Advice of "Re-queen every two years" doesn't seem right...

At the University of Minnesota Short Course for Beekeeping in Northern Climate, I learned two general concepts that seemed to be at-odds.

The first was that a healthy hive is one that has a young queen.  This is so important that we are to re-queen each hive every other year.  To do this, we buy a new queen from CA or elsewhere for each hive every other year and install it.  The old queen is either already dead by this time or becomes obsolete.

The second is the general idea that our repeated interference in evolution and normal life cycle of the bee has yielded problems with which we are now dealing.  Examples include mobile pollination, monocrop fields, medications, mites, other bee pathogens, and hive construction.

These two ideas present--to me--the following problem.  If I am always re-queening my hives, I am not allowing the hives (with their queens) to grow, shrink, thrive, suffer, and otherwise go through the vagaries of life.  How will evolutionary pressures ever develop bee strains that can best manage the stresses of my specific area of MN?  If a new queen comes from CA ever two years and is plopped into my hive, there is no hope of any selection pressure having any effect, no matter how small the scale, in my apiary.  More simply, I won't be able to have any local "survivor stock."

As I try to learn more about this topic, I have decided that I will allow the bees in the meantime to develop as naturally as they can given the constraints of the hive.  Specifically, I will allow the hives to keep their queen as long as they see fit.  I plan that natural selection, supercedure, queen mating, swarming, and the like will happen without my interference.

One problem I see now is that I only have two hives.  Might there be too little genetic variation for the newly created queens and the drones with which they will mate?  As I consider this, though, I realize that I have neighbors with hives, and there are likely to be feral colonies within 2 - 5 miles.  So, I think that genetic variability will be sufficient.  In fact, with the feral colonies surviving completely withough human "help," they might be a very good source of genetic material.

A helpful beekeeping blog that I came across.

I've been reading a lot of posts today from this blog.  Over 1,000 posts, full of a great deal of information for the beginner and more advanced beekeepers.  Good stuff!

My bee supplier...

The place from which I ordered my bees has a very helpful blog.  It's been going on for many years now, and it has regular updates.  Click here to go to the home page of Nature's Nectar blog.

University of MN Northern Climate Beekeeping Short Course.

I continue to blast posts into this blog today in an effort to catch up...

Over the first weekend in March (March 2 and 3, 2013), I took the University of Minnesota's Beekeeping Short Course.  This was very interesting, but I had learned a lot of it from books, YouTube, and other sources.  But, they also had vendors, honey-tasting, product demos, etc.  I joined the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association (MHBA), and they gave me a free hive tool!  We also won some pollen patties.

On the second day of the course, I ordered two packages of bees.  For many reasons, I had decided to start with two hives.  The main reason was that I wanted two hives is to be able to compare them.  If I have one hive, I might not know if the bee activity (or lack thereof) is normal behavior.  With two hives, ideally, I ought to be able to notice if there is a difference of behavior between the two.

Of course, 4 - 6 hives would be an even better number.  However, upon suggesting to the powers-that-be that I start with a handful of hives, the gnashing of teeth that I heard and the profanity that was hurled at me...  Well, let's just say that I was lucky to get two hives past the household approval board.

Once I was done with the U of MN course, I was confident in what I was going to order.  I decided that I would use all mediums for my hives.  No deeps for the bodies and shallows for the supers.  This would make for some more work in maintaining the brood nest (the bottom three deeps or the bottom five mediums), especially during box rotations.  But, each box would be lighter.  Also, if ever needed, I could use frames from the supers interchangeably with frames from the brood nest.

When I ordered the bees, there were two options--Carniolans and Italians.  I ordered one of each.  As a novice beekeeper, I'm not sure that I'll be able to tell the difference.  But, I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between them if they were the exact same subspecies, so one of each it is.