Give Bees a Chance: The Buzz on Honeybee Habitat Destruction

Environmental Biology Final Paper

April 26, 2010

By Krista Robb

All over the United States food is grown and sold to fuel us for living. Humans have harnessed nature’s plentiful bounty through farming. Indeed, we are a part of the whirling lifecycle of the planet, and together we have a responsibility to take care of what has been so wonderfully given to us. Big thanks go out to the small but none-the-less mighty honeybee for providing the necessary pollination for one-third of the U.S. food supply. Watermelons, squash, cucumbers, blueberries, and almonds all require organisms to move pollen grains for reproduction. The once, generally under-recognized, behind-the-scenes work of honeybees, is now raising eyebrows as the destruction of honeybee habitats from Colony Collapse Disorder and the use of miticides become more visible in our ecosystem. Knowing some basic information about the traits and characteristics of honeybees mentally sets us up to understand why conservation and restoration efforts are crucial to our well being.

A honeybee hive is like the American dream: an orderly family and a clean, well kempt-house.  The cleanest house award would definitely go out to the honeybees. For my first endeavor into the home of honeybees, I suited up in my trusty white bee garb, digging into thousands of honeybees living out of specially created box homes. Kind of like a high rise apartment building for bees. Upon opening the boxes and analyzing the scene, I begin to notice that not all honeybees are created equal. The colony is made up of a caste system. You have the queen her majesty, a few big-eyed male drones, and loads of smaller female worker bees. The overall attitude of the colony is determined by the queen. The queen’s perfume of pheromones and slow gentle nature keep the colony at peace, much like the beekeeper, whose smoker and grace is required to keep from pissing the bees off in defense of the hive’s security. The queen is by far the largest member of the colony and is the only honeybee that has the ability produce new honeybees. She does not leave the hive except for one time a year on annual mating frenzies with drones about 200 feet up in the air. The drone’s sole purpose in life is to find the queen with his big eyes and mate with her. Once the queen has been mated, she is capable of laying 1,500 eggs per day. It’s an intimate experience with one of our food resource’s best friends. Funnily enough, the queen cannot feed herself or go outside the hive to get rid of waste. Thank goodness for worker bees and their dedication to the queen in spoon-feeding her and removing her waste from the hive. Otherwise, we would have to give the clean-house award to some other creature.

The female workers make up a majority of the hives population because there are a lot of chores to be done. In contrast to our human pop-culture, the female worker bees get ultimate credit for bringing home the bacon. The bee butts you normally see sticking up out of the flowers center are the worker bees sipping up nectar and collecting pollen. Worker bees are mostly mild tempered when not directly protecting their hive. But that’s not all, not only do they care for the queen and collect pollen and nectar, they also tend to developing new honeybees; control air temperature and humidity of hives by a process called fanning, and masterfully produce wax comb cells as chambers for storing food and incubating the young. Yes, the term “busy bee” is true! There is no time to waste around the hive. It actually takes foraging worker bees 5 million visits to flowers to produce a single pint of honey. They forage a two-to three-mile radius from the hive in search of food (Blackiston). A human dream of retirement doesn’t happen in honeybee life. I can just picture some honeybees lying out on top of a bee box with their feet kicked up, sipping on some mead. Sayonara food supply. Good news for us humans, honeybees work diligently right until the end.

In addition to the roles and chores of hive sustainability, honeybees are what are called, a keystone species. Keystone species are like the middle stone of an arch at its apex, locking all the other pieces into position. If that middle stone is removed, the structure comes crashing down. Honeybees are that middle stone in our ecosystem. If honeybees were removed, there could be massive secondary extinctions of both the plants they pollinate and animals that eat those plants. It’s a cascade effect. Keystone species, because of their large influence on community structure, have become a popular target for conservation efforts. The reasoning is sound: protect one-key species and by doing so stabilize an entire community (Amos). Ensuring the continued reproduction and survival of the plants and other organisms that live on these primary producers is in need of open-eyed attention. Could you imagine what life would be like without the taste of sweet ripe watermelon? The loss of one third of our crops, yes 33%, would crush the U.S. economy and well being of humanity.

Here in North Carolina, conservation efforts can be seen publically. The state zoo has stepped up to recognize the importance of honeybees with the creation of a Honey Bee Garden, in 2008. Fifteen years ago the idea came buzzing and now it is in action. “When someone sits down to eat a piece of fresh fruit, we want them to think about the bee that got it there,” said North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler. The goal of the Honey Bee Garden is to educate visitors about the vital role honeybees play in our food system. The reality is honeybees account for an estimated $70 million of North Carolina’s agriculture industry between pollination and honey, and to see the honeybee disappear from society would be a devastating blow to agriculture (“NC Farm Bureau Magazine”). “The silver lining is that there has been a surge in new beekeepers in the state. It’s been a mass education campaign in many ways.” An oft-used argument for the conservation of honeybees is that they may act, now or in the future, as economically important pollinators of crop plants. Honeybee conservation efforts in North Carolina are becoming widespread, but efforts are also found in some of our neighborhood beeyards.

Last week, I decided to venture out to one of our local Western North Carolina honeybee yards. The Balltown Bee Farm in Bryson City, N.C. sits tucked away in a cove surrounded on three sides by the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The unspoiled land of the park provides plentiful foraging grounds for honeybees. Driving up to the farm you cannot help but notice the colorfully painted bee boxes sitting in three large rows terraced upon the hill above the organic gardens. Healthy and happy honeybees must surely live here, I thought to myself! In addition to the positive buzz about the place, beekeepers Kelley Penn and Quintin Ellison practice “chemical free” beekeeping. So why should we care about chemical free beekeeping? Well, with my combined experiential, online, and paper resources I found out some soul-felt explanations.

Word on the street, from numerous university researchers and personal observations conducted of honeybee colonies, is that the luggage of commercial farming practices, such as the use of pesticides and mono-cropping (planting massive amounts of one crop), are largely contributing to the abandonment of hives known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Not only in the United States, but all across the world, honeybees are disappearing. Could the flowers honeybees are visiting be a tell-all in the search to find out causes of Colony Collapse Disorder? These speculations came alive to me when I applied some basic biology to the equation. Honeybees are like us in the sense that they are a product of what they consume. What goes in, or doesn’t go into the body, directly affects what comes out in means of production and performance. Like humans, honeybees need a diversified diet to sustain a healthy colony. If I ate the American-loved Twinkie over and over again for my whole life, there’s no doubt I would have some internal issues! Did you ever see the movie Super Size Me? When the genetic composition of a food source is changed, the body has a hard time recognizing it as food, so it simply builds up inside you. When the flower pollen becomes genetically modified or sterile, the honeybees will potentially go malnourished and die of illness because of the lack of nutrients and the interruption of the digestive capacity of what they feed on through the summer and over the winter hibernation process. Honeybees exposed to these altered substances can also be adversely affected by a lowered or weakened immune system. As a result they become more vulnerable to diseases and even disoriented as to where their hive is located (Penn, and Ellison). Studies from The Center for Research on Globalization found that honeybees ingesting nectar from genetically modified flowering plants have recognizable digestive tract diseases.  After studies of the autopsy, the most alarming trait is that the lower intestine and stinger have discolored to black vs. the normal opaque color, synonymous with colon cancer in humans (Amos). You still want that Twinkie?

Next, I will share my findings on honeybee habitat destruction taking place inside the hive. Like the so-called “organic movement” in the food industry, chemical-free beekeeping is a hot topic and becoming more prevalent in Western North Carolina. Much of the hype is because of the harsh recoil of using powerful miticides in attempts to control mite infestations. With her 18 years of beekeeping experience, beekeeper Kelley Penn tells me straight up, “Bees have mites. The mites arrived in the 1980's. Chemical companies developed a synthetic treatment. As a result of beekeepers using those treatments, our drones have a low sperm count, workers are deformed and queens are not nearly the laying machines they once were. The chemicals are affecting the mites as well, but not in a good way. They killed all of the mites susceptible to them, so what we have left are super mites.” The use of chemicals on beehives is best put by Penn as beekeeping’s “dirty little secret.” Once again, I can’t help but relate honeybees to humans when thinking of what doctors say about taking an anti-biotic. Taken repeatedly over a period of time, your body builds up immunity to the anti-biotic and needs more and more to fight the infection. It is great to see that Balltown Bee Farm is taking a holistic approach to dealing with honeybee ailments. They actively work with the mites, not against them, to lessen their harmful effects and maintain diversity in the ecosystem. There is no best answer as to why these problems exist, but fortunately there are working solutions to long-term sustainability and conservation.

For the beekeepers: Requeening is an important part of bee management for the following reasons. Younger queens lay more eggs than older queens. The increased egg production results in stronger colonies and increased honey production. Requeening also breaks the brood cycle (the developmental cycle of a bee in the cells of a comb) and tends to disrupt the production of mites since they feed off of the blood of developing bees (Magnum). Since adult mites can survive without bee brood as food for only two days, most of the mite population of the hive will starve to death if deprived of the brood for three days. Taking advantage of this fact, the beekeeper confines the queen in a small egg-laying area and removes the brood combs to an empty hive box or forms new colonies with them ("Food and Agriculture of the United Nations"). Also aiding in a healthy hive, Balltown Bee Farm gets their Russian honeybees from the great Oz of beekeeping, Carl Webb of Georgia. Here’s a tidbit on what one of the Beetown ladies thinks of the stock:

“I truly believe that his Russians are a major reason that our bees have done so well on a chemical-free program. They are showing such a high resistance to mites that Carl said he actually had a beeyard, tested this spring, with no mites at all. Not one. His theory was twofold: A longer winter with a later colony buildup, causing a longer break in the brood (i.e., mite) cycle; and resistant genetic stock.”

–Kelley Penn raves in her April 26, 2010 Balltown Bee Farm update.

For anyone who eats: Buy honey, vegetables, and other goodies from local growers or farmers who do not use pesticides or GMO crops. Think about it like this: Every time you buy a product, in theory, you are voting for the farmer to keep practicing whatever method they are using. When you buy junk food, more than likely, you are voting “yes” for GMO crop production and pesticide use. Be patient and think before you buy. Every dime counts! Most importantly, educate yourself about the little miracles of nature that make this world go round. They are soul filling and fascinating. Focus on how we can work with nature instead of against it. A surprising amount of our well being rests on those tiny striped backs—and on the beekeepers. We must seek to improve and conserve the habitats of honeybees both inside and outside the hive if we want to eat.

The security of our mainstream food system and ecosystem are undoubtedly at risk. Fortunately, the impressive and positive result of a non-chemical, holistic approach to beekeeping shines a new light on honeybee habitat conservation efforts. It’s the small things, like honeybees, that make a big difference in our giant hive called Earth. Be a part of the bigger picture. Give bees a chance.

Sources

"All a Buzz at the North Carolina Zoo." NC Farm Bureau Magazine. July/ August 2009: Print.

Amos, Brit. "Death of the Bees: GMO Crops and the Decline of Bee Colonies in North America." Global Research (2008): Web. 24 Apr 2010. <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8436>.

Blackiston, Howland. Beekeeping for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2002. Print.

"Beekeeping in Asia." Food and Agriculture of the United Nations. 1987. Web. 24 Apr 2010.

<http://www.fao.org/docrep/X0083e/X0083E08.htm>.

Magnum, W.A. "Beekeeping: Insect Pest Management." NC State University. April 1996.

Web. 24 Apr 2010. <http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/PDF%20files/2.10.pdf>.

Penn, Kelley, and Quintin Ellison. "News from the Bee Yard." Balltown Bee Farm.  25 April 2010. Web. 24 Apr 2010. <www.balltownbeefarm.com>.