Disease control via swarming?

[TheMasonicHive]

Hey everyone.


This might be something that might be common knowledge, but it was an epiphany to me.

This being my first year I do not have any nuc boxes or anything like that to plug and play with my hives.  I have heard people giving some methods of controlling varroa and other disease by breaking the brood cycle, which I understand, and is very very interesting to me.

My question is this. 

Are honeybees demonstrating this behavior naturally by swarming? 

Do workers encourage the queen to spark swarming in order to break their own brood cycle and start anew somewhere else?

I'd imagine that a new hive, established in a tree, would take time to build to build comb for the queen to lay, thereby killing off infected bees, and giving them no time to take quarters in the newly established broodnest.

Am I thinking correctly?

[BjornBee]

Depends..... ;)

Do bees benefit from swarming? Yes, in many ways. In AHB's they swarm up to 15-18 times per year and are basically unaffected by v-mites. So while the action is beneficial, it is way less to managed bees in most hives.

Do bees encourage swarming for this desired result....probably not. Bees swarm to perpetuate their species.

Remember, bees if given the chance, will almost always choose an old colony site with comb or remnants of comb. Nature always plays the best odds to her favor. Bees select sites which give them the best chances of survival. And they will select any place that gives them an advantage of building quicker and saving resources. So nothing really is predicated on actual mite control factors. Mites are relatively new to the bees programming. Bees are programmed to swarm every year to perpetuate the species, use old comb to give them an advantage, and go into winter with a first year queen, which is the best chance of a colony surviving through till the next season when the whole thing starts again.

Splitting and requeening can have impact on mites with good results. The best system I have found is one that combines requeening with first year queens, while building hive numbers after the main flow is over. This is a good time to break the mite cycle, and requeen with your own queens harvested by swarm cells, or with "later" better produced queens.

[TheMasonicHive]

Bjorn,

This opens up some questions that I've had for a while as well.

1)  You say that bees swarm to perpetuate their species.  Bees act like a machine, and they always act in the greater good of the colony, which in turn leads to them surviving.

Wouldn't leaving their colony to create a stop in the brood cycle to control their varroa numbers be a demonstration of this?

We are human.  We get sick, we demonstrate behavior (i.e. going to the doctor) to ensure our survival.  Bees cannot take antibiotics on their own, nor do they create their own miticides. 

You say that they go to already established colonies which are old an abandoned, and they certainly do, but just as bees swarm for different reasons, wouldn't it stand to reason that they also select locations for different reasons?

2)  I've considered requeening, and I probably will this year, but if I'm doing it with brood raised from my already (by my standards) weak queens, am I just letting that genetic problem leak into the next generation? 

[Livefreeordie]

Again, a novice speaking, but bees have been swarming for eons, mites are a relatively new problem. I think you are looking at this phenomenon through 2010 eyes, and that is normal, but it think the mite control that comes from swarming is a coincidence.

[BjornBee]

As to number one....eventually it may lead to that. Just as the AHB's selected for survival in their meanness trait and swarming traits, having to deal with destruction of their colonies from humans harvesting honey, as compared to managed nondestructive measures by beekeepers in other parts of the world, among other things. But that takes many hundreds if not thousands of year to create that genetic programming. The bees we use have been dealing with mites for less than 30 years. (Except the Russians. But they developed other disease and mite fighting responses before increased or focused swarming for survival. Like hygienic behavior, etc.)

as to #2, you need to constantly be up grading your stock. By selecting the best of the best from what you have while dealing with genetic limitations, or by bringing in new quality stock every year. There is certainly differences between bee strains and bee breeders. In nature, the bees are being upgraded almost every year. In feral colonies, first year queens are the best chance for survival. And mother nature is very selective and harsh on survivors. We as beekeepers can also do this and see great benefits. But we must get off the mass produced package industry, and start doing it locally. If not yourself, by association programs and beekeepers helping each other. The genetic quality of the overall average bee in the industry today is less than it was in years past. That needs to change.

[BjornBee]

Again, a novice speaking, but bees have been swarming for eons, mites are a relatively new problem. I think you are looking at this phenomenon through 2010 eyes, and that is normal, but it think the mite control that comes from swarming is a coincidence.

Right on the mark.... ;)

[Kathyp]

the break in the brook cycle when they swarm is probably a side benefit.  couple of years ago we had a whole long thing on here about that.  you may be able to find it in a search.  while they do swarm for the sake of reproduction and later maybe because of crowding, i have often wondered if that is the only motivation. 

they are well designed little critters so it is not unreasonable to think that there might be other triggers.  even though varroa is new, other threats have probably come and gone.  if breaking the brood cycle would have been a benefit to overcoming disease, disease or parasites might be a swarm trigger.

[TheMasonicHive]

Kathy,


My thought came from the Russian bee, which (at least I'm told, is swarmy).  I just have a very hard time believing that bees do things for only one reason. 

I believe that swarming behavior is beautifully multipurposed.

Is it such a stretch to believe that bees swarm with MANY benefits in mind, all of which all assure (on paper) survival. 

It would seem that when bees find a place, that they would stay there until they died, because that location was beneficial to begin with...what changed?

Maybe I'm a bit more focused on absconding than swarming.

[FRAMEshift]

According to The Hive and the Honeybee, new swarms have a low survival rate (20%) so survival of the swarm itself  is not likely the sole purpose of swarming.  For bees that swarm less than 5 times per year, a 20% survival rate is not sustainable if it's the survival of the swarmed bees that is important.  So swarming must be of advantage to the old hive.  Well, it removes hungry mouths so that there is more honey for those left behind.  And since swarms are biased toward younger bees, the population of the old hive is reduced even more than you would expect from a random distribution of bees between swarm and hive. 

But I would think the break in the brood cycle is also a benefit.  As pointed out, it did not evolve in response to the current varroa infestations but perhaps is a response to pest infestations in general.  Has anyone shown a relationship between mite infestation and the rate of swarming?  I have not heard of that.

Since Masonic has proposed that swarming is multipurpose, it is notable that if you want to break the brood cycle, one way to do it is to send the old queen out with at least some chance of surviving.  Makes sense to me.

[goertzen29]

I too am a newbee with more questions than answers :) but I'm curious how long of a break in brood is necessary to affect the mites?  What is the mites life cycle and duration?  I'm assuming if there was absolutely no brood the mites couldn't reproduce and would eventually die off but how long does this take.   

[BjornBee]

I too am a newbee with more questions than answers :) but I'm curious how long of a break in brood is necessary to affect the mites?  What is the mites life cycle and duration?  I'm assuming if there was absolutely no brood the mites couldn't reproduce and would eventually die off but how long does this take.   

Way too long for that to be effective.

Some suggest a certain number of days, but this usually is based on also treating them after most of the brood hatches out, etc. If your not treating, then those numbers of days mean little.

What happens when you break the brood cycle is the mites have no place to go. Not many die of old age. They build up in numbers. Then when the bees brood cycle is resumed, the abnormally high level of mites all rush into the first cycle of brood being capped. With hygienic bees that are good for cleaning out infested cells, this is an easy thing to focus on.

Good hives will clean out the abnormally highly infested cells. Those that do not, are seen with a burst of DWV bees. So it is easy to see good genetics and not so good.

Mite breaks are best with requeening and other beneficial management that give the bees the best advantage. I think if you are just confining a queen that may not be that good genetically, then your really not managing your bees moving forward in regards to genetics, etc. But if your using mite breaks with requeening and splitting, and thus benefitting from the efforts in advantages such as having young first year queens, then the best results are seen.

I like doing summer splits and requeening. It does keep the bees in check, But I also now have a queen that has not gone through the full season cycle and is ready to produce a maximum fall brood cycle. I also know that even if all the mites do not get knocked down, the young first year queen gives me the best chance of wintering success.

Nothing is as black or white as it seems.... ;)

[caticind]

Goertzen29: 

It's not that the mites die off, but that if there is no brood, all of the mites can be reached/killed by other methods that don't normally put much of a dent in the infestation.  Normally, you can imagine that for every mite out in the open on an adult bee, there are 4 inside a cell feeding on a pupae, safe from your righteous vengeance.  When you stop the queen laying - by confining her, or better yet, by splitting - in three weeks there will be no brood in the hive and nowhere to hide.  Then all of the mites are out in the open and you can get them.

This requires you to use some kind of treatment during a period of broodlessness, either by killing mites directly (sugar, organic acids, etc) or by making use of the "rush" BjornBee mentions by then limiting the queen to laying a "trap frame" and cutting all of those brood (and the eager mites within) out once they are capped.

This works very very well but is expensive in time and production for the hive.  I use a split-and-sugarshake method, but it means the hive getting split goes through 2 months of population decline and stabilization before it can grow again.  And the 2 splits produce less honey than one big hive would.  For me this is worth it (and preferable, as right now I mainly want to build up my hive count and rear my own queens) but it might not be for you.

[deknow]

According to The Hive and the Honeybee, new swarms have a low survival rate (20%) so survival of the swarm itself  is not likely the sole purpose of swarming. 

i'm assuming that you are talking about a modern rewrite of the hive and the honeybee (my only copy is an old one from the late 1800's)?

is this looking at swarms from feral colonies or managed colonies?  i often hear beekeepers wonder why their bees will cast off "late swarms" which make the winter survival of both the swarm and the parent colony uncertain.

of course, the swarming is "late" because the beekeeper did all kinds of things to try and prevent swarming (which in a case such as this, merely delayed the swarm).  the "late swarms" are often a result of management (keeping the broodnest open, adding supers for honey storage, destroying swarm cells, etc), whereas if left to their own devices (and a cavity/nest of their own choosing), they would have swarmed early enough for the swarm to have a fighting chance...and perhaps the parent colony can cast off more swarms before it gets too late.

beekeepers have also been breeding bees for minimal swarming, which may well also just delay the casting off of swarms rather than eliminating them.

deknow

[FRAMEshift]

i'm assuming that you are talking about a modern rewrite of the hive and the honeybee (my only copy is an old one from the late 1800's)?

Right, I think it was a 1992 re-write with new authors.  
 

is this looking at swarms from feral colonies or managed colonies?  i often hear beekeepers wonder why their bees will cast off "late swarms" which make the winter survival of both the swarm and the parent colony uncertain.

Hmm, I don't have a copy with me now, and I don't remember if feral swarms were differentiated.  It's a good point though.
 

of course, the swarming is "late" because the beekeeper did all kinds of things to try and prevent swarming (which in a case such as this, merely delayed the swarm).  the "late swarms" are often a result of management (keeping the broodnest open, adding supers for honey storage, destroying swarm cells, etc), whereas if left to their own devices (and a cavity/nest of their own choosing), they would have swarmed early enough for the swarm to have a fighting chance...and perhaps the parent colony can cast off more swarms before it gets too late.

beekeepers have also been breeding bees for minimal swarming, which may well also just delay the casting off of swarms rather than eliminating them.

Another factor is that many of us get our queens from further south.  Warm climate adapted bees would expect more time in the fall to get their act together for winter survival.  Even in NC, our South Georgia bees may expect an extra month of warm weather more than they get here.

[BjornBee]

There are studies showing a direct relationship to fall swarming and fall flow. Areas with goldenrod and aster, as well in the south like Florida with Brazilian peppers, have increased swarming in the fall. As much as 20% of all swarms are seen in the fall.

Over the years, many have tried to explain swarming in the fall. It may be impacted by any number of things, but the same studies had shown a lack of swarming in areas where there is no fall flow.

I've heard southern genetics, suicide bees, to about a dozen other things.

Real simple, and just like many animals and insects,,,,when food is abundance, it kicks in the natural impulse to perpetuate the species. Birds if forage is abundant, will raise additional broods, same with many other insects and animals. And in years with a deficit of food, they cut the number of litters or even the number of young raised. Why we assume that bees are not the same is beyond me. Roger Morse, Richard Bonney, and others studied this all in the 70's.