If your lawn is sprouting dandelions and clover, your bok choy is going to flower and himalayan blackberries are sprawling over your fences, pat yourself on the back. You’re creating crucial habitat and fodder for the Western honeybee, apis malifora.
In 2008, Colony Collapse Disorder made headlines across the nation: apparently healthy honeybee colonies with ample stocks of honey and baby bee brood were mysteriously vanishing. A Honey Bee Colony Health Diagnostic Laboratory was established at Washington State University as part of a multi-university effort to study the problem.
“The agriculture system we have developed and that we’re dependent on is really dependent on honeybees,” WSU apiculture program head Dr. Walter S. (Steve) Sheppard told the Sounder. For example, more than a million colonies are brought to California to pollinate almonds each year.
We checked in with local beekeepers to see how San Juan County hives are faring this year. While their answers were mixed, it’s clear that beekeeping has become a challenge in the San Juans, just as it has elsewhere.
“We are seeing symptoms of colony collapse here,” said 30-year San Juan Island bee keeper Colleen Howe, who lost four out of six hives last winter. “It’s still really alarming. I keep losing them over the winter with these symptoms.”
Since 2006, the U.S. has lost 30 to 40 percent of its colonies each year. A nationwide population of 5 million managed colonies dropped to 3.5 million by the mid 1980s, and is now near 2.3 million colonies. Populations of wild honeybees, once prevalent, have almost vanished.
Sheppard said studies haven’t yielded any one “silver bullet” to stop the losses.
“It’s becoming a lot harder for beekeepers to survive,” he said.
Sheppard said factors to bee mortality cited by researchers include: pesticide use, nutrition limited by monoculture and habitat loss, migratory bee keeping, tracheal and varroa mites and disease.
“A lot of other native pollinators have declined in spectacular fashion,” said Sheppard, saying North America has some 4,000 species of bee.
Pesticides
Sheppard said pesticides accumulated in a honeycomb can shorten a bee’s foraging life by 50 percent; the chemicals can also have sublethal effects like disorienting bees so they never return to the hive.
Orcas beekeeper Keith Jones said he rotates out the honeycomb in his hives so that it doesn’t accumulate pesticides as heavily.
Honeybees rely on fungus to help break down a mix of pollen, bee saliva and nectar. Fungicides sprayed on crops interfere with that process.
“When I go down the hardware store chemical aisle, it’s heartbreak to me, because all those chemicals are slated to go into our environment right here,” said Howe. “That’s our food system.”
She cited a big local honeybee die-off this year to dandelion killer sprayed just as the bees were emerging in the spring.
Nutrition
Sheppard said monoculture has made it difficult for bees to find adequate nutrition.
“Bees are normally designed to sample different flowers,” he said. “Then you put them on a crop that is 10,000 acres of almonds.”
He said it’s difficult for beekeepers to find adequate forage to sustain their hives.
He said a diverse diet is key and that the weedy margins once more common on farms were crucial for bees. Now those margins are often eliminated by herbicides. Rhonda Barbieri, an 11-year beekeeper, said she makes sure to leave these high-nutritient patches for bees on her organic farm, La Campesina Project, on Orcas.
“Clearly the migratory beekeeping is another big stressor,” said Sheppard. Take a colony 1,000 miles and 10 percent of the queens will be lost.
He said genetic diversity has also suffered as the mites’ influx decimated wild honeybee populations. WSU researchers are now importing honeybee semen from Europe to try and broaden the gene pool of breeding stock.
Sheppard calls the role of GMOs “sort of ambiguous.”
“Indirectly GMOs could be contributing to a lack of food diversity,” he said, noting that “roundup ready” crops can withstand pesticide spraying that wipes out all other flora.
Mites
Native to Asian and Eastern Honeybees, “varroa destructor” mites can wipe out a Western honeybee hive in two years.
“It would be like you or I carrying around two or three muskrats hanging on and sucking our blood,” said Jones.
The mites also feed on bee larvae, causing malformities and death.
Howe said the mites “caught everybody off guard” when they showed up in the mid 1980s. Despite trying organic methods like garlic and wintergreen, she lost three quarters of her hives in the first year.
With demand high, purchasing replacements for lost colonies is getting more expensive. Jones said the infestation of mites is worse this year, though he hasn’t lost a hive in five or six years.
“You have to really micromanage them,” he said. “Mites are vectors for other ailments because they compromise their immune system.”
Ten-year beekeeper Jim Coffin on Orcas has 12 colonies. He said the bees actually seem healthier in the past two years, and views miticide treatment as crucial. Last winter he lost 20 percent of his colonies; four years ago he lost every single one.
“Every family farm used to keep bees,” he said. “When mites arrived a lot of it became too difficult. There are very few bees here in the San Juans now; there used to be bee trees everywhere.”
“Packaged commercial bees aren’t that healthy anymore,” Barbieri said.
Instead, she keeps two swarms of wild-caught bees. She gives them no medication and calls her approach “hands off management.”
It’s a honeybee’s life
Honeybees go through many jobs during their life cycle. Summer bees live just four to six weeks; winter bees born in October are physiologically different, with fatter bodies, and live six to seven months. One-week-old “nurse” bees create food for larvae with their special glands. Then they move on to the packing yard, stowing pollen inside comb cells or capping honey-filled cells with wax. After graduating to guarding the hive, honeybees spend their last days flying as mature foragers.
Honeybees love sunflowers, buckwheat, clover, dandelions, snowberry, mustards, and “anything with a bloom,” said our beekeepers. They get 95 percent of their nectar from blackberry blossoms. Beekeeper Keith Jones said that salal and madrone, though nectar-rich, are better suited to bumblebees’ longer tongues.
“Bees need no spraying,” Howe said. “I’m too radical, but hey, I like to eat.”
Beekeeper Colleen Howe said this year’s wet spring has given an advantage to the yellowjackets, “horrible enemies” to the bees who take advantage of wetter weather to slip past inactive honeybee guards into a hive. As the honeybees won’t fly until it’s at least 50 degrees, and keep their brood nest at a cozy 92 degrees, she said colder temperatures are hard on them.
Howe said her bees got such a late start this year that her organic farm’s crop of asian pears is only a quarter of normal yields; her italian plum crop is at about 50 percent.
