Where are all the bees going?

In recent years honeybee colonies have been in rapid decline, with some North American beekeepers losing 50 to 100 per cent of their honeybees each year. This phenomenon has been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in North America.

But beekeepers around the world are also experiencing serious losses in their hives, and while the causes are speculated on, a clear-cut answer is still unknown.

What is known: bees are very important to human food pollination. According to the documentary Vanishing of the Bees, one out of three mouthfuls of food North Americans eat is grown thanks to honeybee pollination.

Bob Liptrot, a Sooke beekeeper with almost 50 years of experience and a master’s degree in entomology, is worried about future food production.

“We are on a rock covered with water in a large vacuum called outer space, and we’re going nowhere off that rock in the short term to go set up a farm somewhere else,” says Liptrot. “If we don’t get it together we’re going to join the rest of the extinct species.”

According to Liptrot, one of the largest reasons for CCD is migratory beekeeping on monocultural farms. These industrial farms, which grow just one kind of plant across vast expanses of land, aren’t places that bees naturally like to live. Besides the fact these farms produce pollen for bees only at one time of the year, bees prefer a diversity of pollen sources.

Beekeepers are paid to truck their colonies to these crops, where the honeybees pollinate the plants, and are then are packed up and trucked off across the country to another pollination contract. Liptrot says this form of beekeeping is hard on honeybee immune systems because it is nutritionally insufficient.

“That’s like you depending on one potato crop,” says Liptrot. “If you do manage to harvest a good crop you’re only living off of potatoes, nothing else. Nutritionally that’s a big driving force behind colony collapse disorder.”

Dan Del Villano, a hobbyist beekeeper in Victoria, agrees migratory beekeeping plays a large role in CCD because the bees are moved around so much, and thus, so are viruses and diseases.

“If there’s a new disease in the California almond crop in February, it is along the Canadian border, on the Atlantic coast of the U.S. and along the Mexican border that same season,” says Del Villano.

Monocultural crops are also very susceptible to plant pests that can destroy an entire crop, so industrial farms use large quantities of pesticides and herbicides, which Liptrot says are bad for bees. Studies on the effects that pesticides have on bees are done by the companies that manufacture them. Then the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) decides whether or not to approve the chemicals. He says Canada generally follows suit with what the USDA approves. Liptrot says these studies need to be more complete, and that they don’t take into consideration the effects of the chemicals when they are mixed together — like when a bee brings various different pesticide-laden pollens back to its hive because it’s collecting from different crops.

He says industrial farming practices, including monocultural farming and migratory beekeeping focus on the short term, but in the long term these methods of food production will fail.
“We are producing our food the wrong way,” says Liptrot, “It’s one of the worst agriculture practices that we have come up with, ever, in the history of agriculture.”

The local buzz

On Vancouver Island industrial farming and large-scale beekeeping operations are less common, but beekeepers here are not immune to mass losses of honeybees. According to B.C. apiculture (beekeeping) statistics, Vancouver Island’s overall losses were 30 per cent in 2007, 54 per cent in 2008, and 26 per cent in 2009, with some beekeepers experiencing 80 to 100 per cent losses in a year.

According to Brenda Jager, the Vancouver Island apiary inspector for the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture, yearly losses of 10 per cent are considered acceptable historically.

Both Liptrot and Del Villano say the Varroa mite is the main killer of honeybees on Vancouver Island. The mite is a parasite that attaches itself to the honeybee, and sucks fluid from its circulatory system leaving the honeybee weakened and prone to diseases and viruses.

Del Villano has kept honeybees as a hobby for seven years. The number of hives, or colonies, he keeps varies, but last year he had six on the go until five of them died during the fall and winter from Varroa mites. Although he estimates he lost at least $500 worth of honeybees, he says the financial loss hurts less than the physical loss of his bees.

“We have a relationship that we don’t really have with any other insects, and not really that many animals,” says Del Villano. “People say dogs are humankind’s best friend, but really it’s honeybees that are our best friend.”

Liptrot has about 100 production colonies he uses for honey extraction to make mead, and around 250 to 300 colonies he uses to breed queen bees. He says his losses haven’t been too bad; besides one “shaky year” two years ago when he lost 40 per cent of his colonies, he has been able to keep control over the Varroa mites.

According to Liptrot, many beekeepers place pesticide strips, called miticide, into their beehives to fight the Varroa mite, but the mites become resistant to the strips, and this technique just adds yet another chemical into the mix.

Instead, Liptrot uses a combination of acids and thyme oil to combat the mites, and although it’s very labour intensive, Varroa mites don’t develop a resistance, and the bees aren’t bothered.

However, industrial beekeepers in other parts of Canada and the U.S. sometimes have 20 000 colonies of honeybees, and Liptrot admits with that many hives, his technique would add to their workload considerably.

He says this kind of industrial beekeeping and the use of pesticides needs to be assessed more critically.

“We need to start looking at better animal husbandry processes because we can’t continue to be dumping pesticides on our beehives any more than we can continue to dump pesticides on the food that we eat,” says Liptrot.

Honeybees versus native bees

European honeybees were introduced to North America in the 17th century. While these honeybees are the ones used for crop pollination commercially, native bees also pollinate crops.

Gordon Hutchings, an entomologist in Victoria who studies native bee species, is not worried about human food production were the honeybee to be wiped out, in spite of the doomsday predictions. Although he says it’s hard to pin down what percentage of crop pollination is done by native bees, the amount would be higher than people think, and native bees deserve more attention than they get. “To say the honeybees are doing it all is wrong,” says Hutchings. “Just because you have invested everything into one species doesn’t mean you have to stick to it; you have to start thinking outside the box.”

Hutchings uses an analogy to help explain his point. He says to imagine all the cows in the world are dying, and think about what humans would do without beef.

“People would say ‘oh gee I can’t have my steak and hamburgers’ because all the cows are dying,” says Hutchings, “and while you’re saying that you’ve got a deer eating your tulips in your front yard.” He says people need to focus more on using native bees to pollinate.

According to Hutchings, the viruses honeybees get do not transfer to the native bees; they deal with their own pathogens, diseases, and parasites, but fight them off naturally. However, native bees are in decline due to habitat loss from human population.

Over 450 known native species of bees live in B.C., with more being discovered each year. Most of these bees are solitary — rather than living in colonies like the honeybee — and they need to be attracted to an area to pollinate it. About 70 per cent of them nest in the ground, many preferring hardpan soil that hasn’t been tilled, and are attracted to native plants.

Hutchings says native bees are “terrible” at pollinating monocultural crops because it’s a completely unnatural environment for them. And where honeybee colonies can be plunked in the middle of a large monocultural area to pollinate it (whether they prefer that area or not), native bees can’t since they generally don’t live in colonies. But because monoculture farming generates so much of the food North Americans eat and honeybees are the ones that pollinate it, the food industry relies heavily on honeybees. Hutchings says the situation may have turned out differently if humans had not focussed so heavily on honeybees for pollination.

“The reason honeybees get a lot of credit is because they have received so much of our attention,” says Hutchings. “We have focussed collectively as an industry on that introduced species of bee.”
With humans continually populating more and more land, areas for native bees to nest are disappearing. And with their habitat disappearing, so are the bees.

Liptrot agrees that native bees are disappearing, and that that monocultural farming is a large factor. “We’re basing this whole pollination effort on massive industrial monocultural plantings which have wiped out natural pollinators because of the loss of habitat that those pollinators require,” says Liptrot.

Action and education

Jager says farmers need to have tracts of natural land surrounding their fields to attract native bees, and she says it’s up to the individual farmer to change the way their farms are laid out.

“I believe in action and I believe in education,” says Jager. “It’s important that individuals make choices . . . I think people are working towards [natural land areas] again.”

Jager also says grass has no value for bees and encourages people to leave some native plants on their property.

“We should be encouraging dandelion as a trendy thing in lawns,” says Jager. “It’s the number one flower for all kinds of bees.”

Liptrot says bees like clover, and suggests sprinkling a handful of seeds here and there to attract them.

Hutchings holds seminars teaching people about native bees, including which plants attract them and how to create areas that they like to nest in.

He builds what he calls bee ‘condos’ for solitary bees to live in. The condos are boxes filled with wooden trays which have separate sections so the bees can live side-by-side, yet still have their own space, hence the name condo. He also builds bee boxes for bumblebees to nest in. The boxes and condos can both come with a transparent top, dubbed the ‘Hutchings Peek-a-Boo System,’ so that people can see how the bees nest inside.

As for the decline in honeybees, Liptrot says that more research is vital. He is involved in a five-year study with Jager, and various other beekeepers and scientists to determine which strains of honeybees are the best for virus, disease and pest resistance, as well as optimum honey production. Del Villano suggests more people take up beekeeping as a hobby; not only to try to keep up the populations, but also because it helps connect humans to nature.

“You realize how important the natural world is, and how dependent upon it we are,” says Del Villano. “We’ve always just kind of taken [bees] for granted.”

http://www.martlet.ca/martlet/article/mjr-buzzkill/