[Pollinator] Bees in House and Garden magazine

Tue Sep 4 09:27:12 PDT 2007

An article about bees and CCD from the latest issue of House and Garden magazine.

http://www.houseandgarden.com/gardening/almanac/bees

Bee Smart
The huge number of empty hives has been blamed on cell phones and pesticides, but the real culprit could be the dim way we garden now
By Tom Christopher 

Becky Jones takes her tool and pops the lid off another beehive. She finds no activity in the hive's top story. "It doesn't look good, Ted." Her husband and partner in Jones's Apiaries, Ted strides over. The tension is palpable.

So far, these beekeepers' survey of the 52 hives they delivered a few days ago to pollinate the blueberry bushes on a farm in Glastonbury, Connecticut, has been reassuring. Clouds of honeybees have surged around us, carrying pollen and nectar back to their hives and in the process fertilizing the blueberry blossoms to ensure an abundant crop in mid-July. But the unspoken fear all morning has been the possibility of colony collapse disorder (CCD), the mysterious ailment that destroyed up to 70 percent of the bee colonies in some regions of the United States last winter. Ted has a friend in Pennsylvania who lost 5,000 hives.

Nor, as Becky points out, is CCD a calamity just for beekeepers. About a third of the food crops grown in the United States depend on honeybees for pollination. Without a visit from hives like those of the Joneses, an orchard's apple crop might be reduced by three-quarters. Even the wild blueberries in Maine now depend on imported hives. Sixty thousand hives, Ted tells me, mostly trucked in from out of state, are needed each spring to pollinate that crop. After the hives are trucked to New York State for the apple orchards early in the season, they are taken to Massachusetts and then to their sojourn in Maine. These days, honeybees have a schedule fully as frenetic as that of any corporate multitasker.

And that is surely a factor in the current honeybee disaster. A conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Claire Kremen has been focusing since 1999 on the interaction of farming practices with populations of wild and domesticated bees. Treating honeybees as migratory workers stresses the hives, but, she adds, it's not as if CCD came out of the blue. For 50 years, she says, the number of honeybee colonies in the United States has been in a steady decline (the total has decreased by 50 percent), punctuated intermittently by sudden die-offs caused by epidemics of pests and diseases. Trucking the hives all over the country, she adds, is a perfect way to increase stress and spread disease. In fact, I've heard beekeepers refer to Maine as "the cesspool of beekeeping." It's possible that one of the reasons CCD has not yet appeared in Connecticut is that the state's beekeepers don?t take their hives out of state.

I suggest to Kremen that it's crazy to assign the pollination of a huge portion of our food harvest to a single species of imported insect. (The domesticated honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a native of Europe.) "That," replies Kremen, "is what we have been saying for a while now." Honeybees, she points out, aren't even efficient at pollinating blueberries. Native bees, such as the Maine blueberry bee (Osmia atriventris) and the local bumblebees (Bombus spp.), do a far better job. The same is true for cranberries, another native American crop. But by expanding our areas of cultivation to vast, unbroken monocultures, by bulldozing hedgerows and woodlots, and by chemically poisoning all our weeds, we've robbed the natives of nesting sites and the flowers that would furnish them with pollen and nectar when farm crops aren't in bloom. Where we haven't evicted them we've starved them out.

Fortunately, says Kremen, the wild bees found a sanctuary. Gordon Frankie, Kremen's colleague at UC Berkeley, has discovered that urban and suburban gardens can be surprisingly rich in wild bees. He has identified 40 different species visiting the small garden of bee-attractive flowers that he and his students planted on the Berkeley campus, and they have identified a total of 82 species within the area. Frankie's Web site, nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens. gardens, includes lists of plants and outlines of cultural techniques that will make any garden bee-friendly. For those gardeners who prefer print media, there are fact sheets about native pollinators published by the Xerces Society, an Oregon-based nonprofit devoted to invertebrate conservation, as well as its booklet "Farming for Bees." The booklet highlights the society's collaboration with Claire Kremen and Audubon California; this triumvirate has been restoring bee-friendly native vegetation along streamside corridors at several sites in California's intensively farmed Central Valley to see if it will boost depleted populations of indigenous pollinators. If successful, Kremen says, this technique could be extended to farms throughout the country.

When Ted and Becky Jones lifted the top story off the brood chamber at the base of that troubled hive on the Connecticut blueberry farm, they found the colony—queen, workers, and drones—still intact although reduced. Ted speculated that the honeybees had been injured somehow in the drive over from the Joneses' bee yard. He worries about the stress to his bees, adding that the long hours and heavy lifting of constantly shifting hives discourage young people from becoming beekeepers. It's time, I think, for gardeners to do their part in lightening the load.
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The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
The Xerces Society is an international nonprofit organization that 
protects the diversity of life through invertebrate conservation. To 
join the Society, make a contribution, or read about our work, 
please visit www.xerces.org.

Matthew Shepherd
Senior Conservation Associate
4828 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland, OR 97215, USA
Tel: 503-232 6639 Cell: 503-807 1577 Fax: 503-233 6794
Email: mdshepherd at xerces.org 
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