Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare few who overwinter their bees use sugar syrup and store the bees in a cool warehouse designed to keep them dormant during winter. From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of differen…
I'm a beekeeper and I cannot disagree more... about gassing, and about the recent disorders. I'm not old enough to talk about beekeeping in the '70s and '80s, but our losses are much more important now than 10-15 years ago. CCD is probably a combination of various pressures such as Varroa mites, pesticides, mono-culturing, destruction of natural resources, etc. But these days, one has to work (often hard) to get one'…
Re: Bee Bread
#91I've heard this recently as well, but I've also read that the current difficulties we read about were also the case over a hundred years ago, but obviously with different causes. It's hard to know what's new and what's part of a cycle.
