Go Retro — Become a Backyard Beekeeper

Over the years, our diets have increased the demand for a constant stream of all-season fruits and veggies. Such demand hasn’t bypassed the bees. It’s turned bee pollination into a year-round service and beekeeping into a commercial industry. Today, there are half as many beekeepers as there were two decades ago, and the remaining beekeepers are mostly large-scale pollination services with thousands of hives and millions of bees. But there was a time when beekeeping was much more of a hobby than a commercial industry. “Beekeeping is a graying hobby,” says Jeff Pettis of the Dept of Agriculture. Joining the ranks of backyard beekeepers can not only infuse the dying hobby with life, it can strengthen the bee gene pool by adding healthy local bees to the mix.

If you’re interested in becoming a backyard beekeeper, experts recommend starting with a local beekeepers’ association to learn about keeping bees alive and healthy. It’s important that bees are adapted to the local climate, so you’ll want to start with a local source for bees. Aside from contributing to the bee population, just two hives can pollinate an entire mid-sized residential garden. You might just find yourself with a lifelong hobby. For most people, beekeeping grows into a passion.

Get Closer to Nature

Backyard gardens can offer a welcome supply of nectar and pollen for honeybees.

If you decide to pass putting on a beekeeper’s suit, merely keeping a backyard bee garden is another good deed you can do for the honeybees. With rapid urban development limiting their foraging habitat, backyard gardens can offer a welcome supply of nectar and pollen for honeybees.

Cultivating plants that will attract bees is the most important task of a bee gardener. Choose flowers that bloom successively over the spring, summer, and fall seasons such as coreopsis, Russian sage, or germander in order to provide pollen and nectar resources to the native bees of all seasons. If you’re not sure what to choose, you can always check with a local garden center for their advice on “bee-friendly” florals. To improve bee visitation, the garden should contain large patches of like flowers planted in close proximity to one another. Diversity is a key factor in keeping bee gardens buzzing. Researchers have found that more bees will be drawn to gardens with ten or more species of attractive plants.

As you diversify your garden, keep part of it wild because bees prefer that to a manicured space. Go for a “planted by nature” effect rather than a perfectly pruned garden. Remember: bees don’t discriminate between weeds and cultivated flowers, so let those dandelions grow.

And of course keep your bee garden free of pesticides — a danger in any garden. Some pesticides can kill the bee before it returns to the hive; other pesticides get carried back and can harm the rest of the hive.

If, after all of your hard work, you’re still not seeing bees in your garden, it’s not a wasted effort. Growing a pesticide-free garden is also good for you if you’re growing fruits and vegetables. Robert Mendela, President of the Backyard Beekeepers Association, says, “Even if there isn’t a hive of honeybees within a couple of miles of your garden, gardening brings the grower closer to nature and closer to realizing that what s/he grows is more nutritious and tasty than the ‘factory-ized,’ perfect, unblemished, and perhaps pesticide-covered” produce.

Even if you don’t have a green thumb, buying pesticide-free foods at the market also protects humans and bees from pesticide poisons.

Give the Bees a Voice

“Something the average person can do,” says Mendela, “is to write to their senators and representatives in congress on the federal level and to do the same on the state level to support funding of honeybee research. This support has fallen off over the years.”

The news focus on CCD makes it an ideal time to put pressure on politicians to reinstate laws that used to prevent importing bees into the country and transporting them across state borders.

Large or small, any effort you make to help bees or increase awareness is a step towards healthy bees, healthy crops, and, consequently, healthy humans.

Bees may be bouncing back from yearly declines, but experts remain concerned about their future.

Bees have hit it big on the national radar with their mysterious disappearing act known as CCD – colony collapse disorder – which is characterized by the sudden, complete absence of honeybees in a colony.  They simply vanish, with no trace of foul play and no bodies left behind.

In late 2006, about a quarter of participating beekeepers started reporting missing colonies.  And the number of apiaries reporting CCD climbed to 36 percent from 2007 to 2008.  But the 2008-2009 survey found that only a quarter of apiaries reported any evidence of CCD, and the latest yearly bee survey found that commercial beekeepers reported having lost fewer bees, due to all causes, this past winter than the winters before.

“The drop in losses is encouraging,” said Jeff Pettis, one of the survey authors and research leader of the Agricultural Research Service Bee Research Laboratory.  The survey – conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture – checked on about 20 percent of the country’s 2.3 million colonies.

In 2007, beekeepers reported winter losses of 32 percent.  In 2008, they reported 36 percent.  This past year, winter losses have dropped to 29 percent.

“If the average loss is 20-25 percent, it’s sustainable to keep up a bee business,” said Dr. Eric Mussen, a honeybee expert at the University of California, Davis.  “If you’re much higher than that, you’ll have to have some other income source.”

Bees die in the winter for many reasons, including starvation, pests, and CCD.  In the 1970s, beekeepers expected 5-10 percent losses over the winter from starvation, diseases, or mismanagement.  In the 1980s, two different mite species decimated bee populations – cutting them in half.  The more aggressive mites essentially wiped out wild bees by the mid-1990s.

Honeybee populations have mostly stabilized from the mite attacks by the beginning of this decade, with beekeepers expecting losses of 20-25 percent every winter.  The mites are still prevalent, but bees seem to have learned to live with them, especially with the help of chemical treatments.

While the new statistics offer a glimmer of hope, the honeybee crisis is far from over. Scientists still have not identified the causes of CCD. However, the Agricultural Research Service has undertaken a five-year research program aimed at improving the health of honeybees. Researchers and beekeepers alike hold out hope that such efforts will pay off.

Silence of the Bees is the first in-depth look at the search to uncover what is killing the honeybee. The filmmakers of Bees take viewers around the world to the sites of fallen hives, to high-tech labs, where scientists race to uncover clues, and even deep inside honeybee colonies. Silence of the Bees is the story of a riveting, ongoing investigation to save honeybees from dying out. The film goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our diets and takes a look at what’s at stake if honeybees disappear. Silence of the Bees explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals.

Silence of the Bees premiered on PBS October 28, 2007.

Exclusive Podcast: In this podcast, scientists and bee experts featured in the program discuss the crucial role that honeybees, a “keystone species,” play in our economy and ecosystems, as well as bees’ fascinating social organization and what we can do to reverse the decline of nature’s pollinators.

The role honeybees play in our diet goes beyond honey production. These seemingly tireless creatures pollinate about one-third of crop species in the U.S. Honeybees pollinate about 100 flowering food crops including apples, nuts, broccoli, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, celery, squash and cucumbers, citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, melons, as well as animal-feed crops, such as the clover that’s fed to dairy cows. Essentially all flowering plants need bees to survive.

A daunting question is: If honeybee colonies were so severely affected by CCD that pollination stopped, could we lose these crops from our markets and our diets forever?

Honeybees pollinate about 100 flowering crops.

“We’re not there yet,” says Jeff Pettis of the USDA. Pettis says there are steps researchers and beekeepers can take to ensure that the bee population doesn’t plummet to catastrophic levels. “One measure beekeepers have been taking is to keep bees as healthy as possible — improve nutrition and reduce stress,” says Pettis. Consumers have become more demanding and expect to have fruits and vegetables available to us all year round. In order to achieve this, commercial beekeepers haul colonies of honeybees across the country so their pollination services can serve all growing seasons. The season may start with almonds in California, then move on to apples in the Northwest, cranberries in New Jersey and Maine blueberries. The constant moving about places stress on the bees. In addition, certain crops that may be in the pollination circuit, like cranberries and cucumbers, are not very nutritious for bees. To keep the bees healthy, beekeepers may need to ease up on their schedules. It may be necessary for them to retire bees for a particular season or skip some less nutritious crops entirely.

Of course, nature has its own safeguards to keep crops pollinated. Honeybees aren’t our only pollinators. Other insects and birds pollinate fruits and vegetables as well. The problem with other natural pollinators picking up the bees’ slack is that today’s agricultural industry has simply grown too large for them to keep up. The leviathan that is U.S. agriculture creates a huge demand for pollination. Because honeybees are relatively mobile and can pollinate a generous number of crops, they have been the ideal recruits to meet our crop needs. But honeybees don’t perform such feats naturally without help — lots of it. Commercial beekeepers keep colonies nourished and healthy and move their hives from state to state in semis, selling their pollination services to farmers at a premium.

With the threat of CCD looming, researchers are starting to study how other pollinators like the larger bumble bees could step in for honeybees. “The Dutch have figured out how to use bumblebees,” says Pettis. Bumblebees share many similarities with honeybees. Both are social nesters, although the bumblebees’ society is not as highly ordered as that of honeybees. Also, bumblebees make a new nest each spring by solitary queens, who hibernate through the winter. Honeybees remain in the old nest.

Perhaps the biggest consideration is an economic one. Bumblebees last just 2 months and cost $200 per colony, whereas honeybees can last several months in the summer with colony rentals running only $100 to $140. As a result, the use of bumblebee pollination is usually confined to high-value crops like tomatoes. Clearly, the use of bumblebees is a step in the right direction, but not a final solution.

“There’s nothing waiting in the wings that can replace honeybees at this time,” says Pettis, “but we can solve the problem in honeybee health.” Pettis says that by focusing on reducing stress and improving nutrition, beekeepers can limit some of the factors that potentially lead to disastrous conditions like CCD, thereby keeping bees — and our diets — healthy.

In May 2009, NATURE Online asked Dennis van Engelsdorp, Pennsylvania’s acting state beekeeper, to comment on recent developments in the investigation into Colony Collapse Disorder. Here’s what he had to say. Check back later in May for a new report detailing colony losses in the U.S. for this past winter.

Q: A new study by Spanish researchers, published in the February ’09 edition of the Environmental Microbiology Reports journal, suggests that the fungus Nosema ceranae had been isolated as the cause of colony collapse in two affected beekeeper colonies in Spain. Is this fungus responsible for the Colony Collapse Disorder in the U.S.?

A: Absolutely not. We identified Nosema ceranae right from the beginning, and right away it was clear that Nosema ceranae could not, on its own, explain losses CCD losses in America. I don’t know about Spain, but there are [scientists and beekeepers] in Europe who have had high losses who are saying it’s not Nosema ceranae. What we do know is that the description of mortality described in these papers isn’t the same as Colony Collapse Disorder.   I think what’s happening is that CCD has caught people’s attention and so now everything that is a colony dying is “Colony Collapse Disorder.” And that’s not true. Colony Collapse Disorder is a very defined set of traits: a rapid loss of the adult population and no dead bees in the bee yard or in the bee colonies, and that’s certainly not what this research described.  We also know that in America, not all colonies have Nosema ceranae — colonies have a lot of viruses. So instead of having one or two viruses, they’ll have five or six viruses. We think they have something like the flu, and this flu is simply wiping through. The question is “Why suddenly are the bees so susceptible to all of these other pathogens — including Nosema ceranae but certainly not limited to Nosema ceranae.

What kind of reception is the study having with experts in Spain and Europe right now?

I work with the American group and we were at the first conference they put together to try to figure out [the causes of] Colony Collapse Disorder. We said, “well, we don’t think it’s this because half the colonies that have CCD don’t have any Nosema ceranae.” It just seems like it’s a distraction, and it’s unfortunate because surely there are people in Spain, and in America, who have a problem with Nosema ceranae, and it’s very treatable. And our recommendation is to treat for Nosema ceranae because it is another stress, and if you reduce stress you’re probably going to help your bees out. But this “Oh we found the solution” sort of dilutes the pressure that exists to make sure we have the funding and resources we need to solve this problem. And we really do need to solve this problem.

Are there any other recent developments regarding CCD in North America since we last spoke in June 2008?

We have discovered a condition we’re calling entombed pollen, where there are high levels of fungicide in some pollen that might be associated with mortality. Certainly most of the colonies that are dying are not dying from CCD. Most of them are dying from poor queen quality, which is something that’s surprising.

Could you explain what you mean by “poor queen quality”?

Every colony has a queen, and what we’re finding is that those queens are dying. And if a colony is unable to successfully replace them, or if the beekeeper is unable to identify that there’s a problem with the queen and buy a new queen to replace her, the colony dies.

Also, we’re finding that beekeepers tend to have better success keeping their colonies alive by keeping colonies as healthy as possible and by aggressively treating disease and keeping colonies well nourished.

An updated development happening in California relates to almonds. You may remember from your Silence of the Bees film that normally half the colonies in the country are needed to pollinate the almond crop.  Demand for almonds was expected to grow through 2012, and there was an expectation that there wouldn’t be enough bee colonies in the country to pollinate the almonds. With the drought in California, it appears that they are now plowing under some of the older almond orchards. That has taken some of the pressure off, and we aren’t seeing some of the pollinator shortages we expected.

In June 2008, NATURE checked in with Pennsylvania’s acting state beekeeper, Dennis van Engelsdorp, for an update on the latest details on the investigation into Colony Collapse Disorder.

Q: In Silence of the Bees, you are shown monitoring a quarantine of several collapsing hives from a Pennsylvania beekeeper. Is this monitoring ongoing?

A: All of the original colonies died by December [2007]. We now have eight new colonies at that site, and continue to sample once a week. We are watching disease growth curves, and this year we are sampling a more diverse range of bees.

What have you been hearing recently from other beekeepers?

The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) commissioned a survey to estimate colony losses across the country between September 2007 and 2008. The USDA-ARS Beltsville Honey Bee Lab conducted a similar survey of beekeepers pollinating almonds in California in February 2008. In total, nearly 19 percent of the country’s estimated 2.44 million colonies were surveyed. A total loss of 36 percent of managed honey bee colonies was recorded. This represents a 13.5 percent increase in total losses as compared to last year. The 327 operators surveyed lost nearly a third of their colonies, on average.

Are all of these losses attributable to CCD?

One of the symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder is the complete absence of bees in dead colonies. The AIA survey data doesn’t differentiate between true CCD cases and other cases that share this symptom. However, the 37.5 percent of operations that reported having at least some of their colonies die with this symptom had a total colony loss of about 41 percent. This compares to the roughly 17 percent colony loss reported by beekeepers who didn’t have “the complete absence of bees.”

It’s important to keep in mind that at least 71 percent of all colony deaths can be attributed non-CCD causes. This really emphasizes the need for further research into pollinator health in general — not just CCD.

Last October NATURE Online reported the research breakthrough that Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) had been found in over 96 percent of bees from CCD-affected hives. This doesn’t mean that IAPV is the only — or even the main — culprit behind CCD, however. Could you tell us about what has been learned since that time about the role IAPV may play in CCD?

Research published in September 2007 showed that among known pathogens, IAPV was the most consistent indicator of CCD. And it was found in at least 19 states. However, Kashmir Bee Virus (KBV), and two microscopic spore parasites — Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae — were also found to be indicators of CCD. Also, no clear cause and effect relationship was found between IAPV and CCD. Not all colonies with IAPV die off, and it’s possible that other stress factors are needed to make IAPV deadly to bee colonies.

Besides IAPV, how has the investigation evolved since last fall in regard to the other potential causes, such as pesticides and varroa mites? What kinds of studies are going on now?

We are in the final stages of receiving individual colony analysis on pathogens and pesticides from the original data set and are analyzing and writing up these results. IAPV cannot explain CCD losses by itself, and other factors are being examined.

Last year we monitored 280 colonies as they moved up and down the East Coast. We are processing this data, to test some predictors of disease based on last year’s studies.

We’ve also discovered some new conditions that seem to be affecting survivorship, and we are trying to figure out what exactly these are.

The effort to look at the impacts of pesticides has reveled a surprisingly large number of different pesticides in pollen, wax, and the bees themselves — and some of these at high levels. These pesticides are used in agriculture and sometimes by the beekeepers themselves. We have initiated investigations into the sub-lethal effects of pesticides, potential synergistic effects of multiple pesticides, the impact of pesticides in combination with other stress factors — like IAPV or varroa mites — and the use of irradiation to mitigate pesticides residues.

In many media reports on CCD, there is a feeling of inevitability that suggests that beekeepers are just waiting for CCD to decimate their hives. What can beekeepers do now?

Beekeepers are advised to practice good hygiene with their hives. For example, they shouldn’t combine weak colonies with stronger ones or exchange colony hardware. This kind of contact can spread diseases. Beekeepers should irradiate “dead-out” equipment — or at least store it for as long as possible — before reusing it with other colonies.

There are also products that beekeepers can use to control other colony stresses, like varroa mites and other parasites. And because nutrition is a concern, beekeepers should make sure their colonies are well fed, especially with a protein supplement.

Many of our viewers are interested in doing whatever they can to help. What would you tell them?

There are many things people can do: become a beekeeper, support beekeepers by buying local honey, plant a pollinator garden, and use less pesticides.

For more information, see “How can you help the bees?“