Honey bees are living creatures.
They can get sick just like anyone else.
I actually worked for many years for an insect pathologist.
That was his whole
his whole area of study was insect diseases.
In that case, we worked with crop pests
and we tried to figure out how to kill them using
naturally occurring fungi and bacteria and things like that without pesticides.
But in the case of our honey bees, we don't want to kill them.
So we want to keep them alive and keep them as healthy as possible.
And unfortunately, you can't probably take a colony of bees to the vet.
If you do, you're not going to be
welcome back there with your cats and dogs ever again.
There are some veterinarians that will come in and visit your farm,
but you are going to have to learn how to diagnose a lot of things on your own.
Remember that honey bees can travel outside the hive for quite a distance.
We kind of consider three miles to be sort of at that limit.
They can go farther than that if they need to.
They've been tracked, I think, up to seven miles
in desert situations where resources are few and far between.
But three miles is a pretty good radius for a hive.
And as long as there's food,
they're going to stay a lot closer than that within a mile or two.
So within that three mile radius, of course, there's a lot of flowers,
but there are also other beehives and bees being the friendly neighbors
that they are.
They may go and investigate other hives, especially in the summertime
when things are hot and dry and there's not a lot of wildflowers in bloom.
Then honey bees occasionally will do something called robbing.
We don't like robbing behavior because that means
that another hive may steal all the honey from your bees.
So we want to protect our weak colonies, those with small populations
that don't get robbed out. But it does happen.
And your bees may rob out some other hive that they find.
It's just what bees do.
So also within this same territory around our bee hive,
there are still feral colonies, not nearly as many as there used to be.
And they don't necessarily last as long as we would like them to sometimes.
But they establish from swarms all the time in trees, in buildings
and other things.
And so they may be out there as well.
Now, of course, you guys are going to have excellent bees
because you're so well educated after the end of tonight's lesson.
But the poor bees that live in this tree, no one's looking out for them.
And somehow some condition got into that hive
and they began to get sick and die off.
And as a result of the population shrinking,
they didn't have enough guard bees to protect all of their honey.
And so what happens?
Your bees came over to visit and took that honey home.
But they also may have taken home different bacteria, different parasites,
whatever they might have happen to find in there due to this robbing behavior.
And perhaps you went away on vacation thinking your bees are great.
You spent a couple of weeks having a great time.
You came back and your bees are not looking too good
because they're getting weak.
Then someone else has bees come over to visit and they take that as well.
And if you've got multiple beehives within one bee yard,
then those conditions can sometimes drift from one colony to another.
But you can see how these things can move several miles at a time.
This is why we have apiary inspectors, and this is why they like to have
everyone's bee yards on a map where they know where they are.
So if something contagious does have an outbreak, they can look at that map
and they can see who's within
range of that, that we might need to go and inspect those colonies.
Or at least alert them to it.
And as a beekeeper, if you've got more than one
hive, a lot of times we move things around.
We move frames of brood from one hive to another.
We might take a honey super off of one hive and put it on another.
And so sometimes we are responsible for moving things around.
Some things are so contagious, just using your hive tool in more than one
hive can spread things around.
So we do want to be careful and mindful of some of those things.
Last week we learned about the plant board and the apiary inspectors, and
you got a copy of your registration sheet, but it is required by law and it's free.
So it's not a big deal.
But if you want to move bee colonies, then they need to be inspected
to ensure that we're not moving anything contagious around the state.
So that protects your bees.
It protects my bees, it protects everybody's.
If you purchase bees from another beekeeper, then
they should have had them inspected before they offered them for sale.
It's great that we have apiary inspectors.
These are professional bee lookers.
They come to your place, they make house calls at your farm
and they can guide you through any potential problems that you're having.
But we've only got two of them and they have to cover the whole state.
And so this time of year, they're really busy
and you have to get on their schedule sometimes.
And you may have to wait a week or two for them
to make their route through the state and get back to you.
And that's why you have to pay attention and be your own first bee inspector.
If you encounter a situation you don't understand, you can't recognize it.
You're not sure what's going on you can always
get help from other people.
I'm available.
I, I sometimes diagnose via cell phone photos and things like that,
but it's really great
if you can get somebody there in person, if you really need that help, start out
just knowing what a healthy hive looks like.
Start out with brand new equipment.
Start out with healthy bees, and you're going to watch them grow.
They're going to start small.
You're going to see how that queen starts
to produce brood, how that brood pattern spreads, how they draw out the comb,
how they began putting pollen in there, how they begin putting in the nectar.
You're going to watch that whole colony grow.
And then when things look weird, when things look off,
you're going to be able to recognize, "hey,
something doesn't look normal there," and you'll be able to investigate
a little bit deeper and try to figure out what's going on.