worldvoyageur

Update: we'd burn and call the inspectors for foul brood, not varroa. Foul brood is a nasty, fatal and highly contagious bacterial infection.

I don't really know the bee science, but a) our bees were just the generic European bees and b) the bees on sentinel duty at the hive entrance were pretty good at noticing whatever didn't belong. Varroa mites are very noticeable, especially at the bee scale.

That said, varroa absolutely could overwhelm a colony. Then you had to report it, burn the infected colonies and wait for the inspectors. Not fun.

A typical winter day would be a high of -6 Celcius and a low of -20, but there would be cold snaps of -20 or colder. Winterization itself was several things.

1. In late fall we'd make sure each colony had enough honey to fuel them through to spring (a quick lift would tell you). If short, we'd put sugar saturated water in a tray on top of the colony. The bees would move the sugar into the colony and a couple days later we'd take out the bone dry trays. Failing to ensure enough fuel meant certain death for the colony, though for some in the trade the math was that it was cheaper to buy nukes (a colony nucleus of a queen and some workers) in the spring. Our math was that We liked to have strong colonies in the spring to sell nukes.

2. A bee colony is basically a rectangular box sitting on a frame. We had rectangular insulation that stored flat but easily expanded to slide over each colony before the first snow. The colonies would get buried in snow, which was excellent extra insulation.

3. The bees themselves did the work to survive the winter. They'd huddle in a ball, burning honey to generate heat (a bee could heat itself to something like 40 degrees C), fanning their wings to spread the heat. The bees in the centre of the ball would move out to the periphery while those on the periphery would move into the center.

A cold snap that lasted too long was a disaster as the bees would tighten the ball for greater warmth and then run out of honey within the ball. Those colonies would die. In the spring you'd find the tightly clustered ball of bees, dead, surrounded by honey not that far outside the ball.

You needed at least one brief warming period in a cold snap in which the ball of bees would expand, find a new patch on unconsumed honey in the hive and then recontract around the honey.

If we did our work properly in the fall, we'd have 90% or more of our colonies make it to spring, most strong so we could make nukes to replace our losses and sell on the extras.

I grew up on a farm on which the apiary and all connected with it was a major part of the farm's output. Honey, beeswax, nukes (a queen and 10K or so worker bees as a starter colony, sold to other apiaries in the spring if they'd had too many winter losses), fertilizing services (drop a couple colonies off at a berry farm after dark, pick the colonies up two weeks later, profit!) and other products.

It's been over ten years since I spent any serious time with bees, but the bees themselves did a great job on the varroa mites. Sentinel bees at the hive entrance would pick the mites off the incoming bees. The problem was if the colony had a solid floor the mites would just climb back onto the next bee that passed nearby. If the solid colony floor was replaced with a mesh, the mites would fall through to the ground below while the bees could still go about their business.

We would still sometimes treat for varroa, but making it easier for the bees to handle varroa how they had evolved to was the first line of defence.

This was Canada, regular Italian bees, hard winter kills of whatever wasn't properly winterized.

A new tool atrophies some skills and creates new skills that did not exist before. It is easier to identify which skills atrophy than the new skills being created as even the language to describe what is new has not yet come into focus.

" What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. [...] Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. [...] The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly. [...] nobody told me that working with LLMs would reorganise my research practice around finding good questions rather than producing answers to the ones I already had. There is a further wrinkle here that I find harder to set aside, which is that the language I have for describing what these tools have done to my thinking is itself partly a product of working with them. "