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Dear Bill,

Warm greetings from Germany! Thanks again for your permission to let me translate your website and put it into German here on our website. It is now online and people who view it appreciate it very much.

We also offer some three beekeeping products here and a few German beekeepers use that. Over all, many apiarists are confused, some shy away completely from the pharmaceutic varroa and disease treatments, yet aren’t familiar with the essential oils. Especially young starters of beekeeping don’t really know what to do. These days, the varroa treatment is necessary.

My backgroung is aromatherapy (for humans) and I did some course work actually in Michigan, your state, some years ago. I developed a means called “Stärkung”, maning “strengthening” in English with essential oils as a treatment for bees, causing the bees to become stronger by the two components of the mixture, the essential oils. It has shown good results, but beekeepers over here are confused because of all the treatments available and no single helps really. The best I have seen is a combination of the essential oils and acid treatment.

Many beekeepers who I am in touch with have loss rates of 30-60% of their populations, while some others (a few) only have rates between 0-20%.

Most bee keepers in Germany have only a few colonies and do it as a hobby. They are usually older people and the younger generation isn’t really interested to continue beekeeping of their parents or grandparents as they see all the work and little results. The professional beekeepers with 100 or more colonies usually send 1/3 to 2/3 of their colonies to other places. Overall, the heather areas produces very well this year, the forests quite poor due to a long dryness in early summer, and the average areas with fruit trees and meadows was fair this season here. So the number of beekeepers here went down from about 60000 about ten years ago to now around 50000. Many beekeepers associations try to work to stop the decline, yet that has not happened so far. The main reason may be the varroa, yet, there are many reasons. One is the usage of testing of genetic manipulated crops for testing purposes in some parts – the beekeepers had lawsuits against this industry, as genetic manipulated crops is against EU laws, yet they may do it at some testing places, causing bees to die at higher rates that get in touch with these crops. So, some beekeepers had to take their colonies away from the places where the bees produced for generations and send them – guess what! – to the bigger cities, where there is no testing of crops, like to Munich, this year. That means additional cost and travel. What a crazy world, where ithis is legally possible…

Some people here use grease patties as you do and we have seen about 8-fold varroa death rates with colonies using the patties versus those who don’t. It’s a good long term treatment to keep the varroa in check. We plan to discontinue producing the patties for others, just give them the recipe and offering the natural essential oils they are made with.

You can find our website at http://www.bienenmed.de/

The translation of your beautiful and highly appreciated “a year with the bees” is at http://www.bienenmed.de/html/berichte.html

I would come and stop by your farm, yet, it is a long way to get there – who knows, maybe some day in the future. We wish you and your family good success this year! And thanks again for your beautiful webpage – many people like it, including myself and my family. If you ever come this way to Europe, you are very welcome to visit us. We are located in the Frankonian forest in northern Bavaria – if you look on a map of Germany, that is half way between Munich and Berlin.

All the best,

Holger Grimme