Contact:

Questions, comments, criticism, and praise as appropriate can be sent to:

peter dot brezny at gmail dot com

Please keep/put WNCQBC: at the start of your 'subject'.

About:

The Western North Carolina Queen Breeding Cooperative was created in early 2018 to promote the spread of healthy honey bee genetics in WNC (and around the world).

I hope others will be inspired by this site (just as I was inspired by the West Virginia Queen Producers Co-op: http://www.mountainstatequeens.com/). Please do, "steal" this idea and create a similar organizations in your own community or back yard.

For the entirety of my first and second year as a bee keeper, almost all I heard was, "you have to 'treat and feed' if you want your bees to live." That rhetoric never sat well with me and I finally began to dig into both older literature, and the latest science, to find a better way. Imagine my surprise when I found that there are many successful, treatment free bee keepers who, as early as the 1990's, through careful management and breeding from survivor stock have proven that hazardous chemicals are not only unnecessary, but actually stagnate bee genetics, strengthen mite genetics, and have vast chemical interaction complications well beyond what we have been able to study (reference)...and, the miticides simply don't seem to be working (see the last sentence in the abstract of this 2013 paper).

In 2017, after a trip to France as an apprentice under Dr. John Kefuss, I was giving a simple 'show and tell' presentation to Buncombe County Beekeeper's club about the experience and just happened to ask how many people in attendance used treatment free practices. Again to my surprise, more than half the audience raised their hands! I guess TF beekeepers are just not all that vocal about how they manage their bees.

We're not doing anything new here. Similar devastating losses were experienced in the '80's after the introduction of the tracheal mite, but since there was no effective chemical 'treatment' for it, bees had no choice but to evolve to survive. Dr. Tom Seeley estimates that if everyone in North America simply stopped treating their hives, within two years, the honey bee population would recover on its own (2017 National Honey Show, seeley lecture on youtube).

One notable difference on the organization/management of the WNCQBC: this site isn't part of a tedious, boring, non-profit or board driven organization; subject to the inefficient drudgery, scape-goat-ism, micro politics, or 'big fish, small pond' syndrome that's so common among the Robert's Rules nerds of the word--a system seemingly designed to 'prove others wrong' rather than to contribute and improve upon each others ideas... My individual approach is of course, constrained by the limitations of one person's efforts (I bet you can tell I've served on more than a few non-profit boards in my time...they of course have their place, but this isn't rocket science, I just want to provide a useful resource).

If you do or don't like something presented on this site, there's only one person to congratulate or blame. Me!

If you want to help out and make things better, tell me how your special talents can contribute!

I do my very best to always speak the factual truth, and back up everything I say with the science behind the facts, from peer-reviewed journals in good standing in the scientific community (though I do sometimes provide links to easier to read news articles as long as they reference their original source). There are many 'citizen science' or self proclaimed 'scientific beekeeping' sites, all of which have their place and should be read keeping in mind their 'experiments and conclusions' are likely not as rigorously tested as those found in peer reviewed journals conducted by professionals trained in the scientific method, but may also be more innovative in their approach. When conducting your own search for truth, https://scholar.google.com/ can be immensely helpful.

I'm also human and make mistakes like everyone else, so if you see something that's not right, and you have the scientific literature in hand to prove it, please don't hesitate to help me make this site and my understanding of the world a little better by letting me know.

Genetic diversity is the key, both to the organism and the societies those organisms create. I do my best to support anyone who takes the time to seek out empirical facts from which to shape their understanding of the world, regardless of their genetic makeup or social tendencies, so long as they don't impede anyone else's "pursuit of happiness." How's that for a geeky 'diversity statement'.

I've also been known to react badly to those who spread opinion as fact, or appear motivated for their own self-aggrandizement. Though we all may have a different perception of it, there is only one reality in the empirical world, and we all do well to strive towards an unbiased understanding of the truth.

Thanks for spreading the word, and healthy Honey Bee genetics, wherever you live.

Peter Brezny

NCSBA Journeyman Certified Beekeeper

www.psychochickenecofarm.com

https://www.instagram.com/poulet_derange/