Natural beekeeping and ideal hives

Professor Tom Seeley interviewed by Dr Leo Sharashkin

Professor Dr Tom Seeley is Professor of Biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA. A leading researcher of honey bee ecology and behaviour and award-winning author of The Wisdom of the Hive and Honeybee Democracy, and recently Following the Wild Bees. His current research explores how wild honey bees survive Varroa without treatments, and what beekeeping practices could help mimic wild bees’ success. He says: “To develop sustainable beekeeping management practices, we need to first look at how honey bees live in the wild.”

Professor Seeley is a Patron of Bees for Development

Dr Leo Sharashkin’s treatmentfree apiary in southern Missouri, USA, is composed entirely of local survivor stock. He catches swarms, uses a variety of easy-tobuild horizontal hives, and leads natural beekeeping workshops. He is editor of Keeping Bees with a Smile, a comprehensive book on natural beekeeping, and a regular contributor to American Bee Journal. Dr Sharashkin says “I love Layens hives with extradeep frames. But, as Layens himself said: ‘You can be a good beekeeper with any hive system, but you cannot be a good beekeeper if you don’t know what you are doing’”.

LS Is there such a thing as natural beekeeping? Some people feel that “keeping” bees is inherently unnatural.

TS It depends on how natural it has to be to qualify as natural beekeeping. I do not think there is a set definition. But I can keep bees and simulate bees living in the woods very closely. The one thing I do not simulate is having them 30 feet (10 m) up in a tree. If that disqualifies me from natural beekeeping, that is fine, but except for that, I think you can actually have colonies of bees living very naturally. And probably the more natural, the better. You may have smaller honey crops, but you will probably have healthier bees, so your overall benefits minus costs may come out ahead, and your apiary is a good demonstration of that.

LS Thank you and you are right: many beekeepers are amazed to see my colonies going for five years or longer without any treatment.

Wild bees survive

TS This reminds me of my experience going back to the Arnot Forest – the research forest at Cornell – in 2002 and finding the wild honey bees were still there. How could that be? We know that if we do not treat a colony for Varroa, it is going to be dead in a few years - usually two years at most, rarely three years. But there they were. I could have just ignored that and said: “Oh, that is weird! That does not make any sense, I am going to forget that.” But no, I saw these treatment-free colonies that persisted and it was such a striking thing I could not ignore it; I realised that could be very important.

And once we started studying how colonies could survive in the presence of Varroa, the story is interesting 1 , especially now that we have understood the changes in the bees’ genetics, the possible competitive exclusion between viral strains, the importance of colony swarming, etc.

Left to their own devices, wild honey bees can survive in climates with -40°F (-40°C) winters. Local residents say that this colony living in a rock crevice outside Bozeman, MT (USA), has been there “forever.” The nest is betrayed by the fragrance of propolis and honey, which I could smell from 20 feet (6 m)

Photo © Leo Sharashkin

Lifespan of wild colonies

LS Do we know how long a treatment-free colony may survive in the wild? What is the longest known lifespan of a wild colony occupying the same bee tree?

TS I have just completed a paper on that for Apidologie 2 . In it, I report a study in which I followed a population of wild colonies (living in bee trees and buildings) at 33 different sites for seven years 2010-2016. I have not followed them all for seven years: year one I started following some sites, then added more in the following years. Therefore, some I have been checking for seven years, some for six, and some for five, etc. This is the only study that I know where there is a human being (in this case me) who has been checking each wild colony nest site three times a year in May, July and September, every year for seven years. I am doing it so I can have good evidence that the bee colony did not die out and the nest did not just get reoccupied. I have colonies that I know have been in continuous existence for six years, and no treatments. I made enough observations to calculate (with statistically significant results) that the average lifespan of established wild colonies in that population is 6.2 years. So that is the best evidence I am aware of. I will keep monitoring these colonies and we will see how long they will go.

The longest-surviving wild colony tracked by Tom Seeley is now in its eighth year

Photo © Tom Seeley

Why treat bees when wild colonies show resistance?

LS Six years! That is fascinating information! And it very much raises the question: why treat bees when we have wild colonies showing resistance to Varroa? You have bees like that in upstate New York, I have them in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri (USA), and there are certainly more elsewhere. We may not fully understand which of the traits favour their survival, but the important fact is that they are able to co-exist with the mites. Why not take these genetics and propagate breeding queens from that stock? There is such a focus on helping bees survive and cope with Varroa; researchers are trying to artificially breed a more resistant kind of bee by favouring certain traits, such as hygienic behaviour – in the meantime most beekeepers continue to use chemical treatments. Why? It looks like nature has done the work for us.

TS There are two parts to my answer. First, breeding and maintaining lines that have resistance is harder than using a medicine. So much of medicine is formulated around the “magic bullet” approach. Find one thing you can do, put it in the system to solve the problem. And that is appropriate with human medicine because it is easier to get people to take a drug than it is to have them change their lifestyle.

People have of course tried breeding bees for things like resistance to American foulbrood (AFB) and Varroa. But you probably know that the stocks that have great resistance to AFB also show brood production problems, so as soon as you relax human selection for hygienic behaviour, bees bounce back and move away from it. So that is one of the complications.

We can easily observe many of our managed colonies struggling, but the robust population of treatment-free honey bees living in the wild escapes our view, hidden in nests deep in the woods

Photo © Tom Seeley

Second, I feel that genetics alone is not going to solve the problem completely. There is breeding work being done selecting for Varroa-sensitive hygienic (VSH) behaviour. The USDA lab in Baton Rouge worked hard to get the Russian bees precisely because there was the expectation that they would have gone through selection for resistance to Varroa. I have not used Russian bees, but quite a few people do. Dr Marla Spivak tells me regarding the VSH-trait bees that she has promoted, that these bees offer some control of the mites, but you still need other controls as well.

I cannot say for sure whether the bees that are living in the Arnot Forest would show resistance to the Varroa mite without all the features of their lifestyle – it may not be just those genetics that are helping them. Their persistence may be due to their genetics in combination with how they live in small nests and have the freedom to swarm, etc. I can see a lot of reasons why people want to find the magic-bullet treatment. Here is the chemical to use – be it oxalic acid or thymol or formic acid.

Photo © Tom Seeley

The art of locating wild bees’ nests is described in Tom Seeley’s book Following the Wild Bees

LS Is not this the overall approach of how we deal with any problem? Instead of finding a way to prevent illness, we start fighting the disease agent or parasite, often making them stronger in the process. “Trouble-shooting” seems to be our preferred method, and it fires back. Do the bees have the same way of dealing with problems?

TS It depends on what aspect of honey bee behaviour you are talking about. If their nest is under attack, the bees will strike back. But individual bees also stimulate their nest mates to work co-operatively so the problem is addressed, instead of trying to fix something on their own. For example, if a nectar forager arrives home from the field and she is not finding a receiver bee to take her load of nectar, does she deposit nectar in the cell herself? No! I have watched more than 1,000 foragers arriving with nectar, and only once did I see a bee unload nectar herself after not finding a receiver bee. Rather, she will perform a tremble dance (walking about the nest and shaking) to encourage more of the nest workers to take on nectar processing. It is like if you are not getting service, you ring the bell to call an attendant to help, rather than trying to do everything on your own.

LS That is wonderful! I almost feel like performing a dance so we can co-operatively find natural solutions to the issues bees are facing. But I sometimes encounter the following position: Treatment-free beekeeping is possible, but totally impractical. Would you agree?

Is natural beekeeping impractical?

TS I would need to know more what is meant by “impractical.”

Tom Seeley’s apiary in Ellis Hollow near Ithaca, NY, USA

Photo © Tom Seeley

LS Impractical in the sense that you have to be isolated from everyone else to be able to breed and maintain your own strain of bees. Besides, you mentioned that when you need to be sure that a colony will have a robust population for a student’s project, you do treat your colonies too, even though you give preference to substances based on essential oils rather than harsh chemicals.

TS Yes, but the major reason for doing these treatments is this: those projects are often done in a laboratory, and here we have some projects going where we know some of the colonies will collapse, so other colonies will easily pick up mites. Treating colonies is an “insurance policy” – even if they pick up mites, the mite levels will stay low. There are some experiments where you do not want the mite level to be a variable, so you must keep it low. A lot of what keeps these wild colonies going is to do with them being small colonies with a relatively small amount of brood; but for some of our experiments we need colonies that are not like the wild ones. Then, you are creating a gold mine for Varroa – nothing like what they have in nature. Also, sometimes my students want to make honey, so they want to really push them for honey production. I think that may be the biggest problem for the commercial beekeepers, rendering many natural approaches “impractical” – they want to maximise their production.

LS Would not acquiring stock by setting out swarm traps etc, be too unreliable and slow for someone who runs hundreds or thousands of hives?

TS Oh yes, if we are talking about somebody who is putting so much effort into managing and supervising their hundreds of colonies. I am seeing that the natural approach is highly practical, but I keep at most 80 colonies. I do not keep hundreds or thousands. You are probably better able to address that than I am. What is your sense of that?

Other facets of sustainable beekeeping

LS I think that the number of colonies you can manage sustainably also depends on the environment the bees find themselves in, and on the model of the hive you are using. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting by Eva Crane, and other history books, describe that before the ecosystems were converted from their virgin natural state to agriculture, a thousand hives could be put in the same spot and there was enough forage to sustain them. And the same about hive models employed. Langstroth writes in the 1853 edition of The Hive and The Honey Bee: “The Russian and Polish beekeepers, living in a climate whose winters are much more severe than our own, are among the largest and most successful cultivators of bees, many of them numbering their colonies by hundreds, and some even by thousands! They have, with great practical sagacity, imitated as closely as possible the conditions under which bees are found to flourish so admirably in a state of nature.”

I think part of the reason we feel we cannot go over a hundred hives is because our present hive models put bees beyond their natural limits while the USA ecosystem is so impoverished compared to the linden (basswood) forests of 200-300 years ago and other undisturbed areas.

Langstroth recognised the value of simple fixed-comb hives: due to their low cost and bee-friendly nest, a single Russian beekeeper could have up to 4,000 colonies. Beeyard by Andrei Nikolaevich Schilder (1894)

TS Yes, in American beekeeping literature, A I Root, in central Ohio would have hundreds of hives in one area, but there were various forage crop fields nearby and they were making great amounts of buckwheat and clover honey. It was not linden trees, it was not natural, it was planted crops, and immense fields of them. Things have changed since then.

LS You have mentioned that so much in beekeeping is done for the beekeeper’s convenience rather than for the well-being of the bees. If you could change things, what would be the first most important steps towards what Langstroth called “bees’ natural state”? Which aspects of hive design and management approaches compromise bees’ welfare the most?

Keys to sustainable beekeeping: spacing, hive size, swarming

TS I cannot give an answer with complete confidence, but I believe there are three major culprits: First by spacing colonies closely in apiaries we are creating a scenario where we are selecting for the virulence of pathogens and parasites. Second (or perhaps equal importance), is the large size of colonies that we manage. Coupled to this is third: the prevention of the natural cycle of splitting through swarming and having a broodless period.

It is hard for me to parse out which of these three is most important, but we now have very good experimental evidence that crowding colonies and putting them in big hives really fosters disease problems for bees. Smaller colonies are healthier: they have smaller nests to take care of, they have less brood, and they swarm regularly. In my upcoming Apidologie article I report the results of my long-term observations: colonies that did not replace their queen during a given season (for example through swarming) have a much lower probability of surviving the following winter than colonies that did change their queen. The difference in mite loads is very pronounced as well as swarming colonies end the summer with far smaller mite loads.

LS Very interesting! You are finding that smaller and “swarmier” colonies living in smaller nests stay healthier, but surely bees are programmed to seek nectar and store as much honey as they can? Some wild colonies can accumulate stores far exceeding their needs even in the worst year. Occasionally people remove hundreds of kilograms of honey from a bee tree being taken out. Here is a quote from Russian beekeeper Mikhail Lupanov (1974): “The tree hollow was 5 m deep and 0.4 m across, with seven combs, each 5 m deep. We worked at it for two days, filling 12 deep frames with brood and cutting ten buckets of comb honey. Transferred to a frame hive, the colony built 12 medium frames of new comb in 36 hours.” The question: can the accumulation of extra stores that the colony will never ever use – can it somehow be to the colony’s advantage?

Huge natural colonies at disadvantage

TS I doubt it. What probably happened here is these bees could not find the proper-size cavity. They moved into something that was the best they could find, and it was huge. It was so big that they never got the feedback loop that they would normally get. So, in a way, either they made a bad judgement or they had bad luck, and they may have done poorly. All this honey may look stunning to us, but the bees may have been paying a big cost in terms of being very attractive to ants, to predators, to wasting their energies storing up all that food that they will never use – instead of investing this energy in reproduction.

Does honey production come at a cost for the colony?

LS Is it then correct to say that when we put bees into our managed hives, the production of surplus honey for the beekeeper always comes at a cost to the colony?

TS Probably. You must think about the “cost” in terms of genetic success. Those colonies that put so much effort into storing a huge amount of honey may not have reared as many drones as they could have otherwise. But the big thing is, that they probably did not swarm as much. So, did they pass on their genes as effectively as a smaller and “swarmier” colony? No. If you came back ten years later, which genes are in the environment? Probably not the genes of those huge managed colonies, but of the colonies living out in the wild.

The ideal hive

LS Do you know of any research that compares different models of hives, and whether there is such a thing as an ideal hive for a bee colony?

TS There is a lot of work on that and I must confess I have not explored it well enough. Have you found something good?

LS Old literature has many reports of long-term observations of different hive models. They would put them in the same apiary and track their performance over many years. But performance was mostly gauged by the size of honey crop, swarming was discouraged, and bee health was not that big an issue. I do not know how rigorous these studies would be by today’s standards.

Even Langstroth talks about the advantages and limitations of different hive models. The “Langstroth” hive we use today is not the model Langstroth invented and advocated. His was a double-wall hive with ample insulation, and he was very particular about that. In his book Langstroth expresses admiration of the Polish cultivators who built their hives of boards at least 2.5-4.0 cm thick and even provided extra insulation on top of that. He calls them “practical, common-sense men whose heads have not been turned ... by modern theories and fanciful inventions. They cultivate their bees almost in a state of nature, and their experience on what we would term a gigantic scale ought to convince even the most incredulous of the folly of pretending to keep bees in the miserably thin and unprotected hives to which we have been accustomed.”

TS There is a lot of very interesting information on that, we just do not know it. And there is also a lot of room for examining these things afresh: looking at the horizontal hives with very deep frames, assessing the shape of the frames, and importance of having the continuous comb. Or take insulation: you cite Langstroth, how important it was deemed in his day, then the importance of insulation was downplayed for a long time – but now we get indications suggesting the story’s much more interesting than we thought: location of the entrance for example.

To really address those questions intelligently, we do have to ground ourselves in what is the natural life of the bee colony, and start with that. Then we start changing one thing at a time. The insulation, the position of the entrance, the shape and the continuity of the combs — trying to parse out the importance of each factor. You can then start working on the combination of these factors. The authors of old were not doing their hive model comparisons in the context of bee health, trying to figure out what creates a healthy colony. They were more interested in hives that can produce the most productive colony. But those things are not necessarily different.

Looking down into a Layens Hive, you see the same comb structure as in bees’ natural tree nest: honey on top; empty cells for the winter cluster below – all on the same uninterrupted comb

Photo © Leo Sharashkin

When you consider different hive models, you also want to look carefully at what beekeepers were trying to accomplish by comparing different hives — or by inventing their own. Take Emile Warré: he was trying to make a hive that mimicked the dimensions of a natural bee nest, was inexpensive, and simple enough that a peasant could put it together with very simple tools. For him it was important that the system be productive, yet not require comb foundation, or precise carpentry, or an expensive extractor. To address the question of an ideal hive, you must consider what were the criteria of success: was it a healthy colony, was it low cost, or was it honey production? I bet different people sought different things.

Langstroth sought ease of management of the colony, and honey production. As you say, health was not a big deal back then. The way the Langstroth hive is set up, it is good for migratory beekeeping, and for having honey supers where you can segregate the honey storage vertically from the brood nest. It is good for setting up extractors. This hive fits well with the technology that was being developed: the frame, movable frame hive, the extractor, foundation, smoker, protective gear, all that stuff.

It is a rich topic for investigation and really, from the hardcore scientific perspective, is a frontier subject. I would step back with a fresh mind and get ideas from people like yourself — who have good experience with alternatives to current hives. But current hives may really be quite good, it could be that we just need to tweak insulation, play with frame dimensions, etc.

How to test performance of different hive models?

LS Many of the greatest luminaries of European beekeeping, including Jan Dzierzon and Georges de Layens, believed strongly that a narrow and deep comb (10 inches or 12 inches wide by 16 inches or 18 inches deep) was better for the colony’s development and wintering than comb that is long and relatively shallow (like the Langstroth frame, which is 18 inches long by only 9 inches deep). They based their conviction on the observation of natural bee nests (where comb is elongated vertically rather than horizontally), and extensive beekeeping experience. If we wanted to test the hypothesis whether the narrow and extra-deep frame indeed favours colony health, survival, or honey crop compared to the frame that is long and relatively shallow – how would you structure such an experiment? You would get two groups of colonies that are genetically identical and put them in hives with the two different layouts, but what exactly would you be looking at?

TS I would look at a number of things: survivorship, brood production, honey production, disease, honey stores consumption in the winter. You would look at as many variables as you can, at everything possible.

You would have to be judicious in deciding priorities: to do these things right, you must use groups of at least 10-12 colonies. They must be set up and matched in as many variables that you do not want changed, and then you have them differ just in one variable you examine – say, the shape. This is the simplest experimental design: everything is the same (the size of the hive, insulation) except the shape of the frame: one is taller and narrower, the other squatter and wider.

There are a lot of interesting things to look at here. It is a pity that the needs of honey bee health have lately sucked up the scientific talent and resources that could be used to explore questions about the functioning of healthy, disease-free (or, rather, “disease-OK”) colonies.

Professor Seeley says: “Bee research takes a lot of patience, but can be done without expensive equipment”

Photo © Robin Radcliffe

1 inch = 2.54 cm References

SHARASHKIN,L. (2016) Surviving without treatments: Lessons from wild bees. American Bee Journal 156 (2): 15.

SEELEY,T.D. (2017) Life-history traits of wild honey bee colonies living in forests around Ithaca, NY, USA. Apidologie DOI: 10.1007/s13592-017-0519-1.

We thank American Bee Journal and the authors for their kind permission to reproduce this article first published in American Bee Journal 157, (7), July 2017

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