Are the Bees Dying off Because They're Too Busy?


By Susan Kuchinskas, East Bay Express
Posted on August 11, 2007, Printed on August 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59426/


All across America, a mysterious disease is wiping out bee colonies. This
malady causes all the bees in a hive to seemingly vanish overnight,
abandoning their brood in the nursery, as well as their stores of honey and
pollen. Other bees and pests, which normally plunder deserted honey, shun
these hives. This baffling die-off dealt a financial blow to commercial
beekeepers this season and raised fears of environmental and economic
disaster. For farmers, no bees means no pollination.

But pollination is happening like mad in Leah Fortin's tiny yard in North
Oakland, Calif. Busy little bee bodies cover the clumps of lavender, salvia
and roses that line her driveway. More bees work the malaleucas on the
parking strip, those trees with shaggy bark that look like giant Q-tips when
they're in bloom.

A lot of these bees -- although surely not all -- come from the hive on
Fortin's roof. The unobtrusive wooden box, barely 20 inches by 16, and 13
inches high, sits on the tar-and-gravel roof of her stucco bungalow,
sheltered by the chimney. Honeybees bustle in and out of the narrow slit
along the bottom, delivering bundles of pollen and droplets of nectar, then
hurrying out again for more.

"The neighbors call us 'The Little House on the Prairie,'" Fortin said on a
recent summer afternoon. "They think I'm a kook."

Fortin, who administers after-school programs, captured this wild swarm in
early May, and so far it's thriving. "My book said to take two pieces of
cardboard and scoop them into a five-gallon paint can, so that's what I
did," she said. "I was scared shitless. I had no idea what I was doing." She
covered the can with a net and drove home. "It worked, and there they are."

Fortin put out a small jar of honey to make the new colony feel at home;
since then, she's done nothing except peek at them once in a while. "It
doesn't matter what you know and what you don't know," she said. "The bees
know what they're doing." And what they do is pollinate.

Honeybees aren't native to North America, so indigenous plants don't need
them for pollination. If all the honeybees disappeared, we'd still have corn
and wheat. But most of the imported fruit and vegetable species commonly
thought of as quintessentially Californian -- almonds, grapes, plums,
cucumbers, cantaloupe, asparagus -- need the help of bees to wed male pollen
to female pistil. Without bees, there would be no apples, no cherries, no
tomatoes, no zucchini. Even tofu would be scarcer -- soybeans depend partly
on the honeybee for pollination.

Most of these crops are no longer pollinated by wild honeybees. Like many
indigenous insects and plants, feral honeybees have been nearly wiped out by
pesticides, loss of habitat and parasites like the varroa mite.

Meanwhile, commercial beekeeping has come to resemble other kinds of factory
farming. While the bees themselves retain more freedom of movement than
almost any other living creature raised by man, a commercial bee lot is more
like a cattle feed lot than a wild meadow.

Beehives are crammed close together in rows just a few feet apart; in the
wild, a square mile supports at the most three or four hives. A wild
colony's diet is diverse, comprising pollen and nectar from myriad plants.
To compensate for the lack of forage around bee lots, bees are typically fed
high-fructose corn syrup, the same stuff that's contributing to a human
health crisis. And just like other agricultural livestock, bees become
stressed when you crowd them together. They're more susceptible to diseases
and parasites, less able to function naturally.

It's all making some bee scientists wonder: Is the epidemic known as Colony
Collapse Disorder real, or are the bees simply being worked to death?

Big beesness

If you want to put bees' value into dollars and cents, just look at
California's almond industry. Almonds are the state's second-largest crop,
with farmers raking in $2.34 billion in 2005. This year's yield, grown on
615,000 acres, is expected to be a record 1.310 billion pounds, up 18
percent from last year -- despite the dire statistics about Colony Collapse
Disorder.

If you drive through the heart of California's agriculture industry, the
Central Valley, watching the miles of orchards in bloom, they look natural.
In fact, the California almond industry depends on a herculean human effort
to subvert the natural order of things. In nature, most flowers don't get
pollinated. But you don't get a billion-pound harvest by letting nature take
its course. In the old days, an orchard owner might invite a beekeeper to
keep hives on his land in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The
agribusiness way is to rent hives for the two-week almond pollination
season. This year, growers paid $150 per hive, placing three to five hives
per acre.

Since 1999, beekeepers in the Pacific Northwest have earned four to five
times more income from pollination than from the combined sales of honey and
wax, according to a survey by Oregon State University.

But it was hairy out in the fields this year, as beekeepers from around the
country raced to get their hives to California before they collapsed. Some
growers found themselves renting empty hives.

Thousands of beekeepers had done the math and begun building up their stock.
It's not uncommon for a commercial operation to run to 10,000 hives,
trucking them from California to South Dakota to Florida in the course of a
single year. One million hives, or nearly half of all the hives in the
United States, were hauled into California this year, according to Randy
Oliver, a beekeeper in Grass Valley, Calif., who has pollinated almonds for
25 years.

For a honeybee, the lucrative almond pollination season comes at the worst
possible time. The natural lifecycle of a bee colony follows the seasons,
with a hibernationlike rest period during the winter. Unfortunately for the
bees, California almond trees bloom around Feb. 10, a miserably rainy time
of year.

A colony may rear ten to 12 generations of bees in a year. The queen moves
through the hive, laying eggs in combs toward the center of the nest. The
eggs hatch in three days; the larvae are fed nectar by nurse bees until they
emerge from their cells in 21 days to begin work in the hive. A few are
male; they're called drones because they do nothing but hang around and eat,
on call in case the queen dies and a new queen needs to mate. The females
get to work, spending three weeks as house bees. They may feed the larvae,
keep the hive clean, attend the queen or just fan their wings to cool the
hive. Some act as sentries, attempting to chase away bears, skunks and
robber bees from other hives. Then they go out to forage for another three
weeks, completing their lifecycle. Elderly bees don't retire; they simply
fly out one day and don't return.

As the days shorten and the sun dims, the hive produces its last generation
of the year. These "winter bees" must survive the cold months and live long
enough to raise the vigorous new brood that will bring back the spring
pollen and begin the cycle again.

"Winter bees live for about six months," Oliver said. "Come spring, when the
hives are moved to almonds, these same bees that survived the winter and
raised the first brood then have to go out to forage. They can't do it."
Instead of gathering the pollen, the exhausted bees drop dead outside the
hive, Oliver surmises.

Eric Mussen, who specializes in beekeeping (an apiculturalist) for the
University of California, Davis, thinks malnutrition could be another piece
of the syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder -- the same kind of
malnutrition afflicting Fast Food Nation.

Wild bees live on water, nectar, and pollen. Nectar provides the
carbohydrates they use for energy and to make honey, while pollen is a rich
mix of protein, fats, minerals, vitamins, and micronutrients. But just as
human food can lose nutrients from overcooking, Mussen thinks adverse
weather could produce tiny changes in pollen grains, resulting in one of the
mysterious symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder -- reports that the vanished
bees leave behind combs rich with pollen. Too much chilling, as well as
weather that's too hot and dry, can cause pollen to become sterile by
killing its protoplasm. Perhaps, he speculates, bad weather destroyed some
nutrients vital to the bees as well, making the pollen useless to their
bodies.

The normal dearth of pollen in the fall, combined with the drought that
swept the country last year, could have created a season's worth of
undernourished bee colonies -- colonies too weak to stand up to the strain
of life in the agrifactory.

"Perhaps bees in that malnourished state could have made it had they not
been fed on by mites and viruses," Mussen says. Like humans, all bees carry
viruses, but the immune systems of healthy bees usually keeps the viral load
under control. "They haven't found a bee with less than two viruses. In some
apparently healthy colonies, some bees had five to six different viruses.
You can't blame the viruses, but if you have a weak bee, such things can
overwhelm it."

Add this to the stress of days spent bumping over the interstates, and it
wouldn't be surprising that colonies can't fight off the mites and viruses
that plague them. A working bee's life has become as stressful as any human
cube-dweller's. Colony Collapse Disorder, then, may be no more than the
result of one too many things going wrong in a bad year, surmises bee broker
Denise Qualls.

"Beekeepers, especially commercial beekeepers, have always lost 10 to 20
percent of their hives when they come out here for pollination," says
Qualls, whose company, Pollination Connection, helps manage the annual rush
of bees from all over the country that converge on California for the almond
season. "Granted, the loss is higher, but -- you know, they used to just
call it bad beekeeping. Now they have a name for it."

Buzz in the backyard

Qualls thinks inbred queens are another possible factor in collapsing
colonies. The queen produces all the eggs to replace workers, and she
secretes pheromones that keep the hive humming. The conventional wisdom is
to purchase queens bred to be gentle and good honey producers; some
beekeepers replace the queen each year, because a younger queen is supposed
to be healthier. "But they keep coming from the same stock," Qualls points
out, so any vulnerabilities may get reinforced.

Think of all the hereditary ailments that afflict purebred dogs, and compare
that with the health of your basic mutt. Maybe these queens have become the
poodles of the insect world. During last year's pollination rush, Qualls
says, a significant number of queens died: "They just weren't strong
enough."

Maybe that's what happened to Peter Scholz. For several years, he bought a
starter package -- a queen and three pounds of bees -- and carefully placed
them in the hive that sits on a four-foot-square perch under a tree in the
backyard of his two-story Oakland Edwardian. All through the summer, they
worked the flowers. But every winter, the colony dwindled away -- or, you
could say, collapsed.

Scholz gave up, but left the hive in place. Two springs ago, a feral swarm
moved in. This colony is thriving, and he expects to get 50 pounds of honey
this year. "It makes sense in a Darwinian way that the hives that flourish
locally and swarm are the ones you want to adopt," he says.

It's a method that's worked for commercial beekeeper Steve Gentry for nearly
30 years. He keeps around a hundred hives scattered in 14 locations from
here to Santa Cruz; in winter, he takes them all to the Santa Cruz Mountains
to get fat on the manzanita bloom. Every colony originated from a wild
swarm.

"All my hives are survivor stock," he says, ones that have managed to fight
off varroa and tracheal mites, two parasites that began infecting American
colonies in the 1990s. "It's survival of the fittest. If my bees swarm,
there's some vitality there. Beekeepers say they don't have time for swarms.
But when they don't have any bees, they'll have time."

Living among the bees

Swarming is the natural process by which a colony reproduces itself.
Capturing swarms is a popular pastime for backyard beekeepers -- and it may
provide insurance against whatever disasters are befalling commercial
operators. A colony has to be strong, healthy and able to fight off disease
in order to expend precious resources in swarming. The swarm is a group of
hardy pioneers led by a queen who has proven herself through breeding and,
perhaps, in combat with another queen.

In the spring, while the hive is buzzing with newborn bees and the combs
drip with honey, the colony produces a second queen. The old queen flies out
with a batch of drones to mate, and then takes off with a thousand or so
workers to find a new home. The swarm pauses to rest and feed, gathering en
masse on a tree limb or wall, while scouts look around for an attractive
site. They may stay for a day or two and then move on if they don't find a
good spot.

So, when Leah Fortin gets another swarm call on a hot June weekend, she
throws her gear in her truck and, with neighbor and fellow beekeeper Peter
Scholz, goes after it. But this mass of bees on a clump of lilies in the
front yard of a house near Grizzly Peak is no longer a swarm; it's begun to
set up housekeeping on several fronds of the plant. They must have been
desperate; worker bees in a swarm have only three weeks to establish a new
colony, lay down comb, and let the queen begin to lay eggs before they die.
When it gets close to their time, they'll build comb on just about anything.
But there's no way this nascent colony could have survived the winter's cold
and wind.

Fortin uses a special smoker to calm the bees -- this is a standard
practice, although no one knows exactly why it works. She grasps the bundle
of leaves clotted with wax and snips them off. Now she has a bee bouquet.
She gently places it in a five-gallon bucket.

Back at Scholz's house, it takes only minutes to put the bees into their new
home. A standard beehive consists of a wooden box with a separate bottom and
a lid that rests on top. Inside the box, nine or ten wooden frames hang from
a ledge, like folders in a file cabinet. Each frame holds a sheet of
foundation on which the bees will build their hexagonal chambers to hold
eggs, developing larvae, pollen and honey.

Bees generally fly as far as four miles in search of food, but they do best
when they don't have to venture more than half a mile. Pickings should be
good in this heavily planted neighborhood, even though there are at least
three other tame hives and one wild colony nearby.

While Fortin's North Oakland neighborhood is teeming with bees, others may
have none.

The yield from Bill Smith's home orchard in the Alameda County town of
Hayward, Calif., doubled after he installed his first hive five years ago.
It all started with the 4-H Club. Another member had a hive near horse
stables and mischievous boys, a bad combination. Smith agreed to take them:
"I noticed that the following year, we got a much better fruit set around
here. We really were starving for bees."

Smith claims he keeps bees only for pollination. But now there are the ten
hives piled on a small trailer in a corner of his hilltop half-acre, plus a
tottering stack of empty hive boxes waiting for new colonies. He is
president of the Alameda County Beekeepers Association, and he's stockpiling
honey to make mead. It's a sure case of bee fever.

The engineer lives with his family in a century-old house on a former
chicken ranch. You can see the successive waves of development. A few
two-acre pastures still dot the hill, surrounded by 1950s ranch houses.
Lately, some of those pastures have been replaced by stucco mini-mansions
that fill almost the entire lot.

"Don't tell the neighbors I'm here," Smith says. "They don't know." The row
of yards bordering his are downhill enough that the honeysuckle-covered
fence between them completely obscures their view. To the north, the hives
are shielded by a thick cedar tree, and the house and garage obscure the
view from the street and the south side.

Like Fortin, Smith is a laid-back beekeeper. "I hardly ever work the bees,"
he says. "Bees know how to take care of themselves. You give them a place to
live, and they go crazy on their own."

Indeed, bees follow an internal timetable that's been bred into them through
eons. Home beekeepers know that the less you try to do for the bees, the
healthier they'll be. Is it some pheromone the bees put out that places you
in their thrall? Or just that they're so fascinating, so soothing to watch?
In any case, Smith is far from the first person to find that one hive leads
to another.

"I hear about a good deal, or someone calls me up and says, 'I just captured
some bees, and I have nowhere to put them.' I guess I'm just greedy," he
says.

Back to nature

Although Steve Gentry says bees are a sideline for him, it's a pretty robust
sideline. Gentry sells 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of Steve's Bees-branded honey
every year at gourmet groceries and natural-foods stores, all small-run
varietals. Right now, he's featuring chamise honey, made from the nectar of
the tough, white-flowered chaparral bush. He has another lucrative business
removing hives from inside the walls of homes.

While commercial beekeeping has become a high-labor, low-margin line of
work, in the backyard it can be as natural and laissez-faire as you please.
If you get a couple of quarts of honey, it's all good. But there is a middle
ground, and people like Gentry are moving there. They're taking some tips
from the Slow Food movement, offering high-quality, locally produced
products at premium prices.

Marshall's Farm Honey, based in American Canyon in Napa County, is credited
with being among the first companies to take honey upscale. Spencer and
Helene Marshall have taken their cues from the winemakers of Sonoma County,
offering small batches of varietal honey at farmers' markets. They scatter a
few hives at choice locations throughout the Bay Area and isolate batches
produced by the sequential wildflower and tree blooms. They encourage
consumers to appreciate the "special flavor nuances and wonderful color
variations" that result. The Marshalls even offer Hood Honey, described as a
middle-range amber village mix, harvested from Oakland's neighborhoods.

Honey is just one product of those highly productive bees; the pollen and
wax they produce are valuable, too. Exploiting them -- making use of
everything possible -- is another lesson from boutique farmers.

For instance, you'd never know it from Judy Casale's house in an upscale
subdivision in Castro Valley in California's Alameda County, but she whips
up batches of lip balm, soap, lotion, candles and specialty honeys in her
Tuscan-style kitchen. There's even one hive in her lushly landscaped
backyard; her remaining stock of 34 hives is dispersed on private property
throughout the Alameda County areas of Livermore and Castro Valley.

Like a lot of beekeepers, Casale got interested by chance ten years ago,
after a presentation at a meeting of the California Rare Fruit Growers. "I
liked the idea of backyard honey and pollination," she recalls. "I wasn't
crazy about handling bees, but I got over it. The first time I poured a
container of bees into a hive was pretty scary." She still completely suits
up when she works the bees in her backyard, a colony with a cranky
temperament.

She branched out from selling honey seven years ago. "There are only so many
candles you can make, use, and sell, and I was looking for something more
creative," she says. Today, her Dominique skincare line is a thriving
operation that's transitioning from a hobby to a sideline business. Casale
has landed accounts at several Los Angeles spas and is looking for more in
the Bay Area. Her latest concoction is mojito-flavored lip balm.

Randy Oliver, the Grass Valley beekeeper, is another who looks beyond honey
and wax. In fact, he looks to exploit every niche he can find. In addition
to managing and renting 500 hives, he raises and sells queens and starter
colonies in the spring. He teaches apiculture to bee clubs and schools, and
he writes articles for journals. He's even getting into Web media, charging
a small subscription fee for his website content.

Oliver wants to help commercial beekeepers get off the slippery slope of
using more and more chemicals that have less and less of an effect. His 500
hives are small-time by commercial standards, but enough to prove the
effectiveness of a more natural approach. He aims to be a bridge between
agribusiness bees and the backyard.

Big operations have become monocultures, making more money from pollination
than from honey -- and sometimes even killing off bees at the end of the
season. Instead, Oliver advocates integrated pest-management strategies that
keep mite populations down to reasonable levels without pesticides. At the
same time, he acknowledges the professional's need to automate and minimize
labor.

For example, dusting bees with powdered sugar causes varroa mites to fall
off them. If you also replace the solid bottom of the hive with a screened
bottom, the mites fall all the way out and have trouble crawling back in.
But sprinkling powdered sugar is a lot slower than fumigating a hive, so
Oliver invented a brush/cup combo that lets a beekeeper powder down a hive
in just 15 seconds.

"Beekeepers, like most agriculturists, are pretty conservative and not
willing to risk their operations by trying something out," he says. "They
want to see other beekeepers doing something successfully and making money
doing it. If they see people making money, they'll change." 

Freelance journalist Susan Kuchinskas covers business, technology and
science. Her book, Love Chemistry: How Oxytocin Lets Us Love, Trust and
Mate, will be published in May 2008. She tracks oxytocin research on her
blog, Hug the Monkey <http://www.hugthemonkey.com> . 

 


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