Yesterday an urban beekeeper told me that, unlike rural honey, his honey was pesticide free. He went on to explain that he was miles from the nearest cropland and the concomitant pesticide abuse.

Now this really took me aback. I’ve studied pesticide use and abuse most of my adult life and such a thought never—ever—occurred to me. In fact, just off the cuff, I would guess there is greater abuse, greater variety, and higher spot concentrations of pesticides in urban and suburban settings than in rural ones.

So I did some poking around on various urban beekeeping sites and discovered that “pesticide-free” is a popular assertion among urban beekeepers.

While I’m not a fan of conventional agriculture, I know some things about it. For starters, most farmers are in an economic stranglehold due to a bunch of factors that I won’t touch here. But farmers need to watch every penny, and agricultural chemicals on a conventional farm are a big-ticket item. Farmers go out of their way to get the most for every pesticide dollar spent—and that means not applying more than necessary.

Chemicals on large farms are usually applied by licensed pesticide applicators, and the applicators most skilled in applying pesticides at the recommended rate without over applying will win the most contracts. For farmers, the slogan is “As much as necessary but as little as possible.” It’s a simple financial necessity.

Homeowners are a completely different story. On the first warm day of spring take a folding chair into your local home improvement center, drug store, or hardware store. I’m serious. Make yourself comfortable and watch the pesticides fly off the shelves. Poisonous powders, granules, sprays, gels, and aerosol cans are hard to keep in stock. Stores sell truckloads of this stuff and there’s at least one such store on every block. You can even buy pesticide at most grocery stores: just throw it in your cart along with bread, lettuce, and baby formula.

People take these preparations home and douse their precious flower beds under the assumption that if some is good, more is better. I once saw a woman empty half a can of insecticide on a single hapless spider. She just kept spraying and spraying and spraying until the poor creature keeled over from the sheer weight of the stuff. The really sad part is that insecticides are designed to kill—you guessed it—insects. Many of these products just annoy the spiders.

The problem is that homeowners are not trained to use these products and usually don’t bother reading the label. And even if they do read the label, they often can’t identify the thing they are trying to kill. The whole system is flawed.

It turns out that homeowners are not the only culprits. Several studies have shown that golf courses use 5 to 7 times more pesticide per acre than the most intensely managed farms. Other big users include highway departments, park departments, utilities, cemeteries, city and county governments, apartment complexes, and office parks. These are mostly urban and suburban entities. I would love to know the average pesticide use per acre in the urban versus the rural environment. I have a hunch it would be shocking.

Now, for those urban beekeepers who think their honey is pesticide free, I ask you: How do you get your bees to avoid lawns, planting beds, flower pots, hanging baskets, planter boxes, and gardens that contain these things? Remember that a bee during a nectar dearth may forage within a five-mile radius of the home hive. That is 78.5 square miles or 50,240 acres. Do you have any idea how many households or other entities can fit in that area? And how many of them are working overtime to keep the pesticide industry in business? The amount of pesticide use in urban and suburban areas is nothing short of staggering.

So which honey truly has more pesticide contamination? I don’t know. But I think it is unfair to assume that urban honey is purer than rural honey, and I think it’s even more unfair to promote it that way. Until someone has the time and financial wherewithal to make a detailed scientific study, it is irresponsible for either side to make such a claim.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

The hardest hit objects of male affection, of course, are vehicles. The second is skylights. As I explained in an earlier post, he believes that bees are like birds. They don’t just drop a load whenever they please but seek shiny objects as targets—like a game. Shiny objects include newly washed cars, shimmering swimming pools, snow white lawn furniture, and freshly painted fences.

Even I have to admit it can get pretty bad around here. When the skylights no longer admit sunlight—and you can no longer see the hood of the car from the driver’s seat—you are more or less forced to do something. Last month we had a guest from Seattle who suddenly looked into the sky, then thrust his hand in front of me. “Is that bee stuff?” he asked, amazed. “I thought it was raining.”

I winced as I saw the sticky yellow splotch of the back of his hand. It was time to smile and offer honey.

After years of experience, my husband is now the self-proclaimed world authority on removing bee poop from cars and skylights. After trying high-end car washes and pressure washers that didn’t work, he settled on the “pre-soak” as the very best method.

You can hose down the objects a few minutes before you plan to wash them or—if you want to skip this step—you can commence the wash after a rainstorm or early in the day after a heavy morning dew. After they have soaked, it is possible to remove them with soap and water or a pressure washer.

To make the job easier next time, keep the vehicles waxed. While the pollen stains yellow, it eventually comes off. But other bio-chemicals from the honey bee digestive tract may damage the surface of certain objects if they are not cleaned regularly.

Oh, yes . . . there’s one more thing. By the time you get completely around your car, it will be time to start over again. If you want your work to last more than about ten minutes, do it in the dead of night or the dead of winter.

Rusty

Mischievous proliferous. Flickr photo by beesinfrance.

Bees find water in a number of places including damp rocks, branches, muddy puddles, pond edges, and drops adhering to vegetation. They swallow the water and store it in their crops before flying home. The water is transferred to the waiting in-hive workers through the process of trophallaxis—the direct transfer from one bee to another.

Bees rarely store water, but bring it in as needed. In the heat of summer it is used for evaporative cooling. The water is spread in a thin film atop sealed brood or on the rims of cells containing larvae and eggs. The in-hive workers then fan vigorously, setting up air currents which evaporate the water and cool the interior of the hive. The process is similar to the human-designed air conditioner.

Nurse bees, who feed the developing larvae, also have a high demand for water. The nurses consume large amounts of pollen, nectar, and water so that their hypopharyngeal glands can produce the jelly that is used to feed the larvae, and to a lesser extent, other bees in the hive.

A third use for water occurs in the winter. Stored honey—especially honey high in glucose—tends to crystallize as it dries. Bees need water to dilute the crystals back into liquid before they can eat it. The same occurs if a beekeeper feeds crystalline sugar to bees as a winter supplement: the bees need to dissolve the crystals before they can eat the sugar.

Urban beekeepers face a problem when their bees select the neighbors’ swimming pools, bird baths, or hummingbird feeders as a water source. Although this occasionally happens, the bees’ need for additional water is less during nectar flows because the nectar contains a high percentage of water. Urban beekeepers can provide a source of water if they wish. Bees seem to prefer water that has some growth in it—such as green slime—rather than perfectly clean water. Some scientists speculate that the reason is simply that the bees can smell it and recognize it as a water source. Chlorinated pools were scarce during the last 80 million years, so bees didn’t evolve to recognize the odor.

Another problem with water collection occurs in agricultural areas where plants are treated with systemic insecticides. Bees collecting water from guttation drops—drops of water that naturally seep from the tips of stems and leaves—can be poisoned. Worse, sublethal doses of pesticide can be carried back to the hive and fed to the developing larvae by way of the nurses. Researchers are currently trying to determine the type and frequency of damage this may cause to honey bee colonies.

Rusty

Although it is easy to overlook, the diversity of forage available to urban bees is quite extensive. The panel mentioned parks, river basins, tree-lined streets, green roofs, flower boxes, community gardens, and eco-lawns (lawns with plenty of weeds) as possible sources of nectar and pollen. Other places that come to mind are utility easements, hedges, median strips, and nursery stock.

The panel emphasized the importance of keeping your bees safe from the public—and vice-versa—and discussed prudent placement of hives and ways to reduce their visibility. They concurred that an urban beekeeper must stay alert to signs of swarming and act to prevent it whenever possible. To that advice I would add that urban bee hives should be kept away from playgrounds, bikeways, trails, and crosswalks—or any place where a person could be startled into sustaining an injury.

Fecal trails were also discussed. This is one of my favorite topics because, according to my husband, bees are like birds. They don’t just drop a load whenever they please but seek shiny objects as targets. Shiny objects include newly washed cars, shimmering swimming pools, snow white lawn furniture, and freshly painted fences. Whatever the case, if you’ve never kept bees you will be amazed. As one of the panelists mentioned, you can sometimes change the flight pattern by re-orienting the hive entrance.

Quite a bit of time was spent discussing whether you should tell your neighbors that you’re going to keep bees, and if so, when. This is a topic that combines psychological warfare with legal and ethical dilemmas. I’m not going to touch this one, but I recommend listening to the recording of the webinar if you’re interested. It will be posted on the Brushy Mountain Bee Farm site and is free to anyone. Enjoy.

Rusty