Honey Bee Suite » bee habitat

Occupy the barren landscape

Rusty — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:31:27 +0000

When we think of bee forage, we usually think of vegetable plots, row crops, orchards, hedgerows, flower gardens, and meadows. But some of the best bee forage in the world comes in the form of trees—not only fruit trees—but trees like maple, chestnut, willow, basswood, locust, and alder. Some species provide only pollen, some only nectar, and some both, but in any case they are important food supplies for both honey bees and wild bees.

Unfortunately, treed areas are becoming scarce. In the southeastern United States, coal mining operations flatten mountains in order to extract the coal. Mountaintop removal, as the practice is called, leaves bees with nothing to eat for acres in all directions. Local trees such as sourwood and tulip poplar, along with native shrubs and perennial flowering plants, are typically replaced with non-native grasses that do nothing for bees.

Here in western Washington, our Department of Natural Resources routinely sprays new plantings of Douglas-fir with herbicides designed the kill the maple, alder, elderberry, bitter cherry, and cascara that normally appear in newly logged areas. The purpose, of course, is to give the “economically important” species a head start. But it seems short-sighted. Instead of a healthy recovery with multiple species in a complex habitat, you get the same type of monocrop seen in agricultural areas—with similar problems.

As I hike the state forests, I’m amazed and distraught at the number of warning signs posted by the DNR which list the panoply of herbicides that will be (or were recently) sprayed. Not only do I think it’s an unnecessary and questionable practice, but I wonder that any state so deeply in debt can afford to purchase and apply all those expensive chemicals. Surely there’s a better use for public money than poisoning the land while making the rich corporations even richer.

We beekeepers need to spend less time blaming each other for trivia (you should/shouldn’t feed sugar, you should/shouldn’t stop swarming, you should/shouldn’t provide ventilation) and go after some of the serious problems we have as a nation. We need to occupy the stripped mountains, the clear cuts, and the monocrops until we make our voices heard.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Mountaintop removal = bee removal. Photo by Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Native bees should not be managed like farm animals

Rusty — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:54:15 +0000

Talk of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) tends to bring out two groups of extremists—the group that believes the demise of honey bees will completely destroy our ecosystem and the group that says, “Good riddance, honey bees are not native anyway.”

It is true that honey bees are not native to the Americas. If all the honey bees died tomorrow we would still have an ecosystem. But the ecosystem we have at present is not native either. It is overflowing with introduced crops, ornamental plants, weeds, animals, and even introduced humans. Species have disappeared as well; many plants and animals have gone extinct without a trace. And if that isn’t enough, we’ve changed the composition of our water, our air, and our soil—we’ve even mucked with the climate.

So I don’t agree with either group of extremists. The western honey bee was brought here to pollinate introduced farm crops. As Alex Wild over at Myrmecos says, honey bees are farm animals and CCD is an agricultural problem. This is true.

On the flip side, however, removing honey bees will not restore our ecosystem; it will just leave us with a lot of crops without pollinators. There are many native pollinators that are probably up to the job—but none that can succeed with our present agricultural methods.

There is a lot of talk about finding a “replacement” for honey bees—of finding species that can be managed in large numbers to provide vast amounts of pollination service for our gigantic monoculture cropping system. This, I believe, is something to be wary of.

If we take a native species and try to breed it, manage it, medicate it, and RoundUp Ready it for agricultural service we may very well build into its genetics the same problems we are having with honey bees. We have weakened the honey bee by forcing it to work in these highly artificial agricultural environments, and we will weaken its replacement as well. Already, managed bumble bees have contracted diseases that have spread to wild populations, and managed alfalfa leafcutting bees have come down with diseases such as chalkbrood.

Instead of trying to convert our valuable native bee species into pollination machines, we need to fix our agricultural system so that crops can be pollinated by the large number of native bee species that are already in place and ready to work. If we try to raise native bees like farm animals, we will be setting ourselves up for failure all over again.

Rusty

Apiforestation: Reclaiming coal mines for the bees

Rusty — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:06:37 +0000

If you’ve done much “bee reading” in the past few years, you’ve probably come across a fascinating history by Tammy Horn entitled Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation, which was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2005. The book was a great success that helped launch Horn’s next project.

That project is a joint effort among several groups, including The Lost Mountain Honey Project in Perry County, the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, and the Eastern Kentucky Environmental Research Institute to encourage beekeeping in rural Kentucky.

The project leaders advocate the planting of bee-friendly, pollen- and nectar-rich trees on land that has been deforested by strip mines. The idea is to encourage a sustainable forest industry while, at the same time, providing a “honey corridor” with species—trees, shrubs, and wildflowers—that support honey bees. In the past, the understory was ignored in favor of high-value trees, but Horn has convinced the project leaders that the understory is critical to biodiversity, honey bee health, and the economy.

Before the introduction of parasitic mites in the 1980s, bees in this area of the south thrived on abundant forests of black locust, sourwood, chestnut, tulip popular, and wildflowers. But the bee populations never recovered and the beekeepers who sold honey, candles, and soap at roadside stands virtually disappeared. By replanting strip mines with nectar-rich trees, supplementing the area with native wildflowers, and breeding queens that are suitable for the local environment, the group hopes to re-establish beekeeping as a local way of life.

On her website, http://www.tammyhorn.com, Horn notes that pollination was not an important part of Kentucky agriculture while it was largely engaged in the production of tobacco–simply because tobacco is not a bee-pollinated plant. But now that local agriculture is becoming more diverse, bee pollination will be of greater importance to the local economy.

In addition to honey bees, this project will be a boon to native bees and other wild pollinators as well.

Rusty

Apiforestation is bringing back local honey. Flickr photo by moonlightbulb/Selena N.B.H.