Manifesto for advancement of bee-friendly beekeeping  🇬🇧

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You can support the manifesto here, or by sending an email. Wersja Polska: 🇵🇱

Postulates:

W

e, an unofficial group of beekeepers (being full members of the beekeeping community) and enthusiasts of all species and kinds of bees (and other pollinators), present our views and claims, with the intention of including them in the discussion on the future of apiculture. We believe that beekeeping is currently experiencing a number of problems and stands before many challanges. This is due to both external factors such as the growing environmental crisis but also to the ways of apiary management conducted unsustainably, making it difficult if not impossible for bees to adapt to the changing environment. It is also significant that at present, in some communities, the beekeeping profession does not have the esteem it once had - this is a result of the massive introduction of industrial and intensive methods and the prioritization of production over the welfare and adaptability of bees. 

Transformation in the direction of deeply sustainable beekeeping is not only an opportunity, but in the long term the only way to maintain a profitable apiary business, as well as to practice the passion of beekeeping and tree-beekeeping in a satisfying and healthy way, and to restore the profession to its proper esteem and ethos. In such an management, bees should be treated subjectively, with consideration for their welfare, which is a necessary alternative to their current commodification and objectification.

Caricature of Moses holding the Decalogue and styled as a beekeeper
"Moses" by Mariusz Uchman

Moving away from treating nature purely as a commodity

The natural environment is a complex system that is able to sustain complex ecological relationships, and treating it only in a consumptive and exploitative way leads to biodiversity decline. This results in the depletion and disturbance of diverse species relationships, which directly and indirectly affects the wellness of bees, if only by depleting and limiting their food source.

Supporting regenerative agriculture

Convincing the increased introduction of no-till cultivation (carbon farming), reducing the use of pesticides and changing the approach to so-called weeds (flowering plants that are valuable food sources for pollinators). Encouraging the leaving of uncultivated land (fallows) and wide margins, convincing (including local government authorities and land managers, but also farmers and property owners) to plant trees, shrubs and other pollen- and nectar-giving plants, but above all not to incorporate more land for human use where possible.

Agriculture - including beekeeping - has to be based on cooperation with nature, rather than on using technological progress to control and model it in a way that only facilitates increased productivity and economic growth. In context of the Earth's changing ecological and economic conditions, such an approach even seems a necessity. In the long term, such a solution can reduce costs and increase the resistance of the environment - including that of crops and livestock - to climate change.

Education reform

There is a need for a change in the programme of courses, trainings and lectures so they will raise awareness of the negative impact of apiaries on honeybees themselves and other pollinators. They should also demonstrate the positive environmental role of the various organisms that make up the fauna and flora that are associated in different relationships with crops or farm animals.

Recpect for bees subjectivity

Moving away from (or minimising) apiary management, that serve only to increase the productivity of bees and lead to treating them as purely production and reproductive units - such as, for example:

  1. culling of drone brood,
  2. requeen bees because of their lower economic value,
  3. combining bee colonies even in cases in which they biologically self-sufficient,
  4. clipping queen bees wings,
  5. transporting bees over long distances for many days (especially during hot weather),
  6. isolating queen bees for reasons of increased productivity,
  7. removing spontaneusly drawn queen-cells.

We accept that these and similar interventions may be necessary in some situations, e.g. they may be needed for the preservation of the health of the bee colony, or they may be carried out on the basis of the so-called lesser evil (for example, in cases of combating some bee diseases or selecting for resistance to them). However, promoting them as proper apiary management serves the objectification of bees, which contradicts respect for bees as living beings.

Reducing over-population of managed honey-bee in Poland

Poland today has an over-population of commercially exploited honeybee colonies, which negatively affects both themselves and also other wild pollinators. Over-population can be a risk to the existence of other environmentally important wild pollinators (including those in danger of extinction). Such enormous honeybee population causes thecompetition – either for itself or other wild pollinators - for food (access to flowers), but also creates an epidemiological (epizootic) threat. It seems that it may be good practice to introduce regional regulations for the installation of large apiaries (e.g. registration or even permission above a certain number of hives) and, above all, to obtain permission for migratory beekeeping. Stationary beekeeping of the amateur type, with low density and dispersal, usually creates much less environmental risk than intensive farming and mass husbandary.

Creating the conditions for the naturalisation of Apis mellifera populations

Free-living populations of Apis mellifera, driven by natural selection, can be crucial to the preservation of bees' health. Wherever they occur in Europe, they are a kind of reservoir of genetic diversity and show significantly greater potential to create and sustain adaptations to local conditions than a human-bred population. It is essential, therefore, to change the negative image of feral swarms (where their presence does not pose a danger to humans and competition to other pollinators, especially species of importance from conservation point of view).

We are advocating the creation of nesting habitats by maintaining old trees, especially with hollows (which may be occupied primarily by representatives of various insect, bird or mammal species). Increasing the proportion of free-living bees in the total Apis mellifera population under present environmental conditions is a controversial position (due to the current overpopulation of the managed bees especially those of alien subspecies origin which are not adapted to the local environment). However, at the same time, we advocate a significant reduction in the intensivly managed population, which is presently by far the most common. On the other hand, the natural density of the free-living honey bee population in Polish conditions is low and, under favourable conditions to them, should not exceed 1 colony per km2. Described change in the structure of the bee population in the long term should help in increasing the health and build up the resistance of the entire native population of honey bees and other wild pollinators.

Systematic selection for varroa resistance

We advocate for establishing resistance to varroasis (disease caused by varroa and associated viruses) as a mandatory direction for breeding characteristics in honeybee selection programmes.

Increasing areas of closed breeding territories

Focus on breeding locally adapted bees. Expanding existing conservation areas and creating new ones, for native, local subspecies of honey bees.. Reducing or even completely stopping the introduction of genetically foreign queen bees.

Reforms of support system for the beekeeping sector in Poland

The support system should be used to help develop environmentally sustainable modern beekeeping and agriculture. The existing system of subsidies primarily benefits large producers of beekeeping equipment and promotes a constant increase in the number of managed bee colonies, resulting in a continued increase in risk of health problems of all bees.

We advocate:

  1. the establishment of support schemes which promote small-scale stationary and extensive apiaries and various forms of local food producers associatied in local cooperatives (including beekeeping cooperatives)

  2. only supporting of breeding locally adapted bee subspecies and rearing of such queens(i.e. in particular A. m. mellifera and A. m. carnica in the south of Poland, as well as local queens from own rearing),
  3. creating a forage base, leaving uncultivated land and/or planting and sowing a variety of native pollen- and nectar-producing plants,
  4. limiting support for migratory beekeeping, which increases the horizontal transmission of pathogens and parasites and, in the process, causes negative stress, which is harmful to bee colonies,
  5. limiting support for setting up apiaries under the slogans of saving and helping bees (e.g. introducing apiaries into cities or environmentally valuable areas under these slogans),
  6. support for testing of bee and brood samples to reduce the treatments and customise them to the specific situation in apiaries and colonies which need them, with a higher priority than subsidising pharmaceuticals as treatments.

Reforms to the honeybee treatment management practice

Mandatory monitoring and testing as a criterion for access to treatments. Moving away from season-related treatments and promoting the principle that treatments against varroa should only be used when obvious symptoms of the disease or a high infestation of Varroa destructor are found (during the infestation levelmonitoring). Promote the use of biotechnical methods as a necessary and main element of integrated varroa control. Use of treatments only in rotation, justified by the results of monitoring, using a formulation adapted to the conditions.


You can support the manifesto here, or by sending an email. Wersja polska: 🇵🇱

This English version of our manifesto has been written and translated by a Pole. We are sure that many language mistakes have been made there. If You wish to help us with that - please do, by sending us text files with corrected contents. Thank You!