Beekeepers are busy bees this time of year

Nith Valley Apiaries beekeeper Mike Roth shows how he is getting his hives ready for winter. Photo by Gary West

By Gary West

Mike Roth of Nith Valley Apiaries between New Hamburg and Baden was very busy over the past couple weeks tending to his beehives spread throughout the surrounding area in Perth and Oxford counties, and Waterloo region.

He and his wife, Erika Roth, manage 800 hives with just one of those hives being home to as many as 30,000 honey-producing bees.

We were able to gain some insight on honey production and bee management from Mike Roth as he readied his hives for winter.

“European honeybees came to the Americas a couple hundred years ago by boat with European settlers,” he said. “I can only imagine the opportunity they had then with extensive foraging available and very low disease pressure, and presumably no environmental toxins.”

This began to change with farm development and, in the late 1800s, the first orchard sprays were developed.

In current times, it is completely reversed. Human land-use has decimated foraging options like corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa hay.

The alfalfa is now cut at around 10 per-cent bloom for top protein in dairy herds and covers a huge percentage of the province, which also sees pavement and lawns as another sizeable chunk.

The marginal and conserved lands left are often in lowlands, which collect from all over a given watershed the various human inputs into the land.

Then to top it all off, global trade has spread Varroa Mites and other lesser pests and diseases to the North American honeybee population. Keeping honeybees alive today is a challenge as honey crops have become harder to produce.

Roth says they now manage more hives covering more area to try and collect what honey flows are out there.

Most years, Mike says he feels disappointed.

“Even with strong hives, there’s no guarantee that they’ll make honey,” he said.

Spring and fall wildflower blooms are pretty reliable but summers, when the populations peak and bees traditionally make the most honey, have become unreliable.

In 2024, July and August saw some bee yards starving as rain and pressures to harvest hay earlier than normal resulted in very little bloom available, while the sparse summer wildflowers didn’t yield.

It was interesting to note that bees gather resources from a roughly two-kilometre radius around their hive and concentrate the resulting foraging in their hive.

Mike Roth says the bees of today are exposed to multiple fungicides, insecticides and herbicides, as well as the beekeeper‘s own miticides over the course of a year.

This experienced beekeeper said it took 800 hives this year to make what 200 hives typically made 10 years ago.

In the midst of these challenges, he said they have been able to grow the business, begin a family and feel a lot of support for what they do, selling honey of many varieties to area consumers.

Roth says these are the things that make it all worthwhile.

“We are thankful to be here in Ontario in 2024 with the opportunity to keep bees and make a living doing what we love,” he said.