Beekeeper furious over destruction of $2M honey crop
rnz.co.nz
rnz.co.nz
This method is a little bit more complicated than you describe it. I’m also not sure how easy it is to scale.
You still need to destroy parts of the beehive, let all the bees hunger for a few days and disinfectant the parts of the beehive you want to reuse. I don’t know if all of this is possible with that many beehives mentioned in the post.
At the end hygiene (torching unused hives and frames) is the first thing everybody can do to prevent such situation.
Not the OP, but in my country, instead of destroying everything, we lockdown everything within a 2km radius and only kill the colonies that actually have the disease. Sometimes it means the entire apiary, sometimes only a few hives. There doesn't seem to be a need to bomb the whole area :-).
The second thing is that if it is all about "efficiency", maybe the producer should not complain about the limitations of their "more productive" way. It feels a bit hypocritical to say "we do it this way because it is more profitable, but when we have a loss of productivity that is fundamentally related to the way we operate, then we believe the State should pay for it".
i'v thought about honey making as a hobby once I finish university, but I am unsure if I am allergic to stings....and am not exactly keen to find out.
It means "American foulbrood", it is a disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_foulbrood
> but I am unsure if I am allergic to stings
One can "become" allergic anytime, after many stings. You generally would not know before you make an allergic reaction, which is why beekeepers have to be "ready" to make one (as in, know how to react properly). I know beekeepers who keep practicing after they become allergic, some stop.
> once I finish university
I realised only after I graduated that my university had a beekeeping association... Are you sure yours doesn't? :-)
For more on AFB, since the article doesn't describe it or the treatment protocols well - https://beeinformed.org/2013/10/21/american-foulbrood-afb/
Apart from rules particular to NZ, because I do not know them, a key factor is that honey and wax containing AFB spores can transmit AFB to other bees in other colonies. The reason this is important is that beekeepers ( speaking as one ) move equipment between hives to balance their growth and give more space to make honey as needed. This is especially true after the honey harvest, when we empty frames of honey and give the wax honey comb back to the bees for them to get ready for the winter.
That makes the timing of this crucial, as it will be less likely for the beekeeper to reduce the damage if the boxes have been removed for harvest, and disassociated from their hive of origin when AFB is discovered. If you can't say where it came from and where it didn't, then it came from everywhere.
It isn't a fun hand to be dealt, and certainly it is worthy of more visibility and research, but it isn't worth wishing he didn't have to destroy it. Even the treatments available need to be used before adding equipment that will be used for honey, because the honey will shield the spores from the treatment and preserve the transmissibility of foul brood.
Could it be that the beekeeper took too long to react and let all their colonies get infected? That surely takes some time.
It surely takes time for AFB to spread like this. In my country, when AFB is detected, we lockdown (meaning beekeepers cannot move beehives in and out of that radius) and test all the apiaries in a 2km radius. And we destroy the contaminated beehives. But that stays under control. 10 000 beehives sounds like a huge number to me!
You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent. But any measure designed to take the sting out of the risk is going to increase the density of colonies and thereby create more risk than there was in the first place. It has a positive feedback loop.
As best I can tell the failures of the markets in flood insurance are the results of government interventions.
Fortunately, the feedback loop is finally disintegrating. Unfortunately for those left holding the bag, it's disintegrating by insurers fleeing the state and leaving properties uninsurable - just deserts for those who knew the risks and thought they could profit off the situation, but terrible for locals forced out of their homes.
I too have little sympathy for those who rebuild and increase development in a river floodplain.
Flood plains are often desirable in various other ways, too.
Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive.
IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again.
[1] https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ahrtal-unwetter-auswirkungen...
The insurance companies are using this as an excuse to increase profitability. Focusing on corner cases is a distraction. Only a tiny percentage of houses are built in flood planes.
A much larger percentage are in the sorts of towns that completely burn to the ground these days, or are in places that became flood planes since the housing was built (e.g., a big chunk of silicon valley).
Other areas face other new/more common correlated disasters, like tornados, widespread crop failure, high wet-bulb days, grid/industrial collapse due to winter storms, etc.
Flood insurance is a weird corner case of the market. Insurers would rather not provide flood insurance because of the widespread impact of flooding caused by weather; the claims are enormous. They'd prefer to exclude weather-associated flooding and limit it only to flooding caused by, say, broken plumbing. To the extent you can purchase flood insurance in flood-prone areas, it's because the government has intervened in the market and requires insurers to provide it as a condition of doing business in the state or to get a federally-backed mortgage loan.
For the same reason, earthquake damage is explicitly excluded from homeowner's insurance in quake-prone states like California, Washington, and Hawaii. You have to purchase separate, and very expensive, earthquake insurance. When people see the premiums, they usually decide to forego it.
Some sources:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240311-why-climate-chan...
https://www.nar.realtor/flood-insurance/faq-national-flood-i...
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides...
When doing the right thing is ruinous with nothing to soften the blow, not doing the right thing becomes a lot more attractive.
So what's to stop your neighbor from paying the high premiums, getting infected, and then a wayward bee carries the infection to your uninsured hives? As much as it would be nice to protect the bottom line for each farmer, it's far more important to protect the environment's compatibility with bees, and thats not a game that insurance is set up to play.
It would seem that once we enter a one dimensional incentive space dictated by money we just forget about the reason behind those incentives and instead try to hack around our new limitations.
An alternative analog would be not noticing that a cow was acting up, and allowing a whole herd to contract tuberculosis because a farmer didn't contact the vet or isolate parts of his herd from each other or the neighbors. Some things just happen, and they suck. But some things happen when you aren't on top of good management practices, and that sucks but some of it is on the farmer.
I'm pretty sure that if car insurance were somehow banned, especially medical-liability, fewer people would own and operate motor vehicles.
Insurance exists to put an upper bound on risk; the bad thing will hurt or be inconvenient, but with insurance it won't kill you. Perverse incentives appear in the case where the insurance payout is greater than the inconvenience/pain of the insured event. Until that threshold is breached, however, I don't think there's a case against insurance (and insurers that inadvertently pay people to have accidents rapidly go out of business).
There are plenty of places on earth that have very little car insurance penetrations so we don't have to guess what that would look like. To me it looks pretty much the same. The major difference is that it's difficult to sue for liability and the people you're suing don't have much money so it's often pointless. Society just accepts that accidents happen, people die, and the survivors move on.
In these, often highly unequal societies, the people who have money have a lot of it so they in effect self insure.
Above the deductible (and premium payments), the insured's exposure is largely lost time and headaches, the remaining financial burden is borne by the insurer. If anything, the presence of insurance might increase the amount of compensation an aggrieved party might be able to reap.
Agreed that there are plenty of places in the world where car-insurance is non-existent. In those places, accident victims may not receive proper compensation for their injuries/destroyed property or the recompense may not be monetary in nature.
To your final point, life is unfair yet it continues. I understand that you wish the world would always provide proper compensation for victims, my position is that even if that was theoretically possible, which I don't think it is, it may not even be optimal.
But that was obvious signs (the smell) of AFB. Is this a complaint because its only a spore test and then they burn an entire cluster?
I wonder if that's just due to people not self-reporting due to the cost of doing so.
> "Beekeepers have to notify and then destroy hives within seven days after finding the disease - and most beekeepers, including Steve, usually comply with that regulation.
And yup. "Most." "Usually."
With what? A shoulder to cry on? Nothing in her statement after that included anything about financial support, which is the only type of support that matters in this type of situation.
> "By next year, when we don't have boxes for our honey crop, we're probably going to be losing over $5-6 million,"
I'd say that's a good problem to have.
Large operations are inherently a threat to diversity. Stuff like package mills supplying most of the country. The large producers could reduce their risks of needing to burn all their equipment by managing multiple smaller apiaries separate from each other. This would limit disease speed and potentially increase diversity (or at least preserve it better).
“Market access” in NZ presumably means the local government’s law to use burning, not unwillingness of a pharmaceutical company to sell the antibiotic?
Also, I question the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat AFB. If the spores remain viable, reinfection in subsequent years or spread still seems possible.
The penalties for violating that can be pretty severe too. I.e. if one regulator tests and finds the antibiotics, they might temporarily ban imports of NZ honey altogether until the outbreak has passed or the antibiotic is approved.
No illusions about it not being incredibly slim margins and fucking backbreaking work with long hours - many farms here are propped up with government subsidies and grants - but it’s still tempting sometimes.
I know a few guys in software who are also working farmers and such, and it seems that the regulations are often poorly considered - adding an additional burden.
In this case, it's not the farming that's the issue, it's the lack of setting up your business to handle the known risks of that business.
While it may be unnecessary, which I'm not entirely sure about, if it's how things have been done for 200+ years, you ought to be able to look around that corner and see that you need a plan B for that day.
Crop and livestock insurance is a well trodden path in farming, and you either need to have the cash on hand to replace your entire operation or you need to insure for the possibility that your crops don't turn out or your livestock is seriously diseased.
This applies to all businesses really.
"Most farmers vaccinate their cows for diseases every single year, but it's illegal to vaccinate the hive," Brown said."
My understanding is the vaccine was only just approved last year in the US, it's the first of its kind, and it might not even be commercially available on a widespread basis yet.
It's it really illegal to vaccinate the hive in New Zealand? It seems odd that a vaccine would be illegal if it was just invented last year. Even in areas where the vaccine is legal, it's not going to save an already infected hive.
I'm not familiar with the sterilization techniques the beek alludes to. I assume some jurisdictions allow irradiation for remediation. It seems most jurisdictions require killing the bees, then burning the frames, and charring the inside if the hive body. It seems other remediation methods are less common.
For example, in the US, it's legal to use brand name "API-Bioxal", which is Oxalic Acid, to treat for varroa mites. However, one can head to their local hardware store and buy generic "Wood Bleach", which is also Oxalic Acid. It is not legal to use the wood bleach to treat your hive, even though it's the same chemical compound.
It's not, or to be more precise: there is no certification testing done to make sure the "wood bleach" is just oxalic acid and that's it. The stuff you can buy at a veterinarian, however, is certified to be 6% oxalic acid, 47% water and 47% sugar, and nothing else.
The vaccine thing seems to be extremely new and probably isn't validated enough re: transmission
I think it's lack of availability is just the fact that it was first approved anywhere just last year.
Market access? What does that mean?
There are often EU rules against antibiotics in foods because those antibiotics end up inside the humans eating the food which is unnecessary risk (if the humans need antibiotics we'll prescribe them thanks), and sometimes because this is a sign that you're probably not treating whatever it is that's full of antibiotics very well, that's why it needed antibiotics - so stop doing that.
Also people in other countries, like the another poster in here talking about how they do heat treatment in Germany and don’t need to burn hives.
The heat treatment they talk about is performed in the US too. You generally still need to burn your frames. You are allowed to char the inside of your hive body. It's not a meaningful difference as the frames are the more valuable part. It wouldn't surprise me if New Zealand allows charring the inside of the hive bodies and the farm decided against it due to labor concerns with the volume of equipment.
The EU requires equipment to be destroyed if it contacts AFB.
The standard practice is fire, full stop.
Enough fire, presumably
This part of the article seems to imply that there are sterilization methods that aren't burning down the entire thing. Which I find a bit doubtful as spores are usually very hard to kill.
AFAIK irradiation kills everything when used to treat food for long-term storage, for example.
Also the country marketing themselves as having organic honey is worh a lot more. I've paid like $50 for a small jar of nz honey in Dubai airpot, because of reputation... Champaign from Chapagnia
Its interesting NZ is able to have a reputation like that, but I think honey is the exact opposite of specific regionalism like "Champaign from Chapagnia". Quite sure you can drive through all 50 states and find a local beekeepers with good, interesting and organic honey.
Reputations are worth a lot. Canada attracts millions of students to come here to build its future, on reputation alone. Tough some say it's on the decline. Maple syrup, Ice wine, polar bears and polar dips play on people's imagination across the world.
Costco sometimes sells it, and they're good about making sure their products aren't fakes.
But I can't understand no insurance. Part of me feels like they forwent even trying to get insurance, despite the obvious risk of potentially having to burn your hives. Or got quoted and decided against it.
Just a moment of googling found an insurer immediately... https://aon.co.nz/agri-business/bee-insurance
So now I feel a bit less "The state is screwing me over" and a bit more "I didn't get insurance, got burned, and now want to socialize the loss with a heart-strings story."
Or does vaccine for bees mean something else, more sinister?
"Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets."