Old new equipment

This is an old bear damaged hive body.  It took a hit from a bear long ago in Amherst. It hung around the apirary mostly as a place to store old frames and whatnot. After all my bees came through winter looking strong it became apparent I would need a lot of equipment come split season.  

People have many strategies for preventing swarms and mine is to split the bees in a way that replicates a natural swarm but on my terms.  It happens where and when I want and the bees wind up where I choose. It's a great technique but it also means that I need a lot of equipment, albeit temporarily, to house those bees. To that end I repaired this old hive body. 

There's a lot of skills in beekeeping but a really basic one is planning.  That's all this is, just planning. Have equipment before you need it.  You can order a ready hive body to be at your apiary in a hour. You can read all the theory in the world, and even be a dab hand in the yard but without the resources you need in place when you need them it doesn't do any good.

Counting bees at the hive entrance.

I made a few quick videos to show how I count bees to gauge hive strength, the time or the total number of the count doesn't matter but the cadence does. Sometimes, I do not even count out loud.  When you start to trip over your own tongue that means you have a very strong hive and should worry about splitting. When you absolutely cannot keep count with landing bees you hive will almost surely swarm. 

This hive is moderately strong and will likely need swarm prevention, splitting in my case, sometime in late April or May.  

Here's a video of a double nuc that came from a late September swarm.  I housed it and didn't think much of it.  The hive even full over in the winter but still survived. This hive is less strong than the other one but still OK.  Counting landings means that you can gauge strength that might otherwise be masked by different entrances or landing boards.  It's a simple quantitative measure. 

All my hives use these same red hive entrance reducers which are supposed to reduce small hive beetle, and they may or may not, but it does take the bees around an hour to learn them and I think this also helps stop robbing. When these entrances clog up with returning bees on a honey flow the hive must absolutely be split. 

In this last video you can see bees entering a moderately strong hive but they're all going in on the left side. They're brining in a lot of pollen and the pollen sources look fairly diverse. What stands out to me is that almost all the activity is on the right side of the hive.  To me, that means I will find the brood nest there so I probably want to pull frames from the left side of the hive to open that up so that I am not pulling frames of eggs, brood, or the queen up and possibly rolling the queen. Seeing this imbalance influences where I will stand and start an inspection. 

Overall, I am trying to do less invasive inspections where the hive is opened up and bees are smoked. I am trying to learn more from external observation.  Take time out before you open a hive for observation, just look at the hive and don't be in a run.  Imagine what you'll see inside.  In time you will be able to look at a hive and have a pretty good idea what' going on inside without opening it up. My goal is to stop needlessly opening hives and disrupting their lives. Stop breaking their propolis seal and let them be bees.  I also don't have endless time.  So, a less intervention approach can benefit both me and the bees. 

100% winter survival.

 

100% of our bees made it through winter.  Commercial operations nationally lost over 50% nationally.  In my mind, anyways, this is a bigger deal than 'colony collapse' from 20 years ago.  Now, nobody cares. There's such a shit show in Washington right now that nobody can pay attention.  The government will not respond. 

You can see our bees here photographed on March 4th.  We're using a clear plastic cover now so we can observe them without disturbance. 

Siberian squill

Siberian squill is a garden plant run wild.  You'll find it up by Capen Garden at Smith and around Round Hill Road.  It's also on State street. it's an invasive that you'll find nodding its head in the shade.  It's a demure little flower that you might not notice and it's far prettier up close. 

It's around at a time of year when we're not looking for flowers but bees are. Big daffodils hog the attention and snowdrops too, but squill is there, pretty and quiet in the shade. It's the only blue flower I know of that also makes blue pollen.

Squill is out at the same time as the mat green maple pollen and it's often too cold for bees to fly when it's here.  There must be thousands of times more maple trees but the bees faithfully bring in quite a lot of squill so they must like it. 

 When bees bring in squill they can build up strong before dandelion and fruit trees hit and they can field more bees for those crops.  Squill and maple are a big boost early int eh season when bees have neither resources or numbers. It's an auspicious start to the season.

We're back, again.

It's been a while since Northampton Honey produced any honey to sell.  My work situation changed and it was no longer practical to try an keep bees for honey production.  I wound up working more than I did when we started Northampton Honey. The trees grew up in our yard and made it too shady for bees. 

There were a couple of false starts along the way. We wound up owning a little vacant lot after we bought and dissembled a warehouse there, giving the parts to Habitat for Humanity.  We also remediated an oil spill too, cleaning up the land.  We've now planted it in clover to enrich the neglected soil.  It seemed only natural to bring back bees as well. 

We've had bees there since last spring, and they're doing great.  We hope this year we can extract a bit of honey for friends, family and for some for sale on a very small scale. 

There's a lot of changes that are happening in our beekeeping, all for the better.  One is that our bees will reside in boxes made by Union Bee Company next year. These boxes have roughened insides that would be more like a natural tree.  This causes bees to deposit propolis there.  This is sap they've collected from tree wounds.  It's naturally antibiotic and antiviral because trees use that special sap to heal wounds. 

This acts as a kind of shell that protects the bees. It's the first line of defense. Our smooth hives don't encourage this behavior and this makes bees vulnerable. 

Union Bee Company is a little company round an hour away.  He's a small time bee keeper and woodworker.  The wood for the hives is locally sourced and milled by him right into the hives and woodenware he sells. He's clearly thinking about how to make a better product with every product he sells. 

Because he keeps bees himself there's a level of practicality in figuring out what makes things better is a meaningful way. He said he made 500 top bars, part of a frame that holds comb for bees, before he was satisfied that he'd gotten it correct. 

Northampton Honey is coming back as something that is better than it was and I think sourcing product from small makers like this makes us better.

 

This year's bees look as good at this time of year as I have ever seen bees look. I've been taking a lot of these slow motion videos because it helps me understand just how fast the bees move.  They're actually a bit bumbly in flight, more like zeppelins than jets. 

We now have been on our vacant lot and may soon have some in Florence again.  We didn't really have great spaces for a bee yard but that's changed. My friend Kari kept bees through what I think of as the dark times.  Mites were super bad when we stopped.  The best treatment was Mite Away Quick Strips but it was awful.  It was as likely to kill your bees as it was to do in the mites.  I've been following Kari lead and I am optimistic that one can again keep bees successfully. 

What makes a good bee?

 In the beekeeping world you'll see a lot of emphasis on pedigree bees. I suppose this is a lot like the dog world or the horse world or the British royalty.  The headlines didn't say "rich old lady dies" they said the Queen is dead. They said that Charles will succeed her, as if just showing up and claiming the riches is success. 

I've toyed around with pedigree bees having had most of the major lines, and even Buckfast bees, so rare they're bred on remote islands to preserve their genetics. You also hear a lot about 'northern queens' which is a more generic term for bees that come from the north, like New England or Idaho, I would imagine.  

I'm less skeptical of northern queens than I am of pedigree, because it just seems to mean bees that have survived the winter. That's good for us, because we have a winter. 

Over the years I've become more and more enamored of swarm queens. What this really comes down to is nature over nurture. Most queen bees that you can get commercially are raised in a kind of farming fashion. 

The bees are made to raise many queens at once in a small box called a nuc. They do all right and the queens from this process can be good. 

My problem with it is that it's not how the bees would go about doing it.  In an what I am going to call an 'abundance swarm' the bees have survived the winter and charge ahead raising queens and getting ready to swarm.  The hive is literally abuzz with activity.  In the preceding weeks before the swarm this hive and all the other strong hives locally have been launching drones into the air in preparation. 

A complex reaction of pheromones and activity mean the whole hive of tens of thousands of bees, maybe 40-50,000 bees kicks into gear to raise perhaps a dozen queens. Everything that happens is a result of surplus. 

Like a rich household everything is supplied to these queens in abundance.  The bees that supply the queen with royal jelly are young bees with special glands developed to this task. In an abundance swarm these bees will number in the thousands, they will be just the right age, they will be optimally fed. Every bee along the way in that queens development, and there are many hundreds, is primed and ready for the job. 

When that queen emerges to go on her mating flight she will first murder every possible usurper to the throne before she takes to the air. It's hard to overstate the savageness and power of a swarm raised queen. 

A swarm raised queen is by definition of northern queen that has survived the winter. She's got the lineage of a hive that was strong enough in spring to produce in abundance. This is before she even launches into the air. 

When she goes on her mating flight she takes to the air and flies into a sea of drones from all the most powerful neighboring hives.  The other hives that survived winter in enough abundance to make useless drones who do no work and gather no nectar. 

What's more these drones are rich and varied.  The queen will mate with many to get enough seamen to lay the hundreds of thousands of bees she'll lay in her life. Like a litter of multicolored kittens these bees will have many fathers.  In my own bees now I can see the variation, bees both dark and like, orange and yellow. 

It's said a swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.  This was because the later the swarm came the harder it would be for them to become strong enough to survive winter.  

I see that children's rhyme a bit different, linked to the value of a swarm queen.  That May swarm queen will fly into the densest population of drones from the strongest hives in the region. In June this is probably still mostly true. But those drones will be mixed with package bees that came in from the south.  By July she'll be mating with the results of disaster swarms too, were hives just pump put drones as a last chance cheap chance to procreate. These will mostly be package bees from the south that first year beekeepers got in killed straight away 

This genetic variance from successful mating is shown to keep the hive strong.  Like a town of people it takes all types. The variation probably helps the bees fight off disease because not every bee is the same.  They're not a monocrop. Yes, give me a swarm queen every time.

We started using a method called the Tranov method. This method does a lot of things but, in theory, it can cause the bees to swarm into the object of my choice.

This method is hard.  As shown here it's easy to mess up and not have a swarm queen but just have a swarm and lose half your bees, your best bees and have the whole hive set back weeks

The trickier part of Taranov is timing it right to prevent the swarm from happening. Someday I will be able to time this accurately and everyone will think I am a genius. Until then I will keep trying. 

I think that to large part people project onto bees their own prejudice. There's a broad divide between the survivalist, right wing beekeepers and the left wing hippies. They have their own take on what works and why. Not ever one for pedigree or respecting one's betters I think I am naturally predisposed to the wild, promiscuous mutt queens.  Honestly, how can you not be under the spell of the wild, promiscuous mutt queen? 

October bees, the start of winter.

 

Here's a video I took with a cheap endoscope of bees clustered inside the hive entrance on a cool day.  The left side of the hive is blocked off because the weather has turned colder and the bees don't need as much room to come and go.  This hive is strong but it's also peak robbing season and I have seen some fighting on the landing board so, just to keep things civil the entrance has been reduced by about half. 

I really hadn't expected to see this when I peered in there.  It's not like the weather is super cold, but it's cold enough to cause these bees to cluster or beard.  I can only guess that these bees are here to block drafts from entering the hive. 

I've spent a lot of time observing in both the conventional and unconventional ways with cameras, sensors and my own senses. This gives me some insight that maybe bees don't really require extreme temperatures to start thermoregulating in complex ways. 

It seems that right now the bees are well past producing summer bees and closing down on the production of winter bees.  These kinds of superbees will live many times as long as summer bees and be able to use fat as a fuel. This is required to raise the new bees in the darkest and coldest winter that will emerge into the spring to forage for nectar. 

In a week or two, by halloween for sure, the production of brood will stop completely. The bees will forage a bit but not for the most part they're closing down. They look good, largely pest free, and well set up to survive the winter.  The next big milestone is dandelions.  If this hive lives to see dandelions there spring experiment when they swarmed out of their hive will be successful.  This two year old queen who will have laid hundreds of thousands of eggs from a single mating flight will have won.

I love a swarm hive more than any other kind.  They're mutts, they're fighters, they're optimists. Who could not love that.  

We Don't Sell Marijuana.

If you're looking for marijuana it's not here. Marijuana is wind pollenated. Bees have zero interest in it.  Pretty funny that a dispensary is our name reversed but with 14 of them in town it was bound to happen eventually. 

By the way: Northampton Honey is an Apiary masquerading as an art project masquerading as a business. You can rearrange those parts, apiary, business and art project any way you want and it still makes about as much sense.  We just like keeping bees and having fun with it. 

Sensors Galore, but what does it mean?

 

The is a photo of our beehive.  We used to have 30 hives, now we have just this one.  The problem with 30 hives is that you can't really keep on top of them with a full time job.  They get killed by mites, swarm, go into winter too weak and die. So, we quit keeping bees. 

Now we just have the one hive and I keep keep on top of it pretty well. You'll note the two solar panels in the side.  These are the power supply for Wyze Outdoor Cameras. 

These cameras let us keep an eye on two things, one is how the bees are feeding inside the hive. Winter is coming and we had a pretty severe drought around here. The whole second half of the season was too dry.  There were flowers but mostly with very weak nectar and pollen. The hive made bees but never really stored honey or pollen. So we had to feed them. 

This photo is a still from the video feed from inside the hive. The tank at the center is sugar water. The powder in the dish on the right is dry pollen substitute. The yellow container on the right contains dry pollen substitute mixed with sugar syrup. 

The bees will almost always take sugar syrup but are less interested in it when there's a good nectar flow on.  These bees are very interested in this syrup even though at the time of the photo the best nectar flow of the year was on, goldenrod. 

In the upper right had corner of the photo you will see a small white box.  That's a Bluetooth temperature, humidity sensor.  Using that I can tell how warm the bees are keeping this part of the hive compared to the brood nest and the outdoors. I can see if the bees feed in cold.  So far I have seen that in cooler temperatures the bees seem to plug the hole to the brood chamber at night. They're insulating that interior of the hive with their bodies. 

We also have three Broodminder sensors in the hive.  These sensors measure the weight of the hive, the temperature of the brood nest, where the bees raise their young, and the humidity in the hive along with the outdoor temperature.  The line at the top is the overall hive weight of about 170 lbs. You can see little spikes on it where I've added feed.  

The most important part is the thin grey area in the middle.  That shows the temperature of the brood nest.  As long as the bees keep it between 92 and 98 the brood will survive. The bees keep the center of the hive, where the brood are at this temperature no matter if the temperature outside is 100 or if it goes down to 30 degrees. Since they start raising brood just after New Year's Day around here that outside number might me minus 10.  They'd have to lift that temp 105 degrees, insulating with their bodies and shivering to keep warm. 

 Here, above, you can see these bees are keeping the temp in the center of the zone with variance by less than a degree despite the outside temperature fluctuations.  These sensors read down to the 10th of a degree accurately.  Note the outside temperature goes up and down. 

On this hive we have one scale, two cameras, three temperature sensors and two humidity sensors?  That six sensors.  I started keeping bees 15 years ago, we've had up to 30 hives. I've had plenty of chances to observe bees. 

Still, after all this they're a mystery to me, more so now maybe then when they when I started.  I know more than ever how little I know.  

I kept chickens before I had bees.  Chickens have two arms, two legs and a head.  They're basically like us.  A beehive is a superorganism.  I stopped long ago thinking of it as made of individuals. I hive, the whole of it, the wax, the bacteria, the bees in all their casts are one body that blows up every warm sunny day and spreads itself out over 20 or 30 square miles.  It thinks with 60,000 minds that communicate with dance, vibration, pheromone, and sound.   

Right now these bees are raising "winter bees".  These bees have a switch flipped in them that allows them to store energy as fat. It also makes the bee more durable to last the winter.  Summer bees are like cars.  If they run out of gas (sugar) they die.  The beat themselves to death flying to flowers and dodging raindrops. They're expendable. The the nature of the hive is change now, change to a winter life where they line between success and failure is death for the whole superorganism, not just one bee. 

That's why fall is the start of the new year.  It's the plan, the change, for winter. 

Where these bees came from I have no idea, but they survived. They prospered enough to split and land in my yard. They took the risk that they would be able to divide their resources and come out of summer strong enough to make it though winter again.  

Bees now fight pests imported here from around the world.  Mites from Siberia, beetles from Africa, virus from everywhere. They live in a world with more drought and more rain too. We're in this together the bees and us. In return for my care they provide endless fascination. 

The Bees Came Back

 

We're keeping bees again after a long time off.  Work and life just made it too hard to keep bees for a while. Then, this spring, a swarm landed in some old equipment we had and suddenly we were beekeepers again.  The equipment was in a horrible state with wax moth, mold, and mouse damage but the bees cleaned it up. It was shocking, really. 

It was like they bought a fixer upper and really went to town, all marble countertops and prosumer appliances. I'd have never put bees on that equipment in a million years. Still, with some help, they thrived.  I've never seen such good bees.  The docile, not prone to fight, the queen lays in a really nice pattern. 

I should have paid more attention to them in the drought but they came late, being a swarm, and I had to move them to a friend's property for a bit.  Out of sight out of mind as they say. Still they soldiered on and look like one of the best colonies I've seen. 

I was lucky enough to keep bees with Ross Conrad in Vermont this summer for a day.  I learned quite a few things about mite treatment and where it's come since we stopped.  Ross was just also a fantastic bee keeper, so smooth and efficient.  Keeping with him really lit the fire again. You wouldn't think beekeeping could be like athletics or dance but it is.  When you see someone really good at anything it's just graceful. 

Anyway, these bees seem to be in great health.  I enjoy them roaring away in the evenings with that stinky sock smell that only comes from goldenrod nectar. They seem to me like one of the strongest hives in September I can recall. Maybe I'm just misty eyed about them.  

Next year we'll be a real apiary again, with a few hives at least. And these bees, yes, they really do roar at night. 

Strong Bees in July.

This is what the landing board of a strong hive looks like in July.   These bees were split in mid June by the Taranov method and are now undergoing treatment for mites.   Were using a treatment certified organic in New Zealand as there is not certification for organic aracnoides in bees anyplace else in the world but this may be our last chemical treatment of any type as we're moving to a heat based treatment. Mites die at 104 degrees and bees and larvae at 126.  Anyhow these bees look very strong, the aroma of honey is in the air.  They're flying purposefully and are docile. Their daughter colony is doing wonderfully in Florence.  It's all you could ask of a hive.  

Frame repair

Here's a great example of recycling.  The bees did a super job of rehabbing old comb.  What a difference two months makes! The work on this frame of honey represents about 300,000 miles of bee flight. 

New Hive Bodies (where the bees live) and supers (where they store honey) painted and ready for the bee yard! 

We're Back!

Northampton Honey took a little time off.  When we started the business it was because we both loved beekeeping.  Priscilla worked half time and Adam 22 hours a week. At our peak we had 30 beehives. 

As both of our jobs became more demanding and full time beekeeping just became more work. We made honey but we sort of fell out of love with the bee yard. 

Now, a shocking six years, later we're keeping bees again because we love to. Nobody follows the season like a beekeeper, except perhaps a farmer. To love bees is to love flowers and to know how much rain you've had or how many good flying days the bee have had recently. 

We now have 2 or 4 hives depending on how you look at it.  These are heavily managed hives that put the health of bees before anything. 

Now when we light a smoker and pick up a hive tool and walk to the bees it's with joy again.   The good news is the bees look better than ever.  We should have honey later this year. 

Northampton honey took a little nap and woke up happy. 

New jars celebrate rail's return to Northampton

It's been a really long time since we've posted to this blog! We're getting ready to release our 2014 summer harvest, finally. Since both Priscilla and I are so excited about the return of rail to Northampton and because I, Adam, serve on the Northampton Rail Committee  we've decided to release our harvest in jars commemorative of the return of rail service.

In years past our jars have been stenciled with either 01060 or 01062 (the zip codes of our bee yards) but this year since rail returned to Northampton December 29th we've decided to stenciled NHT--the name of our new rail stop.

It's still the same honey and it still comes from our hives situated either in downtown Northampton or near the old State Hospital.

We hope to have jars at River Valley Market around the new year.

UPDATE: Looks like we'll be bringing the honey to market over the MLK weekend...

Honey Harvest June 9 and 10!

We've had a crazy spring with warm weather starting in March and then cool rain after the warm snap.  I didn't really quite know what to make of it all but I guess the bees did. We have hives heavy with honey already and will do a small but significant harvest this coming weekend.

The honey will be somewhat unusual as normally we'd not harvest until at least July, when clover and basswood would be present and contributing factors in the honey. The honey we take in this weekend will really be spring honey with fruit tree blossom and dandelion being important nectar providers to it.

Expect honey at River Valley Market in a week or two. It'll be a special but small run of unique honey, only from an oddball year like this.

Queenspotting after Brunch

We had a busy day at the apiary last Sunday. We had a visit from friend Hillary Price. We'd post a picture of her here, but everyone looks pretty much the same when their photo is take in a bee veil. We took her over to the yard and we poked around in some hives.

I cannot really imagine what it's like to look into a bee hive for the first time. They're so strange. Anyhow, we had a nice brunch with friends and then did some beekeeping.

Later on Rick Intres from Bear Meadow Apiary stopped by to help us beekeep. We know Rick from the Franklin County Beekeepers. He's very knowledgeable about bees and kindly offered to come by and show us a few tricks.

The early spring has lead to record large hives for this time of year. It's great for taking advantage of nectar, but can very easily lead to swarming, so we had to take action. We set about finding the queen bees in the hives. Can you spot her in the photo above?

It may seem easy there, but in a hive of 30,000 bees it's not easy. Rick showed us tricks that help him locate her. We then moved each queen we found to another part of the hive where she'd be less crowded and have more room to lay eggs. We spent about 6 hours in the hives. If things work out it could be a record year for us, but the swarm impulse will be intense.

This year we're inviting many experienced beekeepers to visit us in the hopes of learning a lot and sharing what we know. Nothing beats really seeing what others are doing that makes their practice special.

We also gave Rick a small colony with a queen from one of our best colonies. We're hoping he'll do well with her too. In this way we preserve and spread the best genetics to deal with the complex and harsh challenges bees face. Think of this practice as being a lot like seed sharing. Beekeepers can't compete and hope to survive; we cooperate.

Add to the list of challenges that bees face a newly emerging disease, Nosema Cerene. Most beekeepers know Nosema Apis pretty well as bee dysentery. This "new" nosema was formerly a bee disease from a social bee found in northern India. Now thanks to globalization it's here too. It's a likely contributor to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), and we're trying a new fix against it. It's the extract from the bark of a tree found in Czechoslovakia. Nosema is a fungus, and trees have to fight off fungal infections all the time. The first line of defense is their bark. Make sense?

Lastly, there's been a lot of news lately about neonicitinoids killing off bees. Everyone is looking for the magic bullet that'll stop CCD but IMHO there is no magic bullet. CCD has many causes, not the least of which is how we live. Sure, neonics are probably not helping anything, but neiter is nosema cerene. I'm not sure what will stop it, or if anything ever will. In a small stand against it all we gave away a queen from our best colony to a friend.

She's been a strong girl that came to us through a swarm I captured in Florence. She was strong enough to fly away and try and make it on her own. She did this in a world with Nosema Cerene, neonics, varroa destructor and crazy weather.

Good luck with your queen Rick. She's the future, part of the one I want to live in anyhow.

Spring comes to Northampton

Spring comes to Northampton to find us with 18/20 hives surviving the winter. Some called this the winter that wasn't, but even this comes with problems. Some people have hives starve because the bees tried to maintain brood all winter and used up stores at a very fast rate. Others are reporting high mite levels due to strong and early growth of brood.

I've seen drone comb in our hives already. This year is historic; old timers say they've never seen anything like this. Our peaches and stone fruit are in bloom-- nectarines are seen above. Oddly we had a huge honey run with bees flying to maple and willow the week of the 70 degree temps in early March. But now the fruit trees have blossomed early and it's gone back to being too cool to fly. It's all so confusing.

Still, our girls came through winter with flying colors (yellow and black)! The bee here was likely born in October or November. She is different than the bees born earlier that year--a special bee designed to carry the hive through the long winter, keep the nest warm to 95 degrees when the queen starts laying, and to then forage in the spring. In bee years she's 3 hundred years old. Normal summer bees live about 6 weeks; she's probably five or six months old.


We also let the bees recycle some wax from last years honey harvest and they made these odd top entrances to their hives. The look like little space towers designed by some 1970s futurist architect from Sweden or Turkey. Here bees are seen boiling out of their little strange door, I guess thinking their weird bee invertebrate thoughts.




As we pick up tools we've not taken to hand in the better part of six months it's hard to not think we've entered some strange new world where it's almost 80 degrees for a week in early March. I was talking over the fence with our neighbor Pam and she commented that her toddler son Gavriel was inheriting an uncertain future environmentally. Beekeeping has brought us closer to the world we live in, marking the temperature ever day and watching a very complex and incredibly old superorganism respond to those changes.

Once again I find myself grateful to have bees around, and to see a bit of the world through my relationship with them. I guess in return I'll do my best to hold up my end of the bargain and take good care of our girls.

Buckfast! The bees that Brother Adam made

In 2012 we're going to add to our bees with some very special new bees. These bees are Buckfast, a special kind of bee. The history is that in 1916 the bees in England were decimated by something called Isle of Wright disease. the beekeepers didn't understand what was killing the bees, but it killed nearly all of them. It turns out it was an imported mite, not unlike our current situation with the Varroa destructor mite, and not unlike our situation with colony collapse.

Nearly all the colonies were killed off but then a monk, Brother Adam, found a feral colony living and healthy. He returned these to the Buckfast Abby for breeding. Over the next 70 years years Brother Adam traveled through the Near East, Africa and Europe returning with the strongest bees he could find.

These bees represent the hope of a generation and a link to ancient monastic breeding programs. Today the bee is produced only by a few specialized breeders that keep Bother Adam's work alive, literally. Our Buckfast colonies are due to arrive in late April.