives and a couple of weeks down the track I was able to identify on the site, two more diseased hives from single-cell infections on frames full of brood.
Right from the beginning, my dad was cool as a cucumber. AFB does not faze him. As he told me, “We’ve had it before - we manage it and move on”. The disease is an almost unavoidable part of the industry. By keeping good hive hygiene and swiftly imposing seek and destroy orders, AFB is controllable for most beekeepers. Using every opportunity when in a hive to quickly inspect brood is a definite shortcut in the identification and management of American foulbrood before it spreads too far.
Fast forward months down the track and this site is to all appearances AFB-free, although honey testing will tell, rather soon, whether it has all been picked up in the preliminary stages. Instant AFB test kits have been a new addition we tried this year, a helpful tool if you can’t visually, positively identify a suspect cell. Positive AFB results appeared in the window within a minute or two. Very reminiscent of pregnancy tests – a line is a line, it doesn’t matter how faint.
As timelines progress, and as needed, we are looking toward the Foster Method, a qPCR test capable of detecting AFB before symptoms become visible, or in a hive with no brood. There is beauty in a composite swab test that can give an indication of an apiary site’s AFB load without even cracking a lid.
Clever idea. Another of those we intend to try this year is the oxalic acid vaporizer for varroa control. A quick blast in the front of the hive sounds too easy. Alternating ‘OA’ with our existing organic and chemical mite applications will help to resist resistance in the mighty mite fight.
Something different we started trialling earlier in the year is Micromed probiotic spray, as an alternative treatment for chalkbrood, and general colony health. Specifically targeting chalkbrood affected hives, initial results seem promising. Treated hives became strong and healthy, and with the colony increase they kicked out the chalkbrood as is (usually) to be expected going into the warmer months. Because the honey boxes are stacking, we are no longer going through the brood nests routinely, but hive trials will recommence when the cooler weather comes, along with other winter stressors that allow the fungal spores to proliferate within the gut of the bees.
Winter – a world away. For now the relentless hours and physical labour has been keeping me out of trouble. Some mornings I recall that line from Men-in-Black, about the ‘last suit you’ll ever wear’ except I had to change clothes, or I wouldn’t have been allowed into the RSA for our work break-up.
My family seams are pulling together, and I have been working some days alongside my brothers, good men and excellent beekeepers, who, after some soul searching, have come to realise we are bound by blood and honey, and life is what you make it.
So, let’s make a go of it in 2025. Let’s take a lesson from the bees and stick together, like a hive gummed up with propolis. Directed energy into something greater than ourselves is a means to grow and I am up for the challenge.
Wishing you all prosperity and good health,
Aimz
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