HOLIDAY VALLEY
Beekeepers share secrets of the trade
440 visitors drawn to annual conference
Published: August 08, 2009, 12:30 am
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ELLICOTTVILLE — Only a few stragglers remain of the swarms of beekeepers who descended for a week on Holiday Valley’s conference facilities intent on sharing knowledge about the tiny winged pollinator, the honeybee.
The annual conference, hosted by members of the Eastern Apicultural Society, drew 440 attendees from all over the U. S. and Canada under the theme “Toward Non-Chemical Beekeeping.”
EAS beekeepers, like their airborne charges, are a colorful and energetic group when they get together, and during the week they entertained Ellicottville townsfolk with tales about the mysteries of their work. They even earned some notoriety and a spot on YouTube by capturing a couple of errant swarms of honeybees that alarmed the local shopkeepers and passersby.
But the conference attendees were not diverted from the more serious purpose of keeping pure domestic honey flowing to the consumer via the grocer’s shelf and farmers’ markets. They visited Merrimack Valley Beeyard, an East Otto apiary with 20,000 hives used for migratory pollination and supplying honey to the Boston area. And they stocked up on the tools of their trade from vendors.
“There’s a phenomenal amount of new beekeepers because of the publicity [over the honeybee decline] and they want to get back to nature and produce their own food,” said Carl Hausknecht, an employee of Dadant of Waverly.
But education and research were the focus of the conference. Intensive “short courses” got 125 students off on the right foot.
They learned from a group of experts how to keep good records, detect and treat diseases, keep the hive healthy through the winter and prepare to package and sell honey. The instructors then launched into the general conference program from Wednesday to Friday, lecturing and leading 45-minute workshops to share some hard-won knowledge.
During the past decade, honeybees began to exhibit a decline, with apiaries suffering huge losses because of tracheal mite infestations, then varroa mite infestations, finally leading to the “disappearing disease” of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which is believed to have caused the loss of about a third of the U. S. honeybee colonies during the winter of 2006-07.
EAS and other beekeeping organizations encourage beekeepers to keep parasitic mite populations down by using nonlethal methods of hive management, such as manipulating the mite-susceptible drone brood, and by introducing special Russian strains of queen bees that are resistant to mites.
But beekeepers know that much food is dependent on pollination, and that only cooperation and research will keep honeybee populations safe for food production.
Maryann Frazier, a Penn State University extension agent and a leading researcher on the subject who spoke at the conference, said CCD is a manifestation of a general decline affecting all agents of pollination — bees, butterflies, bats and birds—as well as the plants they are pollinating.
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