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The Cavity Compromise, Quiney
£15.00
The Cavity Compromise
£15.00
How to integrate mite control, swarm control, honey production, and the overwintering of nucleus colonies in a northern climate using biotechnical controls and leveraging the bees’ own abilities.
People with a beginner’s interest in bees are often disturbed to learn that their bees will die without some form of varroa mite control. I was, and some of mine did.
Yet they didn’t all perish. Data that I obtained from the Bee Informed Partnership for my region showed that the average overwintering survival rate for the bees of non-migratory beekeepers, even with chemical mite control, is around half.
Luck, intuition, skepticism, thrift, research, the observations of others, and the help of generous online mentors has led me to develop a method that has allowed me to overwinter more than two thirds of my colonies consistently without chemical mite control.
I have written this book to offer an alternative to traditional methods that have not been working for sustainable beekeeping. This book is meant to save you money and, increase your chances of having a surplus of bees in the spring.
Adrian Quiney RN BSN
VIEW Book Review
Reviewed by Tina Sebestyen (American Bee Journal, June 2023)
This very enjoyable book begins with the author describing his journey into beekeeping, and the progression of his adventure. He has a nice way with words, and his adventure begins like so many of ours, starting out slowly, beginner’s luck, getting some education, and getting “bee-fever.” I really appreciated his starting out right up front with a graph showing his successes and failures as percentages over the years. He humbly shares his failures and discoveries, and we can see that his ideas have merit by his growth.
In this book the author is describing how he took management cues from Mel Disselkoen and Michael Palmer and combined that with Dutch Drone Trapping techniques. He came up with a system that allows treatment-free beekeeping and still produces honey crops and overwinter survival by timely splitting and moving between 10-frame deep boxes and 5-over-5 Palmer brood factory nucs. One of the nuggets I gleaned from this book was that mites can out-reproduce bees when a colony can raise nine brood cycles without interruption. This makes the timing of brood breaks of supreme importance.
I read with interest how he learned “biotechnical” mite control, what we call Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. Especially interesting was his description of Dutch Drone Brood Trapping, which I had never heard of. I don’t want to give it away here, but learning this technique is worth the price of the book. This creates a special way of splitting colonies, and doing so at the right time allows full-season mite control.
Mr. Quiney also has good reasoning as to why wintering in 5-over-5 nucs makes sense, and his success rate is very good in this type of hive. He has dialled in his expectations of what parent and daughter colonies can produce as far as the honey crop and bee populations, so that he manages them properly to maximise their capabilities.
With success rates like his in Palmer nucs, buying replacement bees can become a thing of the past. As he so aptly states, mites that endure constant treatments in commercial settings and survive are not going to be controlled with miticides, and the viruses out-of-state bees bring with them are risks we would be better off avoiding. His overwintering survival rate of colonies in 10-frame boxes still isn’t great, which makes me think that some more tweaking of timing of manipulations will be needed. It might also have something to do with the way he equalises colonies in fall.
Nevertheless, these ideas have great merit, and the way the author describes the bee biology that makes things work along with his reasoning means that we can take his ideas and adapt them into our own methods and climates.
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