The first of my beekeeping experiments this year is to try out SuperBoost, a larval brood pheromone product supplied by Pherotech Inc in British Columbia. It’s the result of four years of work by Pherotech, “capped by a rigorous experimental test at Texas A&M University.”

What is SuperBoost?

SuperBoost is a slow-release product that replicates the 10-component pheromone produced by larvae within the cells. In nature it tells workers, “We’re hungry, please go out and get us some food.” As I understand it, the effect is basically to make the bees think that there’s more brood to tend than the colony actually contains. Extra brood to feed means bees are stimulated to forage more actively. More food coming in will stimulate the queen to lay more eggs, which produces more bees, which can bring in more food. And so the cycle goes… and so the colony builds up.

SuperBoost is delivered through the membrane on one side of a small plastic pouch mounted in a 35 mm photographic slide frame. The corners slip into a holder that is set into the brood area of a hive so the product hangs down between the frames. Bees pick up the pheromone by walking on the membrance and gradually distribute it as they move around the hive.

My SuperBoost Trial

The pheromone supply of each unit will last for about 30-36 days, according to the instruction sheet, and 3-4 treatments a year are suggested: early spring, later in the spring, late summer, and over the winter.

My partner Rick and I are going to follow a similar treatment pattern (assuming that we get good bloom and good weather) with two overwintered colonies here in Keswick Ridge. This is not intended as any kind of a scientific study, of course, but just from a curious beekeeper’s perspective, to see how the bees respond to the product.

Colony #1 was started from a nuc with queen cells early last summer, so the queen is new. It built up well through the summer, was overwintered as a double, and came out of winter with enough bees to make a fairly good single. I started feeding at the end of March (medicated syrup in a top feeder, plus pollen patty, in both hives) and reduced it to a single super as soon as the weather warmed up enough to do so — about the third week of April.

Colony #2 is as strong an overwintered colony as a beekeeper could hope to see, a full double. The bees were sluggish to begin with, however, with bad signs of Nosema dysentery. At first those bees were very slow to go up into the feeder and I had to open the hive to pour a bit of medicated syrup right onto the cluster. Feeding soon perked them up, and by the third week of April they had well-filled the two supers.

Also, Colony #2 has an old queen who must be replaced as soon as possible, and I’ve split off four frames into a nuc box, including one frame with capped brood and one with young larvae and new eggs. Hopefully the bees will raise a new queen; if not, we’ll try it again in another couple of weeks.

Oxytet treatment was started and SuperBoost was put in the brood area at the first of May on both hives (the new queenless nuc isn’t getting SuperBoost) and we’ll be starting in with the usual spring formic acid treatment shortly.

SuperBoost has been in these two hives for exactly 2 weeks now.

Just now I was out counting the bee traffic at the entrances, and both colonies are well up to pollination strength. Is it luck or SuperBoost? We don’t know… but so far, so good.

SuperBoost Q & A

I had some questions about SuperBoost, which the Pherotech sales person passed along to Dr. John Borden, their Chief Scientific Officer. Here are my questions and his answers:

What is the difference between SuperBoost and that BeeBoost that came out a few years ago?

We have changed the name of BeeBoost to PseudoQueen to reflect that it is a device that emits the five-component queen mandibular gland pheromone, and can replace or temporarily supplement the queen within the hive.

If a beekeeper is going for organic certification, will using SuperBoost break the rules for organic honey production?

Don’t know the criteria. The product is an exact replica of the natural pheromone with a good-grade additive to prevent breakdown of four of the 10 components. Without it, there would be no shelf life.

Disposal of used product: is household garbage okay or does there need to be special handling as for chemicals?

The components are all methyl and ethyl esters of long-chain fatty acids. They are all very safe.

If SuperBoost goes into a hive, and isn’t replaced at the end of the 30 days or whatever, is the colony likely to go into a decline and/or produce extra queen cells, as it would in the presence of a failing queen? (Or worse, some workers start laying?)

SuperBoost should last five weeks. After it runs out, there is no reason to remove the device and holder from the hive until it is opened for some other reason.

In all of the studies that Tanya Pankiw has done at Texas A&M she has never seen the kind of withdrawal symptoms that you fear. It seems that the colony just keeps functioning at a higher level.

Because of colony growth, I would expect that you would have to deal with a larger colony sooner in the year than without SuperBoost, but this is only good. The queen is stimulated to lay additional eggs in the presence of SuperBoost (a new finding just last year at Texas A&M), but I have not heard any suggestion that the extra effort causes her to fail prematurely.

If you have questions of your own about SuperBoost, feel free to add them in the comment section below along with any other thoughts about the topic.

Going Forward

Pherotech is now doing a year-long study with Mike Campbell (Campbell’s Gold, Abbotsford, BC) in which 50 of his colonies will be put on a SuperBoost regime, and compared with 40 control colonies throughout the year. They’ll be doing two initial treatments back to back (10 weeks) for the pollination season (blueberries, cranberries and blackberries in sequence), then a long break until late summer for another 5-week treatment “to beef the colonies up” as they head into fall, and a final five-week treatment in late winter to stimulate feeding on pollen substitute.

Rebecca Leaman
14 May 2008