John Berry on ‘SAD’, Sudden Autumn Decline

Beekeeping is getting more and more challenging and a ‘sudden autumn decline’ of hives has veteran Hawke’s Bay beekeeper John Berry worried about the sustainability of beekeeping.

By John Berry

I was planning to write something a bit upbeat as it's been pretty tough for beekeepers lately, but what I saw the other day made me change my mind.

Around seven weeks ago I helped take the honey off my mate’s hives and they were in really good nick, fast forward to mid-March and we went out to requeen some of these hives. Patchy brood, parasitic mite syndrome, deformed wing virus and bee numbers down by about two thirds.

Wax moth takes over a hive inflicted with an undiagnosed decline in hive health which John Berry is calling ‘Sudden Autumn Decline’.

All this was bloody depressing and left my mate wondering whether he should even bother trying to keep bees. I am going to check my bees this week and if they are the same I will be asking the same questions... Okay I have checked my hives and they actually look pretty good, but for whatever reason whatever happens to my friend’s hives generally hits me the following year. The only thing we did different this year from each other was that I used oxalic acid Swedish cloths over the summer and he fogged more.

Before you ask, yes he knows what he’s doing, he was taught by one of the best – me! Yes, the hives had all had a full varroa treatment with amitraz (had been in seven weeks) as well as several oxalic fogs over the summer.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened to him. There was the time that synthetic pyrethroids stopped working. Pretty obviously that was because of resistant varroa. I contacted the Ministry for Primary Industries and submitted mites and they were shown not to be genetically resistant to the treatment. My testing showed otherwise, but I could not get anyone to do any practical follow-ups.

Another time was when he got a bad batch of strips along with many other beekeepers in the country. Once again, no follow-up from anybody. Then there was the time when the hives just up and died in the autumn. This happened to other beekeepers for at least one year before and after, but no follow-up, nothing from the authorities, very little from any governing bodies and no science at all as far as I know. We’re talking about tens of thousands of hives.

So what happens now? Unless we get some major changes, nothing at all. The government and its departments seem to be totally unaware that there is a health crisis in New Zealand beekeeping. One assumes they are aware that there is a financial crisis, what they don’t seem to realise is that the combination of both health and financial worries is getting very close to destroying beekeeping as we know it.

We don’t know how bad or how widespread the problem is. There will be plenty of beekeepers out there that have been unaffected and on reading this will think I was just another case of PPB (piss poor beekeeping). I thought that for a while, till I got knocked off my perch by reality back in 2022. We face perhaps the greatest crisis New Zealand beekeeping has ever seen, but we didn’t even have a national conference last year where we could at least discuss face-to-face what was going on and talk to each other about what was working and what wasn’t.

“These hives were good two weeks ago. I hope they still are now,” says John Berry amidst his concern at hive health decline in autumn.

I think I could keep some hives healthy around here or at least reasonably healthy, but I strongly suspect that will involve a lot more costs and about twice as many apiary visits as I have done in the past. I cannot see how I or anyone else could justify that with the current low honey prices. When orchardists and farmers have to start paying over a thousand a hive for pollination then beekeeping will once again be profitable, but I strongly suspect in a few years there will be nowhere near enough hives to meet pollination demand at any price.

What We Need

We need a governing body for beekeepers (including hobbyists and retired beekeepers) and those beekeepers need a chance to talk and more importantly talk to each other. This is not easy because the mānuka gold rush has left a legacy of distrust.

We need a government that helps us and reduces bureaucracy and expense. The price of honey in the shops hasn’t gone down that much since the boom years, but the price to the beekeeper is not sustainable. You used to be able to extract honey, put it in a pot and eat it. Now sometimes it feels like you do more paperwork and testing than you do beekeeping and the honey is not any better for it, just way more expensive to the consumer.

We need science. We have some of the best scientists in the world, but they are either not doing beekeeping stuff or they are doing beekeeping stuff that is fascinating and amazing, but with little or no practical value. Think back to when varroa first arrived in the country and the amazing work that was done then to prepare us for the inevitable. They had funding in those days, a beekeeping team who worked on practical beekeeping. That funding seems to be completely gone.

Top Research Priorities

We need urgent work done on:

Are varroa resistant to our current treatments? Science is saying ‘no’, but practical experience and quite a bit of individual testing by beekeepers is giving a resounding ‘yes’. It’s years since I have been able to use synthetic pyrethroids. Amitraz appears to be failing as well.

Why are so many hives collapsing in autumn (my guess is a combination of varroa, viruses and nosema ceranae)? The New Zealand Colony Loss Survey is great and has my full support, but it doesn’t seem to be picking up the massive losses that have been occurring for years in autumn. There is no doubt that there have been massive drops in hive numbers, but no one can tell me how many of those were because of deliberate reduction in numbers or hives that just died and weren’t replaced because it was not economic to do so. I know one local beekeeper who lost around 90% last year, hives he was not looking to lose and was looking after.

What are the most effective ways to use alternative treatments, such as the various forms of oxalic acid? There is lots of anecdotal stuff out there, but very little concrete science-based facts especially for dosing and timing. I have done a bit on this myself and thought I could answer my own questions, but there are too many variables. We need some really good science  on this one.

Lastly, we need to get serious about breeding resistant bees. There are people working on it and have been for years, but it will never be successful until every beekeeper in New Zealand commits to this. I could do all the breeding in the world but whatever I do will be continuously swamped out by neighbouring genetics. We were told when varroa got here that treatments would eventually fail, that it would take less varroa every year to kill a hive, and that our only long-term answer was resistant bees. Despite this, we have spent the last 20 years relying on relatively cheap, easy to use and, initially, reliable treatments. Complacency must end.

Honey while magnificent is an insignificant by-product, important only to people with specific taste buds and beekeepers who depend on it for their living. Pollination is the important one and I can only urge the government to urgently (and by that I mean tomorrow) fund some real research into some real problems before it is too late. And beekeepers, we need to work with those scientists and each other.

Just as well I am an optimist.

John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.