Honey Bee Update

By Keith Kimes, Kimes Apiary

Keith Kimes is a local beekeeper who keeps many of his hives on High Ground Organics’ two farm properties. We know that many of you are interested in the plight of honeybees worldwide, so we asked Keith for an update on his own efforts at limiting losses in his beehives.

Last week I harvested more honey from the hives at High Ground’s home farm along Harkins Slough. The Harkins Slough apiary has yielded over 500 pounds of honey this year–much more than I expected in this drought year! It is not as much as we want, but compared to last year, it is wonderful. The web store is now well stocked for those of you who want to order 1 lb or 2 lb jars.

The winter of 2014 and the beekeeping year of 2015 have been much better than the previous year. You may remember that over the winter of 2013, I lost about 80% of my bees, and the 2014 season was very poor for honey and pollen because of the severe drought and the limited number of surviving hives. It became apparent that I had to make some changes in hive management if I was to do more than catch new swarms every year and watch most of them die over the winter.

Varroa mite, a mite about the size of a pin head that lives off of bee blood, has been one of my major problems. With the mites also come a number of viral diseases that bring the hives to their knees. In 2014 I learned that a new mite treatment using formic acid had been developed and approved for use as an organic treatment. Formic acid, the same acid that gives ants their smell and spinach the slightly sour taste, is the only treatment available that can be applied while the hive is producing honey. Honey already has formic acid in it and the formic acid application does not change that value much. The acid vapor kills the mites, but it is also very hard on the bees so I closely monitor mite levels in the hives and treat with the formic acid only in those hives in which the mite population is critically high.

I also started a queen rearing program raising mite resistant queens as another cornerstone to my pest management program. The approach seems to be paying off and my overall winter losses were only 40% for 2014 compared to the 80% of 2013.

I have also found that in this drought, Harkins Slough is a much better place for the bees than Lewis Rd. The edges of the slough provide a lot of food sources for the bees through most of the year. I moved as many of the bees to Harkins Slough as I could last September. It has been very interesting to see the differences between the two locations. I only lost 26% of the hives at Harkins Slough while I lost 60% of the hives on Lewis Rd. We harvested very little honey on Lewis Road this year, having to leave what there was for the bees.

High Ground Organics maintains native habitat around both the Lewis and Harkins Slough farms, so they are blessed with a relative abundance of native pollinators. I see a lot of bumble bees and a number of different solitary bee species around their farms. This means that the honey bees are not essential for most of their crops. But the honeybees do help with the squash, fruit trees and blueberries, and they do visit the strawberries and some varieties of beans. Keeping bees at High Ground has allowed me to keep a lot more hives than I can keep at my own home on Lewis road, so I have been able to observe and learn much more about the bees than I would otherwise. It has also provided me the opportunity to do more extensive queen rearing to improve my stock of bees. I like to think that it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.