SoCal Beekeeping

P. Michael Henderson
Villa Park, CA

I'm adding this note at the beginning because I keep getting asked about it. If you want to keep bees in Southern California, you have two choices: you can keep European bees or you can keep feral (wild) bees. What's the difference?

European bees are generally pretty docile and easy to handle. The problem is that they're susceptible to varroa mites so you have to treat the hive with various chemicals to control the varroa or the varroa will kill the hive.

Feral bees can deal with varroa so you don't have to use any chemicals in a feral hive to control varroa. But feral bees are hybrids of Africanized bees and are not as docile and easy to handle as European bees.

If you start with European bees, you'll have to requeen the hive every year or two. If the hive swarms or supersedes the original queen, the new queen will mate with feral drones and you'll have hybrid bees.

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Some years ago, I started keeping urban bees in southern California. While I read everything I could find about bees, I found it very difficult to find any literature about keeping bees in southern California.

You may ask "What difference does it make? Is there that much difference in beekeeping across the US?"

I think there is. Southern California is different in several ways:

1. We don't have a really cold winter and nectar is usually available year round in urban areas, although in diminished quantity during the winter.

2. We have had Africanized bees in this area for the past 25 or so years.

I choose to keep feral bees, even though this area has Africanized bees, because the Africanized bees have the ability to coexist with varroa mites. People who choose to keep pure European bees have to treat for varroa, and the problem is that the varroa keep developing resistance to the chemicals that are used to treat for them. It's my opinion that we can't keep throwing chemicals at the bees - we have to have bees that can resist varroa. Africanized bees groom varroa off of each other and can detect varroa in brood cells - and then clean out the infected brood cell.

The problem with keeping Africanized bees is that they are more defensive than pure European bees. But Africanized bees are not genetically monolithic - some are a lot less defensive than others. Remember that the term "Africanized" means that the bees are a hybrid and have some genes from the African bee (Apis mellifera scutellata) mixed with the genes from the European honey bee (most likely Apis mellifera ligustica). We need to keep selecting for the less defensive Africanized bees and exterminating the more defensive Africanized bees. Basically, that's the way European bees were developed into very docile bees - European beekeepers kept the more docile bees and exterminated the more defensive bees. Over time, the bee population becomes less defensive.

Those of us who work with Africanized bees have to decide, hive by hive, how much defensiveness we're willing to put up with, and how much defensiveness is safe in a backyard. Those hives that are too defensive we generally destroy to keep their genes out of the wild gene pool.

The local beekeeping club seems to avoid talking about feral bees and encourages its members to keep pure European bees. That's good, in a way, because it keeps drones with pure European genes available for mating with the feral virgin queens. Hopefully, the offspring will be bees that have the varroa hygiene behavior of Africanized bees, but will be less defensive than pure Africanized bees. The downside for the club members is that they have to treat their hives for varroa or risk losing them.

Through this web site I hope to pass along what I've learned about feral bees in the southern California. I don't claim to be an expert and I make mistakes. But I learn from my mistakes and, hopefully, I won't make the same mistakes in the future.

If you would like to contact me, you can email me at mike at this URL (socal-beekeeping.com).

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08/24/2022 Cutout in a Fence

02/20/2022 Two hives went queenless, and a swarm moved into an empty hive.

05/22/2021 Introdution to the Bee Vacuum and Construction Videos.

05/14/2021 Comment on using 9 frames in a super.

11/28/2020 Tutorials on Beekeeping. I'm working on this so it's not finished but I'll keep plugging away on it.

11/27/2020 Villa Park Magazine article (click here to download PDF)

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7/1/2020 Swarm in a tree.