If cattle or dairy farmers awoke one morning to find half their livestock dead, it’s likely a crisis would be declared, news coverage would be constant, and governments would urgently seek ways to mitigate the die off. Now imagine this continuing on ranches and dairies over a few decades. This very scenario is happening to honeybees in the United States, except with little or none of the reaction. Howard Kerr, President of the Tennessee Beekeepers Association and hobbyist at Smokey Mountain Honey Co. in Blount County since 1965, shares this metaphor often. Together with Gene Armstrong, President of the Nashville Beekeepers Association (NABA) and Bernie Ellis, a blueberry and blackberry farmer at Trace View Farm in Santa Fe, TN the problem of “poor bees” in Tennessee may have a chance of being recognized by every Tennessean who eats.
The Situation
‘Poor bees’ are bees with compromised immune systems. Bees are suffering from several systemic issues. Varroa mites infested U.S. beehives in the 1980s but, once recognized, seemed to be managed with careful treatment. Today, varroa mites have eliminated most feral bees and are having dire consequences for kept honeybee populations. Lack of food, ‘good bee pasture’ including trees, which provide 50% of the pollen bees need, is continually being eliminated and mono-culture crops are providing bees with a feast or famine scenario. Soil and water degradation also compound the difficulty of plants which produce pollen and nectar to flourish. And “poor queens”, Howard Kerr explains, “cannot do their work.” In the 1990’s, a queen bee lived three to four years and a new queen was raised as she aged. Today, queens may live a year, and often do not lay eggs consistently to fill the honeycomb, instead laying a ‘salt and pepper’ pattern, producing fewer bees and die suddenly. There is no hive without a queen.
Most people think of honey as the ‘crop’ of bees, but the real reason for bees is they keep 75% of fruits, vegetables, and grains on our plates. 70 of the 100 most common human crops depend upon insect pollination; by far bees are those insects.
The History
Scientists were alerted to unexplained bee die-offs in the early 1990s, when about 15% of colonies began dying annually. By the early 2000s, bee die-offs escalated to 50-80% and the term Colony Collapse Disorder was coined. Initially, causes were not understood but today all the science points to the increase in pesticide use, including treatments used on the bees to control varroa mites. “Poor bees” simply cannot recover from other pressures when they become severely immuno-compromised due to chemical laden forage.