Sit just to one side of a beehive when pollen is plentiful, and you’ll see wave after wave of honeybees returning, their leg baskets brimming with arrestingly bright, tidily packed pollen loads. Maneuvering with the extra weight must be difficult; most bees glide gracefully inside the hive, but occasionally, an ungainly one will misjudge the landing and tumble into the coming-and-going others. The color ranges and amounts of pollen that each bee is able to manage are a marvel. There are the creamy whites and smiley face yellows, sure, but there are delicate grays, blues, purples, and blacks as well. Bees gather these colorful loads one minuscule grain at a time, and as the bees work, excess pollen grains get stuck to the honeybees’ tiny hairs, which, in turn, help transfer the pollen from male flower parts to female ones, making honeybees inadvertently instrumental in a plant’s production of seeds and fruit.
It happens that bees are responsible for pollinating 80 percent of all the plants on the planet. From almonds and apples to blueberries and coffee, that includes about 90 different food crops that we depend on. It’s widely believed that one out of every three or four bites of food we eat is the result of the activity of honeybees. Without their pollination help, our diets would be a lot less colorful. Instead of loads of fire-engine red peppers, neon orange pumpkins, and great, green avocados, cucumbers, kiwis, or broccoli, for instance, we’d be stuck eating more plain Jane grains, rice, and fish than we could stomach.1
Of course, hived honeybee colonies aren’t the only pollinators around. Birds, bats, and the wind get some credit, along with feral bees like bumblebees, sweat bees, and carpenter bees. There was a time when wild bees were the preeminent agricultural pollinators, and farmers could take natural pollination for granted. Ironically, though, as increasing amounts of forested land—where many feral bees prefer to live—was turned into farmland, farmers had to start renting beekeepers’ managed hives to pollinate their crops. That wasn’t such a big deal when bees and beekeepers were plentiful. There were nearly five million honeybee colonies in the United States after World War II. But in the late 1950s and 1960s that number began to plummet, and these days, it’s estimated that there are just under two and a half million managed honeybee colonies in the United States. In part, modern agriculture’s reliance on chemical pesticides is to blame, but honeybees face still other challenges.
Every beekeeper has a run-in with wax moths at least once, and wax moth larvae can really wreck a hive. Eating their way through beeswax comb, the cream-colored larvae leave twisting tunnels in place of the bees’ orderly hexagonal cells, and when they’re ready, they spin webby cocoons in which they’ll pupate until it’s time to emerge as whitish-tan moths. Usually, if a hive has a strong population of bees, the bees can keep wax moths from doing such damage.
But for any empty honeycomb in storage, it’s another story entirely. The number of supers on one’s hives is typically reduced for the winter, and the extra supers and the frames they contain must be tucked away until spring. Unless those frames are stuck in a large freezer or kept in an area which consistently stays under 40 degrees or so, the wax moths, now left unchecked, will find a way to turn once pristine honeycomb into crumbly, brown nothingness. As a result, when it’s time to build up the size of the hive in spring, one’s honeybees must spend valuable time and energy rebuilding the wax honeycomb on any wax moth–damaged frames, instead of storing as much nectar as they can to ripen into honey.
The small hive beetle is another, more problematic, adversary. Originating in Africa, the six-legged insect is a third of the size of the average worker bee. Small hive beetles are dark-colored, with hard, shiny backs that stingers can’t seem to penetrate, and although bees are able to recognize them as intruders, the hive beetles can get the better of them in still another way. In their defense, the honeybees do cordon off groups of adult beetles, effectively “circling the wagons” to prevent the beetles from running amok. But the beetles don’t seem to mind too much; when they get hungry, they simply rub the mouthparts of the bees guarding them. This stimulates the bees’ natural feeding response, resulting in endless free meals.2 Hive beetles that are able to get far enough away from the guard bees to lay eggs, do so on the honeycomb cells, and any emerging hive beetle larvae feed on the honeycomb itself, along with honey, pollen, eggs, and larval bees. As with wax moths, keeping one’s hives as strong as possible is the best defense against the small hive beetle, but many beekeepers have found the need to use chemical controls.
They may not have Bela Lugosi’s screen presence, but vampires, unfortunately, do loom large in the honeybee world. As far as insect pests go, the Varroa or “vampire” mite is easily the worst of the worst. Eight-legged and golden-brown, a single Varroa destructor is only about the size of a worker bee’s eye, but these tiny, external parasites nearly destroyed the beekeeping industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite their best efforts to contain the problem with chemical miticide treatments, commercial beekeepers typically lost about half of their colonies to the mites each year during the height of the epidemic, and Varroa mites still do significant damage today. When they aren’t busy laying their eggs inside honeybee brood cells, female Varroa mites attach themselves to the backs of adult honeybees and slowly suck out the bees’ blood. And as they grow inside honeybee brood cells, the young Varroa mites feed on the larval bees contained therein. Each new generation of Varroa mites does likewise, and before long, their populations have exploded to the point that even a strong honeybee colony can’t survive.
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There’s nothing better than personal experience to make the abstract real. I’d heard the devastating statistics, and I even knew beekeepers who had sustained losses, but foolishly, I never thought the Varroa mite would actually hit my apiary. The day I discovered I’d lost one of my own hives to Varroa mites was as sad as it was strange. I’d suited up, got the smoker lit, and popped the top off the hive expecting to see thousands of my girls buzzing at their business as usual. Instead it was eerily quiet in the hive. I set section after empty section aside to get to the brood areas, where I found just a couple hundred bees left. On my hands and knees for a better look, I saw the awful mites taking their free ride on the backs of my beautiful bees. It was much too late to do anything for them. By the next week, the hive was dead, and I had one big mess on my hands.
One other noteworthy parasite is the tracheal mite. Unlike Varroa, tracheal mites actually infest the airways of honeybees. These mites are no bigger than the tiniest speck of dust; so to see them, one must dissect an unfortunate bee or two to examine under a microscope.
Some honeybee afflictions are slightly easier to spot, but considering their severity, that’s cold comfort indeed. American Foulbrood, or AFB, is a highly contagious disease caused by the Bacillus larvae bacterium, which produces spores that are deadly to bees still in the early brood stage. AFB causes larval bees to deliquesce, and the effect is as disgusting as you might expect. Worse yet, because AFB spores can hang around for forty years or more, beekeepers with infected hives must kill their bees, burn their brood frames, bees, and wax, and bury the ashes.
European Foulbrood is caused by the Streptococcus pluton bacterium, and it also affects very young, larval bees, but unlike the American Foulbrood–causing bacterium, Streptococcus pluton doesn’t form spores. That means beehives hit with European Foulbrood don’t have to be destroyed. Larvae with EFB often look yellowish-brown and become twisted inside their not-yet-capped cells. If an EFB outbreak is small enough, adult bees may be able to remove the diseased larvae and, with it, the Streptococcus pluton bacterium. In more advanced cases, some beekeepers step in with antibiotic treatments, but any honey stores inside a hive during treatment aren’t safe for people to eat.
Adult bees have their own problems, with most of them resulting in bee diarrhea. Sometimes the poor bees barely make it outside to relieve themselves, and the front of their hive and the ground just around it are splattered with the yellowed, streaky evidence.
Honeybees can get as run-down as the rest of us, and as with people, stress can weaken their ability to fend off illness. In many cases, the bees that, despite their natural enemies, do manage to keep going are expected to complete rather punishing pollination circuits. Their hives are loaded onto trucks and driven from state to state, so that the bees can pollinate apples, apricots, almonds, and more. In a typical season, bees might log miles from Florida to Texas, from Texas on to Arizona, from Arizona to California, and beyond. That’s a lot of wear and tear on the honeybees, and it looks as if it’s finally catching up with them and, by extension, us . . .
Within the last couple of years, honeybees have had to face yet another adversary—what researchers are calling Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). So far, its effects have been devastating, accounting for the loss of between 45 and 90 percent of some beekeepers’ hives. The syndrome causes seemingly healthy colonies to disappear nearly overnight. In CCD-affected hives, honey stores and capped brood usually have remained intact, but most all of the bees—save the queen and a few pitiful handfuls of the very young—have vanished.
Presently, entomologists have more questions than answers, and while they’re still searching for clues, CCD has popped up in at least thirty-five states and across Europe, Asia, and South America. Some theories include pesticide poisoning, some new or existing parasite or virus, or as the USDA suggests, a set of immune-suppressing factors such as drought, migratory stress, and poor honeybee nutrition “due to apiary overcrowding, pollination of crops with low nutritional value, or pollen or nectar dearth.” In other words? For far too long, our honeybees have been ridden hard and put away wet.
Scientists are scrambling to find CCD’s cause—and a cure. For now there are at least some promising developments. Jerry Bromenshenk is one of many researchers at work on the problem. Because a hive’s buzzing can change under certain conditions, Bromenshenk has inserted microphones less than an eighth of an inch in diameter into the heart of honeybee colonies to digitally record the sounds they make. The sonic fingerprints or “signatures” of each of these recordings are then analyzed, and some interesting patterns have emerged. For one, when exposed to sublethal chemicals, honeybee colonies have reacted quickly, altering their sonic signatures in the same ways from colony to colony. The researchers were amazed to discover that they could actually identify the kind of chemical any hive of honeybees was exposed to by studying its sonic signatures. The same holds for honeybee colonies plagued by Varroa mites, and not only could researchers differentiate colonies with Varroa mites from those without them, but they could also distinguish low-level infestations from medium and high levels.
By sampling the sounds of thousands of hives, scientists are slowly building a library of the different sounds—and the sound signatures—bees make under all sorts of conditions. The hope is that, one day, beekeepers may have a new tool in their arsenal, one that Bromenshenk likens to Star Trek’s famous “tricorder.” With such a device, a beekeeper could “scan” his hives for signs of mites, chemical exposure, or disease, and help his bees accordingly.
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That honeybees are neither bald eagle majestic nor pygmy rabbit cute hasn’t helped their cause. Too much rough handling—and a general disregard for the honeybee—ultimately, will translate into higher prices for nuts, fresh fruit, and veggies at the grocery store and fewer kinds of available produce in general. But it’s not too late to help the honeybees. That’s why, even though fending off those parasitic mites, assorted pathogens, and any lingering, negative perceptions about Apis mellifera can be daunting, we diehard beekeepers will never give up. After all, beekeeping has long been about preparing for the worst, while always, always hoping for the best.
1 Even ice cream would be affected, according to the makers of Häagen-Dazs. Te company claims bees are responsible for 40 percent of its favors, including strawberry, toasted pecan, and banana split.
2 Bees are happy to share with one another at any given time, so one bee might touch her antennae to the mouthparts of another to indicate that she’d like some of that bee’s food.