September 21, 2021

How Low-Touch Beekeeping May Increase Honey Bee Survivorship

In Research 6 min. read

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Maximilian Cherney
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Special thanks to Jason Miller at Miller Honey Farms, and Randy Oliver at ScientificBeekeeping.com for their input. Phoebe Snyder and Maximilian Cherney also contributed greatly to this article.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of honey bee hives are trucked across North America, following the flowering of many kitchen staples. As commercial beekeepers are well aware, the travel required to pollinate these crops is very hard on the bees. Bees, and particularly queens, can become stressed during transportation due to changes in temperature, elevation, and humidity; and holding yards often promote the spread of disease, inter-yard robbing, colony drift, and poor hive nutrition.

Enter low-touch beekeeping. Pioneered by Jason Miller, Ryan Elison, and their team at Miller Honey Farms, “low-touch” refers to the number of times a hive is moved throughout the year. Low-touch beekeeping aims to get the bees where they need to go, while greatly reducing the number of stops in between.

Miller Honey Farms used to “touch” their hives, which they define as anytime a hive is transported on a truck, approximately thirteen to fifteen times a year. In addition to transporting the hives to pollination, a honey yard, and their indoor over-wintering facility; hives were also moved in and out of holding yards. Holding yards have long been an industry standard in commercial beekeeping, since they make transportation and caring for hives easier while travelling. The migratory pollination industry has integrated modern logistics principles similar to the airline industry’s “hub-and-spoke” model, using holding yards as the “hubs”. By using centralized locations to hold the hives, the benefits include less travel for the beekeeper and streamlined hive management. 

Miller Honey Farms has incorporated low-touch beekeeping principles, which replace the “hub-and-spoke” model with a “point-to-point” route, using precise logistics planning. The team is now down to only seven or eight movements a year, while almost eliminating their use of holding yards. The benefits they’ve observed so far include less broken equipment, lower queen mortality, and stronger bees.

Interested in learning more about low-touch beekeeping? The advantages are evident, but it does require advance planning and more in-depth management than relying on holding yards. Here are the benefits and some tips on planning your first low-touch journey! 

Benefits for the Bees - Less Loss of Foragers

Each time a hive is relocated, even if done carefully at night, there is an inevitable loss of foragers. Typically they require time and a consistent landmark to orient themselves to a new location. For foragers infested with mites, which is more likely if they’ve been kept in a holding yard, it’s even more difficult for the affected bees to orient themselves as mites can impair the homing ability of honeybees. Mites can also influence the flight behaviour of forager bees, to the extent that foragers with mites might not return to the hive, perhaps as an adaptive behaviour to remove parasites from the colony.

Randy Oliver, from ScientificBeekeeping.com, also does absolute minimal moving of his hives. He adds, “It’s not only the foragers, but in crowded apiaries, such as holding yards, there is a huge drift of nurse bees on their defecation flights. These nurses are the most highly-infested with mites, and readily accepted by guard bees.”

Low-touch beekeeping reduces the opportunities where a forager could become lost, leading to stronger hives.

Benefits for the Bees - Less Time Spent in Holding Yards

The main way Miller Honey Farms was able to reduce the number of times their bees were moved was by eliminating visits to holding yards. “We used to do a lot of manipulation in holding yards. We still do a bit, but for the most part, we’ve pivoted away from this model and focused on strategies that get bees to their end destination asap,” Jason Miller said.

Holding yards are tough on bees for a variety of reasons. Because there are so many bees in the same area, and the environment surrounding the holding yards tend to be poor in forage, bee nutrition is generally quite poor. The high concentration and inevitable mixing of bees from different colonies means that holding yards are also perfect for spreading disease and pests such as varroa and foul brood. When temperatures are high and forage is scarce, holding yards often become a ‘robbing frenzy’ as stronger hives pillage the honey stores of weaker hives. Finally, holding yards lack the physical landmarks bees use to orient themselves leading to increased ‘hive drift’, generally to the hives around the perimeter of the holding yard. 

Benefits for the Bees - Reduced Queen Stress and Lower Queen Mortality

Miller has consistently observed that whenever a group of hives are transported, around 2-4% of the queens fail shortly thereafter. This queen loss often doesn’t show up immediately, but rather over time as hives are discovered to be queenless or superseding. Jason believes this is, “one of the phantom culprits to the high queen mortality frequently observed in commercial beekeeping.”

Benefits for the Beekeeper - Improved Overwintering Success

One of the conveniences of holding yards is that it’s easy and fast to treat and feed multiple colonies at once. Miller Honey Farms has made low-touch beekeeping successful for their bees and operation through precision planning and an optimized team workflow. The additional time it takes to work hives that are more spread out in the pollination/honey yards are worth it when they sit down to look at their overwinter hive mortality numbers. Along with other management changes low touch beekeeping has helped Millers consistently increase their winter hive survivorship to over 90%.

Benefits for the Beekeeper - Less Broken Equipment

After transitioning to low touch beekeeping, Miller Honey Farms has also reduced their costs related to broken equipment (including pallets, covers, etc.). Since the hives are being transported less, woodenware is lasting far longer and remains in better overall condition. 

Tip - The Key to Low-Touch Beekeeping is Planning. 

Prior to the start of the season you can sit down, plan your route and look for ways to eliminate or cut down on holding yard visits. If you’re bringing your bees to pollination prior to bloom, you’ll want to be prepared to do some extra feeding and increase the spread of your teams of workers. Many commercial beekeepers also use record-keeping technology to streamline the planning and management of their operations. 

Nectar’s BeeTrack app is optimized to help commercial beekeepers evaluate any of their inputs, and its effects on the bees. Beetrack combines GPS technology with QR code tags, a mobile app, and the manager’s portal; to show the history of your hives including past locations, feeding, and treatment. BeeTrack can help streamline the complicated logistics of commercial beekeeping, so you can focus on caring for your bees. Interested in learning more about BeeTrack? Click here to view a product demo and contact one of our experts.
 

References

  1. D Melicher et al, 2019, “Long-Distance Transportation Causes Temperature Stress in the Honey Bee”, https://academic.oup.com/ee/article/48/3/691/5423020
  2. P Hristov et al, 2020 - “Factors Associated with Honey Bee Colony Losses: A Mini-Review”, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7712510/
  3. J Kralj, 2006 - “Parasitic Varroa destructor mites influence flight duration and homing ability of infested Apis mellifera foragers”, https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2006/05/m6048/m6048.html

About the author

Maximilian Cherney

Maximilian Cherney is the Chief Operating Officer at Nectar Technologies, a precision beekeeping technology startup. Max joined Nectar in early 2018 and has helped the startup develop their vision around how they could improve the state of affairs for pollinators and the people who work with them. Today, Max works closely with a cutting edge group of early stage collaborators who share Nectar's vision for the future of beekeeping. Those partners include commercial beekeepers who aim to make more data-driven decisions, and applied beekeeping researchers, who are working to provide those same beekeepers with actionable, context-specific learnings from their research. Prior to Nectar, Max spent time on a regenerative farm. There, he was particularly inspired by the wellbeing of the farm's wild and managed pollinator populations.

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