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The big bad dirty

I do not recall the exact wording, but it went something like this: “Do you agree that urban bees are healthier because they have fewer mites?” A trick question that can’t be answered yes or no, it made me want to scream. Oddly, I do remember my exact response, but I will spare you.

It’s hard to know where to begin disagreeing. Healthier than what? Fewer than whom? Are we comparing urban bees to suburban bees, prairie bees, forest bees, or monoculture bees? And who said they are healthier? Who said they have fewer mites? Show me some studies, some numbers.

Do people really believe that the spot where they plop down a hive determines the health of the colony? If all urban bees were healthier and had fewer mites, don’t you think just a few people would start overwintering their hives in the nearest metropolis? It just isn’t that simple.

City folk seem to think the big bad dirty is rural, and rural folk think the big bad dirty is urban. And for some reason, neither side realizes there is middle ground, that there are vast areas without cities or big ag.

If anything, I think big ag is more aware of bee problems than big urb. Growers know pesticide contamination is problematic, they know monoculture diets are bad, they know migration from crop to crop is hard on the bees.

Big urb, on the other hand, likes to disregard the high level of noise and incessant light in the environment. They like to ignore that fact the bee-killing roads are everywhere and that high winds shriek around buildings and throw bees off course. They pretend fine particulates and pollutants, including heavy metals, don’t land on flowers and stick to nectar and pollen alike.

Sure, some urban bees will do great, just as some rural bees will do great. But just because five colonies tucked between skyscrapers a half-mile from the airport exceeded expectations doesn’t mean they all will. Maybe their keeper had good training. Maybe he purchased exceptional bees. Maybe he made lucky decisions. Maybe this wasn’t his year to fail.

I’ve often wondered why beekeeping has to be a contest between urban and rural, commercial and hobbyist, natural and unnatural. No matter where you are or what your philosophy, you should concentrate on your own bees and stop worrying about everybody else. By all means learn from other beekeepers, absorb the details, compare notes—but stop keeping score. If your bees are thriving, be grateful.

As for all those arrogant, supercilious, pain-in-the-butt beekeepers? Forgetaboutthem. They disappear. Honestly. When the arrogant ones fail—and they all do eventually—they just quietly disappear rather than let it be known that their colonies up and died. The louder they crow, the harder they fall. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Occupy the barren landscape

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

Wednesday word file: pollination saturation

Pollination saturation is the practice of flooding a crop with an overly-large number of honey bee colonies in order to assure adequate pollination.

The practice is used where the crop to be pollinated is either not a honey bee favorite, or when it happens to be in bloom at the same time that other nearby crops—those more favorable to honey bees—are also in bloom. The extra-large population of bees will not find enough forage without working the non-favored plants as well as the favored ones.

For example, blueberries are not a favored plant although honey bees will forage on them if nothing else is available. But if the farmer next door is growing cabbage seed, the honey bees will abandon the blueberries in favor of the cabbage. To assure good blueberry pollination, the blueberry farmer is forced to bring in extra colonies of bees.

Pollination saturation is also used in alfalfa, ladino clover, alsike clover, cranberries, and standard kiwifruit. Its use has become more frequent as the number of native pollinators has decreased and the number of monoculture crops has increased.

Migratory beekeeping and honey bee health

We often hear that migratory beekeeping is bad for honey bees. But why, exactly, is this so? I’ve put together a list of the most commonly cited reasons.

  • Migratory beekeeping disrupts the natural rhythm of the colony. Like most things in nature, a colony has a life cycle. It begins to expand in late winter, the population explodes just before the honey flow, and then the colony swarms one or more times. The original colony and each of the swarms use the rest of the summer to prepare for winter. During the fall the populations decrease and “winter” bees are born. The winter bees see the colonies through until spring. But colonies that are trucked across the country—say from Maine to Florida and back again—to pollinate both summer crops and winter crops, get their signals crossed. The change in latitude changes the hours of daylight as well as the temperature, humidity, and floral types. These rapid changes and mixed signals are thought to stress the bees. Should the colony be raising winter bees or foragers? Should it be getting ready for spring or fall? Is winter coming or not?
  • Migratory beekeeping brings billions of bees together in one place where they can most effectively exchange disease organisms and parasites. Migratory beekeeping is responsible for the extremely rapid dissemination of disease we have seen in the last few decades.
  • Migratory beekeeping caters to the needs of monocropped farmlands. These monocultures do not provide the large variety of nutrients bees need for maximum health and immune response. In addition, the vast number of bees trucked to these areas means there is stiff competition for the food that is available.
  • Most crops are treated with one or more pesticides. When bees are trucked from one monoculture to the next, the colony is exposed to a greater number of pesticides. This increases the possibility of synergistic effects among pesticides that have been collected with pollen and stored inside the hive.
  • A colony may spend days during the hottest part of the summer confined on the back of a truck along with 400-500 other colonies. High heat, poor ventilation, and lack of water are the norm.
  • Freeway noise is not natural to bees. The incessant, high-decibel assault on the bees from road noise, traffic, and wind is thought to stress the bees. High noise levels are not normally found in the pastoral environments where bees live.

I still find it odd when people express surprise that honey bees are in trouble. The only surprise is that they have survived at all. It’s hard to believe any animal could withstand such harsh and constant abuse and still survive to work for us the next day. Truly amazing.

Rusty

Native bees should not be managed like farm animals

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