The plight of the honeybee

By Randa Wagner

editor@newscolorpress.com

Many of the things we take for granted and use in our mod­ern world have had a sig­nif­i­cant effect on nat­ural resources, weather and nature itself. The meek, indus­tri­ous hon­ey­bee is no excep­tion. If the hon­ey­bees’ biggest chal­lenges are not reduced or elim­i­nated soon, the results could be grim.

Colony Col­lapse Dis­or­der (CCD) has begun claim­ing hon­ey­bee colonies around the world in recent years. This syn­drome is char­ac­ter­ized by the dis­ap­pear­ance of all adult worker bees in a hive, leav­ing only the queen, drones, imma­ture bees and honey. Dur­ing the win­ter of 2006, bee­keep­ers reported losses of 30–90 per­cent of their hives. Losses dur­ing the win­ter aren’t unusual, but losses of that mag­ni­tude are. Since that time, a third of the hives in the U.S. have died off or disappeared.

Sci­en­tists study­ing CCD are chal­lenged because the prob­lem is world­wide rather than in a selec­tive area. That fact makes it dif­fi­cult to nar­row down the cul­prits and makes the prob­lem a com­plex issue. Some researchers attribute the losses to sys­temic pes­ti­cides, par­tic­u­larly neon­i­coti­noids, which affect a bee’s neural path­way. Farm­ers and gar­den­ers use a vari­ety of pes­ti­cides, her­bi­cides, fungi­cides and chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers on crops. Neon­i­coti­noids were banned for use in France and other coun­tries in the 1990s. Other chal­lenges hon­ey­bees face are air­borne pathogens, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied seed, inva­sive pests (par­a­sitic mites) and poor hive management.

As devel­op­ers pave and build their way across the coun­try, they elim­i­nate areas that once pro­vided pollen-producing plants hon­ey­bees har­vested. As streams, ponds and rivers become pol­luted, clean drink­ing water sources become less abun­dant for ani­mals and bees alike. This year’s drought in the U.S. has affected the num­ber of flow­er­ing and blos­som­ing plants bees rely on for nec­tar and honey. Honey is, after all, the honeybee’s main source of food.

A per­fect cycli­cal system

Hon­ey­bees live lives of com­plete sub­ju­ga­tion. They are devoted to the hive and its func­tion. In a hive, whether nat­ural or man­made, there is one queen, sev­eral hun­dred male drones and 40,000–60,000 female worker bees. The worker bees gather pollen and nec­tar and defend the hive against ene­mies. They fan the hive inside to keep it cool in sum­mer and cre­ate heat in win­ter by hud­dling close together and shiv­er­ing to radi­ate heat.

The queen lives in the cen­ter of the clus­ter and is kept at a con­stant 92 degrees. When she starts to lay eggs in Feb­ru­ary, adjust­ments are made in the clus­ter to accom­mo­date the growth and keep the tem­per­a­ture steady. The queen can lay 1,500–2,000 eggs a day at 30-second inter­vals and is respon­si­ble for the repop­u­la­tion of the hive. A colony can­not sur­vive with­out her. Her only two func­tions are to emit a chem­i­cal scent to reg­u­late the unity of the hive and to lay eggs. She can­not feed or groom her­self, so ‘atten­dants’ take care of that task. She has only one mat­ing period that occurs 30–300 feet in the air as far as a mile away from the hive in her two to five years of life. After the mat­ing period, she remains in the hive.

Hon­ey­bees have an unusual method of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each other. The loca­tion and dis­tance of a food source is trans­mit­ted by a bee through a ‘wag­gle dance’ that uses turns, cir­cling and angles to tri­an­gu­late a loca­tion for fel­low bees to fol­low. The geom­e­try of the dance changes as the dis­tance changes. It’s a sophis­ti­cated method unique to bees.

The honey we all enjoy eat­ing is a mar­vel in its pro­duc­tion. For­ag­ing bees carry pollen from blos­soms and flow­ers in ‘bas­kets’ on their back legs to be used as food for devel­op­ing bees. Nec­tar is sucked through their pro­boscis, mixed with enzymes in the crop, and car­ried back to the hive where young worker bees col­lect and deposit it into cells. An enzyme is added to the nec­tar and bees fan the cells to evap­o­rate the water and turn the nec­tar into honey. Build­ing a new comb requires six times the amount of energy to pro­duce than honey does and may require bees to fly over 150,000 miles to gather enough pollen to make just one pound of wax. A hon­ey­bee works con­tin­u­ously until it dies in a few short months.

Their prob­lem is your prob­lem, too

Hon­ey­bees are crit­i­cal for pol­li­na­tion of 130 high value crops such as berries, nuts, fruits and veg­eta­bles. They also pol­li­nate the legumes and grains meat and milk-producing ani­mals eat. About every third mouth­ful of food and bev­er­age we con­sume requires the pres­ence of hon­ey­bees. No hon­ey­bees means no pol­li­na­tion of 80 per­cent of our crops, which means no fruit, no veg­eta­bles, no seed. The pop­u­la­tion of the earth is grow­ing expo­nen­tially and the demand for ade­quate food sup­plies has never been greater.

The decline in hon­ey­bee pop­u­la­tions in this coun­try means we now import 80 per­cent of the honey used in foods and sold on store shelves. Much of the prod­uct is what bee­keep­ers refer to as ‘funny honey’ because it has been altered and sup­ple­mented with sugar syrup or high fruc­tose corn syrup which, until recently, was unde­tectable. The FTC imposed stiff import tar­iffs on China in 2001 to stop them from flood­ing the mar­ket with cheap, diluted and heav­ily sub­si­dized honey that is often con­t­a­m­i­nated with chlo­ram­pheni­col and other ille­gal ani­mal antibi­otics. To get around this, China sent the honey to other coun­tries, which then sold it to U.S. com­pa­nies to use. The U.S. imported 208 mil­lion pounds of honey from 2010-early 2012 and almost 60 per­cent of it came from Asian coun­tries. Forty-five mil­lion pounds came from India alone.

An inves­ti­ga­tion into the honey mar­ket found 76 per­cent of honey pur­chased in gro­cery and drug stores has been treated with a process called ‘ultra-filtration’ which removes all traces of pollen along with impu­ri­ties, like wax. Ultra-filtration is expen­sive and many experts believe that it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily improve shelf life. The pres­ence of pollen is a way to trace honey’s ori­gin (loca­tion), and some believe the process is a shady way to mask the ori­gin of the honey. The less expen­sive, off-brands in the store are the like­li­est ‘funny honey’ suspects.

What is the solution?

Indi­vid­u­ally, peo­ple can plant native wild­flow­ers, hedges, shrubs and choose nat­ural meth­ods of deter­ring pests over chem­i­cals. You can install top-bar (pol­li­nat­ing) hives on your prop­erty if your area is con­ducive to sup­port­ing a bee colony. Buy your honey from local bee­keep­ers. If you must use insec­ti­cides, choose tar­geted ingre­di­ents with the least harm­ful for­mu­la­tions (i.e. gran­ules). Apply on dry evenings soon after dark when bees are inactive.

More infor­ma­tion is avail­able from the Hon­ey­bee Con­ser­vancy at (419) 947‑9436, where this infor­ma­tion was obtained.

Randa Wag­ner is edi­tor at The Mor­row County Sentinel.

Posted by Acres Admin on Sep 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.