The WCBA pollination standard

Everything growers need to know about the Western Cape Bee Industry Association standards for pollination beehives. By Anna Mouton.

Effective pollination requires beehives to meet specific criteria. The Western Cape Bee Industry Association has developed a standard for pollination hives to help beekeepers and growers optimise colony performance. The standard represents current best practices based on beekeepers’ experience and input from well-known bee researcher Mike Allsopp of the ARC Plant Protection and Health Division.

What follows is the standard summarised for deciduous-fruit growers. The original document is available on the WCBA website. View Herman Brink of the WCBA explaining the standard at the Hortgro Pollination Webinar on the Hortgro YouTube channel.

2021 pollination standard

Hive construction

Pollination hives must be Langstroth hives with at least ten individually removable deep frames. The hive may have a super with at least nine individually removable frames.

Frames must be reinforced to prevent collapse during transport and handling.

All hives must display their DALRRD registration number.

Hives and handling

Hives must enable quick and easy sealing that prevents bee escape during loading and transport.

Hives must also allow sufficient ventilation to prevent overheating or suffocation of brood and bees during transport.

Bees should forage normally within 24 hours of delivery during dry weather with temperatures above 17 °C. No or few dead bees should be visible in front of hives. Significant mortalities suggest inadequate ventilation during transport.

The colony

The hive must be queenright — the queen must be healthy and laying actively.

Colonies should be healthy with no evidence of American foul brood and no more than 50 cells each with European foul brood or chalk brood, no more than 50 small hive beetles, and no more than five varroa mites per 100 adult bees.

Colony strength

At least 90% of the hives in a consignment must have:

• A minimum of four deep frames filled at least 75% with brood — developing bees — or the equivalent amount of brood spread over more than four deep frames.
• A minimum of eight deep frames covered in worker bees. Assess when bees are calm.

The minimum standards for pollination hives are:

• Three deep frames filled at least 75% with brood — developing bees — or the equivalent amount of brood spread over more than three deep frames.
• A minimum of six deep frames covered in worker bees. Assess when bees are calm.

All pollination hives should have:

• At most three deep frames of stored honey or two of stored pollen.
• At most two super frames of stored honey in hives with supers.

Bonus

Inside the Langstroth hive

The Langstroth is the standard beehive in modern beekeeping. The basic hive unit is a deep rectangular box holding 8–11 vertically suspended frames covered by a lid — the left image above shows a beekeeper removing a frame from an opened hive.

Bees build their combs in the frames — the right image above shows a frame of partially filled comb. Beekeepers can accelerate the process by providing frames with foundation wax sheets or recycled pre-made comb.

The deep boxes are called brood boxes because bees use them to store food and raise their young. Beekeepers can also add shallower boxes — supers — on top of brood boxes. Supers can contain brood and food, but beekeepers often use queen excluders to prevent the queen from laying eggs in them.

The lid can include a compartment for artificial feed.

Bees access the hive through a gap below the lower edge of the front panel. The hive’s base is a bottom board that extends beyond the entrance to create a landing stage.

American beekeeper Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth patented the original Langstroth hive in 1852 after he recognised the significance of bee space.

Bee space refers to gaps of about 5–9 millimetres inside the hive, particularly between frames. Honeybee workers are tidy — they are, after all, female — and they will close smaller gaps with a custom plant-resin-based sealant called propolis, while bigger gaps are filled with comb. Everything inside beehives used to be either cemented with propolis or joined with comb.

Efficient colony management requires beekeepers to inspect the frames, but that’s hard when frames are stuck to other frames and the rest of the box. Maintaining bee space between the frames and everything else keeps frames removable.

Langstroth’s primary occupations were clergyman and schoolteacher, but he made many contributions to beekeeping, including publishing a beekeeping manual in 1853 that’s still in print today.