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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

Great expectations

My daughter sent me a news article about bees on a rooftop restaurant in Kirkland, Washington. For those of you from elsewhere, Kirkland is an urban/suburban city outside of Seattle. If the name sounds oddly familiar, it’s because the city is home to Costco and its Kirkland Signature brand of products.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Now, as part of the Woodmark Hotel, Yacht Club & Spa’s latest program, “Bee on the Lake,” Seattle-area residents will have the chance to taste a buzz-worthy batch of golden honey produced by 180,000 Italian honeybees and six queen bees housed just steps from the property.

Once settled in, it is expected that the six hives of bees, which are located on top of a Carillon Point rooftop near the Woodmark, will begin producing honey around mid-July. At the end of production in September, the Woodmark will have approximately 1,200 pounds of honey to work with, and with that impressive number in mind, has already begun planning how to best use the locally-produced product.

Did you catch that? These six colonies, during a span of ten weeks, are going to produce 1200 pounds of honey for the restaurant. That’s 200 pounds per hive or 20 lbs per hive per week. And that’s just the amount the restaurant will have “to work with.” One has to assume they will leave some for the bees.

Maybe all those folks in Kirkland have Costco-size expectations, but that is nuts. According to a report by the USDA, the average honey production in Washington was 37 pounds per colony in 2010 and 38 pounds per colony in 2011. And that’s for the whole season, not a ten week period spanning the July and August nectar dearth. It makes you wonder where they get their information.

Impressive numbers like that are certainly attainable in some places—but not in western Washington in the middle of the summer. No way. I hope they have some other sources of local honey lined up. Maybe some of you Seattle beekeepers have a new market . . . just keep those prices high as the rooftops.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Pesticide residue in urban honey: yes or no?

The best way to make yourself into a target these days, is to say something negative about urban beekeeping. You may as well paint a bull’s eye on your beesuit. And those yellowjackets I’ve been complaining about? They can’t hold a candle to an angry urban beekeeper. Hear that? Those are arrows zinging by and I haven’t even started yet.

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, which are not insects at all.

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

More thoughts on urban beekeeping

Since I wrote my post on over-inspecting hives and Karen Peteros wrote her rebuttal, I’ve been mulling over the concept of urban beekeeping.

I still think my philosophy is best for the bees, that is, leave them alone as much as possible. On the other hand, I think Karen’s philosophy is best for urban beekeepers and their neighbors. But this begs a question. Should we be keeping bees in urban environments at all? We know it can be done, but should it be?

If we have to manipulate colonies half to death in order to conform to what we see as “neighborly behavior” maybe it’s not the right thing to do. A lot of lip service is paid to the idea that we should “let the bees be bees” and much of this talk originates from urban beekeepers—the very ones who are doing all the manipulating. It appears that urban beekeeping and “letting bees be bees” are antithetical concepts.

I’ve never been against urban beekeeping; in fact, I think it has encouraged people to learn more about their environments, their food sources, and living things in general. It has stimulated a renewed interest in beekeeping and honey, and it has generate a flood of publicity about things like bee diseases, colony collapse, pesticide use, and even the existence of other pollinators. All of these are good things.

On the other hand, many people are afraid of bees, so to bring them into densely populated areas might not be the best thing for either the humans or the bees. Some people must live in the city even if they’d rather not, but many people live in the city because they don’t want to near stinging insects, wild animals, or “earthy” people. These folks have rights, too.

As I see it, the bees are caught in the middle. Urban dwellers should not be hassled by bees, and bees should not be hassled by beekeepers. But beekeepers are constantly hassled by the urban dwellers who don’t want to be hassled by the bees that don’t want to be hassled by the beekeepers. Got that?

I haven’t come to any conclusions about this, I’m just thinking on paper . . . er, keyboard. But I see several contradictions between what we are saying and what we are doing. I find it amusing that, in general, hobby beekeepers are very critical of commercial beekeepers. Although commercial beekeepers use some practices I don’t like, in many ways they “let the bees be bees” more than your typical hands-on (many hands, many ons) urban beekeepers who are caught in a choke-hold between the nature of bees and the nature of urban society.

Of course there are different levels of urban-ness. Some urban areas are concrete and asphalt; others are sprinkled with parks, tree-lined streets, and gardens. Suburbs can be compact or sprawling, uptight or easygoing. Every place is different. But once a jurisdiction allows beekeeping within its borders, it must then accept the things that go along with beekeeping, and one of those things is swarms.

Rusty

Summer in the city: urban hive inspections

Note: Today’s post was written by Karen Peteros, a beekeeper and beekeeping instructor in San Francisco. Karen took issue with my post, “Is too much hive inspection a bad thing?” and wrote a dissenting opinion. Her arguments are both articulate and valid. I thought it would be useful, especially for new beekeepers in urban and suburban areas, to read her opinion.

Thanks, Karen, for your contribution to Honey Bee Suite.

Hi Rusty:

I very much enjoy your blog posts but I do feel that your latest, “Is too much hive inspection a bad thing?” is unique to (1) your beekeeping location which I assume is somewhat rural given your reference to the landscape where you keep bees, your swarm catchers posted on various trees etc; and (2) the fact that you have a few years of beekeeping experience in your location under your belt.

A different perspective — If you were beekeeping in a densely populated suburban area or in an urban environment, you would need to significantly modify your practices or you may find you have neighbor, community and legal problems on your hands.  Regular and thorough inspections, particularly for swarm control, is very important.  Losing more than 50% of your bees to swarming is bad enough, but reliable queen mating in a suburban/urban environment can be lacking.  This can result in a queenless colony that becomes pissy (e.g., hot).  Moreover, rotted trees are not generally allowed to persist in densely populated areas, even in urban parks, due to public safety and liability concerns.  Therefore, the nearest cavity a swarm is likely to find would be in someone’s wall or attic via a small area of dry rot.  Not surprisingly, colony removal is an unwelcome cost to homeowners.

Accordingly, we urban beekeepers must balance the responsibilities of being good stewards to our bees, but also being good neighbors.  I regularly teach classes for beginning beekeepers and, after having taught such classes and mentored beginners for a number of years now, I recommend that they get into the hive not less than every other week after the first 3 weeks of installing a package or a swarm, through September.  As a point of reference for San Francisco, our primary swarm season is March-June, but swarming can begin as early as mid-February depending on the weather and can continue into September (primarily, congestion swarming).  I tend to recommend this frequency of inspections for at least the first year of beekeeping.  But I also recommend this frequency of inspections through the second year because the biological goal of a colony following the year of establishment has shifted from survival to reproduction.  Otherwise, newer beekeepers simply do not gain enough experience in their first couple of years of beekeeping to understand the significance of what they are seeing, on the frames and within the hive as a whole, as it changes through the seasons and the life cycle of the colony. Unless newer beekeepers can gain this understanding through hands-on and observational experience, they are less likely to be able to manage for the success of the colony and their beekeeping experience.

I also keep bees in Ashland, Oregon on a rural property, and my practices there are much more akin to yours.  However, in my (and other people’s) San Francisco backyards where I also keep bees, my intrusions into the hive are much more frequent and regular out of the necessity to balance the somewhat competing responsibilities to my bees and immediate and nearby neighbors.

Karen Peteros
San Francisco CA