**2. Materials and methods**

*Modern Beekeeping - Bases for Sustainable Production*

beekeepers [26].

was contracted by the beekeeper without taking into account the robustness of the honey bee colony [15]. However, some research has shown that robustness significantly affects the productivity of the bees [16–19]. Consequently, farmers should choose the stocking density on the basis of their robustness to obtain the optimal pollination. In reality, the inhomogeneity of colony-to-colony robustness reflects the effects on the pollination of the crop. For this reason, balancing of honey bee colonies before the start of pollination service is to be counted among the good beekeeping practices [20]. The migratory management of modern beekeeping offers advantages but also involves risks: the concentration of numerous honey bee colonies coming from the most disparate places in a restricted area to be pollinated can facilitate the spread of honey bee diseases [21, 22]; displacement of honey bee colonies over long distances can affect their health [23, 24] and also the percentage of winter losses [25]. Moreover, when the supply of the commercial pollination service involves the movement of bees of a subspecies of not managed *Apis mellifera* within the natural range of another subspecies, or when honey bees belonging to the so-called commercial hybrids are handled, damage can be created both to the not managed populations of *Apis mellifera* of the other local subspecies and to honey bees managed by local

Even the intensive cultivation of the apple trees shows some problems from the point of view of pollination [27]. The intensification of cultivation has made the survival of local not managed pollinators difficult, especially where the cultivations reach great extents, while at the edge of the cultivated area, near the natural vegetation (woods or grasslands), not managed pollinators can easily satisfy the residual pollination needs. To support the pollination provided by wild pollinators in areas where these do not constitute stable and conspicuous populations, apple producers use the pollination service provided in general by the managed honey bee colonies. We used honey bee colony and beehive as synonyms even if this latter is formed by

Commercial pollination is a consolidated practice in Val di Non (North Italy), an alpine area specialized in intensive apple cultivation. In this area the pollination contract with the beekeepers is stipulated by the cooperatives to which the farmers confer apples for storage, processing, and marketing. The combined management of the pollination service allows to overcome the technical-economic limit deriving from the typical pulverization of the land structure of the local farms. In order to gather information about beekeepers who support the pollination of the apple orchards in Val di Non, a survey was conducted through a questionnaire. The survey was filled anonymously. Participants were asked questions about some technicaleconomic and apidological questions concerning mainly migratory beekeeping. The objective of the survey is twofold: on the one hand to verify if there are differences between the answers provided by small- and large-scale beekeeping operations on quantitative aspects, such as the level of bee colony losses in winter and the number of kilometers traveled annually, but also on qualitative aspects such as balancing of bee colonies and the propensity to ensure bee colonies, and on the other hand, to compare the results obtained with those of other surveys on beekeeping. Unfortunately, this comparison will remain confined to a few aspects because many

the colony of honey bees and the hive (box) that contains it.

questions we submit to beekeepers are lacking terms of comparison.

The structure of this chapter is the following. After the presentation in Section 2 of the materials and methods of investigation, in Section 3 five economic and five apidological aspects considered worthy of attention will be briefly discussed, not all those considered in the questionnaire, to avoid that the analysis becomes too dispersive. The results obtained will be shown and briefly discussed in Section 4. Section 5 will present some proposals for the future of migratory beekeeping in Val

**36**

di Non (but not only).

The exploratory survey on beekeepers supporting apple pollination in Val di Non was conducted during the spring 2019 using a special questionnaire. Submitting questionnaires to the beekeepers to collect business information is a fairly common practice. The winter losses of bee colonies [28, 29], the pollination fees [30, 31], and the movement of bee colonies during the year [32, 33] have been surveyed with this instrument.

The associated management of the pollination service in Val di Non facilitated the investigation; in fact, the cooperative managers contacted beekeepers to interview, distribute, and collect questionnaires. Beekeepers filled in a questionnaire with 20 questions: in some cases, the interviewee was asked to provide a dichotomous answer (yes/no) as shown in **Table 1**, Section 1; in other cases, the questions


#### **Table 1.**

*Beekeepers replies to the questionnaire.*

were multiple choice and the interviewee could choose between several pre-coded answers (**Table 1**, Section 2); in other cases, the answer was in an open form where the interviewee entered numeric data (**Table 1**, Section 3).

A total of 43 completed questionnaires were returned by the beekeepers. However, the number of valid answers varies from question to question. As a whole, the respondent beekeepers, given the stocking density average locally applied to apple orchards, provide almost half of the commercial pollination needs in the area under investigation.

The commercial pollination of the apple orchards in Val di Non is always practiced at the beginning of the migration itinerary of the beekeepers of Northern Italy. In this period of the year, beekeepers are not able to provide data on the loss of honey bee colonies in summer and winter, on the average feeding cost of the honey bee colony. For these aspects, the questionnaire asked the beekeeper to refer to the situation of the previous year (2018) or the last two years or to indicate the expected value under normal conditions. The averages of the continuous variables and the percentages of the answers to the pre-coded questions were calculated. The statistical analyzes of the data collected with the questionnaire are placed, for the peculiarity of the questions set out and for the lack of information on the distribution of the variables, in the context of non-parametric statistics. To process the collected data, the R program, an open source programming language designed specifically for statistical analysis [34], was used. In order to ascertain the effect of the company size, beekeepers were divided into two groups based on the number of bee colonies they managed: a) up to 80 honey bee colonies; and b) more than 80 honey bee colonies.
