Bees on airfields

Emir wrote:

recent sad event in Croatia with misuse of some pesticide which resulted in death of more than 50 million bees

I read about it; hopefully the awareness will grow in the agricultural community and beekeepers and farmers will figure out a way to work together. It’s a super complex problem; even though some cultures aren’t toxic at all, the fact that they are ubiquitous gives the bees an unbalanced diet and malnutrition problems arise.

So far airfields have been ideal spots with acres and acres of green pastures and no intensive agriculture in the immediate vicinity. Now the challenge is to figure out a way to make this work in the long run :-)

A few hives for LFCK :-)

It is going quite all right so far. Airfields are great places for the honeybees thanks to the large pastures that provide food year-long (vs. areas with agricultural crops where the bees feast on rapeseed for 2 weeks then stare at the plowed land). We actually collected some honey today; 40kg in Graulhet (LFCQ). The amount of honey produced this year is really low because we focused on splitting the colonies to increase the stock.

There are sometimes initial friction to set up the hives, because we need a written agreement and even though the local airfield / airport manager is enthusiast about the project, getting a written approval can get a bit complicated (especially with the airfields owned by the local towns because this year was an election year).

Once the hives are set up, they drive a lot of interest and most of the time local airfields users ask to join for the inspections – we always have a spare bee suit for this specific purpose (and a kid-sized one as well).

To answer your questions a bit more specifically:

• The airfield does not need to provide a beekeeper. All we need to get started is a spot to put the hive, within reasonable distance of the GA parking (waiving the landing fee is appreciated – so far all the airfields have offered it without us asking).
• We are constantly adjusting our playbook to minimize the need for a physical visit of the hives:
  • we built a mobile app to collect all the observations made on the colonies. These observations are then aggregated to better plan the next visit.
  • we are experimenting with a low-cost way to detect queen failures early on: most of our queens sport a RFID tag on their back; an antenna then counts how many time per day they cross the center of the hive, and we use that data to detect disasters (that’s really a research project at this point).
• For now we are planning to visit the colonies 5 times a year, indeed according to a schedule (first visit at the end of Winter; a visit in the end of Spring to collect honey / add supers; a visit at the end of Summer to perform varroa treatment & collect honey / winterize the colonies; and one more visit provisioned for some kind of disaster event; there always are problems ..).

Last week we made 90 new swarms for 2021. Most queens have been correctly accepted so these swarms will winter in LFCQ and be dispatched in Spring 2021 to the participating airfields.

Then at some point we’ll need to figure out how to balance all this from an economic standpoint, but for now the plan is to scale the project to 30 airfields and see how the logistics pan out.

This year’s production is pretty small (very much expected as we started the season with tiny swarms) but it is finally in jars!

LFCQ:

LFCL:

Now it’s time to prepare everybody for winter and to start planning for 2021.

There is a little fb page with updates for those interested.

Cheers!