The Dutch "aalster" beekeeping method

[ugcheleuce]

Hello everyone

The Dutch (and Belgians) have a beekeeping method they call the Aalst method ("Aalster methode"), but I have found that different beekeepers understand the term "Aalst method" to refer to a range of different things, some of which are only marginally related to the original description of the Aalst method, published in 1952.

In this post I'd like to ask your input about the original method, however. Any comments that you have, would be helpful.

The Aalst method involves making nucs in mid-year (after the spring flow, when the hives want to swarm), and then using the nucs as forager factories during summer and autumn flows, and then merging the overwintered nucs with larger hives again in spring. The nucs also accompany the larger hives to the flows, and if the flow is long and/or prolific, the nucs contribute foragers to the larger hives by being moved and having their foragers fly off onto the larger hives. So, basically, hives are always dealt with and overwintered in pairs -- a larger hive plus an accompanying smaller hive (except during spring flow, when the nucs don't exist).

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

The Aalst beekeepers also believed that their method worked best if the hives were not checked too often -- they checked their hives only at times when the checking would result in information that is necessary to know at the time of checking.

Of course, many things have changed since 1952. In 1952, the act of marking queens was a revolutionary idea. Swarm prevention by making artificial swarms was also quite a new idea in some beekeeping circles. I'm told that Dutch and Belgian beekeepers from the 1930s-1950s did not use supers at all, and most honey for extraction was collected in brood comb (the brood nest would start in the upper box and then move downwards while the upper empty cells got filled with honey).

Prior to the war, the Aalst beekeepers' main focus was heather honey (autumn flow). The Aalst region is a very poor beekeeping region, so beekeepers would build up their colonies slowly over the course of the year by feeding it, and then hope to get a good harvest when the heather comes into bloom. After the war, they changed tack, by travelling with their hives to regions with a good flow for each of the three flows, and applying the now called Aalst method of beekeeping. I get the impression from old beekeeping magazines that travelling with bees was also fairly uncommon at that time... most fruit farmers simply kept their own bees and did not hire hives during flows from heather beekeepers. When did travelling with bee hives to regions with flow kick off in the UK?

So, this is the Aalst method, then:

1. For each large hive there is at least one nuc hive (i.e. a 5-6 frame single story brood box).

2. If the nucs are overwintered in the same apiary as the large hives, the nucs travel to the willow flow in March, so that the bees don't fly back their original overwintering positions when the nucs are moved back to the apiary. The nucs are not checked for strength until they come back from the willows flow.

3. At the start of April, the large hives are checked for strength, and the queens are marked and their wings clipped (these queens are about 9 months old).

4. Shortly before the large hives travel to the flow (e.g. rape seed or fruit), the nucs are checked for strength (i.e. to decide which nuc will be merged with which large hive), and the queens in the nucs are killed (these queens are about 18 months old). Optionally one can keep the old queen along with one or two frames of brood/bees and put them far away, Mike Palmer style. Then, all the brood frames and all the bees from the nucs are added to the large hives. The brood frames are placed in the upper box, to form one large brood nest, and any frames with food in it were placed in the lower box (I'm not sure if this would apply to modern beekeeping with supers, though). This merging does not, apparently, result in fighting. [If the hives do not travel and if there is insuffient flow locally, the bees may have to be fed during this period.]

5. When the spring flow is finished, at around mid May, the hives are returned to the apiary and the honey is extracted.

6. At the end of May and/or the start of June is swarming season. Swarming is prevented/circumvented by making an artificial swarm as follows:

a. Find the queen in the hive. Hang the frame that the queen is on, into the empty nuc box, and shake 3-4 additional frames of bees into the nuc as well, and put the nux box elsewhere in the apiary (presumably also add empty frames to fill up the nuc). The original hive (now queenless) stays in its original position. The foragers from the nuc will fly back to the original hive, so the nuc must be fed well during this time.

b. Check the large hives comprehensively (frame by frame, after shaking off the bees) for any queen cells, and destroy the queen cells. This forces the bees to create new rescue queen cells. After 12 days, all large hives should have a new queen again.

c. On day 14 after the split, check the large hives again comprehensively (frame by frame) and remove any remaining queen cells. Optionally, if you have extra queens, add a spare queen to the hive (if that means that there are then two queens, they'll fight it out in the evening).

d. By the start of June, when the summer flow begins, the new queen should be a laying queen. Initially, that new queen will not lay that many eggs, so most bees will be available for foraging.

7. By mid-July, when the summer flow begins (e.g. clover, linden), the nucs and the large hives travel to the flow region. At the flow site, the hives are placed in a row in staggering sequence: large hive, nuc hive, large hive, nuc hive, large hive, etc).

8. After a while, if the flow is good or long, and the nucs have grown well, the nucs are moved to ends of the row. This means that the foragers from the nucs fly back to where the nucs used to be, and then beg their way in to the large hives. After another while, if the flow is particularly good or long, and the nucs grown even more, one can move the nucs about 100 meters further up, so that more foragers from the nucs join the large hives.

9. When the summer flow is finished, the hives are returned to the apiary and the honey is extracted. If there is no autumn flow (e.g. heather), preparations for overwintering begin now. In either event the nucs must be fed.

10. Steps 7 and 8 above repeat during the autumn flow.

11. When the autumn flow is over, the hives are returned to the apiary (or taken to their overwintering sites) and the honey from the large hives are extracted (not from the nucs).

12. Now prepare the hives for overwintering (e.g. feed the large hives about 10 kg of sugar and the nucs about 5-6 kg of sugar), and overwintered. In the original method, the nucs are overwintered in the same apiary as the large hives, but stacked/packed together and under blankets.

So, what do you think?

Samuel

 

[Hivemaker.]

So, what do you think?

Sounds like the Heather not starting to flower until September is very late there, compared to here, where it is often starting to flower by mid to late July.

 

[Finman]

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IT has happened some basic things in beekeeping in 60 years.

Real bee breeding started when artificial insemination became usual after world war. I got my first artigicially inseminated queens about 1985, and it was a revolution in my beekeeping. Colonies were very tame and very productive.


Nowadays colonies are 3 times bigger than in old days. Thanks to breeding. Reason is that colonies do not swarm so easily as on old days.

If there is some usefull in beekeeping in those old days, it has been moved up to these days.

I could say that nothing to he learned from those old habits any more.

.

 

[oliver90owner]

All good ideas for some to think about. One or two 'errors' maybe?

I often used to reinforce production colonies. This is but one way to accomplish that. Some of those reinforcemets will be foragers, so that is good, but moving emerging brood a couple or three weeks earlier is a perfectly acceptable option.

5b seems a dodgy assumption/action, especially for some that are numerically challenged. Better, IMO, to remove excess queen cells much earlier and choose a good sized cell which is still open. Avoids the risk of a smaller queen emerging first, too.

Using a nuc (or two) with each full sized hive seems excessive. I always got by with alternatives/extras remaining in the home apiary, although moving nucs to flows is not a bad ploy, isuppose!

The other details are unimportant as they would be decided as and when needed/appropriate. Different seasons may need slightly different approaches.

Lastly(?), varroa need to be included in the plans these days, but that need not be too much of a complication for most of us.

I prefer to change queens later in the year, so current year queens for overwintering. Swings and roundabouts for that one though - eg more time to assess the fresh queen before introduction but within a smaller colony.

Checking colonies every week is not always necessary - unless one is a book-following beekeeper (rather than one that actually thinks for themselves).

So nothing particularly earth shattering. Just a method where the beek is actually actively encouragig a large foraging force in the production colony.

 

[JEP]

Sounds like a mess to me - it all starts to go wrong around no. 6.

When you get to no. 6 a) at the end of May / start of June you are placing your laying queens with just a few frames of bees. This will severely limit their laying capacity for the rest of the season and cause a massive reduction in possible late season crop i.e. heather.

Much better to keep the big colonies going as single units and bleed off a few frames of bees / brood to stock any queen mating nucs - adding a decent queen cell to each nuc.

6. b) and c) Will most likely result in multiple casts being thrown from the main hive. In addition it will also result in the production of lower quality emergency queens. Then whilst waiting for the virgins to mate the majority of your bees will be largely idle because you have essentially used the main hive as a mating hive.

 

[Goran]

As since my main forage is at very beginning of May. It would be too late to merge. It is better to merge in autumn/late summer for my conditions. Especcially when doing two queen systems I think these beeks do this combining in autumn.
One colony lost queen in September 2013 if I recall right, I merged it with neighbouring ( two boxes full of bees). Next year almost every forage in top of yields ( some of which I didn't merge followed), but at the other hand and the queen was awesome also.
We usually here develope colonies by themselves. If some fail we merge to other cause there is no use of it, or reduce to one box and taking extra brood to others.
So when you overwinter nucs, good side is you have spare queens. But at the other hand 7frame nuc with young good queen can become standard quality colony even for our main May forage. It would be waste to merge such.
Here si considered that it pays off to merge less than average, if you merge two strong ones your yield is on the loss and for extra work with heavy boxes ( I meant here for two queen systems). Two strong colonies separate bring more honey than combined ( according to researches and practice).

 

[Finman]

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My main idea is to let hives grow as fast as possible, and big hives make most brood frames.. When a hive show swarming fever, I make an artificial swarm. I am not afraid of their swarming intentions.

When main flow begins, I join the AS parts and smaller colonies to a 6 langstroth units.

Oh dear. Last summer was rainy and swarmy. 120% swarmed. hive number jumped +50% and that was not the purpose . Last summer was out of control, but I got a good yield. In autumn nucs were so strong that I could not join them. I had good queens and late joining is a risk for queens.


,

 

[Finman]

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In my area wintering hive should as big as possible. Then it is able to lay 6-8 frames brood on the first half of May.

Then 6 weeks later those brood are foragers and are able to catch raspberry yield. Yield is sometimes 7-9 kg/day, and some year nothing.

Small colonies and nucs are not able to make yield from rasberry, because they have not much brood at the beginning of May.

Big hives swarm first.

Making nucs weakens big hives that they are not eager to swarm, but it weakens too their ability to handle first big flows.

 

[oliver90owner]

I don't particularly like emergency queens, but at least the colony should be strong - and it allows the colony to go several weeks without unnecessary beekeeper interference (sorting through the frames every week hunting for queen cells, per eg).

As I wrote earlier, it should be a good read for some of the current non-thinkers, perhaps has a few new points (for those that do think) to possibly include in their beekeeping. But as a method to strictly adhere to, forget it. The fact it quotes dates is rubbish and OSR was unknown as a crop in 1952, so it is a corrupted version anyway, I woud suggest.

 

[Finman]

The fact it quotes dates is rubbish and OSR was unknown as a crop in 1952, so it is a corrupted version anyway, I woud suggest.

Hmm. Like Hivemaker said too.

Everything begins from that, when your hives are going to get the yield.
Making nucs is not a goal, which solves everything. I do not use them in foraging, and I do not need them. ..

And pastures have changed lot in 60 years. All kind of weeds qrowed everywhere but about 40 years ago herbicides started to change bee pastures. And rape fields.
As I said before, swarming was a huge problem in old good days. I bet too that this aspect is much more easier in thes days.

Beekeeping has changed a lot during decades.

.

 

[ugcheleuce]

The fact it quotes dates is rubbish...

Only beginner beekeepers think that if a method mentions a date, then the date should be adhered to. The dates are simply an indication of roughly when something is expected to happen (here and in other descriptions and books). It is seldom the intention of a described method that the date (i.e. month of the year) should be followed.

Dates that annual events in nature occur differ from year to year and from region to region.

...and OSR was unknown as a crop in 1952, so it is a corrupted version anyway, I would suggest.

My copy is a scanned PDF of the original magazine from 1952, and it specifically mentions "koolzaad" (which I think is rape seed).

Dutch Wikipedia says that rape seed have been grown as a production crop in Germany and the Netherlands since the 1800s, for machine oil and lighting oil. What gave you the impression that OSR was unknown as a crop in 1952?

 

[ugcheleuce]

As since my main forage is at very beginning of May. It would be too late to merge.

If we ignore the word "May" for a moment, and simply say that the method merges nucs and large hives shortly before the first flow, would you still say "it would be too late to merge"? If so, why would you say that?

It is better to merge in autumn/late summer for my conditions. Especcially when doing two queen systems I think these beeks do this combining in autumn.

If you were to merge in late summer/autumn, when would you make the nucs? Or would that mean that your method runs on a two-year cycle (in year 1 the nuc is made, in year 2 the nuc is merged with the large hive)?

So when you overwinter nucs, good side is you have spare queens. But at the other hand 7 frame nuc with young good queen can become standard quality colony even for our main May forage. It would be waste to merge such.

That is true, and I suppose it depends on what is meant by "nuc". The original series of articles did not use the word "nuc" or in fact any word that we currently use in beekeeping here. The author speaks of a "little English hive", which was apparently a kind of nuc that was used specifically for exporting bees from the Netherlands to England. From the drawings and photos I figured it must be a thin-walled 5- or 6-frame hive, so I used the word "nuc" as a generic term.

The method does not propose merging production colonies with each othe, but merging small hives (with 2-year old queens) with large hives (with 1-year old queens). If all your hives are large hives by the time you go to the forage, then you should not complain

On the other hand, the method is based on the idea that if a hive has lots of brood in it, then more of the bees will remain inside the hive to take care of the brood, en fewer bees will be available to forage, which means that less honey will be harvested. Do you agree with that idea?

 

[ugcheleuce]

Sounds like the heather not starting to flower until September is very late there, compared to here, where it is often starting to flower by mid to late July.

No, the sought-after heather honey's heather in the Netherlands (Calluna heather) blooms from July to September, although most local beekeepers who travel to the heather do so only after the summer honey has been harvested. There is, of course, heather during the entire year, mostly Erica heather.

 

[Finman]

On the other hand, the method is based on the idea that if a hive has lots of brood in it, then more of the bees will remain inside the hive to take care of the brood, en fewer bees will be available to forage, which means that less honey will be harvested. Do you agree with that idea?

That idea is incorrect.

All colonies takes its time that foragers and home bees will be in balance.

Foragers collect the nectar and home bees handle the crop in the hive. Boath are necessary. Bees are short living and the whole continuous chain of brood ... home bees ... foragers are necessary along the summer.

Good yield comes from pastures. And if weathers are suitable.

Swarms, AS and nucs can mix the buid up of the colony.

You may put together 2 small colonies for main yield. Then you get a big colony which has only one laying queen. If colony has not enough work, it starts swarming easily.

 

[ugcheleuce]

When you get to no. 6 a) at the end of May / start of June you are placing your laying queens with just a few frames of bees. This will severely limit their laying capacity for the rest of the season and cause a massive reduction in possible late season crop i.e. heather.

This is an interesting point, and I don't have enough knowledge or experience to comment on it.

The method presupposes that the nucs will grow enough to act as forager factories for the large hives by the time the summer and autumn flows arrive.

An interesting point that is mentioned in the series (which I did not include in my post because I did not think it relevant) relates to the belief which is still "taught" to new beekeepers here, namely that the heather flow is very tough on bee colonies:

[Quick translation:]Many beekeepers arrive at the heather with impoverished colonies, practically without brood, that bear the appearance of having a large number of bees, while in fact having mostly aged forager bees that are left over from the summer flows. These bees disappear as soon as they arrive at the heather, and beekeepers are baffled at their disappearance, and so incorrectly conclude that heather takes a large toll on bees. When a hive experiences a very active flow (e.g. a summer flow), the bees tend to throw all their effort in gathering honey, and this causes brood rearing to suffer, and there will be insufficient numbers of new bees for the next flow (if that flow follows too soon after). With the Aalst method, by continuously milking the nucs during the summer flow, the large hives end up having lots of young bees when the hives go to the heather.

What do you think of that?

6. b) and c) Will most likely result in multiple casts being thrown from the main hive. In addition it will also result in the production of lower quality emergency queens.

Although most Dutch beekeepers do practice artificial swarming, the method described in my first post is almost non-existent these days, for the reasons you mention. Cheap good-quality well-bred queens are easy to get these days, so a more usual approach is split the colony somewhat earlier, and then break all emergency cells after 10 days and introduce a ready-made queen (mated or unmated) into the colony.

Then whilst waiting for the virgins to mate the majority of your bees will be largely idle because you have essentially used the main hive as a mating hive.

Thanks for that thought -- I'm not really qualified to comment on that.

 

[Hivemaker.]

Sounds like a mess to me - it all starts to go wrong around no. 6.

It does.

d. By the start of June, when the summer flow begins,

7. By mid-July, when the summer flow begins

The summer flow begins twice.

At the end of May and/or the start of June is swarming season. Swarming is prevented/circumvented by making an artificial swarm as follows:

By the start of June, when the summer flow begins, the new queen should be a laying queen.

The colonies are moved back in mid may, then the procedure you describe to produce an emergency queen is carried out, which is then mated by the start of June, how do they imagine to get a queen mated as soon as she emerges from her cell, or maybe even before she emerges if going by these dates.

No, the sought-after heather honey's heather in the Netherlands (Calluna heather) blooms from July to September, although most local beekeepers who travel to the heather do so only after the summer honey has been harvested. There is, of course, heather during the entire year, mostly Erica heather.

The bell heath only flowers wild here on the moors from around mid June until early September, I did not realize it grew wild in Denmark all year round.

10. Steps 7 and 8 above repeat during the autumn flow.

Autumn starts here in September, so they would usually be missing most or even any Autumn heather flow from the ling.

 

[ugcheleuce]

I often used to reinforce production colonies. This is but one way to accomplish that. ... moving emerging brood a couple or three weeks earlier is a perfectly acceptable option.

Where would you move them from?

6b seems a dodgy assumption/action, especially for some that are numerically challenged.

I simply repeated in English what was written in Dutch (perhaps a translation error?). I agree that "12 days" seems a bit quick, even if bees use old larvae for the emergency queen.

Even so, I find it odd that these beekeepers seemed to prefer emergency queens made from older larvae as opposed to emergency queens made from younger larvae or even from eggs. I'm not sure why that was so (I doubt if i was mere convenience).

Using a nuc (or two) with each full sized hive seems excessive. ... although moving nucs to flows is not a bad ploy, I suppose!

Yes, well, this was the thing that stood out for me about this method -- overwintering just as many nucs as large hives, and taking the nucs to the flows.

 

[Hivemaker.]

7. At the flow site, the hives are placed in a row in staggering sequence: large hive, nuc hive, large hive, nuc hive, large hive, etc).

8. After a while, if the flow is good or long, and the nucs have grown well, the nucs are moved to ends of the row. This means that the foragers from the nucs fly back to where the nucs used to be, and then beg their way in to the large hives. After another while, if the flow is particularly good or long, and the nucs grown even more, one can move the nucs about 100 meters further up, so that more foragers from the nucs join the large hives.

So let us say forty hives and nucs in the apairy, and on the second move of the nucs, all or most of the foragers would return to the nearest couple of end hives, that does not seem like sense to try and pack all those foragers from forty nucs into a couple of end hives, or even from twenty.

 

[ugcheleuce]

d. By the start of June, when the summer flow begins...
7. By mid-July, when the summer flow begins...

The summer flow begins twice.

Thanks for catching that... point 6d should obviously read "July", not "June", and point 7 should read "when the summer flow has begun". This also confirms that the dates are simply approximate.

The bell heath only flowers wild here on the moors from around mid June until early September, I did not realize it grew wild in Denmark all year round.

Do you also have shrub heather (i.e. Calluna) in the UK? Dutch beekeepers don't really focus on bell heather for their heather honey.

 

[Finman]

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Nowadays you get so good queens that you do not need to rear nucs with which you support big hives.

Is heather only crop what you are trying?

A strange discussion about "Lost World".
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