Hi, always good to hear from Kerry.  The honey bee/alfalfa leafcutter bee
debate continues to be waged.
 
Researchers and beekeepers both have strong views about the efficacy of
honey bees on alfalfa.  Kerry mentions differences in climate, I suspect
this and other factors are important.
 
I would not be doing bee research today if it had not been for honey bees
and alfalfa pollination.  The story may be educational - it certainly
raises some questions about the reliability of reports that say bees
dodge the trip mechanism and as such rob nectar with little contribution
to pollination.
 
Anyway, here goes:
 
In 1973, I got a chance to look at the environmental impacts of a
large-scale development of coal-fired power in eastern Montana.
 
Eastern Montana is a semi-arid region, with rolling hills, on the edge of
historic short-grass prairies.  Long finger-shaped valleys follow creeks,
that flow heavily in the spring and often dry up before the end of summer.
The hills are grazed or planted to wheat.  The rocky, heavy clay soils
along the streams in the valley bottoms are planted to alfalfa.  Apiaries
of 50-100 colonies are sited about every 2-3 miles just off the gravel roads
that parallel the creeks.  The alfalfa fields sub-irrigate because of the
high water table in early summer.  The second cutting of alfalfa is left
to go to seed.
 
The alfalfa grows sparsely, but provides good seed.  The bees are always
placed on the edge to the field, usually on a small rise, on the opposite
side of the field from the water source.  In most cases, the apiaries sit
between rangelands and alfalfa fields.  The rangeland vegetation keeps
the bees going between alfalfa blooms.  These colonies either remain on
site all year, or are moved in from California in May and taken back out
in September.  The only time that they are moved during the summer is to
avoid a pesticide spray.
 
In 1973, much of southeastern Montana was sprayed to control grasshoppers
- in July and August!  It was a very dry summer.  I meet a beekeeper near
Broadus, Montana who had just lost 1/3-1/2 of his 1200 colony operation
to spray.
.
When I introduced myself and said we were starting a long-term study of
the effects of coal burning on the rangeland and agricultural systems of
eastern Montana, he told me he had little interest in such matters,  His
only concern was keeping from going bankrupt.
 
Because I had just finished a five year thesis on rangeland grasshoppers,
I wanted to know why anyone would waste time and money spraying them at
the time of year when the populations would soon crash naturally.  He
said that the grasshoppers were eating the seed.  I challenged that
assumption, because the grasshopper species that were so evident in his
fields were specialists - they only ate grasses, not alafalfa.  He
countered that the grasshoppers moved up on the alfalfa every night to
feed.  I commented that they were moving up to follow the warmth and to
be positioned to catch the sun in the morning, not to eat.
 
Well, that conversation didn't go very far, and I left without getting
his cooperation in the proposed coal impact study.
 
A couple of weeks later, my research associate and I were heading back to
our field camp. We had travelled almost 200 miles that day, had worked a very long day, and
found ourselves in Broadus, late in the evening, with another three hours
ahead of us to get home.  Broadus has two small hotels, both were filled.
 
Because we often camped out, we needed a place to stay, but there weren't
any campgrounds in that remote area - and if we just pulled into
someone's field, we were likely to get shot or run in for cattle rustling.
 
We needed to find a place to set up camp, and we didn't feel like
knocking on the doors of strangers just before dark.  I decided that the
beekeeper had at least met us and maybe he would let us park in the far
corner of his yard - at least he was less likely to run us off at gun point.
 
(Remember, Montanan's are known for our independent spirit - where else
do you find FreeMen, Militia, and the Unabomber more or less left alone?)
 
We were in for a real surprise,  The beekeeper greeted us like long lost
family.  He was eager to talk, had a late dinner made up, and let us camp
in his warehouse.
 
Why the change of attitude?  Well, after we left a couple of weeks
earlier, he went out with a flashlight to check the hoppers in his
fields.  Turns out they were just hanging on the tops of the stems - more
or less comatose (it gets cold at night in eastern Montana).
 
What I didn't know is that he, his brother, and his father also grew
alfalfa seed.  They were considering spraying!  Why, because everyone
else was spraying.  When he found the the grasshoppers were not eating
his seed, he saw two opportunities:
 
1) He wasn't going to spray and told his brother and father not to spray.
 
2) He rounded up 600-700 colonies of bees (the remainders of his
operation) and placed them on these fields.
 
Did he get seed?  You bet - biggest crop ever!  Filled his 55 gallon
honey barrels with seed and just about recouped his honey losses.
 
His neighbors got very little seed - nothing left to pollinate after
repeated sprayings (some of them sprayed three times).
 
 
Ok, this is an extreme situation.  But the honey bees did the trick.
Probably had so many bees that they had to fight for blossoms.  He also
made honey, enough to sell and to get his bees through the winter.
 
 
He contends (and I don't have any data to support or to dispute this)
that his bees had been selected to work alfalfa.  His bees (and queens)
had been kept in that same area for over 3 decades.  He grafted his own
queens from his own stock, always picking bees that did well on alfalfa.
 
I can say that I have trapped lots of alfalfa pollen from bees throughout
Montana.  Like southern California, our beekeepers work this crop for
honey and many growers depend on honey bee for pollination.
 
Are they as good as alfalfa leaf-cutters?  I can say that they are less
susceptible to some pesticides - we have watched leaf-cutters dying from
helicopter sprays of fields in eastern Washington, with little impact to
adjacent honey bee colonies.
 
My guess, all things being equal, leaf-cutter bees probably have the
edge.  But, honey bees can get the job done.  It may take more honey bees
per acre (a guess).  Climate may be a factor, as Kerry suggests.  And
maybe, just maybe, different lines of honey bee vary in their ability or
willingness to collect pollen from alfalfa.
 
So, how does these long-winded narrative lead into my 20+ years of bee
research?  Well, after getting a bumper crop of seed and saving his bees
from any additional exposure to pesticides, the beekeeper not only agreed
to participate in our studies - but he taught me just about everything
that I know about working with bees.  After all, I had been trained as an
entomologist at a University that did not have an apiary.
 
Cheers
 
Jerry Bromenshenk
The University of Montana-Missoula
[log in to unmask]
 
http://grizzly,umt.edu/biology/bees