[Pollinator] Agriculture's smallest worker buzzes all around us

Mon Mar 23 10:39:20 PDT 2009

Beaumont, TX
Agriculture's smallest worker buzzes all around us

By _KYLE  PEVETO_ (mailto:kpeveto at hearstnp.com) 
March, 22, 2009
After a puny blueberry crop last season, Sharon Harkness knew all the  
fertilizer, rain and sweat in the world wouldn't put more berries on the  bushes. 
The honeybees were missing. 
She didn't know if it was because of rainy weather, hurricanes or a  
mysterious illness that has killed hives across the country, but bees didn't  hover 
around her Buna farm. 
"We hardly had a crop at all," said Harkness, a 53-year-old who has raised  
blueberries, mayhaws and other fruits for 20 years. "We hadn't had that happen  
before. It was a mess." 
Blueberries, like pears, cherries, almonds and dozens of other crops, require 
 honey bees to bloom. Most years the bees came from the woods around 
Harkness'  home off FM 1004 or they flew from beekeepers' boxes. 
Bees are not surviving like they once did, said Bob Morlock, "the bee man,"  
as Harkness called him, who lent the blueberry farmer a few hives of bees to  
pollinate her crop. Morlock, a commercial beekeeper who produces honey in 
Fargo,  N.D., travels to the Buna area each winter to feed and grow his hives. 
"Things have changed so much since I started," Morlock said. "You didn't even 
 have to know how to keep bees and they would stay alive." 
Over the past three years, 50 to 75 percent of commercial bee colonies have  
been wiped out by the phenomenon named Colony Collapse Disorder, according to  
the Texas Apiary Inspection Service from Texas A&M University. Morlock said  
the heavy use of chemicals as pesticides on crops and around the home may be a 
 cause. 
"We're in a chemical age now," said Morlock, who has not lost as many hives  
as other keepers he has known. 
Bee loss has slowed recently, according to the Apiary Inspectors of America,  
but scientists are still trying to stop the loss of agriculture's most 
important  pollinator. 
Every third bite of food is pollinated by bees - more than $15 billion worth  
of food a year, according to The Beekeeper's Handbook. 
Throughout the spring, millions of the tiny insects are busy pollinating  
plants and flowers in the yards, gardens and farms of Southeast Texas. 
Beekeepers across the north take their bees to the West coast or the South  
every winter. Morlock has been coming to Southeast Texas for almost 20 years to 
 build hives during the warmth and humidity of the early spring. The company 
he  bought began coming to Buna in the late 1970s. 
"It's just a good climate for raising bees with the trees and the pollen that 
 we get from all the different shrubs and the flowering plants and stuff 
grows  the bees," Morlock, 46, said in a break from beekeeping work as a few bees 
still  zipped around his head. 
Texas has more than 100,000 colonies of bees, according to the U.S.  
Department of Agriculture, placing the state usually sixth or seventh in the  nation. 
Despite the suitable climate of East Texas, North Dakota ranked No. 1 in  
honey production last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The  
state's honey brings a higher price because of its light color and lower  
moisture content raised from bees pollinating clover alfalfa, Morlock said. 
"We have an early spring here (in Texas), and we start our hives and take  
them back north for honey production and then we basically take them to another  
spring there," Morlock said. 
Throughout the spring, Morlock and his aides build new colonies by removing  
the queens, manipulating the bees into creating more. 
Wearing white bee suits that cover every inch of skin, Morlock and Shane  
Poindexter, 29, of Mount Airy, N.C., worked Wednesday in a bee yard with two  
long rows of white boxes situated in a green pasture outlined by tall pines. 
They moved deliberately, spraying the bees with a silver smoker resembling a  
coffee percolator that can soothe the bees. 
Poindexter learned some beekeeping from his cousin and found work with  
Morlock for the year. 
"I enjoy being in the outdoors, and you get to travel," he said. "To me this  
is one of the neatest things I've done." 
Morlock began keeping bees more than three decades ago. Growing up on a dairy 
 farm in central North Dakota, he watched a beekeeper across the road at his  
uncle's farm. 
"I used to sit and watch him work the bees, and I found it fascinating," he  
said. 
He went to college, then worked construction and other jobs before becoming a 
 commercial beekeeper. He started coming to Woodville and Kountze with a crew 
in  the spring before they moved their hives to Buna. 
Now he owns the business - and more than 6,000 honey bee hives spread out  
across several bee yards in the area. Morlock is always searching for more  
places to raise his bees. 
In the fall, he moves his bees from Fargo to Texas and takes a few thousand  
hives to California, where almond growers lease millions of hives a year to  
pollinate the bee-dependent crop. According to the Texas Apiary Inspection  
Service from Texas A&M University, the 1.4 million almond trees in  California 
require 2.8 to 4.2 million bee colonies. 
Moving hives across the country, working seven days a week, the beekeeper's  
life is not the back-to-nature job that many think it will be. Morlock misses  
his children and wife most of the winter. 
By May, Morlock and the hard-working bees will return to North Dakota to  
begin honey production in earnest. 
"It's the life of a gypsy," Morlock said. "It's a lifestyle you have to  
pretty much love." 

Laurie Davies Adams
Executive  Director
Pollinator Partnership 
423 Washington Street, 5th  floor
San Francisco, CA  94111
415-362-1137
LDA at pollinator.org

_www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 

_www.nappc.org_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

National Pollinator Week is June 22-28, 2009. 
Beecome  involved at _www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 
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