Alright, well my name is Bill Stagg.
I run and operate a small commercial bee outfit, Sweet Acre apiaries.
This is the shoe shop.
We're right in Tappin Valley right now, a few minutes out of Salmon Arm.
And yeah, I've been running that for, I guess, four years now.
It's been a fun growth process.
Yeah, and then I work for the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands as a local inspector
for the area.
I've been doing that, I think that's my fourth year as well.
This year.
Beekeeping in itself is a very meditative practice.
It has wonderful calming effects.
I think there's been so much research done with the benefits of, you know, you often
hear about these farms where they take troubled teens or whatever and introduce them to horses
and things of that sort.
And I think beekeeping is a wonderful thing that can be done in an urban setting.
We have hives in our front yard.
I'm not even sure if we're supposed to, but we do.
And yeah, our neighbors love it because their plum trees are heavy and their flowers are
pollinated.
And I think one advantage to urban beekeeping is more and more cities are passing, laws
are restricting or prohibiting use of different chemicals for controlling weeds and whatnot.
And you have so many flowers in a city that I think the bees will do quite well.
All the bees in North America that are being used are from Europe.
So there's no truly North American honeybee that exists.
There's a lot of different stock that went into the stock that I have.
I use basically an open population mating system that Harry Laidlaw basically came up
without a California many, many moons ago.
There's nothing really new about it.
Basically, I select breeders, the best performers from my different bee yards, and I have yards
set up from Grinrod to Chase, which is quite a good distance.
And I bring them all into a mating yard and I set up my starters and finishers and raise
cells.
And when I raise cells out of, say, Grinrod, then those cells are going to be transferred
over to Chase and open mated in these colonies, like these units you see here, some of them
they have no queen.
So we're in Tappan, so I'm going to take queen cells from my breeders that weren't in this
yard last year and then introduce them here.
That ensures a lot of variation in the stock.
They're wonderful mutts, Heinz 57 breed, I guess.
Most of my queens, they look like Italians, but I bet you 30-40% look a lot like Carniol
and their dark stock would be dark queens.
In the late 70s, early 80s, BC did a big push under John Corner, who at the time was a provincial
apirist, and they wanted to become self-sufficient in stock production and produce their own
stock and not rely on the states or offshore for queens.
So one of the guys involved in starting that, his name was John Gates, and he lives in Armstrong,
not too far from here, and I worked for him for a few years.
And basically they took commercial stock from the big producers around the world and wintered
them in the Vernon area and monitored them and chose basically the best performers, those
that built up well, ones that produced honey, nice temperament, and continued that process
ever since.
Throughout the years, with so many different projects that have been done, time and time
again, it shows that local stock does outperform imported stock.
It's tough when you're getting packages, especially from down under.
Those bees are getting ready for winter down there, and we move them across the globe.
When they're going into fall, coming Christmastime, well, in a sense, down there, it's a pretty
good shock for them to be transported around the world and then expected to perform in
an environment that they weren't raised in.
When you start beekeeping, you have to know about Varroa, you will have it.
And I know the first few years I was keeping bees, I didn't even feel like I was going
to bee meetings, I felt like I was going to mite meetings because that's all they talked
about.
I thought, well, I'm here to talk about bees, not about these crazy mites, but it's something
that you can still keep bees very successfully with Varroa, but you have to understand a
lot more about the biology of the bees and also of the mites themselves as compared to
20 years ago.
You'll often hear people say, before the mite came over, there was a lot more bee havers
and not beekeepers, whereas now with Varroa and the pests that we have, it's fleshed
those bee havers pretty much out because if they don't know how to tell the difference
between a hive that's succumbing to pests and a healthy colony, they're going to lose
their bees.
For several years now, I've been using exclusively formic acid, it's an organic acid, it's found
in honey, which why I got quickly sold on it.
Again, you have to monitor the colonies and see how they're responding.
The one thing about formic acid is it is quite weather dependent, so if the weather isn't
right, you have to time your treatments according to what the weather is.
Another thing about formic I like is there's no residual effects in the comb and it does
not impact drone development or a lot of these other things like the harsh chemicals do.
Those pesticides build up in the wax over time and can be quite detrimental to the colonies.
In fact, that's another big part of CCD I think is these chemicals that the beekeepers,
we love to point our fingers at everybody else, but beekeepers have been dumping the
same stuff in their hives for 20 years now.
The environment that we expect those bees to live in can get to the point of being toxic
to the bees themselves.
Some of the reasons why I'm sold on formic acid.
As far as I know, all the organic associations that do certify beekeepers approve the use
of formic acid.
Everything is a wonderful, wonderful thing and it is calming, it is meditative.
You are going to get stung, that's part of the equation, but no, I think it's a wonderful
thing to get involved in and I try to mentor a couple people each year and make sure they
get started off on the right foot, but I encourage, especially the beginning beekeepers, to know
what's going on and to know not just about the bees, but understand a little bit about
mites and it's a form of husbandry and it's just like anything else.
If you get a dog, you're going to have to realize that you're going to have to make
sure that he stays healthy or if you got goats or anything else.
So yeah, that's basically it for me.
