Synchronici-bee

I've had a hive of bees now for about 3 months. Wow. Seems like it's been longer than that, but it hasn't. I took my first class back in April, got my hive together by May, and got a swarm of bees to take up residence after one failed attempt, and that was in late June. That makes their industriousness even more impressive to me; in that time, they've gone from a completely empty hive to one with bar after bar full of comb, honey, pollen, brood, and nectar, and that's even given that they have to build their own comb completely from scratch in the Top Bar hive, unlike Langstroth hives where they get a foundation frame.

Anyway, I've been interested in bees for much longer than the three months I've had them living in my yard, and I've read many articles and websites and theories about the big threats to the honeybee population, primarily CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). With CCD, there is often no evidence of what happened; the bees just up and disappear, leaving brood, pollen, honey, everything. No thousands of bodies piled up around the hive, just gone. (My personal theory? They returned to Melissa Majoria. Sorry, Doctor Who geek inside joke.)

In science magazines, the focus has been on varroa and tracheal mites, foulbrood disease, fungi and other diseases, and even the effect of artificial lighting, cell phones, and electrical lines. Each time researchers find something new affecting bees, they wonder if they've found the "real" problem. New treatments are developed, new management techniques employed, new advice generated, and the cycle begins anew. Right now, some apiaries around the US are suffering yearly winter losses of 25 - 50% or more. It's really putting a spin into the commercial honey production business, but of even greater importance, it's putting a strain on agriculture, since a huge amount of our nation's food production relies on bees for pollination.

So what's really going on? Well, I'm not actually a scientist, so I have only a mishmash conglomeration of opinions and facts I've gathered from various sources, including my own theories and observations. Seems to me, since bees have been around for literally tens of millions of years, we're a little arrogant to think we know what's best for the bees in terms of frame size, food supply, location and such. It's common in commercial apiculture to harvest all the honey in the fall, then give the bees *corn syrup* or even sugar water to survive the winter. Does that seem wrong to anyone except me? Bees are often trucked thousands of miles from where they originated, then forced to forage within a vast monocultural landscape, feeding on only one source of food for days or weeks at a time, then moved to another type of monoculture field repeatedly until the end of the season. Now almond or apple blossoms may be a perfectly viable source of pollen and nectar, but they're not complete. Think of it this way: oatmeal is very good for you, but if that's all you got to eat you'd be missing some vital nutrients. And if you relied on the properties of herbs and flowers to help combat disease or fungus, you'd be out of luck if all you could have was one source of food.

With the Langstroth hives that are common in commercial apiculture (because they're easy to increase, move, and harvest), bees are typically given frames for their hives. This means they spend less time drawing out their own comb and therefore can breed faster and store honey quicker. However, is that what the *bees* need? They're geared, through millennia of evolution, to spend their first few weeks of life on household chores like comb building. They vary the size of their comb cells in nature, for reasons clear mostly to the bees. For one thing, the size of the comb cells helps determine the gestation period of the bee larvae, and therefore determines what kind of bee will result. Interestingly, the gestation period of common mites are matched to the bees, and a small variation will cause the bees to hatch before the mites, resulting in mites starving because they lack a host. Another problem with providing frame comb is that the combs are either plastic (with the resultant chemicals and deterioration) or made from recycled wax. One recent study found over 100 kinds of chemicals in a frame; this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows how the frames are made, as every fungus, virus, fungicde, miticide, and pesticide ever brought into or poured into the hive will be recycled along with the contaminated wax. Seems suboptimal to me.

Then there's the problem of fungicides and miticides themselves. Most obviously, trying to find a miticide (a targeted type of insecticide) that will kill the mites without also killing the bees is complicated. Fungicides are less problematic in that respect, but problematic in their own right. First of all, do we really know what the biological mechanisms of a healthy hive are? (Answer: No.) And applying repeated doses of any -cide has the interesting side effect of generally breeding a stronger species of whatever you're trying to wipe out, and making your pathogen or pest resistant to your current batch of -cides, so that you have to continually develop new poisons to stay ahead of the problem, and you create an endless feedback cycle of poison - resistance - new poison. It's the same principle as with the overuse of antibiotics and the failure of most patients to take their full dose of antibiotics: You kill off the weakest of the pathogens and leave a few alive, the very ones which are more resistant to the poison and stronger in general, and they breed the next generation of pathogen. Mites and fungal diseases are no different. With the current treatments, we're selecting for stronger mites and fungi, and weaker bees. Again, suboptimal.

So what's the alternative to the cycle of poisons and treatments and winter feeding and over-management of hives? It's essentially the same question as people are now beginning to apply to factory farming practices with animals like chickens. It may be more convenient for the humans to have the chickens packed in tightly, with beaks cut and eggs dropped directly into a chute, but it's not healthy for the chickens, the eggs, or the humans consuming the products. The costs of free-range, cage-free, or pastured chickens may be higher, but they are consistently better for you in terms of both nutrition and pathogen-transmission. The costs of honey will be higher if we begin to rely on smaller beekeeping methods, but the bees may be given the chance to recover. The one major question we'll have to answer which is very different from those in other factory farming methodologies is the question about using trucked-in bees for pollination of our major food crops. Right now, about 1/3 of our major food sources in the US are dependent upon bees for pollination, and with giant agricultural companies relying on vast monocultural orchards and fields, the only way to get bees into the heart of the operation is to truck them in. Solving the problem may require a major shift in the way farmers and agricultural companies think, with a return to a more blended, varied cultural practice which was the standard up until fairly recently. Instead of 500 acres of just almond trees, farmers may have to go for mixed orchards of almonds, peaches, apples, low growing berries, and chickens running loose to provide pest control and fertilizer. While this works very well for small to mid-scale farms, the vast commercial ventures that provide much of the nation's food will not be able to make the shift without significant increases to their costs, and I'm pretty sure they're not willing to give up their monopoly on food production and turn it over to smaller-scale farmers again. It'll be interesting to see where the system breaks first. Me, I'm ramping up my own farming and animal husbandry so that if and when it truly does break, we'll be set up to mitigate some of the impact on my own family and friends.

So where do small-scale beekeepers come in? I know our local commercial beekeepers are constantly sending out reminders about feeding hives, applying miticides, applying fungicides, checking for this disease or that disease, and really managing the bees. In my hive I've gone for a minimally-invasive, low-maintenance theory of beekeeping; I assume the bees know what they're doing and leave them alone. I've been told by commercial keepers that "you can't do it that way", but I know many other hobby and small-scale keepers who are in fact "doing it that way", quite successfully. We allow our hives to swarm if they wish, and take it as a sign of a very vigorous hive, and just deal with the reduced honey production that results. We also attempt only minimal treatments if something goes wrong with the hive, and sometimes choose to allow a weak or immune-compromised hive to die off instead of trying desperately to save a weak hive. Most of us don't smoke our bees (which is very stressful) and open only a few bars of a hive at a time, which the bees look at as a repair job rather than a full-scale invasion.

I originally titled this post "Synchronici-bee" because I've come across two articles in the past couple of days that are about Bee issues very close to my heart. The first is an article in the October 2009 issue of Discover Magazine titled "Buzz Off", and subtitled "The great bee die-off is not such a mystery after all; industrial agriculture has stressed our pollinators to the breaking point." Hallelujah! Someone gets it. I'm sure they'll get a lot of criticism from scientists and the public for stating it so clearly and making a case for getting bees back to a more natural state, but good for them for putting the pieces together. Seems like most of the researchers have been so focused on finding one cause or one disease or a set of circumstances that they've missed the obvious. I suspect it comes partly because most people look at bees as individuals, when really they're a hive-being; each hive is a critter, and when you start messing around with the critter and assuming you know better than the critter's own instincts, you end up weakening it. (Common practice: squash your Queen bee every year or so, and replace her with a commercially-bred, completely unrelated Queen from a totally different climate. Does that make sense to ANYONE? Seriously??)

"We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."

Scary fact: A study published in July showed that honeybee Queen breeders use only 500 select mothers annually to produce a million Queen bees. And the bees are chosen on some mostly-random factors the breeders consider important, not on factors the BEES consider important. Same with the drones selected for the artificial insemination process; they aren't selected by the Queens, they're selected based on what a human thinks is important. Yikes.

In the end, the article says, "Bees have been doing this for 80 million years...all we have to do is get out of their way." And that's what many backyard beekeepers seem to be doing, at least here in the We're-So-Green-You-Could-Plant-Us-In-The-Dirt Pacific Northwest. Many of us prefer wild-caught swarms and low-management practices. It remains to be seen how that will pan out in the long run, but the practice of keeping bees in urban and suburban environments is NOT just a fad us Pac NWers came up with!

In the second "Synchronici-bee" moment, I purchased a magazine called "Gleanings in Bee Culture" from February of 1910. Yes, almost exactly 100 years ago. (You can find anything on eBay, I'm convinced.) And in it, there is an article entitled "Bees in the Garret". For those of us living in the 21st century, that means "Bees in the Attic", more or less...the garret being a room on the top floor with a pitched roof, what we would think of as an attic room. The article was written by Charles Stewart of Toledo, OH, who seems to have been very forward-thinking when it comes to the keeping of bees in an urban environment!

"Bee-keeping is classed among rural industries; yet it is not necessary to live in the country or even in the suburbs or in a village to taste the pleasure of the pursuit, for it is a genuine pleasure - it is even more; it is a delightful and seductive charm; and for the city man who retains many of his original illusions and all his love for the simple life of rural industry, keeping bees is the least depressing method of being "stung."

(I do note that beekeeping was a "gentlemanly" pursuit. Wonder what he'd have thought of me wearing jeans and short sleeves and poking around at my hive and generally being not-too-ladylike...)

He goes on to suggest that one can keep a colony of bees in the attic, and that one should make a start during the swarming season! He notes that most urban bees don't swarm, and recommends a style of hive called a Danzenbaker, though I'm not certain what those are.

"You can put a colony in your garret; and if it has sufficient hive room, the chances are a hundred to one the bees will not disturb your neighbors nor dissipate your expectations of a honey-yield by swarming."

I still have a lot to learn about bees; seems to me that keeping bees is a lot like anything else, in that the more you learn the more you need to learn, and the longer you're at it the more you realize how little you know. But it's nice to read articles like these two and gather a little more information, and a little more reassurance that keeping bees in a "natural" manner only a foot from my house isn't as insane as it sounds!