Good bee people but bad information
In my beekeeping youth, like so many other beekeepers, I had a beloved mentor. I speak of my very first beekeeping professor with pure reverence and warm memories. Many professors have such a cadre of graduate students who are forever beholden to them. While my first beekeeping professor did not mentor grad students, he did teach thousands of undergrads. Seemingly every one of them adored the man as an instructor and as a person.
In 1973, I distinctly remember him telling class participants that drones are colony laggards and contribute essentially nothing to the functionality of the colony. Other than rarely mating with new queens, drones served no purpose. Consequently, at every opportunity, drones were to be eliminated.
In his defense, the bee world was wildly different at the time. Other than organophosphate insecticides, nothing else was yet a problem — no mites, no small hive beetles, and no killer bees. Flowering weeds were common, and there were abundant honey bees — everywhere. Drones were abundant.
From the beekeeper’s perspective at that time, drones were not critical to the specific colony in question. But if anyone had ever asked a healthy colony if it wanted drones, an entirely different answer would have been presented.
This is an example of bad information being given by an excellent instructor. This is also an old obsolete memory file that I have stored away. I will never again use this advice, but the memory file just sits there — waiting for the day to come when it is once again thought to be good management to kill all drones in our colonies. Oh, wait. Drone elimination is a commonly recommended technique for varroa management.
No, American foulbrood is not wind-distributed
Years ago, I was at a bee meeting in the upper Midwest. While discussing American foulbrood, the speaker confidently explained that the reason AFB had always been such a persistent problem for U.S. beekeepers is that wind easily spreads the disease miles and miles away from the diseased hive site. This was why, when the bee disease was encountered, beekeepers with American foulbrood needed to immediately implement a scorched-earth policy. Actually, that last part is correct. But otherwise, these comments were seriously wrong. Wind plays very little, if any, role in AFB dissemination.
This speaker is still a respected beekeeper in his community, as he should be. The rest of his information was rock solid. I was the traveling presenter — the outsider — far from home and departing the next day. What would you have had me do? (Later, I told one of the meeting organizers that some of the AFB spore dissemination information should be reviewed, and then I left town.) …
