I don’t know if you saw this, it was published in the November American Bee Journal

Big Agriculture, Love It or Leave It

Beekeepers are fond of calling themselves the angels of agriculture. Maybe more fitting would be the stepchildren. Early on, bee hives were seen as part of the farm, but by the late 1800s they began to get a bit too numerous. Some keepers in New York  State had as many as 500 hives on their property. Fruit growers actually wanted the bees out of the orchards. First, there was the notion that bees ate damaged and even ate the fruit. While wasps will do this, domesticated honey bees prefer nectar from flowers and will only visit fruit that is already exposed.

Beyond that, orchardists were starting to get into trouble with the beekeeping organizations over poisoning due to sprays such as arsenic. It was easier to send them packing than to take the heat over being characterized as bee killers. Meanwhile, the great success of honey production in the late 1800s led to a crash in prices. Beekeepers got too good at what they did. Add to this adulteration and rumors of adulteration, and the business became far less profitable.

Things picked back up during the World Wars due to scarcity of food and especially sweets. But by the end of WWII, the honey business was right back where it was: vastly overproducing. The number of bee colonies in the US fell from approximately six million to 4 million in a decade – back to the number before the war. This changed when very large acreages of fruit and nuts became the rule in the western states. Bee hives were in demand for pollination, now recognized to be essential when vast areas of arid lands are converted to crops; pollination became a way to earn a living.

Beekeepers could now offset the vagaries of getting a honey crop, which depends largely on weather and crop rotations, things out of their control. Pollination provided a steady contracted source of income, since the farmers paid to have the hives in place before the bloom period. However, the contracts stipulated the hives be pulled out at petal drop, because the spray regimen had to recommence.

As agriculture boomed, so did crop protection chemicals. With the hue and cry over environmentally damaging pesticides, newer formulations were developed, some with unintended consequences. For example, microencapsulated chemicals seemed safer at first until it was discovered that bees would collect the pellets as if they were pollen and transport them back to the hive, where they would poison the nest.  Rather than tackle the issue directly, a new approach was worked out: pay beekeepers for losses. Soon beekeepers were receiving large checks for dead hives, in some cases hives that had not had bees in them for years.

After this program was killed due to widespread fraud, beekeepers began to take advantage of the honey price support program. The US government would loan money based upon what honey “should” be worth, and then take the honey when the beekeepers “defaulted” on the loan. Some of that honey is probably still in warehouses somewhere. Beekeeping fell on hard times again in the 1990s. Price support ended and the number of beehives declined precipitously as a result of the invasive varroa mite. Add to this the importation of cheap honey from third world countries and beekeepers began to go belly up. Fortunes changed again when the acreage of almonds in California grew so large that it necessitates almost all the migratory beekeepers in the US -- with their hives -- to be there in February.

However, this process of moving hives all over the country has not been without its toll. Beekeepers began to be aware of the very bad state of honey bee health, not only in the US but in Europe as well. The French were the first to blame it on pesticides, but beekeepers all over the world soon jumped on that bandwagon. Despite evidence that the health of honey bees has been severely damaged by parasites and pathogens, as well as the endless transcontinental trucking of hives, there is a renewed demand to ban insecticides. Either that, or provide subsidies again -- for dead hives. Beekeepers should stop and reconsider as they bite the hands that feed them.

Peter Loring Borst
Ithaca, NY 14850

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