The author, Rotarian Todd Tucker, tends his hive.
Todd Tucker
Ten thousand honeybees distracted me as I reviewed the procedure for setting up a new hive. Their stingers thrust through the screen on the shipping box, and the beating of their wings actually forced a breeze across my kitchen table.
The bees, sent via first class mail from Moultrie, Georgia, U.S.A., would be the nucleus of my first hive — assuming, of course, that I succeeded in introducing them to their new home.
When you open a box brimming with bees, something at the base of your brain urges you to throw it down and run, even if you've taken the normal precautions. I was, after all, padded by layers of protective clothing and armed with a device called a smoker (it produces cool white smoke that calms the bees for handling). I also was bolstered by the knowledge that humans have managed — if not truly domesticated — honeybees for thousands of years.
I carefully poured the bees out of their mailing container into the new, white frame hive in my backyard in Salem, Indiana, U.S.A. Most went into the hive, but a few flew away. Some landed on the ground. One lit on my ankle and stung me through my sock.
I tried to ignore the pain and follow the procedure — a task easier said than done. I was supposed to punch a small entry hole in the hard substance, called "queen candy," that sealed the queen bee in her own separate compartment during the move — but I pushed the entire chunk through by mistake. Then my attention to the smoker lapsed, and it went out. Then a mislaid hive cover crushed some of the new arrivals that had almost made it all the way from Georgia to Indiana without incident. On my first day as a hobbyist beekeeper, I was learning a basic truth: bees have a way of demanding one's attention.
These days, bees have many people's attention — and concern. The reason: the emergence of a parasitic mite known as Varroa jacobsoni, a prime suspect in the widespread die-off of wild and kept hives throughout the world.
Beekeepers have had limited success protecting hives with strips laced with the pesticide Apistan, but untreated wild hives have been virtually wiped out in many regions.
For years, the mite coexisted harmlessly with Asian honeybees. The Asian bees live in smaller, less productive colonies than the European strains — especially the Italian variety — that dominate commercial and avocational beekeeping. By the 1980s, the mite had adapted to infest European bees, where its presence was no longer benign. In the United States, the mite was first reported in Wisconsin in 1987 and has since spread to every state and into Canada and Mexico.
Infestation begins when female mites attach themselves to adult bees in order to gain access to a hive's brood cells, where larval bees develop. After the cells are capped with wax for the final stage of brood development, the female mites lay eggs. Within 10 days, entirely within the capped cell, the eggs hatch and the mites mature and mate. The male mites die, and the females emerge by attaching themselves to the newly formed bees. The mites feed off their hosts by puncturing their abdomens and sucking the blood. In temperate regions, infested hives are less able to survive the winter. The overall effect is a greatly weakened colony, and untreated hives eventually die from what some researches call "parasitic mite syndrome."
In Pennsylvania, U.S.A., for example, the number of commercial honeybee colonies plummeted from 85,000 in 1981 to 27,000 in 1995, with some keepers losing 50 percent to 70 percent of their hives, according to researchers at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). They estimate that about 80 percent of the wild bee population in the northeastern United States has been lost.
The mite has found its way to every continent except Australia. One expert in the Czech Republic estimated in 1996 that up to 25 percent of the world's commercial hives had been lost to the mite, with losses in several European nations ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent.
The irony is that after centuries of human dependence on bees for honey, wax and crop pollination, the insects' very survival now may well depend on human intervention. Greg Hunt, Ph.D., a honeybee specialist at Purdue University in Indiana, says the mite threat represents "absolutely the worst crisis beekeepers have ever faced."
Indeed, the stakes are high for both insects and humans, and the implications for agriculture are immense. Fully one-third of the United States' food supply depends on insect pollination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that bees pollinate about $10 billion worth of crops each year. As wild bees succumb to the mite infestation, growers in hard-hit regions are scrambling to rent hives from beekeepers to pollinate fruit orchards, berry fields and other crops.
The total value of products directly produced by managed bee operations isn't small potatoes, either. The three million hives kept by the nation's 120,000 beekeepers each year produce about 100,000 tons (90,718 metric tons) of honey valued at $125 million, and nearly 2,000 tons (1,814 metric tons) of beeswax valued at $7 million.
Jed Davis has been keeping bees in Stamping Ground, Kentucky, U.S.A., for 28 years and is the president of the Kentucky State Beekeepers Association. On this day, he's manning the association's booth at the Kentucky State Fair.
Like all beekeepers at the fair, Davis is fighting a holding action against the mite. He first began using Apistan, the only government-approved treatment, about five years ago. At that time, it was just a precaution, since nobody in Kentucky had yet encountered the mite. Now he treats all his hives with one strip of Apistan for every five frames of honeycomb. Even so, he sometimes sees the tiny parasites attached to bees when he inspects them with his magnifying glass, disturbing evidence that the pests may be developing resistance to the treatment, much like a bacterium develops resistance to an antibiotic. At the beekeepers' booth, Davis hands out slips that read, "Beware of Varroa resistant to Apistan."
Scientists hope to turn the tables by making the honeybee resistant to the mite. "Genetics will be the long-term answer," says Dr. Hunt, the Purdue researcher. He and his colleagues are studying the genetic makeup of the European bee, the Asian bee and the mite itself, confident there is a solution somewhere within the long, complex code that is DNA. Meanwhile, they hope that smart beekeeping and judicious use of Apistan will buy them enough time to find it.
Back at the state fair, Davis takes his mind off the mite crisis by reflecting on the attractions of beekeeping. A mechanical designer for 30 years, he retains an engineer's love of elegant, practical structure. Looking at the observation hive on display, he points out a prime example of bee engineering: the delicate six-sided cells that give the honeycomb its distinctive appearance. "The cells don't stick straight out," he notes admiringly. "They slant upwards at seven to eleven degrees so that the honey doesn't spill out."
Two panes of glass protect the bees and the spectators from each other. A printed sign indicates that the hive's queen is marked, and children press their faces against the glass to search for the tiny white dot in the swarm.
The children's presence is heartening for Davis, who fears not only for the future of the honeybee, but for the future of beekeeping itself. He notes that he is the youngest man working the beekeepers' booth and grumbles that the Boy Scouts of America recently dropped its beekeeping merit badge.
Recruiting young beekeepers is a personal mission for Davis, who works extensively with the local chapter of 4-H, a national youth development organization. He even arranged for Sarah Paulson, the reigning "American Honey Princess," to travel from Dallas, Texas, to appear at the fair. She is a student at Texas A&M University, majors in elementary education — and, yes, she is a beekeeper. That makes Davis smile again, like he does when he talks about the work of geneticists and hexagonal cells at a seven-degree angle. There is hope.
Rotarian Todd Tucker is a free — lance
writer, brew master, mead-maker, and small-time beekeeper in Salem, Indiana,
U.S.A.