Have you thought about treatment-less beekeeping? Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey by Theresa Martin (2024. Little Wolf Farm, ISBN 979-8-9902757-0-6, available from Amazon) is best explained by its subtitle 10 tips for Healthy Productive Bees. This newest of practical paperbacks is an extremely well written guide to help ensure success with bee colony care using the natural history of bees.
Author Theresa Martin is a 6 year beekeeper from Kentucky. She started with 2 colonies and now keeps around 20, each individually named. She describes a treatment-less management approach. For her it is working, having only a single colony loss in her beekeeping journey. Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey clearly and thoroughly explains how she and you can manage for success.
Dead Bees has 4 different sections. The first section of 10 tips is roughly ½ of the book. The tips are her beekeeping roadmap. Five examples of treatment-less tips are: Acquiring local bees, encourage more propolis, space colonies out in apiary, keep colonies smaller and insulate hives. Each tip, discussed in less than 10 pages, are easy to follow and flow easily. Throughout the next three sections the author references back to the tips as tip # 1 or tip # 3 for example.
Each tip has repeating, clearly identified subheading coverages. Tips begin with a bee biology section and then, relative to that tip, coverage of conventional beekeeping as related to the tip. Abundant footnotes each referenced, identify the source of the material. The next subsection zeros in on how adoption of the tip can improve bee health and productivity and then there are personal notes by Teresa identified as “my implementation.”
Theresa writes that Dead Bees is not a ”how to” book of common beekeeping practices.” She recommends Honey Bee Biology & Beekeeping and other books for that information. The “my implementation” section, her personal application of the tip, is “detail only of the natural practices that… are less common.”
The second section is 40 pages of 10 illustrative precision beekeeping practices. The data presented by Theresa was developed via use of the T 2 SM BroodMinder © (https://broodminder.com/) temperature sensor. Included are 5 examples of how temperature data illustrates brood rearing and colony queen right condition, 1 example of how temperature can detect swarm departure (a distinctive 4-degree temperature spike), 2 examples of how temperature can illustrate colony stressors of varroa and a single nighttime visit of a skunk and the last two illustrate how beekeeper management (winterizing and colony examinations) can be documented simply via temperature measurement. We can see how winterizing a colony is especially conservative of holding a winter heat sink and its influence on winter brood rearing.
The third section (20 pages) covers the concept of treatment-less management as practiced by Theresa. She describes her effort to establish a treatment-free zone around one of her apiary sites but could not get buy-in from 9 surrounding beekeepers. Heavy losses would be expected with adoption of treatment-free beekeeping due to selection pressure before achieving colonies more tolerant of mites. Therefore, she describes why and how she adopted treatment-less management. Her wintering success speaks to the effectiveness of her adopted managements.
The fourth section includes 18 frequently asked questions (FAQs) – developed from talks to beekeeping groups. There is a detailed 21 page seasonal management calendar that includes sufficient detail to permit adoption not just for Kentucky but for where you keep bees. There are numerous photos, mostly by the author and the Broodminder charts along with tables of her beekeeping results.
This is a great self-help book for those who wish to keep bees more closely to natural beekeeping. There is no management you couldn’t adopt – the author recognizes we all keep bees to our individual preferences. I highly recommend Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey by Theresa Martin.