Year 4 July - CCD 🖊️

Year 4 July - CCD 🖊️

Wrestling with Bee Challenges

Randy Oliver’s Ameriise Journal series Sick Bees perfectly captures the ordeal my bees have been enduring these past two seasons.

It’s an entirely new struggle.

Back in the late ’60s to the late ’70s, I was part of a non-migratory, 1600-colony beekeeping operation in southeastern Wyoming. Cliff Weller, who had started it a decade before WWII, ran the outfit with a conservative and traditional approach:

  • Foulbrood colonies were promptly destroyed.
  • Antibiotics, pesticides, and fungicides were never used.
  • Adequate stores were left on the hives for winter.
  • Sugar feeding was a rare practice.
  • The colony was maintained through splitting.
  • External queens were never purchased.

Under Cliff’s management, the bees were robust, prolific, and overwintered successfully. However, they were also famously known for their spirited nature, being Africanized honey bees (AHBs).

Occasionally, a lone hive would exhibit classic virus symptoms, much like the descriptions in old beekeeping books. It could devastate that specific hive, but the issue wasn’t contagious.

That was my beekeeping education, influenced by Cliff’s methods. Working with him meant always having more than one super and moving swiftly for more than one reason—his bees were spirited.

I followed Cliff’s approach, and it proved effective until the late ’70s. The yards were flourishing, brimming with bees, boxes, and ample provisions through the dandelion flow. Everything seemed promising.

Then, abruptly, in less than three days, a thriving yard would lose its bees in a manner reminiscent of classic Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD):

  • Hives devoid of bees but filled with nectar, honey, and pollen.
  • Absence of dead bee piles.
  • No crawlers or clingers.
  • Beeless hives experienced no robbing.

Within three weeks, over half of the outfit’s hives were lost. Then, just as suddenly as CCD emerged, it halted and ‘disappeared.’

A season that promised a honey-filled harvest of 220 barrels plus a semi-load of comb honey turned into a hundred-barrel year with no comb honey—the outfit’s worst ever. Despite the setbacks, I was grateful for salvaging some honey and maintaining enough bees to offset the losses.

For three weeks, it seemed like the entire outfit was on the brink of collapse, and there was nothing I could do to alter the course of events.

-Cheers, D 🍂🐝